Newsdesk Archive

Arizona State University researchers have discovered for the first time that temperature determines where key soil microbes can thrive -- microbes that are critical to forming topsoil crusts in arid lands. And of concern, the scientists predict that in as little as 50 years, global warming may push some of these microbes out of their present stronghold in colder U.S. deserts, with unknown consequences to soil fertility and erosion.The findings are featured as the cover story of the June 28 edition of the journal Science.

Far more of Earth's water was locked up as ice at the height of the last ice age than previously thought, and current climate change models may need to be adjusted to account for it, according to a new study.The research is the latest salvo from geophysicists who are re-examining assumptions made about Earth's crust by climatologists calculating ancient sea levels. Those levels are commonly used to fine-tune models that attempt to predict how much Earth's average sea level may rise because of climate change.

In this fascinating dialogue, two bestselling authors and explorers of the spiritual realm discuss the big questions at the heart of their latest books: Is there a battle between Good and Evil? Why are some people drawn to the dark side? Do we only see a fraction of reality? Do angels really walk amongst us and what would it take to see them? How much do the daily choices we each make affect the positive future of the universe? Also discussed is the influence of angels and demons on human affairs, the threat posed by science for limiting our spiritual experience and the power of the internet as a tool of global awakening.Investigator of ancient mysteries, Graham Hancock's latest supernatural adventure novel War God: Nights of the Witch tells the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, exploring the powerful demonic forces behind this devastating clash of civilisations. "Angel Seer" Lorna Byrne is the author of three international bestsellers including her latest Sunday Times Bestseller, A Message of Hope from the ANGELS which shows how we can be supported by angels to lead happier, more fulfilled lives.See here for background info and free-to-read extracts from Graham Hancock's War GodFor more information on Lorna Byrne see here. A Message of Hope from the Angels is available to buy on Amazon UK, Amazon US, or from any good bookshop.

"I've been arguing for a while that connection to nature should be thought of as a human right," Richard Louv told the crowd assembled in the courtyard of National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Louv was there to inspire the staff about the benefits of spending time outdoors.Louv, the author of the bestsellers Last Child in the Woods (2005) and The Nature Principle (2011)-coined the term "nature-deficit disorder" to describe the loss of connection children increasingly feel with the natural world.

Boat noise disrupts orientation behaviour in larval coral reef fish, according to new research from the Universities of Bristol, Exeter and Liège. Reef fish are normally attracted by reef sound but the study, conducted in French Polynesia, found that fish are more likely to swim away from recordings of reefs when boat noise is added.Sophie Holles, a PhD researcher at the University of Bristol and one of the study's authors, said: "Natural underwater sound is used by many animals to find suitable habitat, and traffic noise is one of the most widespread pollutants. If settlement is disrupted by boat traffic, the resilience of habitats like reefs could be affected.".

Women may be more "hetero-flexible," or be primarily attracted to men with some same sex attraction, because same-sex behavior allowed women to raise their children with other women, a new study has proposed.The hypothesis, published this April in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, suggests that more fluid female sexuality may have evolved because it benefited women's offspring. Some women who were raped or fathered children with absentee or deceased dads formed sexual relationships with other women, which may have made it easier to raise children together, according to the theory.

Parasites found in 12th-century feces recovered from a castle latrine tell us why so many crusaders died on their way to the Holy Land.It may sound like a bunch of BS, but two researchers have unlocked clues about medieval famine by recovering centuries-old, petrified poop from a castle latrine.

Jan Simek, leader of the team that discovered the oldest known cave art in the United States, says he is far from finished.The 60-year-old science professor at the University of Tennessee still plans to belly crawl through caves or climb atop bluffs in the hope of finding more art in his cave-rich state.

The hair of mummies from the town of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile reveals the people in the region had a nicotine habit spanning from at least 100 B.C. to A.D. 1450.Additionally, nicotine consumption occurred on a society-wide basis, irrespective of social status and wealth, researchers say.

Current policies designed to safeguard Mars against biological contamination from Earth are hampering exploration of the Red Planet and should be relaxed, some scientists say.These "planetary protection" requirements impose heavy financial burdens on Mars missions, partially explaining why no robots have searched for life on the Red Planet's surface since NASA's twin Viking landers ceased operations three decades ago, researchers Alberto Fairen of Cornell University and Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University write in a commentary published online today (June 27) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

This August, a consortium of Japanese scientists, engineers and advertising bigwigs will send a talking robot into space. The robot will be named Kirobo, and its mission will be to communicate directly with astronauts onboard the International Space Station.The moral of this, clearly, is that Japanese consortiums need to watch more films. Rule No1 of almost every science-fiction film ever made is that you should never put a talking robot in space. Never. 2001: A Space Odyssey put a talking robot in space, and it ended up trying to kill everyone.

