Google finds El Dorado!
Is there nothing the search engine can't do?
Scientists studying Google Maps of the Amazon rainforest reckon they've stumbled across the site of the legendary City of Gold.
Since the time of the conquistadors, the legend of an ancient, lost civilization deep in the Amazonian jungle has beguiled hundreds of explorers and led many to their deaths.
But those who returned did so without any proof of its existence.
Until now - and the boffins did it without even leaving the comfort of their lab.
The journal Antiquity has published a report showing more than 200 massive earthworks in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia.
From the sky it looks as if a series of geometric figures has been carved into the earth, but the archeologists and historians who published the report believe these shapes are the remains of roads, bridges, moats, avenues and squares that formed the basis for a sophisticated civilization spanning 155 miles, which could have supported a population of 60,000.
The remains date from AD200 to 1283.
Many scientists saw the jungle as too harsh to sustain anything but small nomadic tribes.
Now it seems the conquistadores who spoke of "cities that glistened in white" were telling the truth.
They, however, probably also introduced the diseases that wiped out the native people, leaving the jungle to claim - and hide - all trace of their civilisation.
Now that's what I call irony.
Weird Science Factoid: If Manhattan had the same population density as Alaska, there would only be 15 people living there.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
