Newsdesk Archive

A pyramid and 30 ancient graves were discovered during a construction project in Mexico and archaeology officials believe they could be up to 2,000 years old.The graves were found in the town of Jaltipan, southeast of Veracruz in eastern Mexico. along with skeletal remains, archaeologists also discovered clay figurines, jade beads, mirrors, and animal remains.

Archaeologists believe they have discovered the world's oldest lunar "calendar" in an Aberdeenshire field.Excavations of a field at Crathes Castle found a series of 12 pits which appear to mimic the phases of the moon and track lunar months.A team led by the University of Birmingham suggests the ancient monument was created by hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago.The pit alignment, at Warren Field, was first excavated in 2004.

I am hosting a new blog on my website by Mike Alivernia. Mike has a most unusual take on things. Here's what he has to say on subjects as diverse "Google to Give the World Telepathy", "If God is Real", and "Beating Back the Barriers of Bipolar". Feedback welcome on the message boards.More Mind of Mike articles coming soon on the Articles page.

If you don't like your what your palm reader is telling you, maybe all you need is a new palm.An appointment Takaaki Matsuoka might be in your future. The Japanese doctor is a leading advocate of plastic surgery palmistry, wherein electric scalpels are employed to change the lines in a person's palm.

If you need cardiac surgery in the future, aortic dissection in particular, reach for the moon. Or at least try to schedule your surgery around its cycle. According to a study at Rhode Island Hospital, acute aortic dissection (AAD) repair performed in the waning full moon appears to reduce the odds of death, and a full moon was associated with shorter length of stay (LOS).

As Albert Einstein once said, time only exists 'so that everything doesn't happen at once'. But the problem of it passing too slowly or quickly has now been examined by a psychologist who looked at how our emotions, health and age can dictate the speed of the day in our minds.BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Claudia Hammond found that time - the most common noun in the English language - speeds up as you get older and passes faster if you are relaxed rather than scared. Her book, Time Warped, also explains how time passes twice as fast if you are in amusing company, rather than with someone who is boring.

A fossil tooth found buried inside the healed tailbones of a duckbill dinosaur suggests the animal survived a close encounter with a Tyrannosaurus rex about 65 million years ago, according to a new study.Scientists say the embedded tooth, discovered in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, is the first conclusive proof that T. rex was not just a scavenger, but also a predator that hunted and killed prey.

Astronomers have found evidence of an alien planet forming surprisingly far from its host star, a discovery that could challenge the prevailing wisdom about how planets take shape.Researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted a large gap in the planet-forming debris disk surrounding the red dwarf star TW Hydrae, which lies about 176 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra (The Sea Serpent).

At the end of the last Ice Age, as the world began to warm, a swath of the North Pacific Ocean came to life. During a brief pulse of biological productivity 14,000 years ago, this stretch of the sea teemed with phytoplankton, amoeba-like foraminifera and other tiny creatures, who thrived in large numbers until the productivity ended -- as mysteriously as it began -- just a few hundred years later.

Scientists have released microscopic images of fragments of the meteorite that hit central Russia in February.A team from the Ural Federal University was able to analyse some of the dozens of samples as soon as they were found.But the technique they used allowed them to assess the rock's chemical make-up at the microscopic level even as they snapped pictures of the fragments.

We open our hymnals to Hymn 379, and we begin to sing. "God is Love, let heav'n adore him / God is Love, let earth rejoice ..."Lifting voices together in praise can be a transcendent experience, unifying a congregation in a way that is somehow both fervent and soothing. But is there actually a physical basis for those feelings?.

Children who grow up in religious cults face diffiulties not only during their childhood, but also after leaving the group.That is the conclusion of research being presented today, Friday 12 July 2013, by the Chartered Psychologist Jill Mytton at the Annual Conference of the Society's Division of Counselling Psychology in Cardiff.

LMU researchers have identified a yet unknown bacterial cell-cell communication system.In nature, bacteria are no mavericks but live in close association with neighboring bacteria. They have evolved specific cell-cell communication systems that allow them to detect the presence of others and even to build up cooperative networks.

Bitcoin has landed in Kenya.The online currency that was, until recently, the preserve of tech entrepreneurs and only the most pioneering financiers, is to go mainstream in Nairobi while the rest of us continue to look on gingerly from the sidelines.

