Newsdesk Archive

Bee keepers' use of corn syrup and other honey substitutes as bee feed may be contributing to colony collapse by depriving the insects of compounds that strengthen their immune systems, according to a study released on Monday.U.S. bee keepers lost nearly a third of their colonies last winter as part of an ongoing and largely unexplained decline in the population of the crop-pollinating insects that could hurt the U.S. food supply.

No clear evidence suggests modern humans ate Neanderthals, much less that they did so enough to drive Neanderthals to extinction, despite recent claims from scientists in Spain.Neanderthals were once the closest living relatives of modern humans, ranging across a vast area from Europe to western Asia and the Middle East. Their lineage went extinct about the same time modern humans expanded across the world, leading to speculation that modern humans wiped them out.

Nowadays, people bounce effortlessly from reading news to blogs to email. And it turns out the reading habits of people in medieval times weren't so different, a new book suggests.People in 14th-century London consumed a variety of texts, often linked together in bound volumes. Arthur Bahr, a literature professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explores these habits in his new book "Fragments and Assemblages" (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Scientists have found that meditation can reduce anxiety by as much as 39 per cent and have also identified the brain functions involved.Buddhist monks and Zen masters have known for years that meditation can lower anxiety, but the mechanism has not been clear, until now.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have designed an interface that allows humans to control a robot using only their thoughts.How close are we getting to actual brain control? It's starting to seem not far off at all. On the more silly end of the spectrum, we've seen robotic ears and tails that respond to brainwaves; but we've also seen more recently a Chilean company that has created a brain interface for designing printable objects, a mind-controlled exoskeleton for helping people walk, even mind-to-mind communication.

Invisalign, a San Jose company, uses 3-D printing to make each mouthful of customized, transparent braces. Mackenzies Chocolates, a confectioner in Santa Cruz, uses a 3-D printer to pump out chocolate molds. And earlier this year, Cornell University researchers used a 3-D printer, along with injections of a special collagen gel, to create a human-shaped ear.

If you thought Google Glass took the whole "wearable tech" thing a little too far, you don't even want to know what other tricks the champion of Internet innovation has up its sleeve. Let's just say you can forget two-step verification. In the future, you'll be your own walking password.That's right, folks. From passwords tattooed on your skin to an ingestible password pill, Google could one day take authentication to a whole new, Big Brother-y level.

Investigations continued this week into how unauthorised genetically modified wheat ended up on a farm in Oregon.No varieties of GM wheat have been cleared for commercial use anywhere in the world. The wheat plants in question are believed to be the legacy of a research programme that was abandoned nine years ago. How and why they have resurfaced is unclear.The discovery last week triggered an international reaction, with both South Korea and Japan temporarily suspending imports of US wheat.

The US government's trial against Apple, accused of leading a conspiracy to fix prices of electronic books, opened Monday in New York.US antitrust watchdogs say Apple orchestrated a collusive shakeup of the electronic book business in early 2010 that resulted in higher prices.The result was an increase in price to $12.99 or $14.99 for most books.

When Elena Skoko gave birth to her daughter three years ago, she felt pain. But she also felt something else: waves of pleasure so ecstatic they compared to an orgasm."I had this wavy sensation of blissful waves going through me," said Skoko, a singer and author of "Memoirs of a Singing Birth"Though childbirth is frequently spoken of in terms of pain and punishment, some women do experience what are known as orgasmic or ecstatic births. A new survey, available online May 3 in the journal Sexologies, finds that midwives report witnessing orgasms in about 0.3 percent of births.

A new study conducted by genetic researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the regulatory gene Egr, known to be involved in learning and the detection of novelty in vertebrates, increases in activity in the brains of honey bees (Apis mellifera) when they are learning how to find food and bring it home.

Humans, like other animals, compare things. We care not only how well off we are, but whether we are better or worse off than others around us, or than we were last year. New research by scientists at the University of Bristol shows that such comparisons can give individuals an evolutionary advantage.According to standard theory, the best response to current circumstances should be unaffected by what has happened in the past. But the Bristol study, published in the journal Science, shows that in a changing, unpredictable world it is important to be sensitive to past conditions.

While psychologists have long debated the core personality dimensions that define humanity, primate researchers have been working to uncover the defining personality traits for humankind's closest living relative, the chimpanzee. New research, published in the June 3 issue of American Journal of Primatology provides strong support for the universal existence of five personality dimensions in chimpanzees: reactivity/undependability, dominance, openness, extraversion and agreeableness with a possible sixth factor, methodical, needing further investigation.

