It's been known for a while that many galaxies have super-massive black holes at their centres (including our own). Recently it has been shown that at least some of these also rotate extremely rapidly and rapidly spinning massive bodies are thought to twist the fabric space-time. This is something that a new $700 million space probe is about to be sent up to test for. Most (but by no means all) galaxies have other strange dynamical aspects as well, I can't help wondering whether some of these could also be explained by the effects frame dragging by super-massive bodies.

The evolution of tiny, shelled sea creatures ended a 200 million year era of extreme ice ages and has protected the Earth from any repeat ever since, suggest the results of a new modelling study.

During the frozen period, known as "snowball Earth" the polar ice caps extended far down into low latitudes, covering much of the planet.

The emergence of the plankton, which incorporate carbon dioxide into calcium carbonate shells, created a new stability in the planet's carbon cycle, argue Andy Ridgwell, at the University of Riverside, California, and his colleagues. The minute organisms did this by providing for the first time a way to dump calcium carbonate into the deep waters below the open oceans.

Chemical processes in the sea that dissolve calcium carbonate deposits alter the acidity of the water. This helps regulate the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide that can dissolve in seawater. And this in turn helps the planet to regulate its temperature. [link]

The conventional view of how the Native Americans originally migrated from Asia to America is that they walked across the land bridge that formed across the Bering Strait (otherwise known as Beringia) during the last Ice Age.

At this time, sea-levels had dropped by as much as 110 metres thus creating land bridges like Beringia but it's worth noting that this was because most of sea water was locked up massive glaciers that rested upon the land, especially in North America and Eurasia. These glaciers created enormous, high and generally impassable wastelands and it is likely that they would have prevented migration until 12,000 years ago at the earliest. Furthemore, it has been argued that this route may have been blocked in Canada for even longer than that.

An alternative theory that is now starting to gain ground argues that humans may have migrated to the Americas by sea instead of land, by island hopping along an archipelago just off the ancient coastline. This is just what the Australian Aborigines did more than forty thousand years ago. Recent studies of plant and animal life indicate that even during the Ice Age the environment of the coastal regions would have been rich enough to sustain human populations as early as 16,000 year ago and possibly even much earlier.

There are many things that are contentious in American paleontology but one thing that is generally accepted is that humans starting living in the Americas no later than 11,500 years ago. The earliest uncontested sites are those of the Clovis people, a culture whose characteristically fluted arrow tips can be found in thick profusion in archaeological sites scattered across both North and South America. While there is tantalizing evidence of much earlier settlements, the best preserved being at Cactus Hill in Virginia and at Monte Verde in Chile, the latter yielding dates which may go back as far as 33,000 years, the evidence for pre-Clovis settlement still has some way to go before being accepted as mainstream.

But that point aside, even with the Clovis people plenty of mystery remains. Who were the Clovis people and where did they come from? The answers to those questions are not as straightforward as they once seemed.

He was about 175 cm tall, a vigorous middle-aged man who for years had carried a spear point lodged in his hip, apparently without ill effect

He had a long face, a long low brain pan, a prominent nose and other skull measurements that distinguished him from most, if not all, of the modern world's distinct human populations.

He bore no resemblance to any modern American Indian, and some scientists have suggested that he was more Caucasoid than Asian. This possibility has made him perhaps the most celebrated and controversial skeleton ever found in North America. [link]

The conventional theory has it that the Clovis migrated into the Americas from Siberia via a land-bridge across the Bering strait some time after the glacial maximum which was 14,000 years ago. This theory is based on a notion first put forward by a Jesuit missionary Fray José de Acosta (Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias) in 1590 when he suggested that "small groups of savage hunters" may have traveled overland from Asia to America many thousands of years ago (the Bering strait, incidentally, was not discovered until 1823).