Concerns about oil supplies running dry are receding, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).Massive new discoveries in the US have led to a "dramatic" change in global prospects.The IEA's head of oil markets, Antoine Halff, says forecasts have had to be repeatedly revised upwards in the past two years.

Engineers at the University of Toronto have won a prize that has been unclaimed for 33 years by building the world's first helicopter powered only by human muscle.The Igor I Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition was launched in 1980 by the American Helicopter Society (AHS). The rules stated that the $250,000 prize could only be won by a human-powered machine capable of hovering for at least 60 seconds, reach at least 3 metres in height, and stay within an area 10 metres by 10 metres.

Computer simulations by a pair of researchers at the University of Edinburgh predict that a fleet of interstellar probes could explore the entire Milky Way galaxy within a fraction of the present age of Earth. This may seem like a tall order considering that our farthest interstellar spacecraft, Voyager 1, is still less than a light-day from Earth after being launched 36 years ago.In the new simulation, however, alien probes only need to travel at 10 percent the speed of light to survey the entire galaxy within 10 million years. And, they could get a turbo-boost and save fuel by doing a slingshot off the gravitational fields of stars.

Among the many strange mantras repeated by climate change deniers is the claim that even in an overheated, climate-altered planet, animals and plants will still survive by adapting to global warming. Corals, trees, birds, mammals and butterflies are already changing to the routine reality of global warming, it is argued.Certainly, countless species have adapted to past climate fluctuations. However, their rate of change turns out to be painfully slow, according to a study by Professor John Wiens of the University of Arizona.

In the Altay Mountains of southern Siberia, some 200 miles from where Russia touches Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan, nestled under a rock face about 30 yards above a little river called the Anuy, there is a cave called Denisova. It has long attracted visitors. The name comes from that of a hermit, Denis, who is said to have lived there in the 18th century. Long before that, Neolithic and later Turkic pastoralists took shelter in the cave, gathering their herds around them to ride out the Siberian winters.

A rare, unlooted royal tomb has been found in Peru, replete with gold and silver riches, the mummified bodies of queens and other, less-adorned bodies thought to have been human sacrifices.The pristine state of the site is something of a miracle, say archaeologists, surrounded as it is by other heavily looted areas.

Their stone tools may have been simple and their dwellings made from simple straw huts, but ancient Britons were in fact ahead of the times - literally - when it came to the world's first ever calendar.That's the claim of archaeologists who believe they have found evidence of a giant 'year clock' capable of tracking lunar months and the changing seasons in a field near Banchory in Aberdeenshire.Dating back 10,000 years, it is twice the age of time-keeping systems created by the ancient Mesopotamians, which were thought to be the world's oldest.

After the dramatic display of a frozen carcass in Japan, the ethics of reviving an extinct species are under intense scrutinyThe idea would make headlines around the world and bring tears of joy to the planet's journalists. An adorable baby woolly mammoth, tottering on its newborn legs, is introduced to the media. Cloned from a few cells scraped from the permafrost of Siberia, the little creature provides the latest proof of the might of modern science and demonstrates the fact that extinction has at long last lost its sting.

A disease which robs children of the ability to walk and talk has been cured by pioneering gene therapy to correct errors in their DNA, say doctors.The study, in the journal Science, showed the three patients were now going to school.A second study published at the same time has shown a similar therapy reversing a severe genetic disease affecting the immune system.

Scientists have created a virtual model of the brain that daydreams like humans do.Researchers created the computer model based on the dynamics of brain cells and the many connections those cells make with their neighbors and with cells in other brain regions. They hope the model will help them understand why certain portions of the brain work together when a person daydreams or is mentally idle. This, in turn, may one day help doctors better diagnose and treat brain injuries.

A new bill introduced into the U.S. Congress would establish the Apollo Lunar Landing Sites National Historical Park on the moon.Called the Apollo Lunar Landing Legacy Act, the bill was introduced Monday (July 8) by Rep. Donna Edwards of (D-Md.) and was co-sponsored by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas).

As Washington lawmakers struggle to find ways to balance the national budget, a significant source of revenue may be burning away right before their eyes.The federal legalization of marijuana would offer a large new revenue stream, according to research from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.According to a 2010 study from Cato, legalizing marijuana would generate $8.7 billion in federal and state tax revenue annually.