Here is something strange about the sun that you have probably never considered, as I heard it from Justin Casper, an astrophysicist who studies our star at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.The sun is powered by fusion reactions at its core in which hydrogen atoms fuse together into helium, releasing tremendous energy in the process. That energy moves out from the core to the surface of the sun, called the photosphere. The temperature there is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Northern Ireland police have a new eye in the sky just in time for the G-8 summit of world leaders. A unit of surveillance drones will be used here for the first time to keep tabs on protest marches and scan the countryside for terrorist threats.

BRAZILIANS are calling the protests sweeping through their country the Salad Uprising after police began arresting people carrying vinegar as a remedy for tear gas. The name could be more apt than protesters realise: uprisings of this sort could also have food links. But they spread like a disease.Brazil's uprising came "totally out of the blue", says Marcus de Aguiar at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. "We never had anything like this before." It began when police responded violently to protests over a 6 per cent hike in bus fares in São Paulo. But the uprising continued even after the fare increase was rescinded.

There has always been something otherworldly about Hokkaido. It is the most northerly of the four great land masses that make up Japan, and although separated from the mainland, Honshu, by a strait only a few miles wide, the island remains geologically and geographically distinct. Spiked with mountains, thick with forests, and never more than sparsely populated, it has a stark and wintry beauty that sets it apart from the more temperate landscapes to the south.

Scientists have found a way to reconnect severed spinal cords in rats, allowing them to regain bladder control--a major accomplishment that could one day help humans with similar nervous system injuries recover lost abilities.The spinal cord is the root of all bodily nerves, with an intimate, direct connection to the brain; together, they comprise the central nervous system. Severe injuries to the spinal cord are drastic and were long presumed to be irreparable. In many cases they result in a loss of bodily functions and permanent paralysis.

The government is to push ahead with plans that would allow doctors to prevent major childhood diseases by creating IVF babies that have genetic material from three people.The controversial procedure, called mitochondrial transfer, uses a snippet of DNA from a healthy female donor to prevent mothers passing on devastating genetic disorders such as muscular dystrophy and heart and liver conditions.

The US Supreme Court has struck down a law denying federal benefits to gay couples and cleared the way for same-sex marriage in California.The justices said that the Defense of Marriage Act, known as Doma, discriminated against same-sex couples.They also declined to rule on Proposition 8, California's prohibition of gay marriage, in effect allowing such unions to resume in the state.Opinion polls indicate that most Americans support same-sex marriage.

There's nothing slippery about Elif Bilgin's idea of using banana peels as a substitute for old-school petroleum-based plastics.The 16-year-old student from Istanbul spent two years perfecting a way to make a bioplastic out of discarded banana peels that could, in turn, be used for the electrical insulation of cables.

The shock wave from an asteroid that burned up over Russia in February was so powerful that it travelled twice around the globe, scientists say.They used a system of sensors set up to detect evidence of nuclear tests and said it was the most powerful event ever recorded by the network.More than 1,000 people were injured when a 17m, 10,000-tonne space rock burned up above Chelyabinsk.

The worn-down flat stones of an ancient Roman road have been unearthed in Jerusalem, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced.About 1,800 years ago, the road was one of two imperial arteries that connected Jerusalem to the ancient coastal city of Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv. A well-preserved section of the path was exposed in northern Jerusalem during an excavation ahead of the installation of a drainage pipe, excavators say.

Scientists in Japan have cloned a mouse from a single drop of blood.Circulating blood cells collected from the tail of a donor mouse were used to produce the clone, a team at the Riken BioResource Center reports in the journal Biology of Reproduction.The female mouse lived a normal lifespan and could give birth to young, say the researchers.Scientists at a linked institute recently created nearly 600 exact genetic copies of one mouse.

Scientists at MIT say they have discovered a mechanism that prevents noncoding DNA from being copied, by pointing the copying in the right direction. Almost all of the human genome is made of noncoding, or "junk" DNA, that is, DNA that usually doesn't get copied and encoded into proteins.So when copying DNA, how do cells tell the diference between actual genes and non-coding DNA?.

It seems that stories of the paranormal sprout up every day, and everywhere, in pop culture and the media. Weird news websites number in the hundreds, and there are entire television series dedicated to psychic abilities, hauntings and paranormal investigation.But that's all showbiz, really. The actual academic study of parapsychology -- the established term for phenomena such as clairvoyance, psychokinesis, telepathy and precognition -- has seemingly disappeared since its heyday in the mid-20th century. So what happened to parapsychology?.

