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Dentistry Without Drills: Paint Your Cavities Away
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, March 1, 2005
Japanese researchers say they have found a way to produce an artificial tooth enamel that is chemically like the real thing.
The discovery, they report in the current issue of Nature, may allow dentists to fill some cavities without using a drill.
Getting even a small filling can be destructive: that high-pitched whine you hear when drill meets tooth is the sound of healthy enamel being pulverized.
Dentists try to damage as little healthy tissue as possible, but even a skilled one has to destroy a large amount of the tooth to create a surface that will bond with the filling.
Dr. Kazue Yamagishi of Tokyo's FAP Dental Institute and colleagues introduced fluorine ions into hydroxyapatite, the crystalline material of enamel, and then dissolved the product in acid to make a paste.
This creates a substance that can be painted on a tooth. After it is applied, the material crystallizes, forming a seamless bond.
Because it contains fluorine, it also offers protection against decay.
The material is highly durable, and although it is also subject to decay, it is somewhat more resistant to acid than natural enamel.
It bonds so perfectly with the natural enamel that even when viewed with an electron microscope there is no apparent gap at the interface between the artificial substances and the actual ones.
So far, the procedure has been used only for cavities that are not large enough to penetrate the one to two millimeters of enamel that cover a normal tooth.
The manufactured material grows crystals perfectly oriented to the tooth surface, essentially becoming an integral part of it.
The paste is whitish, and blends fairly well with the color of teeth, but it probably cannot be dyed to match.
"I could mix something into it to change the color," Dr. Yamagishi said, "but that would cause the crystal to change its structure, so I don't recommend it."
But before the paste is used commercially, Dr. Yamagishi said, "We need to study it more to confirm the safety of the therapy."
To the Rescue of Goliath
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, March 1, 2005
Suppose you are a Goliath bird-eating spider, the largest known spider on earth, now or ever. Imagine your chagrin when in 1980 an amateur collector in Argentina finds a fossil declared by experts to be that of a spider nearly three times as large. They give this misbegotten piece of rock the grand title of Megarachne - giant spider - and you are left in distant second place.
You seethe in malice for 25 years and it seems no one cares. But then, who should come riding to your rescue but Paul Selden. Yes, Paul Selden no less, the president of the International Society of Arachnology. Dr. Selden has doubted from Day 1 that Megarachne was a true spider. Recently a second Megarachne-like fossil was discovered at the same site in Argentina as the first. Dr. Selden, an expert on fossil arthropods at the University of Manchester, was invited to compare the two.
His suspicions were immediately confirmed. On seeing the impostor's cuticular mucrones and raised lunules, he reports in Biology Letters, he recognized it as not a spider but a eurypterid, and a rather puny one at that. Eurypterids were highly aggressive marine scorpions, some more than six feet long, that in their long ago heyday killed just about anything they wanted to.
So now your rightful position as biggest thing on the World Wide Web has been restored. But wait, there is a fly in the ointment. You would like the title of Megarachne for yourself, or at the least for Dr. Selden to strip it from the usurper. But he refuses!
"Although its name is anomalous, it has to keep it," he said of the fossil nonspider. Under zoological rules of nomenclature, names cannot be taken back.
"Even if you find a bird and call it a horse, it can't be changed," Dr. Selden avers. The only way out is if he should judge that Megarachne belongs to some already named species of eurypterid such as Woodwardopterus, a step he is not yet prepared to take.
It's more than enough to send you into a deep, bleak, bird-crunching rampage.
A Goliath bird-eating spider, the world's largest spider at 10 inches in diameter, was not usurped by an eurypterid, inset, after all.
Japan Mulls Plan to Establish Lunar Base
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, March 1, 2005
TOKYO (AP) -- Joining a swelling group of countries shooting for the moon, Japan is considering a plan to establish a manned lunar base by 2025, officials said Tuesday.
Officials at Japan's space agency, JAXA, confirmed the mission was under consideration, but said the plan is still being fleshed out and has yet to be formally accepted. A report outlining the plan is expected to be submitted to the government later this month or in early April.
``The building of a manned moon base is part of our long-term plan, looking to about 20 years from now,'' said Hisashi Dobashi, a JAXA official. ``We believe if we keep developing our technologies, a manned space mission will be possible.''
If approved, the mission would mark a major change of direction for Japan's space program, which has for decades focused on unmanned, scientific probes.