THE head of Australia's leading alcohol research body has called for marijuana to be legalised to reduce the harm of drinking.Robin Room, director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, says marijuana should be legalised under strict controls because the social harm associated with it was significantly less than from drinking.

The personality traits of children in the first five years of their life may help predict alcohol use during teenage years, a new study shows.The study, detailed today (July 10) in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, reveals certain temperaments of kids that are correlated with teen drinking."People don't enter adolescence as blank slates; they have a history of life experiences that they bring with them, dating back to early childhood".

Yoga improves the mood and mental wellbeing of prisoners, say psychologists who report that after a ten-week yoga course, the convicts reported improved mood, reduced stress and were better at a task related to behavior control than those who continued in their normal prison routine.The work was inspired by the Prison Phoenix Trust, an Oxford-based charity that offers yoga classes in prisons.

Forget fingerprints or iris recognition, the next big thing in biometrics will be a thermal imaging scan that maps the blood vessels under the skin of your face for instantaneous face recognition that would be almost impossible to spoof.Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies, a team at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, explains how the pattern of blood vessels just beneath the skin of our faces is as unique as a fingerprint, iris or other characteristic.

New information made available by Edward Snowden reveals that Skype's turning over video and audio information to the NSA has skyrocketed in the past year, by a factor of three. Given that Skype already helps the Chinese government snoop on its citizens, this makes Skype one of the world's biggest privacy invaders.The information about Skype was published yesterday by the Guardian, in a report that details just how closely Microsoft has collaborated with NSA and other U.S. intelligence services via the Prism program.

Japan is reconsidering to restart Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant No. 2, just over two years after its reactor meltdown.Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco)'s nuclear reactor, which got crippled after a tsunami hit, might get another chance by Japan to fulfill its atomic energy requirements.Related: Japanese Nuclear Plant May Have Been Leaking for Two Years

New research has shown surface ice melt will be the dominant process controlling ice-loss from Greenland. As outlet glaciers retreat inland the other process, iceberg production, remains important but will not grow as rapidly.The Greenland ice sheet is often considered an important potential contributor to future global sea-level rise over the next century or longer. In total, it contains an amount of ice that would lead to a rise of global sea level by more than seven metres, if completely melted.

More than 2 million deaths occur globally each year as a direct result of air pollution from human activity, a team of international scientists has said.But climate change has only made a small contribution to the lethal effects, according to the study published on Friday in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

When Pope John Paul II died eight years ago, supporters chanted "Santo subito," or "Sainthood now!"It looks like his supporters will finally be getting their wish. The former pope's path to sainthood is almost complete, with the Vatican recently confirming that he performed two miracles. Now all that's left is the official canonization ceremony, which has not been scheduled yet. The process of certifying miracles in the Catholic Church goes back centuries and involves an investigation by scientific experts.

International team will synthesise genome of brewer's yeast with a view to creating strains that make biofuel, vaccines and drugsBritain's latest bid to embrace the futuristic science of synthetic biology will be revealed by the government on Thursday when it announces plans to make new strains of brewer's yeast.Researchers will receive nearly £1m to create a synthetic chromosome for the single-celled organism that since Neolithic times has been exploited for its ability to turn sugar into alcohol.

Archaeologists in Poland believe they've made a startling discovery: a group of vampire graves.The graves were discovered during the construction of a roadway near the Polish town of Gliwice, where archaeologists are more accustomed to finding the remains of World War II soldiers, according to The Telegraph.But instead of soldiers, the graves contained skeletons whose heads had been severed and placed on their legs.

Construction work in eastern Mexico exposed an ancient settlement, including 30 skeletons and the ruins of a pyramid, believed to be up to 2,000 years old, archaeology officials announced.At the site of the graves in the town of Jaltipan, southeast of Veracruz, archaeologists also found clay figurines, jade beads, mirrors and animal remains, according to the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH.

Ever since the discovery of the remains in 2003, scientists have been debating whether Homo floresiensis represents a distinct Homo species, possibly originating from a dwarfed island Homo erectus population, or a pathological modern human. The small size of its brain has been argued to result from a number of diseases, most importantly from the condition known as microcephaly.Based on the analysis of 3-D landmark data from skull surfaces, scientists from Stony Brook University New York, the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen, and the University of Minnesota provide compelling support for the hypothesis that Homo floresiensis was a distinct Homo species.

