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A Viking Age marketplace may be buried on a Norwegian island, new research suggests. Archaeologists surveying part of the historic island of Klosterøy, in southwest Norway about 190 miles (300 kilometers) west of Oslo, used ground-penetrating radar to detect signals from what appear to be the buried remains of several pit houses and piers. The archaeological remains suggest the site could have been a market during the Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066), and other finds hint that the place was important to local people long before that, according to Kristoffer Hillesland , a researcher at the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology who took part in the research. "It was likely that this was a power center during the Iron Age," or from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 800 in this region, Hillesland told Live Science, noting that several large burial mounds from this period are visible nearby. The marketplace would have been established later, he said, possibly when the i...

What if the world of dark matter was a mirror of our own, just with a broken set of rules? That might explain why dark matter appears to be so abundant yet invisible, a new theory suggests. Dark matter is the mysterious, unknown substance that seems to make up the bulk of all the mass in the universe; for every 2 pounds (1 kilogram) of regular matter, there's roughly 10 pounds (5 kg) of dark matter. It doesn't interact with light or normal matter. The only way scientists can detect it is through its subtle gravitational influence on normal matter, such as the motions of stars within galaxies and the growth of super-large structures in cosmic time. It might be easy to think that because matter and dark matter operate with different rules, one would be totally dominant over the other. But despite having wildly different properties, the amounts of normal matter and dark matter are still in the same ballpark. That seems like a strange coincidence.  To explain this, scientis...