Newcastle University scientists discovered by chance that urchins use the metal nickel to turn carbon dioxide into shell.

They say the technique can be harnessed to turn emissions from power plants into the harmless calcium carbonate.

The research is in the journal, Catalysis Science and Technology.

Many sea creatures convert carbon dioxide in the waters into calcium carbonate which is essentially chalk. Species such as clams, oysters and corals use it to make their shells and other bony parts.

Bubbling under

When the team at Newcastle looked at the larvae of sea urchins they found that there were high concentrations of nickel on their external skeletons.

Working with extremely small nickel particles, the researchers found that when they added them to a solution of carbon dioxide in water, the nickel completely removed the CO2.

“It is a simple system,” Dr Lidija Siller from Newcastle University told BBC News. “You bubble CO2 through the water in which you have nickel nanoparticles and you are trapping much more carbon than you would normally – and then you can easily turn it into calcium carbonate.”

“It seems too good to be true, but it works,” she added.

An X-ray of a sea urchin embryo shows lots of blue which indicates calcium carbonate

At present most carbon capture and storage (CCS) proposals are based around the idea of capturing CO2 from electricity generating stations or chemical plants and pumping the stripped out gas into underground storage in former oil wells or rock formations.

But there are still question marks about the possibility that the stored carbon may leak back out again.

The Newcastle researchers say that an alternative approach would be to lock up the CO2 in another substance such as calcium carbonate or magnesium carbonate.

This can already be done by using an enzyme called carbon anhydrase but it is very expensive.

PhD student Gaurav Bhaduri who is the lead author on the research paper explained that using nickel would be a far more economic option.

The dominant technology is still the oldest – absorption of carbon dioxide by liquid amines

“The beauty of a nickel catalyst is that it carries on working regardless of the pH and because of its magnetic properties it can be re-captured and re-used time and time again,” he said.

“It is also very cheap, a thousand times cheaper than carbon anhydrase. And the by-product – the carbonate – is useful and not damaging to the environment.”

Calcium carbonate is said to make up 4% of the earth’s crust.

courtesy of BBC

I love how Steve writes and I think this piece is great.

courtesy of Steve Pavlina

The Law of Attraction simply says that you attract into your life whatever you think about.  Your dominant thoughts will find a way to manifest.  But the Law of Attraction gives rise to some tough questions that don’t seem to have good answers.  I would say, however, that these problems aren’t caused by the Law of Attraction itself but rather by the Law of Attraction as applied to objective reality.

Here are some of those problematic questions (all are generalizations of ones I received via email):

• What happens when people put out conflicting intentions, like two people intending to get the same promotion when only one position is available?
• Do children, babies, and/or animals put out intentions?
• If a child is abused, does that mean the child intended it in some way?
• If I intend for my relationship to improve, but my spouse doesn’t seem to care, what will happen?

These questions seem to weaken the plausibility of the Law of Attraction.  Sometimes people answer them by going pretty far out.  For example, it’s been said by LoAers that a young child experiences abuse because s/he intended it or earned it during a past life.  Well, sure… we can explain just about anything if we bring past lives into the equation, but IMO that’s a cop-out.  On the other hand, objective reality without the Law of Attraction doesn’t provide satisfactory answers either — supposedly some kids are just born unlucky.  That’s a cop-out too.

I’ve never been satisfied by others’ answers to these questions, and they’re pretty important questions if the Law of Attraction is to be believed.  Some books hint at the solution but never really nail it.  That nail, however, can be found in the concept of subjective reality.

Subjective reality is a belief system in which (1) there is only one consciousness, (2) you are that singular consciousness, and (3) everything and everyone in your reality is a projection of your thoughts.

You may not see it yet, but subjective reality neatly answers all these tricky Law of Attraction questions.  Let me ‘splain….

In subjective reality there’s only one consciousness, and it’s yours.  Consequently, there’s only one source of intentions in your universe — YOU.  While you may observe lots of walking, talking bodies in your reality, they all exist inside your consciousness.  You know this is how your dreams work, but you haven’t yet realized your waking reality is just another type of dream.  It only seems solid because you believe (intend) it is.