It would also up the ante in an increasingly heated space race in Asia. Both China and India have announced moon missions, and President Bush has proclaimed that the United States will return to the moon in the next decade or so and will try to send astronauts to Mars as well.
Dobashi refused to discuss details of the plan, which would require a huge influx of funds. JAXA now has a yearly budget of about $2 billion -- compared with NASA's $16.2 billion.
According to a report Monday in the Mainichi Shimbun, a major newspaper, JAXA hopes to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2010, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the moon and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.
Long Asia's leading spacefaring nation, Japan has lately been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003, a feat Japan has yet to accomplish.
Beijing has since announced it is aiming to put a man on the moon. India said last year it would send a manned mission to the moon by 2015, but is reconsidering that project because of the high cost. Officials say an unmanned mission is still in the works, however.
Japan's space program has been plagued by failures in recent years.
One month after China's first manned mission, a Japanese H-2A rocket carrying two spy satellites malfunctioned after liftoff, forcing controllers to end its mission in a spectacular fireball.
Further launches were put on hold for 15 months.
But on Saturday, Japan took a big step toward re-establishing the credibility of its space program with the successful launch of an H-2A rocket that placed a communications and navigation satellite into orbit.
Experts said concern over being left in China's shadow has been a factor in Japan's new focus on starting up a manned program of its own.
``The success of China's manned mission ended up playing a role in allowing space officials to voice their opinions more openly,'' said Saburo Matsunaga, assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. ``Space projects have broad implications on the various abilities of a country, and China's success gave Japan a sense of economic crisis.''
Summers' Remarks Supported by Some Experts
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, February 28, 2005
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has suffered acrimonious condemnation, and may have jeopardized his job, for suggesting that the underrepresentation of women in engineering and some scientific fields may be due in part to inherent differences in the intellectual abilities of the sexes. But Summers could be right.
Some scholars who are in the know about the differences between mens' and womens' brains believe his remarks have merit.
``Among people who do the research, it's not so controversial. There are lots and lots of studies that show that mens' and womens' brains are different,'' says Richard J. Haier, a professor of psychology in the pediatrics department of the University of California Los Angeles medical school.
Academia has been bitterly divided in recent years by the nature vs. nurture debate, and the Harvard president's comments last month at a National Bureau of Economic Research symposium squarely address aspects of that dispute that are so controversial the opposing sides almost never discuss them.
On one side are those who believe the sexes are equal enough in their intellectual abilities that any biological difference between them is vastly outweighed by social pressures and discrimination that discourage girls and women from pursuing science and engineering.
``When people hear 'biology' they think there's nothing you can do about it,'' says Joshua Aronson, a professor of applied psychology at New York University. ``It's in that context that Summers' remarks are not helpful.''
On the other side are those who believe that biological differences between men and women really can account for at least some of the underrepresentation of women in engineering and some fields of science.
``I think it's an outrage that certain questions -- that real, important questions -- can't be raised in an academic atmosphere, that research that's well-known can't be presented without some sort of hysterical response,'' says Linda S. Gottfredson, a psychologist at the University of Delaware.
In recent years, scientists have found that male and female brains are wired differently from one another, due to the role of testosterone and other male hormones during gestation. Brains growing under the influence of male hormones are slightly larger and have denser concentrations of neurons in some regions.
Male brains also contain a greater proportion of gray matter, the part of the brain responsible for computation, while women have relatively more white matter, which specializes in making connections between brain cells.
Brain-imaging studies suggest that both sexes exploit these differences to their benefit. UCLA researchers have done brain scans of men and women who scored in the top 1 percent on the math section of the SAT. As they worked on math problems, the men relied heavily on the grey matter in the brain's parietal and cerebral cortices. Women showed greater activity in areas dominated by the well-connected white matter.
``Maybe they're doing the math using the white matter,'' Haier says. ``It's not completely unreasonable.''
So men and women appear to use their brains differently in some situations. Does that make any difference in how smart they are?
The short answer is no. Average IQ is the same among men and women.
But it's the long answer, which considers different kinds of cognitive ability and speculates about how they are distributed among individuals in the two sexes, that has been raised in support of Summers' remarks.
Intelligence tests have found that men, on average, perform better on spatial tasks that require mentally rotating or otherwise manipulating objects. Men also do better on tests of mathematical reasoning. Women tend to do better than men on tasks requiring verbal memory and distinguishing whether objects are similar or different. The relative strengths even out, so on average the sexes are of equal intelligence.
