o

i-mass guides : Index | Classic Articles | Definitions | History | Movies | Nobel Prizes | Protocols | Resources | Techniques | Troubleshooting | Tutorials



Past Features


WWW ChemTools

  • Ion Formula by Mol. Weight
  • Isotope Pattern Calculator
  • Mass Loss Calculator
  • Periodic e-Table


WWW BioTools

  • EMBL Peptide Search - protein ID from peptide mass and sequence data
  • FindMod - post-translational modifications by peptide mass
  • GlycanMass - oligosaccharide mass from structure
  • GlycoMod - oligosaccharide structures from mass
  • GlycoSuiteDB - search database with oligosaccharide mass
  • Javascript Protein Digest - peptide digest masses
  • Javascipt Fragment Ion Generator for peptides
  • Mascot Search - peptide mass and sequence tools
  • Mowse - protein identification from peptide MS data
  • Protein Prospector - mass spectra interpretation tools
  • PROWL - identification of proteins from MS data

past feature

 

Carbon Dating of Prehistoric Art

Mass Spectrometry has dated prehistoric cave paintings in south central France at about 30,000 years old, a discovery which has the art world rethinking its origins.

The charcoal etchings on a cave wall depict horses, rhinoceros and a deer. The drawings were discovered in 1994 at a narrow entrance to several underground chambers in a rocky escarpment in the Ardeche region in France.

Scientists of the Laboratory for Climate and Environment Studies at the France's CEA-CNRS research centre carried out carbon dating of tiny fragments of the charcoal. They used accelerator mass spectrometry, which separates and counts radioactive carbon isotopes residual in the charcoal and found the drawings to be between 29 700 and 32 400 years old.

This finding makes the drawings significantly older than those of Lascaux caves in the Pyrenees in Southwest France which are dated at around 17 000 years old. The drawings in the Chauvet caves show that early European dwellers were just as skilled at art as the humans who followed 13 000 years later.

Prehistorians, who have traditionally interpreted the evolution of prehistoric art as a steady progression from simple to more complex representations, may have to reconsider existing theories of the origins of art as a result of these findings.

Yet the oldest known objects considered to be art are far older than the French cave paintings and precede the existence of anatomically modern humans, the Homo sapiens. A tiny stone carving found in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in 1981 is estimated at 233 000 years old. And pigments and paint-grinding equipment found in a cave in 2000 at Twin Rivers, near Lusaka in Zambia, are believed to be between 350 000 and 400 000 years old.

The cave painting report appears in the October 4 issue of
Nature.

 

MS Journals

  • European Mass Spectrom.
  • Intl. J. of Mass Spectrom.
  • J. American Society of MS
  • J. Mass Spectrometry
  • J. MS Society of Japan
  • Mass Spectrometry Reviews
  • Rapid Communications in MS


Science Journals

  • Analyst
  • Analytical Chemistry
  • Nature
  • New Scientist
  • Science
  • Scientific American


Literature Search

  • Beilstein Abstracts
  • ChemWeb
  • Current Contents - ISI
  • PubMed - NCBI
  • PubScience - DOE


World Laboratories

x

Copyright www.i-mass.com. All rights reserved worldwide.

Related Links

Resource Links