Some perspective

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Ice Discovered on Asteroid, Suggests Earth’s Oceans Came From Space | Wired.com

Water ice and organic molecules have been discovered on the surface of an asteroid for the first time... "What we've found suggests that an asteroid like this one may have hit Earth and brought our planet its water"... While there is plenty of debate around how Earth got its oceans, this new evidence suggests some of the water came from extraterrestrial sources.

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Looting of Iraq sites destroys history, distresses scholars - USATODAY.com

Guards can't stop it all

More than five years after the fall of Baghdad, the fate of Iraq's antiquities still torments archaeologists.

The looting of the National Museum garnered headlines in April 2003. But the widespread pillaging of archaeological sites — 10,548 sites are registered, with perhaps 100,000 actually buried there — bewilders and saddens scholars. They believe they are witnessing the ransacking of the cradle of civilization, a calamity "almost impossible to overstate for the destruction of history that has taken place," says Patty Gerstenblith of DePaul University College of Law in Chicago.

The Iraqi government employs about 1,200 guards to keep an eye on all its sites, according to a July 18 Iraqi Crisis Report.

A satellite image analysis, published earlier this year in the journal Antiquity by Stone, concluded that since 2003, looters have dug 6 square miles of holes in archaeological sites across Iraq. The looting "must have yielded tablets, coins, cylinder seals, statues, terra cotta, bronzes and other objects in the hundreds of thousands," Stone reported.

USAToday article