A fragment of a fossilised bone thought to be more than 700,000 years old has yielded the genome of an ancient relative of modern-day horses.This predates all previous ancient DNA sequences by more than 500,000 years.The study in the journal Nature was made possible because the bone was found preserved in Canadian permafrost following the animal's demise.

smh.com.auAustralia has warned Japan's "scientific" whaling is a dangerous precedent with potentially catastrophic effects, as the case to end the hunt opened at the International Court of Justice.Australian Government counsel Bill Campbell, QC, told the court that according to Japan's interpretation of the global whaling treaty, any member country would be free to decide its own scientific kill.

A new method for the desalination of sea water has been reported by a team of American and German researchers in the journal Angewandte Chemie. In contrast to conventional methods, this technique consumes little energy and is very simple. This electrochemically mediated seawater desalination is based on a system of microchannels and a bipolar electrode.

The Gulf of Mexico could see a record-size dead zone this year of oxygen-deprived waters resulting from pollution, US scientists have cautioned based on government data models.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's forecasts said the dead zone could be as large as New Jersey, or up to 8,561 square miles (22,172 square kilometers).

Humans have a number of special abilities not shared by other primates. Being capable of walking continuously on two legs might be the first that comes to mind. The ability to speak, produce written language and engage in complex reasoning are a few more.One of our most remarkable skills, though, might be one that you rarely consider outside of sporting contexts: the ability to throw small objects fast and hard.

The traces of ancient corn farms could reveal how many people lived in a legendary Maya city, a new study suggests.The pyramid-filled Maya site of Tikal in Guatemala is one of the largest archaeological complexes in Central America. The vast city-state had a long run, flourishing from roughly 600 B.C. until A.D. 900 when the Maya civilization mysteriously collapsed. A group of scientists recently revisited the site, not to hunt for lost treasures or artifacts, but to look for clues in the soil chemistry that might reveal the population of Tikal in its prime.

BYU researchers have dug up new evidence from an ancient Maya city that may help solve the mystery of just how many people lived in the civilization.Using soil chemistry, combined with advanced remote sensing and satellite imagery, the researchers have pinpointed for the first time where Maya farmers in Tikal, Guatemala, carried out some of their most significant crop production.

It was a stunning discovery: the first unlooted imperial tomb of the Wari, the ancient civilization that built South America's earliest empire between 700 and 1000 A.D. Yet it wasn't happiness that Milosz Giersz felt when he first glimpsed gold in the dim recesses of the burial chamber in northern Peru.

Scientists may have solved an evolutionary riddle of how the ancestors of elephants changed their diet from soft leaves to relatively tough grasses and in the process became one of the dominant herbivores of the African savannah.A study of the fossils of animals with tusks and trunks, such as elephants and mammoths, has revealed that the crucial change in diet occurred about 3 million years before elephants had actually developed the big teeth needed for a grass diet.

On the morning of June 30 in 1908, a gigantic fireball devastated hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited Siberian forest around the Tunguska river. The first scientists to investigate the impact site expected to find a meteorite, but they found nothing. Because no traces of a meteorite were found, it many scientists concluded that the culprit was a comet. Comets, which are essentially muddy ice balls, could cause such a devastation and leave no trace.

A joint Japanese and Egyptian team began on Tuesday the work of removing a 4,500 year old pharaonic boat from the pit on the Giza pyramid plateau where it is buried.Restorers removed a wooden beam, part of a boat built for King Khufu which was buried in approximately 2,500 BC. The boat was discovered in 1954 along with another identical boat in a separate pit; the latter was removed and restored, and is now on display in a purpose-built museum on the site.The beam is the first of several which will be removed for restoration.

Weizmann Institute scientists discover that spontaneously emerging brain activity patterns preserve traces of previous cognitive activity.What if experts could dig into the brain, like archaeologists, and uncover the history of past experiences? This ability might reveal what makes each of us a unique individual, and it could enable the objective diagnosis of a wide range of neuropsychological diseases.New research at the Weizmann Institute hints that such a scenario is within the realm of possibility: It shows that spontaneous waves of neuronal activity in the brain bear the imprints of earlier events for at least 24 hours after the experience has taken place.

Witold Mielniczek, a Ph.D. student and robotics expert from the University of Southampton in the UK, developed a patent pending hybrid quadcopter-car vehicle. The unit known simply as "B" is powered by an 11.1-volt lithium-polymer battery, which is said to provide up to 15 minutes of combined driving and flying per charge.According to Mielniczek, the combination of the special design of B and material selection creates a solid construction that is capable of surviving the worst of landings. When the vehicle crashes from a high altitude, the driving rings detach from the housing and can be easily put back together.