Since none of the other characters you encounter are conscious in a way that’s separate from you, nobody else can have intentions.  The only intentions are yours.  You’re the only thinker in this universe.

It’s important to correctly define the YOU in subjective reality.  YOU are not your physical body.  This is not the egoic you at all.  I’m not suggesting you’re a conscious body walking around in a world full of unconscious automatons.  That would be a total misunderstanding of subjective reality.  The correct viewpoint is that you’re the single consciousness in which this entire reality takes place.

Imagine you’re having a dream.  In that dream what exactly are YOU?  Are YOU the physical dream character you identify with?  No, of course not — that’s just your dream avatar.  YOU are the dreamer.  The entire dream occurs within your consciousness.  All dream characters are projections of your dream thoughts, including your avatar.  In fact, if you learn lucid dreaming, you can even switch avatars in your dream by possessing another character.  In a lucid dream, you can do anything you believe you can.

Physical reality works the same way.  This is a denser universe than what you experience in your sleeping dreams, so changes occur a bit more gradually here.  But this reality still conforms to your thoughts just like a sleeping dream.  YOU are the dreamer in which all of this is taking place.

The idea that other people have intentions is an illusion because other people are just projections.  Of course, if you strongly believe other people have intentions, then that’s the dream you’ll create for yourself.  But ultimately it’s still an illusion.

Here’s how subjective reality answers these challenging Law of Attraction questions:

What happens when people put out conflicting intentions, like two people intending to get the same promotion when only one position is available?

Since you’re the only intender, this is entirely an internal conflict — within YOU.  You’re holding the thought (the intention) for both people to want the same position.  But you’re also thinking (intending) that only one can get it.  So you’re intending competition.  This whole situation is your creation.  You believe in competition, so that’s what you manifest.  Maybe you have some beliefs (thoughts and intentions) about who will get the promotion, in which case your expectations will manifest.  But you may have a higher order belief that life is random, unfair, uncertain, etc., so in that case you may manifest a surprise because that’s what you’re intending.

Being the only intender in your reality places a huge responsibility on your shoulders.  You can give up control of your reality by thinking (intending) randomness and uncertainty, but you can never give up responsibility.  You’re the sole creator in this universe.  If you think about war, poverty, disease, etc., that’s exactly what you’ll manifest.  If you think about peace, love, and joy, you’ll manifest that too.  Your reality is exactly what you think it is.  Whenever you think about anything, you summon its manifestation.

Do children, babies, and/or animals put out intentions?

No.  Your own body doesn’t even put out intentions — only your consciousness does.  You’re the only one who has intentions, so what takes precedence is what YOU intend for the children, babies, and animals in your reality.  Every thought is an intention, so however you think about the other beings in your reality is what you’ll eventually manifest for them.  Keep in mind that beliefs are hierarchical, so if you have a high order belief that reality is random and unpredictable and out of your control, then that intention will trump other intentions of which you’re less certain.  It’s your entire collection of thoughts that dictates how your reality manifests.

If a child is abused, does that mean the child intended it in some way?

No.  It means YOU intended it.  You intend child abuse to manifest simply by thinking about it.  The more you think about child abuse (or any other subject), the more you’ll see it expand in your reality.  Whatever you think about expands, and not just in the narrow space of your avatar but in all of physical reality.

If I intend for my relationship to improve, but my spouse doesn’t seem to care, what will happen?

This is another example of intending conflict.  You’re projecting one intention for your avatar and one for your spouse, so the actual unified intention is that of conflict.  Hence the result you experience, subject to the influence of your higher order beliefs, will be to experience conflict with your spouse.  If your thoughts are conflicted, your reality is conflicted.

This is why assuming responsibility for your thoughts is so important.  If you want to see peace in the world, then intend peace for EVERYTHING in your reality.  If you want to see abundance in the world, then intend it for EVERYONE.  If you want to enjoy loving relationships, then intend loving relationships for ALL.  If you intend these only for your own avatar but not for others, then you’re intending conflict, division, and separation; consequently, that’s what you’ll experience.