A $1 billion deal to save Indonesia's rainforests has slowed a "tidal wave" of logging destruction, Greenpeace's global chief said Monday, but he warned much more needed to be done.While many environmentalists have sharply criticised Indonesian efforts to end rampant logging across some of the planet's most vital forests, Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo said there was reason to hope.

It is straight out of the X-Files, but conspiracy theorists are buzzing with speculation that the shooting and killing of the legendary Bigfoot in Altoona, Pennsylvania has been covered up by authorities.According to Bigfoot enthusiasts, on May 14th, police in Altoona, Pennsylvania took a 911 call from a John Winesickle claiming to have proof of Sasquatch a few miles from his property and wanted them to come and verify this.While the 911 call is not in doubt, what followed has become a matter of dispute and debate as various rumors have circulated - mainly focusing on an unidentified turkey hunter who had shot and killed the mythic beast and a menacing helicopter hovering over the alleged scene.

A Catholic priest claims to have performed more than 160,000 exorcisms.Now Father Gabriele Amorth wants help from his boss to banish the demons, so he's asking Pope Francis to bestow exorcism privileges to every priest with proper training, The Sunday Times of London reports."There's a huge demand," Amorth told the newspaper.

In a new video, a UFO seems to approach Mexico's Popocatepetl volcano, then slows down, turns and deliberately enters the smoldering volcano crater.The video, recorded on May 30 at around 8:30 p.m., is the latest in a series of alleged UFO events that have taken place near the central Mexico active volcano since late 2012.Mexico's media company, Televisa, monitors any daily activity around the volcano, which is about 40 miles south of Mexico City. Last November, video images showed what appeared to be a brightly lit, cigar-shaped object plunging into the top of Popocatepetl.

Observations by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity have revealed areas with gravel and pebbles that are characteristic of a former riverbed. Researchers, including members of the Niels Bohr Institute, have analysed their shapes and sizes and the rounded pebbles clearly show that there has been flowing water on Mars. The results are published in the scientific journal, Science.The Mars rover's stereo camera took pictures of a few areas with densely packed pebbles, cemented together like concrete. The image field of an area named Hottah was a mosaic of approximately 1.4 meters x 80 centimeters.

The Biblical account of Noah and his Ark poses a lot of questions, even for believers like the creators of the controversial Creation Museum in Kentucky.What is "gopher wood"? How did Noah fit all those animals on the boat? And how did he stand the smell?In an office park in Hebron, Kentucky, the designers of the proposed "Ark Encounter" theme park are trying to answer questions like these in order to build faith in the Bible's literal accuracy.

Crusading mycologist Paul Stamets says fungi can clean up everything from oil spills to nuclear meltdowns.Most Americans think of mushrooms as ingredients in soup or intruders on a well-tended lawn. Stamets, however, cherishes a grander vision, one trumpeted in the subtitle of his 2005 book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Mushroom-producing fungi, he believes, can serve as game changers in fields as disparate as medicine, forestry, pesticides and pollution control. He has spent the past quarter-century preaching that gospel to anyone who will listen.

The recent passage of Amendment 64 in Colorado, which legalizes the cultivation and recreational use of marijuana throughout the state, is having a major impact on the state's agricultural sector. But the biggest potential for economic growth may actually come from marijuana's non-psychoactive cousin hemp, which is right now being planted on U.S. soil for the first time in 60 years, thanks to the initiative's passage.

Beijing, China - As archaeologists here excavate a palace complex that has been buried for more than two millennia, new puzzles are emerging surrounding ancient beliefs of the afterlife.Decades after discovering thousands of sculpted terracotta warriors and bronze war chariots deployed to protect China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang, on his journey through eternity, scientists are now exploring the nearby remains of a subterranean palatial compound - believed to have been built on his orders, so he could continue his reign.

Sabrina Warner keeps having the same nightmare: a huge wave rearing up out of the water and crashing over her home, forcing her to swim for her life with her toddler son."I dream about the water coming in," she said. The landscape in winter on the Bering Sea coast seems peaceful, the tidal wave of Warner's nightmare trapped by snow and several feet of ice. But the calm is deceptive. Spring breakup will soon restore the Ninglick River to its full violent force.In the dream, Warner climbs on to the roof of her small house. As the waters rise, she swims for higher ground: the village school which sits on 20-foot pilings.Warner's vision is not far removed from a reality written by climate change.

BEIJING, May 14 (Xinhuanet) -- A museum in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, has suspended the excavation of what is thought to be an imperial mausoleum following protests from archaeologists and the public.The department of archaeology at the Nanjing Museum admitted it plans to build a heritage park and a museum on the site of the mausoleum, and said it will further consult experts before putting forward new protection measures.

