* Astronomy

A professional archaeologist could be called in to probe the secrets of the Fylde's "Atlantis" before it is lost forever as it makes way for a new cemetery.
An Iron Age settlement at Bourne Hill on Fleetwood Road, close to the border between Fleetwood and Thornton, which was unearthed by local enthusiasts, may be under threat because Wyre Council wants to build the new graveyard.
Fleetwood Cemetery is expected to be full by 2012 and the council is seeking an alternative site.
Now the race is on to discover as much as possible about a location the local team believe could be the site of the long-lost Roman port of Portus Setantiorum.
Depending on what discoveries are made, the site could be declared an ancient monument.

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Within every tree lies a coded history to its past, and when stitched together with the information found in other trees, this record can span the past 10,000 years. Each year, a tree adds on a new growth ring to its trunk, preserving and reflecting the information about its surrounding climate and environmental conditions based in part on the width of that ring. Prof. Sturt Manning, classics, and Cornells Lab of Dendrochronology have been able to use tree-ring chronologies in combination with radiocarbon dating in order to place important events, such as the massive volcanic eruption at Santorini in the late 17th century B.C.

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Cornell archaeologists are rewriting history with the help of tree rings from 900-year-old trees, wood found on ancient buildings and through analysis of the isotopes (especially radiocarbon dating) and chemistry they can find in that wood.
By collecting thousands of years worth of overlapping tree rings, with each ring representing a tree's annual growth, the researchers have created long-term records in the eastern Mediterranean that allow them to precisely date such seminal milestones in history as when Hammurabi, "the law-giver," reigned, when the massive Santorini volcanic eruption occurred, and the timelines of the Bronze and Iron ages, as well as many more recent events.
Sturt Manning, director of the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology at Cornell, summarized his work for Cornell council members and trustees, Oct. 19 in Statler Hall. Dendrochronology is the science of comparing growth patterns in tree trunks to date past events or climate changes. Cornell's dendrochronology laboratory now holds more than 40,000 tree-ring samples, including many from the eastern Mediterranean.
Using ancient beams from palaces of known contemporaries of Hammurabi, Cornell researchers combined radiocarbon dating techniques with dendrochronological evidence to date Hammurabi to around 1792 B.C., Manning said.
Similar techniques used on wood buried beneath volcanic ash allowed Manning and others to date the Santorini volcanic eruption, one of the largest in the last 10,000 years, as most likely occurring in the late 17th century B.C., 100 years earlier than previously believed. The discovery may rewrite the late Bronze Age history of Mediterranean civilizations.

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Czech Archaeologists have uncovered a part of a half-meter high statue of a woman nearly 7,000 years old in the country, which was called "a find of the century".
Experts from Brno's Masaryk University confirmed the unique character of the statue uncovered in Masovice, South Moravia area of the Czech republic.
The hollow legs and haunch of the female statue, made of ceramic, originate in 4,800 - 4,700 B.C.
The statue was made by the people of the prehistoric culture known as "Moravian Painted Ceramic".

"The statue was decorated with yellow paint. It is of an immense archaeological value" - archaeologist Zdenek Cizmar.

Nothing similar has been uncovered so far, according to the experts.