Some studies also have suggested that the IQ distribution is more spread out among men. If that is true, then there are proportionately more men at the extremely brilliant end of the IQ scale -- and the dull end as well.
So the reasoning goes like this: Fields such as physics require superb mathematical ability. Not just above average, but really out there.
If men do have a slight advantage over women in mathematical ability, as much of the current research suggests, and there are more men at the extreme ends of the intelligence spectrum, that suggests there is a larger pool of men who can do the heavy intellectual lifting physics requires.
But is the difference really biological, or are exceptional girls and women intimidated by cultural stereotypes and discouraged from cultivating their talents from an early age?
``If I had to guess, the real reason for the lack of women in the upper strata is that there's a comfort zone when you walk into a classroom and see a certain number of people like you,'' Aronson says.
Female physicists and engineers almost always live their entire professional lives outside that comfort zone. Aronson and his colleagues have shown that many of the performance differences between men and women, and also between different races, can be erased with minor adjustments that influence test takers' confidence. Tell a group of girls before a math exam that the test does not detect gender differences in mathematical ability and their scores increase. Tell white men before a similar exam that their scores are going to be compared to those of Asians and their scores drop simply because they think they won't measure up.
``This suggests there's something about the testing situation itself,'' Aronson says. ``If there is a biological difference, then it's one that's awfully easy to overcome.''
Whatever the reason, researchers have found differences in math ability between males and females from pre-kindergarten through adulthood.
Vanderbilt University psychologists who have been giving exceptionally bright 12- to 14-year-olds the SAT for more than 20 years have found that boys do exceptionally well on the math side of the exam. In a sample of 40,000 children who took the test, twice as many boys as girls scored above 500, four times as many boys scored above 600 and 13 times as many topped 700. The sexes were equally matched on the verbal portion of the test, which is scored on a scale of 200 to 800.
That would suggest there are differences between the sexes in innate ability, the Vanderbilt researchers have concluded in various scientific papers.
Though they declined to be interviewed about Summers' comments, members of the Vanderbilt group offered another possible explanation for the shortage of women in engineering, physics and related fields in the November 2000 issue of Psychological Science.
The psychologists followed up with one group of exceptionally talented people 20 years after they had taken the SAT. Male or female, all of the subjects had scored well enough on the test to handle just about any career they chose.
At the age of 33, fewer of the women had pursued careers in physics, engineering, computer science and related fields. But the women outnumbered the men in medicine, social sciences and the humanities. And the two sexes had earned advanced degrees at about equal rates, which suggests that although women may have been steered away from certain fields by biology, discrimination or a lack of role models, they had not simply dropped out but had fully achieved their potential in the fields they did pursue.
``Although equally achieving educationally,'' the Vanderbilt researchers wrote, ``these men and women appear to have constructed satisfying and meaningful lives that took somewhat different forms.''
(Personally I fail to be impressed by research based on intelligence tests - the same "science" used to historically discriminate against any number of minorities.)
Ancient Earth Drawings Found in Peru
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, February 28, 2005
LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Archaeologists have discovered a group of giant figures scraped into the hills of Peru's southern coastal desert that are believed to predate the country's famed Nazca lines.
About 50 figures were etched into the earth over an area roughly 90 square miles near the city of Palpa, 220 miles southeast of Lima, El Comercio newspaper reported.
The drawings -- which include human figures as well as animals such as birds, monkeys, and felines -- are believed to be created by members of the Paracas culture sometime between 600 and 100 B.C., Johny Islas, the director of the Andean Institute of Archaeological Studies, told the newspaper.
One prominent figure appears to represent a deity commonly depicted on textiles and ceramics from the period, Islas said.
The recently discovered designs predate the country's famous Nazca lines, which have mystified scientists and were added to the United Nation's Cultural Heritage list in 1994.
The Nazca lines -- which also include pictographs of various animals -- cover a 35-mile stretch of desert some 250 miles south of Lima and are one of Peru's top tourist attractions. The Nazca culture flourished between 50 B.C. and 600 A.D., Islas said.
The lines, thousands of them in all, were made by clearing darker rocks on the desert surface to expose lighter soil underneath.
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, March 1, 2005
Japanese researchers say they have found a way to produce an artificial tooth enamel that is chemically like the real thing.
The discovery, they report in the current issue of Nature, may allow dentists to fill some cavities without using a drill.
Getting even a small filling can be destructive: that high-pitched whine you hear when drill meets tooth is the sound of healthy enamel being pulverized.
