Megastructures

TSG site of Kačarevo 2 showing: A) Low-lying land, B) raised sand-plateau, C) enclosure ditch, D) activity areas. Photograph and key by Barry Molloy and Darja Grosman. Credit: PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288750 Archaeologists from University College Dublin, working with colleagues from Serbia and Slovenia, have uncovered a previously unknown network of massive sites in the heart of Europe that could explain the…

There’s a couple of new hints about the Venture Bros. movie, as well as the next Resident Evil film. Peter Dinklage discusses Scourge’s miserable life under Unicron in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Plus, get a look at the next DC animated movie, Justice League: Warworld. Spoilers now!Spoilers of the Week: July 1stResident Evil: The Umbrella ChroniclesAccording to Bloody-Disgusting, Production Weekly and The Resident Evil Wiki, the upcoming Resident Evil movie, The Umbrella Chronicles, will be based on Resident Evil 0…

It’s hard to imagine constructing a building without a detailed plan, but when exactly did humans first start doing that? Archeologists have discovered the oldest known blueprints, with a 9,000-year-old rock carving in Jordan depicting a to-scale plan for a nearby megastructure.Early air travel in the 1920s revealed a series of large stone structures in the deserts of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, which weren’t clearly visible from the ground. These “desert kites” are made up of long stone walls that…

Landscape of Saudi Arabia where the engravings have been found. Credit: Olivier Barge, CNRS. CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) The oldest scale plans of human made megastructures are reported in the open access journal PLOS ONE on May 17, 2023. The engravings, dated to between 7,000 and 8,000 years old, depict nearby desert kites, vast structures used to trap animals. The ability to transpose large space…

Archaeologists have unearthed ancient stone engravings of vast animal traps in Jordan and Saudi Arabia that are possibly the earliest “blueprints” ever discovered. The engravings, estimated to be about 7,000 to 8,000 years old, are precise plans for nearby structures archaeologists call “desert kites”—converging lines of piled stones that were probably used to drive wild herds of gazelles and antelopes into pits at their corners. Regardless of the structures’ purpose, the newly found plans show an understanding of the…

In July, a puzzling new image of a distant extreme star system surrounded by surreal concentric geometric rungs had even astronomers scratching their heads. The picture, which looks like a kind of “cosmic thumbprint”, came from the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's newest flagship observatory.The internet immediately lit up with theories and speculation. Some on the wild fringe even claimed it as evidence for “alien megastructures” of unknown origin.Luckily, our team at the University of Sydney had already been studying…