Discoveries

A 2,500-year-old city influenced by the Olmecs -- often referred to as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica -- has been discovered in Mexico, hundreds of miles away from the Olmecs' Gulf Coast territory, archeologists said Wednesday. Two statues and architectural details at the site, known as Zazacatla, indicate that the inhabitants adopted Olmec styles when they changed from a simple, egalitarian society to a more complex, hierarchical one.

Archeologists have solved the mystery of the Thirteen Towers, a line of low stone structures that have spanned an arid Peruvian slope like a massive set of prehistoric teeth for 2,400 years. The towers lined up outside the citadel at Chankillo are a massive solar observatory that marks not only the summer and winter solstices, but also the days and weeks of the year.

Cave divers in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula have discovered what may be the world's longest underground river, connecting two cave systems with a waterway of at least 95 miles. A group of foreign divers exploring the area near the Caribbean beach resort of Playa del Carmen have yet to name the river but believe it could be connected to two other major systems, adding more than 125 miles to its length.

Caltech astronomers have detected a family of rocky objects in the Kuiper Belt that were formed by something hitting an object larger than Pluto. Such groups of objects, called collisional families, are common in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but the new family is the first to be found in the Kuiper Belt, which is beyond Neptune, more than 3 billion miles from the sun.

The key to schizophrenia may be found in a gene region thought to play a role in inflammation and autoimmune disorders, U.S. researchers said Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. If confirmed, the finding could lead to a test and possibly new treatments for the mental disorder that affects about 1% of the world's population, researchers said. The link to inflammation might help explain why many patients with schizophrenia have autoimmune diseases.

Evidence of water has been detected for the first time in a planet outside our solar system, an astronomer says -- a tantalizing find for scientists eager to know whether life exists beyond Earth. The research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., said Tuesday that water vapor had been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet 150 light-years from Earth.

German researchers have found a peptide in human blood that blocks HIV and have identified a synthetic variant that is 100 times more potent, they reported Friday in the journal Cell. The synthetic version has been shown to be safe in animals and the team hopes to begin trials in humans this year, they said.

There are places in the woods where nature and civilization intersect to create a mystery. How else to explain the ceramic storybook bunny village that Mike Hazzard and Ed Schlegel discovered in the Santa Ana Mountains? Here, where there should have been nothing at all, was a scene the two experienced hikers found delightful and bizarre. "It's eerie," said Hazzard, 49, an environmentalist and outdoorsman for most of his life.

European astronomers announced Tuesday that they had discovered the first planet beyond our solar system that orbits in a "sweet spot" zone where life could exist. The planet, about five times as massive as Earth, orbits Gliese 581, a red dwarf star about 20 light-years from our solar system. The team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists who found the planet estimate its surface temperature at freezing to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a range in which water can exist as a liquid.

Geologists have found a naturally occurring mineral with the same composition as kryptonite, used to weaken Superman, mineralogist Chris Stanley of London's Natural History Museum reported Tuesday in the journal Geology. Stanley found that the formula for kryptonite, in the movie "Superman II," matched that of sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide. But it isn't green crystal; it's white, powdery and nonradioactive.