Gold Thief busted at famous Mandalay Pagoda

The Mahamuni Buddha Temple is a temple and pilgrimage site in southwest of Mandalay, Myanmar. Recently a man who scraped gold from Mandalay’s ancient bronze Mahamuni Buddha image was arrested. Security cameras caught the man scraping out the gold from the back of the Mahamuni image.

With a short piece of steel pipe hidden up his sleeve, Tun Aung Kyaw mingled with other pilgrims who were applying gold leaves to the 6.5-ton image as offerings. Devotees have regularly applied gold leaves to the image over centuries. Except for the face, the image is covered with layers of gold believed to be about 15 centimeters (6 inches) thick. The trustees of the pagoda said this is the first time gold has ever been removed from the image. Kyaw is being charged with theft and defaming Buddhism, a serious offense in Myanmar.

Mystery ancient Iron Age skeleton unearthed in Ireland

A storm has unearthed an Iron Age skeleton on the coast of Ireland. The complete remains were discovered near Kilmore Quay in Co Wexford. The person lived between 1,500 and 2,500 years ago around the time the Celtic tribes arrived in Ireland.

The remains were buried, not washed ashore. They were found by people out walking on the beach. Locals are baffled by the find and say it throws up questions about whether there could be more historical sites in the area.

Spectacular fossils of the Green River Formation

Large teeth and rear-placed fins make Phareodus encaustus well suited for catching and eating other fish.

Rocks of the Green River Formation contain a story of what the environment was like about 50 million years ago in what is now parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Streams draining the steep and newly formed mountains carried large amounts of sand, silt, mud and dissolved minerals into lakes that occupied the intermountain basis. Over time the sand, silt and mud began infilling the lakes. Abundant plants grew on broad swampy areas that developed around the margins of the lakes.

This 5.5 inch long bat is the most primitive known. Claws on each finger of its wings indicate it was probably an agile climber and crawled along and under tree branches searching for insects.

A lagerstätte is a sedimentary rock unit with fossil content. The Green River swamps and lakes provided an exceptional environment for fossil formation. The lakes and swamps were calm where remains were quickly buried by sediment. This resulted in one of Earth's most spectacular deposits of preserved plants, animals, insects and fish.

This 1.7 meter (5 foot 6 inch) softshell turtle is one of the largest turtles from Fossil Lake. During the Eocene, trionychid turtles reached maximum size.

This fully-articulated early horse is an extremely rare find.

The insect fossils from Fossil Lake sometimes show color patterns, wing venation, and sex-related characteristics.

Palm Tree Flower

Astronomers find the cosmic source of gold and rare metals

130 million years ago, the ultra-dense cores of two dead stars collided. The first evidence of the cataclysmic collision were gravitational waves. They reached Earth on August 17th. As astronomers targeted their source, they turned up a trove of riches. It is explaining, among other things, the source of such precious metals as silver, gold and platinum. This is the first direct sighting of a collision between two neutron stars. The corpses of these stars are spectacularly dense. A single teaspoon of material would carry a mass that on Earth would weigh roughly one billion tons.

Churning debris produced in the afterglow of the collision included newly created gold, silver and platinum. There was also a smattering of other heavy elements, including uranium. Until now, the birthplace of such elements had been theory. The extreme conditions produced in the collision forged heavier elements than the parent stars had hosted.

The actual smashup now appears to have taken place 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra. The afterglow revealed the birth of elements. As the collision spurted neutron-rich material into space, a variety of heavy elements formed through a chain of nuclear reactions known as the “r-process.”

Ancient Greek Roman city of Phaselis Sinking

Almost two meters of the ancient city of Phaselis have submerged in 2,000 years say Turkish archaeologists. The submerging is a natural phenomenon. “The African continent puts pressure on the Asian plate. In some areas, it’s three-centimeters per year and in other areas, nine centimeters. Plate movements in the Mediterranean basin cause that area to collapse in some areas."

Phaselis, situated in the southern province of Antalya’s Kemer district, was important for trade in ancient times as it had three ports. Its possible to still see the wealth of the ancient city. The town was set up by the Rhodians around 700 BC. Because of its location on an isthmus separating two harbours, it became an important center of commerce between Greece, Asia, Egypt, and Phoenicia.

The city was captured by Persians, and was later captured by Alexander the Great. After the death of Alexander, the city remained in Egyptian hands from 209 BC to 197 BC, under the dynasty of Ptolemaios. After 160 BC it was absorbed into Roman rule. In 42 BC Brutus had the city linked to Rome. In the 3rd century AD, the harbor fell under the constant threat of pirates.

The city gradually lost it's importance and the area was totally impoverished by the 11th century.

Psychology of Gold

Human beings' fascination with gold is as old as history itself. Gold has always had an irresistible appeal. Empires have flourished by possessing gold, they have fallen to ruin for it's failure to exist. Uncountable wars have been fought to control regions harboring it. Countless have died in pursuit of it.

