Newsdesk Archive

The public imagination has been captured by 3-D printing in recent months, as people have used it to conjure up custom medical devices, a working handgun, and even an edible pizza. This spring, Staples became the first major retailer to announce that it would carry 3-D printers, putting the technology in the hands of the masses for about $1,300.To Janine Benyus, a biologist, author, and innovation consultant, the 3-D printer revolution offers great opportunity, as well as risk. She hopes the technology can be improved by modeling it after natural processes.

I have worked as a musculoskeletal radiologist for many years and have seen a wide range of bone injuries. But recently, I found myself for the first time using my X-ray table to look at a 2,500-year-old bone and a piece of an ancient arrow.The bone, discovered in Northern Greece, was brought to me by Anagnostis Agelarakis, a professor and chair of anthropology at Adelphi University. It was a section of the ulna bone, which is the inner of two forearm bones.

Comet ISON, rocketing toward Mother Earth at 48,000 miles per hour, is providing us with some Independence Day fireworks via the Hubble Space Telescope thanks to this timely time-lapse video released on July 2 by NASA.

For many years scientists have believed that our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is set to crash into its larger neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, in about 3 billion years' time and that this will be the first time such a collision has taken place. But now a European team of astronomers led by Hongsheng Zhao of the University of St Andrews propose a very different idea; that the two star systems collided once before, some 10 billion years ago and that our understanding of gravity is fundamentally wrong.

More than 20 years ago, researchers proposed the existence of a space wind--a steady flow of charged particles--inside the Earth's magnetosphere, the region of space governed by our magnetic field. After years of theoretical work, Iannis Dandouras, an astrophysicist from the University of Toulouse in France, has directly detected this plasma wind in data from the European Space Agency's Cluster spacecraft.

While the naming gods have swatted away an attempt to christen one of Pluto's newfound moons "Vulcan," the "Star Trek" universe may still leave its mark on the dwarf planet soon enough.After NASA's New Horizons spacecraft gets the first up-close views of Pluto in 2015, craters, mountains and other features spotted on the dwarf planet's surface could bear the names of famous "Star Trek" characters, researchers said.

A network has been launched to promote academic research in the UK relating to the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The UK SETI Research Network (UKSRN) brings together academics from 11 institutions across the country.The network's Patron is the Astronomer Royal, Professor Martin Rees. UKSRN will present current activity and consider future strategy in a session and panel discussion at the National Astronomy Meeting in St Andrews on Friday 5 July.

Astronomers using a radiotelescope to perform a survey of a broad patch of the sky have spotted a set of unusual events that last for just a handful of milliseconds. The events don't repeat and aren't accompanied by anything obvious at optical X-ray wavelengths. A careful examination of their properties, however, gives reason to believe that they are likely to occur at great distances from our galaxy, suggesting they are the product of cataclysmic occurrences.

Archaeologists digging in the foothills of Iran's Zagros Mountains have discovered the remains of a Stone Age farming community. It turns out that people living there were growing plants like barley, peas and lentils as early as 12,000 years ago.The findings offer a rare snapshot of a time when humans first started experimenting with farming. They also show that Iran was an important player in the origin of agriculture.

A sealed Roman container was opened today to reveal a 2,000-year-old cream - complete with fingerprints. The metal artefact, measuring 6cm in diameter and showing little sign of decay was unearthed during archaeological excavations at a Roman temple complex in Southwark, London.Experts lifted the lid of the round metal pot at the Museum of London this morning. Archaeologists were surprised and delighted by the discovery of the white paste with a sulphurous odour.

Analysis of ice cores obtained from the basin of Lake Vostok, the subglacial lake that Russian scientists drilled down to in 2012, have revealed DNA from an estimated 3,507 organisms.While the majority were found to be bacteria, many of which were new to science, there were also other single celled organisms and multicellular organisms found, including from fungi.

Humans have been affecting their environment since the ancestors of Homo sapiens first walked upright, but never has their impact been more detrimental than in the 21st century. "The loss of biodiversity has much greater and more profound ecosystem impacts than had ever been imagined," said David Tilman, professor of ecology, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

With fewer than a dozen flowering plants out of 300,000 species accounting for 80 percent of humanity's caloric intake, people need to tap unused plants to feed the world in the near future, claims Cornell University plant geneticist Susan McCouch in the Comment feature of the July 4 issue of Nature.To keep pace with population growth and rising incomes around the world, researchers estimate that food availability must double in the next 25 years. The biodiversity stored in plant gene banks coupled with advances in genetics and plant breeding may hold the keys for meeting the demands of more food in the face of climate change, soil degradation and water and land shortages, according to the paper.

