Newsdesk Archive

Researchers studying clay balls from Mesopotamia have discovered clues to a lost code that was used for record-keeping about 200 years before writing was invented.The clay balls may represent the world's "very first data storage system," at least the first that scientists know of, said Christopher Woods, a professor at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, in a lecture at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, where he presented initial findings.

Current efforts to find exoplanets with the potential to harbor life habitable planets and exoplanets with life focus on smaller stars than the Sun, because these so called M dwarfs or red dwarfs make up more than 75% of stars in the solar neighborhood. It may be possible to find habitable planets around these small stars with the current level of technology. Thus searching for habitable planets around M dwarfs is considered the fast track to find a second Earth. High levels of atmospheric oxygen are considered the most promising indicator for life on exoplanets.

A charred black pebble found in the Egyptian desert may be a piece of a comet that shattered near Earth about 28 million years ago. If so, the stone would offer a first close-up glimpse of rock that formed at the very edges of the solar system.The 30-gram stone was discovered by Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat in December 1996 in a part of the Sahara desert near the border with Libya. The 6000-square-kilometre region is famous for being strewn with fragments of pale green glass, thought to have formed millions of years ago during a meteorite strike. Ancient Egyptians used a piece of this Libyan desert glass to make a scarab for King Tutankhamen's burial jewellery.

A novel device that uses only sunlight and wastewater to produce hydrogen gas could provide a sustainable energy source while improving the efficiency of wastewater treatment.A research team led by Yat Li, associate professor of chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, developed the solar-microbial device and reported their results in a paper published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

VANCOUVER - Last month, a diver alerted Vancouver Aquarium staff that he had found a number of dead and decaying sunflower sea stars in the cold Pacific waters of a popular dive spot just off the shore of West Vancouver.Within weeks, the tentacled orange sea stars had all but disappeared in Howe Sound and Vancouver Harbour, disintegrating where they sat on the ocean floor.

A new study in the journal Geology is the latest to tie a string of unusual earthquakes, in this case, in central Oklahoma, to the injection of wastewater deep underground. Researchers now say that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake near Prague, Okla., on Nov. 6, 2011, may also be the largest ever linked to wastewater injection. Felt as far away as Milwaukee, more than 800 miles away, the quake -- the biggest ever recorded in Oklahoma--destroyed 14 homes, buckled a federal highway and left two people injured. Small earthquakes continue to be recorded in the area.

Deep furrows on Antarctica's floating ice shelves mark arch-shaped channels melted out under the ice. Thinner ice floats lower, and researchers can read the corrugated surface topography like a map that mirrors what lies beneath.Now, a new study published today (Oct. 6) in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests that in some spots, these surface scars also signal where water drains from beneath Antarctica's giant ice sheets.

A team of Belgian and Bolivian archaeologists has found more than 2,000 pieces of ceramic, gems and gold objects at an apparent ceremonial site beneath the waters of Lake Titicaca.The most impressive of the items, some said to date back a millennium, are well-preserved puma heads carved of stone, while pieces of gold leaf were hammered into other anthropomorphic forms.

Some subordinate female meerkats wet-nurse a dominant female's offspring in exchange for not being evicted from the group, a study suggests.Researchers found that females were more likely to do this if they had recently lost pups or had returned to the group following eviction.A group's dominant female aggressively suppresses other females from breeding through infanticide or eviction.

When I was nine I was frogmarched to the opticians for my first sight test. It was after copying down the fact that "Marco Pob was a famous explorer" from the board at school.The optometrist explained what the test entailed and asked me questions about how much I watched TV and used computers, all in this incredibly soothing, soft-spoken voice. When she lowered the lights and used the pen torch to see into the backs of my eyes, I experienced this tingling sensation. It began at the crown of my head and trickled over my scalp, down my neck and across my arms and legs. It was so relaxing I could have fallen asleep, though that wouldn't have been conducive to an eye examination.

Petting your cat seems like a concrete way to show him you love him, but it turns out that he might not be such a big fan of your caresses. A new study published in the Journal Physiology and Behavior finds that felines who reluctantly allow their owners to pet them are likely stressing out about it.