For years, scientists have been puzzled by the mysterious "sailing stones" of Death Valley.Located in a remote area of California's Death Valley National Park, the heavy stones appear to move across the dried lake bed known as Racetrack Playa, leaving a trail behind them in the cracked mud.The rocks' apparent movement has been blamed on everything from space aliens and magnetic fields to pranksters. But no one has actually seen the rocks move, which only adds to the mystery.

An international team of physicists working at the University of Michigan has succeeded in building a tabletop antimatter "gun" capable of spewing short bursts of positrons. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team describes how they created the gun, what it's capable of doing, and to what use it may be put.

Computer viruses do not discriminate. Malware prowling the cybersphere for bank information and passwords does not distinguish between a home computer or a hospital machine delivering therapy to a patient. Even if a radiation therapy machine, say, is infiltrated unintentionally, malware could theoretically cause radiation doses to spike.Medical device-makers need to protect their products from cyber attack, according to recent draft guidance the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA calls for medical device manufacturers to consider the vulnerabilities that crop up when medical devices are designed to be more thoroughly integrated into networks and connected to the Internet.

Researchers at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco have been able to identify and deactivate a brain pathway linked to memories that cause alcohol cravings in rats, a finding that may one day lead to a treatment option for people who suffer from alcohol abuse disorders and other addictions.In the study, researchers were able to prevent the addicted animals from seeking alcohol and drinking it, the equivalent of relapse.

They tweet and blog about street gunfights and murders in Mexican regions plagued by the drug war, keeping people informed about gangland crimes which local newspapers are too afraid to report on.With traditional media often intimidated by drug cartels, social media has given Mexicans a way to stay appraised about the dangers lurking in their towns and cities.

Governments everywhere are struggling to cope with an increase in the number of new drugs known as "legal highs", according to a UN report.The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says the use of traditional drugs such as heroin and cocaine is globally stable.But new synthetic substances are being constantly spread via the internet, the office's latest World Drug Report says.

Hungry people are often difficult to deal with. A good meal can affect more than our mood, it can also influence our willingness to take risks. This phenomenon is also apparent across a very diverse range of species in the animal kingdom. Experiments conducted on the fruit fly, Drosophila, by scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried have shown that hunger not only modifies behaviour, but also changes pathways in the brain.

Scientists have added another piece to the evolutionary puzzle to explain why certain mammal families evolved to be very large, while others remained tiny.In research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, an international group of scientists including Monash University's Dr Alistair Evans proposed a new theory explaining the diversity of mammal sizes - from the Etruscan shrew which weighs around two grams, to the blue whale which clocks in at almost 200 tonnes. Surprisingly, baby weight relative to adult body mass is key.

Astronomers have discovered a new cluster of stars relatively close to earth which contain three 'Super-Earth' sized planets which could, in theory, be suitable for sustaining life.It is the first time that a system has been found with what is being described as "a fully packed habitable zone". The star, named Gliese 667C, is already a very well-studied star which is just over one third of the mass of the Sun.It is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667, which is situated 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius.

On Wednesday, the Ministry of State for Antiquities received five Ecuadorian and Peruvian artefacts confiscated from Cairo International Airport.The artefacts include three Ecuadorian heads carved in black wood that date back to 800BC, and two Peruvian statues that date to 250BC.Official Ahmed El-Rawi told Ahram Online that the statues were confiscated in March when the police at the airport caught an Egyptian citizen trying to illegally smuggle the objects to Alexandria. The objects had been transported to Egypt from the United States in a wooden box.

Modern day reproductive systems are the result of changes in two letters of genetic code that took place 500 million years ago, a team of geneticists has discovered."If those two mutations had not happened, our bodies today would have to use different mechanisms to regulate pregnancy, libido, the response to stress, kidney function, inflammation, and the development of male and female characteristics at puberty," Joe Thornton, a professor of human genetics, ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, said in a statement.

A smashed pot uncovered at the site of an 1800s longhouse could be evidence of a potentially violent eviction, archaeologists have suggested.Hundreds of the homes were abandoned during the Highland Clearances, when families were moved off land to make way for large-scale sheep production.Thatched roofs of longhouses were set on fire and walls toppled to prevent people from moving back into them.The pot at Lower Caen in Sutherland was found under a collapsed wall.

It was not long ago when the U.S. government used education to harm our Indigenous neighbors to prevent the spiritual knowledge and values of Indigenous Peoples from threatening more materialistic goals. How federal education policies and common core standards today use education is not all that different, except now the same suppression of vital knowledge and values is hurting us all in ways soon revealed if not already known to the readers.

