In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012.

The painted figure of a man through the doorway of an ancient dwelling in the Maya city Zultun in northeastern Guatemala. Archaeologists have found the small room where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society’s intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago.

In a recently excavated house, archaeologists have found one wall scrawled with hundreds of numbers, which the team says relate to the Mayan calendar.

The tiny, millimetre-thick, red and black glyphs are "unlike any seen before" at other Maya sites.

"For the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community," archaeologist William Saturno of Boston University, who led the exploration and excavation, said.

"It’s like an episode of TV’s Big Bang Theory, a geek math problem and they’re painting it on the wall. They seem to be using it like a blackboard."

The only other time the glyphs have been spotted is in the Dresden Codex, a book famed for its astrological accuracy which was written several hundred years after the words were painted on the walls of the Xultún complex.

Among the glyphs, the team spotted references to the four Maya calenders – the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars.

Four long numbers on the wall represent 300,000-2.5 million days which seem to bring together all of the astronomical cycles the Maya thought important.

In a recently excavated house, archaeologists found one wall with scrawled hundreds of numbers, which the team says relate to the Mayan calendar.

And here’s the sad bit for the conspiracy theorists – the dates stretch some 7000 years into the future.

Xultún is the first place Maya archaeologists have found that seems to tabulate all of these cycles in this way.

And no, the site isn’t 7000 years old – a number scratched into the plaster likely records the date at 813 A.D., just as the Maya world began to collapse.

Anthony Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, says all the signs point to the much less Hollywood belief held by academia that 2012 signals the end of just one of the ancient civilisation’s calendar cycles.

"It’s like the odometer of a car, with the Maya calendar rolling over from the 120,000s to 130,000," Prof Aveni said.

"The car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn over; the Maya just start over."

The complex the house sits in was discovered about 100 years ago and was home to tens of thousands, the team said.

Its discoverer, Sylvanus Morley, named the site Xultún, meaning "end stone".

Conservator Angelyn Bass cleans and stabilizes the surface of a wall of a Maya house that dates to the 9th century A.D. in the Maya city Zultun in northeastern Guatemala.

It wasn’t mapped until the 1970s and the house in which the glyphs were found was number 54 of the 56 verified.

Remarkably, it sat just a metre below the surface, a fact which helped Prof Saturno’s student Max Chamberlain discover it by following looter’s tunnels in 2010.

"It’s weird that the Xultún finds exist at all," Prof Saturno said.

"Such writings and artwork on walls don’t preserve well in the Maya lowlands, especially in a house buried only a metre below the surface."

Bah. Back to the drawing board, Hollywood.

8012 just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Unmarked Pills No telling what’s in there.

The capsules originate in northeastern China, probably in Jilin province, which shares a border with North Korea. Since August, South Korean authorities have thwarted 35 smuggling attempts accounting for 17,450 capsules containing the powdered flesh of human babies whose bodies were “chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder,” theAssociated Press reports.

It’s uncertain where exactly the babies are coming from or who is making the capsules, but it is known that some people consider such pills to be a panacea for a range of physical ailments. Real science tells us that they are actually chock full of potentially harmful bacteria. Plus, they are made from human babies. We can’t stress that enough.

Remarkably, no one has been arrested. The smugglers caught with the capsules–which have mostly been marked as stamina boosters–have denied knowing that they were anything other than energy supplements. And because they aren’t meant for resale–those caught with the capsules have claimed they are either private stock or for non-commercial distribution to family and friends–no economic crime has technically been committed.

South Korean officials have confiscated all of the capsules, however, and while no illnesses have been reported from ingesting the capsules, customs agents are stepping up their targeting of these unsettling pills. Chinese officials have also launched an investigation into the origins of the capsules.

"The Aeolian harp is a quite mysterious sound, really," said Jerram. "I think the Victorians were very excited by it just because it sounds quite unearthly – it almost sounds like the aliens landing. It’s quite mysterious and quite beautiful. And it’s also quite hard to predict – it’s hard to predict the sound that’s going to be produced from our string. It’s just created by the string vibrating in the wind."

Jerram got the idea for the wind harp after speaking with desert well (qanat) diggers while on a visit to Iran several years ago. "They basically go out into the desert with an axe and they draw a circle in the sand and then they dig straight down into the sand and into the rock," he said. "When they hit the water table, they then dig across and create these incredibly long tunnels transferring the water out of the desert into the town. They might then dig air vents sort of maybe every 50 meters."

Schematic of a qanat desert well which helped inspire Jerram to create Aeolus

The diggers described how when conditions are just right, the wind can make those vents "sing" and make noises. This gave Jerram the impetus to explore other structures that might use the wind in a similar manner, and eventually, his version of this ancient musical instrument was born.

The Aeolus and other wind harps make their music through a phenomenon known as the von Kármán Vortex Street effect in which wind blowing across a string or other thin, rigid object creates an alternating series of vortices downstream that sets up a vibration in the object. The pitch and volume of the sound generated by the effect is random and is determined by the strength and speed of the wind as well as the length and thickness of the string.

Artist’s interpretation of the von Kármán Vortex Street effect

Jerram’s harp is composed of 310 stainless steel tubes that terminate in a double-curved arch (picture a section taken from a sphere) which visitors can enter for a unique audio-visual experience. Polished to a mirror finish internally that reflects the changing weather conditions, in musical mode, many of the tubes are connected to strings attached to a membrane or "skin" on their outer end that transmits wind-generated sound into the arch and to listening posts situated nearby. Even on windless days, the tubes without strings hum at low frequencies, enhanced by an acoustic lens effect that focuses the sound directly at observers in a specific point under the arch.

Until May 10, 2012, the Aeolus, which has been traveling about the UK since its completion last year, can be experienced at its location in Canary Wharf, London. Eventually, Jerram hopes to sell Aeolus and find it a permanent home where it can continue to delight the public for many years to come.

Check out the videos below to learn how the Aeolus’ tubes were made and see an interview with the artist:

Charles Lushear has designed and built a coffee table that resembles a Nintendo Entertainment System controller, with buttons and a joypad that can actually control onscreen gaming action

While it’s certainly true that there have been a number of both functional and aesthetic NES controller coffee tables built over the last few years, Lushear’s creation is a little different from the rest. Rather than reproduce the black, gray and red coloring of the 4.92 x 2.17 x 0.67-inch (12.49 x 5.5 x 1.7 cm) plastic original, the instrument and furniture maker has instead opted for the natural tones of maple, mahogany and walnut woods used in the construction of his guaranteed conversation piece. The retractable cord and dovetail joinery are also nice touches.

When not being used to control the onscreen action of favored NES classics likeSuper Mario, the table’s huge wooden four-way directional pad and action buttons sit underneath a removable glass top.

Four versions of the 42 x 18.25 x 18-inch (106.68 x 46.35 x 45.72 cm) Nintendo Controller Coffee Table have been designed to suit various tastes and budgets, including a non-functional version. USB compatibility can also be added and Lushear says that he’s currently looking into making the controller compatible with the Wii console, for those who don’t happen to own an NES gaming system.

The table is priced at US$3,500, although the first creation has been bought by DudeIWantThat.com and is currently being raffled off to readers of the curiosity site. There’s an estimated build time of between 4-6 weeks on the construction of new built-to-order coffee tables.

The Chalktrail – which was recently funded on Kickstarter – comes in two varieties (bike or scooter) but both work on the same simple principle: Using a flexible wishbone design the device clamps to the rear wheel of a bike or scooter and holds a stick of sidewalk chalk. The fitting process is said to have been kept simple and tool-free so children could do it themselves without parental help.

Once attached it’s all about getting moving and seeing the lines created as the chalk touches the road. Makers say it’s just as common for kids to create figure eights, patterns and designs as it is to play follow the leader, draw race tracks or simply mark where they have been. Each piece of chalk is said to last up to 1.5 miles.

Inventor Scott Baumann from Bellingham, Washington told Gizmag he first came up with the idea five years ago as he was watching his kids riding their bikes and playing with sidewalk chalk. "It went something like this: On the bike, off the bike, draw with chalk, back on the bike, back off the bike, draw some more with chalk, etc., etc." he said.

"I started wondering why nobody had ever combined the two activities so kids could ride and draw at the same time, says Baumann. "Then I looked over and saw a hula hoop lying in the lawn. I grabbed it and cut it in half with a pair of garden shears, taped a piece of sidewalk chalk to one end and taped the other end of the hula hoop to the seat-post of my daughter’s bike. It was magic – every kid in the neighborhood immediately wanted one."

Since then he’s worked to develop the idea into a finished product and taken it to promotional events. "We took Chalktrail to a city art festival last summer with about 10 bikes and 10 scooters and half of a city block of roped-off street," Baumann added. "The kids rode in circles for hours … it was the most popular attraction at the show,".

In addition to the Kickstarter funding, there’s also a licensing deal in the works with a major toy company, which could see Chalktrail rolled out around the world in time for Christmas with a suggested retail price of US$19.99 for the bike option and $14.99 for Chalktrail Scooter.

In case you were wondering … yes, the Chalktrail will fit your adult-sized bike too! Users can adjust the trailing angle of the chalk so that it will leave the same artistic lines whether attached to Junior’s 12-inch wheel starter bike or dad’s 29-inch cruiser.

The explosion unleashed a rather large coronal mass ejection (CME), those sometimes-menaces that threaten satellites, astronauts and terrestrial electronics, though the CME was not pointed toward earth. So instead of a space weather warning, we get this: beautiful imagery and footage of this M1 class (that’s like a medium) solar flare and prominence captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. While it was quite pleasant here on the Earth yesterday, click play below to see just how crazy things were getting on the surface of the sun.

The new analysis centers on one of the three experiments carried by the probe: the Labeled Release (LR) experiment. This instrument searched for signs of life by mixing samples of Martian soil with droplets of water containing nutrients and radioactive carbon. If the soil contained microbes, the reasoning went, they would metabolize these carbon atoms and nutrients and release either methane gas or radioactive carbon dioxide, either of which would tip off the probes that life existed in the soil.

That’s exactly what happened. But other experiments aboard Viking didn’t back up the LR, and NASA scientists had to dismiss the LR’s findings as anomalous.

But now an analysis by a University of Southern California neurobiologist (and former NASA space shuttle project director) and a mathematician from Italy’s University of Siena could reverse that thinking. They used a technique called cluster analysis, which clusters together similar-looking data sets, to see what would happen. They found the analysis created two clusters: one for the two active experiments on Viking and the other for five control experiments.

Further, when they compared Viking’s data to confirmed biological sources on Earth, like temperature readings from a lab rat, the analysis correctly clustered the biological readings with the active Viking experiment data, separate from the non-biological data in the control experiments. All that essentially means that the cluster analysis, when fed a good deal of data from both biological and non-biological sources, correctly separates the two types of data. And when it does so, it lumps the Viking data into the “biological” category.

That’s not concrete evidence for microbial life on Mars. It’s merely concrete evidence that there is a stark difference between Viking’s LR experiment data and the control experiment data. And it’s evidence that the Viking data tracks with biological rather than non-biological data. More study is necessary (isn’t it always?), but if the cluster analysis is to be believed then our first shot at detecting microbial life in the soils of Mars may have hit pay dirt–and we didn’t even realize it.

The bearded face of the deity appears to shine out of the space dust of distant galaxy NGC 1316 in this image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Medieval Christians believed heaven was a physical place above the clouds – but Hubble seems to have pinpointed ‘Cloud Nine’ a little further off, in an elliptical galaxy 75 million light years from Earth.
If the ghostly face is in fact the Heavenly Father, he may be trying to communicate with his children on Earth – NGC 1316 is one of the most powerful radio sources in the sky.

Loops of cosmic dust form an image that looks remarkably like the face of God in this Hubble telescope image.
This image made from data obtained with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope reveals the dust lanes and star clusters of this giant galaxy that give evidence that it was formed from a past merger of two gas-rich galaxies.

Astronomers conclude that these star clusters constitute clear evidence of the occurrence of a major collision of two spiral galaxies that merged together a few billion years ago to shape NGC 1316 as it appears today.

NGC 1316 is on the outskirts of a nearby cluster of galaxies in the southern constellation of Fornax, at a distance of about 75 million light-years.
It is one of the brightest ellipticals in the Fornax galaxy cluster. NGC 1316, also known as Fornax A, is one of the strongest and largest radio sources in the sky, with radio lobes extending over several degrees of sky (well off the Hubble image).

PRETTY SPACE PICS, NEW COLOURS: HELIX NEBULA – EYE OF GOD

To make the topping, regular Ichiban beer is frozen to -5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) while air is continuously blown into it. It’s kind of like when a child makes bubbles in their drink, except inside a blast freezer. Once the topping is placed onto regular, unfrozen beer though, it acts as an insulating lid and keeps the drink cold for 30 minutes. A side effect of this process (or bonus, depending on how you like your beer) is a creamier taste and texture for the beverage overall. Best of all though, it doesn’t dilute the beer’s flavor as it melts, the way ice would.

Kirin is currently previewing the Ichiban Shibori Frozen Draft in Tokyo, but plans to launch the drink in the rest of the country in May. Unfortunately, no word yet from the company on how that frozen beer foam would taste on a waffle cone.

You can watch the video below to see how it’s prepared, but don’t expect much more than what looks like ice cream being poured over beer.

Church pews nationwide were lit up this Easter weekend, and not just by the glow of so many churchgoers making their once-a-year appearances — iPads and smartphones were on plenty of parishioners’ laps, helping people follow along with the ceremonies. Congregants are feeling increasingly comfortable with using gadgets in church, and priests and ministers are condoning it.

In Chicagoland, many congregations encourage the use of gadgets during church, as the Chicago Tribune reports. Worshippers are using Bible apps and web searches to find greater context behind the sermons they hear, and the preachers themselves are using the technology to get their messages out. As long as people are listening, maybe Googling Romans 6:8 and not playing Angry Birds, congregation leaders are glad to encourage the use of technology in the pews — a few even offer WiFi connections. Some churchgoers have even taken to Twitter during services to share the conversation.

“It’s a tool to get closer to God on a weekly basis,” one churchgoer told the paper.

Some observers think modern, evangelical churches would be more open to using smartphones and tablets, the Tribune says. But the Catholic Church, too, has plenty of experience with gadgets and apps — there’s at least one app designed to help priests craft their sermons, another to help people write confessions, and Pope Benedict XVI is on Twitter.

There was a time when the only people allowed to play with toys in church were the children, skimming Matchbox cars along the pews while nibbling on Cheerios. But now it sounds like all the adults are doing it. Some might argue looking at the new iPad’s retina screen is akin to a religious experience, so maybe it makes sense.