National Geographic Tales of the Weird

by David Braun

  From there, Spahr said, planets could be grouped into subclasses: terrestrial planets like Earth, gas giants like Jupiter, and icy outer planets like Pluto. “We could even have a category for rogue planets, to account for the worlds that don’t orbit stars.”

  While NASA’s Kuchner thinks the current definition should stand for now, he says he’s “happy that we are constantly updating our definitions and revising our vision of universe—that’s what science is all about.”

  TRUTH:

  AN 11-YEAR-OLD GIRL NAMED THE DWARF PLANET PLUTO.

  And of course, no matter what you call it, many astronomers will continue to see Pluto as one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system, the Minor Planet Center’s Spahr said. The IAU definition “doesn’t change the fact that we’re going to visit Pluto with [the New Horizons] spacecraft, and scientists are still going to go hog wild over all the data we collect.”

  VAMPIRE STARS

  “Vampire” Stars

  Found in the Heart of Our Galaxy—A First

  To help maintain a youthful appearance, stars may steal energy from other stars, draining their energy away.

  The stellar version of vampires—stars that drain life away from other stars—has been discovered for the first time in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.

  Blue Stragglers

  Called blue stragglers, these cannibal stars have been spotted in other parts of the Milky Way. They seem to lag in age next to the other stars with which they formed—appearing hotter, and thus younger and bluer. Astronomers suspect blue stragglers look so youthful because they’ve stolen hydrogen fuel from other stars, perhaps after colliding into their victims.

  These cannibal stars are routinely found in dense star clusters, where stars have many chances to feed off each other. Now, however, scientists have found blue stragglers in the Milky Way’s galactic bulge, a dense region of stars and gas surrounding the galaxy’s center.

  TRUTH:

  STELLAR VAMPIRISM HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR 500,000 YEARS, AND SHOULD CONTINUE FOR 200,000 MORE.

  “For a long time, it was suspected there were blue stragglers in the bulge, but no one knew how many there might be,” said Will Clarkson, an astronomer at Indiana University Bloomington and the University of California, Los Angeles. “At long last, we’ve shown they’re there.”

  Milky Way Vampires Formed Differently?

  Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers looked at 180,000 stars in and near the bulge. The team discovered 42 unusually blue stars that appeared much younger than the other stars.

  From these 42 stars, researchers estimate that 18 to 37 of them are likely real blue stragglers that are about 10 billion to 11 billion years old. The remainder may be genuinely young stars in the bulge, or stars not actually in the bulge.

  It’s also possible the blue stragglers did not form by slamming into other stars and absorbing extra hydrogen fuel, as occurs in other parts of the universe. Instead, the blue stragglers in the galactic bulge may have formed by ripping hydrogen off their companion stars. This possibly occurred either when one star fed off its partner in a two-star system, or perhaps after gravitational interactions in a triple-star system had caused two of its members to merge into one.

  “We think we have a good understanding of stellar evolution, but it doesn’t predict blue stragglers … now we have the detailed observations needed to identify how they were created. I’ve always enjoyed trying to get to the bottom of a mystery.”

  Aaron M. Geller

  astronomer, Northwestern University

  “There’s still a lot we don’t know about the details of how blue stragglers form,” Clarkson said. “Finding them in the bulge provides another set of constraints that can help refine models of their formation.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Human History

  (Photo Credit 8.1)

  There’s a saying: “The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there.” When archaeologists and historians travel to that “country,” often they’re lucky enough to bring back some strange souvenirs: 120 Roman shoes from a British dig site, the location of a lost Saharan fortress, or a sword recovered from the wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship. Each object—big or small—tells us something about the past, the people who lived in it, and just how weird their world was.

  A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP

  Oldest Known Mattress Found

  The world’s oldest known mattress has been unearthed in South Africa, archaeologists have announced. About the size of a double bed, it could sleep a whole family.

  Thousands of years before adjustable beds and foam mattresses, a group of cave dwellers in South Africa slept on a mattress made of reeds and rushes—the world’s original organic bedding. Archaeologists announced this week that they had discovered such a mattress, believed to be the world’s oldest, at the Sibudu Cave site in KwaZulu-Natal.

  “There were no rules for separate eating, working, or sleeping places. Breakfast in bed may have been an almost daily occurrence.”

  Lyn Wadley

  archaeologist, University of Witwatersrand

  Original Organic Bedding

  The mattress—which consists of layers of reeds and rushes—was discovered at the bottom of a pile of bedding made from compacted grasses and leafy plants. The bedding had accumulated over a period of 39,000 years, with the oldest mats dating to 77,000 years ago.

  “What we have is evidence of plant bedding that is 50,000 years older than any previous site anywhere in the world,” said study leader Lyn Wadley of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The compacted layers of fossil plants—excavated from sediments 9.8 feet (3 meters) deep—show that the bedding was periodically burned, possibly to limit pests and garbage.