Dentists try to damage as little healthy tissue as possible, but even a skilled one has to destroy a large amount of the tooth to create a surface that will bond with the filling.
Dr. Kazue Yamagishi of Tokyo's FAP Dental Institute and colleagues introduced fluorine ions into hydroxyapatite, the crystalline material of enamel, and then dissolved the product in acid to make a paste.
This creates a substance that can be painted on a tooth. After it is applied, the material crystallizes, forming a seamless bond.
Because it contains fluorine, it also offers protection against decay.
The material is highly durable, and although it is also subject to decay, it is somewhat more resistant to acid than natural enamel.
It bonds so perfectly with the natural enamel that even when viewed with an electron microscope there is no apparent gap at the interface between the artificial substances and the actual ones.
So far, the procedure has been used only for cavities that are not large enough to penetrate the one to two millimeters of enamel that cover a normal tooth.
The manufactured material grows crystals perfectly oriented to the tooth surface, essentially becoming an integral part of it.
The paste is whitish, and blends fairly well with the color of teeth, but it probably cannot be dyed to match.
"I could mix something into it to change the color," Dr. Yamagishi said, "but that would cause the crystal to change its structure, so I don't recommend it."
But before the paste is used commercially, Dr. Yamagishi said, "We need to study it more to confirm the safety of the therapy."
To the Rescue of Goliath
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, March 1, 2005
Suppose you are a Goliath bird-eating spider, the largest known spider on earth, now or ever. Imagine your chagrin when in 1980 an amateur collector in Argentina finds a fossil declared by experts to be that of a spider nearly three times as large. They give this misbegotten piece of rock the grand title of Megarachne - giant spider - and you are left in distant second place.
You seethe in malice for 25 years and it seems no one cares. But then, who should come riding to your rescue but Paul Selden. Yes, Paul Selden no less, the president of the International Society of Arachnology. Dr. Selden has doubted from Day 1 that Megarachne was a true spider. Recently a second Megarachne-like fossil was discovered at the same site in Argentina as the first. Dr. Selden, an expert on fossil arthropods at the University of Manchester, was invited to compare the two.
His suspicions were immediately confirmed. On seeing the impostor's cuticular mucrones and raised lunules, he reports in Biology Letters, he recognized it as not a spider but a eurypterid, and a rather puny one at that. Eurypterids were highly aggressive marine scorpions, some more than six feet long, that in their long ago heyday killed just about anything they wanted to.
So now your rightful position as biggest thing on the World Wide Web has been restored. But wait, there is a fly in the ointment. You would like the title of Megarachne for yourself, or at the least for Dr. Selden to strip it from the usurper. But he refuses!
"Although its name is anomalous, it has to keep it," he said of the fossil nonspider. Under zoological rules of nomenclature, names cannot be taken back.
"Even if you find a bird and call it a horse, it can't be changed," Dr. Selden avers. The only way out is if he should judge that Megarachne belongs to some already named species of eurypterid such as Woodwardopterus, a step he is not yet prepared to take.
It's more than enough to send you into a deep, bleak, bird-crunching rampage.
A Goliath bird-eating spider, the world's largest spider at 10 inches in diameter, was not usurped by an eurypterid, inset, after all.
Japan Mulls Plan to Establish Lunar Base
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, March 1, 2005
TOKYO (AP) -- Joining a swelling group of countries shooting for the moon, Japan is considering a plan to establish a manned lunar base by 2025, officials said Tuesday.
Officials at Japan's space agency, JAXA, confirmed the mission was under consideration, but said the plan is still being fleshed out and has yet to be formally accepted. A report outlining the plan is expected to be submitted to the government later this month or in early April.
``The building of a manned moon base is part of our long-term plan, looking to about 20 years from now,'' said Hisashi Dobashi, a JAXA official. ``We believe if we keep developing our technologies, a manned space mission will be possible.''
If approved, the mission would mark a major change of direction for Japan's space program, which has for decades focused on unmanned, scientific probes.
It would also up the ante in an increasingly heated space race in Asia. Both China and India have announced moon missions, and President Bush has proclaimed that the United States will return to the moon in the next decade or so and will try to send astronauts to Mars as well.
Dobashi refused to discuss details of the plan, which would require a huge influx of funds. JAXA now has a yearly budget of about $2 billion -- compared with NASA's $16.2 billion.
According to a report Monday in the Mainichi Shimbun, a major newspaper, JAXA hopes to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2010, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the moon and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.
