Take a chill pill

A study done by John Hopkins School of Medicine in 2002 showed that men who expressed higher levels of anger when responding to stressors were more than 6 times as likely to suffer a heart attack by 55.

Secret 'Slave' Tunnels Discovered Under Roman Emperor's Villa

archaeologists have uncovered a massive network of tunnels under the Roman Emperor Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, Italy.

The underground passageways likely allowed thousands of slaves and merchants to keep the estate running without creating any distraction at the street level.

Though similar tunnels have been discovered at the complex before, the new discovery is exciting because the passageways were not mentioned in any ancient plans of the grounds, Marina De Franceschini, an archaeologist heading the excavation who works with the University of Trento, wrote in an email.

Underground network

Researchers have long known that a massive underground network of roads lay underneath the ruins of Hadrian's villa in Tivoli, Italy.

The villa was a retreat for the emperor Hadrian, a patron of art and architecture who reigned from A.D. 117 to A.D. 138.

But while Hadrian discussed affairs of state and held grand dinner parties in his opulent house, underneath him, a network of nearly invisible people kept the estate running.

The underground passageways allowed thousands of merchants, slaves and carts laden with goods to enter the villa without causing any hustle and bustle.

"It is a very modern solution, something similar to what you see today in cruise ships where you have luxury quarters for the passengers and a parallel system of corridors for the personnel," De Franceschini said.

Slaves chiseled the passageways out of the soft tufa rock, and the same rock was then was used to construct the villa. But over the centuries, soil had completely filled in the underground tunnels and their full extent was a mystery.

Using ancient architectural plans, researchers had uncovered passageways underneath southwestern part of the ruins, but they suspected there must be more.

New passageway

So a few years ago, Franceschini asked for help excavating the eastern portion from a group called Sotterranei di Roma, or Underground Rome. These speleologists and amateur archaeologists specialize in rappelling into underground tunnels and excavating them, said Inge Weustig, a classicist who works with the group.After carrying countless buckets of dirt from the narrow subterranean passageways — some of which are just a few feet wide — the team uncovered an entirely new passageway, leading from an area of the Villa called the Academy to a 2.5 miles (4 km) underground roadway called the Grande Trapezio.

The specific purpose of the system of passageways remains a mystery, but it lies on the outskirts of Hadrian's Villa, Weustig said.

"It is seen as the more private part of the whole complex," Weustig told LiveScience. "They've interpreted it as a kind of secret or more remote place in the villa where he could just go to be alone, or at least with a few people."

Here Be Dragons- The Evolution of Sea Monsters on Medieval Maps

WASHINGTON — The iconic sea serpents, mermaids and other mythical creatures found on world maps from medieval and Renaissance times splash to life on the pages of a new book.

Chet Van Duzer's "Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps" (British Library, 2013) charts the evolution of the mythical creatures that adorned atlases from the 10th century through the 17th century. Cartographers used the beastly art to illustrate mysterious, unexplored regions of the globe and the possible dangers of seafaring.

Despite their wild appearance, many of these creatures were based on real animals."The creatures look purely fantastic. They all look like they were just made up," Van Duzer, a map historian at the Library of Congress, said here Thursday (Sept. 5) in a talk about his book. "But, in fact, a lot of them come from what were considered, at the time, scientific sources."

 Bizarre beasts

Sea monsters on maps run the gamut from menacing sea serpents to improbable lion-fish hybrids. Many cartographers simply copied these sea monsters from illustrated encyclopedias, Van Duzer told LiveScience. At other times, particularly a period in the 16th century, mapmakers took some poetic license with the animals (like terrestrial-aquatic hybrid animals).

But depictions of these creatures have been studied very little, Van Duzer said. Though people in modern times typically think of monsters as mythical beasts, whales and walruses were considered monsters in medieval and Renaissance times.