An analysis of ancient dog burials finds that the typical prehistoric dog owner ate a lot of seafood, had spiritual beliefs, and wore jewelry that sometimes wound up on the dog.The study, published in PLoS ONE, is one of the first to directly test if there was a clear relationship between the practice of dog burial and human behaviors. The answer is yes."Dog burials appear to be more common in areas where diets were rich in aquatic foods because these same areas also appear to have had the densest human populations and the most cemeteries," lead author Robert Losey, a University of Alberta anthropologist, told Discovery News.

Archaeologists have long debated when early humans began hurling stone-tipped spears and darts at large prey. By throwing a spear, instead of thrusting it, humans could hunt buffalo and other dangerous game from a safe distance, with less risk of a goring or mauling. But direct evidence of this hunting technique in early sites has been lacking. A new study of impact marks on the bones of ancient prey shows that such sophisticated killing techniques go back at least 90,000 years ago in Africa and offers a new method of determining how prehistoric hunters made their kills.

An international team of scientists reveals that a unique strain of potato blight they call HERB-1 triggered the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century.It is the first time scientists have decoded the genome of a plant pathogen and its plant host from dried herbarium samples. This opens up a new area of research to understand how pathogens evolve and how human activity impacts the spread of plant disease.

An ancient Egyptian iron bead found inside a 5,000-year-old tomb was crafted from a meteorite, new research shows.The tube-shaped piece of jewelry was first discovered in 1911 at the Gerzeh cemetery, roughly 40 miles (70 kilometers) south of Cairo. Dating between 3350 B.C. and 3600 B.C., beads found at the burial site represent the first known examples of iron use in ancient Egypt, thousands of years before Egypt's Iron Age. And their cosmic origins were suspected from the start.

The discovery itself is notable enough: Navy specialists found a rare torpedo off the San Diego coast, an 11-foot brass gem called the Howell that dates back 130 years or so and was one of the first torpedoes to propel itself.Only 50 were made, and only one other one still exists. But what makes the story even better is that the Navy specialists who found it were trained dolphins, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Squadrons of bumblebees are being deployed in a novel attempt to prevent grey mould turning the summer's strawberries into fluffy mush.The bees are routed via a one-way system in their hive through a tray of harmless fungus spores which, when delivered to flowers, ensure that the grey mould cannot take hold as the fruit grows. New flowers on a strawberry crop open every day, which means that spraying with pesticides only protects those that are open at the time. "But the bees visit the flowers at the perfect moment for that flower," said Harriet Roberts of Adas, an agricultural consultancy testing the use of bees as delivery systems in the UK.

Worrying news for anyone keen on taking a trip to Mars: flying to the Red Planet and back could, in a single mission, expose you to a dose of radiation equivalent to two-thirds of the safe lifetime limit for astronauts, according to a new study led by Nasa.Scientists used measurements from the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), the spacecraft that took the Curiosity rover to the Red Planet in 2012, to work out the radiation threat to humans travelling through deep space for long periods of time.

On Wednesday, NASA officials announced a serious problem with the Kepler satellite, the world's most successful planet-finding machine.Since its launch four years ago, Kepler has found more than 2,700 possible planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, of which more than 100 have been confirmed. A few of these exoplanets resemble the Earth in size or mass.

The world is OK -- at least this time -- and scientists are psyched.An asteroid dubbed 1998 QE2 whizzed past Earth on Friday, with its own moon in tow."#asteroidQE2 has sailed harmlessly past Earth," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tweeted around 5 p.m. ET.

Cassava has huge potential and could turn from "a poor people's food into a 21st century crop" if grown according to a new environmentally-friendly farming model, the UN food agency said on Tuesday.The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a report that global cassava output has increased by 60 percent since 2000 and that yields could be boosted by up to 400 percent.Cassava has "huge potential", the FAO said.

Go to about any public square, and you see pigeons pecking at the ground, always in search of crumbs dropped by a passerby. While the pigeons' scavenging may seem random, new research by psychologists at the University of Iowa suggest the birds are capable of making highly intelligent choices, sometimes with problem-solving skills to match.The study by Edward Wasserman and colleagues centered on the "string task," a longstanding, standard test of intelligence that involves attaching a treat to one of two strings and seeing if the participant (human or animal) can reel in that treat by pulling the correct string.

Like many humans, chimpanzees and bonobos react quite emotionally when they take risks that fail to pay off.This is according to researchers from Duke University in the US, who developed decision-making games that the apes played to earn edible treats.Some animals that lost the game - receiving a bland piece of cucumber rather than a preferred piece of banana - reacted with what looked like the ape equivalent of a tantrum.

