Discover Magazine (13)
For those seeking life on Mars, it is the best of times and the worst of times. Nearly 35 years after NASA’s twin Viking robots eased down onto its ruddy surface, there is still no incontrovertible evidence that living organisms ever existed on the fourth planet from the sun. Few researchers accept one scientist’s claims that the 1976 Viking experiment…
Andrew Lawler leaves modern civilization several times a year to visit the remains of ancient ones in central Asia and the Middle East. In covering the archaeology beat for Science magazine, Lawler has traveled to more than 25 foreign lands. “I get to see parts of countries that most Americans don’t—to witness village life and talk to people whom I’d…
The sobering message from an extraordinary ancient Syrian settlement: Urban civilization and organized warfare emerged hand in hand. Joan Oates’s sharp blue eyes spotted something that was not right. Standing on the windy summit of a vast, human-made mound in northeastern Syria, the wiry 81-year-old archaeologist noticed an ugly scar that had been left by a backhoe on one…
Friday, 28 August 2009 03:19
Is Jupiter's Bizarre Moon Our Best Hope for Finding Extraterrestrial Life?
Written by Andrew Lawler
NASA is gambling $4 billion that there's life beneath the thin atmosphere, lethal radiation, and miles-thick ice on Europa. The crackling radiation would kill you in 10 minutes—that is, if you did not first asphyxiate in the nearly nonexistent atmosphere, die of exposure to the –300 degree Fahrenheit temperature, or plunge into a thousand-foot-deep icy crevice. Jupiter’s moon…
Top 100 Stories of 2008 #13: A nation delights in its pioneering venture “It was as if all spring festivals, new years, and Christmases had come at once,” a breathless Chinese commentator wrote in the China Daily. An enraptured Chinese public watched last September as a 42-year-old astronaut—“taikonaut” in Chinese parlance—floated for about 15 minutes outside the Shenzhou VII…
Top 100 Stories of 2008 #78: In 2007, excavators of a remote site in southeastern Iran reported finding evidence of a writing system that dates back more than 4,000 years. Featuring odd geometric symbols, three baked mud tablets unearthed near the Iranian city of Jiroft could reveal much about a sophisticated and independent urban culture that flourished between the…
Top 100 Stories of 2008 #66: While the corpses of their enemies still lay on the battlefield, the victors celebrated by slaughtering cattle and holding a gigantic feast. Then they dumped the war dead into a pit, heaved in the animal bones from their repast, and tossed their plates on top of the pile. Now—nearly six millennia later—the…
The doomsday rock is out there. It’s just a matter of time... In 2004, as a massive tsunami roiled through the Indian Ocean killing hundreds of thousands of people, a dozen or so scientists quietly confronted an impending disaster potentially even more lethal. They had inside intelligence that a chunk of rock and metal, roughly 1,300 feet wide, was…
Friday, 03 August 2007 02:42
Discover Interview: Director of Iraq's National Museum
Written by Andrew Lawler
The archaeologist talks about the loss of artifacts and why he fled his homeland. Uruk, located near Basra in Iraq, was one of the world’s first cities, and it is where the first writing system emerged. Babylon, just an hour’s taxi ride from Baghdad, was long the world’s largest and most sophisticated urban center. And the first truly international…
2,000-year-old nomadic treasures, shielded from the Taliban and nearly lost, resurface in a stunning exhibition in Paris. At the close of 2003, a small group of Afghan, Russian, and U.S. officials gathered in the high-walled presidential compound in Kabul to witness the opening of a long-hidden collection of Afghanistan’s most treasured artifacts. From a dusty storeroom belowground came breathtaking…
Archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi is unearthing a chain of long-forgotten towns built 4,000 years ago on the plains of modern Turkmenistan. His finds challenge conventional thinking about culture, trade, and religion in the ancient world Thousands of people lived in towns like Gonur with carefully designed streets, drains, temples, and homes. To water their orchards and fields, they dug lengthy…
Saturday, 01 April 2006 22:46
Inside the Restoration of the Amirya Madrassa
Written by Andrew Lawler
With foundation walls three feet thick, the Amiriya, a 16th-century palace and mosque in Rada, Yemen, has weathered earthquakes, monsoons, and tribal warfare. The ruler who sponsored the monument, Sultan Amir ibn Abd al-Wahhab, had a residence on the second floor. The first floor contains this courtyard. It took almost 15 years of labor with wooden tools and dental…
You are drifting down the sluggish, muddy Tigris River on a reed raft, headed for a prominent spur of rock rising from a broad plain. Upon the rock stand the massive walls of brightly painted temples. Just behind them soars a brilliantly colored temple tower, or ziggurat, nearly 200 feet high, with a pair of smaller ziggurats in the background.…