A shard of pottery unearthed near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem bears an inscription that dates to the 10th century B.C.The inscription is the oldest alphabetic text found in Jerusalem and predates the earliest found Hebrew inscription in the region by 250 years.The enigmatic letters, which wrap around the top of a neck-less ceramic jar, were written around the time of King David or King Solomon's reign in an early form of Canaanite, not Hebrew. As a result, archaeologists believe a Jebusite or some other non-Israelite tribe member wrote the inscription.

A massive iceberg, larger than the city of Chicago, broke off of Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier on Monday (July 8), and is now floating freely in the Amundsen Sea, according to a team of German scientists.The newborn iceberg measures about 278 square miles (720 square kilometers), and was seen by TerraSAR-X, an earth-observing satellite operated by the German Space Agency (DLR). Scientists with NASA's Operation IceBridgefirst discovered a giant crack in the Pine Island Glacier in October 2011, as they were flying over and surveying the sprawling ice sheet.

THREE times in the last decade Earth's spin has missed a beat. These seemingly random blips cause days to temporarily stretch and shrink. They have emerged from the clearest ever view of how long a day is.Earth's spin fluctuates as the oceans and the atmosphere push and tug on the planet's spin But these small daily variations hide longer-term patterns, some well known, some not.Richard Holme of the University of Liverpool, UK, looked at 50 years of GPS and astronomical data to see how day length varied during that time.

Earthworm faeces can be used to measure past temperatures, providing a window into the ancient climate.A study shows that the chemistry of small balls of chalky crystals secreted into soil by the worms varies with temperature.A UK team said the granules could be compared with other climatic "proxies", such as ice cores and deep sea sediments.Details appear in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

Japan's nuclear watchdog said Wednesday the crippled Fukushima reactors are very likely leaking highly radioactive substances into the Pacific Ocean.Members of the Nuclear Regulation Authority voiced frustration at Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), which has failed to identify the source and the cause of spiking readings of radioactive materials in groundwater.

As fears rise over antibiotic resistance, two experts on the British Medical Journal website today debate whether adding antibiotics to animal feed poses a serious risk to human health.David Wallinga from Keep Antibiotcs Working: the Campaign to End Antibiotic Overuse in Animal Agriculture, believes that physicians and policymakers have "overlooked the critical role played by the ongoing overuse of antibiotics in livestock and poultry.".

STANFORD, Calif. -- Inside a lab on the Stanford University campus here, students experienced what it might feel like to be a cow.They donned a virtual reality helmet and walked on hands and feet while in a virtual mirror they saw themselves as bovine. As the animal was jabbed with an electrical prod, a lab worker poked a volunteer's side with a sticklike device. The ground shook to simulate the prod's vibrations. The cow at the end was led toward a slaughterhouse.

Many birds feed on mosquitoes that spread the West Nile virus, a disease that killed 286 people in the United States in 2012 according to the Centers for Disease Control. Birdsalso eat insects that can be agricultural pests. However, rising temperatures threaten wild birds, including the Missouri-native Acadian flycatcher, by making snakes more active, according to University of Missouri biologist John Faaborg. He noted that farmers, public health officials and wildlife managers should be aware of complex indirect effects of climate change in addition to the more obvious influences of higher temperatures and irregular weather patterns.

Two satellites have seen "tsunami" spreading on the surface of the Sun after a release of matter into space called a coronal mass ejection (CME).These tsunami of heightened magnetic field and hot, ionised gas race across the Sun at about 400km per second.Analysis of the chance sighting, to be published in Solar Physics, allowed the measurement of the magnetic field in "quiet" areas, away from the CME.

In a pair of recent papers, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have demonstrated that, for a few specific tasks, it's possible to write computer programs using ordinary language rather than special-purpose programming languages.The work may be of some help to programmers, and it could let nonprogrammers manipulate common types of files -- like word-processing documents and spreadsheets -- in ways that previously required familiarity with programming languages. But the researchers' methods could also prove applicable to other programming tasks, expanding the range of contexts in which programmers can specify functions using ordinary language.

Fragments of two ancient stone axes found in China could display some of the world's earliest primitive writing, Chinese archaeologists say.The markings on the axes, unearthed near Shanghai, could date back at least 5,000 years, the scientists say.But Chinese scholars are divided on whether the markings are proper writing or a less sophisticated stream of symbols.