YOU may be walking on chimp-like feet without knowing it. At least 1 in 13 of us have feet that are specially adapted for climbing trees.Textbooks will tell you that the human foot is rigid, which allows more efficient walking. Other apes, in contrast, have flexible feet better suited to grasping branches as they move through the trees. But the textbooks are wrong, say Jeremy DeSilva and Simone Gill at Boston University.

In the film "After Earth," the main characters return to Earth after the planet has evolved natural defenses against humans.In real life, plants and animals are evolving in response to human action as well, although with less malicious intent than on the silver screen.Criminal armies equipped with high powered weapons have declared war on Earth's largest land animal. Outlaw organizations, such as Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, sell black market ivory to finance their rampages in Central Africa.

Hurricane Sandy caught the public and policymakers off guard when it hit the United States' Atlantic Coast last fall. Because much of the storm's devastation was wrought by flooding in the aftermath, researchers have been paying attention to how climate change and sea-level rise may have played a role in the disaster and how those factors may impact the shoreline in the future.A new study led by the University of Pennsylvania's Benjamin P. Horton, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, relied upon fossil records of marshland to reconstruct the changes in sea level along the New Jersey coast going back 10,000 years.

A farmer in Oregon has found some genetically engineered wheat growing on his land. It's an unwelcome surprise, because this type of wheat has never been approved for commercial planting.The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it's , trying to find out how this wheat got there. The USDA says there's no risk to public health, but wheat are worried about how their customers in Asia and Europe will react.Also, nobody knows how widely this genetically engineered wheat has spread, and whether it's been in fields of wheat that were harvested for food.

The destruction of tropical rainforests is having an even greater impact on the environment than was previously thought, a study suggests.Scientists have found that deforestation in Brazil is causing trees to produce smaller, weaker seeds that are less likely to regenerate.They believe this has been triggered by the loss of large birds from the forests, which have beaks big enough to feed on and disperse the seeds.

How safe would a mission to Mars really be? As well as embarking on trips lasting several years in cramped craft with no breakdown cover, future interplanetary explorers will need to accept that their bodies will be zapped by high-energy particles, raising their risk of contracting cancer and other ill effects of radiation.

Entanglement is a property in quantum mechanics that seemed so unbelievable and so lacking in detail that, 66 years ago this spring, Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance."But a mathematician at Case Western Reserve University and two of his recent PhD graduates show entanglement is actually prevalent in large quantum systems and have identified the threshold at which it occurs.

A vast and hidden field of small black holes predicted to be near the centre of our galaxy could be revealed as a giant gas cloud passes by.The G2 cloud is as large as our Solar System, and bound for a "supermassive" black hole at the Milky Way's core.On the way, it should encounter many black holes just tens of km across.

Mammoth blood won't bring us any closer to cloning adorable baby woolly mammoths. That is, if the substance being ballyhooed in news reports really is mammoth blood to begin with.Despite this week's breathless stories heralding the discovery of mammoth blood and the prospect of recreating the shaggy beasts, relatively little is known about the find.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a dimmable LED street light that consumes significantly less energy than current lighting systems, while improving the lighting characteristics. The street lights were tested in Helsinki with user experiences collected.Traditional street lights work on full power when turned on, and the amount of light is not usually adjusted.

We urgently need to know how far and how fast the sea will rise, but the latest attempt to put figures on it is dangerously misleadingIMAGINE your job is to protect London from surging seas. In one way it is easy: unlike most coastal cities, London has a formidable flood defence system in the form of the Thames Barrier, capable of protecting it from all but the highest storm surges.But as the seas rise, the risk of the barrier being breached will increase steadily.

Scientists at The University of Nottingham have found that a genetic rogue element produced by sequences until recently considered 'junk DNA' could promote cancer progression.The researchers, led by Dr Cristina Tufarelli, in the School of Graduate Entry Medicine and Health Sciences, discovered that the presence of this faulty genetic element -- known as chimeric transcript LCT13 -- is associated with the switching off of a known tumour suppressor gene (known as TFPI-2) whose expression is required to prevent cancer invasion and metastasis.

What a spring clean. Vials of moon dust collected by the first men to walk on the moon have been discovered in storage in California after being missing for more than 40 years.When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, NASA sent 68 grams of lunar dust to Melvin Calvin at the University of California, Berkeley, who had won the 1961 Nobel prize in chemistry.

10) A Volcanic ElephantEver since Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described his discovery of canals on Mars in 1877 and American astronomer Percival Lowell started to map them, we humans have been fascinated with the Red Planet. Although the canals were nothing more than a case of mistaken identity and our technology has come a long way since Schiaparelli and Lowell's telescopes, Mars continues to serve up its fair share of illusions, hoaxes and misunderstandings.

