The Complete History of Science (Full Documentary)

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Everybody DOES have a twin: Photographer creates amazing portraits of STRANGERS who look the double of each other

At first glance, it's an elegant set of portraits of twins - but look more closely and the secret is revealed.

None of the individuals captured by photographer Francois Brunelle are related by blood, their faces just have strikingly similar characteristics. 

Mr Brunelle, who lives in Québec, has studied the human face since he started out as a photographer at the age of 18 in 1968.

The same...but different: Nathaniel (who did not give his last name) and Edward Toledo, pictured in Montreal in 2003, are remarkably similar but not twins

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Meet the grandparents: Researchers use forensics to rebuild 27 faces of man's ancestors, stretching back 7 million years

• Models built from forensic reconstruction of fossil skulls
• Reconstructs face age when humans and chimps shared common ancestry
• Ancestors from when 'hominids' first emerged in Africa

An exhibition in Dresden, Germany has used forensic technology to recreate some of the most distant members of the human evolutionary 'family' - ancestors stretching back seven million years. The 27 model heads were created using fossil remains, and includes a glimpse of sahelanthropus tchadensis, an ancestor dated to about seven million years ago, when our 'hominid 'ancestors' first originated in Africa. 

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Forbidden Archeology: The Mysterious Origins of Man

It's Indiana Jones meets The X-Files in this intriguing program that tackles the age-old question "Where did we come from?" Fascinating viewing! Highly recommended! - Michael Rogers, "Library Journal"

The creators of the Emmy Award Winning Mystery of the Sphinx present a revolutionary new film that examines one of our greatest mysteries: Man's origins. Hosted by Charlton Heston, this film challenges what we are being taught about human evolution and the rise of early civilization. A new breed of scientific investigators present startling evidence that the academic community has quietly ignored.

Includes the facts about this amazing mystery and a fascinating series of spellbinding interviews with researchers, scientists, and the best known, most credible authorities in the world today.
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Scientists model ancient bog woman's face

German researchers have shed light on life during the Iron Age after examining the ancient remains of a woman found in a bog in what is now Lower Saxony. The body dates back to the pre-Roman era, more than 2,600 years ago.

A team of experts presented their findings on Thursday in Hannover, including facial simulations of the bog woman dubbed “Moora.” Archaeologists first began studying the find six years ago, according to news magazine Der Spiegel.

Experts from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) generated a digital model of the bones, which was used to make a replica of the bog woman’s skull. Later, five researchers from Germany and the United Kingdom produced a series of facial reconstructions.

“It’s a look into the face of a young woman who lived at a time when Rome was still just a small village,” said Stefan Winghart, head of the regional heritage conservation office in Lower Saxony.

After examining Moora’s corpse, researchers estimated she was between 17- and 19-years-old at the time of her death. Her life was brief but gruelling: The team determined the young woman suffered from malnutrition, chronic inflammation, curvature of the spine – as well as a benign tumour at the base of her skull. The bones also point to a pair of skull fractures due to blunt trauma.

Experts said Moora probably lived a life of intense physical labour – and likely regularly carried heavy loads, such as water jugs, while roaming through the marshland.

When Moora’s remains were initially uncovered – including vertebrae, hair and pieces of the skull – the body was not treated as an archaeological find. Instead forensics experts in Hamburg identified the corpse as a 16- to 21-year-old woman with poor dental hygiene, Der Spiegel said. Until a DNA test proved otherwise, the corpse was suspected to be the body of the young woman Elke Kerll, who disappeared in 1969 after going to a dance club.

Yet after a human hand was uncovered at the site five years after the initial find, archaeologists began to take a closer look. Radiocarbon dating completed at the University of Kiel confirmed the girl had died between 764 and 515 B.C.

Despite researchers’ efforts to learn more about Moora’s life, the circumstances of her death remain a mystery. The team determined the young woman was naked at the time of her death – and the absence of any clothing or jewellery at the site seems to suggest the young woman did not suffer a fatal accident. But the find also contradicts historical knowledge of common burial practices during the Iron Age, as most bodies were cremated.
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Ancient Aliens: Alien Devastations (2010)

Presented in the 1968 bestselling book Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Daniken, the theory of “ancient aliens” rocked people’s beliefs in mankind’s progress. Ancient cave drawings of strange creatures, remains of landing strips in Peru, and Indian texts that describe the “flying machines of the gods” were just a few of the odd archaeological artefacts cited by von Daniken as proof that ancient astronauts were well known to our ancestors. Produced with the exclusive cooperation of von Daniken himself, Ancient Aliens launches all-new expeditions to seek out and evaluate this evidence, with a concentration on the latest discoveries of the last 30 years, including unusual DNA findings on man’s evolution and newly decoded artefacts from Egypt to Syria to South America. It is a balanced investigation into a theory some believe cannot be true, but many agree cannot be ignored.

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Shakespeare's 3D image to be unveiled

The History Channel is slated to unveil a new 3D image of British playwright William Shakespeare, which is said to be the first to resemble the poet.

The picture will be revealed in the TV documentary Death Masks, which is to be aired on the History Channel on Sept. 13, 2010.

According to the Daily Mail, the program will present a quite different picture of the poet which shows every wrinkle on the playwright's face.

"They show strong evidence both forensically and historically that this 3D model may be, in fact, the way Shakespeare looked in life," said Director Stuart Clarke.

Images of Napoleon, Julius Caesar, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have also been recreated by the same method which is based on scans taken from death masks and in some cases masks made during life.

Producers of the program claim "the images will challenge viewers' perceptions of what some of history's most famous figures looked like."

Many experts doubt the validity of the death mask used by Clarke.

The mask was found in Darmstadt, Germany, in the 1840s, when German scientists said it belonged to Shakespeare and proved that the writer suffered from cancer towards the end of his life.

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust chairman Stanley Welles rejects the validity of the new image and the death mask saying that "Shakespeare was not a national figure at the time, not in the way he is today, and it is unlikely a mask like this would have been made."

William Shakespeare is known by many as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist.

He is also known as England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. About 38 plays, 154 sonnets and two long narrative poems are among his remaining works.

His plays have been translated into every major living language and are frequently staged all around the globe.
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Stan Lee's Superhumans

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About Stan Lee's Superhumans

Throughout history, the forces of evolution and genetic mutation have endowed humans with astonishing new abilities and features. It's a process that continues to this day, and nowhere is it more evident than in the fascinating world of Stan Lee's "Superhumans."

Co-hosted by Stan Lee, the legendary creator of the X-Men, the series scours the globe for the real-life counterparts of Lee's characters–people with unique genetic traits that translate into remarkable powers. These include a man whose body is powerfully magnetic, another who can withstand deadly levels of cold and yet another whose brain performs complex calculations at staggering speeds.

In each episode, these "superhumans" undergo tests that may help explain their amazing gifts, while viewers discover the long history of people with extraordinary powers. Daniel Browning Smith, who's been dubbed the most flexible man in the world, hosts this thrilling journey into the farthest reaches of humankind.

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American Paranormal: Bigfoot

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If you get a chance, be sure to catch the episode of American Paranormal (a new series on the National Geographic channel) on Bigfoot. It's quite good and presents new evidence in the form of a thorough, expert analysis of the famed Patterson-Gimlin film. They pretty much prove, to my satisfaction at least, that the creature in the film could not have been a man in a suit. Physically, anatomically and costume-wise, it's just not possible. I highly recommend checking it out. If this first episode is any indication of what this new series is going to be like, it's going to be great!
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Inside the Mars-500 'spaceship'

Russia's ambitious plan to put a group of prospective cosmonauts in isolation for 17 months, as a potential first step of a mission to Mars, will start in a year's time.

Richard Hollingham of BBC World Service's Discovery programme gained rare access to the Mars-500 project's home at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, to take a look at the preparations under way there.

Special exercise pulleys will prevent muscle wastage in space

Early next year, six Russian cosmonauts will climb through the hatch of the Mars-500 "spaceship" and not come out for over 500 days.
The mock-up of a Martian craft is the first part of an ambitious project to send humans to Mars.
"The Mars-500 project is envisaged as an answer to the big question of whether a human being can realise a Martian flight - taking into account all the limitations and restrictions which are characteristic of this flight," says deputy director of the institute, Dr Viktor Baranov, who has overall responsibility for the Mars 500 experiment.
"We need to understand that in a manned flight, the people are the most vulnerable thing."

Napkin shower
The institute is very busy. Because not all aspects of the Mars mission can be simulated in the ground-based Mars-500 project, other experiments are being conducted in parallel.
Obviously, once any real mission to Mars got under way, a crew member could not simply leave when they felt like it - so Mars-500 will involve numerous studies of autonomy and isolation.

Scientists will constantly monitor the health of the 'cosmonauts'

The scientists will also be watching the crew's psychological response to being confined, in order to watch for conflicts.
And they will study the effectiveness of telemedicine, as there will be no hospital on the ship.
The Mars-500 mock-up features the cramped personal quarters that would be an inevitable part of a real craft. Each cosmonaut has a narrow bed, some small shelves, a desk and a wardrobe.
There is no shower - instead, the cosmonauts clean themselves in a heat chamber like a sauna, and use napkins to scrape off the dirt.
Scientists here are keen to stress, however, that the Mars-500 craft is not a prison and that if a crew member wants to leave they can do so.
It also may be the case that doctors recommend a person leaves based on their medical data, or if the state of the facility drops to a level where it is affecting health and safety.
However, ultimately the institute does want people who can last the full 500 days - which means it takes a special kind of person to volunteer.
They are looking for highly-motivated people to form a team which will include a physician, a biologist, an IT specialist and engineer.

'One organism, one body'
Sergei Ryazansky is a young cosmonaut who works at the Institute of Biomedical Problems. He has not yet been into space, but has been in the simulation - and would like to be one of the first to put his name forward for a real mission to Mars.
"Training of crew members - especially their personal and psychological training - must be at a really high level," he said.

The government wants to be on the safe side; it wants to know what technologies we have Anatoly Grigoriev, director of the Institute of Biomedical Problems

"In the Autumn we had a technical crew that I commanded for two weeks. We were testing all the equipment of the module. One day I saw one guy not acting like usual. He was missing his girlfriend.
"It is really important to see such things and help; to give him work to keep him busy. The only way to survive such an extreme flight will be working as one organism, one body; helping each other, discussing everything."
To make the training exercise more realistic, the designers have brought in a time delay.
Because it can take around 20 minutes for a message to travel from Mars to Earth, it takes this amount of time in the simulation.
This means there can be no real-time conversations with friends and family - and that, in moments of crisis, the crew will have to make crucial decisions themselves.
Meanwhile, the cosmonauts will also have to deal with the impact of prolonged weightlessness on the human body.
Inesa Koslovska from the department of Sensory, Motor and Physiology and Countermeasures has been tracking what happens when people spend long periods away from gravity.
"Muscles immediately start to deteriorate" she says.
This is followed by changes in cardio-vascular function and all metabolic processes, she says.
"Then our bones start to deteriorate, because they get their signals from the muscles," she adds.
In space all of this would not matter - but as soon as the cosmonauts returned to Earth, they would be so weak they would not be able to stand.

First step
Dr Koslovska found that the main trigger for these changes is muscular unloading, so she developed a number of counter-measure exercises to allow the cosmonauts to keep muscle tone in space.
The most important is a specially-developed treadmill, on which a suit is attached via elastic pulleys. Instead of gravity, the runner has to strain against the tension of the pulleys.

Russia has continued space launches from bases in Kazakhstan

"We don't have weight in space - but in this suit, you do," Dr Koslovska says.
Of course, Mars-500 remains only the first step - the decision to commit so much time and energy to a Mars mission has not been explicitly backed by the Kremlin.
But as Anatoly Grigoriev - director of the Institute of Biomedical Problems - points out, neither has it been discouraged.
"The government wants to be on the safe side; it wants to know what technologies we have," he says.
"When these factors are gathered, it will be easier to convince taxpayers at large that there is a possibility of success for such a mission.
"The time has come now when the knowledge has been gathered. The mission can be undertaken with a possibility of success."
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Life After People (History Channel)

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Ardipithecus ramidus - 4.4 million-year-old hominid skeleton 'Ardi' discovered in Ethiopia

         (Science)

The fossil, known as 'Ardi', is the oldest specimen on the hominid branch that led
to modern humans yet unearthed

by Hannah Devlin 

She had a stocky, ape-like form and a protruding jaw, with huge hands and a stooping gait. Beautiful she was not.

But Ardi, as scientists have christened her, has emerged as one of our oldest and most important ancestors.

The question of what our first “hominid” forebears looked like has intrigued scientists since the birth of evolutionary theory 150 years ago. But it is only now, with the discovery of a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton, that scientists have been able to paint a vivid picture of them.

The Ardipithecus ramidus fossil is the oldest specimen on the hominid branch found to date, and the closest that we have got to tracing our roots back to “the missing link” — our last common ancestor with modern apes.

The fossil is more than a million years older than the so-called “Lucy” skeleton. The lines that evolved into modern humans and apes last shared an ancestor at least six to seven million years ago.

Tim White, of the University of California Berkeley and a lead author of the study, said: “Darwin was very wise on this matter. He said, ‘We have to be really careful. The only way we are really going to know what this last common ancestor looked like is to go and find it’. Well, we have not found it. But we have come closer than we have ever come.”

The adult female specimen was found in 1994 in Afar, in the Great Rift Valley of northeastern Ethiopia.

It took an international team of researchers nearly three years to trawl the volcanic ash where the fossil lay and piece together the 125 fragments. The significance of the find meant that scientists took a further 13 years analysing the specimen, which is described today in intricate detail in the journal Science.

Ardi would have been about 4ft tall, and weighed about 9st, almost a foot taller and twice the weight of Lucy. Her brain was only slightly larger than a modern chimp’s and considerably smaller than Lucy’s, suggesting that our ancestors evolved an advanced intellect much later.

The angle of her head relative to her spine and the position of her pelvis and hip show that Ardi would have been able to walk with a stooped posture.

However, she retains the “grasping” big toe of our more primitive ancestors, as well as long arms and big hands, which suggest that she was an able climber, and would have spent much of her time in the trees. Unlike chimpanzees and orang-utans, though, she would not have been able to swing through the branches.

Analysis of Ardi’s teeth suggests that she lived on a diet of fruit, leaves and small mammals. Her canine teeth, and isolated male canine teeth found at the site, were similar in size and very small. This reveals an intriguing departure from modern apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, where males possess large canines that they bare in conflicts over females.

The comparable size of canine teeth between males and females suggests a low level of male aggression in hominid societies of the time. Males and females were likely to have had co-operative, monogamous relationships in which the males were involved in raising the young.

“This fossil suggests that the ‘feminisation’ of the canines, which is unique to humans, goes back deep into our history,” said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

The fossil also changes thinking about the habitat of early hominids. It was previously thought that our ancestors developed upright walking as a consequence of living in the grassland savannahs. However, Afar would have been a lush forest environment populated by monkeys and elephants.
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