Buttercup the duck is able to walk again thanks to a prosthetic 3D-printed foot.Born with his left foot turned backwards, the bird had difficulty waddling like a normal duck and could only hobble.Waterfowl sanctuary Feathered Angels, based in Arlington, Tennessee, asked 3D-printing company NovaCopy to help.

Details of a touchscreen showing 3D images that can be felt and manipulated have been published by Microsoft's research unit.The project combines an LCD flat panel screen with force sensors and a robotic arm that moves it back and forwards.By controlling how much resistance there is to a user's fingertip the firm says it can simulate the shape and weight of objects shown on screen.

A new study claims that exercise even in small doses changes the expression of our innate DNA.The study conducted by researchers at Lund University described the effect of physical activity on the epigenetic levels in fat cells."Our study shows the positive effects of exercise, because the epigenetic pattern of genes that affect fat storage in the body changes", said Charlotte Ling, associate professor at Lund University Diabetes Centre, in a press release.

The ability to control one quantum particle by manipulating another somewhere else sounds like the stuff of science fiction. Now physicists say they know how to do itTeleportation is one of the more extraordinary phenomena in the quantum world. It allows a quantum object, such as a photon or electron, to travel from one location to another without passing through the space in between.Teleportation is a standard procedure in any decent quantum mechanics laboratory. Physicists use it on a daily basis for quantum communication and quantum computation.

The tropical moths produce ultrasound in response to bat sonar, which may serve as a warning or jam bat echolocation.Talk about a multi-purpose tool. Several species of tropical moth can rasp their genitals against their abdomens to beam loud ultrasound signals at approaching bats, possibly throwing the hunters off course.

The Oregon Legislature this week gave its final approval to a bill that might someday allow students to attend public university without paying tuition.The concept, called Pay It Forward, calls for students to pay a small percentage of their future income into an education fund to support the next generation of students.

Look up into the night sky and count the moons. You can see only one moon, "the" Moon. But does the Earth have any other moons? Around the Solar System, multiple moons are the rule. Jupiter has 67 natural satellites, even Mars has two asteroid-like moons.Could Earth have more than one? Officially, the answer is no. The Earth has a single moon.Today.

What if the solution to smog was right where the rubber meets the road?Scientists in the Netherlands have found that installing special air-purifying pavement on city streets can cut air pollution nearly in half.Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology outfitted one block in the city of Hengelo, Netherlands, with paving blocks sprayed with titanium oxide, which has the ability to remove pollutants from the air and turn them into less harmful chemicals. The researchers left normal pavement on an adjacent street as a control.

Doug Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse, this week deceased. Virtually all personal computers today utilize a mouse. It is hard to imagine the world without the PC with a graphical interface and therefore the mouse is an integral part of every modern home, office or class.One of the concepts was developed by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute back in the early sixties. The Engelbart's mouse utilized two wheels located perpendicular to each other. The device could naturally move either horizontally or vertically...

Being a bookworm, jotting down your thoughts and completing other tasks that keep your brain active may help you stay sharp in your later years.A study published on July 3 in Neurology revealed that reading, writing and doing other mentally-stimulating activities at every age helped stave off memory problems."Our study suggests that exercising your brain by taking part in activities such as these across a person's lifetime, from childhood through old age, is important for brain health in old age,"...

New technology developed by Britain's Sky Go and advertising agency BBDO Dusseldorf can turn vibrating bus and train windows into hi-tech advertisements by beaming sound into commuters' heads.The nefariously clever device is installed on a window, where it releases high-frequency oscillations. The brain then converts those oscillations into sound. Lean your head against the glass, and the window talks to you.The process is called "bone conduction", which sounds rather ominous. Rightly so. This technology could stop thousands of drained and groggy commuters from dozing on their trips home.

If a liquid metal alloy is cooled slowly it will eventually form a solid phase. Before it solidifies, however, the liquid undergoes a liquid-liquid transition to a phase in which it has the same concentration but a more strongly ordered structure. This structure has now been demonstrated for the first time by material scientists from Saarland University in a collaborative project with the German Aerospace Centre and the Leibniz Centre for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden.The experimental work, which was performed at the German Electron Synchrotron Facility (DESY) in Hamburg...

British scientists are to make a concerted effort to look for alien life among the stars.Academics from 11 institutions have set up a network to co-ordinate their Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti).The English Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, will act as patron.The group is asking funding agencies for a small - about £1m a year - sum of money to support listening time on radio telescopes and for data analysis.It would also help pay for research that considered new ways to try to find aliens.

