From an ancient Viking capital, to the biggest comet ever heading straight for the sun, here
are ten of the most incredible recent discoveries!
10: The Viking Capital A massively significant discovery has finally
been made in the search for an ancient Viking capital in Shetland, UK.
The excavations going on here are part of the Skailway Project led by Kristian Leith
who has been part of the crew hunting for the legendary capital of the Vikings in The
United Kingdom ever since he accidentally stumbled upon a mysterious structure while
digging out the foundation for his garden shed.
Talk about discoveries made by accident!!
The structure led to more round house structures and 26 human remains.
Kristian actually crowdfunded the excavation himself, something that doesn’t usually
happen.
He raised £20,000 and brought in archaeological experts.
It almost looked like it would be a bust.
9 trenches were dug throughout the year and nothing was found.
On the very last day, just before archaeologists gave up hope, they made a huge discovery.
They uncovered a structure that they believe to be part of a settlement – one used by
the Vikings when they touched down on British soil back around 750 AD.
The crew also found red sandstone whetstones that date back to the same period.
The discovery shows the settlement is a minimum of 4,000 square metres – much larger than
previously thought.
While this may not seem that exciting on the outside, it's pretty amazing.
The excavations are still going on as we speak, so they haven’t uncovered the entire settlement
yet.
When all is said and done, the archaeologists are hoping to have uncovered a massive Viking
city previously unknown to history, where they had likely launched many of their attacks
on the surrounding kingdoms.
9: Skeletons at the Beach A totally bizarre discovery was just made
at the beach and for once it wasn’t a sea monster!!
This time, buried beneath the sand at a beach in Wales, archaeologists uncovered hundreds
of human skeletons that date back to the medieval era.
It all began in 2014 during a string of particularly bad storms.
Members of the public began complaining that there were bones sticking out from the sand.
Human bones!!
So, over the following years, archaeologists started digging them up.
According to BBC, the skeletons have all been dated back to between the 8th and 11th centuries,
back when there had probably been an early Christian community living on the shore.
The excavations themselves are quite complicated.
Experts must carefully excavate each layer of sand to see what’s hidden beneath.
Surprisingly the archaeologists said that they don't normally get this quality of preservation
of bone from the early medieval period because the bone doesn’t usually survive in the
acidic Welsh soil.
So far, other than hordes of bodies, they've also found the walls of an old church.
However, there's been an odd lack of artifacts.
There have been 210 burials found, but almost no relics from the past.
This has led researchers to speculate that there could have been a seaside church here
and the graveyard may have been a bit too close to the beach.
Nobody actually knows what happened to the people who lived here.
They seem to have vanished mysteriously and without a trace.
8: Golden Death Masks At the national archaeological museum in Athens,
there is a disturbing gold mask that scientists can't quite wrap their heads around.
It's known as the golden death mask of Agamemnon, and it was discovered at a royal cemetery
in the ancient city of Mycenae, dating back as far as the 16th century BC.
In total, there were five golden funeral masks uncovered, but they are all still shrouded
in mystery.
The mask of Agamemnon was found by a German archaeologist in 1876.
At the time, he was convinced that the tomb he’d uncovered was that of the legendary
Mycenaean king from the Trojan War.
Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case.
The mask was ultimately dated to be 400 years older than the Trojan War.
Nobody knows who the golden mask was crafted for.
Based on its facial features, it was made to look like a man probably in his 30s.
He had a long nose and a mustache and was buried with all the honors of a king, even
with his corpse being covered in pure gold.
In fact, he had sheets of 24-carat gold covering his whole body inside his tomb, with the mask
being the most fascinating piece.
Another really interesting thing is that the people who lived in this particular region
of Greece had been poor farmers for hundreds of years until within just one generation,
archaeological evidence points to a sudden burst in wealth, riches, and exotic materials.
Archaeologists still don’t know why, and they still don't know who once wore the brilliant
golden death mask.
7: Meth Fish In the most incredible and disturbing recent
discovery, researchers suggest fish can get hooked on crystal meth.
As totally outrageous as that is, it's apparently true.
Fish are getting hooked on meth thanks to water polluted with human drugs.
Research was done by scientists in the Czech Republic who deliberately got dozens of trout
addicted to methamphetamine as part of a study on water pollution.
The results of the study showed that illegal human drugs have devastating consequences
on water ecosystems because fish get addicted to the tainted water.
And yes there are drugs in polluted water.
For the study, one group of trout was kept in a clean water tank for eight weeks.
The other group was kept in a water tank laced with a small amount of crystal meth.
The amount was based on the same levels of meth found in polluted streams.
After eight weeks, researchers moved all the fish to one tank that had two streams of running
water in it.
Yes, one of the streams was laced.
50% of the fish that had been exposed to meth went straight to the tainted stream.
Only 40% of the unexposed fish went to that same stream.
Every fish from the meth tank became sluggish for 96 hours once moved to the clean tank,
suggesting withdrawal.
The result is that fish can get hooked on drugs too, and because there are alarming
levels of drugs coming out of wastewater treatment plants, fish could be gathering there in unusually
high numbers and becoming addicts, wreaking havoc on the environment.
6: Warrior Laid to Rest The tomb of a legendary warrior was recently
discovered in the city of Xiangyang, China.
The tomb dates back 1800 years, to a volatile time in China's past.
The tomb was discovered with domed roofs, the body of a man who died in his mid-40s,
and his wife.
Archaeologists don't know their names or why they were given such an impressive burial,
but they were discovered with some pretty fascinating grave goods that suggest this
particular person could have been one of the famous warring lords of China in the time
of the Three Kingdoms, perhaps Cao Cao or his son Cao Pi.
Inside the tomb, archaeologists found some very impressive treasure, such as a large
horse figurine, a pottery model of a huge mansion, strange figures of feathered humans,
and plenty of gold jewelry and jade relics.
All this stuff would have been gifted to a person of great import upon their death.
But who was Cao Cao?
Almost 2000 years ago, during the end of the Han Dynasty which had ruled China for 400
years, the city of Xiangyang was taken by the armies of Cao Cao.
But shortly after, Cao Cao was defeated.
His burial was never found, which is why experts believe the warrior’s tomb just uncovered
could belong to him.
And now for a new species discovered in a really weird place!
But first wanted to give a big shout out to Nasmul Alam and EZisme71- probably didn’t
say that correctly but thanks so much for your support!
If you want to learn about more amazing discoveries be sure to hit that subscribe button for more!
5: New Species found in unexpected place Scientists have discovered a totally new species
of beetle.
You'll never believe where they found it.
The scientist made this amazing discovery thanks to fossilized dinosaur poop.
Particularly, the fossilized poop from the silesaur, a type of herbivore that kind of
looked like a raptor from the Jurassic Park movies.
The creature lived between 237 and 227 million years ago.
At some point, it dropped some waste, that waste was attacked by hungry beetles, and
through and through, the pile of waste fossilized into what is known today as a coprolite, trapping
the beetles inside of it.
According to evolutionary biologist Martin Qvarnstrom from Sweden, coprolites are hidden
treasure chests because until now, scientists have never bothered to look at them.
They contain all kinds of microscopic fossils.
By using a synchrotron scanner to create power X-rays, scientists uncovered entire beetle
fossils inside the dino’s droppings.
They were able to recreate the beetle in its entirety and label it as a new species.
The beetle itself isn't that interesting – it was just an ordinary dung beetle – but the
fact that scientists identified a new species of anything inside a lump of dino coprolite
millions of years old is pretty cool.
4: A Lemur’s Genome For the first time in history, a team of collaborating
scientists led by Penn State University and working with the Universite D’Antananarivo
in Madagascar, have sequenced the full nuclear genome of the koala lemur.
The koala lemur is one of the biggest lemur species to have ever lived on the planet.
It went extinct on the island of Madagascar somewhere between 500 and 2000 years ago.
Unraveling the mysterious animal’s genome has revealed new information about the lemur’s
life as a primate and how it impacted its environment, including the impact of its extinction
on the ecosystem of Madagascar.
Today, there are over 100 species of lemurs living throughout Madagascar.
But 2000 years ago, there were significantly more.
According to George Perry, associate professor of anthropology, scientists have found the
skeletal remains of at least 17 species of extinct lemur.
All these extinctions happened relatively recently, which is why it's so fascinating.
Plus, all the extinct lemurs were significantly larger than the ones that survived.
You're probably familiar with some of the smaller lemurs of today, the ones that are
cute and tiny and can fit in the palm of your hand.
Well, the extinct lemurs being studied by the team were giants, weighing upwards of
180 pounds.
That's larger than your family dog!
Even with the full genome sequenced of the koala lemur, experts are having a difficult
time tracing the origins of the animals.
What I mean is that scientists can't figure out how so many lemur species prospered in
the same place, especially since they can't figure out how they were all related.
The team has no idea what killed off all the big lemurs, with one of the main theories
being that when humans settled on the island, they killed and ate them all.
3: Synthetic Venom Scientists have finally figured out how to
make their very own snake venom.
Depending on your outlook, this is either an incredible discovery and good for science
or a potential disaster in the making.
Ever since Victorian times, the only way for a person to survive a deadly snake attack
was to get anti-venom injected into their veins.
The only way to make anti-venom is to milk a snake by hand, not a job most people are
super interested in doing.
It also involves injecting the venom into another animal to provoke an immune response,
before that animal’s blood can be removed and purified for scientists to extract the
antibodies.
It's a long process.
But now, scientists have finally figured out how to create a gland which produces venom
inside a laboratory using stem cells.
Let that just sink in for a minute.
Scientists have literally learned how to create a gland from a snake without a snake being
involved.
They simply grow the glands in a laboratory, then the 3-D replicas create venom identical
to what a real snake would make.
It’s like growing a human lung and hooking it up to a respirator.
In any case, the discovery is pretty amazing.
Scientists hope to create more efficient anti-venom in the future without the need of real snakes.
2: Iron-Age Chariot A metal detectorist has once again struck
gold!!
Mike Smith was out and about with his trusty metal detector on a piece of farmland in Pembrokeshire,
England.
He made an incredible discovery when he found parts of a chariot from the Iron Age.
The handful of artifacts he uncovered could be worth up to seven figures and they were
declared national treasures.
The artifact fragments were part of a ritual burial.
About 2000 years ago, somebody buried an entire chariot underground, probably as part of a
very important person’s funeral rites.
The discovery was rare because nobody has ever found a chariot using a metal detector
before.
Mike nearly missed it too.
Completely by chance, a sudden change in weather forced him to explore a different field, and
that was when he found a Celtic harness decoration.
He realized there would be more treasure in the area, and so after a significant amount
of digging, he found the old chariot pieces, dated by the local museum archaeologists as
being buried around the year 25 AD.
Why was an entire chariot buried in the middle of a random field?
It's because the ancient Celtic people who once lived in the United Kingdom often buried
their most prestigious warriors with the things most important to them in life, such as their
weapons, their animals, and even their chariot.
It's the equivalent of you being buried in a grave with your favorite dog and your favorite
car.
What else do you need in the afterlife?
1: The Largest Comet The largest comet ever identified by modern
scientists is now speeding towards the sun.
Should you be worried?
Well, scientists say not until around 2031!
We can calm down before the storm hits.
The comet is huge, about 1000 times larger than an ordinary comet, estimated to be up
to 120 miles across.
It will make its closest approach to our planet in 2031 on its way to our great, life-giving
star.
According to researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the comet was identified
extremely early, which is giving scientists many years to observe its path through our
solar system.
Gary Bernstein who helped to discover it said they are excited for people to watch it evolve
as it approaches and “warms up”.
It is the most distant comet to be discovered on its incoming path and it is a very infrequent
visitor!
The last time it came to our solar system was 3 million years ago.
The icy comet’s size was estimated based on how much sunlight it reflects, and will
be about as bright as Pluto’s moon.
It probably won't smash directly into the sun and cause a giant galactic explosion,
so we probably don't need to worry about the total destruction of our own planet.
More likely, the comet will zip around the sun and head off into the darkness of the
galaxy.
How do you feel about a giant comet speeding towards the sun?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching.
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