Skull fossils found in Africa have provided a first look at a species of knobbly-headed, cow-sized reptile roamed the Earth around 298-252 million years ago.The existence of bunostegos akokanensis was already known, but recently unearthed skull fossils from digs in Niger and other parts of Africa have allowed researchers to create an artist's impression of what the creature looked like.

Robotic animals can help to improve the quality of life for people with dementia, according to new research.A study has found that interacting with a therapeutic robot companion made people with mid- to late-stage dementia less anxious and also had a positive influence on their quality of life.

Different environments certainly have an impact on behavior, and a new study suggests that various settings may be likely to determine whether or not some are more tempted to actually steal, cheat or commit certain violations."In everyday working and living environments, our body postures are incidentally expanded and contracted by our surroundings - by the seats in our cars, the furniture in and around work spaces, even the hallways in our offices - and these environments directly influence the propensity of dishonest behavior in our everyday lives," said Andy Yap, a key author of the research who spearheaded its development during his time at Columbia Business School, according to a press release.

Research scientists believe it will be possible to manufacture a competitive aviation fuel by 2020-2025.On behalf of the Ramboll consulting company, SINTEF Energy Research has carried out a study of the most relevant technologies for creating biofuel for Norwegian aircraft.A recent report concludes that two technologies appear promising based on Norwegian conditions.

The White House and Nasa will ask the public for help finding asteroids that potentially could slam into the Earth with catastrophic consequences.Citing planetary defence, the government has decided that the search for killer rocks in space should be the latest in a series of "Grand Challenges", in which the US government sets an ambitious goal, helps create public-private partnerships and sometimes offers prize money for innovative ideas.

More than 10,000 asteroids and comets that can pass near Earth have now been discovered. The 10,000th near-Earth object, asteroid 2013 MZ5, was first detected on the night of June 18, 2013, by the Pan-STARRS-1 telescope, located on the 10,000-foot (convert) summit of the Haleakala crater on Maui. Managed by the University of Hawaii, the PanSTARRS survey receives NASA funding.Ninety-eight percent of all near-Earth objects discovered were first detected by NASA-supported surveys.

Can a handful of ancient copper coins from a once-opulent but now abandoned corner of East Africa change what we know about Australian history?A team of researchers is on a mission to find out.With its glittering wealth, busy harbor and coral stone buildings, the island of Kilwa rose to become the premier commercial post of coastal East Africa around the 1300s, controlling much of the Indian Ocean trade with the continent's hinterland.

It was a legend. No trace of the city had ever been found, and it appeared only in a few rare inscriptions and ancient texts. The city of Thonis-Heracleion (known by both its Egyptian and Greek names) was not something anyone was expecting to find, because no one was looking for it. So it was something of a shock when in 2000 French archaeologist Franck Goddio, looking for 18th-century French warships, saw a colossal face emerge from the watery shadows of the Alexandria bay.

The A344, which carried 6,000 cars a day past the monument's Heel Stone, will now be turfed over and the high fences removed to recreate the traditional downland pasture.The closed section of the A344 is between the junction with the A303, the main road to the southwest, and Byway 12 which severs Stonehenge from its ancient processional approach, the Avenue.

Dinosaur skeletons unearthed in polar regions have changed scientists' ideas about the range of the ancient beasts. In one of the latest such finds, paleontologists say they've discovered the skull of a young plant-eating dinosaur in sediment from Alaska's North Slope, well inside the Arctic Circle.The dinosaur, dubbed Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, was a massive herbivore with a broad, bony frill protecting its neck, a thick bone above its nose and a lumpy bulge at its snout, thought to be used for head-butting. It belonged to the ceratopsids, a group that included the Triceratops found mainly in the western part of North America.

Higher levels of air pollution reduced the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes and other tropical storms for most of the 20th century, a study said Sunday.Adding to evidence for mankind's impact on the weather system, the probe found a link between these powerful storms and aerosols, the scientific term for specks of matter suspended in a gas.

You think you have interesting work, and indeed you may, but chances are it doesn't involve hieroglyphs, fieldwork at a Belize geological site, a 2,000-year-old stalagmite or coordinating a team of diverse experts across oceans to help solve a centuries-old mystery that may hold important lessons for us today.But if this work, which is that of environmental archaeologist Douglas Kennett, sounds a little bit like Indiana Jones, it is in fact, often a slog. For his late 2012 published research related to the role of climate in the collapse of the Classic Maya (300 to 1000 C.E.), his team extracted and analyzed thousands of samples from a 2,000-year-old stalagmite.

An international team of paleontologists that includes Northern Illinois University anthropologist Dan Gebo is announcing the discovery of a nearly complete, articulated skeleton of a new tiny, tree-dwelling primate dating back 55 million years.The Eocene Epoch fossil was recovered from Hubei Province in central China.

Synchrotron imaging reveals odd couple - 250 million years ago, a mammal forerunner and an amphibian shared a burrowScientists from South Africa, Australia and France have discovered a world first association while scanning a 250 million year old fossilised burrow from the Karoo Basin of South Africa.The burrow revealed two unrelated vertebrate animals nestled together and fossilised after being trapped by a flash flood event. Facing harsh climatic conditions subsequent to the Permo-Triassic (P-T) mass extinction, the amphibian Broomistega and the mammal forerunner Thrinaxodon cohabited in a burrow.

Some 40 million years before rock and roll singer Jim Morrison's lyrics earned him the moniker "the Lizard King," an actual king lizard roamed the hot tropical forests of Southeast Asia, competing with mammals for food and other resources.A team of U.S. paleontologists, led by Jason Head of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, describes fossils of the giant lizard from Myanmar this week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Their analysis shows that it is one of the biggest known lizards ever to have lived on land.

The Parawixia bistriata (pictured), a large spider that lives in the semiarid habitats of southern Brazil, knows that when it comes to living in a crowded neighborhood, fighting is never the answer. Scientists knew that communities of P. bistriata emerge from collective shelters at sunset and build individual webs along permanent and communal silk support lines.

The trick used by hamsters to get an exercise ball rolling are helping to power a spherical robot.Spanish researchers have found a way to mimic the shifting movement of a hamster inside a ball to get their Rosphere robot moving.The electronics controlling the robot replace the hamster and act as a swinging weight to propel it forward.

Plants are often described as being in an evolutionary arms race with the creatures that eat them. Plant eaters develop new strategies for attacking, and plants acquire new ways to defend themselves.But sometimes, non-conflict may be the best strategy for both plant eaters and plants, according to a new Cornell study that uses ideas from economics and game theory in a computer model. The research was published online June 20 in the American Naturalist.

In the UK, Africa is often talked about as a failing continent where the hungry apparently wait around for northern benefactors to save us. Talk of Africa seems to imply that we have little or no food production, that our farmers are clueless, our seed unproductive. We won't go into how patronising and insulting this attitude is. Instead, we will focus on how this failure to acknowledge African farming systems and seed is being used to wipe them out.

With just 121 protein-coding genes, the diminutive Tremblaya princeps, a symbiotic bacterium that lives inside specialized cells of the sap-eating mealybug, has the smallest known genome of any cellular organism on the planet. Tremblaya helps to supply the mealybug with essential amino acids and likely receives nutrients and other life-sustaining molecules in return. And even as it tests the lower limits of genome size, the Tremblaya genome may still be shedding genes.

The term supermoon denotes a full moon that occurs at roughly the same time the moon is nearest Earth in its monthly orbit. The most recent one happened on the night of June 22-23, 2013. An astrologer, not an astronomer, coined the term supermoon, and it has only recent come into common usage. Although this term is of little to no importance in astronomy, its significance to astrologers may be greater, and some may suppose that a supermoon has some kind of effect on people on Earth. But does it? I decided to calculate the values of different influences on individuals at the extreme of lunar perigee (when the moon is closest to Earth, and presumably has the greatest effect on our planet).

We now understand the nature of the giant storms on Saturn. Through the analysis of images sent from the Cassini space probe belonging to the North American and European space agencies (NASA and ESA respectively), as well as the computer models of the storms and the examination of the clouds therein, the Planetary Sciences Group of the University of the Basque Country has managed to explain the behaviour of these storms for the very first time. The article explaining the discovery, the lead author being Enrique García Melendo, researcher at the Fundació Observatori Esteve Duran -- Institut de Ciències de l'Espai, of Catalonia, was published in Nature Geosciences.

SEBASTIA, West Bank (AP) -- The ancient town of Sebastia is one of the major archaeological sites of the Holy Land, with its overlapping layers of history dating back nearly 3,000 years. But today the hilltop capital of biblical kings, later ruled by Roman conquerors, Crusaders and Ottomans, is marred with weeds, graffiti and garbage.

In remote caves of the Pyrenees, lie precious remnants of the Ice Age undisturbed: foot and hand prints of prehistoric hunters. The tracks have remained untouched for millennia and are in excellent condition.

A fragment of a unique and mysterious silver plaque discovered in South Karelia may force historians to rethink some of Finland's early Iron Age history. As of yet, the cultural context of the find has not been explained.Hobbyists sweeping fields and roadsides with metal detectors in the areas of Rautjarvi and Ruokolahi in South Karelia have recently turned up some rare finds.Most recently, the South Karelia Museum in Lappeenranta was given a silver plaque that so far has defied explanation.

Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world.Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn (a former LLNL postdoc) found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA.

