Recent scientific discoveries (since about the first of July):

* Archaeologists found a 1,000-years-old brewery in southern Peru that may be the oldest large-scale brewery ever found in the Andes. Remains of the facility were uncovered on Cerro Baúl, a mountaintop city, home to elite members of the Wari Empire AD 600-1000. Predating the Inca Empire by at least four centuries, this brewery made chicha, a fermented beverage similar to beer that played an important role in ritual feasting and drinking during Peru's first empire.

* [The] discovery of a cooking hearth and artifacts including thousands of bone fragments may settle for good the debate about where the Donner family camped and whether they resorted to cannibalism to survive being trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The find was made by a team led by archaeologists from the University of Oregon and the University of Montana working at Alder Creek Camp near Truckee, Calif.

* What happens to painkillers, antibiotics and other medicines after their work is done, and they end up in the wastewater stream? The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is using laboratory experiments to help answer this question by studying what happens to pharmaceuticals when they react with chlorine--a disinfectant commonly used in wastewater treatment.

* A team of Texas A&M University and Louisiana State University scientists conducted a research cruise in late August to the "dead zone" - a region in the northern Gulf of Mexico that suffers from low oxygen and results in huge marine losses - and much to their surprise, the "dead zone" area had either moved or had disappeared completely.

* A report by Yale physicists in the journal Nature describes the first coherent coupling of a single photon to a single superconducting qubit (quantum bit or "artificial atom"). This new paradigm for quantum optics allows experiments in a micro-chip electrical circuit using microwaves instead of visible photons and lasers.

* In Nature, a Yale mathematician presents models showing that the most recent person who was a direct ancestor of all humans currently alive may have lived just a few thousand years ago. "While we may not all be 'brothers,' the models suggest we are all hundredth cousins or so," said Joseph T. Chang, professor in the Department of Statistics at Yale University and senior author on the paper.

* Despite a long-standing international ban on ivory trade, African elephants continue to be killed in large numbers for their prized tusks. But a team headed by a University of Washington biologist has devised a new means of determining the geographic origin of ivory that could prove a potent tool in slowing elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade by identifying hot spots where enforcement should be increased.

* A Temple University environmental engineer has outlined new mathematical procedures, or techniques, to produce analytical solutions of the complex, non-linear equations of water flow in soils. These new techniques will help with the development of more accurate and more efficient flood forecasting and contaminant propagation predictions.

* Researchers led by Wilfred M. Post of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory describe in the October 2004 issue of BioScience an approach to assessing "promising" techniques for mitigating global warming caused by the greenhouse effect. Agriculturally based options for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by increasing sequestration of carbon in soils "should be evaluated to see how competitive they are in comparison with a variety of other options," according to Post's team.

* According to a study directed by Phouthone Keohavong, Ph.D., associate professor, department of environmental and occupational health, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, individuals in Xuan Wei County, China, exposed to smoky coal emissions from cooking and heating their homes may carry genetic mutations that greatly increase their risk of developing lung cancer. The study is being presented Oct. 3 at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Environmental Mutagen Society in Pittsburgh.

* Changes in U.S. forests caused by shifts in land use practices may have inadvertently worsened ozone pollution, according to a study led by Princeton University scientists.

Heck, that's enough for now. I'll see about posting some other research summaries later.