Neanderthals, like modern humans, likely communicated among themselves and with others using tonal languages.New research, published in the journal Frontiers in Language Sciences, presents strong evidence -- genetic, fossil, archaeological and more -- that modern speech and language existed among Neanderthals, Denisovans (a Paleolithic type of human), and early members of our own species.

The rover the US space agency (Nasa) sends to Mars in 2020 will look for signs of past life.It will carry a suite of instruments that will attempt to detect the traces left in rocks by ancient biology.The mission is a subtle step on from the current Curiosity rover, designed to establish if the planet has ever had habitable environments in its history.But the 2020 mission will still not be an explicit hunt for present-day life on Mars.

Scientists working on NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer mission have nabbed their first direct glimpse of the so-called heliotail, the long trailing edge of the solar wind. Much to their surprise, three years of data from IBEX, as the Earth-orbiting craft is known, showed that the tail has a sort of clover shape, with separate "lobes" of faster- and slower-moving solar wind.The scientists detailed their discovery in a study in the Astrophysical Journal and during an online news media event Wednesday.

The heavens are home to an alien world that shines a deep cobalt blue in a solar system far, far away from our own.Astronomers used the ageing Hubble space telescope to determine the true colour of the distant world, the first time such a feat has been achieved for a planet that circles a star other than the sun.Unlike the pale blue dot that harbours all known life in the cosmos, the "deep blue dot" is an inhospitable gas giant that lies 63 light years from Earth. On HD189733b, as the planet is named, the temperature soars to 1,000C and glassy hail whips through the air on hypersonic winds.

I've no idea if anyone has ever done a study to find out if people care more about a particular creature once it's featured in one of those Hollywood computer animated movies.But let's presume that people do and that the fan base for penguins (Happy Feet), clownfish (Finding Nemo) and ants (Ants) is now considerably larger than it once was.Australian study finds keystone Antarctic krill species struggle to hatch in more acidic oceans

Scientists have created genetically-engineered mice with artificial human chromosomes in every cell of their bodies, as part of a series of studies showing that it may be possible to treat genetic diseases with a radically new form of gene therapy.In one of the unpublished studies, researchers made a human artificial chromosome in the laboratory from chemical building blocks rather than chipping away at an existing human chromosome, indicating the increasingly powerful technology behind the new field of synthetic biology.

A UK team is building an "artificial" chromosome to be inserted into the world's first synthetic yeast.Teams worldwide are making the other parts of its genome, which will be assembled to make the yeast strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae.Once complete, new strains of synthetic yeast could help make products such as vaccines, biofuels and chemicals.The UK government has announced a grant of almost £1m towards the project, which aims to be complete by 2017.

A new study led by a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine shows that mammalian species can "choose" the sex of their offspring in order to beat the odds and produce extra grandchildren.In analyzing 90 years of breeding records from the San Diego Zoo, the researchers were able to prove for the first time what has been a fundamental theory of evolutionary biology: that mammals rely on some unknown physiologic mechanism to manipulate the sex ratios of their offspring as part of a highly adaptive evolutionary strategy.

Nervous about that job interview? You'd better have a chat with Mach: an avatar designed to help people succeed in nerve-wracking social situations.Mach stands for My Automated Conversation Coach, and it takes the form of a 3D-animated character, who asks a raft of typical interview questions. The system watches your face via webcam and can recognise gestures and facial expressions, what you say and even how you say it and respond with some useful advice on improving your interview technique.

Scientists say they have found a more accurate way to measure time.We currently use atomic clocks to count the seconds, but tests on an alternative atomic timekeeper have revealed that it is more precise.The devices, called optical lattice clocks, lost just one second every 300 million years - making them three times as accurate as current atomic clocks.Writing in Nature Communications, the team said they offered a better system for defining the second.

Alan Turing and an army of codebreakers took years to crack the Enigma code during the second world war. Just be thankful the Nazis weren't using a quantum Enigma machine.Quantum key distribution (QKD) can already keep secret the key to a code. "I was trying to think of alternatives," says Seth Lloyd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It occurred to me that it would be interesting to quantise the Enigma machine.".