Oxus chariot

The Aztecs described gold as the "excrement of the gods" while the Incas thought of it as the "sweat of the sun." In ancient Egypt, gold was considered the "flesh of the gods." Across human cultures, it was sacred. In ancient Rome and medieval Europe, laws prohibited people from wearing too much gold -- or wearing it at all unless they were from noble stock. In many cultures, the word for money derives from the word for gold. Gold debuted as a recognized exchange standard for international trade around 1500 BC. In China, the ideogram for money is the ideogram for gold. Gold continues to feature heavily in religion and religious rituals worldwide.

40,000-year-old “Tianyuan Man” pure Homo sapiens

When scientists excavated a 40,000-year-old skeleton in China in 2003, they thought they had discovered the offspring of a Neandertal and a modern human. But ancient DNA now reveals that “Tianyuan Man” has only traces of Neandertal DNA and none detectable from another type of extinct human and elusive cousin of Neandertals known as a Denisovan. Instead, he was a full-fledged member of our species, Homo sapiens, and a distant relative of people who today live in East Asia and South America.

The first modern humans arose in Africa about 300,000 years ago. By 60,000 years ago, a subset swept out of Africa and mated with Neandertals, perhaps in the Middle East. After that, they spread around the world. Tianyuan Man shares DNA with one ancient European—a 35,000-year-old modern human from Goyet Caves in Belgium. But he doesn’t share it with other ancient humans who lived at roughly the same time in Romania and Siberia—or with living Europeans. Tianyuan Man is most closely related to living people in east Asia. All of this suggests that Tianyuan Man was not a direct ancestor, but rather a distant cousin, of a founding population in Asia that gave rise to present-day Asians.

3,200-year-old stone tells of invasion of mysterious sea people

Symbols on a 3,200-year-old stone slab have been deciphered by researchers who say they could solve "one of the greatest puzzles of Mediterranean archaeology". The 29-metre limestone frieze, found in 1878, in what is now Turkey, bears the longest known hieroglyphic inscription from the Bronze Age. Only a handful of scholars worldwide can read its ancient Luwian language. Researchers believe the inscriptions were commissioned in 1190 BC by Kupanta-Kurunta, the king of a late Bronze Age state known as Mira. The text suggests the kingdom and other Anatolian states invaded ancient Egypt and other regions of the east Mediterranean before and during the fall of the Bronze Age. The script tells how a united fleet of kingdoms from western Asia Minor raided coastal cities on the eastern Mediterranean. The identity and origin of the invaders which scholars call the Trojan Sea People had puzzled archaeologists for centuries. The first translation provides an explanation for the unexplained collapse of the Bronze Age's advanced civilizations.

It suggests they were part of a marauding seafaring confederation, which historians believe played a part in the collapse of nascent Bronze Age civilizations.

Top Archaeological Discoveries in 2015

Ancient Mosaic in Israel. A 1,700-year-old mosaic discovered in Lod, Israel, was revealed to the public for the first time in November, 2015. Measuring 36 by 42 feet, the impressive artwork covered in depictions of nature was found during construction of a visitor center for the Lod Mosaic, another artwork found two decades ago in that same area.

Musashi Japanese Warship Wreck. The wreckage of the Musashi was found at a depth of more than 3,000 feet. The ship went down in October 1944 after multiple torpedo and bomb hits during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

About half of its 2400-member crew was lost.

Superhenge. Archaeologists in Great Britain discovered evidence of a row of up to 90 stones buried at Durrington Walls, a prehistoric henge less than 2 miles from Stonehenge. The line of stones, which have been pushed over and covered with an earthen mound, roughly outline the southern border of the Durrington Walls, forming a C-shaped arena about a third of a mile in diameter. Researchers believe the earthworks could have been built earlier than Stonehenge.

Amenhotep's Tomb. Egypt announced the discovery of the 3,000-year-old tomb of Amenhotep, a nobleman who guarded the temple of the Egyptian deity Amun. The tomb was discovered by an American research team in the city of Luxor, which is more than 400 miles away from Cairo. It is believed to date to 1543 B.C. - 1292 B.C. Colorful artworks and hieroglyphics are etched into the tomb walls, telling the story of the tomb owner and his family.

Burial Tomb in Pompeii, Italy. French archaeologists found a perfectly preserved pre-Roman tomb dating to the fourth century B.C. in Pompeii. It predates and survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. It was discovered near the Herculaneum Gate and held the remains of an adult woman about 45 years old, as well as a number of vases and clay jars known as “amphoras.”

Texas Supershark. Fossils of a megashark that lived 300 million years ago were unearthed in Jacksboro, Texas in October 2015. The sharks were more than half the length of a school bus. That's 25 percent larger than the modern great white shark and more than three times as long as other fossil sharks. They lived before the age of dinosaurs, which emerged about 230 million years ago. The find indicates that giant sharks date back much further in the fossil record than previously thought.

Siberian Cave Lion Cubs. Scientists in Yakutsk, Russia discovered two incredibly well-preserved remains of two lion cubs approximately 12,000 years old. The two cubs are cave lions, a long extinct species, and were about two weeks old when they died. Dug from permafrost, the cubs still had fur, soft tissue and even whiskers.