Long Asia's leading spacefaring nation, Japan has lately been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003, a feat Japan has yet to accomplish.
Beijing has since announced it is aiming to put a man on the moon. India said last year it would send a manned mission to the moon by 2015, but is reconsidering that project because of the high cost. Officials say an unmanned mission is still in the works, however.
Japan's space program has been plagued by failures in recent years.
One month after China's first manned mission, a Japanese H-2A rocket carrying two spy satellites malfunctioned after liftoff, forcing controllers to end its mission in a spectacular fireball.
Further launches were put on hold for 15 months.
But on Saturday, Japan took a big step toward re-establishing the credibility of its space program with the successful launch of an H-2A rocket that placed a communications and navigation satellite into orbit.
Experts said concern over being left in China's shadow has been a factor in Japan's new focus on starting up a manned program of its own.
``The success of China's manned mission ended up playing a role in allowing space officials to voice their opinions more openly,'' said Saburo Matsunaga, assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. ``Space projects have broad implications on the various abilities of a country, and China's success gave Japan a sense of economic crisis.''
Summers' Remarks Supported by Some Experts
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, February 28, 2005
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has suffered acrimonious condemnation, and may have jeopardized his job, for suggesting that the underrepresentation of women in engineering and some scientific fields may be due in part to inherent differences in the intellectual abilities of the sexes. But Summers could be right.
Some scholars who are in the know about the differences between mens' and womens' brains believe his remarks have merit.
``Among people who do the research, it's not so controversial. There are lots and lots of studies that show that mens' and womens' brains are different,'' says Richard J. Haier, a professor of psychology in the pediatrics department of the University of California Los Angeles medical school.
Academia has been bitterly divided in recent years by the nature vs. nurture debate, and the Harvard president's comments last month at a National Bureau of Economic Research symposium squarely address aspects of that dispute that are so controversial the opposing sides almost never discuss them.
On one side are those who believe the sexes are equal enough in their intellectual abilities that any biological difference between them is vastly outweighed by social pressures and discrimination that discourage girls and women from pursuing science and engineering.
``When people hear 'biology' they think there's nothing you can do about it,'' says Joshua Aronson, a professor of applied psychology at New York University. ``It's in that context that Summers' remarks are not helpful.''
On the other side are those who believe that biological differences between men and women really can account for at least some of the underrepresentation of women in engineering and some fields of science.
``I think it's an outrage that certain questions -- that real, important questions -- can't be raised in an academic atmosphere, that research that's well-known can't be presented without some sort of hysterical response,'' says Linda S. Gottfredson, a psychologist at the University of Delaware.
In recent years, scientists have found that male and female brains are wired differently from one another, due to the role of testosterone and other male hormones during gestation. Brains growing under the influence of male hormones are slightly larger and have denser concentrations of neurons in some regions.
Male brains also contain a greater proportion of gray matter, the part of the brain responsible for computation, while women have relatively more white matter, which specializes in making connections between brain cells.
Brain-imaging studies suggest that both sexes exploit these differences to their benefit. UCLA researchers have done brain scans of men and women who scored in the top 1 percent on the math section of the SAT. As they worked on math problems, the men relied heavily on the grey matter in the brain's parietal and cerebral cortices. Women showed greater activity in areas dominated by the well-connected white matter.
``Maybe they're doing the math using the white matter,'' Haier says. ``It's not completely unreasonable.''
So men and women appear to use their brains differently in some situations. Does that make any difference in how smart they are?
The short answer is no. Average IQ is the same among men and women.
But it's the long answer, which considers different kinds of cognitive ability and speculates about how they are distributed among individuals in the two sexes, that has been raised in support of Summers' remarks.
Intelligence tests have found that men, on average, perform better on spatial tasks that require mentally rotating or otherwise manipulating objects. Men also do better on tests of mathematical reasoning. Women tend to do better than men on tasks requiring verbal memory and distinguishing whether objects are similar or different. The relative strengths even out, so on average the sexes are of equal intelligence.
Some studies also have suggested that the IQ distribution is more spread out among men. If that is true, then there are proportionately more men at the extremely brilliant end of the IQ scale -- and the dull end as well.
So the reasoning goes like this: Fields such as physics require superb mathematical ability. Not just above average, but really out there.
If men do have a slight advantage over women in mathematical ability, as much of the current research suggests, and there are more men at the extreme ends of the intelligence spectrum, that suggests there is a larger pool of men who can do the heavy intellectual lifting physics requires.
