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The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, built 2,300 years ago in the Peruvian desert, have been identified as the oldest solar observatory in the Americas.
The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, built 2,300 years ago in the Peruvian desert, have been identified as the oldest solar observatory in the Americas. (Ivan Ghezzi)
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The towers were built in a row at regular intervals. When Ghezzi and co-author Clive Ruggles, an authority on archeoastronomy, found the observation points a short distance to the west, they concluded that the towers were designed to help fix the time of sunrise and sunset throughout the year.

The research, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, suggests that the monuments were a statement of power. Those who controlled the monuments, they said, were also seen to control the sun. The relationship between the monuments and political power is further reinforced by the fact that the observatory is near a heavily fortified hilltop structure with large walls, gates and parapets.

-- Marc Kaufman

Sex Doesn't Always Sell

Advertisers will sell more stuff if their commercials run during innocuous family-fare programs rather than sexually charged shows, suggests new research into the effects of erotic programming on viewers' response to ads.

Programs with overtly sexual content appeared to interfere with viewers' ability to remember the commercials, according to the study, published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Researchers Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham at University College London said provocative content may have left little "cognitive space" in viewers' brains to process the commercials.

The researchers brought volunteers into a laboratory to watch an episode of the comedy "Malcolm in the Middle" and an episode of "Sex and the City" called "Was It Good for You?" One program contained nudity and sex scenes; the other had neither. Interspersed in the programs, the researchers had viewers see different advertisements for cellphones, hair products and other everyday items. After the program, the volunteers were asked to recall as many advertisements and brands as they could.

"Brand recall for advertisements was 'hindered' by sexual content of programs, suggesting that there is something particularly involving or disturbing about sexual programs," the paper concluded.

In a separate part of the experiment, researchers tested how advertisements with sexual content affected viewers. They found that men had better recall of advertisements with sexual content and women had worse recall for those ads.

-- Shankar Vedantam


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