What if we could deactivate treatments after use to cut the rise of antibiotic resistance? Researchers hope they may be able to control the medicines we take to fight infection using light.The voices warning of the demise of our antibiotic defences are getting louder. With common pathogens such as E. coli and the pneumonia bug K. pneumoniae developing resistance to our antibiotics of last resort, leading pharmacologists, clinicians and epidemiologists say we risk being cast back to a time when even routine surgery put Victorians at risk of fatal infection.

Women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings, suggests a new analysis of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were predominantly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological dogma.Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female.

Humans love to hear about ancient history, but they aren't always that great at preserving it. Here are some of the worst, most thoughtless, and just plain dumbest ways that humans have wrecked their own heritage.

An online game will challenge computer users to solve an archaeological puzzle: how to put together thousands of stone fragments to reconstruct the chiseled design on a 1,200-year-old Scottish monument.PictishPuzzle.co.uk will make its debut on Oct. 25, thanks to National Museums Scotland and the project's digital designers.

Without predators like dingoes to control kangaroo populations, culling may be necessary to restore the natural balance and ensure the future of the Australian landscape, according to new University of Canberra research.

The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant said on Thursday another tank holding highly contaminated water overflowed, probably sending the liquid into the Pacific Ocean, in the second such breach in less than two months.Recent site mishaps have returned Tokyo Electric Power Co, or Tepco, to the spotlight, calling into question its ability to execute a complex cleanup that could last decades. The company has vowed to monitor the tanks more closely and improve its water management.

Video of illegal gold mining operations that have turned a portion of the Amazon rainforest into a moonscape went viral on Youtube after a popular radio and TV journalist in Peru highlighted the story.Last week Peruvian journalist and politician Güido Lombardi directed his audience to video shot from a wingcam aboard the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), an airplane used by researchers to conduct advanced monitoring and analysis of Peru's forests.

Archaeologists from Bournemouth University have been able to identify a stone head that was found in a flowerbed in Chichester over 200 years ago, and remained a mystery ever since. Using the latest laser scanning technology, they have revealed that The Bosham Head, as it is known, is from a Roman statue of Emperor Trajan, dating back to AD 122, and one of the most significant Roman finds in Britain.

Most have heard of the treasures of the 18th Dynasty pharaoh Tutankhamun, first discovered by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922 when they uncovered his tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Few are familiar with his impeccably preserved brooch, recovered along with the numerous other artifacts within the tomb. Fewer still know about the striking yellow-brown scarab that is set at its center, and that it is made of a yellow silica glass stone procured from the sand of the Sahara and then shaped and polished by ancient craftsmen. The silica glass was originally formed 28 million years ago, when an ancient comet entered the earth's atmosphere and exploded over Egypt, heating up the sand beneath it to a temperature of about 2,000 degrees Celsius and resulting in the formation of a huge amount of the yellow silica glass, which lies scattered over a 6,000 square kilometer area in the Sahara.

These are the steps that could, theoretically, allow an Asian elephant to give birth to a hybrid woolly mammoth, which could eventually breed with other hybrids to produce an animal that closely resembles the extinct species. A number of scientific hurdles, described below, still need to be overcome to make this a reality.

A carved stone found marking a Bronze Age grave in the Ukraine is the oldest sundial of its kind ever found, a new study reveals.The sundial may have marked the final resting place of a young man sacrificed or otherwise marked as a messenger to the gods or ancestors, said study researcher Larisa Vodolazhskaya of the Archaeoastronomical Research Center at Southern Federal University in Russia. Vodolazhskaya analyzed the geometry of the tire-sized stone and its carvings, confirming that the stone would have marked the time using a system of parallel lines and an elliptical pattern of circular depressions.

Over 80% of the world's ice-free land is at risk of profound ecosystem transformation by 2100, a new study reveals. "Essentially, we would be leaving the world as we know it," says Sebastian Ostberg of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany. Ostberg and collaborators studied the critical impacts of climate change on landscapes and have now published their results in Earth System Dynamics, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

New research, reported in the Geophysical Research Letters, changes our understanding of how the Hawaiian Islands formed.Study leader Ashton Flinders from the University of Rhode Island and his colleagues have determined that it is the eruptions of lava on the surface, extrusion, which grow Hawaiian volcanoes, rather than internal emplacement of magma, as was previously thought.