  Insect-Repelling “Top Sheet”

  What’s more, researchers believe the ancient people added a “top sheet” to the bedding made of insect-repelling greenery, possibly to ward off biting bugs such as mosquitoes and flies. This fine covering of leaves may also represent the earliest known use of medicinal plants by humans.

  The leaves are from the tree Cryptocarya woodii, or river wild-quince, a medicinal plant that produces insect-killing chemicals. While there’s no evidence that the cave dwellers suffered from bed bugs, they likely used the leaves to counteract body lice, Wadley said.

  TRUTH:

  INDIGENOUS GROUPS IN AFRICA STILL USE RIVER WILD-QUINCE LEAVES TODAY TO REPEL INSECTS.

  Fit for the Whole Family

  At an estimated 12 inches (30 centimeters) or so high, the mattresses would’ve been a “very comfortable” and “quite long-lasting form of bedding,” Wadley said. Measuring up to 22 square feet (2 square meters), the beds were also large enough to accommodate a whole family.

  For modern hunter-gatherers, such as the Inuit and Kalahari Bushmen, “the idea of just one or two people sleeping on a bed is unknown,” she noted. “Hunter-gatherers tend to live with each other in kinship groups,” said Wadley, whose study appeared in the journal Science. “It was probably the same in the Stone Age—parents, children, grannies, and all sorts of people using the same bed.”

  AUTHORS IDENTIFIED?

  Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?

  The recent decoding of a cryptic cup, the excavation of ancient Jerusalem tunnels, and other archaeological detective work may help solve one of the great biblical mysteries: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

  New clues hint that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include some of the oldest known biblical documents, may have been the textual treasures of several groups, hidden away during wartime—and may even be “the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple,” which held the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible. New theories have been generated, but the controversy over the identity of the scrolls’ authors remains.

  Fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Photo Credit 8.2)

  The Dead Sea Scrolls

  The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves nea
r an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes—thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.—wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls.

  But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem. “Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews,” said archaeologist Robert Cargill of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

  TRUTH:

  THE DEAD SEA IS SEVEN TIMES SALTIER THAN THE OCEAN.

  The new view is by no means the consensus, however, among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. “I have a feeling it’s going to be very disputed,” said Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (NYU).

  Ritual Bathers

  In 1953, a French archaeologist and Catholic priest named Roland de Vaux led an international team to study the mostly Hebrew scrolls, which a Bedouin shepherd had discovered in 1947. De Vaux concluded that the scrolls’ authors had lived in Qumran, because the 11 scroll caves are close to the site.

  Ancient Jewish historians had noted the presence of Essenes in the Dead Sea region, and de Vaux argued Qumran was one of their communities after his team uncovered numerous remains of pools that he believed to be Jewish ritual baths. His theory appeared to be supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, some of which contained guidelines for communal living that matched ancient descriptions of Essene customs.

  “The scrolls describe communal dining and ritual bathing instructions consistent with Qumran’s archaeology,” explained Cargill.

  Temple Treasure?

  Recent findings by Yuval Peleg, an archaeologist who has excavated Qumran for 16 years, are challenging long-held notions of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Artifacts discovered by Peleg’s team during their excavations suggest Qumran once served as an ancient pottery factory. The supposed baths may have actually been pools to capture and separate clay.

  And on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion, archaeologists recently discovered and deciphered a 2,000-year-old cup with the phrase “Lord, I have returned” inscribed on its sides in a cryptic code similar to one used in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. To some experts, the code suggests that religious leaders from Jerusalem authored at least some of the scrolls.

  A Stone’s Throw

  In 1947, a goat wandered into a cave near the site of the ancient settlement of Qumran. A Bedouin shepherd hurled a stone into it, and the clink he heard against a pot led him to investigate. He came back out with the first of what would eventually be about 15,000 fragments of 850 scrolls hidden in the many caves along the cliffs of the Dead Sea.

  “Priests may have used cryptic texts to encode certain texts from non-priestly readers,” Cargill told National Geographic News. According to an emerging theory, the Essenes may have actually been Jerusalem Temple priests who went into self-imposed exile in the second century B.C., after kings unlawfully assumed the role of high priest.

  This group of rebel priests may have escaped to Qumran to worship God in their own way. While there, they may have written some of the texts that would come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Essenes may not have abandoned all of their old ways at Qumran, however, and writing in code may have been one of the practices they preserved.

  It’s possible too that some of the scrolls weren’t written at Qumran but were instead spirited away from the Temple for safekeeping, Cargill said. “I think it dramatically changes our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls if we see them as documents produced by priests,” he said.

  “Gone is the Ark of the Covenant. We’re never going to find Noah’s Ark, the Holy Grail. These things, we’re never going to see,” he added. “But we just may very well have documents from the Temple in Jerusalem. It would be the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple.”