Miriam Siebenberg lives in a very unusual house -- unusual because of the fact that her home was built on top of another home, one that existed over 2,000 years ago. Within the ancient walls of Jerusalem's Old City, Miriam and her husband Theo purchased a house after the Six Day War, eventually discovering that it contained a treasure trove of history buried deep underground.

The most comprehensive catalog of great-ape genome diversity to date offers insight into primate evolution, revealing chimpanzees have a much more complex genetic history than humans.In a new study, researchers sequenced a total of 79 great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, eastern and western gorillas, orangutans and humans, as well as seven ape subspecies. The animals were wild- and captive-born individuals from populations in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Ancient people who lived in in Northern America about 5,000 years ago have living descendants today, new research suggests.Researchers reached that conclusion after comparing DNA from both fossil remains found on the northern coast of British Columbia, Canada, and from living people who belong to several First Nations tribes in the area.

Clay-rich marine sediments in southeastern Tanzania contain some of the world's best-preserved fossils of ocean-dwelling microorganisms, including the foraminifera that I use to study ancient climate and ocean systems.Foraminifera are tiny, single-celled sea creatures with solid shells, and they have lived in the oceans since the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago.

Archaeologists have discovered two ancient Egyptian skeletons, dating back more than 3,300 years, which were each buried with a toe ring made of copper alloy, the first time such rings have been found in ancient Egypt.The toe rings were likely worn while the individuals were still alive, and the discovery leaves open the question of whether they were worn for fashion or magical reasons.

Some of the web's biggest names have backed mass protests over internet surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA).The Restore the Fourth movement - referring to the US constitution's fourth amendment - said it wants to end "unconstitutional surveillance".Reddit, Mozilla and Wordpress are among the big web names backing the action, due to take place on Thursday.Almost 100 events have been planned across the US.An interactive map detailing their locations has been published.

The sun fired off an intense solar flare Wednesday (July 3), giving NASA scientists a solar preview to the Fourth of July holiday in the United States.The solar flare erupted at about 3 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT) and was spotted by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which snapped a photo of the July solar storm.

Whales flee from the loud military sonar used by navies to hunt submarines, new research has proven for the first time. The studies provide a missing link in the puzzle that has connected naval exercises around the world to unusual mass strandings of whales and dolphins.Beaked whales, the most common casualty of the strandings, were shown to be highly sensitive to sonar. But the research also revealed unexpectedly that blue whales, the largest animals on Earth and whose population has plummeted by 95% in the last century, also abandoned feeding and swam rapidly away from sonar noise.

A LIVE NIGHT PARROT has reportedly been photographed in western Queensland for the first time since the species was discovered more than 150 years ago.With a loosely estimated population of less than 250 individuals across central Australia, the last living night parrot specimen was collected in 1912 at Nicol Spring in Western Australia.The species has since famously avoided detection, save a handful of sightings and two dead specimens, the most recent of which was a decapitated young female picked up by a ranger in Queensland's Diamantina National Park in 2006.

Cockatoos can pick their way through a series of locks to reach a reward, scientists have found.Researchers presented 10 birds with a box containing a cashew nut treat, which they could reach by removing five different interlocking devices.One of the Goffin's cockatoos, called "Pipin", solved the complex mechanical puzzle unassisted within two hours.Several other birds mastered the task after observing peers or being presented with the locks incrementally.

A team on South Georgia have successfully completed the world's largest rodent eradication in an effort to rid the British territory of millions of rats and mice.The project director, Prof Tony Martin, said the team, managed by the Dundee-based South Georgia Heritage Trust, aimed to return the 104 mile (167 km) long island to the millions of seabirds wiped out by rats and mice introduced by 19th- and 20th-century whalers and sealers."South Georgia, before man came along, was probably the most important bird breeding island in the world. And it is no longer anything close to that," he said. Probably less than 1% of the original population of burrowing seabirds remains, Martin said.

Cells self-organize and grow into functional organs after transplantation.Transplanting tiny 'liver buds' constructed from human stem cells restores liver function in mice, researchers have found. Although preliminary, the results offer a potential path towards developing treatments for the thousands of patients awaiting liver transplants every year.

Following a well-targeted campaign, the UK government has banned khat, a stimulant drug widely used by members of east African communities in the UK.The fresh leaves are chewed to achieve a state of mild euphoria. Its stimulant effect is similar to that of amphetamines.The ACMD, the government's adviser on dangerous drugs, has previously concluded khat should not be banned.Last week, Professor David Nutt, chair of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, said: "Banning khat shows contempt for reason and evidence, disregard for the sincere efforts of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs."