Billions of years ago, the newborn Earth morphed from a messy ball of mixed-up rock to a perfectly layered planet with an iron core.A new model explaining this mysterious process suggests the core was created as dribs and drabs of iron percolated inward from Earth's lower mantle, according to a study published Oct. 6 in the journal Nature Geoscience. The mantle is the viscous, rocky layer between the crust and Earth's iron core.

An alien world reported to be the first known planet to consist largely of diamond appears less likely to be of such precious nature, according to a new analysis led by UA graduate student Johanna Teske.A planet 40 light years from our solar system, believed to be the first-ever discovered planet to consist largely of diamond, may in fact be of less exquisite nature, according to new research led by University of Arizona astronomy graduate student Johanna Teske.

A tiny, mysterious moon orbiting Neptune has been spotted for the first time in more than 20 years.By analyzing photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., have caught sight of Naiad, the innermost of Neptune's moons. The 62-mile-wide (100 kilometers) moon has remained unseen since the cameras on NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft discovered it in 1989.

False killer whales and bottlenose dolphins in New Zealand form long-term partnerships that might help them fend off predators or find food, researchers suggest.Masters student Jochen Zaeschmar, and colleagues, from Massey University's Coastal-Marine Research Group, report their findings in a recent issue of Mammal Review.

Researchers at a US lab have passed a crucial milestone on the way to their ultimate goal of achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion.Harnessing fusion - the process that powers the Sun - could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.

A decade ago cosmologists began to suspect that the universe might be bizarrely lopsided. Hints of a universal imbalance emerged from the afterglow of the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, which is dotted with hot and cold spots signifying fluctuations in the density of matter. Starting in 2003, data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) suggested that one side of the cosmos is hotter than the other.

A 10-year, billion pound neuroscience project which aims to revolutionise our understanding of the human brain has begun.Scientists from 135 institutions, mostly in Europe, are participating in the The Human Brain Project (HBP).Co-funded by the EU, it aims to develop the technology needed to create a computer simulation of the brain.

What has India given to the world?Nothing.The mathematical concept of zero emerged in India about one and a half thousand years ago, and this summer I travelled there to visit a temple where the oldest known zero symbols are written on an inside wall.

Extended periods of stress can cause bee colony failures, according to new research published today in the journal Ecology Letters.Scientists from Royal Holloway have found that when bees are exposed to low levels of neonicotinoid pesticides - which do not directly kill bees - their behaviour changes and they stop working properly for their colonies. The results showed that exposure to pesticides at levels bees encounter in the field, has subtle impacts on individual bees, and can eventually make colonies fail.

Details of a bizarre Nazi plan to breed giant Angora rabbits in concentration camps to provide fur-lined clothing for Hitler's armed forces has been unearthed in a German archive.'Operation Munchkin', as it was known, was the brainchild of sinister S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler who was had a career as a trained chicken farmer before he became the architect of the Holocaust.

Authorized medical patients in Romania may now use marijuana to allay their pain under new provisions in two of the country's narcotic laws. Romania legalized medical marijuana this week, becoming the 10th member of the European Union to do so, according to local reports.Related: Caribbean countries start looking at marijuana legalization

Ecuador's parliament has authorised drilling of the nation's largest oilfields in part of the Amazon rainforest after the failure of President Rafael Correa's plan to have rich nations pay to avoid its exploitation.Correa launched the initiative in 2007 to protect the Yasuni jungle area, which boasts some of the planet's most diverse wildlife, but scrapped it after attracting only a small fraction of the $3.6bn (£2.2bn) sought.

Pollution with plastic waste is not confined to the oceans but poses a growing threat to lakes as well.That is the view of researchers who found significant concentrations of the substance in Italy's Lake Garda.They say the levels are similar to those found in samples taken from marine beach sediments.

Brazilian authorities on Friday sided with protesting natives and slammed as unconstitutional an amendment that would give lawmakers authority to approve and demarcate indigenous lands.Hundreds of indigenous militants have flocked to Brasilia over the past few days to protest the amendment, which critics say has been designed to benefit a powerful pro-agribusiness bloc in Congress.