Scientists now have definitive proof that many of the landscapes seen on Mars were indeed cut by flowing water.The valleys, channels and deltas viewed from orbit have long been thought to be the work of water erosion, but it is Nasa's latest rover, Curiosity, that has provided the "ground truth".Researchers report its observations of rounded pebbles on the floor of the Red planet's 150km-wide Gale Crater.Their smooth appearance is identical to gravels found in rivers on Earth.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to a researcher from the University of Waterloo in a controversial new study published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week.CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now suggests that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the researcher argues.

The Transportation Security Administration announced it has finished removing from all airports the X-ray technology that produced graphic and controversial images of passengers passing through security screening checkpoints.In a letter released Thursday, TSA administrator John Pistole told the House Homeland Security committee that as of May 16, all US airports scanners equipped with the ability to produce the penetrating images will now only show a generic outline of a passenger to the operator. A colored box pops up if the full-body scanner detects a potentially forbidden item.

On Tuesday, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper signed several historic measures to implement marijuana legalization in the state, establishing Colorado as the world's first legal, regulated and taxed marijuana market for adults.Hickenlooper, a vocal opponent of marijuana legalization who said that "Colorado is known for many great things, marijuana should not be one of them," signed the first bills in history to establish a legal marijuana market as well as starting the development of a regulatory framework for the cultivation, distribution, and processing of industrial hemp.

A group of graduate students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program have developed an open-source API that can allows you to move someone else's arm remotely using a keyboard, a joystick or even an iPhone.Open Limbs, "a platform for controlling human arms over the internet," uses electric pulses to fire the nerves connected to muscles, making them contract, in conjunction with the Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX), an orthopedic device designed to help people with weak muscles move their arms.

The brain's perception of the body may seem set in stone, but a new study shows the mind can be tricked into taking an entire virtual body for its own.In 1998, neuroscientists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen performed an experiment where they showed people a rubber hand being stroked with a paintbrush, while applying the same strokes to each person's own, hidden hand. This gave people the feeling that the dummy hand was their own.

The internet might be a historic boon for kitten-fanciers and steaming-eared trolls, but it's not all good news. Online writing, you see, is destroying the purity of English as we know it and threatening to dumb us all down into a herd of screen-jabbing illiterates. Or so runs one regular technophobic complaint, the latest version of which has been offered by Robert McCrum. He is worried about what he describes as "the abuse and impoverishment of English online (notably, in blogs and emails)" and what he perceives as "the overall crassness of English prose in the age of global communications".

Ever since the first recorded history of Atlantis, written by the Greek philosopher Plato over 2,360 years ago, debate has raged as to whether or not Atlantis ever really existed. Why some of us still search for the answer to this mystery?Plato described Atlantis as an extraordinary Utopian society, thriving around 9,600 BC, which valued peace, art and wisdom, possessed advanced technological knowledge for the time, and enjoyed riches beyond that of any subsequent civilization. Atlantis was said to have been the nearest thing to paradise that the earth has seen.

Earth's evil twin Venus was born that way, so our planet may not be destined to become a hellish wasteland, after allVenus and Earth are the same size, made of similar materials and are next-door neighbours in the solar system. But while Earth is wet and lush with life, Venus is desiccated, acidic and very hot. Planetary scientists have long assumed that whatever happened to Venus to send it down this dark path could one day befall Earth.Now, Keiko Hamano of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues have created a new model that suggests Venus was always that way.

In 1889, an Italian librarian's faulty identification sentenced to archival obscurity an antique Torah scroll that has turned out to be the oldest complete such scroll in existence.This week, University of Bologna Professor Mauro Perani announced the results of carbon-14 tests authenticating the scroll's age as roughly 800 years old.The scroll dates to between 1155 and 1225, making it the oldest complete Torah scroll on record.

A prehistoric beast the size of a pheasant has become a contender for the title of oldest bird to stalk the Earth.The small, feathered "Dawn" bird lived around 160m years ago, about 10m years before Archaeopteryx, which holds the official title of the earliest bird known to science.The new species, which scientists have named Aurornis xui, had claws and a long tail, with front and hind legs similar to those of Archaeopteryx, but some features of its bones were more primitive. It measured 50cm from its beak to the tip of its tail.

The Jurasssic Park dream of cloning long-dead animals from their genetic remains may have taken a step closer to reality, as scientists claim to have found mammoth blood.The purported discovery came inside the carcass of a female mammoth, which died 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the expedition, told The Siberian Times the discovery of blood and muscle tissue was "the most astonishing case in my entire life," and could be a boost to researchers who dream of cloning the animal.

