Newsdesk Archive

Small fires in the Amazon rain forest are having a huge impact.A new satellite imaging technique has allowed scientists to see Amazonian fires burning beneath the jungle canopy, called "understory fires," which were previously difficult to detect. These fires destroy several times more forest than is taken out by deforestation each year, according to a new study, published recently in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

The trees died first. One hundred million of them in the eastern and midwestern United States. The culprit: the emerald ash borer, a beetle that entered the U.S. through Detroit in 2002 and quickly spread to Iowa, New York, Virginia and nearly every state between. The bug attacks all 22 species of North American ash and kills nearly every tree it infests.Then came the humans. In the 15 states infected with the bug starting, an additional 15,000 people died from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 more from lower respiratory disease compared with uninfected areas of the country.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA research indicates hunks of frozen carbon dioxide -- dry ice -- may glide down some Martian sand dunes on cushions of gas similar to miniature hovercraft, plowing furrows as they go.Researchers deduced this process could explain one enigmatic class of gullies seen on Martian sand dunes by examining images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and performing experiments on sand dunes in Utah and California."I have always dreamed of going to Mars," said Serina Diniega, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and lead author of a report published online by the journal Icarus. "Now I dream of snowboarding down a Martian sand dune on a block of dry ice." .

Researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa NASA Astrobiology Institute (UHNAI) have discovered high concentrations of boron in a Martian meteorite. When present in its oxidized form (borate), boron may have played a key role in the formation of RNA, one of the building blocks for life. The work was published on June 6 in PLOS One.The Antarctic Search for Meteorites team found the Martian meteorite used in this study in Antarctica during its 2009-2010 field season. The minerals it contains, as well as its chemical composition, clearly show that it is of Martian origin.

PASADENA, Calif. -- Researchers using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have found that temperatures in the Martian atmosphere regularly rise and fall not just once each day, but twice."We see a temperature maximum in the middle of the day, but we also see a temperature maximum a little after midnight," said Armin Kleinboehl of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is the lead author of a new report on these findings.Temperatures swing by as much as 58 degrees Fahrenheit (32 kelvins) in this odd, twice-a-day pattern, as detected by the orbiter's Mars Climate Sounder instrument.

Research from North Carolina State University, the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) and the University of South Florida shows that outpatient treatment of mental illness significantly reduces arrest rates for people with mental health problems and saves taxpayers money."This study shows that providing mental health care is not only in the best interest of people with mental illness, but in the best interests of society," says Dr. Sarah Desmarais, an assistant professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

A simple brain scan may offer a way to predict which people being treated for depression will respond to drugs, and which will respond to cognitive behavioural therapy.Neurologist Helen Mayberg from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her colleagues have run the first systematic, well-controlled study to identify the first potential biomarker that distinguishes between treatment responses. The work is published in JAMA PsychiatryPsychiatrists are desperate for such biomarkers, because fewer than 40% of people with depression go into remission after initial treatment.

Last July, a record melting occurred on the Greenland ice sheet. Even in some of the highest and coldest areas, field parties observed rainfall with air temperatures several degrees above the freezing point. A month before, it was as though Greenland expert Jason Box had a crystal ball; he predicted this complete surface melting in a scientific publication. Box's research then got broader public visibility after climate activist and writer Bill McKibben covered it in Rolling Stone magazine.The basic premise of Box's study was that observations reveal a progressive darkening of Greenland ice. Darkening causes the white snow surface to absorb more sunlight which in turn increases melting. Given that this process is likely to continue, the impact on Greenland melt, and subsequent sea level rise, will be profound.

One of the biggest science projects in human history is ready to begin. Scientists from around the world announced today that they have completed the final design specs for what will become the largest particle accelerator ever built, the International Linear Collider, a planned 19.3-mile-long (31 km) machine that will be used to reveal the properties of dark matter and other fundamental particles that make up the universe. "The technology is there, the R&D milestones have been achieved, the physics case is clear, and we could start construction tomorrow," said Barry Barish, a US physicist and the leader of the accelerator's global design effort, in a statement.

The U.N. recently suggested (not for the first time) that we put a bit more crunchy insect protein into our diets. Eating bugs could provide a sustainable source of snackage--they produce less greenhouse gas than cattle, those four-legged methane-factories, and don't require as much farmland as animals. In fact, you can raise insects right in your kitchen!That's the goal of Lepsis, a prototype countertop grasshopper breeder from designer Mansour Ourasanah in collaboration with KitchenAid.

Stem cells, the precursors to other kinds of cells in the human body, promise near-miracle medical treatments such as regenerating organs or repairing nerves.But stem cell medicine is still in the early stages. Culturing the right kind of cell remains difficult and so far only a few procedures are FDA-approved. Odds are it will be several years before a wide range of ailments can be treated with stem cells.