"Ancient humans" used toothpicks nearly 1.8 million years ago, a study of their teeth has revealed.A team studied hominid jaws from the Dmanisi Republic of Georgia - the earliest evidence of primitive humans outside Africa.They also found evidence of gum disease caused by repeated use of what must have been a basic toothpick.

Nasa has given the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or Maven, an emergency exemption from the shutdown that is currently crippling the US government.The spacecraft is scheduled to launch on 18 November and final preparations and testing are currently being performed to ensure it is ready.

A powerful solar flare directed at Earth has put on majestic display of the northern lights across parts of Canada, the U.S and Ireland.The explosion crashed into Earth's magnetic field on Tuesday allowing people to see the light show as far south as Kansas, Maine and Kentucky.One lucky photographer managed to catch the aurora as it began. In one photograph, a young Amish man's cart and horse is silhouetted against the luminescent green lights.

Moving away from the conservative ways of converting food waste into something productive like energy or heat, Colorado School of Mines has created minerals out of the waste. Using food wastes such as rotten banana peels, eggshells and rice husks, the team created a 60-gram piece of crystal-clear glass.

The mystery of how coral reefs thrive in "ocean deserts" has been solved, scientists say.Reefs are among Earth's most vibrant ecosystems, yet they flourish in waters lacking nutrients - a phenomenon known as Darwin's Paradox.A team found that sponges keep the reef alive - by recycling vast amounts of organic matter to feed snails, crabs and other creatures.

Scientists have discovered huge ice channels beneath a floating ice shelf in Antarctica. At 250 metres high, the channels are almost as tall as the Eiffel tower and stretch hundreds of kilometres along the ice shelf. The channels are likely to influence the stability of the ice shelf and their discovery will help researchers understand how the ice will respond to changing environmental conditions.

Еhe elongated body of some present-day fish evolved in different ways. Paleontologists from the University of Zurich have now discovered a new mode of body elongation based on a discovery in an exceptionally preserved fossilfish from Southern Ticino. In Saurichthys curionii, an early ray-finned fish, the vertebral arches of the axial skeleton doubled, resulting in the elongation of its body and giving it a needlefish-like appearance.

Resolving a long-standing mystery in human evolution, new research from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute indicates that early hominids developed finger dexterity and tool use ability before the development of bipedal locomotion.

For thousands of years, Judean date palm trees were one of the most recognizable and welcome sights for people living in the Middle East -- widely cultivated throughout the region for their sweet fruit, and for the cool shade they offered from the blazing desert sun.From its founding some 3,000 years ago, to the dawn of the Common Era, the trees became a staple crop in the Kingdom of Judea, even garnering several shout-outs in the Old Testament. Judean palm trees would come to serve as one of the kingdom's chief symbols of good fortune; King David named his daughter, Tamar, after the plant's name in Hebrew.

The Rift Valley's Lake Natron is the chosen mating ground of the endangered lesser flamingo. The long-legged waterfowl may flourish, but to any other living creature, Lake Natron is hell on earth. The lake's steeply alkaline waters are a graveyard for thousands of small birds. Wildlife photographer Nick Brandt used the corpses littering the Tanzanian lake shores as posed models for a haunting new series of photographs.Natron is usually a toasty 80 degrees Fahrenheit and blood-red from bacteria, the only living things that can survive its deadly alkalinity.

Hawaii's vibrant mythology is populated by savage, emotional gods. But behind the fantasy could lie clues to the catastrophic volcanic events that scientists now believe inspired those tales.Ten centuries ago, the small group of Polynesian sailors who first glimpsed the Hawaiian Islands must have sensed the miraculous; a thousand miles from home, the Pacific had thrown them a lifeline. What they saw when they landed, though, confirmed the supernatural: On this lone outpost, in an unending ocean, the ground itself was alive.

Blackened Roman skulls, possibly victims of Boudicca's revolution that scorched the foundations of the Roman empire in Britain, have come tumbling out of a Crossrail tunnel in the heart of London.Archaeologists know they will find thousands of skeletons on the site, which was the 17th-century Bedlam burial ground, but the Romans are a surprise.