It's Bigfoot! Or is it? A 911 call in the Altoona, Penn. reported "proof" of Bigfoot.A group of Bigfoot enthusiasts promptly investigated the claim, and the police released this partial transcript to themAn officer responded to the 911 call and found John T. Winesickle, who told him he'd found Bigfoot tracks when out for a walk. The officer accompanied Mr. Winesickle to the tracks, and took pictures of them.

People in most cultures view women with small feet as attractive. Like smooth skin or an hourglass figure, petite feet signal a potential mate's youth and fertility.Because they signal reproductive potential, a preference for mates with these qualities may have evolved in the brains of our Pleistocene ancestors and are viewed by evolutionary psychologists as evidence that the preference is hard-wired into our genetic makeup.

A towering "rain control" site, where shamans would have asked the gods to open up the skies centuries ago, has been discovered in South Africa.Located in a semiarid area of the country, near Botswana and Zimbabwe, the site of Ratho Kroonkop (RKK) sits atop a 1,000-foot-tall (300 meters) hill and contains two naturally formed "rock tanks." These tanks are depressions in the rock created when water weakens the underlying sandstone. When the scientists excavated one of them, they found over 30,000 animal specimens, including the remains of rhinoceros, zebra and even giraffe.

Ethiopia has started diverting a stretch of the Blue Nile to make way for a $4.7bn (£3.1bn) hydroelectric dam that has caused a dispute with countries downstream, state media say.The Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is currently under construction, is part of a $12bn (£8bn) investment project to boost power exports.The Blue Nile is one of two major tributaries of the Nile - one of the world's longest rivers.Egypt and Sudan object to the dam.

The global decline in pollinators -- both wild and domesticated -- has scientists wondering if plants will adapt or die -- and the fate of a lot of our food hangs in the balance.Some plant scientists now propose that many flowering plants could rapidly evolve strategies to avoid sinking with the pollinators, including self pollination and building tighter bonds with those pollinators that are still around.

We take for granted the effortless flight of insects, thinking nothing of swatting a pesky fly and crushing its wings. But this insect is a model of complexity. After 12 years of work, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have succeeded in creating a fly-like robot. And in early May, they announced that their tiny RoboBee (yes, it's called a RoboBee even though it's based on the mechanics of a fly) took flight. In the future, that could mean big things for everything from disaster relief to colony collapse disorder.

The offspring of genetically modified salmon and wild brown trout are even faster growing and more competitive than either of their parents, a new study has revealed, increasing fears that GM animals escaping into the wild could harm natural populations.The aggressive hybrids suppressed the growth of GM salmon by 82% and wild salmon by 54% when all competed for food in a simulated stream.

Insects are the super food of the natural world. They're high in protein, good fats and calcium. But now, it turns out that insects aren't just good for people, they're also good for animals. A South African "fly factory" that uses larvae to convert tons of blood, guts and other farm waste into a protein-packed animal feed recently won a United Nations innovation award, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Crawling, shedding and flitting around on gossamer wings, the Brood II batch of Magicicadas is probably screeching over your Memorial Day picnic at this very moment, at least if you live on the East Coast of Turtle Island. Swarmageddon has arrived.For 17 years they lurked just below the surface, sucking sap from tree roots and getting ready to mature so they could join their kin, billions of them, in a 90-decibel mating orgy this summer.

The accelerating disappearance of Earth's species of both wild and domesticated plants and animals constitutes a fundamental threat to the well-being and even the survival of humankind, warns the founding Chair of a new global organization created to narrow the gulf between leading international biodiversity scientists and national policy-makers.

A team of high school students have co-authored a scientific journal paper with their University of Arizona grad student instructor that could have a serious impact on the reliability of climate models. Their work details the impact of shrinkage on dried, fossilized leaves--shrinkage that is often unaccounted for in climate models. By better accounting for this change in leaf size, the students found that researchers could significantly improve the accuracy of their climate models.

Scientists have devised a new molecular technique, inspired by Celtic Knots and trees, which could be used in the treatment of multiple diseases.Researchers at the Network of Excellence for Functional Biomaterials (NFB) in NUI Galway have discovered a new process that could be used in the industrial and medical fields.

The brains of people with depression show a reduced ability to adapt to their environment, a unique study shows.The research on 'neuroplasticity' and depression, is a collaboration between the Black Dog Institute and Neuroscience Research Australia and is reported online in a recent issue of Neuropsychopharmacology."We have demonstrated plasticity is reduced when you're depressed," says one of the lead researchers, Professor Colleen Loo, from the School of Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales, and colleagues.