If you stop thinking about something entirely, does that mean it disappears?  Yes, technically it does.  But in practice it’s next to impossible to uncreate what you’ve already manifested.  You’ll continue creating the same problems just by noticing them.  But when you assume 100% responsibility for everything you’re experiencing in your reality right now — absolutely everything — then you assume the power to alter your reality by rechanneling your thoughts.

This entire reality is your creation.  Feel good about that.  Feel grateful for the richness of your world.  And then begin creating the reality you truly want by making decisions and holding intentions.  Think about what you desire, and withdraw your thoughts from what you don’t want.  The most natural, easiest way to do this is to pay attention to your emotions.  Thinking about your desires feels good, and thinking about what you don’t want makes you feel bad.  When you notice yourself feeling bad, you’ve caught yourself thinking about something you don’t want.  Turn your focus back towards what you do want, and your emotional state will improve rapidly.  As you do this repeatedly, you’ll begin to see your physical reality shift too, first in subtle ways and then in bigger leaps.

I too am just a manifestation of your consciousness.  I play the role you expect me to play.  If you expect me to be a helpful guide, I will be.  If you expect me to be profound and insightful, I will be.  If you expect me to be confused or deluded, I will be.  But of course there’s no distinct ME that is separate from YOU.  I’m just one of your many creations.  I am what you intend me to be.  But deep down you already knew that, didn’t you?

Dr. Peter Bentley of University College London

A few years ago, Peter Bentley got stuck on a problem: No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get software to heal itself. “We were trying to make them survive damage, show graceful degradation instead of just crashing, says the University College, London computer scientist, “or even reconfigure themselves to recover lost code. Conventional computers just couldn’t do it.”

In fact, the hardware and the software he was using at the time couldn’t even tolerate damage to a single bit; 99.9 percent of the time, the system would crash.

Bentley is a polymath. A popular science author as well as a geek, he views computer science as a lens through which to get to know other disciplines, from history to, especially, biology. This kind of synthetic approach has led him through 15 years of exploration toward a breakthrough working prototype of a computer that never crashes, created with UCL’s Christos Sakellariou and debuting thisApril.

Bentley and his team looked to the natural world for inspiration. Wetware systems are far more robust and redundant than centralized computer systems, says Bentley: “They use multiple elements which interact in a distributed and somewhat random manner to produce an emergent result. Think of the brain, the immune system, an ant colony, a flock of birds.”

The team set out to follow these rules to build a “systemic” computer like one that might appear in nature. That’s an entirely different paradigm than the centralized and linear nature of traditional computers, which are based on Von Neumann architecture.

What makes decentralized computing systems so robust is redundancy. If a traditional computer wanted to add numbers together, it uses a program with a single add instruction–if that single program throws an error, it brings the whole operation to a halt.

“In a systemic computer, it might have several ‘adds’ floating about, any of which might be used to perform that calculation,” says Bentley. “It’s the combination of redundancy at a low level–multiple copies of instructions and data–and decentralisation, plus that randomness” that enables the systemic computer to be robust against damage.

If part of the computer is damaged or hits a bug, the randomized selector hits on another part with some compatible instructions to keep working. This is similar to what happens in the brain. “In our brain we lose neurons every day but we’re fine–our brains have the redundancy to cope and the ability to reconfigure themselves to make use of what is left. The systemic computer does the same thing. The systemic computer uses a pool of systems where its equivalent of instructions may be duplicated several times.”

The systemic computer’s ability to reconfigure its own code is similar to what is found in individual cells as well. DNA’s double strands are complementary like the two halves of a zipper, so one half can be used to replicate and repair the other.

“One way in which DNA repairs itself it to use an undamaged complementary strand of the DNA as a template,” says Bentley. “The systemic computer uses multiple copies of instructions floating about–if one is damaged, the others can be used as templates to fix the damaged one.”