Swedish archaeologists have uncovered what appears to be a 5th-century murder mystery at an island fort that's being compared to Italy's Pompeii ruins."It's more of a frozen moment than you normally see in archaeology," said Helene Wilhelmson, a researcher who specializes in the study of bones at Sweden's Lund University. "It's like Pompeii: Something terrible happened, and everything just stopped.".

A 10-year legal battle is drawing to a close in the Holy Land over several astounding biblical relics, including a limestone box said to have held the bones of the purported brother of Jesus and the first-ever relic of biblical King Solomon's First Temple.But are they real or the greatest hoax in a hundred years?Last year, the Israel Antiquities Authority failed to prove in court that the items were forged by antiquities collector Oded Golan. Now the IAA seems to have changed its tune, and the two parties found themselves in court again in early August. Now Israel wants to own the items it spent a decade calling fake.

Conventional wisdom agrees that a fine wine generally gets better with age -- good news for the 6,200-year-old wine samples unearthed in Greece, huh?Researchers working at an ongoing dig site in northern Greece recently announced that the final results of residue analysis from ancient ceramics showed evidence of wine dating back to 4200 B.C., according to the Greek Reporter. The excavation, located at a prehistoric settlement known as Dikili Tash, is situated 1.2 miles from the ancient city of Philippi and has been inhabited since 6500 B.C., according to the researchers' website.

SHAKEN, scorched and boiled in its own juices, this 4000-year-old human brain has been through a lot.It may look like nothing more than a bit of burnt log, but it is one of the oldest brains ever found. Its discovery, and the story now being pieced together of its owner's last hours, offers the tantalising prospect that archaeological remains could harbour more ancient brain specimens than thought. If that's the case, it potentially opens the way to studying the health of the brain in prehistoric times.

The pigment vermilion has been a favourite of artists for centuries, but it is notorious for turning black as it degrades over time. But the source of the black colouring, found in works ranging from ancient Roman frescoes to the baroque paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, has been unclear. Now researchers have shown that the culprit is elemental mercury, which forms under exposure to light and chlorine ions in the air. The finding is the first step to devising a way for conservators to prevent further degradation of historic masterpieces.

Thought to be one of the most intelligent species on the planet, dolphins have been shown to possess self-awareness and complex communicative abilities, as well as the capacity to use tools, recognize and remember "names," and problem-solve.This week, rumors are swirling that yet another incredible skill could be added to the marine mammal's seemingly bottomless bag of tricks: music appreciation.

The world's biggest hornet is wreaking havoc in northwestern China, where 42 people have died after being swarmed and stung in Shaanxi Province, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua.Some 1,600 others have been injured since the outbreak of the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) began in July, the regional health authority reported, and attacks continue even as local authorities take action, including destroying hundreds of hives and improving medical treatment for victims.

Scientists reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have discovered a peptide in the venom of the Chinese red-headed centipede, Scolopendra subspinipes mutilans, with the potential to be developed into a pain drug as effective as morphine.

A non-profit called Empower Playgrounds has developed a way to harness the energy of kids playing in order to provide electricity to poor rural villages in Africa. The organization is making merry-go-rounds that have a clean tech twist -- onboard kinetic energy harvesters that store that energy in batteries for later use.

Warning Instagrammers: you might want to stop taking so many pictures of your food.New research out of BYU finds that looking at too many pictures of food can actually make it less enjoyable to eat.

China is employing two million people to keep tabs on people's Internet use, according to state media, in a rare glimpse into the secret world of Beijing's vast online surveillance operation.Many of the employees are simply performing keyword searches to monitor the tens of millions of messages being posted daily on popular social media and microblogging sites, the Beijing News said.

We know the oceans are warming. We know they are acidifying. And now, to cap it all, it turns out they are suffocating, too. A new health check on the state of the oceans warns that they will have lost as much as 7 per cent of their oxygen by the end of the century.The cascade of chemical and biological changes now under way could see coral reefs irreversibly destroyed in 50 to 100 years, with marine ecosystems increasingly taken over by jellyfish and toxic algal blooms.