A lizard dipped in wine may not seem like an obvious asthma remedy, but as Cambodian traditional healers strive to turn their ancient wisdom into a professional industry such treatments are finding their way into the classroom.For generations, the secrets of "Kru Khmer" traditional remedies have been passed down by word of mouth -- often from father to son -- with each expert tweaking the methods along the way.

A Delaware aircraft preservation group denies a Wyoming man's claim that it found pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart's missing plane in 2010 but sat on the news so it could solicit him to pay for a later search.Mystery has surrounded Earhart's fate since her plane disappeared in 1937 in the South Pacific. Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932, but many experts believe she crashed into the Pacific a few years later while trying to establish a record as the first woman to fly around the world.

An 1,800-year-old stone carving of what may be the head of a Roman god was recently found in an ancient garbage dump, British archaeologists announced today (July 3).An undergraduate student at Durham University discovered the largely intact head during an archaeological dig at the Binchester Roman Fort, a major Roman Empire fort built around A.D. 100 in northeastern England's County Durham.Archaeologists involved in the dig believe that somebody probably tossed the 8-inch-long (20 centimeters) statue in the garbage when the building was abandoned in the fourth century, during the fall of the Roman Empire.

Authorities in Peru say an ancient pyramid at the oldest archaeological site near the capital, Lima, has been destroyed.They are pressing criminal charges against two real-estate companies blamed for tearing down the structure, which was 6m (20-ft) high.An archaeologist said those responsible had committed "irreparable damage".The building was one of 12 pyramids found at the El Paraiso complex and is thought to be at least 4,000 years old.

These days, getting a Ph.D. is probably the last thing you want to do if you are out to revolutionize the world. If, however, what you propose is an idea, rather than a technology, it can still be a valuable asset to have. Dr. Eugene McCarthy is a Ph.D. geneticist who has made a career out of studying hybridization in animals. He now curates a biological information website called Macroevolution.net where he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees.

The active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms may erase frightening memories and encourage new brain cell growth in mice, a new study suggests.Mice given an electric shock, then a low-dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, lost their fearful response to a sound associated with a painful electric shock much more quickly than mice that didn't receive the drug."They stopped freezing; they lost their fear," said study co-author Dr. Juan Sanchez-Ramos, a professor of movement disorders at the University of South Florida.

The remains of a 5,000-year-old pyramid have been bulldozed by construction companies in Lima.The ancient temple in the El Paraiso archaeological complex in central Peru was knocked down by two building companies on Saturday, Peru This Week reports.It cites a report by archaeologist Frederic Engel, who claims the site could have required over 100,000 tons of rock to construct and was likely to have been used for religious and ritual purposes.

London, June 3 - Some researchers are suggesting that Neanderthals were driven to extinction by a massive volcanic eruption near Naples. The suggestion is one of the topics under debate this week at a conference at London's British Museum examining what forces led to the destruction of the Neanderthals and what led to the triumph of the homo sapiens. One new theory holds that a gigantic eruption of the volcano in the Campi Flegrei area near Naples 39,000 years ago was catastrophic for the Neanderthals.

The shores of the Sea of Galilee, located in the North of Israel, are home to a number of significant archaeological sites. Now researchers from Tel Aviv University have found an ancient structure deep beneath the waves as well.Researchers stumbled upon a cone-shaped monument, approximately 230 feet in diameter, 39 feet high, and weighing an estimated 60,000 tons, while conducting a geophysical survey on the southern Sea of Galilee, reports Prof. Shmulik Marco of TAU's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences. The team also included TAU Profs. Zvi Ben-Avraham and Moshe Reshef, and TAU alumni Dr. Gideon Tibor of the Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute.

A latest study conducted by researchers at The University of Nottingham suggests that exposure to insecticides alters genes in honeybees.According to the new finding, exposure to the insecticide neonicotinoid leads to changes in the genes of honeybees.This study supports the decision recently made by the European Food and Safety Authority to temporarily ban three neonicotinoids that include imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam as they pose high risk to bees.

Blue and beaked whales' behaviour is disturbed by simulated navy sonar, according to two published studies.In two experiments, teams of researchers managed to attach tracking and sound-recording tags to 17 blue whales and two beaked whales.They then played simulated sonar sound through an underwater speaker and measured the animals' responses.The findings are reported in two Royal Society journals, Proceedings B and Biology Letters.

If you think the world is warming and the weather getting nastier, you're right, according to the United Nations agency committed to understanding weather and climate.The World Meteorological Organization says the planet "experienced unprecedented high-impact climate extremes" in the ten years from 2001 to 2010, the warmest decade since the start of modern measurements in 1850.

