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Possible early Viking settlement in North America explored

The new Viking settlement was found on the edge of Point Rosee in
Newfoundland (illustrated above) 400 miles south of another site at
L'Anse aux Meadows. They suggest that the Vikings' mastery of the
seas allowed them to venture to North America.   
There is so much speculation on possible discoverers of the Americas ranging from Polynesians, Japanese and Chinese to French Merovingians to a lost tribe of Israel, ancient Egyptians and sailors from the lost continent of Atlantis.  There are two statements that need to be said about this:

  1. An extended family group first crossed from Siberia to North America some 14,000 years ago, and survived, built sophisticated cultures and societies, and left undeniable evidence of their presence.  To give credit where credit is due, they discovered the Americas and no one else.
  2. Until solid scientific evidence establishing other groups as having visited the Americas is produced and peer reviewed, it remains in the realm of speculation.  And, yes, I have watched the various television pop science shows (some would say pseudo science) that present evidence of other early visitors to the continents. Interesting? Yes.  Conclusive?  No.
This find adds to the possibility of Viking explorations to the Americas potentially adding to the evidence supporting this theory. 

Here's the report - with an announcement of television programming covering the research.
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Possible Viking discovery by archaeologist
could rewrite North American history

Using satellite imaging, an archaeologist may have found evidence of the 2nd Norse settlement in North America at a site in Newfoundland. With the use of pioneering satellite imagery analysis, excavation and investigation of archeological evidence, the team has uncovered what could be the first new Norse site to be discovered in North America in over 50 years. If confirmed by further research, the site at Point Rosee in Newfoundland will show that the Vikings traveled much farther into North America than previously known, pushing the boundary of their explorations over 300 miles to the southwest.

To date, scientists have known of only one other Viking site, found on the very northern tip of Newfoundland in Canada, at L'Anse Aux Meadows. In the 1960s, archaeologists uncovered the foundations of 1,000-year-old Viking buildings, signs of metalworking, iron nails and artifacts. The site appeared to pre-date Columbus' voyages to the New World by some 500 years, confirming that Norse explorers had reached North America as suggested in the Vinland sagas. For more than 50 years, scientists have searched for another Norse site.

Using infrared images from 400 miles in space, Parcak and her team looked at tens of thousands of square kilometers along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. Images taken in Point Rosee revealed possible human-made shapes under discolored vegetation. This intriguing evidence suggests the Vikings traveled farther south than previously known. The Newfoundland project was co-directed by Gregory Mumford, Ph.D., Parcak's husband and professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Anthropology. Preliminary excavations took place over a period of two and a half weeks in June 2015.

Parcak recently made international headlines when she was named winner of the 2016 TED Prize. She is an expert in satellite remote sensing for archaeology and wrote the first textbook in the field. Her methods have helped locate 17 potential pyramids in Egypt, in addition to 3,100 forgotten settlements and 1,000 lost tombs. She has also made major discoveries throughout the Roman Empire. She is a National Geographic Senior Fellow, TED Senior Fellow and a professor of archaeology at UAB. Parcak is also the founder and director of the UAB Laboratory for Global Observation.
The discovery is the subject of a two-hour special called "Vikings Unearthed." The program will first stream online at pbs.org/nova Monday, April 4, at 2:30 p.m. CT to coincide with the premiere of a 90-minute version of the film in the U.K. on BBC One. A two-hour U.S. broadcast will follow Wednesday, April 6, at 8 p.m. CT on PBS.
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Story Source:  Vaterials provided by University of Alabama at Birmingham, original written by Tiffany Westry. "Possible Viking discovery by archaeologist could rewrite North American history." ScienceDaily. 1 April 2016.
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The basis of political ideology

Candidate Collage
http://www.jta.org/

Is your political ideology in your head?
The differences between conservatives and liberals may be psychologically fundamental

Conservatives and liberals know there is a chasm between their policy and social ideals. A new study indicates that the thought processes of political conservatives gives greater weight to negative information. Conservatives are significantly more likely to remember images that evoke negative emotions.

The research, led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Mark Mills, revealed that negativity bias -- where greater weight in our cognitive processes is given to negative information over positive or neutral information -- is stronger in political conservatives and that the negativity bias transfers to how well they remember stimuli.

In other words, conservatives in the study were more likely to remember things that evoked negative emotions -- images of war, snakes, dead animals -- than their more liberal counterparts.

First, study organizers placed participants on a political scale based on their degree of approval or disapproval on 20 hot-button political issues. They were then asked to study 120 negative, positive and neutral pictures in preparation for a memory test.

Afterward, participants viewed 240 pictures -- an even split of new and previously seen images -- and were asked to identify the pictures they had already seen.

Scientists hypothesized that they would see some difference in memory of positive and negative imagery between conservatives and liberals, but were surprised at the pronounced difference. The most conservative participants remembered about 91 percent of negative images compared with 80 percent of positive ones. The most liberal participants, in contrast, remembered about 84 percent of negative images compared with 86 percent of positive ones.

"There are lots of reasons why people differ in how they process emotion," said Mills, a graduate student of psychology in UNL's Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior. "One part of the study was trying to account for how much of that variance is explained by political ideology. That had been unknown up until this point."

Forty-five percent of variance between subjects was accounted for by political ideology, he said.

"It quantifies the size of the correlation between negativity bias and political ideology," Mills said. "Out of all the possible reasons in the entire world for why individuals would differ in how well they remember positive and negative images, political ideology alone can account for about half of these reasons."

Despite its name, however, negativity bias isn't a bad thing -- and everyone has it, the researchers said.  "If you ignore a positive stimulus in your environment, you might miss lunch," co-author Kevin Smith, a UNL professor of political science, said. "If you ignore a negative stimulus in your environment, you might be lunch, so there is good reason for why we have a negativity bias."

Smith said the latest study is another step in a line of research at UNL that examines the most basic psychological and physiological underpinnings of the differences between liberals and conservatives. Smith and Hibbing have broken ground with this research, which has spawned numerous papers and their 2013 book, "Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences."

"When conservatives get a negative stimulus and you track their physiology and their neurology, you tend to see reactions that are capable of distinguishing between liberals and conservatives," Smith said. "One area that we really haven't investigated is the cognition of the negativity bias. There hadn't been a lot done on memory.

"(The new study) explains even on an intuitive level why liberals and conservatives are different. There are distinct psychological differences between them."

The study was published this month in the journal Behavioural Brain Research. It was co-authored by political science graduate students Frank Gonzalez, Karl Giuseffi and Benjamin Sievert; professor of political science John Hibbing; and associate professor of psychology Mike Dodd.

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CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Nebraska-Lincoln, original by Deann Gayman. Mark Mills, Frank J. Gonzalez, Karl Giuseffi, Benjamin Sievert, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing, Michael D. Dodd. Political conservatism predicts asymmetries in emotional scene memory. Behavioural Brain Research, 2016.
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