But is the difference really biological, or are exceptional girls and women intimidated by cultural stereotypes and discouraged from cultivating their talents from an early age?
``If I had to guess, the real reason for the lack of women in the upper strata is that there's a comfort zone when you walk into a classroom and see a certain number of people like you,'' Aronson says.
Female physicists and engineers almost always live their entire professional lives outside that comfort zone. Aronson and his colleagues have shown that many of the performance differences between men and women, and also between different races, can be erased with minor adjustments that influence test takers' confidence. Tell a group of girls before a math exam that the test does not detect gender differences in mathematical ability and their scores increase. Tell white men before a similar exam that their scores are going to be compared to those of Asians and their scores drop simply because they think they won't measure up.
``This suggests there's something about the testing situation itself,'' Aronson says. ``If there is a biological difference, then it's one that's awfully easy to overcome.''
Whatever the reason, researchers have found differences in math ability between males and females from pre-kindergarten through adulthood.
Vanderbilt University psychologists who have been giving exceptionally bright 12- to 14-year-olds the SAT for more than 20 years have found that boys do exceptionally well on the math side of the exam. In a sample of 40,000 children who took the test, twice as many boys as girls scored above 500, four times as many boys scored above 600 and 13 times as many topped 700. The sexes were equally matched on the verbal portion of the test, which is scored on a scale of 200 to 800.
That would suggest there are differences between the sexes in innate ability, the Vanderbilt researchers have concluded in various scientific papers.
Though they declined to be interviewed about Summers' comments, members of the Vanderbilt group offered another possible explanation for the shortage of women in engineering, physics and related fields in the November 2000 issue of Psychological Science.
The psychologists followed up with one group of exceptionally talented people 20 years after they had taken the SAT. Male or female, all of the subjects had scored well enough on the test to handle just about any career they chose.
At the age of 33, fewer of the women had pursued careers in physics, engineering, computer science and related fields. But the women outnumbered the men in medicine, social sciences and the humanities. And the two sexes had earned advanced degrees at about equal rates, which suggests that although women may have been steered away from certain fields by biology, discrimination or a lack of role models, they had not simply dropped out but had fully achieved their potential in the fields they did pursue.
``Although equally achieving educationally,'' the Vanderbilt researchers wrote, ``these men and women appear to have constructed satisfying and meaningful lives that took somewhat different forms.''
(Personally I fail to be impressed by research based on intelligence tests - the same "science" used to historically discriminate against any number of minorities.)
Ancient Earth Drawings Found in Peru
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, February 28, 2005
LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Archaeologists have discovered a group of giant figures scraped into the hills of Peru's southern coastal desert that are believed to predate the country's famed Nazca lines.
About 50 figures were etched into the earth over an area roughly 90 square miles near the city of Palpa, 220 miles southeast of Lima, El Comercio newspaper reported.
The drawings -- which include human figures as well as animals such as birds, monkeys, and felines -- are believed to be created by members of the Paracas culture sometime between 600 and 100 B.C., Johny Islas, the director of the Andean Institute of Archaeological Studies, told the newspaper.
One prominent figure appears to represent a deity commonly depicted on textiles and ceramics from the period, Islas said.
The recently discovered designs predate the country's famous Nazca lines, which have mystified scientists and were added to the United Nation's Cultural Heritage list in 1994.
The Nazca lines -- which also include pictographs of various animals -- cover a 35-mile stretch of desert some 250 miles south of Lima and are one of Peru's top tourist attractions. The Nazca culture flourished between 50 B.C. and 600 A.D., Islas said.
The lines, thousands of them in all, were made by clearing darker rocks on the desert surface to expose lighter soil underneath.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 02:56 pm (UTC)seriously, whenever I read stuff about women and math and spatial relations I have the following train of thought: "women can't do WHAT? oh, so I'm the only one? I am the only woman in the world capable of doing xyz? c'mon now!"
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 03:00 pm (UTC)That's exactly what I was thinking, but I have been reading about phrenology lately, so I didn't want to go off...
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 03:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 03:34 pm (UTC)I'm sure they searched long and hard for her.
That whole article was bogus -- a headline making you think that they'd found some evidence that us girls can't count too good, but all it was was a re-hashing of the fact that well, gee, the jury's still out on whether we're really smart or not.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-02 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-02 03:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-02 02:20 am (UTC)