Bentley says his computer is part of a new wave of non-Von Neumann computers that feature specialized applications in areas like AI, drone control, and more broadly, the entire so-called Internet of Things: disaster-proofing infrastructure, modeling weather systems, or synthesizing chemicals.

The theory that superintends Bentley’s organic computer is laid out more fully in his book Digitized, a history of the theory and practice of computation.

“Tracing many original documents for the book, I realized that lots of my ideas in the systemic computer date back to the birth of computers,” he says. “Turing, Shannon, von Neumann–all these pioneers were informed by biology. They all wanted to make a computer that worked more like a biological brain. In the 1940s and ’50s the technology was too primitive to allow it. It turns out that pioneers from then to the present day all have the same ambition: to make a parallel, distributed, adaptive, brain-like computer.”

While Bentley’s computer may be called a non-Von Neumann architecture, Von Neumann himself actually thought of his 80-ton computer as prototypical of biology. As Bentley reports in his book, Von Neumann wrote this while on a train in 1945:

First: Since the device is primarily a computer, it will have to perform the elementary operations of arithmetics most frequently. These are addition, multiplication and division. It is therefore reasonable that it should contain specialized organs for just these operations… a central arithmetic part of the device will probably have to exist and this constitutes the first specific part: CA.

Second: The logical control of the device, that is the proper sequencing of its operations can be most efficiently carried out by a central control organ… this constitutes the second specific part: CC.

Third: Any device which is to carry out long and complicated sequences of operations (specifically of calculations) must have a considerable memory… this constitutes the third specific part: M…The three specific parts CA, CC and M correspond to the associative neurons in the human nervous system. It remains to discuss the equivalents of the sensory or afferent and the motor or efferent neurons. These are the input and the output organs of the device.

 

courtesy of Fast.Co

courtesy of Huff.Po

Printing out body parts? Cornell University researchers showed it’s possible by creating a replacement ear using a 3-D printer and injections of living cells.

The work reported Wednesday is a first step toward one day growing customized new ears for children born with malformed ones, or people who lose one to accident or disease.

It’s part of the hot field of tissue regeneration, trying to regrow all kinds of body parts. Scientists hope using 3-D printing technology might offer a speedier method with more lifelike results.

If it pans out, “this enables us to rapidly customize implants for whoever needs them,” said Cornell biomedical engineer Lawrence Bonassar, who co-authored the research published online in the journal PLoS One.

This first-step work crafted a human-shaped ear that grew with cartilage from a cow, easier to obtain than human cartilage, especially the uniquely flexible kind that makes up ears. Study co-author Dr. Jason Spector of Weill Cornell Medical Center is working on the next step – how to cultivate enough of a child’s remaining ear cartilage in the lab to grow an entirely new ear that could be implanted in the right spot.

Wednesday’s report is “a nice advancement,” said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Three-dimensional printers, which gradually layer materials to form shapes, are widely used in manufacturing. For medicine, Atala said the ear work is part of broader research that shows “the technology now is at the point where we can in fact print these 3-dimensional structures and they do become functional over time.”

Today, people who need a new ear often turn to prosthetics that require a rod to fasten to the head. For children, doctors sometimes fashion a new ear from the stiffer cartilage surrounding ribs, but it’s a big operation. Spector said the end result seldom looks completely natural. Hence the quest to use a patient’s own cells to grow a replacement ear.

The Cornell team started with a 3-D camera that rapidly rotates around a child’s head for a picture of the existing ear to match. It beams the ear’s geometry into a computer, without the mess of a traditional mold or the radiation if CT scans were used to measure ear anatomy.

“Kids aren’t afraid of it,” said Bonassar, who used his then-5-year-old twin daughters’ healthy ears as models.

From that image, the 3-D printer produced a soft mold of the ear. Bonassar injected it with a special collagen gel that’s full of cow cells that produce cartilage – forming a scaffolding. Over the next few weeks, cartilage grew to replace the collagen. At three months, it appeared to be a flexible and workable outer ear, the study concluded.

Now Bonassar’s team can do the process even faster by using the living cells in that collagen gel as the printer’s “ink.” The 3-D technology directly layers the gel into just the right ear shape for cartilage to cover, without having to make a mold first.