  From Far and Wide?

  Many modern archaeologists such as Cargill believe the Essenes authored some, but not all, of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Recent archaeological evidence suggests disparate Jewish groups may have passed by Qumran around A.D. 70, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, which destroyed the Temple and much of the rest of the city.

  A team led by Israeli archaeologist Ronnie Reich recently discovered ancient sewers beneath Jerusalem. In those sewers they found artifacts—including pottery and coins—that they dated to the time of the siege. Some suggest that the finds indicate that the sewers may have been used as escape routes by Jews, some of whom may have been smuggling out cherished religious scrolls. Importantly, the sewers lead to the Valley of Kidron. From there it’s only a short distance to the Dead Sea—and Qumran.

  The jars in which the scrolls were found may provide additional evidence that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of disparate sects’ texts. Jan Gunneweg of Hebrew University in Jerusalem performed chemical analysis on vessel fragments from the Qumran-area caves.

  Gunneweg described the testing process: “We take a piece of ceramic, we grind it, we send it to a nuclear reactor, where it’s bombarded with neutrons, then we can measure the chemical fingerprint of the clay of which the pottery was made.”

  “Since there is no clay on Earth with the exact chemical composition—it is like DNA—you can point to a specific area and say this pottery was made here, that pottery was made over here.” Gunneweg’s conclusion: Only half of the pottery that held the Dead Sea Scrolls is local to Qumran.

  TRUTH:

  MOST OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS ARE MADE OF ANIMAL SKINS, SOME ARE PAPYRUS, AND ONE IS MADE OF COPPER. THEY ARE WRITTEN WITH A CARBON-BASED INK, FROM RIGHT TO LEFT.

  Controversial Theory

  Not everyone agrees with the idea that Dead Sea Scrolls may hail from beyond Qumran. “I don’t buy it,” said NYU’s Schiffman, who added that the idea of the scrolls being written by multiple Jewish groups from Jerusalem has been around since the 1950s. “The Jerusalem theory has been rejected by virtually everyone in the field,” he said.

  “The notion that someone brought a bunch of scrolls together from some other location and deposited them in a cave is very, very unlikely,” Schiffman added.

  “The reason is that most of the [scrolls] fit a coherent theme and hang together. If the scrolls were brought from some other place, presumably by some other groups of Jews, you would expect to find items that fit the ideologies of groups that are in disagreement with [the Essenes]. And it’s not there,” said Schiffman, who dismisses interpretations that link some Dead Sea Scroll writings to groups such as the Zealots.

  UCLA’s Cargill agrees with Schiffman that the Dead Sea Scrolls show “a tremendous amount of congruence of ideology, messianic expectation, interpretation of scripture, [Jewish law] interpretation, and calendrical dates. “At the same time,” Cargill said, “it is difficult to explain some of the ideological diversity present within some of the scrolls if one argues that all of the scrolls were composed by a single sectarian group at Qumran.”

  TRUTH:

  THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS WERE FOUND IN 11 DIFFERENT CAVES.

  Safekeeping

  If Cargill and others are correct, it would mean that what modern scholars call the Dead Sea Scrolls are not wholly the work of isolated scribes. Instead they may be the unrecovered treasures of terrified Jews who did not—or could not—return to reclaim what they entrusted to the desert for safekeeping.

  “Whoever wrote them, the scrolls were considered scripture by their owners, and much care was taken to ensure their survival,” Cargill said. “Essenes or not, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a rare glimpse into the vast diversity of Judaism—or Judaisms—in the first century.”

  RAZOR-SHARP SWORDS

  Legendary Swords’ Sharpness

  Strength From Nanotubes, Study Says

  Studies of Damascus swords, legendary for their sharpness and strength, are revealing that the
distinctive blades contain nanowires, carbon nanotubes, and other extremely small, intricate structures that might explain their powers.

  Damascus swords, first made in the eighth century A.D., are renowned for their complex surface patterns and sharpness. According to legend, the blades can cut a piece of silk in half as it falls to the ground and maintain their edge after cleaving through stone, metal, or even other swords.

  But since the techniques for making these swords have been lost for hundreds of years, no one is sure exactly why these swords are so exceptional.

  TRUTH:

  METALSMITHS LOST THE FORMULA FOR FORGING DAMASCUS STEEL AT THE END OF THE 18TH CENTURY.

  Tiny Structures, Big Strength

  Studies of the swords’ molecular structure are now uncovering the tiny structures that may explain these properties. Peter Paufler, a crystallographer at Technical University in Dresden, Germany, and his colleagues used an electron microscope to examine samples from a Damascus blade made in the 17th century. The team found the steel to contain rare-earth elements and evidence of nanowires in its microstructure.