Again, the late discoveries of Captain Cook, coasting from Kamchatka to California, have proved that if the two continents of Asia and America be separated at all, it is only by a narrow strait. So that from this side also, inhabitants May have passed into America; and the resemblance between the Indians of America and the eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former; excepting indeed the Esquimaux, who, from the same circumstance of resemblance, and from identity of language, must be derived from the Greenlanders, and these probably from some of the northern parts of the old continent.

[Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia. 1782]

There is no doubt that the land-bridge did exist and that it was (at least theoretically) usable for migration at various times between glacial maxima and there is also certainly a strong physical resemblance between modern Native Americans and modern North-East Asians however it is a curious fact that there have been no Clovis sites found in Alaska and that the cultural artifacts found in Siberia for the same period differ significantly from the Clovis ones.

Finding human remains of this antiquity is even rarer in the Americas than finding tools and camp sites but of the few skeletons that have been found that date to over 8,000 years old, another curious fact emerges: only one (found at Wizard's Beach in Nevada) has facial features that resemble those of modern Native Americans or for that matter North-East Asians.

Instead, these skulls have been variously described as resembling South Asians, Australian Aborigines, Polynesians, Africans and even Europeans. Skeletons with more familiarly Native American characteristics do not start showing up much before 7,000 years ago, more than a millennium after the end of the Clovis period. This implies that the original makeup of the American population was far more diverse than had originally been thought and that there may have been several immigration events which occurred at various times, some after the land-bridge route was inundated and some possibly very much earlier. The most likely scenario for these migrations being via a coastal route in boats rather than overland by foot.

It's worth recalling at this point that the demographic make up of Asia has been in a state of constant flux as well so it really should not be too surprising to see people's of quite different backgrounds washing up on American shores. Recently, research into the settlement pattern for the Indian subcontinent, South-East Asia and Australia has demonstrated that modern humans from Africa started migrating eastwards more than 60,000 years ago using boats which hugged the coastline. Within 10,000 years they had reached Australia and New Guinea and negotiating 250 km of open sea to get there. It is likely that this early migration pattern continued up the Chinese coast and as far as Japan and it is an exciting possibility that these early people also arrived in the Americas, migrating down the full length of both continents and contribution to the genetic stock which would one day create the Clovis culture.

Specimen from Baja California Sur Courtesy: Rolando González-José

Skulls point to varied origins for first Americans

The ancestry of the first Americans may be more complex than anthropologists thought.

Researchers studied 33 ancient skulls excavated in Mexico. They say unlike other early American remains, the artifacts resemble those of people from south Asia and the southern Pacific Rim.

Rolando González-José of the University of Barcelona and his colleagues took detailed measurements of skulls from an extinct tribe.

The skulls were excavated at the tip of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico. The study appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The researchers conclude the skulls' features appear more Paleoamerican than those of the Paleoindians, thought to be direct ancestors of present-day Native Americans.

"Surprisingly, the craniofacial features of these Baja Paleoamericans skulls have similar long and narrow braincases and relatively short, narrow faces, implying a common ancestry with the inhabitants of south Asia and the Pacific Rim," wrote anthropology researcher Tom Dillehay in a commentary accompanying the study.


[link]

It's important to realise here that this "extinct tribe", the Pericu (and its neighbouring tribe the Guaycuras) only died out a few hundred years ago and only after contact with white colonizers. Furthermore, similarities have been noted between the Baja Indians and the natives of Tierra del Fuego, a people who have largely abandoned their traditional way of life but are still very much with us.