All animals and plants will vanish from the Earth, which will be inherited by tiny microbes before life disappears completely, a new study suggests.Ironically, Armageddon is going to arrive as a result of too little, rather than too much, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Though only about dozen potentially habitable exoplanets have been detected so far, scientists say the universe should be teeming with alien worlds that could support life. The Milky Way alone may host 60 billion such planets around faint red dwarf stars, a new estimate suggests.Based on data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, scientists have predicted that there should be one Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of each red dwarf, the most common type of star. But a group of researchers has now doubled that estimate after considering how cloud cover might help an alien planet support life.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is announcing that the names Kerberos and Styx have officially been recognised for the fourth and fifth moons of Pluto, which were discovered in 2011 and 2012. The names were submitted to the IAU by the leader of the team responsible for the discovery, who had called for the help of the general public in an open contest that attracted a substantial number of participants.

Space scientists from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) report that data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) show lighter materials like plastics provide effective shielding against the radiation hazards faced by astronauts during extended space travel. The finding could help reduce health risks to humans on future missions into deep space.

Rockets that harness the power of nuclear fusion may provide the next big leap in humanity's quest to explore the final frontier, NASA's science chief says.Nuclear fusion rockets could slash travel times through deep space dramatically, potentially opening up vast swathes of the solar system to human exploration, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

Earth looks like such a solid and stable blue marble from outer space. But looks can be deceiving. Our planet is actually quietly leaking the equivalent of about 90 metric tons of plasma into outer space every day, according to new data collected by the European Space Agency's Cluster mission. Plasma is an invisible, electrically charged gas that forms in the upper atmosphere when air particles are heated by the Sun's ultraviolet rays. These particles travel along Earth's magnetic field lines and are able to escape Earth's gravity, but most remain trapped in an enormous bubble around the Earth known as the plasmasphere that ends about 16,000 miles outward from the planet.

Two men who became free of HIV infection after bone marrow transplants have stopped taking Aids drugs without any sign of the virus returning, according to scientists.Talk of a cure is premature, the doctors told the International Aids Society conference in Kuala Lumpur, but the news will raise hopes that progress can be made towards a treatment that will not only keep the virus at bay but eventually eradicate it.

Head transplants have been attempted since the 1950s, when Russian scientist Vladimir Demikhov experimented with dogs. American neurosurgeon Robert White conducted a successful head transplant by moving the head of one monkey to the body of another 20 years later. The monkey lived for several days, but because White could not connect the two spinal cords, the monkey eventually died.

Scientists have seen evidence for a colossal flood under Antarctica that drained six billion tonnes of water, quite possibly straight to the ocean.The cause is thought to be a deeply buried lake that suddenly over-topped.Satellites were used to map the crater that developed as the 2.7km-thick overlying ice sheet slumped to fill the void left by the escaping water.

Just a hundred years ago, they were searching for it desperately. German, French and Italian archaeological expeditions were mounted to comb the lower stretches of Elephantine Island in the Nile River, in southern Egypt, but without success. They had been activated by the publication in 1911, two years earlier, of papyrus documents from the area that contained personal stories of members of a Jewish military colony in the area from the 5th century BCE. According to the document, there had been a temple in their midst of the colony. But where, exactly? Was it real or a myth?

The centuries-old skull of a white man found in Australia is raising questions about whether Captain James Cook really was the first European to land on the country's east coast.The skull was found in northern New South Wales in late 2011, and police initially prepared themselves for a gruesome murder investigation.But scientific testing revealed that not only was it much older than expected, but possibly belonged to a white man born around 1650, well before Englishman Cook reached the eastern seaboard on the Endeavour in 1770.

In the 1960s, the "Minnesota Iceman" was paraded from mall to fairground, leaving rumors of Bigfoot, missing links and government conspiracy in its wake.Then, just as quickly as the 6-foot-tall frozen beast surfaced, it vanished -- until now.Earlier this year, Steve Busti -- owner of the Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas -- bought the ice man from the family of its original owner in Minnesota. He's going to once again reveal the ape-like creature to the world starting July 3 at his museum.

The infamous Loch Ness monster often appears, according to legend, accompanied by Earth tremors and swirling bubbles from the Scottish lake of the same name.However, at least one researcher believes the shaking ground and bubbles aren't signs of a monster but rather an active fault underlying Loch Ness and other nearby lakes.Italian geologist Luigi Piccardi credits the Great Glen fault system for reported sightings of the legendary beast, Scientific American reports.