Humans have reached the moon and are planning to return samples from Mars, but when it comes to exploring the land deep beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet.This may be about to change with a $1 billion mission to drill 6 km (3.7 miles) beneath the seafloor to reach the Earth's mantle -- a 3000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock between the crust and the core which makes up the majority of our planet -- and bring back the first ever fresh samples.

New England's Native tribes, whose sustainable ways of farming, forestry, hunting and land and water management were devastated by European colonists four centuries ago, can help modern America adapt to climate change.That's the conclusion of more than 50 researchers at Dartmouth and elsewhere in a special issue of the journal Climatic Change.

Land covering an area the size of Italy has been taken from indigenous communities around the world by suppliers to the biggest names in the food and drinks industry, according to a major new report.Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are among the companies criticised by Oxfam for their links to land disputes, with the charity alleging that nearly 800 large-scale land deals by foreign investors have seen 33 million hectares taken into corporate ownership globally since 2000.

Would you give up your seat to someone unable to stand or protect a stranger from attack? We may say we would, but we don't always. Is this just human nature, or can we be taught to be kind?Early one morning in March 1964, a young woman called Kitty Genovese returned home to her New York apartment and was attacked and killed by an armed assailant.

The left and right hemispheres of Albert Einstein's brain were unusually well connected to each other and may have contributed to his brilliance, according to a new study conducted in part by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk."This study, more than any other to date, really gets at the 'inside' of Einstein's brain," Falk said. "It provides new information that helps make sense of what is known about the surface of Einstein's brain.".

Your ability to "read" the thoughts and feelings of others could be affected by the kind of fiction you read. That's the conclusion of a in the journal Science that gave tests of social perception to people who were randomly assigned to read excerpts from literary fiction, popular fiction or nonfiction.On average, people who read parts of more literary books like The Round House by Louise Erdrich did better on those tests than people who read either nothing, read nonfiction or read best-selling popular thrillers like The Sins of the Mother by Danielle Steel.

Best-selling US author Tom Clancy has died at the age of 66, his publisher Penguin has confirmed.Clancy wrote a string of best-selling spy and military thrillers. His 17th novel, Command Authority, is due out in December.Several of his books featuring CIA analyst Jack Ryan have been adapted into successful Hollywood films.

A new shape-changing metal crystal is reported in the journal Nature, by scientists at University of Minnesota.It is the prototype of a new family of smart materials that could be used in applications ranging from space vehicles to electronics to jet engines.Called a "martensite", the crystal has two different arrangements of atoms, switching seamlessly between them.

A committee administering Egypt's antiquities decided Tuesday to re-erect a dismantled replica tomb of King Tutankhamun, placing it beside the former residence of discoverer Howard Carter on Luxor's west bank.Secretary-general of the Ministry of the State of Antiquities (MSA), Mostafa Amin, told Ahram Online that the replica tomb will provide tourists with a better picture of how Carter lived during his excavation work at the Valley of the Kings in the early 1920s.

Scholars are calling a rare Hebrew text dating back to the 9th century the earliest known Jewish prayer book, predating the world's oldest Torah scroll.The 50-page book is 4.3 inches tall and about 4 inches wide and is written in an archaic form of Hebrew, on pages of aged parchment. The text includes 100 Jewish blessings and discusses topics such as the apocalyptic tale of the End Times and the Passover Seder.

Until the recent past, scholars and archaeologists believed the ancient Maya were a peaceful and carefree people, whom had lived a utopian lifestyle. However, the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphic script has shed new light on old and erroneous theories.In fact, the ancient Maya were a people whose belief system required blood to maintain fertile crops, appease the gods and to maintain the general order of life in the physical realm. Therefore, to all intents and purposes, the sacrifice of blood appears to have been a reciprocal condition between humankind and the gods.

The most fragile of Amazonian cultures are the isolated indigenous groups, those few "lost tribes " that have chosen to avoid contact with the outside world. The recent historic record amply demonstrates that contact can devastate these hunter-gatherer bands: within a few years of making contact, 50 percent of the Nukak tribe of the northwest Amazon and 80 percent of the Akuriyo tribe of the northeast Amazon had perished. And these fatalities were not equally distributed among all age groups: the most vulnerable were the very young and very old. When the elderly members of a small tribe die, because they typically are the repositories of tribal knowledge, much of the culture disappears with them.

