Hydraulic Machine Found Inside A Pyramid

It appears that hydraulic mechanics were used extensively and may have indeed been the driving force behind the construction of ancient Egyptian pyramids.

In a preprint paper, scientists concluded that the Step Pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara, Egypt—believed to be the oldest of the seven monumental pyramids and potentially constructed about 4,500 years ago — offers a remarkable blueprint for hydraulic engineering.

The hydraulic-powered mechanism could have maneuvered the oversized stone blocks forming the pyramid, starting from the ground up. The research team says the Step Pyramid’s internal architecture is consistent with a hydraulic elevation mechanism, something that’s never been reported before at that place or in that time.

By lifting the stones from the interior of the pyramid in what the authors call a "volcano fashion," the water pressure from the hydraulic system could have pushed the blocks into place. If proved out, this research shows the Egyptians had a powerful understanding of advanced hydraulic systems well before modern scholars believed they did. That begs the question: Was this the first major use of the system, or had it been in play previously?

No matter the answer, pulling it off at the Step Pyramid would have been no easy feat.

The team believes that based on the mapping of nearby watersheds, one of the massive—and yet unexplained—Saqqara structures, known as the Gisr el-Mudir enclosure, has the features of a check dam with the intent to trap sediment and water. The scientists say the topography beyond the dam suggests a possible temporary lake west of the Djoser complex, with water flow surrounding it in a moat-like design.

As a Nile tributary fed the area, a dam could have created a temporary lake, potentially linking the river to a "Dry Moat" around the Djoser site, helping move materials and serving the hydraulic needs.

"The ancient architects likely raised the stones from the pyramid center in a volcano fashion using the sediment-free water from the Dry Moat’s south section," the authors write.

In one section of the moat, the team found that a monumental linear rock-cut structure consisting of successive, deep-trench compartments combines the technical requirement of a water treatment facility—and a design still often seen in modern-day water treatment plants — by including a settling basin, retention basin, and purification system.

"Together, the Gisr el-Mudir and the Dry Moat's inner south section work as a unified hydraulics system that improves water quality and regulates flow for practical purposes and human needs," the authors write. The team believes the water available in the area was sufficient to meet the needs of the project.

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Budget Issues Hound ISS

The dilapidated state of the International Space Station (ISS) serves as a sad reminder of shifting priorities amid reports that President Donald Trump's administration is planning to slash NASA funding by 20 percent.

For years, NASA has emphasized budgetary and aging hardware concerns regarding the ISS. Now, during a public meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) last 17 April, NASA officials said they were "deeply concerned" about the diminishing safety of the orbital station.

The panel cited long-standing issues – cracks and air leaks – as well as funding shortfalls. They called for more funding to facilitate the end of the ISS's operations and avert a potentially catastrophic unplanned deorbit.

During the ASAP meeting, members of the NASA safety panel emphasized the growing risks facing ISS operations.

Cracks aboard the space station have been a long-running concern. Over the years, air leaks have also hindered operations – the source of one of those leaks was pinpointed thanks to floating tea leaves.

At the time of writing, NASA aims to deorbit the ISS by 2030. The space agency has contracted SpaceX to develop US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) to safely remove the ISS from orbit within that timeframe.

However, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk may throw a spanner in the works. He recently recommended NASA deorbit the station sooner. Following a public spat with a former ISS commander, he claimed the station had "served its purpose".

Conversely, when it comes to Trump's NASA budget cuts, Musk recently stated he can't get involved because of a conflict of interest.

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The Fall Of Nuremberg In 1945

About eight decades ago, U.S. Army soldiers raised the American flag in the center of Nuremberg. They stood atop a bunker adorned with Nazi symbols, now in the hands of Allied forces after five days of fierce urban combat.

By April 1945, the invasion of Germany was well underway. After crossing the Rhine River, American soldiers were pushing forward. Soviet troops were already well into Germany, and both forces were moving towards Berlin. To do so though, they had to eliminate the remaining bastions of Nazi military power. The city of Nuremberg, in the southern part of the country, was one such place. It ended up being some of the most intense urban combat that U.S. forces in Europe experienced.

At this point in the war, advancing Allied forces had a doctrine to avoid being bogged down in urban warfare, preferring to encircle and besiege Nazi-held cities and advance forward, rather than suffer heavy casualties that they knew would come from building-to-building combat. But the push into Germany proper meant that Nazi strongholds had to be taken.

Nuremberg in particular was a target due to its importance in Nazi propaganda, having been the site of major rallies by the party prior to the war. Berlin was the capital of Germany but Nuremberg was seen as the Nazi’s political center.

As such, the Nazis had significant defenses set up. Nuremberg had been heavily bombed by American forces, reducing large portions of the city to rubble, which the German forces used to place anti-tank guns and machine gun nests throughout the streets. Despite being outnumbered, the conditions of urban combat meant they could put the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and 45th Infantry Division through hellish conditions.

In the first two days the two Army divisions swept across the city’s outskirts, capturing suburban towns and passes. On April 18 they entered Nuremberg proper, and that was when the main phase of the battle began.

"The 3rd Division entered the city with the [7th Infantry Regiment] on the right, the 15th [Infantry Regiment] in the center, and the 30th [Infantry Regiment] on the left. The advance was slow and methodical," a Combat Studies Institute paper on the battle recounted.

"There was heavy German resistance from the basements of buildings, foxholes in the city parks, and prepared 88mm gun emplacements. The 7th Regiment encountered heavy small arms, automatic weapons, and bazooka fires. The Germans fought fanatically and had to be rooted out of every house and building."

The 45th Infantry Division, moving in from the east, reported similar resistance, with house-to-house fighting becoming the norm. By 19 April, American troops were at Nuremberg’s old city, where the Nazis were headquartered out of. Still, the Germans were able to continue to fight back, prompting additional American bombardment of the already wrecked city.

On 20 April, soldiers from the 30th Infantry Regiment reached Adolf Hitler Platz in the center of the city, where they raised the American flag. At 11:00 A.M. the Germans officially surrendered. Nuremberg had fallen. According to the Army, there were more than 800 casualties in the fighting. German losses were unknown.

Rather, victory was "a direct result of battle-hardened U.S. veterans refusing to be denied," the same Combat Studies Institute report concluded. "The fighting involved building-to-building, room-to-room, and at times hand-to-hand-combat."

Nuremberg was more than just a symbolic win. Allied intelligence at the time suggested that the Nazis were looking to pull their remaining forces south into Austria to regroup as an insurgency, with Nuremberg as one of the last bastions on the way out of southern Germany.

The capture of Nuremberg also paved the way for the U.S. military’s post-war trials. Seven months after the city fell to the U.S. Army, the Allies began trying high-ranking Nazi officials and officers for their roles in war crimes. The Allies chose to hold the tribunals in Nuremberg, again citing its symbolic importance to the now-defeated Nazi Germany. They weren’t the first war trials — that actually took place in May 1945, prior to the establishment of the International Military Tribunal — but were the largest and highest level of such prosecutions.

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Only Five People Have Seen This Very Rare Color

There are only so many colors that the typical human eye can see; estimates put the number just below 10 million. But now, for the first time, scientists say they’ve broken out of that familiar spectrum and into a new world of color.

In a paper published in Science Advances, researchers detail how they used a precise laser setup to stimulate the retinas of five participants, making them the first humans to see a color beyond our visual range: an impossibly saturated bluish green.

Human retinas contain three types of cone cells, photoreceptors that detect the wavelengths of light. S cones pick up relatively short wavelengths, which we see as blue. M cones react to medium wavelengths, which we see as green. And L cones are triggered by long wavelengths, which we see as red. These red, green and blue signals travel to the brain, where they’re combined into the full-color vision we experience.

But these three cone types handle overlapping ranges of light: the light that activates M cones will also activate either S cones or L cones. "There’s no light in the world that can activate only the M cone cells because, if they are being activated, for sure one or both other types get activated as well," says Ren Ng, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ng and his research team wanted to try getting around that fundamental limitation, so they developed a technicolor technique they call "Oz."

"The name comes from the Wizard of Oz, where there’s a journey to the Emerald City, where things look the most dazzling green you’ve ever seen," Ng explains. On their own expedition, the researchers used lasers to precisely deliver tiny doses of light to select cone cells in the human eye. First, they mapped a portion of the retina to identify each cone cell as either an S, M or L cone. Then, using the laser, they delivered light only to M cone cells.

It wasn’t exactly a comfortable setup. "This is not a consumer-oriented device, right? This was a basic visual science and neuroscience project," Ng says. In fact, the researchers experimented on themselves: three of the five participants were co-authors of the study. The two others were colleagues from the University of Washington, who were unaware of the purpose of the research.

Ng himself was one of the participants. He entered a darkened lab and sat at a table. "There were lasers, mirrors, deformable mirrors, modulators, light detectors," Ng says. There, he had to bite down hard on a bar to keep his head and eyes still. As the laser shone into his retina, he perceived a tiny square of light, roughly the size of a thumbnail viewed at arm’s distance. In that square, he glimpsed the Emerald City: a color the researchers have named "olo."

What, exactly, did olo look like? Ng describes it as "blue-green with unprecedented saturation" — a perception the human brain conjured up in response to a signal it had never before received from the eye. The closest thing to olo that can be displayed on a computer screen is teal, or the color represented by the hexadecimal code #00ffcc, Ng says.

If you want to try envisioning olo, take that teal as the starting point: Imagine that you are adjusting the latter on a computer. You keep the hue itself steady but gradually increase the saturation. At some point, you reach a limit of what your screen can show you.

You keep increasing the saturation past what you can find in the natural world until you reach the limit of saturation perceptible by humans—resulting in what you’d see from a laser pointer that emitted almost entirely teal light. Olo lies even further than that.

Ng’s team dreams of one day building screens that can scan your retina to display perfect images and videos by delivering light to individual cones—enabling crisp, nonpixelated visuals in impossible colors. "That’s going to be extremely hard to do, but I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility," Ng says.

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Lucy Spacecraft Beamed Back Photos Of "Bowling Pin-Shaped" Asteroids

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has beamed back pictures from its latest asteroid flyby, revealing a long, lumpy, odd-shaped space rock.

The space agency released the images last 21 April, a day after the close approach. It was considered a dress rehearsal for the more critical asteroid encounters ahead closer to Jupiter.

This asteroid is bigger than scientists anticipated, about 5 miles (8 kilometers) long and 2 miles (3.5 kilometers) wide at its widest point — resembling an irregular bowling pin. It's so long that the spacecraft couldn't capture it in its entirety in the initial downloaded images.

Data returned over the next week should help clarify the asteroid's shape, according to NASA.

Lucy passed within 600 miles (960 kilometers) of the harmless asteroid known as Donaldjohanson in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It's named for the paleontologist who discovered the fossil Lucy 50 years ago in Ethiopia.

The spacecraft was launched in 2021 to study the unexplored so-called Trojan asteroids out near Jupiter. Eight Trojan flybys are planned through 2033.

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