Esotericism of the Popol Vuh [the holy book of the Maya civilization]

Survivals of that archaic form of culture still persist on this continent and, as might be expected, are found in areas of refuge where they were preserved by farming peoples. Populations which retain a high degree of "First-Age" characteristics, as described by the native sources, live in Baja California as well as on the islands of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost extreme. Both populations display notable similarities, and in terms of nature and physique appear to be the oldest and most primitive people of the hemisphere. Baja California is or was peopled by the Yumas, Guaícuris, and Pericu; and the Seri – now confined to an island in the Sea of Cortez. All of them belong to the primitive hunter cycle and, excepting the Yumas, are dolichocephalic. They have a very primitive type of physique, like the Tierra del Fuego Indians of the extreme south and the Botocudos of Brazil. Like their remote ancestors, the Fuego Indians, whom W. Krickeberg regards as direct descendants of the oldest immigrants (W. Krickeberg, Etnología de América, Mexico, 1946, Spanish-language edition), preserve a religion based on the purest monotheism and have almost no ritual acts. They have neither tribal organization nor institution of chiefs, living in nomadic hordes of two or three families, small consanguinal patrilineal groups. They produce neither pottery nor weaving and live by hunting and fishing, feeding on mollusks, fish, birds, and seals. A piece of sealskin covers the shoulders of the men and serves as an apron for the women (A. D'Orbigny, L'Homme Américain , Paris, 1839). They do not know the fire drill, employing instead two stones and tinder, a very primitive method still used by the Chortí, particularly in connection with the interment of the dead. In the south of Patagonia in former times caves were used for habitations as well as for burials, as W. Krickeberg notes; and the same author indicates that estimates based on archaeological remains and island middens show that the Fuegians have lived in that region for at least two thousand years, their culture undergoing very little modification during that time. These data tend to confirm the cultural stability as well as the great ethnological age of those people.

[link]

"Luzia" of Brazil


A skull belonging to a roughly 20 year old woman was unearthed in Brazil by the French archaeologist Annette Amperaire in 1971. She died before before being able to do any work on her dicovery. The skull was later "re-discovered" on a museum shelf by Brazilian Prof. Walter Neves and recognized for what it was. In a brilliant popularization of his find, he named the ancient lady "Luzia" (in analogy to the famous and much older African "Lucy") - the press and a wider public could not be troubled with the skull's official designation "Lapa Vermelha IV Hominid 1".

The face of "Luzia" was reconstructed using modern forensic methods and its morphology painstakingly analyzed by craniometric measurements. The reconstruction brought to light and and the measurements confirmed that "Luzia" was not a mongoloid Amerindian but had features indicating a possibly Australoid or southeast Asian ancestry. When it was dated to around 11,500 to 12,500 years ago (the oldest human remains found so far in the Americas), the sensation was perfect.

Since Luzia's discovery, at least 50 similarly un-mongoloid Palaeoamerican remains have been found in the Lagoa Santa area near where "Luzia" herself was found. They all seem to have been buried within a small area that may have been a cemetery. This rises the intriguing question of whether the Lagoa Santa population at this early time was perhaps already settled in a specific area and perhaps even no longer just hunter-gatherers. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the Lagoa Santa people that cry out for further research.


[link]

How did a European arrive in America 9,000 years ago?

Bid to clear up the Kennewick mystery
Tests to be carried out in the next few days may shed light on the mystery of the Kennewick man.
[In 1996] an apparently European skeleton was found near Kennewick, Washington State, in the western United States - a discovery that sparked a bitter clash between archaeologists and native Americans.

The scientists want to examine the bones to look for clues to where the ancient traveller came from, but native Americans consider this disrespectful to one of their ancestors and want to re-bury the remains.

However the Kennewick Man skeleton prompts a particularly awkward question - what was an apparently European man doing in North America over 9,000 years ago?

Conventional wisdom has it that Vikings may have reached North America around 1,000 AD, but archaeologists hope the remains would tell them more about the spread of humans across the Americas.

[link]

Kennewick Man's "caucasian"-ness has since been discounted as it has been recognized that large noses and a long faces are not exclusive characteristics of Europeans but can also be found in other Asian racial groups. An examination of the skull's dental pattern demonstrated a possible affinity with South Asians.

While it seems likely that there were several waves of migration into the Americas from Asia, the one made by North-East Asians, seemingly the last and perhaps the largest in terms of population, has prompted some commentators to interpret this in terms of a population replacement and one which entailed the mass extermination of the original inhabitants over the length and breadth of two continents.
This strikes me more as a case of overkill in theoretical terms than in reality. Undoubtedly there were violent encounters as the new arrivals competed for the same resources as the locals. This always happens with human populations but to me a far more likely pattern than genocide over the course of thousands of years would have been conflict, accommodation and ultimately assimilation. There are a number of genetic differences between Native Americans and North East Asians and some of these point to a diverse genetic inheritance.

So while it is true that we are:

Slowly... realizing that the ancestry of the Americas is as complex and as difficult to trace as that of other human lineages around the world.

It does not necessarily follow that:

not all early American populations were directly related to present-day Native Americans.

That is, assuming that, say, Kennewick Man had left any descendants at all that are alive today (and it is worth noting here that he had been properly buried after his death by someone who cared enough to do so) then it is practically certain that all Native Americans alive today are his descendants. Furthermore, a high percentage of the black and white communities living today in the Americas could also legitimately claim him as their ancestor¹.

As James Chatters, the only archeologist to have examined the Kennewick Man skeleton, puts it:

No matter how long we might study the Kennewick man we would never know the form or color of his eyes, skin and hair, whether his hair was curly or straight, his lips thin or full – in short many of the characteristics by which we judge living peoples' racial affiliation. We will never be certain if his wound was by accident or intent, what language he spoke, or his religious beliefs. We cannot know if he is truly anyone's ancestor. Given the millennia since he lived, he may be sire to none or all of us.

1 - ancestor: This is because of a suprising effect, well-known amongst genealogists, that as you go back far enough in time you start to run out of individual ancestors. For each generation the number of ancestors you need to take account of doubles but at the same time, generally speaking, these ancestors are being drawn from a smaller and smaller population. Taking a biblical example, if we traced our ancestry back to 4004 BC, that's 240 generations, we would all have 2 raised to the power of 12016 ancestors and half of them would be called Adam and the other half, Eve.

If we speak only of Europeans, one only has to go back about 400 years before you can say with quite a reasonable degree of certainty that if an individual living back then had any descendants that are alive today then all Europeans living today are also descendants of that person.

In a nutshell, it seems everyone is descended from Charlemagne.

While investigating a mountain ridge facing Machu Picchu using aerial infra-red scanning technology, a team of archaeologists have discovered a previously unknown series of high-status sacred ceremonial buildings scattered over at least a square mile of jungle. They also rediscovered seven other buildings which had originally been found in 1912 but lost again due to incomplete reporting of their location. Preliminary examination of the ruins suggests that the complex was a large religious centre used for ceremonies and astronomical observations. [link]

After 10 years of digging, "Little Rome," as the great Roman orator Cicero called it, is coming to light near Naples, in what could be the most important discovery of an ancient Roman town since the excavation of lava-entombed Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century. The ancient town of Puteoli, once one of the major trading ports of the Mediterranean, has been found under Rione Terra, a stout promontory in Pozzuoli, just 8 miles west of Naples. Known to Italians as the birthplace of movie star Sophia Loren, Pozzuoli is a pleasant seaside resort surrounded by volcanic hills. But under palaces and hotels lies an ancient city with streets, temples and exceptionally preserved buildings — in no way inferior to those of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. [link]

Update: Based on a discussion over at Languagehat, I have altered the spelling of Niépce to Nièpce.

I have a fascination with old photographs, the older the better. So it stands to reason (by this admittedly pretty simple-minded critereon) that this would be one of my favourites.

It's not what you might call a conventional beauty. Being fuzzy and poorly defined,

any beauty that it may contain is definitely of the more austere variety. Also its subject matter is somewhat mundane. Nevertheless, it still has a number interesting aspects about it, some better known than others.

Apologies for pause in content, Ladies and Gentlemen. I've been a little busy with other things.

Please stayed tuned for more updates shortly.

A team of Japanese researchers has confirmed the existence of an ancient Buddhist temple 120 kilometers west of the Afghanistan town of Bamiyan.

The remains contain a courtyard, several small rooms with dome-shaped roofs and a lecture hall. In hollows in the walls were miniature shrines to place Buddhist images. The remains also contain a stupa with a diameter of about 7.7 meters. About 6 kilometers west of the temple remains are the remains of a fortress whose local names translates as "40 towers."

[link]

Artificial protein S-824 has features similar to natural proteins.

Stringing together random amino acids is unlikely to result in a protein-like molecule, but add a little design and structures that fold up just like real proteins are possible. In research appearing in PNAS, Michael Hecht of Princeton University and colleagues describe a combinatorial library approach to making artificial proteins. In this method, chains of amino acids that alternate between water-loving (polar) and water-hating (nonpolar) are built up. The precise amino acid added is randomly chosen from a pool. The underlying pattern of polar and nonpolar amino acids, the researchers hoped, would lead to sequences that adopt three-dimensional shapes similar to proteins. The team created a large library of such sequences and singled out one so-called "de novo" protein, labeled S-824, for detailed study. Using spectroscopy to check its 3D shape in solution, the team found that S-824 formed a unique structure with features resembling those seen in natural proteins. These features include a non-polar core with a polar surface. Such artificial proteins might ultimately be used as catalysts in the biotech industry, as drug-delivery agents, and as smart materials. [link]

While it was easy to spot cameras twenty years ago due to their large size, this has become increasingly difficult during the last decade. Cameras have become much smaller and consume a fraction of the power they did ten years ago. Due to this, covert installation in nearly any imaginable place is possible. This paper will show methods frequently used for hiding cameras as well as methods to detect and locate covertly installed cameras. [link]

The disappearance of the dinosaurs is an one of those fascinating mysteries but there's an equally interesting riddle which has been given far less attention:

How is it that the dinosaurs came to rule the earth in the first place?

It took Copernicus to revolutionise our understanding of the universe, Kepler to make it work and Newton (many years later) to explain it but it took the heretical monk Giordano Bruno to understand what it meant.

Bruno, who was born five years after the death of Copernicus and who himself died nine years before Galileo first peered through a telescope, was more philosopher than scientist but he had a powerful intuition and could see what none of his contemporaries or immediate successors were able to.

Copernicus replaced the earth with the sun as the center of the universe for some very classical reasons. Ptolemy had broken with Aristotle and introduced a concept of non-uniform motion in order to explain the observed behaviour of Venus and Mars. This had bothered astronomers ever since and Copernicus decided to create a model which would consist purely of uniform circular motion but the price was to reject the common sense view that the world was at rest and instead he argued that it was in circular motion around the sun. Nevertheless, despite the revolutionary (in ever sense) potential of this innovation, Copernicus continued to accept the majority of the Ptolemaic dogma. He continued to think of the so-called fixed stars of the firmament as merely equidistant points of light which lay upon the inside of an invisible sphere (but one that didn't rotate as Ptolemy had believed). Copernicus in the process of rejecting geocentrism simply replaced the earth with the sun as the central point in the universe while holding all things else in Ptolemy as the truth.

Bruno went much further this. He agreed that earth was a planet just like any other (in fact he referred to all planets as "earths") but he also denied that the sun itself was in anyway special. Far from placing it at the centre of the universe, he argued that it should be considered just a star amongst an infinity of others and that stars were not fixed to an outer sphere but rather were separated from one another by vast stretches of open space. Furthermore, he considered the possibility that all of the planets were inhabited (and even the sun!) and that every star in the universe was orbited by inhabited worlds.

In his work, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, he expounds his theory in the form of a dialog

Philotheo. [The whole universe] then is one, the heaven, the immensity of embosoming space, the universal envelope, the ethereal region through which the whole hath course and motion. Innumerable celestial bodies, stars, globes, suns and earths may be sensibly perceived therein by us and an infinite number of them may be inferred by our own reason. The universe, immense and infinite, is the complex of this [vast] space and of all the bodies contained therein.

Elpino. So that there are no spheres with concave and convex surfaces nor deferent orbs; but all is one field, one universal envelope.

Philotheo. So it is.

...


Elpino. There are then innumerable suns, and an infinite number of earths revolve around those suns, just as the seven we can observe revolve around this sun which is close to us.

Philotheo. So it is.

Elpino. Why then do we not see the other bright bodies which are earths circling around the bright bodies which are suns? For beyond these we can detect no motion whatever; and why do all other mundane bodies (except those known as comets) appear always in the same order and at the same distance?

Philotheo. The reason is that we discern only the largest suns, immense bodies. But we do not discern the earths because, being much smaller, they are invisible to us. Similarly it is not impossible that other earths revolve around our sun and are invisible to us on account either of greater distance or of smaller size, or because they have but little watery surface, or because such watery surface is not turned toward us and opposed to the sun, whereby it would be made visible as a crystal mirror which receiveth luminous rays; whence we perceive that it is not marvellous or contrary to nature that often we hear that the sun hath been partially eclipsed though the moon hath not been interpolated between him and our sight. There may be innumerable watery luminous bodies – that is, earths consisting in part of water – circulating around the sun, besides those visible to us; but the difference in their orbits is indiscernible by us on account of their great distance, wherefore we perceive no difference in the very slow motion discernible of those visible above or beyond Saturn; still less doth there appear any order in the motion of all around the centre, whether we place our earth or our sun as that centre.

...

Elpino. Therefore you consider that if the stars beyond Saturn are really motionless as they appear, then they are those innumerable suns or fires more or less visible to us around which travel their own neighbouring earths which are not discernible by us.

Theophilo. Yes, we should have to argue thus, since all earths merit the same amount of heat, and all suns merit the same amount.

Elpino. Then you believe that all those are suns?

Philotheo. Not so, for I do not know whether all or whether the majority are without motion, or whether some circle around others, since none hath observed them. Moreover they are not easy to observe, for it is not easy to detect the motion and progress of a remote object, since at a great distance change of position cannot easily be detected, as happeneth when we would observe ships in a high sea. But however that may be, the universe being infinite, there must ultimately be other suns. For it is impossible that heat and light from one single body should be diffused throughout immensity, as was supposed by Epicurus if we may credit what others relate of him. Therefore it followeth that there must be innumerable suns, of which many appear to us as small bodies; but that star will appear smaller which is in fact much larger than that which appeareth much greater.

Elpino. All this must be deemed at least possible and expedient.

Philotheo. Around these bodies there may revolve earths both larger and smaller than our own.

...

Burchio. We, however, maintain that the earth should always be regarded as central, as hath been believed by so many highly learned personages.

Fracastoro. And hath been confirmed by fools.

Burchio. What do you say of fools?

Fracastoro. I say that this opinion hath not been confirmed either by sense or reason.

...

Burchio. Quickly, your conclusion!

Fracastoro. I would conclude as follows. The famous and received order of the elements and of the heavenly bodies is a dream and vainest fantasy, since it can neither be verified by observation of nature nor proved by reason or argued, nor is it either convenient or possible to conceive that it exist in such fashion. But we know that there is an infinite field, a containing space which doth embrace and interpenetrate the whole. In it is an infinity of bodies similar to our own. No one of these more than another is in the centre of the universe, for the universe is infinite and therefore without centre or limit, though these appertain to each of the worlds within the universe in the way I have explained on other occasions, especially when we demonstrated that there are certain determined definite centres, namely, the suns, fiery bodies around which revolve all planets, earths and waters, even as we see the seven wandering planets take their course around our sun. Similarly we shewed that each of these stars or worlds, spinning around his own centre, hath the appearance of a solid and continuous world which taketh by force all visible things which can become stars and whirleth them around himself as the centre of their universe. Thus there is not merely one world, one earth, one sun, but as many worlds as we see bright lights around us, which are neither more nor less in one heaven, one space, one containing sphere than is this our world in one containing universe, one space or one heaven. So that the heaven, the infinitely extending air, though part of the infinite universe, is not therefore a world or part of worlds; but is the womb, the receptacle and field within which they all move and live, grow and render effective the several acts of their vicissitudes; produce, nourish and maintain their inhabitants and animals; and by certain dispositions and orders they minister to higher nature, changing the face of single being through countless subjects


...

Burchio. Then the other worlds are inhabited like our own?

Fracastoro. If not exactly as our own, and if not more nobly, at least no less inhabited and no less nobly. For it is impossible that a rational being fairly vigilant, can imagine that these innumerable worlds, manifest as like to our own or yet more magnificent, should be destitute of similar and even superior inhabitants; for all are either themselves suns or the sun doth diffuse to them no less than to us those most divine and fertilizing rays, which convince us of the joy that reigneth at their source and origin and bring fortune to those stationed around who thus participate in the diffused quality. The innumerable prime members of the universe are then infinite [in number], and all have similar aspect, countenance, prerogative, quality and power.

...

Burchio. In this way, you would put the world upside down.

Fracastoro. Wouldst thou consider him to do ill who would upset a world which was upside down?

Bruno was a man with a breathtaking vision and one which he didn't mind sharing with everyone he met. In those days of religious schism and political upheaval, his views were considered dangerous by Catholics and Protestants alike. He had fled Italy and his Dominican in order to escape suspicion of heresy, he then joined the Calvinists in Geneva only to be excommunicated shortly thereafter, later he was to be similarly ejected by the Lutherans.

He was constantly moving from place to place, lecturing, cajoling and hawking his heterodox philosophy throughout many of the centres of learning in Europe. He travelled to France and was for a while a favourite of the King, after that he was presented before the court of Queen Elizabeth and expounded his views before an unreceptive crowd at Oxford, was chased from princedom to princedom in Germany.

After he was enticed to return to his native Italy, he was arrested and brought before the Roman Inquisition. He was charged with heresy and imprisoned for six years and was probably tortured. When he refused repeatedly to recant he was finally condemned to death. On February 17, 1600 he was taken to the Campo di Fiora in Rome and burnt at the stake. A statue of Giordano Bruno, erected in the 19th century, now marks this spot.

See also:

Giordano Bruno: The Forgotten Philosopher
False Doctrine: The Recantation of Galileo

There are then innumerable suns, and an infinite number of earths revolve around those suns, just as the seven we can observe revolve around this sun which is close to us.

[Giordano Bruno, 1584]

Giordano Bruno was the first to envisage planetary systems in revolution around distant stars but it took more than four hundred years before his speculation was proven to be correct. In 1995, Geneva-based astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz identified a rythmic shift in the light spectrum coming from a star known as 51 Pegasi which was highly suggestive of the star being tugged at by an invisible body with about half the mass of the planet Jupiter. This behaviour of 51 Pegasi was confirmed shortly after by Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler who had themselves been searching for extrasolar planets since 1987. The door was opened and since then more than a hundred extrasolar planets have been found using this technique, by observing the periodicity of the doppler shifts in the light coming from the star it is possible to ascertain the masses and distances of these planetary bodies. But the technique is really only sensitive to planets within the same order of magnitude as the planet Jupiter and the evidence is indirect, so far no one has been able to directly observe an extrasolar planet.

Some highlights from the archive for November 2002

Further to an earlier post about spinning black holes, it appears that the blackhole in our own glalaxy is more massive that previously thought (between 3.2 million and 4 million solar masses) and is rotating at an incredible rate , once every 11 minutes or at about 30% of the speed of light.

And, yes, frame dragging seems to be involved as well, distorting the space-time around it in a way enabling matter to orbit it at far higher speeds than would normally be expected. [link]