Despite temperatures well below freezing, Antarctica's Deep Lake remains unfrozen thanks to its extremely high salt content. The lake was isolated from the oceans about 3,500 years ago, when the continent lifted up around it. As inhospitable territory goes, this is pretty high on the list, a lake both colder and more saline than most living things can survive.

Climate change is taking a visible toll on Yosemite National Park, where the largest ice mass in the park is in a death spiral, geologists say.During an annual trek to the glacier deep in Yosemite's backcountry last month, Greg Stock, the park's first full-time geologist, found that Lyell Glacier had shrunk visibly since his visit last year, continuing a trend that began more than a century ago.

The effects of the U.S. federal government shutdown are threatening to ripple out into the solar system.NASA's next mission to Mars, due to launch next month, is in danger of being delayed."We are just inside of seven weeks to launch and we are shut down," Bruce Jakosky, the head of the mission, said late Wednesday.Related: Shutdown a huge waste and cost to science

Traffic fumes render the scent of flowers barely recognisable to honeybees and may have a serious impact on their ability to find food, according to new research.Scientists found that reactive pollutants in diesel destroyed key chemicals in the odour of oilseed rape flowers, making them "smell" different to the bees.

Our world has become a more dangerous one for man and beast alike, with murder and murderers dominating recent news.I was struck these past few days by the callous murder of some 80 elephants in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park.Poachers, it has been reported, poured cyanide into the drinking and salting wells frequented by some of Zimbabwe's 80,000 elephants with the sole aim of killing them and removing their ivory tusks for sale to buyers in Asia.Related: Elephant ivory could be bankrolling terrorist groups

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The number of rhinos killed by poachers has hit a new annual record in South Africa, raising worries of a downward population spiral in a country that is home to almost all of Africa's rhinos.As of the end of September, 704 rhinos had been killed by poachers in South Africa, exceeding the annual record of 668 set in 2012, according to data provided by the Environmental Affairs ministry on Tuesday.

Unlike humans, mice don't have laws or social customs to govern who they mate with. Nor can a mouse ask a potential partner about her age. So how do mice know that their potential mate is acceptably adult?Through tears, according to a study led by Harvard Medical School.

The oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may already be almost inevitable as a result, leading marine scientists warned on Thursday.An international audit of the health of the oceans has found that overfishing and pollution are also contributing to the crisis, in a deadly combination of destructive forces that are imperilling marine life, on which billions of people depend for their nutrition and livelihood.

Capturing an asteroid may not be as difficult or expensive as NASA had thought.The space agency is currently planning out a bold mission to snag an asteroid and drag it to a stable orbit near Earth, where it could be visited repeatedly by astronauts for scientific and exploration purposes. The best way to do this may be to chase down one of the "minimoons" that zip around our planet temporarily before zipping back off into deep space, some researchers say.

Scientists have created the first-ever cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system.Although the roughly Jupiter-size Kepler-7b lies far closer to its star than scorching-hot Mercury does to the sun, astronomers using NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have determined that clouds exist high up in the western portion of the exoplanet's atmosphere.

A nearby alien planet six times the size of the Earth is covered with a water-rich atmosphere that includes a strange "plasma form" of water, scientists say.Astronomers have determined that the atmosphere of super-Earth Gliese 1214 b is likely water-rich. However, this exoplanet is no Earth twin. The high temperature and density of the planet give it an atmosphere that differs dramatically from Earth.

Ancient Mars was home to giant volcanoes capable of eruptions a thousand times more powerful than the one that shook Mount St Helens in 1980, say scientists.The discovery of irregularly shaped craters in the Arabia Terra, a region in the northern highlands of Mars, constitutes a previously unrecognised Martian volcanic province, they report in the journal Nature.

A melting patch of ancient snow in the mountains of Norway has revealed a bow and arrows likely used by hunters to kill reindeer as long ago as 5,400 years.The discovery highlights the worrying effects of climate change, said study author Martin Callanan, an archaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

In the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq archaeologists have discovered an ancient city called Idu, hidden beneath a mound.Cuneiform inscriptions and works of art reveal the palaces that flourished in the city throughout its history thousands of years ago.Located in a valley on the northern bank of the lower Zab River, the city's remains are now part of a mound created by human occupation called a tell, which rises about 32 feet (10 meters) above the surrounding plain. The earliest remains date back to Neolithic times, when farming first appeared in the Middle East, and a modern-day village called Satu Qala now lies on top of the tell.