University of Utah researchers developed a new weapon to fight poachers who kill elephants, hippos, rhinos and other wildlife. By measuring radioactive carbon-14 deposited in tusks and teeth by open-air nuclear bomb tests, the method reveals the year an animal died, and thus whether the ivory was taken illegally."This could be used in specific cases of ivory seizures to determine when the ivory was obtained and thus whether it is legal," says geochemist Thure Cerling, senior author of a study about the new method. It was published online the week of July 1 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists taking stock of cetaceans off California's coast captured an amazing sight from the air: a pod of dolphins enjoying a free ride from a migrating gray whale.In the photo, a dozen long-beaked common dolphins cruise in front of the gray whale, pushed along by the bigger animal's bow wave. The image was taken from about 600 feet (182 meters) above the water near Catalina Island and published last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Regular marijuana use is associated with favorable indices related to diabetic control, say investigators. They found that current marijuana users had significantly lower fasting insulin and were less likely to be insulin resistant, even after excluding patients with a diagnosis of diabetes mellitus. Their findings are reported in the May issue of The American Journal of Medicine.

XILINHOT, China -- By many measures, this northern Chinese city is an ideal candidate for being China's Wyoming.It has more brown coal reserves than any other Chinese region, and it is only 600 kilometers away from power-hungry Beijing. The sparsely populated landscape here provides enough space for new coal mines and downstream businesses.There's just one problem: The coal industry consumes huge amounts of water, while this land is one of China's driest. Informal ads offering well-drilling services hang everywhere outside of Xilinhot's coal fields, signaling how pressing the conflict is.

The last surviving creatures on Earth will be tiny organisms living deep underground, according to scientists.Researchers used a computer model to assess our planet's fate billions of years from now.They found that as the Sun becomes hotter and brighter, only microbes would be able cope with the extreme conditions that the solar changes would bring.The research is being presented at the National Astronomy Meeting.

Every year for the past 100 years or so, the little city of Yoro, Honduras, has experienced some very strange weather.Typically occurring in May or June, "lluvia de peces" or "rain of fish" is an annual weather event in which hundreds of fish rain from the sky onto the city's streets in the wake of severe thunderstorms.

It's a weird, lopsided fight if ever there was one: seagulls divebombing to attack and feed on the fat of 50-ton whales and their babies. And the birds are winning.The battle, new in recent years, is playing out in the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina's Patagonia region, and is not known to be happening in waters elsewhere in the world that are home to the mighty mammals.

A new fossilized, cigar-shaped creature that lived about 520 million years ago has been unearthed in Morocco.The new-found species, Helicocystis moroccoensis, has "characteristics that place it as the most primitive echinoderm that has fivefold symmetry," said study co-author Andrew Smith, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, referring to the group of animals that includes starfish and sea urchins. Modern echinoderms typically have five-point symmetry, such as the five arms of the starfish or the sand dollar's distinctive pattern.

For an astrobiologist, going into the field doesn't have to mean going to another planet.There's plenty to learn about life in the cosmos by studying what our planet has to offer. To help in this exploration, the Lewis and Clark Fund supports the field work of early career scientists. The eight awardees from last year traveled to different corners of the world, from South Africa to the Swedish Lapland. They've come back with data, technical know-how, and a few traveler's tales.

Scientists have obtained the sharpest view yet of features in the Sun's atmosphere using an experimental camera launched on a short-lived rocket.The system returned just five minutes of data, but this was enough to identify a fascinating new phenomenon the researchers refer to as "sparkles".These are bright points that appear along magnetic field lines where huge amounts of energy are released.

A find in Egypt may be one of the greatest ancient treasures yet discovered, a 4,500-year-old boat that carried the mummified bodies of the pharaohs.Scientists are removing the first fragments of wood from a pit in the rocks near the pyramids of Giza where one of the "solar" boats of the pharaoh Cheops, or Khufu, was buried.Over the next two years, the remainder of the boat will be excavated and digital technology will be used to reconstruct the vessel.

As a schoolboy, Akihiro Matsumura spent hundreds of hours learning the intricate Chinese characters that make up a part of written Japanese.Now, the graduate student can rely on his smartphone, tablet and laptop to remember them for him."Sometimes I don't even bother to take notes in seminars. I just take out my tablet to shoot pictures of what instructors write on blackboards," he told AFP.

As privacy advocates and security experts debate the validity of the National Security Agency's massive data gathering operations, the agency is putting the finishing touches on its biggest data farm yet.The gargantuan $1.2 billion complex at a National Guard base 26 miles south of Salt Lake City features 1.5 million square feet of top secret space. High-performance NSA computers alone will fill up 100,000 square feet.