The next step is to use a patient’s own cells in the 3-D printing process. Spector, a reconstructive surgeon, is focusing on children born without a fully developed external ear, a condition called microtia. They have some ear cartilage-producing cells in that tissue, just not enough. So he’s experimenting with ways to boost those cells in the lab, “so we can grow enough of them from that patient to make an ear,” he explained.

That hurdle aside, cartilage may be the tissue most amenable to growing with the help of 3-D printing technology, he said. That’s because cartilage doesn’t need blood vessels growing inside it to survive.

courtesy of GizMag

e’re surrounded by electromagnetic fields almost everywhere these days. Just because they’re almost imperceptible doesn’t mean they can’t be used as a source of energy though. One student in Germany recently built the Electromagnetic Harvester, a small box that allegedly charges an AA battery using just the electromagnetic fields given off by the likes of power lines, vehicles and electronic gadgets.

Dennis Siegel, a digital media student at the University of the Arts in Bremen, designed the handheld charger as a way to recover some of the energy from these electromagnetic fields. It may sound a little sketchy, but it’s an idea that many researchers, including a team at Georgia Tech, have been exploring for years. The main issue with this form of energy collection is the amount of power it generates tends to be incredibly small, which might explain why it takes a full day for the Electromagnetic Harvester to charge a single AA battery.

According to Siegel, using the harvester involves simply holding it up to anything with an electromagnetic field – a cell phone, a coffee maker, a commuter train, etc. Once it enters a strong enough field, a red LED will light up to indicate it is charging. It also has a magnet on the back to leave it attached near an EMF source and can charge from the combined fields of living things, like when a person pets a dog. Seigel designed two different versions of the harvester: one for frequencies below 100Hz (like those found in electricity mains) and one for frequencies above 100Hz (like those found in Bluetooth, WLAN, and radio broadcasts).

But don’t start thinking this signals the end of charging devices through ordinary wall sockets just yet. While the potential for this type of technology being used to charge very low-powered devices like wireless sensors or RFID tags is there, we remain very skeptical about any practical consumer electronics applications. Aside from not being able to generate enough power for a typical smartphone user, Siegel has yet to reveal any specifics on how his take on the ambient energy charging device works – only that it involves “coils and high frequency diodes.” So while it’s great in theory, we’ll take these claims with a grain of salt.

Check out the video below to see some of the examples of how Siegel sees the Electromagnetic Harvester being used throughout a typical day.

Electromagnetic Harvester from Dennis Siegel on Vimeo.

Stanford engineers have generated electrical current by tapping into the electron activity in individual algae cells. Photosynthesis excites electrons, which can then be turned into an electrical current using a specially designed gold electrode. This study could be the first step toward carbon-free electricity directly from plants.

It seems to me that this is a pretty amazing idea that could really work and clean the air pollution from urban areas (like parking lots, tested in the video above) and at the same time look good. That said, reducing is still better than restoring, but in the meantime- let’s get this lamp working!

courtesy of Tree.Hugger 

courtesy of Huffington.Post

In 11 years of teaching, ditching students’ desk chairs in favor of yoga balls is one of the best decisions Robbi Giuliano thinks she ever made.

Replacing stationary seats with inflatable bouncers has raised productivity in her fifth-graders at Westtown-Thornbury Elementary School, making students better able to focus on lessons while improving their balance and core strength, she said.

“I have more attentive children,” Giuliano said. “I’m able to get a lot done with them because they’re sitting on yoga balls.”

The giant rubber spheres, also called stability balls, come in different sizes, colors and degrees of firmness. By making the sitter work to stay balanced, the balls force muscle engagement and increased blood flow, leading to more alertness.

The exercise gear is part a larger effort to modernize schools based on research linking physical activity with better learning, said John Kilbourne, a professor of movement science at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich.

Traditional classroom setups are being challenged as teachers nationwide experiment with yoga balls, footrests and standing desks, which give children outlets to fidget without disrupting class.