In his book, Van Duzer, who was a 2012 Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress and has since joined its staff, charts the origin of sea monsters from "mappa mundi," medieval European aps of the world; nautical maps; and Ptolemy's Geography, a treatise by the Greco-Roman mathematician and scientist Claudius Ptolemy, which contained an atlas of the known world during the second century.

Mappa mundi aren't the most geographically accurate maps, but they contain a treasure trove of bizarre animals. One illustration depicts a man in the belly of a monster, most likely a reference to the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Another shows a creature with the head of a chicken and the body of a fish. "Every land creature had an equivalent in the sea," Van Duzer said.

A Latin version of Ptolemy's Geography known as the Madrid manuscript is the only version that contains sea monsters. Close inspection of the map reveals the sea monsters were drawn by an expert — likely an add-on to increase the map's sale value, Van Duzer said.

Dangers of the deep

These monstrous creatures suggest a world full of dangers lurking in distant oceans. Gigantic octopuses drag ships and sailors into the sea, and seductive sirens flaunt their beauty.

Whales feature prominently in medieval and Renaissance maps. Many sketches allude to an ancient story about sailors mistaking a whale for an island. In the story, sailors anchor their ship to the whale's back and light a fire to cook food. When the whale feels the fire's heat, it plunges into the deep, carrying the ship and sailors along with it.

Portrayals of whales and other map creatures became more realistic during the early 17th century. Maps from this era show ships exerting dominion over the beasts of the ocean. Eventually, the beasts disappeared from maps altogether.

Modern maps, which lack these fantastic beasts, have absolutely lost something, Van Duzer said.

New Clues To King Solomon's Mines Found

New evidence that links the vast copper mines in southern tip of Israel to the reign of King Solomon has been discovered, archaeologists report.

During the Iron Age, humans took advantage of the copper deposits lurking in Israel's Timna Valley, as evidenced by the thousands of ancient mines and dozens of smelting sites in the district. But archaeologists have debated who controlled the mines, and when.

After American archaeologist Nelson Glueck explored the region in the 1930s, he announced he had found the real-life "King Solomon's Mines" in the biblical kingdom of Edom. ("King Solomon's Mines" was a popular Victorian adventure novel, published by the English author H. Rider Haggard.)ater research — and the 1969 discovery of an Egyptian temple in the center of the valley — cast doubt on Glueck's claims. Some archaeologists have since favored an interpretation suggesting the ancient Egyptians first built the mines in the 13th century B.C.But recent excavations at Timna Valley turned up artifacts that have been radiocarbon dated to the 10th century B.C., when the Bible says King Solomon ruled.

The mines, however, were likely operated by the Edomites, a semi-nomadic tribe that battled constantly with Israel, the researchers say.

"The mines are definitely from the period ofKing Solomon," archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University, said in a statement this week. "They may help us understand the local society, which would have been invisible to us otherwise."

This past winter, Ben-Yosef and a team of researchers investigated an area known as Slaves' Hill, a previously untouched smelting camp that holds traces of hundreds of furnaces and layers of copper slag, the grit that's left over after the metal is extracted from its ore.

The site lacks significant architectural ruins, but the researchers found more ephemeral traces of ancient life: bits of clothing, woven ropes, dates, grapes, pistachios and ceramics.

Eleven samples of material from Slaves' Hill were submitted for testing at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford in England. The results showed that the ancient items dated toSolomon's reign, the researchers said.

"In Timna Valley, we unearthed a society with undoubtedly significant development, organization, and power," Ben-Yosef said in a statement. "And yet because the people were living in tents, they would have been transparent to us as archaeologists if they had been engaged in an industry other than mining and smelting, which is very visible archaeologically."

Despite debate about how much archaeologists can trust the Bible as a historical source, Ben-Yosef added that it's very possible David and Solomon existed and at times, may have even exerted some control over the Timna Valley mines.