It's the month of July, right before the Atlantic hurricane season really gets chugging. And there are already signs that a busy year might be on the way, chief among them the unusual early appearance of a "Cape Verde-type" storm. These storms are typically sparked by atmospheric waves traveling all the way from the coast of Africa, and generally don't appear until later in the hurricane season.

Major earthquakes thousands of miles away can trigger reflex quakes in areas where fluids have been injected into the ground for fracking and underground waste water storage, according to a study published in the journal Science on Thursday.Previous studies, covered in a recent Mother Jones feature from Michael Behar, have shown that injecting fluids into the ground can increase the seismicity of a region. This latest study shows that earthquakes can tip off smaller quakes in far-away areas where fluid has been pumped underground.

Modern humans did not leave Africa prior to the massive eruption of Sumatra´s volcano Mount Toba 74,000 years ago, according to a new study appearing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Rather, Professor Martin Richards of the University of Huddersfield and colleagues have concluded that genetic evidence supports the belief that they departed for Asia approximately 60,000 years ago. Their findings refute a recent theory which had suggested that there was archaeological evidence establishing the presence of people in the southern part of the continent prior to the super-eruption, the university said in a statement.

At more than 6,000 years old, prehistoric cave and rock art found in what is today Tennessee is easily the oldest discovered yet within the United States. The art is also the most widespread collection found anywhere in the U.S., according to a new paper in the journal Antiquity that documents the art. The extensive cave and rock art provides intriguing clues about what life was like for Native societies more than 6,000 years ago.

Angkor, the ancient capital of the Khmer Empire, has been mapped for the first time using laser light.The technique called LIDAR, which uses billions of reflected light beams to map the topography below a thick forest canopy, revealed that the city was even more massive than previously thought.The new analysis "shows there were hundreds, if not thousands of settlements, mounds, ponds, roads and urban blocks which actually organized a quite dense city," said study co-author Christophe Pottier, an archaeologist and co-director of the Greater Angkor Project.

On 8 July 2013 a huge area of the ice shelf broke away from the Pine Island glacier, the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, and is now floating in the Amundsen Sea in the form of a very large iceberg. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute - Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research have been following this natural spectacle via the earth observation satellites TerraSAR-X from the German Space Agency (DLR) and have documented it in many individual images. The data is intended to help solve the physical puzzle of this "calving".

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shed new light on how diving mammals, such as the sperm whale, have evolved to survive for long periods underwater without breathing.The team identified a distinctive molecular signature of the oxygen-binding protein myoglobin in the sperm whale and other diving mammals, which allowed them to trace the evolution of the muscle oxygen stores in more than 100 mammalian species, including their fossil ancestors.

On June 21 the Philippines will destroy five tons of seized ivory, becoming the world's first ivory-consuming nation to destroy its national ivory stock.The act comes in the wake of the country's being identified by National Geographic magazine as having a longtime ivory-trafficking problem."The destruction of the items would hopefully bring the Philippines' message across the globe that the country is serious and will not tolerate illegal wildlife trade, and denounces the continuous killing of elephants for illicit ivory trade".

FOR countless couples who want to have children but cannot conceive naturally, the birth of Connor Levy is excellent news. Connor is the first child to be born as a result of a new IVF procedure that can screen out genetically abnormal embryos before implantation.The technique is designed to minimise the chances of a failed pregnancy, still a major issue with IVF. But it also brings the prospect of designer babies one small step closer.

Bacteria grown in a dish of fake urine in space behaves in ways never-before-seen in Earth microorganisms, scientists say.A team of scientists sent samples of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa into orbit aboard NASA's space shuttle Atlantis to see how they grew in comparison to their Earth-dwelling counterparts.

A favorite theme of science fiction is "the portal"--an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed....It turns out that they do, sort of, and a NASA-funded researcher at the University of Iowa has figured out how to find them.

New technology for reading brainwaves while monitoring eye movement could lead to improved systems for stopping drivers falling asleep at the wheel.Researchers from Leicester University have developed signal processing algorithms to compensate for the electrical activity created by the eye muscles as they move, which can interfere with the brain signals captured through electroencephalograph (EEG) systems.

How is it possible to be both a present parent and a successful employee? This question has been posed by Norwegian women since the 1970s. Today, men are asking the same question."Forty years ago having children was not a problem for working men in Norway," says Professor of Sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, An-Magritt Jensen.