The vast and glittering Ivanpah solar facility in California will soon start sending electrons to the grid, likely by the end of the summer. When all three of its units are operating by the end of the year, its 392-megawatt output will make it the largest concentrating solar power plant in the world, providing enough energy to power 140,000 homes. And it is pretty much smack in the middle of nowhere.

An estimated two-thirds of all Americans are overweight or obese and many find it difficult to lose weight and keep it off. They've tried fad diets, exercise programs, diet pills and other methods but the battle continues. Now, a new study suggests that watching an avatar model weight-loss behavior in a virtual community might help some women shed pounds in the real world.

The exploding popularity of hand-held digital devices could lead to a big jump in sleep disorders, with experts warning the light emitted from digital screens can have a disturbing effect on the body clock.Leading Australian researcher Professor Shantha Rajaratnam says there is growing evidence that the night time use of portable digital devices is likely to compound the problems associated with artificial lighting.

Quantum weirdness can generate a molecule in space that shouldn't exist by the classic rules of chemistry. If interstellar space is really a kind of quantum chemistry lab, that might also account for a host of other organic molecules glimpsed in space.Interstellar space should be too cold for most chemical reactions to occur, as the low temperature makes it tough for molecules drifting through space to acquire the energy needed to break their bonds. "There is a standard law that says as you lower the temperature, the rates of reactions should slow down," says Dwayne Heard of the University of Leeds, UK.

A find in Egypt may be one of the greatest ancient treasures yet discovered, a 4,500-year-old boat that carried the mummified bodies of the pharaohs.Scientists are removing the first fragments of wood from a pit in the rocks near the pyramids of Giza where one of the "solar" boats of the pharaoh Cheops, or Khufu, was buried.Over the next two years, the remainder of the boat will be excavated and digital technology will be used to reconstruct the vessel. However, there is a race against time as water and insect damage could be eroding the ancient wood.

With the score tied at 1-1, it has gone to a penalty shootout in a tense football match between Israel and Australia. As the Australian goalkeeper braces for the shot, the Israeli striker pauses. Then he breaks into a dance instead of kicking the ball.Perhaps he can be forgiven: he is a robot, after all. Welcome to the RoboCup, where more than 1,000 football-playing robots from 40 countries have descended on the Dutch technology mecca of Eindhoven this week with one goal in mind: to beat the humans. Eventually.

Finding extrasolar planets has become so commonplace that it seems astronomers merely have to look up and another world is discovered. However, results from Gemini Observatory's recently completed Planet-Finding Campaign - the deepest, most extensive direct imaging survey to date - show the vast outlying orbital space around many types of stars is largely devoid of gas-giant planets, which apparently tend to dwell close to their parent stars.Finding extrasolar planets has become so commonplace that it seems astronomers merely have to look up and another world is discovered.

Five Japanese volcanoes are a bit stouter than they were just a few years ago. Within a day of the 2011 megaquake, they shrank by up to 15 centimetres. The same thing happened to a string of Chilean volcanoes after a magnitude 8.8 quake ripped through the centre of the country in 2010.This sinking effect could be common to most big earthquakes. "There's every reason to suspect this is a widespread feature," says Matt Pritchard of Cornell University in New York, who studied the Chilean volcanoes. Nobody had noticed the subsidence before, bar a few hints in the 1990s, because satellite imaging was not sensitive enough to detect it.

For the first time, scientists have watched the Earth heal itself after an earthquake.The process is similar to the body repairing a cut, researchers from China and the United States reported this week in the journal Science. During an earthquake, the ground tears apart along a fault, leaving a jagged series of fractures. After China's devastating magnitude 7.9 Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, fluids filled the fractured fault, like blood gushing into a wound, the team found by drilling into the fault.

Kim Nam-Hee pulls no punches as she warns a classroom of wide-eyed South Korean 10-year-olds that they stand on the edge of an addiction that will turn them all into "mindless slaves".The grim presentation by the social campaigner follows a survey with the loaded title: "Who's your real family?" It asked the students to compare the hours they spend on their smartphones with the time they spend interacting with relatives.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration and members of Congress are pressing India to curb its generic medication industry. The move comes at the behest of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, which have drowned out warnings from public health experts that inexpensive drugs from India are essential to providing life-saving treatments around the world.Low-cost generics from India have dramatically lowered medical costs in developing countries and proved critical to global AIDS relief programs; about 98 percent of the drugs purchased by President George W. Bush's landmark PEPFAR AIDS relief program are generics from India. Before Indian companies rolled out generic versions priced at $1 a day, AIDS medication cost about $10,000 per person per year.