Ben-Yosef told LiveScience in an email that the team plans to submit their findings to a peer-reviewed academic journal. The new radiocarbon dates are in line with the chronology Ben-Yosef and other researchers put forth last year in the journal American Schools of Oriental Research. That 2012 study was based on findings from a nearby mining site.

Biblical-Era Town Discovered Along Sea of Galilee

A town dating back more than 2,000 years has been discovered on the northwest coast of the Sea of Galilee, in Israel's Ginosar valley.

The ancient town may be Dalmanutha (also spelled Dalmanoutha), described in the Gospel of Mark as the place Jesus sailed to after miraculously feeding 4,000 people by multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread, said Ken Dark, of the University of Reading in the U.K., whose team discovered the town during a field survey.

The archaeologists also determined that a famous boat, dating to around 2,000 years ago, and uncovered in 1986, was found on the shoreline of the newly discovered town. The boat was reported on two decades ago but the discovery of the town provides new information on what lay close to it.The evidence the team found suggests the town was prosperous in ancient times. "Vessel glass and amphora hint at wealth," Dark wrote in an article published in the most recent edition of the journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly, while "weights and stone anchors, along with the access to beaches suitable for landing boats — and, of course, the first-century boat … all imply an involvement with fishing." 

The architectural remains and pottery suggest that Jews and those following a polytheistic religion lived side by side in the community. In addition, the researchers found that the southern side of the newly discovered town lies only about 500 feet (150 meters) away from another ancient town known as Magdala.

Architecture and pottery

Fields between the modern-day town of Migdal and the sea coast contained hundreds of pottery pieces dating from as early as the second or first century B.C. to up to some point after the fifth century A.D., the time of the Byzantine Empire, the archaeologists found. The artifacts suggest the town survived for many centuries. 

Also among their finds were cubes known as tesserae and limestone vessel fragments, which were "associated with Jewish purity practices in the early Roman period," indicating the presence of a Jewish community in the town, Dark told LiveScience in an email.

Some of the most impressive finds, however, were not made in the fields but rather in modern-day Migdal itself. The archaeologists found dozens of examples of ancient architectural remains, some of which the modern-day townspeople had turned into seats or garden ornaments, or simply left lying on the ground. In one instance, the researchers found more than 40 basalt ashlar blocks in a single garden.

After talking to the local people, and trying to identify the source and date of the findings, the researchers determined that many of the architectural remains came from the local area and likely were part of this newly discovered town.These remains included a number of ancient column fragments, including examples of capitals (the top of columns) carved in a Corinthian style. "This settlement may have contained masonry buildings, some with mosaic floors and architectural stonework," Dark wrote in his paper.

The finds also included a pagan altar, made of light-gray limestone and used in religious rituals by those of a polytheistic faith, Dark said.

Is it Dalmanutha?

In the New Testament, Dalmanutha is mentioned only briefly in the Gospel of Mark.

The gospel says that after feeding 4,000 people by miraculously multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread, Jesus "got into the boat with his disciples and went to the region of Dalmanutha. The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, 'Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it.'Then he left them, got back into the boat and crossed to the other side." (Mark 8:10-13, New International Version)

Dark isn't certain the newly discovered town is Dalmanutha, but there is evidence to support the idea. From the remains found, researchers can tell the newly discovered town would have been a sizable, thriving location in the first century A.D., and the name Dalmanutha has not been firmly linked to a known archaeological site.

It's likely that the newly found town's name is among the few place-names already identified by other researchers relating to the Ginosar valley shore, and one of those places is Dalmanutha, Dark said.

Running the A/C? New Building Codes Could Slash Energy Costs (Op-Ed)

Suppose you're in the market for a new home. There's brand new construction in a neighborhood you like — but there's also an older home that looks like a good buy. Of course, many factors enter into your decision, but if you're a smart buyer, you'll consider not only the purchase price but the cost of maintaining the home, including utility bills.

The problem is, unless you start ripping out the walls and examining the insulation, you have no way of knowing how energy-efficient a house is. You might be cranking up the heat all winter and sweltering in the summer with the air conditioning on full blast — and paying higher energy bills every month.A revised building-energy code, proposed by NRDC, the Institute for Market Transformation, and the Britt/Makela Group — with unprecedented support from 20 of the biggest homebuilders in the country — would significantly improve the energy efficiency of new homes, and make it easier for consumers to factor energy efficiency into a home-buying decision.

The code, if adopted, would make newly built homes 20-percent more energy efficient by 2015 — saving each household anywhere from $300 to $850 each year in utility costs — and give homes a numerical score on an energy-efficiency index.

A new building code that trims home energy waste is an obvious plus for consumers. Energy-efficient homes are more comfortable and save homeowners money on energy bills. (Energy efficient homes are even, according to new research, 30 percent less likely to go into default.) But what's remarkable here is that much of the building industry is throwing its weight behind efficiency improvements, too.Leading Builders of America, an organization representing homebuilders responsible for 40 percent of the new, single-family-home market, and about 90 small builders and other industry groups, are fully behind the proposed code upgrade. Not just because it's nice to be eco-sensitive, but because it's good for business.

According to my colleague David Goldstein, a MacArthur Fellowship winner and one of the masterminds — along with another esteemed colleague, Meg Waltner — behind the new code, this is the first time in nearly 40 years that efficiency advocates and the building industry have jointly supported a major upgrade in energy-efficiency requirements. For builders, the code proposal makes sense for the bottom line, because it gives them flexibility in how they meet the standards, and allows them to find more cost-effective ways to do so.

In the past, a builder had to check off a list of specific requirements in order to meet the code — a certain amount of insulation in specific areas, a maximum solar heat transmission through windows, a maximum duct leakage, and so on. For a home that is long and skinny, for example, it might be more difficult for a builder to meet the duct leakage requirements at a reasonable cost.

The new code would allow a builder to install triple-pane windows or a more efficient water heater instead. Or a builder could use a lot of insulation he picked up inexpensively at a distress sale, and forego a more costly efficiency measure somewhere else in the building, as long as the home's overall efficiency requirement was met.

Under the existing code requirements, even if the builder checked off all the right boxes, a home buyer would still have no clue as to how efficient their new home might be. Did it come in well above code? Did it barely make the grade? Or was it rubber-stamped without actually meeting code in the first place?

The revised code, if adopted, would give homes a numerical rating on an efficiency index — like a miles-per-gallon rating on a car — making it easy for a home buyer to comparison shop, and also to figure out, later on, if their home is performing as promised.

Many homebuilders are already voluntarily using an energy index, called the Home Energy Rating System (HERS), to rate their homes, because it's a useful selling point. A new home that saves hundreds of dollars a year in energy costs has a distinct edge over an older home — or even an almost-new foreclosure — that is less efficient. And if builders are already getting a HERS rating, using it to meet building codes reduces their costs of doing business.

On a large scale, this market shift toward more energy-efficient homes will save consumers more than $100 billion by 2030. It will also take a big chunk out of U.S. carbon emissions. Homes are responsible for 18 percent of U.S. global-warming emissions, and over the long term, as more housing stock meets new energy codes, that could be cut in half. The new code would reduce carbon emissions by a total of 560 million metric tons by 2030 — the equivalent of the carbon pollution produced by 158 coal-fired power plants in a year.

The International Code Council, a nonprofit organization that develops model building codes for state and local building authorities, will consider the revised energy code when it meets in Atlantic City in October. If it passes the council, the new energy-saving code will become the new model on which many cities, counties and states base their building codes. Once it's adopted by local and state authorities, the new building energy code will save money for homebuyers and homebuilders, reduce waste, and cut carbon pollution. If that's not enough reason to get excited by a building code, I don't know what is.

Lehner's most recent Op-Ed was Building a Drought-Proof Farm. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

Rare 6-Million Year Old Skull of Juvenile Ape Discovered

An extremely rare juvenile skull of an extinct ape has now been revealed from China, findings that suggest a very diverse group of apes once lived in Southeast Asia, researchers say.

Apes, which include gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, are the closest living relatives of humanity. They once inhabited most of the Old World, including large portions of Europe and Asia, and a much larger swath of Africa than they do at present.

A critical time in the evolution of humans and their ape relatives was the late Miocene Epoch about 5 million to 11 million years ago. Near the end of the Miocene, apes had become extinct in most of Eurasia.Climate and environments were changing rapidly throughout the world at the end of the Miocene, and these changes are reflected in the changing faunas, particularly in the Old World, where animals adapted to living in more equable forest habitats gave way in most places to those capable of living in more open habitats and drier, more seasonal conditions," said researcher Jay Kelley, a paleoanthropologist at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Cool cranium discovery

To explore ape evolution during the late Miocene, scientists investigated a site in the Yunnan province in southern China called Shuitangba, which is a mine for lignite, a form of low-grade coal. Southern China was less affected by the deteriorating climate during the late Miocene that drove extinct many ape species throughout the rest of Eurasia.Miners have recovered fossils at Shuitangba since at least the 1950s. The investigators began excavating at the site in 2007. "The workers keep a lignite fire going all the time to roast potatoes, which is smoky and smells awful, and your hair and clothes become permeated with the lignite smell," Kelley said.

The researchers now reveal the 6-million-year-old cranium of the extinct ape Lufengpithecus, a skull about 3 inches (8 centimeters) wide. 

"It's from a young juvenile — it would have been perhaps about 5 years old if its growth was like that of chimpanzees," Kelley told LiveScience. "I suspect adults of this species would have been in the body size range of large chimpanzees, the larger males perhaps somewhat larger. We know from the developing canine teeth that our juvenile was a male."

Back when these apes were alive, the area was fairly swampy — "warm or hot and wet for much of the year, even if there was some seasonality," Kelley said. "We have also found a diverse array of birds associated with wetter environments, and mammals associated with wet environments such as beavers and otters. We have also uncovered the trunks of very large trees, so it was heavily forested."

Learning about ape evolution

Skulls of fossil apes and other close relatives of humanity are extremely rare, especially those of infants and young juveniles. This find is only the second relatively complete cranium of a young juvenile from the Old World during the entire Miocene, an epoch stretching from 5 million to 23 million years ago.

"The preservation of the new cranium is excellent," Kelley said in a statement. "This is important because all previously discovered adult crania of the species to which it is assigned, Lufengpithecus lufengensis, were badly crushed and distorted during the fossilization process."

In living species of apes, skulls at the same stage of development as the new fossil already closely resemble those of adults. "Therefore, the new cranium, despite being from a juvenile, gives researchers the best look at the cranial anatomy of Lufengpithecus lufengensis," Kelley said.

Due to where and when Lufengpithecus lived, scientists had thought it was related to the modern orangutan, which is now limited to Southeast Asia, but once also dwelled in southern China. However, the new skull bears little resemblance to living orangutans.

"More similarity to orangutans would have been expected," Kelley said.

As such, the researchers now suggest Lufengpithecus represents a late-surviving lineage of Eurasian apes without clear links to living groups of apes.

"It increasingly appears that there was a very diverse radiation of apes surviving in southeastern Asia long after apes had become extinct in most of the rest of Eurasia," Kelley said.

The researchers hope further excavations will unearth remains of adult specimens to better uncover the relationships between this lineage and other fossil and living apes.

"There is a natural tendency among paleoanthropologists to want one's discovery to be relevant to human evolution, but I don't think that's the case here," Kelley said. "The evolution of apes is equally fascinating and to that our new cranium can make a valuable contribution."

The scientists will detail their findings in print in November in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin.