Just when you think that the real world has no mystery left in it, a high school kid uses star charts to locate an ancient lost city.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/10/canadian-teenager-discovers-ancient-mayan-city-lost-in-jungles-o/ (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/10/canadian-teenager-discovers-ancient-mayan-city-lost-in-jungles-o/)
If you follow through to the original French article and translate it, you learn that the kid got hold of a Mayan star atlas (which already impresses me) and he realized that the layouts of the constellations corresponded to the physical locations of several known Mayan ruins in Mexico and Central America. That's already a pretty cool thing to have figured out, right?
Then he found a different star atlas with a constellation that wasn't in the other book(s) and when he overlayed it on the map, he found that one of the stars that did not correlate to any known cities was "located" in unexplored jungle in central Mexico. So, he did what any kid would do - he wrote to the Canadian Space Agency, told them his findings, and asked them what was out there. (Sure, because kids write their space agencies every day asking for satellite maps, amirite?)
Somebody at the CSA took an interest and got hold of some satellite maps from NASA and some Google Maps, and lo and behold: In that very spot, there was a big, unnatural looking rectangle shape. Something man-made was lurking under the trees, right where the kid said it should be.
Of course, it's incredibly remote (which probably accounts for why nobody found it before now) so the odds of anyone mounting an expedition to investigate anytime soon are pretty small. Still, how exciting to be that kid and know you thought of something that nobody else had tried and that it paid off!
And, really - ancient Mayan star charts leading to lost cities? If that doesn't have adventure movie written all over, I don't know what does. I'd wager money that some screenwriter who saw this article in his morning email feed is writing the script this very moment.
Somebody call Nicholas Cage! National Treasure 3 coming right up!
The funny thing is that they already did this idea in a movie - The Fountain in 2006. I even vaguely remember watching it on Netflix or on rental dvd.
Sadly, the scientists with experience in the field in Central America, and with the skills to interpret satellite photos of the region, have stepped in and confirmed that the idea of locating cities by constellation maps is mostly bunk. The features in the satellite maps are probably corn fields that have been been abandoned and been overgrown.
Apparently, that part of the world is sort of lousy with ruins anyway, so while it would be highly momentous to discover an actual large city, the discovery of a structure or a few structures, in and of itself, is neither momentous nor does it really prove anything about Mayan tastes in urban planning just because a building happened to be at a spot dictated by your favorite mysterious method for finding old buildings.
So, the romance once again gets wiped out by those kiljoy scientists! :-p Somebody oughta tell them that the world needs a few dreams, sheesh! ;-)