On 21 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the surface of the Moon, it appeared as though mankind was on the verge of a new age of space exploration. After all, if the moon could be conquered, what could prevent us travelling to other planets, even to other solar systems?

LONDON: Scientists are currently analysing data to study the exact amount of radiation in Mar's atmosphere.Days after Nasa found that humans who travel to Mars will be blasted with dangerously high levels of cosmic radiation equivalent to 50 full body CT scans that will increase their risk of suffering from fatal cancer by about 3%, one of the top scientists in that team have told TOI that they are currently measuring and analyzing radiation data from the surface of Mars, the findings of which will be announced soon.

In 1972, Heinrich Böll won the Nobel Prize for literature. But before he became a writer of novels, short stories, and essays, Böll was a writer of letters. During his early 20s, which also happened to be during World War II, he was conscripted into the German military. And as he fought, serving in France, Romania, Hungary, and finally the Soviet Union, Böll corresponded with his family back in Cologne.

A new policy will deal with drugs as a health issue, not a criminal one, writes Amy Corderoy.At first glance, it resembles your typical focus group. A free feed, $20, and a gift card - all to have your every thought poked and prodded for a few hours."It was just that out-of-hours corporate focus group experience," says Brendan*. "But this time we got stoned".

Another workday with your drab, dull-looking coworkers. If only your world was filled with the beautiful people - more Kate Uptons than Katie from accounting, more Jon Hamms than John from HR.Actually, technology exists that could almost make that possible -- provided you're OK with an electric shock to your brain. But the brain zap isn't some party game. Findings from a new California Institute of Technology study could one day help lead to new, noninvasive ways to study and treat mental disorders.

Cabbages are better for you if they are kept to their natural cycle of night and day after harvest. Doing so seems to treble the amount of anti-cancer chemicals they contain.The work revealing this also demonstrates for the first time that even when separated from the plant, cabbages and other vegetables and fruit continue to maintain some of their circadian cycles.To protect themselves against pests such as caterpillars and larvae, cabbages produce repellent chemicals called glucosinolates. These have been found to inhibit some cancers in rats and mice, and there has been some suggestion that they reduce cancer risk in humans.

Every year Robert Hodgson selects the finest wines from his small California winery and puts them into competitions around the state.And in most years, the results are surprisingly inconsistent: some whites rated as gold medallists in one contest do badly in another. Reds adored by some panels are dismissed by others. Over the decades Hodgson, a softly spoken retired oceanographer, became curious. Judging wines is by its nature subjective, but the awards appeared to be handed out at random.

Boosting optimism, defined as the general expectation that the future will be favorable, could provide new ways to improve health, some researchers believe. But scientists remain unsure if optimism precedes health improvements, or vice versa.Julia Boehm, a psychologist at Harvard University, and her colleagues performed what she describes as one of the first studies to investigate a measurable link between psychological and physiological health.

The mention of ocean pollution usually triggers searing images of birds and turtles choked by bags, fasteners and other debris floating at the ocean surface. But thousands of feet below, garbage also clutters the seafloor, with as yet unknown consequences for marine life, a new study finds."It's completely changing the natural environment, in a way that we don't know what it's going to do," said Susan von Thun, a study co-author and senior research technician at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Monterey, Calif.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported the curious case of Glendon Scott Crawford, a man with Ku Klux Klan connections who wanted to build an X-ray weapon to "help Israel kill its enemies while they slept." It's an act so unsubtle and cartoonishly evil that Hollywood execs would probably laugh the premise out of the room.Crawford was arrested Tuesday, after a sting operation by FBI agents in which they provided Crawford and his co-conspirator, engineer Eric J. Feight, with an nonfunctioning X-ray machine. This begs the question: Could an actual weapon be made from a working X-ray machine?.

The night sky has been illuminated by what appears to be a much bigger and brighter Moon.The so-called "supermoon" occurs when the Moon reaches its closest point to earth, known as a perigee full moon.The effect makes the Moon seem 14% bigger and 30% brighter than when it is furthest from the planet.Skywatchers who miss the phenomenon this weekend because of cloudy skies will have to wait until August 2014 for the next one.

The European Space Agency is preparing to launch an experimental reusable spaceship next summer following a successful atmospheric test flight this week, officials said at the Paris Airshow.A mock-up built by Thales Alenia Space was dropped from a helicopter flying 1.9 miles above the Mediterranean near Sardinia on Wednesday to check its handling and parachute system, company officials said.

Scientists have found that a common antifreeze compound that might exist on Saturn's moon Titan can get trapped within ice-like cages. This discovery could influence our ideas about the evolution and development of life on Titan and other icy celestial bodies.Antifreeze normally helps prevent freezing, but scientists find a common antifreeze compound that might exist on Saturn's largest moon Titan can get trapped within ice-like cages.