TOKYO, July 9 (Reuters) - Japan may restart several reactors shut down by the Fukushima nuclear crisis in about a year, a senior regulator said in an interview on Tuesday, a day after new safety rules went into effect designed to avoid a repeat of the disaster.At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant north of Tokyo, the site of the world's worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986, the situation took a turn for the worse as radiation levels in groundwater soared, suggesting highly toxic materials from the plant are now close to the Pacific Ocean.

An international team of scientists reporting in the journal Nature has discovered a biochemical pathway that links nail growth to fingertip regeneration.Mammals possess the remarkable ability to regenerate a lost fingertip, including the nail, nerves and even bone. In humans, an amputated fingertip can sprout back in as little as two months, a phenomenon that has remained poorly understood until now.

THIS species of fly was declared extinct more than 100 years ago. Here's the problem. It's still buzzing around, feasting merrily on decaying corpses.The 'bone-skipper', or Centrophlebomyia anthropophaga if you're in a scientific mood, once developed quite a reputation for eating human remains. Not fresh remains, mind you. These flies prefer bodies in advanced stages of decomposition.

Flapping insects build up an electrical charge that may make them more easily snared by spider webs, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.The positive charge on an insect such as a bee or fly attracts the web, which is normally negatively or neutrally charged, increasing the chances that an insect flying by will contact and stick to the web, said UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez.

Over 20 years ago, a landscaper in eastern Germany discovered a formation of trees in a forest in the shape of a swastika. Since then, a number of other forest swastikas have been found in Germany and beyond, but the mystery of their origins persist.Blame it on the larches. Brandenburg native Günter Reschke was the first one to notice their unique formation, according to a 2002 article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

Researchers plan to launch a tiny spacecraft to Earth orbit and beyond within the next 18 months, in a key test of new propulsion technology that could help cut the cost of planetary exploration by a factor of 1,000.The scientists and engineers are developing a new plasma propulsion system designed for ultrasmall CubeSats. If all goes well, they say, it may be possible to launch a life-detection mission to Jupiter's ocean-harboring moon Europa or other intriguing worlds for as little as $1 million in the not-too-distant future.

Antimatter has been detected in solar flares via microwave and magnetic-field data, according to a presentation by NJIT Research Professor of Physics Gregory D. Fleishman and two co-researchers at the 44th meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division. This research sheds light on the puzzling strong asymmetry between matter and antimatter by gathering data on a very large scale using the Sun as a laboratory.

If galaxies were only limited to the amount of gas they formed with, they would quickly burn through their entire supply by making stars. Astronomers have long suspected that galaxies pull in resources from the universe around them to sustain themselves, but evidence of such consumption is challenging to obtain.

In Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, paleontologists discovered a small piece of amber with something remarkable inside: a 23-million-year-old preserved lizard.Scientists at the curiously named National Autonomous University of Mexico's Physics Institute are analyzing the amber. It's small, loosely trapezoidal in shape, and only about 1.7 inches by 0.5 inches, but contains the entire body of a very tiny lizard.

Archaeologists in Mexico have catalogued thousands of etchings carved into stones that they believe were made by hunter-gatherers 6,000 years ago.The carvings, known as petroglyphs, mostly consist of wavy lines and concentric circles, with some images representing deer tracks.Some 8,000 images were found at the site in Narigua in northern Mexico.

Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that our close cousins, the Neanderthals, were much more similar to us than imagined even a decade ago. But did they have anything like modern speech and language? And if so, what are the implications for understanding present-day linguistic diversity? The MPI for Psycholinguistics researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson argue in their paper in Frontiers in Language Sciences that modern language and speech can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.

A rover named Zoë recently traveled the Atacama Desert in Chile, the driest place on Earth and a landscape that has much in common with the harsh terrain of Mars.From the unrelenting ultraviolet (UV) radiation to the thin, cold air at high altitudes to the desiccated sand and lava flows, the Atacama is not especially "life-friendly," but it is a great place to test instruments for future Mars missions.

Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world's arid regions over the past 30 years through a process called CO2 fertilisation, according to CSIRO research.In findings based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), found that this CO2 fertilisation correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa, according to CSIRO research scientist, Dr Randall Donohue.