“It’s the future of education,” Kilbourne said.

Stability balls, frequently used in yoga, Pilates and physical therapy, have even begun appearing in offices in the wake of recent studies stressing the dangers of sedentary work environments.

The balls first began to surface in schools as aids for kids with attention problems or autism, said Michelle Rowe, executive director of the Kinney Center for Autism at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. The equipment has since gone mainstream.

“It takes away the taboo of wiggling, which most kids do anyway,” said Rowe, who also is a professor of health services.

Giuliano began using the balls in her class in West Chester, a Philadelphia suburb, about three years ago after her husband mentioned how they increased productivity at the holistic wellness company where he worked.

Student Ashley Hasson conceded that adjusting to her dark pink ball was tough at first.

“But once you get used to it, it’s not that hard because basically you’re just sitting down,” she said.

Another student, Kevin Kent, said the ball makes it easier for him to concentrate and keeps his back from getting stiff. Now, he said, sitting in a chair is “weird, because you’re all bent up.”

Some health experts cautioned against the possibility of student horseplay and falling off the balls. But Giuliano’s 24 students know they must keep their bottoms on the balls and feet on the floor at all times, though they can bounce and bob as much as they like.

The same goes for Dannielle Doran’s fourth-graders at Merion Elementary School in a nearby district, where misbehavior risks loss of the ball and a return to a four-legged seat.

“They like sitting on them so much, and they don’t want to lose that privilege,” Doran said. “It seems to almost … motivate better behavior.”

At Namaste Charter School in Chicago, which is guided by the philosophy that healthy and active kids perform better in class, all students learn to use stability balls during physical education.

Yet they’re used as seats in academic settings only on a case-by-case basis, principal Allison Slade said.

“Fifth-graders are so antsy that, for some kids, this is really good for them,” Slade said. “But for others, I think it could be really distracting.”

To be sure, the balls are not mandatory in Doran’s or Giuliano’s classes, but Giuliano noted only one student in three years has opted to continue using a chair.

Parents have been supportive as well, voluntarily purchasing the $5 balls for their kids. Some even ended up buying balls for themselves to use at home and work, said Giuliano, who wants to spread the word to other teachers.

“I don’t like sitting on a chair all day … so I started sitting on a yoga ball, and I find I’m more alert,” Giuliano said. “And my message is to try it with your class and see if it works for you.”

• Divers have found traces of ancient land swallowed by waves 8500 years ago
• Doggerland once stretched from Scotland to Denmark
• Rivers seen underwater by seismic scans
• Britain was not an island – and area under North Sea was roamed by mammoths and other giant animals
  
• Described as the ‘real heartland’ of Europe
• Had population of tens of thousands – but devastated by sea level rise

 courtesy of Daily.Mail

‘Britain’s Atlantis’ – a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea – has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews.

Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.

Divers from oil companies have found remains of a ‘drowned world’ with a population of tens of thousands – which might once have been the ‘real heartland’ of Europe.

A team of climatologists, archaeologists and geophysicists has now mapped the area using new data from oil companies – and revealed the full extent of a ‘lost land’ once roamed by mammoths.

Divers from St Andrews University, find remains of Doggerland, the underwater country dubbed ‘Britain’s Atlantis’

Dr Richard Bates of the earth sciences department at St Andrews University, searching for Doggerland, the underwater country dubbed ‘Britain’s Atlantis’

A Greater Britain: How the North Sea grew and the land-mass shrunk

Drowned world: Scans show a mound discovered under the water near Orkney, which has been explored by divers

 

St Andrews University’s artists’ impression of life in Doggerland

The research suggests that the populations of these drowned lands could have been tens of thousands, living in an area that stretched from Northern Scotland across to Denmark and down the English Channel as far as the Channel Islands.

The area was once the ‘real heartland’ of Europe and was hit by ‘a devastating tsunami’, the researchers claim.

The wave was part of a larger process that submerged the low-lying area over the course of thousands of years.

‘The name was coined for Dogger Bank, but it applies to any of several periods when the North Sea was land,’ says Richard Bates of the University of St Andrews. ‘Around 20,000 years ago, there was a ‘maximum’ – although part of this area would have been covered with ice. When the ice melted, more land was revealed – but the sea level also rose.

‘Through a lot of new data from oil and gas companies, we’re able to give form to the landscape – and make sense of the mammoths found out there, and the reindeer. We’re able to understand the types of people who were there.

‘People seem to think rising sea levels are  a new thing – but it’s a cycle of Earht history that has happened many many times.’

Organised by Dr Richard Bates of the Department of Earth Sciences at St Andrews, the Drowned Landscapes exhibit reveals the human story behind Doggerland, a now submerged area of the North Sea that was once larger than many modern European countries. 

Dr Bates, a geophysicist, said: ‘Doggerland was the real heartland of Europe until sea levels rose to give us the UK coastline of today.

World beneath the waves: Scientists examine a sediment core recovered from a mound near Orkney

Seismic scans reveal a submerged river at Dogger Bank

A visualisation of how life in the now-submerged areas of Dogger Bank might have looked

The research suggests that the populations of these drowned lands could have been tens of thousands, living in an area that stretched from Northern Scotland across to Denmark and down the English Channel as far as the Channel Islands

Life in ‘Doggerland’ – the ancient kingdom once stretched from Scotland to Denmark and has been described as the ‘real heart of Europe’

‘We have speculated for years on the lost land’s existence from bones dredged by fishermen all over the North Sea, but it’s only since working with oil companies in the last few years that we have been able to re-create what this lost land looked like.

‘When the data was first being processed, I thought it unlikely to give us any useful information, however as more area was covered it revealed a vast and complex landscape.

‘We have now been able to model its flora and fauna, build up a picture of the ancient people that lived there and begin to understand some of the dramatic events that subsequently changed the land, including the sea rising and a devastating tsunami.’

The research project is a collaboration between St Andrews and the Universities of Aberdeen, Birmingham, Dundee and Wales Trinity St David.

Rediscovering the land through pioneering scientific research, the research reveals a story of a dramatic past that featured massive climate change. The public exhibit brings back to life the Mesolithic populations of Doggerland through artefacts discovered deep within the sea bed.

The research, a result of a painstaking 15 years of fieldwork around the murky waters of the UK, is one of the highlights of the London event.

The interactive display examines the lost landscape of Doggerland and includes artefacts from various times represented by the exhibit – from pieces of flint used by humans as tools to the animals that also inhabited these lands.

Using a combination of geophysical modelling of data obtained from oil and gas companies and direct evidence from material recovered from the seafloor, the research team was able to build up a reconstruction of the lost land.

The excavation of Trench 2, unveiling more finds about this lost land-mass

Fossilised bones from a mammoth also show how this landscape was once one of hills and valleys, rather than sea

The findings suggest a picture of a land with hills and valleys, large swamps and lakes with major rivers dissecting a convoluted coastline.

As the sea rose the hills would have become an isolated archipelago of low islands. By examining the fossil record – such as pollen grains, microfauna and macrofauna – the researchers can tell what kind of vegetation grew in Doggerland and what animals roamed there.

Using this information, they were able to build up a model of the ‘carrying capacity’ of the land and work out roughly how many humans could have lived there.

The research team is currently investigating more evidence of human behaviour, including possible human burial sites, intriguing standing stones and a mass mammoth grave.

Dr Bates added: ‘We haven’t found an ‘x marks the spot’ or ‘Joe created this’, but we have found many artefacts and submerged features that are very difficult to explain by natural causes, such as mounds surrounded by ditches and fossilised tree stumps on the seafloor.

‘There is actually very little evidence left because much of it has eroded underwater; it’s like trying to find just part of a needle within a haystack. What we have found though is a remarkable amount of evidence and we are now able to pinpoint the best places to find preserved signs of life.’

For further information on the exhibit, visit: http://sse.royalsociety.org/2012/exhibits/drowned-landscapes/

Drowned Landscapes is on display at The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2012 from July 3-8 at the Royal Society in London.