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In Peru Archaeologists have found 40 mummies which are 1,200-year-old. Chachapoyas culture in the Amazon fortress of Kuelap, project leader Alfredo Narvaez told local media on Wednesday.

He said that the mummies were found together with Inca pottery, and that they indicated signs of being affected by a fire in the archaeological complex, some 1,409 km northeast to the nation’s capital.

Narvaez said the bodies were buried under a platform of 24 meters in diameter in the El

Tintero structure during a dig of the Kuelap Archaeological Complex Restoration and Conservation project.

El Tintero enclosed six circular buildings, which seemed to be homes to the inhabitants of that time. The mummies, of men and women of all ages, were found inside and outside the buildings. Narvaez said that it seemed that there was no time to bury them.

According to the reports the mummies may have been victims of a pandemic or a brutal assault which ended in a mass execution and the burning of the stone fort.

The Chachapoyas, who were one of the superior cultures of ancient Peru, had settlements from the Mara and Urubamba River to Abiseo Basin with a capital in the Utcubamba Basin, in the current Amazonas region.

The Chachapoyas stone fort, which is about 3,000 meters above sea level, was built in the year 800 A.D. It occupies six hectares and has three defense platforms.

The scientific name of the white winged wood duck is Cairina scutulata. It is mostly found in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The male and female have a white head and neck which is spotted with black. The bill is orange, dappled with black. The wings are tipped with white. The male is more colored than the female and the female is smaller than the male. Single birds or pairs are most commonly seen, but sometimes groups form around waterholes in the dry season.

They live in pools and marshes in dense, swampy forest where they depend on trees for roosting and nesting. The White-winged Duck is very secretive and feeds mostly at night on seeds, grain, rice, snails frogs and fish hence they are omnivores by nature.

Their mating display is very simple. The male swims with his neck arched and stretched forward making pumping motions. This is rarely answered by the female.

Females lay up to 15 greenish-yellow eggs in a hole in a tree, a forked branch, or hollow trunk. The eggs are incubated for around 30 days. The chicks are dark brown with lighter under parts. They fledge after about 14 weeks.

This species depends on swampland and forest, two of the most threatened habitats on the planet. In the past there may have been as many as 500,000 of these birds. Now only a few thousand remain and numbers are still declining. The conservation status of these birds is endangered.

The mummy of an ancient Inca girl called La Doncella or The Maiden sits literally frozen in sleep at a museum in Argentina.It is  mummy of a teenage girl who died more than 500 years ago in a ritual sacrifice in the Andes Mountains.

According to the archaeologists, the girl and two other children were left on a mountaintop to succumb to the cold as offerings to the gods. The remains of the mummies were found in Argentina in 1999.

According to the National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Johan Reinhard, who co-led the expedition, said that this was the best preserved of any mummy. La Doncella, the oldest of the three victims was unveiled by the High Country Archaeological Museum in Salta, Argentina on September 6 for public viewing on.
 
The mummy is displayed in a refrigerated, low-oxygen environment to reproduce the high-altitude conditions which was responsible for the remarkable, natural preservation.

The officials of the museum added that the mummies of the other two children are in storage for further study.

The rise in temperature that the Earth experiences due to certain gases in the atmosphere is called the greenhouse effect. Water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane, trap energy from the sun thus increasing the temperature. If these gases are not present, heat would escape into space and Earth’s average temperature would be much lower, making it a cold place. As these gases are responsible for keeping the Earth warm, these gases are referred to as greenhouse gases.

Greenhouses mostly look like a small glass house. They are used to grow plants, especially in the winter. They work by trapping heat from the sun. The glass panels of the greenhouse let light in but keep heat from escaping. Because of this, the greenhouse heats up and keeps the temperature warm enough for plants to live in the winter.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere work much like the glass panes in a greenhouse. Sunlight enters the Earth’s atmosphere, going through the blanket of greenhouse gases, as it reaches the Earth’s surface, land, water, and biosphere. The gases absorb energy from the sunlight; this energy is sent back into the atmosphere. Some of the energy goes back into space, but much of it remains trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouse gases, due to which the Earth heats up.

The greenhouse effect is very important because without it, the Earth would not be warm enough for humans to live in. But if the greenhouse effect becomes stronger, it could make the Earth hotter than usual. Little more warming can cause problems for humans, plants, and animals.

Lemurs are small primates known as “prosimians,” which, roughly translated, means “pre-primates” or “before monkeys.” They are a native of the island of Madagascar and the neighboring Comoro Islands. Lemurs bear a resemblance to the oldest ancestors of primates which existed tens of millions of years ago.

To communicate with each other Lemurs use their sense of smell. These primates have scent glands on their bottoms and on their feet that leave smell on surfaces they cross. Lemurs have big, bushy tails that they wave in the air as another form of communication. These big tails also help them balance when they jump from tree to tree.

Most lemurs are arboreal, which means they spend most of their time in trees and bushes. Only the ring tail lemurs spend most of their time on the ground. Usually lemurs that are awake during the day live in groups. Nocturnal lemurs, that are active at night, tend to live alone.

The ring-tailed lemurs, brown lemurs, and sifakas sleep during the night whereas the smaller mouse lemurs and dwarf lemurs are nocturnal. The aye-aye, an enthralling lemur with an extended, claw-like middle finger which it uses to dig insects out of tree bark, is also nocturnal. This lemur is often feared by the Malagasy people of its native Madagascar because of its unusual appearance.

Lemurs mostly eat fruits, leaves, and other edible plant materials. Insects may also be on the menu, especially for the smaller lemurs.

When lemurs are born, they are carried in their mothers’ mouths until they are old enough to hang on to her fur by themselves. Most lemurs live for about eighteen years.

Out of the fifty different kinds of lemurs, ten of those of them seriously endangered,seven are endangered, and nineteen are considered susceptible.

Fortunately, all types of lemurs are protected, which makes it illegal hunt or capture lemurs for trade, except for scientific research, and to breed in zoos. These laws are well-enforced, and the lemur has been a long-time focus of conservation efforts. Although the lemurs are no longer being hunted like in the past, deforestation is still threatening their survival.

Asteroids are small bodies that are supposed to be left over from the beginning of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. They are stony objects with round or uneven shapes up to several hundred km across, but most are much smaller.

There are more than 100,000 asteroids lying in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. These asteroids lie in a site in the solar system where there seems to be a jump in the spacing between the planets. Scientists believe that these remains may be the remnants of an early planet, which could have broke up early in the solar system.

Several thousand of the biggest asteroids in this belt have been given names. The probabilities of an asteroid having a collision with Earth are very small! But some do come close to Earth, like Hermes. The closest approach was of 777,000 km.

The region in our solar system, called the Asteroid Belt or Main Belt, possibly contain millions of asteroids ranging extensively in size from Ceres, which are at 940 km in diameter is about one-quarter the diameter of our Moon, to bodies that are less than 1 km across.

As they rotate around the Sun in elliptical orbits, giant Jupiter’s gravity and occasional close meet with Mars or with another asteroid change the asteroids’ orbits, knocking them out of the Main Belt and throwing them into space across the orbits of the planets.