ikenbot:

Oldest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Discovered

The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.

The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn’t a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.

“The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future,” said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the glyphs. “Numbers we can’t even wrap our heads around.”

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blamoscience:

From The Earth Story Facebook:

While it certainly looks as though someone has taken a great deal of paint to these hills, these colours in fact formed naturally.
This unique geological formation is known as the Zhangye Danxia landform, found in southern China. It was formed by sediments laid down in a low-elevation fault basin during the Cretaceous period, which then experienced uplift due to their position on top of various fault zones. The various colours are a result of the erosion of the thick-bedded red sandstone and conglomerate: from running water erosion, biological effect, chemical precipitation and organic staining.

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samanthadavey:

Cooool

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jtotheizzoe:

If Earth is a blue marble, it’s certainly not one you’d want to depend on in the chalk circle. Instead of being a sphere, it’s actually far more irregular (and not just the mountains, duh). Charles Q. Choi lays out lots of oddities about our lumpy planet at SciAm. 

Here’s some tidbits:

• Earth is actually an oblate spheroid, bigger at the equator than at the poles.
• Gravity is unevenly distributed around Earth, which looks something like this when you draw it.
• Areas of the crust and mantle are still rising up to a centimeter a year after being crushed beneath the weight of glaciers during the ice age.

I hope that the Earth doesn’t feel self-conscious, though. Because we all have our imperfections. And this lumpy ball of dirt and magma is the only home we have.

(via scinerds)

(via scinerds)