A close encounter involving the South Wales Police helicopter and a man who claimed his dog, car and tent had been abducted by a "spaceship", are included in the final UFO files released by the National Archive.Most of the latest sightings in Wales date between 2007 and 2009.A few date back to the 1970s and 1990s. The oldest was from 1954.

Thousands of workers at a garment factory in Bangladesh stopped working and rioted earlier this week, demanding that a ghost be removed from their building. The problem began when a female worker said she felt sick and attributed her condition to "an attack by a ghost" inside a toilet in the women's washroom.According to news reports, more than 3,000 frightened workers at a plant in the city of Gazipur protested, with dozens of them vandalizing the factory before police used tear gas to quell the riot. This bizarre situation is understandable when we consider the psychological, historical and cultural context of the events.

An archaeological mystery that has eluded experts in Kent for 140 years has finally been solved following the rediscovery of the site of a Roman villa.The remains of a bath house were first unearthed in hop gardens on the banks of the River Medway at Teston in 1872, but after some excavations it was covered over until 1972, when archaeologists reinvestigated the site but failed to locate any trace of ancient remains.

Did that prairie dog just call you fat? Quite possibly. On The Current Friday, biologist Con Slobodchikoff described how he learned to understand what prairie dogs are saying to one another and discovered how eloquent they can be.Slobodchikoff, a professor emeritus at North Arizona University, told Erica Johnson, guest host of The Current, that he started studying prairie dog language 30 years ago after scientists reported that other ground squirrels had different alarm calls to warn each other of flying predators such as hawks and eagles, versus predators on the ground, such as coyotes or badgers.

250 million years ago, a mammal forerunner and an amphibian shared a burrow. Scientists from South Africa, Australia and France have discovered a world first association while scanning a 250 million year old fossilized burrow from the Karoo Basin of South Africa.The burrow revealed two unrelated vertebrate animals nestled together and fossilized after being trapped by a flash flood event. Facing harsh climatic conditions subsequent to the Permo-Triassic (P-T) mass extinction, the amphibian Broomistega and the mammal forerunner Thrinaxodon cohabited in a burrow.

Leprosy has plagued humans for thousands of years, but a new genetic analysis of the pathogen that causes the disfiguring disease has come to the surprising conclusion that its DNA is essentially unchanged since medieval times.The discovery, published this month in the journal Science, suggests that the disease's retreat in Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries was probably the result of human adaptation to the bacterium that causes leprosy rather than due to any change in its DNA.

A mysterious and beautiful 15th-century text that some researchers have recently deemed to be gibberish may not be a hoax after all. A new study suggests the text shares quantifiable features with genuine language, and so may contain a coded message.That verdict emerges from a statistical technique that puts a figure on the information content of elements in a text or code, even if their meaning is unknown. The technique could also be used to determine whether there is meaning in genomes, possible messages from aliens or even the signals between neurons in the brain.

When Benedetto Vigna set out to create a 3D motion sensor that had the strength to resist the stress of rough and tumble yet the smarts to detect human movement, it would have been easy to look for answers in academic papers and the latest scientific theories.Instead, the Italian nuclear-physicist-come-microelectronic-specialist cast conventional wisdom aside and sought inspiration in the architectural splendor of the Japanese city of Kyoto.

Scientists in Japan have genetically engineered silkworms to create red, green or orange silks that glow under fluorescent lights.The silkworm is the larval form of the domesticated silkmoth (Bombyx mori) and is one of only two insects domesticated by humans (the other being the bee). The larvae build a cocoon around themselves in which to pupate, and each cocoon is made from a fine protein thread of silk up to 900 meters in length. Silk is made by harvesting the cocoons (with larvae inside) and softening them so the threads can be reeled. Around 6,000 cocoons are needed to make a kilogram of silk. Normal silk is a soft, white thread.

Puya chilensis is a very large bromeliad, native to the mountains of Chile. Bromeliads are spiky, mostly tropical, mostly New-World plants, the best-known of which is probably the pineapple. But while the pineapple is delicious, Puya chilensis is a bit more...sinister.Most bromeliads have firm, hard leaves, but Puya chilensis is sort of an extreme example. Its leaves look sort of like aloe leaves, but in between them are huge, sharp spines that jut out past them. Most plants that have spines, like cacti, use them for protection, but it's theorized that Puya chilensis actually uses them for hunting.

Université Laval researchers have developed a highly effective method for converting CO2 into methanol, which can be used as a low-emissions fuel for vehicles. The team led by Professor Frédéric-Georges Fontaine presents the details of this discovery in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.