El Perú-Waka' Archaeological Project

The tomb of K'abel, Supreme Warrior and Snake Lord. Her skull peeps up just above the plate fragments.

At the end of the seventh century, the Mayan queen K'abel was the most powerful ruler in northwestern Petén, Guatemala. Not only did she reign with her husband K'inich Bahlam for nearly twenty years, she also bore the titles Supreme Warrior and, most awesomely, Holy Snake Lord -- which meant her authority vastly exceeded that of the king.

Now a team of archaeologists, led by Washington University professor David Freidel, believe they have found her tomb.

Freidel and his group, which includes co-director Juan Carlos Pérez, a former official in the Guatemalan government, and a former student Olivia Navarro Farr, now a professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio, have been investigating the ancient Maya city of El Perú-Waka' since 2003. El Perú-Waka' is about 45 miles west of Tikal and is about two-thirds of a mile square. The archaeologists have been concentrating on what Freidel calls "ritually charged" areas.

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A tube room in the basement of a post office. It's unclear where this particular tube room was, but if it wasn't in St. Louis, the one here probably looked very similar.

One hundred years ago, subterranean St. Louis was a fascinating place. There was, of course, the web of caves that stretched from Benton Park north to downtown and east to the Mississippi River with detours into neighborhood basements. Before the Civil War, the cave network may have been one of the the last stops on the Underground Railroad before Illinois and freedom, but by the turn of the twentieth century, it was mostly used by local breweries to store beer and was -- and remains -- a subject of fascination for urban explorers.

Less well known, maybe because it was too small for people to crawl through, was the system of pneumatic tubes that spirited mail from Union Station to the Old Post Office on Ninth Street and back again.

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Mary Lea Shane Archives of Lick Observatory/University of California, Santa Cruz

David Peck Todd, auteur of today's film.

Yesterday's Transit of Venus -- which happened when the planet Venus interposed itself between the Earth and the Sun yesterday afternoon -- was touted as the last one we would see in our lifetimes. That's because the next Transit won't happen until December 2117, and we'll all be dead.
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An artist's rendering of ancient Cahokia. Say, is that an Arch?

Even 900 years ago, big cities had suburbs. The biggest city in North America then was Cahokia, and its suburbs stretched westward across the Mississippi River and north across most of what is now East St. Louis. We know that the Cahokians had a nasty habit of using their suburban neighbors as human sacrifices -- way harsher than even the nastiest East Side joke -- but we don't know much about the lives of those suburbanites before the evil city folk clubbed them to death.

A group of archaeologists from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) has been trying to find out. Last summer, they unexpectedly discovered a previously-unknown mound in East St. Louis, at the edge of I-70, five miles from the main Cahokia site. At the base of the new mound were the remains of more than a thousand ancient houses. For the past year, the archaeologists have been patiently scraping away, trying to learn more about the people who lived in those houses.

Unfortunately, this dig site happens to be exactly where the new Mississippi River Bridge will land when it reaches the Illinois side.

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This is sort of what your brain networks look like, but instead of signals traveling on different ramps, they travel on different frequencies.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

In a less metaphysical sense, the sign of a well-working brain is the ability of multiple networks to work at the same time, even if they have opposing goals -- say, the network that controls the various muscle systems that get you to run and the network that controls the part that thinks over and over, "I hate this."

How can one part of the brain participate in multiple networks simultaneously? A team of researchers, comprised of scientists from Washington University Medical School and the University Medical Center at Hamburg-Eppendorf and the University of Tübingen, both in Germany, have had a brain wave.

Or, rather, it has to do with brain waves.

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Earl Richardson

They're back!

Happy news from Prairie Chicken Land, aka Wah'Kon-Tah Prairie in far western Missouri, just outside El Dorado Springs: The prairie chickens that workers from the Missouri Department of Conservation captured in Kansas last year and transported east are alive and booming and, best of all, reproducing.

We realize that the phrase "transported east," not to mention the bland reassurances of prairie chicken happiness, makes this sound like Stalinist propaganda, but there is proof that this is not a cover-up by the MDC. Nobody's sure how many prairie chickens are at Wah'Kon-Tah right now, but it is an indisputable fact that there are now than there were five years ago when the relocation project started.

Back then, the number of prairie chickens at Wah'Kon-Tah was precisely zero.

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In St. Louis, Russian TV comes to you.

Arch Grants awarded its first $50,000 grants to a dozen startup companies today, providing what is hoped to be an initial foothold in the St. Louis region for young, forward-thinking entrepreneurs. Each of the recipients is expected to build their business right here in St. Louis in return for the grant, with the potential down the road for their company to win another grant -- this time for $100,000 -- from Arch Grants next year.

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NASA

That's no moon -- no, wait, it is. It is the moon.

Saturday night the full moon will appear unnaturally large in the sky. It's that time of the year when the moon is at its closest to the earth, and so will appear to be more of a special effect than our familiar neighbor.

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It's been noted that in Michelangelo's rendering of God in the Sistine Chapel, the deity looks like He's resting inside a giant brain.

There has been much debate over the existence of the G-spot. No, not that G-spot. The other one, in the brain, where G stands for God.

"The spiritual experience is very complex," says Brick Johnstone, a neuropsychologist at the University of Missouri. Johnstone and four of his colleagues just completed a study that shows that the right parietal lobe is connected to feelings of selflessness, which are associated with self-forgetfulness and spiritual transcendence. But that's not the only part of the brain associated with spirituality.

"There's not one spot in the brain that makes you believe in God," Johnstone asserts. Ultimately, he hopes to draw a spiritual map of the brain similar to the ones scientists have now to illustrate all the parts that contribute to the process they call "cognition" and the rest of us call "thinking."

And if spirituality is the result of brain function, then spiritual experiences aren't just limited to believers.

That's good news for us heathens.

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courtesy Donald Danforth Plant Science Center

The Danforth Center's new robot, already at work, sort of.

Scientists at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center are all aflurry this week over the new toy that just got delivered. Sorry, it's a tool that will advance our understanding of the plant world and affect agriculture and biofuel production and etc., etc., etc., that just happens to come in the form of a robot.

But we must point out that test tubes are also tools and nobody gathers around to marvel over them when a new shipment gets delivered or starts a contest, open to the public, to give those adorable little vessels names. As far as we know.

The new robot is state-of-the-art in terms of technology, but slightly retro in terms of form: It bears more of a resemblance to the maternal, utilitarian Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons than the sleek and streamlined EVE from WALL*E. Which is entirely appropriate, since this sucker was made to work its plastic ass off.

The lucky recipient is Todd Mockler, leader of a lab in the Danforth Center that studies plant genetics. Mockler is a nice guy, though; he's planning to share his new toy.

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