Science Tuesday - Cave Paintings, EPA, Green Burials, and ancient astronomy

Scientist at Work | Randall White: Falling in Love With France and Its Troves of Ancient History
By MICHAEL BALTER, The New York Times, April 10, 2007

LES EYZIES-DE-TAYAC, France — A few miles upstream from this red-roofed village in the Périgord region of southern France, the meandering Vézère River flows past the entrance to the Gorge of Hell. A trail runs along the base of a limestone cliff to a locked steel door. Behind the door, which can be opened to a visitor only by appointment, is the oldest depiction of a fish ever discovered.
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Challenge to Emissions Rule Is Set to Start
By DANNY HAKIM, The New York Times, April 10, 2007

The fight over cars and carbon dioxide moves today from the Supreme Court to a federal courtroom in Burlington, Vt., in a case that automakers say could reshape vehicles sold on the East and West Coasts.
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Roadblock for Spreading of Human Ashes in Wilderness
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, March 30, 2007

MISSOULA, Mont. — Last wishes notwithstanding, federal officials are opposed to a Montana woman’s plan for a business that would spread the cremated remains of her clients over western Montana’s publicly owned wild mountain peaks and flower-studded meadows.
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Scientists say that this ancient toothed horizon served as part solar observatory at a ceremonial complex, right.

Stone Towers Are Decoded as Earliest Solar Observatory in the Americas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 6, 2007

Early people in Peru, like others in antiquity, went to great lengths to track the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons as a guide for agriculture, an object of worship and a mystical demonstration of a ruler’s power.

Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.
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Muzzle Awards

Thomas Jefferson Center 2007 Muzzle Awards:
Since 1992, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has celebrated the birth and ideals of its namesake by calling attention to those who in the past year forgot or disregarded Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that freedom of speech ‘cannot be limited without being lost.’

Announced on or near April 13 — the anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson — the Jefferson Muzzles are awarded as a means to draw national attention to abridgments of free speech and press and, at the same time, foster an appreciation for those tenets of the First Amendment.
Because the importance and value of free expression extend far beyond the First Amendment’s limit on government censorship, acts of private censorship are not spared consideration for the dubious honor of receiving a Muzzle.

Unfortunately, each year the finalists for the Jefferson Muzzles have emerged from an alarmingly large group of candidates. For each recipient, a dozen could have been substituted. Further, an examination of previous Jefferson Muzzle recipients reveals that the disregard of First Amendment principles is not the byproduct of a particular political outlook but rather that threats to free expression come from all over the political spectrum.

1. The Bush Administration - For its unprecedented efforts of discouraging, changing, and sometimes censoring the reports and studies of government scientists in order to make them more supportive of political policies, a 2007 Jefferson Muzzle goes to… the Bush Administration.
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