Volcanic eruptions and reduced solar radiation caused global cooling between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The resulting accelerated formation of sea ice in the Northern Seas triggered a positive feedback process that shaped the Little Ice Age, as a new study by climate scientists from the University of Bern and the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research reveals.

Beaches are far more than just places to hang out and enjoy the ocean. They are also buffers that take the brunt of crashing waves and save the land behind the beach, where people live and work, from being washed away. A new study has taken a stab at figuring out just how much land we could lose this century due to sea level rise, how many people will be forced to move and how much it will all cost. It also looks at what could happen if we try and fight back by artificially adding sand to beaches.

Two very similar species of Amazonian electric fish share a key difference: One uses direct current (DC) and the other alternating current (AC), according to research that formally describes the two species for the first time.The paper was published Aug. 28 in the open-access journal ZooKeys.Until now, the two types of knifefish were often mistaken for each other and placed together in fish collections.

A number of unusual glowing lights recently appeared in the sky near a smoking ship reportedly somewhere off the California coast. They moved in that dazzling way that gets UFO enthusiasts excited, lighting up the sky.Then, one-by-one, the lights disappear in different directions away from the ship.

US space agency Nasa is planning to launch a 3D printer into space next year to help astronauts manufacture spare parts and tools in zero gravity.It will be the first time a 3D printer has been used in space and could help reduce the costs of future missions.The device will have to withstand lift-off vibrations and operate safely in an enclosed space station environment.

The U.S. government shutdown may have taken NASA's asteroid-warning Twitter feed offline, but it shouldn't affect the search for potentially hazardous space rocks much, scientists say.NASA announced Monday (Sept. 30) that the Near Earth Object Office at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., won't be sending out tweets from its @AsteroidWatch account during the government shutdown, which went into effect at midnight EDT today (Oct. 1).

A team of MBA students were the recipients of the 2013 Hult Prize earlier this week, providing them with $1 million in seed money to produce an insect-based, protein-rich flour for feeding malnourished populations in other countries. The product is called Power Flour."It's a huge deal because we had a very ambitious but highly executable five-year plan in place," said team captain Mohammed Ashour, whose team hails from McGill University in Montreal. "So winning this prize is a great step in that direction." .

The fossilized jaw of a pint-size primate that lived about 35 million years ago in Asia has been unearthed in Thai coal mines.The new species, dubbed Krabia minuta, after the Krabi coal mines where it was found, was an ancient, extinct member of a group of primates called anthropoids, which includes the ancestors to all monkeys and apes, including humans. Even so, the creature showed peculiar features, including its distinct molars, not seen in other members of this primate group.The tiny primate emerged during a mysterious period when primates somehow moved across a vast sea from Asia to Africa.

New York (CNN) -- In addition to phone records and email logs, the National Security Agency uses Facebook and other social media profiles to create maps of social connections -- including those of American citizens.The revelation was disclosed by the New York Times on Sunday, using documents provided to the newspaper by former government contractor Edward Snowden.Related: Ex-Microsoft privacy adviser: I don't trust company after NSA revelations

Imagine an automobile coating that changes its structure to adapt to a humid environment or a salt-covered road, better protecting the car from corrosion. Or consider a soldier's uniform that could alter its camouflage or more effectively protect against poison gas or shrapnel upon contact.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a way to induce the ovaries of some infertile women to produce eggs.Using the technique, clinicians at the St. Marianna University School of Medicine in Kawasaki, Japan, collected viable eggs from five women with a condition called primary ovarian insufficiency. One of these women has given birth to a healthy baby, and another is pregnant.

Scientists regularly tap into biological systems to find solutions for human problems. Although they work with plants and viruses in the lab, bacteria have many advantages as a starting point. When programmed in certain ways, bacteria can store data, clean dangerous waste, produce film-like images and even make renewable fuel.