Britain and other countries may not be able to increase the amount of food they grow because many staple crops are close to their physiological growing limits, one of the world's leading food analysts has warned."In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the three leading wheat producers in western Europe, there has been little rise in yields for over 10 years. Other countries will soon be hitting their limits for grain yields. Agriculturally advanced countries are hitting natural limits that were not widely anticipated," said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Institute in Washington and a former US government plant scientist.

Dr. Craig Coufal hopes his egg-sanitizing machine may revolutionize the poultry industry.Every year, the U.S. poultry industry incubates about 9 billion eggs to hatch the chicks that will become billions of pounds of meat, most of which was will be consumed domestically, according to Coufal, a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service poultry specialist in College Station.

There could be some complex animals living in Lake Vostok, which lies close to 4km below Antarctica's ice sheet.The possibility is raised by scientists who have sifted genetic material in ice drilled from close to Vostok's surface.They found signatures for organisms such as bacteria that are often associated with marine molluscs, crustaceans and even fish.

Scuba divers have discovered a primeval underwater forest off the coast of Alabama.The Bald Cypress forest was buried under ocean sediments, protected in an oxygen-free environment for more than 50,000 years, but was likely uncovered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said Ben Raines, one of the first divers to explore the underwater forest and the executive director of the nonprofit Weeks Bay Foundation, which researches estuaries.

The origin of our moon has long been debated.Now, a scientist has claimed that Earth effectively 'gave birth' to the moon four-and-a-half billion years ago.A controversial new theory has been proposed that a giant explosion equivalent to 40 billion atomic bombs originating from the Earth's core somehow led to the formation of the moon.Planetary scientist Wim van Westrenen believes this violent event took place approximately four-and-a-half billion years ago and could answer the hotly contested question of where our moon comes from.

In 2 billion years' time, life on Earth will be confined to pockets of liquid water deep underground, according to PhD astrobiologist Jack O'Malley James of the University of St Andrews. The new research also suggests that though the hardiest forms of life may have a foothold on similar worlds in orbit around other stars, evidence for it may be very subtle. O' Malley- James will present the findings at the National Astronomy Meeting in St Andrews, Scotland.

At least two people have been wounded after multiple low-intensity blasts hit a Buddhist temple complex in the eastern state of Bihar, police say.Police said that eight blasts took place early on Sunday on the campus of the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya. Three other explosions were reported at the nearby Karma temple and a shrine with a 55m-high Buddhist tower.The site attracts thousands of pilgrims every year, the centre of attraction being a huge tree under which Buddha was supposed to have sat and gained enlightenment.

A device that trains the brain to turn sounds into images could be used as an alternative to invasive treatment for blind and partially-sighted people, researchers at the University of Bath have found.The vOICe sensory substitution device is a revolutionary tool that helps blind people to use sounds to build an image in their minds of the things around them.

Treating oil spills at sea with chemical dispersants is detrimental to European sea bass. A new study, to be presented at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting in Valencia on July 6, suggests that although chemical dispersants may reduce problems for surface animals, the increased contamination under the water reduces the ability for fish and other organisms to cope with subsequent environmental challenges.

Residents and water plants along a river in southern China that is used as a drinking source have been warned not to use the river's water after authorities detected excessive amounts of two dangerous chemicals.Tests by authorities detected the chemicals thallium and cadmium in a section of the Hejiang River in Guangdong province after dead fish turned up in the water, the official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday.

Toxic radioactive substances have once again been detected in groundwater at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, its Japanese operator said on Sunday, the latest in a series of incidents at the tsunami-battered complex.Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said tests showed that tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen used in glow-in-the-dark watches, was present at levels 10 times the permitted rate.

It remains one of the most intriguing premises for a science fiction film. Near the beginning of Steven Spielberg's classic Jurassic Park, scientists reveal how they have collected the DNA of dinosaurs from mosquitoes trapped in amber more than 65m years ago. These insects had previously fed on dinosaurs' blood and by extracting these blood cells, and removing their DNA, entrepreneur John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) recreates genomes of velociraptors, triceratops, and other dinosaurs. From these genomes, he clones the terrifying creatures that go on to terrorise the film's characters.

Gondwana is long gone, but the rocky remnants of the dino-era super continent still fit together like pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle.Australian geologists recently put that puzzle back together using a computer simulation. The digital model improved maps of how India, Australia and Antarctica fit together 165 million years ago and could lead to fossil fuel deposits.