Pope Francis, while delivering a homily at his residence in the Vatican, said the Catholic Church should not seek wealth.Pope Francis also noted that Saint Peter did not have a bank account.

Pigs fed a diet of only genetically modified grain showed markedly higher stomach inflammation than pigs who dined on conventional feed, according to a new study by a team of Australian scientists and U.S. researchers.The study adds to an intensifying public debate over the impact of genetically modified crops, which are widely used by U.S. and Latin American farmers and in many other countries around the world.

Climate change is likely to worsen floods on rivers such as the Ganges, the Nile and the Amazon this century while a few, including the now-inundated Danube, may become less prone, a Japanese-led scientific study said on Sunday.The findings will go some way to help countries prepare for deluges that have killed thousands of people worldwide and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage every year in the past decade, experts wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change

The lush marshes of Iraq are regarded by some as the original Garden of Eden, but they were drained and decimated by Saddam Hussein. Now a major restoration programme has seen people and wildlife return to one of the world's most famous wetlands.Ahead of me stretches a channel through the reeds - Phragmites reeds that grow in the marshes near my home in England.But unlike those at home, these are over 4m tall and seem to reach the sky above me as we gently glide through the avenue of still water they majestically flank.

Flying low and slow above the wild, pristine terrain of Alaska's North Slope in a specially instrumented NASA plane, research scientist Charles Miller of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., surveys the endless whiteness of tundra and frozen permafrost below. On the horizon, a long, dark line appears. The plane draws nearer, and the mysterious object reveals itself to be a massive herd of migrating caribou, stretching for miles. It's a sight Miller won't soon forget.

Since 1996, farmers worldwide have planted more than a billion acres (400 million hectares) of genetically modified corn and cotton that produce insecticidal proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt for short. Bt proteins, used for decades in sprays by organic farmers, kill some devastating pests but are considered environmentally friendly and harmless to people. However, some scientists feared that widespread use of these proteins in genetically modified crops would spur rapid evolution of resistance in pests.

Inbreeding is generally deleterious, even in flowering plants. Since inbreeding raises the risk that bad copies of a gene will be expressed, inbred progeny suffer from reduced viability.Many flowering plants are able to recognize and reject their own pollen, thereby preventing inbreeding despite the plants' hermaphroditic nature. This mechanism is a complex trait that involves the interaction of a gene that tags the pollen with an identifier molecule, and a gene that produces a molecule capable of detecting pollen produced by the same plant.

Dolphins have uncovered a marvel of naval history: the 125-year-old Howell torpedo, the first torpedo that could be released into the ocean and follow a track to smash a target without leaving a wake. Only 50 were made between 1870 and 1889 by a Rhode Island company before the competition copied the design. There are two others of its kind known to exist, housed in naval museums in Washington and Rhode Island. Now dolphins working for the Navy have turned up a third.

When a scout honeybee returns to the hive, she performs a "waggle dance," looping and shaking her rear end in particular patterns to direct her comrades toward the jackpot of nectar and pollen she's found. Her movements communicate the direction and distance of the nectar source, providing a vector along which the other bees can now travel. As they fly through the air, the flow of optical stimuli across their peripheral vision tells the bees how far they've traveled and when to turn.

The field of 3-D printing technology is revolutionizing industries across the spectrum, from the arts to electronics. We asked Constantinos Mavroidis, Distinguished Professor of Engineering, to explain how the approach, which is capable of rapidly producing low-cost three-dimensional structures the same way an ink-jet printer creates a two-dimensional image, is beginning to do the same for the biomedical field.

Activity observed in the brain when using a "mind machine" is similar to how the brain learns new motor skills, scientists have found.Participants' neural activity was recorded by using sensors implanted in their brain, which were linked to a computer that translated electrical impulses into actions.The researchers believe people will be able to perform increasingly complex tasks just by thinking them.

Talk about bringing an idea to life. A new series of augmented reality books lets you use your smartphone or tablet to animate the solar system, or conjure up roaring dinosaurs on the table in front of you. You can even snap photos of what you see and email them to your friends.

What started out as a casual sightseeing trip to a historic castle in the Netherlands took a bizarre turn for one Dutch woman, who claims she may have spotted some kind of UFO.Corrine Federer, 43, a business manager and amateur photographer, was visiting medieval Muiderslot Castle outside Amsterdam last month when she started taking pictures using her camera's high-dynamic range, or HDR, feature.

Newborn babies can recognize the sound of their mother's voice at birth. But scientists are unsure which aspects of language are built into our brain through genetics and which are learned by listening in the womb. To investigate this question, a group of researchers in France studied 12 preterm infants, who were born two to three months' premature. At this stage brain connections are just beginning to form, meaning the infants' brain activity reflects the brain's initial organization rather than connections strengthened by learning, according to the researchers.

Thanks to scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, audiences can hear a 200-year-old opera by composer Luigi Cherubini in full for the first time in centuries. The scientists blasted X-rays at the damaged musical score to peek at the musical notes hidden beneath a layer of smudgy black.At first glance the beautifully bound 1797 Luigi Cherubini opera Médée looks like an impeccably preserved relic of opera's golden age. However, flip to the final pages of the aria "Du trouble affreux qui me dévore" ("The terrible disorder that consumes me") and you see the problem: Thick smudges of carbon completely black out the closing lines.

Flood risk is projected to increase in humid areas in Asia and Africa and decrease in most regions of Europe except the UK and northern France by the end of this century, according to a new model published today in Nature Climate Change.An international team of researchers, including Dr Dai Yamazaki from the University of Bristol, estimated the change in global flood risk in the 21st century with a state-of-the-art global hydrodynamics model that used the outputs from 11 global climate models under the latest climate change scenarios.

There's a new player on the continent and it is spreading damage from Texas to Florida in a scary assault that sounds like a really bad movie."Crazy" ants on the march have a taste for everything from livestock to electrical equipment. They are so obnoxious that many residents yearn for the good old days when all they had to fight was red ants that are quickly being wiped out by the crazies.

In a new study conducted by U.S. team of scientists from Columbia University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, mice engineered with a human gene for schizophrenia called DISC1 and exposed to lead during early life exhibited behaviors and structural changes in their brains consistent with schizophrenia.

An old Mars rover that landed nine years ago has found the latest evidence that drinkable water once flowed on the Red Planet. Combined with previous, similar discoveries, this suggests that neutral water was once present all over the planet, so life could have arisen in multiple places.Winter is coming to Mars's Southern hemisphere, where NASA's Opportunity rover is exploring. But before heading for sunnier hills for the rest of the season, the solar-powered rover squeezed in an examination of an ancient rocky outcrop on Endeavour crater and hit pay dirt. The outcrop, called Esperance, contains aluminium-rich clay minerals, something that must have formed in the presence of neutral, life-friendly water billions of years ago.

The oldest and most widespread collection of prehistoric cave and rock art in the United States has been found in and around Tennessee, according to a new paper in the journal Antiquity that documents the art. It provides intriguing clues about what life was like for Native American societies more than 6,000 years ago. That is the age of the newly discovered cave art, one of which is seen here, showing what appears to be a human hunting. Other images are of a more direct spiritual/mythological nature.

Scientists have shown off their latest "invisibility cloak" by making a pet goldfish and a small cat vanish from plain sight.The device is crude and unlikely to pass muster with the pupils of Hogwarts, but researchers said it marked a significant step forward in the science of the unseen.In video footage of the device in action, a goldfish suddenly appears as it swims out of a cloak submerged in its tank. In another clip, the lower half of a cat disappears as it steps inside a cloak placed on a table.

Death by drowning was the biggest killer in the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami.Since the disaster, scientists have analyzed the massive Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, seeking better ways to predict these dangerous waves. Based on computer modeling, scientists at Stanford University now think sound waves from big earthquakes such as Japan's could provide 15 to 20 minutes of advance notice before a tsunami hits, according to a study published in the June 2013 issue of the journal the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. (Some towns on the Japan coastline had just 10 minutes to flee before the tsunami arrived.).

They came from outer space. Fragments of rock retrieved from a remote corner of Siberia could help to settle an enduring mystery: the cause of the Tunguska explosion.On 30 June 1908, a powerful blast ripped open the sky near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river in Russia and flattened more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest. Eyewitnesses described a large object tearing through the atmosphere and exploding before reaching the ground, sending a wave of intense heat racing across the countryside.

One of the first visitors to Jupiter's icy moon of Europa could be a tiny submarine barely larger than two soda cans. The small craft might help strike the right balance between cost and capability for a robotic mission to look for alien life in the ocean beneath Europa's icy crust.The idea for the incredible shrinking submarine originally came from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and Uppsala University in Sweden. Such a vehicle would help keep mission costs low at a time when launching objects into space can still cost tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. The mission concept also would have the advantage of only requiring a small borehole drilled through the ice covering Europa's surface.

A conflict between "science" and "pseudoscience" is now playing out on the national stage, including in the Huffington Post. The conversation is long overdue. I speak of the recent flap surrounding two TED lectures on the nature of consciousness -- by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock -- that were initially removed from YouTube because TED's scientific curators deemed them "pseudoscience." The move generated strong reaction from TED's normally doting followers.Sheldrake's and Graham's offense: proposing the unorthodox view that consciousness is nonlocal.

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has made perhaps the biggest discovery of its nearly 10-year career, finding evidence that life may have been able to get a foothold on the Red Planet long ago.The Opportunity rover spotted clay minerals in an ancient rock on the rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater, suggesting that benign, neutral-pH water once flowed through the area, scientists said.

Russia's Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to go to space, said on Friday she was ready to score another coup and fly to Mars, even if it would be just a one-way trip."Mars is my favourite planet," the 76-year old told a news conference in Zvyozdny Gorodok (Star City) outside Moscow, home to a cosmonaut training centre.

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request.Related: Whitehouse petition to pardon Edward Snowden

The image is still powerful, isn't it?So are the anger, and the memories.Most Americans don't just remember where they were on September 11, 2001 -- they remember feeling frightened. Along with anger, that's one emotion I felt, despite watching the attacks from a different continent. That week, you couldn't have paid me to get on a plane to New York or Washington, D.C. Even today, I'm aware that terrorists target exactly the sorts of places that I frequent. I fly a lot, sometimes out of LAX. I've ridden the subway systems in London and Madrid. I visit Washington and New York several times a year. I live in Greater Los Angeles.

Explorers have recounted their tales of survival and adventure for 125 years in National Geographic, a pantheon joined this month by filmmaker-explorer James Cameron.Diving deep and living to tell the tale, James Cameron sees no divide between his life as a deep-sea explorer and an award-winning filmmaker."I'm a storyteller, that's what exploration really is all about," Cameron says. "Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before." The 58-year-old director of Avatar and Titanic made his mark on the ocean depths last year, descending 35,787 feet deep into the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench south of Japan and east of the Philippines.

One hundred and fifty years ago, on May 30, 1863, young geologist Robert Bruce Foote bent down and picked up a stone tool on the Parade Ground at Pallavaram cantonment, near Chennai. It turned out to be an epochal discovery.It was a hand-axe made of a hard rock called quartzite. Prehistoric man had crafted it to dig out tubers and roots from the soil, butcher animals he had hunted and take out the meat, and so on. As Foote, then a 29-year old assistant geologist in the Geological Survey of India (GSI), cradled the hand-axe and looked at it transfixed, he recognised it to be a Palaeolithic tool. (Palaeo means old, lith means stone. Prehistory is that part of history before written records began).

It is considered the driest desert in the world. Without provision, a person would not last long in this hostile place, where after a few days without water one just might hallucinate, might see things that simply were not there. And it could be that a small group of people may be seeing things in this place that are not what they seem to be -- lines and walls on a landscape, remains of structures that may or may not be man-made. The site, located in the Atacama desert, a 105,000 square kilometer (41,000 sq mi) plateau along the Pacific coast of Chile, has attracted the focused attention of only a few to date. Most professional news organizations and journals will not touch the story, presumably because there is not enough solid information and evidence about the site advanced by any professionally recognized archaeologists or scholars to justify the risk of publishing even an acknowledgement of its existence.

In a move that would make the Alchemists of King Arthur's time green with envy, scientists have unraveled the formula for turning liquid cement into liquid metal. This makes cement a semi-conductor and opens up its use in the profitable consumer electronics marketplace for thin films, protective coatings, and computer chips.

Heide Pfutzner is getting favorable recognition as an artist who has produced skilled, accomplished abstract paintings with their colorful shapes in electric-like blues, reds, pinks, and yellows, Her admirers not only appreciate her art but her determination as a paralyzed woman who paints by way of thoughts. These thoughts are translated into pictures by a computer. She is able to express herself creatively through brainpainting, where a computer system can translate an artist's thoughts into images. With use of a brain controlled computer system, the person's brainwaves translate into instructions as to which colors, shapes and brushes will be put to use for the finished piece.

In the news business, an evergreen is a story that doesn't have to run on a particular day, but can stay fresh for a long time.This is an evergreen story about an evergreen. In particular, a group of plants called. Turns out they may be evergreen quite a bit longer than most people thought.The most famous bryophyte of them all is moss. "After a hundred years, a moss may look perfectly natural and even retain its green color," says , a scientist at the bryology lab at Duke University.

An American researcher has found new information about the movement of the Vikings in Newfoundland and Labrador which suggests they may have moved further inland than previously thought, and may have even travelled to other parts of Atlantic Canada.Kevin Smith, chief curator at Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University in Rhode Island, says the Norsemen may have had contact with the Aboriginal Peoples a thousand years ago. He presented his findings in April at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

An idea suggesting massive stone statues that encircle Easter Island may have been "walked" into place has run into controversy.In October 2012, researchers came up with the "walking" theory by creating a 5-ton replica of one of the statues (or "moai"), and actually moving it in an upright position, and have published a more thorough justification in the June issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. If the statues were walked into place, then the islanders didn't need to cut down the island's palm trees to make way for moving the massive carvings, the researchers argue.

Tiny bubbles of water found in quartz grains in Australia may hold the key to understanding what caused the Earth's first ice age, say scientists.The Anglo-French study, published in the journal Nature, analysed the amount of ancient atmospheric argon gas (Ar) isotopes dissolved in the bubbles and found levels were very different to those in the air we breathe today.

Top UK male business leaders show dominant traits in their faces.This is the finding of research by Professor Jamie Ward and Shuaa Alrajih and from the University of Sussex that will be published in the British Journal of Psychology on 7 June.The study focussed on the link between the facial width-to-height ratio (FWH) and dominance in men. Participants were asked to rate different aspects of the personalities of 100 men using a single photograph.

New research sheds light on why some birds have lost their penises over the course of evolution.Land fowl, such as chickens, have normally developing penises as early embryos, but only have rudimentary organs as adults.A study in Current Biology shows that these birds initiate a genetic "programme" during development that stops the budding penises from growing.

Researchers from the Seoul National University found that wild birds appear to "think faster" when humans, and possibly predators in general, are directly looking at them. "We started this study from our experience" says Dr. Sang-im Lee, the leader of magpie research team and the first author of the paper. "For a long time we had this impression that somehow magpies know that we are watching them because they often fly away from us when we observe them. But when we don't observe them, we can pass them pretty close-by but they don't fly away!".

If you think keeping up with what's happening via Twitter, Facebook and other social media is like drinking from a fire hose, multiply that by 7 billion -- and you'll have a sense of what Court Corley wakes up to every morning.Corley, a data scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has created a powerful digital system capable of analyzing billions of tweets and other social media messages in just seconds, in an effort to discover patterns and make sense of all the information. His social media analysis tool, dubbed "SALSA" (SociAL Sensor Analytics), combined with extensive know-how -- and a fair degree of chutzpah -- allows someone like Corley to try to grasp it all.

The study, a joint venture from researchers at Lloyd's of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the United States, details a dystopian scenario where a shortage of electrical transformers would leave Western nations without electricity for months because of the time needed to build replacements.A solar storm occurs when magnetic fields "loop" out of sunspots, releasing huge amounts of energy. These bursts of "plasma", a superheated, electrically-charged gas, could enter the Earth's own magnetic field and eventually disrupt networks dependent on electricity on the ground.

Gray wolves, whose packs now prowl through the northern Rockies and the forests along the Great Lakes, no longer need endangered-species protection to prevent their extinction, the Obama administration said Friday.The Fish and Wildlife Service unveiled a proposal to eliminate the remaining restrictions across the country, saying wolves are flourishing again. The only populations to have protection, under the proposal, would be Mexican wolves in southern Arizona and New Mexico and a small experimental population in North Carolina.

Cod could be in for a revival at the fish counter as stocks recover after being overfished for decades.Eating cod has been regarded as close to a crime by environmentalists, and consumers have been urged to opt for alternatives such as gurnard.But a survey by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and other fisheries organisations suggests that effective management means cod is increasing. The standards body, which certifies certain fisheries as sustainable as a guide for consumers, said that on current trends cod would soon qualify for its certification.

Let's not pretend: I don't have much of a fan base among vegans. I respect their views, but not their menus. I love eating meat; it's a part of who I am. And that makes the next sentence all the harder, but it has to be said. We need to reduce the amount of it that we are eating. The way we produce meat, and the amount we produce, is simply unsustainable and in the 21st century sustainability in food production is paramount. The evidence for the prosecution is pretty unanswerable. Globally, livestock stands accused of producing 37% of the world's methane (which has 23 times the global warming potential of CO2). More than 55% of the agriculture sector's emissions come from rearing livestock alone. The meat and dairy sector uses 70% of agricultural land.

The inner workings of bizarre and potentially dangerous earthquakes that break the seismic sound barrier creating a sonic boom have been confirmed in laboratory experiments.And these events -- known as supershear earthquakes -- may be more common than previously thought, report scientists in today's issue of the journal Science.

Getting out of bed to draw the curtains may soon be a thing of the past after scientists developed revolutionary technology that changes the transparency of windows.The Wi-Fi-enabled window shade, designed by Californian start-up SONTE, can be stuck to any glass including windows, showers and mirrors and can be controlled wirelessly using a smartphone.The energy-saving film also provides UV protection, can save money on heating bills by controlling the amount of heat that enters your home, and doubles up as a video projector screen.

No pilot was required when the Aeryon Scout took off into the leaden skies of Alaska to inspect a stretch of oil pipeline. The miniature aircraft was guided by an engineer on the ground, armed only with a tablet computer.The 20-minute test flight, conducted by BP Plc last fall, was a glimpse of a future where oil and gas companies in the Arctic can rely on unmanned aircraft to detect pipeline faults, at a fraction of the cost of piloted helicopter flights.

The biggest drought to hit the planet in the 20th century, the Sahel drought sucked Central Africa dry from the 1970s to the 1990s. The severe famines that resulted killed hundreds of thousands of people during this period and gained worldwide attention.A new study blames the dry spell on pollution in the Northern Hemisphere, primarily from America and Europe. Tiny particles of sulfate, called aerosols, cooled the Northern Hemisphere, shifting tropical rainfall patterns southward, away from Central Africa, according to research published April 24 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The number of people in the UK who will get cancer during their lifetime will increase to nearly half the population by 2020, a report has forecast.Macmillan Cancer Support said the projected figure of 47% would put huge pressure on the NHS.In 1992, the proportion of people in the UK who got cancer during their life was 32%. This increased to 44% in 2010, an increase of more than a third.

LONDON -- Today is World Environment Day, and to mark it, the U.N. Environment Programme and the World Resources Institute are releasing a paper calling for concerted action to reduce food loss and waste.UNEP and WRI estimate that one-third of all food produced annually worldwide, worth about $1 trillion, gets either lost or wasted.Converting this to calories, they say, it means one-quarter of all calories intended for human consumption are never eaten.

Eating is generally a good idea. Not only does it satisfy fundamental needs, but it can often be quite delicious, too.Navenna Shine, however, isn't convinced.The Seattle resident and British native recently embarked on an experiment, titled "Living on Light," in which she nourishes her body much as a plant would: on water, air, and "light." According to Shine, this isn't light in the conventional sense of sunlight, but "a nutritional source already embedded within our body/mind/Spiritual systems.".

Scientists can use daredevil comets to probe regions of the sun's complex, hellishly hot atmosphere that are off-limits to spacecraft, a new study reports.The sun's magnetic field caused the tail of Comet Lovejoy to wiggle in strange ways during the icy wanderer's suicidal plunge through the solar atmosphere in December 2011, researchers have found, suggesting that the close approaches of such "sungrazer comets" can help astronomers better understand Earth's star.

On Earth, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, are best known as carcinogens and environmental pollutants, produced as byproducts of fuel burning. It turns out these complex hydrocarbons are also contributing to the thick orange-brown smog that cloaks Saturn's largest moon, Titan, researchers say.With a diameter of 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers), Titan is the second-largest moon in the solar system. It's also the only one with clouds and a dense, Earth-like atmosphere and the only known place in our solar system besides Earth to have stable liquids on its surface.

A team of scientists working at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii has solved one of the vital inconsistencies in the Big Bang theory, reconciling observed data with our current theoretical models of how the birth of the universe went down 13.8 billion years ago. The discovery was published in the June 6 edition of Astronomy and Astrophysics.Though widely accept in the scientific community, the Big Bang theory still has some kinks. One of the greatest discrepancies between the model and our actual observations of the universe involves the presence of lithium isotopes.

Zahi Hawass is back.The famous, and at times controversial, Egyptologist is free of legal charges, free to travel and is launching a worldwide lecture tour with the aim of getting tourists back to Egypt, he told LiveScience in an interview.Hawass also said that he believes there are some fantastic discoveries waiting to be made, including more tombs in the Valley of the Kings and a secret burial chamber, containing treasure, which he believes to be inside the Great Pyramid built by the pharaoh Khufu (also known as Cheops).

An idea suggesting massive stone statues that encircle Easter Island may have been "walked" into place has run into controversy.In October 2012, researchers came up with the "walking" theory by creating a 5-ton replica of one of the statues (or "moai"), and actually moving it in an upright position, and have published a more thorough justification in the June issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. If the statues were walked into place, then the islanders didn't need to cut down the island's palm trees to make way for moving the massive carvings, the researchers argue.

Jupiter's icy moon Europa is thought to be hiding a saltwater ocean beneath its thick outer crust, an exciting prospect for scientists searching for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.A fresh look at decade-old observations from NASA's Galileo mission could help researchers pick the ideal spot to probe Europa in the future to get an idea of what's below its surface.

Opportunity has made one of its greatest scientific discoveries so far. Clay minerals in a rock called Esperance clearly indicate that neutral water flowed across the rock some time in the first billion years of its existence.The rock was found near Endurance Crater, and took seven attempts to analyse because it was partially covered in Martian dust.The clay minerals are similar to one called montmorillonite. Formed under the influence of neutral water, this is significant because neutral water, which is similar to household tap water, is thought to be much more conducive to the chemistry needed for the origin of life.

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.Related: UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation

The cores of black holes may not hold points of infinite density as currently thought, but portals to elsewhere in the universe, theoretical physicists say.A black hole possesses a gravitational field so powerful that not even light can escape. A black hole generally forms after a star dies in a titanic explosion known as a supernova, which crushes the remaining core into dense lumps.

Nasa is finally thinking about getting its Curiosity rover on the road and heading towards the big mountain at its exploration site in Mars' Gale Crater.The robot has spent the past six months in a small depression, drilling its rocks and analysing their composition.But mission managers say they will soon command Curiosity to start moving on the roughly 8km drive to Mount Sharp.

The impact of comets crashing into Earth's surface may have provided the energy to create simple molecules that formed the precursors to life, a new study suggests.That conclusion, published in the June 20 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, was based on a computer model of such an impact's effect on a comet crystal initially made up of water, carbon dioxide and other simple molecules.

Tower One of the new World Trade Center in New York was completed last month and at 541m, it now stands proud over Manhattan, the highest skyscraper in the western world.Skyscrapers seem to dominate this part of New York, but look a little closer and you can see very clearly that they are actually clustered in two distinct areas: Downtown, the financial hub of this great city, and Midtown - the home of the Empire State Building.To understand how this modern skyline came to be and why these tall buildings cluster as they do, you need to look downwards instead of up.

Tiny bubbles of water found in quartz grains in Australia may hold the key to understanding what caused Earth's first ice age, say scientists.The Anglo-French study, published in the journal Nature, analysed the amount of ancient atmospheric argon gas (Ar) isotopes dissolved in the bubbles and found levels were very different to those in the air we breathe today.

BRAZIL says it has reduced Amazon deforestation by almost 84 per cent over the past eight years and is nearing its international target for slowing devastation of the world's largest rainforest.From August 2011 to July 2012, 4,571 square kilometres of Amazon forest were destroyed, 27 per cent less than during the previous corresponding period and the lowest rate since Brazil began monitoring, said Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira.

Curators at Perth's museum are sending a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy for CT scans and X-rays.They hope investigations, by Manchester University and Manchester Children's Hospital, will reveal details about the mummy's life and death.It is thought she could have been a priestess or princess, possibly in the ancient city of Thebes.The mummy has been in Perth's collection since it was donated by an Alloa museum which closed down.

Nuclear bomb tests carried out during the cold war have had an unexpected benefit.A radioactive carbon isotope expelled by the blasts has been used to date the age of adult human brain cells, providing the first definitive evidence that we generate new brain cells throughout our lives. The study also provides the first model of the dynamics of the process, showing that the regeneration of neurons does not drop off with age as sharply as expected.

Dogs may help to correct certain human mental health disorders by beneficially affecting brain chemistry and function, a new study suggests.The research shows how interacting with dogs improves mood among teenagers living in residential treatment centers. In this case, the teens were in therapy for drug or alcohol abuse.

If humans ever hope to talk to animals, dolphins might represent our best bet. They're highly intelligent, and they have a sophisticated form of communication amongst themselves. But despite decades of research, scientists have not been able to find a cetacean Rosetta Stone.

Psychologists who analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species.This is the first time such data have been used to compare the development of gestures across species. The chimpanzee and bonobo, formerly called the "pygmy chimpanzee," are the two species most closely related to humans in the evolutionary tree.

An ancient Egyptian city swallowed by the sea more than 1,200 years ago has started to reveal its secrets.Items including 16ft sculptures, gold coins and giant tablets are among some of the objects recovered from the ancient port city which lies 20 miles northeast of Alexandria in the Mediterranean.For hundreds of years it was believed to be a legend, but the city of Heracleion, also called Thonis, was found during a survey of the Egyptian shore at the beginning of the last decade.Now, an international team of marine archaeologists is preparing to show some of the objects found in the underwater city.The city was mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus, who told of Helen of Troy visiting Heracleion with her lover Paris before the Trojan war.

Researchers have been able to trace the impact of volcanic eruptions on the climate over a 1200 year period by assessing ancient Irish texts.The international team compared entries in these medieval annals with ice core data indicating volcanic eruptions.Of 38 volcanic events, 37 were associated with directly observed cold weather extremes recorded in the chronicles.The report is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

New research by a group of international scientists has found ice sheet loss in Antarctica is likely to be less extreme than previously thought.New research by a group of international scientists has found ice sheet loss in Antarctica is likely to be less extreme than previously thought.The review - Ice-sheet mass balance and climate change, published in the journal Nature - confirms that Antarctica and Greenland are both losing ice and contributing to rising sea levels.Related: Experts say Antarctic ice loss may be less than we thought

The ocean absorbs energy from the sun, stores it and then releases it slowly. Sounds like a prescription for meeting the world's energy needs, since the ocean is the largest feature of our planet. But, can it be tapped in a way that doesn't create more problems than it solves?That's the promise behind a recently announced deal between the Lockheed Martin Corp. and Reignwood Group, a resort developer based in Beijing. The two companies will develop a 10-megawatt power plant using ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology in waters off southern China's Hainan Island. Construction is expected to be completed in 2017.

Residents of the Fukushima prefecture in Japan may finally breathe a sigh of relief.A new scientific evaluation by the United Nations reveals that radiation exposure from the Fukushima nuclear accident, brought about by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami two years ago, is unlikely to result in future health problems for workers and residents in the region.

Researchers report that a single, short session of the popular Hatha yoga significantly improves working as it improves memory, speed and focus, more so than regular workouts.The university study involved a 20-minute progression of seated, standing and supine yoga postures that included contraction and relaxation of different muscle groups and regulated breathing. The session concluded with a meditative posture and deep breathing.

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

A species of frog that was recently rediscovered after being declared extinct has been reclassified as a "living fossil".Israel's Hula painted frog had not been seen for nearly 60 years, but in 2011 one was found lurking in a patch of swampy undergrowth.Tests have revealed that the frog belongs to a group of amphibians that died out 15,000 years ago.The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Efforts to restore sturgeon in the Great Lakes region have received a lot of attention in recent years, and many of the news stories note that the prehistoric-looking fish are "living fossils" virtually unchanged for millions of years.But a new study by University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues reveals that in at least one measure of evolutionary change -- changes in body size over time -- sturgeon have been one of the fastest-evolving fish on the planet.

Some 1,000 years ago, the Vikings set off on a voyage to Notre Dame Bay in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada, new evidence suggests.The journey would have taken the Vikings, also called the Norse, from L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the same island to a densely populated part of Newfoundland and may have led to the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous people of the New World.

President Mohamed Morsi Monday warned that Egypt would not allow its share of the Nile to be diminished by "one drop" after Ethiopia began diverting the Blue Nile as part of a giant dam project."We cannot let even one drop of Nile water be affected," Morsi said during talks with political and religious leaders broadcast live on state television.

A slow but powerful earthquake underneath New Zealand started in January and is still going strong, according to scientists with GeoNet, the country's geological hazard monitoring agency.Equivalent to a jarring magnitude-7.0 earthquake, the slow-slip quake is centered west of Wellington, on the subduction zone between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates.

To keep astronauts safe and healthy during future missions to Mars, superfast new propulsion technologies will likely be necessary, experts say.Crewmembers flying to Mars and back using traditional chemical thrusters would be exposed to the high radiation levels of deep space for 12 to 17 months. That's simply too long to keep astronauts' radiation doses from fast-moving particles known as galactic cosmic rays within currently acceptable limits, researchers said.

Southern Europeans get a significant portion of their genetic ancestry from North Africa, new research suggests.The findings are perhaps not surprising, given that the Romans occupied North Africa and set up extensive trade routes in the region, and the Moors, a North African people, ruled a medieval territory called El-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula.

A new analysis of early human teeth from extinct fossils has found that they expanded their diets about 3.5 million years ago to include grasses and possibly animals.Before this, humanlike creatures - or hominins - ate a forest-based diet similar to modern gorillas and chimps.Researchers analysed fossilised tooth enamel of 11 species of hominins and other primates found in East Africa.

City living could have a major impact on the biological clocks of humans and animals, a new study has found.Researchers measured the circadian rhythms - the 24-hour cycle of biological activity - of urban and rural blackbirds in southern Germany.German and Scottish researchers found the city birds woke up earlier and rested less than forest dwelling birds.The team has raised the possibility the differences could be the result of micro-evolutionary changes.

When astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered what became one of the best-known -- and most debated -- quotes in all of history, he actually might have said it exactly the way he meant to, not the way people heard it.After Armstrong lowered his left foot from the landing craft to the surface of the moon, people watching around the world heard him call it "one small step for man.".