Quebec teen discovers ancient Mayan ruins by studying the stars

I noticed a while back playing with google earth that if you take the ruler tool and trace a ray from the Nazca lines that quite a few of them intersect with known ruins...some quite some distance away. I am not sure if it has any "real" meaning...but it was an interesting thing to play with. For all I know it is irrelevant due to the errors on the google earth stuff or the curve of the earth...but it was still fun to play with. Some of the intersections were all the way up in Mexico...some as close as the coast.

peter theil needs to meet this kid.

formal schooling is the worst thing in the world for curious and thoughtful minds like this.

still, it's amazing that such a 'discovery' can be made so quickly by sattelite confirmation. the age old human mind combined with modern sensor tools is capable of 'discoveries'. simply not possible in the past.

consider in the past, it owuld have taken years to put together expedition funding and organize explorers to get to the suspected location of the alleged city.

now, you just get the right person on the phone at the right research department , and existing searchable maps of the location are already at your disposal, if they (high resolution lidar?) aren't already accessible through public google earth maps.

this is amazing. we are making discoveries at light speed because massive quantities of diverse information are available to 15 year olds, and the capacity for verifying suspicions is there because of our capacity for creating searcheable organized data.

this truly is the structure of scientific revolution. so many things coming together to make a new paradigm of discovery possible. it is THESE kinds of stories really give me passion for science making the world better.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/forgotten-m... another source

Snopes doesn't think so: http://www.snopes.com/canadian-teen-satellite-maps

Can someone hook this kid up with a blog or a school or something?

Great find. But sort of lowers my opinion of Maya culture. Having city locations decided by star constellations ? Sounds like this is on the insane side even for theocracies.