The absent-minded professor is a classic image: someone who's lost in deep thoughts all the time but pays very little attention to what's going on right in front of them. There may be a little something to that cliché (if only just a little) if a study published this week in Current Biology is to be believed. The study showed that IQ scores, an imperfect measure general mental faculties, correlated with their tendency to ignore an image that may be mistaken for background visual noise.

MAINZ, Germany -- In their search for justice that has endured for decades, the biggest challenge Nazi hunters face is time.The knowledge that war criminals are escaping prosecution through death by natural causes means their task has never been more pressing.On Monday, German state police arrested a 93-year-old man accused of being a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Russian scientists discovered a fully-grown female mammoth with blood and well-preserved muscle tissue trapped in ice in Siberia. The findings come amid debates on whether the extinct species should be resurrected using DNA.Scientists say they have managed to find mammoth blood during the excavation of a grown female animal on the Lyakhovsky Islands, the southernmost group of the New Siberian Islands in the Arctic seas of northeastern Russia.

The venerable Mars rover Opportunity, the older and smaller cousin of Curiosity, has discovered another water-weathered rock hinting that the Red Planet could have supported life in its ancient past, NASA officials said.In its last days exploring "Cape York," a site on the rim of the giant Endeavour crater, the Opportunity rover examined a fractured rock unlike any it has seen during its nine years on Mars, researchers say.With data from a camera and spectrometer on the rover's robotic arm, researchers found that the rock, dubbed "Esperance," is a relic of a wetter time on Mars when life may have been possible.

A 2- to 3-year-old child from a Romano-Christian-period cemetery in Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt, shows evidence of physical child abuse, archaeologists have found. The child, who lived around 2,000 years ago, represents the earliest documented case of child abuse in the archaeological record, and the first case ever found in Egypt, researchers say.

Germany's national railway company, Deutsche Bahn, plans to test small drones to try to reduce the amount of graffiti being sprayed on its property.The idea is to use airborne infra-red cameras to collect evidence, which could then be used to prosecute vandals who deface property at night.A company spokesman said drones would be tested at rail depots soon.

Author and investigator Graham Hancock discussed some of the hidden supernatural or demonic forces that were factors in the Aztec empire, and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, as well as the Ark of the Covenant, and his research into a advanced lost civilization.Information on the show here. Sign up for Coast to Coast here.Note: Graham begins starting 38 minutes into the video.

Researchers began decoding the glyphic language of the ancient Maya long ago, but the internet is helping them finish the job and write the history of this enigmatic Meso-American civilisation.For centuries, scholars understood little about Maya script beyond its elegant astronomical calculations and calendar. The Maya had dominated much of Central America and southern Mexico for 1,000 years before their civilisation collapsed about 600 years before the Spaniards reached the New World. The Maya script began to give up its secrets in the 1950s and 1960s, and progress accelerated in the 1970s. But much remains to be puzzled out from the immense body of carvings and inscriptions that has languished for centuries in jungle ruins and museum closets.

Egypt's revolution has not only brought political upheaval, but also lucrative opportunities for illegal diggers hunting for antique treasures and gold. There is ample anecdotal testimony from people living near the Great Pyramids at Giza that since the revolution large holes have been appearing in the ground there.Our own inspection quickly revealed evidence of what they were talking about. Close to a desert track, just beyond a small outcrop of sandstone and with the pyramids looming in the distance, we found a large, evenly dug vertical shaft. It was at least a metre and a half in diameter and we could not see the bottom of it.

In advance of the creation of an artisan centre in the federated districts of Bléré-Val-de-Cher, central France, archaeologists have been excavating Neolithic, Antique and Medieval remains. Among the Medieval remains, a well preserved underground refuge chamber was discovered, representing a rare archaeological find.The entrance to the underground refuge was hidden under the floor of a small building on stilts.

A group of archaeologists from Warsaw located the place of second location of the city Nieszawa near Dybowski Castle in Toruń. The researchers used non-invasive research methods: air prospection and geophysical surveys."With surveys, we were able to preliminarily locate the likely range, size and topography of the city, which has not existed for over 550 years" - says project co-ordinator Michał Pisz.

Parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are up for sale -- in tiny pieces.Nearly 70 years after the discovery of the world's oldest biblical manuscripts, the Palestinian family who originally sold them to scholars and institutions is now quietly marketing the leftovers -- fragments the family says it has kept in a Swiss safe deposit box all these years.

A recent Baylor University research study has shed new light on the diet and food acquisition strategies of some the earliest human ancestors in Africa.Beginning around two million years ago, early stone tool-making humans, known scientifically as Oldowan hominin, started to exhibit a number of physiological and ecological adaptations that required greater daily energy expenditures, including an increase in brain and body size, heavier investment in their offspring and significant home-range expansion. Demonstrating how these early humans acquired the extra energy they needed to sustain these shifts has been the subject of much debate among researchers.

Differences and similarities in pottery decorations can offer clues about cultural relationships over space and through time. Residues on pots reveal important clues to how people used their pottery.An international team of scientists last month reported chemical analyses of the charred gunk on the surfaces of pottery shards from Jomon period sites in Japan was composed mostly of the oily residue from cooking ocean fish.More here and here

Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity.

Back in October 2011 I first wrote about Italian engineer, Andrea Rossi, and his E-Cat project, a device that produces heat through a process called a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR).Very briefly, LENR, otherwise called cold fusion, is a technique that generates energy through low temperature (far lower than hot fusion temperatures which are in the range of tens off thousands of degrees) reactions that are not chemical. Most importantly, LENR is, theoretically, much safer, much simpler, and many orders of magnitude cheaper than hot fusion. Rather than explaining LENR in detail here please see my original posting for a more complete explanation.More here

Google's acquisition of a kite power generator manufacturer suggests a strong future for the technology.Google has acquired a Bay Area technology company that generates power through wind turbines attached to robotic kites. The news comes just a couple weeks after the company, Makani Power, completed the first fully autonomous flight of a kite power system.

Meat from endangered whales caught by Icelandic hunters is being sold in Japan as luxury dog treats, environmental campaigners said Tuesday.Michinoku Farm, a Tokyo-based company, is offering chews made from North Atlantic fin whales on its company website, with the meat described as a "low calorie, low fat, high protein" snack.

Lawrence Livermore scientists have discovered and demonstrated a new technique to remove and store atmospheric carbon dioxide while generating carbon-negative hydrogen and producing alkalinity, which can be used to offset ocean acidification.The team demonstrated, at a laboratory scale, a system that uses the acidity normally produced in saline water electrolysis to accelerate silicate mineral dissolution while producing hydrogen fuel and other gases. The resulting electrolyte solution was shown to be significantly elevated in hydroxide concentration that in turn proved strongly absorptive and retentive of atmospheric CO2.

To the viewer it is an accomplished semiabstract image of flowers and clouds, but in fact this painting was produced by a paralysed woman solely through the power of thought.Heide Pfützner, a former teacher from Leipzig, Germany, was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Motor Neurone Disease, yet she has managed to produce a series of the paintings with the aid of a new brain controlled computer.

Several miscellaneous bits and pieces of the first moon mission have orbited back into our field of view lately.In March, it was pieces of the rocket that propelled Apollo 11 spaceward, kindly dragged from their watery grave by Amazon CEO and space enthusiast Jeff Bezos.And more recently, the auction block played host to Buzz Aldrin's space jammies, as well as Neil Armstrong's jumpin' heartbeat as he first set foot on the lunar surface.

Strange minerals detected at the centers of impact craters on the moon may be the shattered remains of the space rocks that made the craters and not exhumed bits of the moon's interior, as had been previously thought.The foreign matter in the craters is probably asteroid debris and some could even be from Earth, which has thrown off its share of material as it's been battered by asteroids and comets over the eons.The discovery comes not from finding anything new in the craters themselves, but by planetary scientists who were looking at models of how meteorite impacts affect the moon.

A high-tech United States surveillance tool which sweeps up all communications without a warrant was sent to New Zealand for testing on the public, according to an espionage expert.The tool was called ThinThread and it worked by automatically intercepting phone, email and internet information.ThinThread was highly valued by those who created it because it could handle massive amounts of intercepted information. It then used snippets of data to automatically build a detailed picture of targets, their contacts and their habits for the spy organisation using it.

Search giant Google is intending to build huge wireless networks across Africa and Asia, using high-altitude balloons and blimps.The company is intending to finance, build and help operate networks from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, with the aim of connecting around a billion people to the web.To help enable the campaign, Google has been putting together an ecosystem of low-cost smartphones running Android on low-power microprocessors. Rather than traditional infrastructure, Google's signal will be carried by high-altitude platforms - balloons and blimps - that can transmit to areas of hundreds of square kilometres.

The use of GMOs has been a growing issue of contention in recent years, with health advocates pushing for mandatory labelling of genetically modified products even though the federal government and many scientists say the technology is safe.The "March Against Monsanto" movement began just a few months ago, when Canal created a Facebook page on 28 February calling for a rally against the company's practices. "If I had gotten 3,000 people to join me, I would have considered that a success," she said Saturday. Instead, she said, two million responded to her message.