What do human evolution and baseball have in common? Pretty much everything, according to a new Harvard study.While anybody who's ever watched a chimpanzee fling poop at the local zoo can confirm that our primate cousins will sometimes nail an unlucky target, it's also quite obvious that their throwing style will not land them any major league pitching contracts.

Recent discoveries point to the possibility that a great many, maybe even most, non-avian dinosaurs had feathers or something similar as part of their body covering.As I've recently been going heavily on the feathers theme, it seemed appropriate to deal with a major question in dinosaur palaeontology that is currently being considered by many researchers. There are no hard and fast answers, and as with the most interesting ideas out there, some of the data is contradictory or can be seen to support either contention in context. The simple question is, were a great many, even most, non-avian dinosaurs feathered to some degree, or at least, covered in some kind of feather-like covering?

Tracking the growth of dinosaurs and how they changed as they grew is difficult. Using a combination of biomechanical analysis and bone histology, palaeontologists from Beijing, Bristol, and Bonn have shown how one of the best-known dinosaurs switched from four feet to two as it grew.Psittacosaurus, the 'parrot dinosaur' is known from more than 1000 specimens from the Cretaceous, 100 million years ago, of China and other parts of east Asia. As part of his PhD thesis at the University of Bristol, Qi Zhao, now on the staff of the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing, carried out the intricate study on bones of babies, juveniles and adults.

Cats may try to hide their true feelings, but a recent study found that cats do actually pay attention to their owners, distinguishing them from all other people.The study, which will be published in the July issue of Animal Cognition, is one of the few to examine the cat/human social dynamic from the feline's perspective. Cats may not do what we tell them to, but they usually adore their human caretakers.Co-author Atsuko Saito of The University of Tokyo explained to Discovery News that dogs have evolved, and are bred, "to follow their owner's orders, but cats have not been. So sometimes cats appear aloof, but they have special relationships with their owners.".

The Great green wall project is one of the vital economic schemes and African nations hold high hopes on it due to its countless economic benefits, as it will contribute to the elimination of drought and desertification that have many negative effects on the continent.Therefore, African leaders gathered in the Chadian capital last May N'Djamena to seek an urgent end to the environmental phenomenon.

Some of Britain's best-loved trees could be cloned in an effort to reproduce a range of our most successful and sturdy oaks, yews and firs.The £2m scheme to reproduce and grow again all of Britain's biggest, oldest, tallest and most ecologically important trees has been devised by the US tree conservationist David Milarch, who hopes to reproduce all the UK's "super-trees" and then offer tens of thousands of their genetically identical offspring free to schools, cities and landowners. Famous trees that could be cloned include the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest where Robin Hood is said to have sheltered, a 3,000-year-old yew in Berkshire and a majestic 209ft fir in the Scottish Highlands.

The Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm has 3D-scanned its collection of Egyptian mummies and will soon allow visitors to see below their wraps.The museum scanned the mummies with X-rays and took photos, combining the two together to create high-resolution three-dimensional digital models. The museum calls this process "reality capture".

A treasure hunter armed with a metal detector has unearthed a rare piece of Viking gold that is more than 1,000 years old.Tom Crawford was sweeping farmland in County Down last year when he found the small ingot which may have been used as currency during the 9th and 10th centuries.Experts said only a few such nuggets had been found in Ireland.

The Wadi al-Natrun, a geological depression west of the Nile delta, is one of the cradles of Coptic monasticism. In the 4th century hermits were retreating here is search of asceticism and solitude, but soon the monasteries that developed out of these anchoretic communities, became centres of ecclesiastical culture. One of them, Deir al-Surian (the Syrian monastery) holds a special place among them.

Can a handful of ancient African coins, discovered almost 70 years ago by a lone soldier on a remote island, rewrite history?A weathered, hand-drawn map, with an "X" marking the spot on the Australian island where the African coins were discovered, might help an international team of researchers, who will travel to the island this summer, answer that question.

A ground-breaking archaeological discovery in Cambodia has revealed a colossal 700-year old urban landscape connecting ancient cities and temples to Angkor Wat. Lara Dunston joins the excavation team for the first site visit by a British newspaperIt's 7am at Angkor Wat and there's not a tourist in sight. It's blissfully quiet, the first clear June morning after two days of torrential rains. The only souls around are a small group of Buddhist pilgrims, lighting incense at the rear of the spectacular Khmer temple. The bleary-eyed early-risers, who woke in darkness to board tour buses to Angkor archaeological park for sunrise photo ops, have already trundled back to their breakfast buffets.

Chemists are hopeful their new energy-efficient method to desalinate water can be scaled up for personal or even municipal usesThe method, which creates a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques.The technique, described in the journal Angewandte Chemie, requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery.