Newsdesk Archive

The Formosan clouded leopard, a clouded-leopard subspecies native to Taiwan, is now extinct, according to a team of zoologists."There is little chance that the clouded leopard still exists in Taiwan," zoologist Chiang Po-jen told Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA). "There may be a few of them, but we do not think they exist in any significant numbers."Zoologists from Taiwan and the United States have looked for the animal on and off since 2001, to no avail. To see if any of the animals remained, the researchers set up about 1,500 infrared cameras and scent traps in the Taiwanese mountains but found nothing.

For two years now, the FBI has been talking about how new Internet communications technologies are stopping them from getting the bad guys. In 2011, the FBI's top lawyer called it the "going dark" problem. Last year, FBI Director Robert Mueller related similar concerns to Congress, stating it needs "wiretapping backdoors" into popular websites, or it would have to shut down more investigations. The FBI's position was reportedly that installing such "backdoors" should be mandatory, not optional.

In the very early hours of the morning, in a Harvard robotics laboratory last summer, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m. -- subject line, "Flight of the RoboBee.".

Modern science and collective society are too quick to label cognitive conditions, and as a result, dismiss the potential for understanding and exploration. Parapsychological phenomena amongst savant syndrome individuals is a severely affected area. What is going on in the human mind when defects lead to brilliance?In his blog, Paranormalia, Robert McLuhan explores the case of 9 year old Nandana, who has been diagnosed as a highly functioning child with Autism and ADHD, but is said to have a telepathic connection to her mother. Through a series of tests between mother and daughter, Nandana was able to type word for word a poem given initially only to her mom. She was also able to identify up to a nine digit number, as well as simple words and phrases.

Researchers who unearthed the fossil specimen of an ape skeleton in Spain in 2002 assigned it a new genus and species, Pierolapithecus catalaunicus. They estimated that the ape lived about 11.9 million years ago, arguing that it could be the last common ancestor of modern great apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gorillas and humans. Now, a University of Missouri integrative anatomy expert says the shape of the specimen's pelvis indicates that it lived near the beginning of the great ape evolution, after the lesser apes had started to develop separately but before the great ape species began to diversify.

A team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) has launched a project to re-create the first web page. The aim is to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the web.The world wide web was developed by Prof Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at Cern.The initiative coincides with the 20th anniversary of the research centre giving the web to the world. According to Dan Noyes, the web manager for Cern's communication group, re-creation of the world's first website will enable future generations to explore, examine and think about how the web is changing modern life.

I'll bet you that archaeologist Betsy Bryan's perspective on reality-show behavior is a little longer than most. Since 2001, Bryan has led the excavation of the temple complex of the Egyptian goddess Mut in modern-day Luxor, the site of the city of Thebes in ancient Egypt. And the ritual she has uncovered, which centers on binge drinking, thumping music and orgiastic public sex, probably makes "Jersey Shore" look pretty tame.At least it was thought to serve a greater societal purpose.Bryan, a specialist in the art, ritual and social hierarchy of Egypt's New Kingdom (roughly 1600 to 1000 BC), has painstakingly pieced together the details of the Festivals of Drunkenness...

Staring at a small patch of sky for more than 50 hours with the ultra-sensitive Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have for the first time identified discrete sources that account for nearly all the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. They found that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies with gorging black holes at their cores and the remaining 37 percent comes from galaxies that are rapidly forming stars."The sensitivity and resolution of the VLA, following its decade-long upgrade, made it possible to identify the specific objects responsible for nearly all of the radio background emission coming from beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy," said Jim Condon, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "Before we had this capability, we could not detect the numerous faint sources that produce much of the background emission," he added.Previous studies had measured the amount of radio emission coming from the distant Universe, but had not been capable of attributing all the radio waves to specific objects.

Deposits left by the eruption of a subglacial volcano, or tuya, 1.8 million years ago could hold the secret to more accurate palaeo-glacial and climate models, according to new research by University of British Columbia geoscientists.The detailed mapping and sampling of the partially eroded Kima' Kho tuya in northern British Columbia, Canada shows that the ancient regional ice sheet through which the volcano erupted was twice as thick as previously estimated.

A team of scientists find in the Laguna de Rio Seco lagoon, at an altitude of 3,020 m., evidence of atmospheric pollution caused by lead and linked to metallurgical activities from 3,900 years ago (Early Bronze Age). Lead pollution increased gradually during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, coinciding with the development and expansion of metallurgy in southern Europe.Atmospheric contamination due to heavy metals is currently a severe problem of global proportions, with important repercussions in public health. This type of pollution also occurred in prehistoric times.

The idea that humans nearly became extinct 75,000 ago because of a super-volcano eruption is not supported by new data from Africa, scientists say.In the past, it has been proposed that the so-called Toba event plunged the world into a volcanic winter, killing animal and plant life and squeezing our species to a few thousand individuals.An Oxford University-led team examined ancient sediments in Lake Malawi for traces of this climate catastrophe.

Earthquakes can permanently crack the Earth, an investigation of quakes that have rocked Chile over the past million years suggests.Although earthquakes can wreak havoc on the planet's surface, more than a century of research has suggested the Earth actually mostly rebounds after quakes, with blocks of the world's crust elastically springing back, over the course of months to decades, to the way they initially were. Such rebounding was first seen after investigations of the devastating 1906 San Francisco temblor thathelped lead to the destruction of more than 80 percent of the city. The rebound is well-documented nowadays by satellite-based GPS systems that monitor Earth's movements.

A teensy skeleton with a squashed alien-like head may have earthly origins, but the remains, found in the Atacama Desert a decade ago, do make for quite a medical mystery.Apparently when the mummified specimen was discovered, some had suggested the possibility it was an alien that had somehow landed on Earth, though the researchers involved never suggested this otherworldly origin.

Scientists have figured out a technique to measure gravity's effects on antimatter, that mysterious stuff so beloved of Dan Brown fans and physicists alike.The achievement, made by the ALPHA collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, marks another step toward understanding the differences between ordinary matter and antimatter -- and perhaps, physicists hope, toward revealing more about the origins of the universe.

April 15, 2013, the date of the Boston Marathon bombings, was the saddest recorded day in five years, according to a measure of global happiness created by using Twitter data.As reflected by English-language users' posts, the date saw a leap in the use of negative words, such as "sad," "victims" and "tragedy," and a decline in positive phrases, such as "hahaha." The finding comes as researchers launch a new public website, hedonometer.org, that shows daily global mood swings as expressed via Twitter.

Jonathan Rowley reaches into the basin of white powder and like a magician pulls out the frame of a pair of spectacles. Made of plastic, they're the same white as the powder, but hard, and unusually shaped.Designed by Ron Arad for PQ Eyewear, each hinge on the glasses (pictured below and above right) consists of segments like an armadillo's tail. "We made these here," Rowley says, indicating a hulking white machine behind him, which looks like a cross between a dry cleaning apparatus and an industrial oven. "The thing is, you couldn't make these any other way," he says.

Hundreds of mysterious spheres lie beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, an ancient six-level step pyramid just 30 miles from Mexico City.The enigmatic spheres were found during an archaeological dig using a camera-equipped robot at one of the most important buildings in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan."They look like yellow spheres, but we do not know their meaning. It's an unprecedented discovery," said Jorge Zavala, an archaeologist at Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute.

An archaeological dig led by Dr Marc Oxenham from The Australian National University's School of Archaeology and Anthropology has uncovered possibly the earliest cemetery site in Southeast Asia.More than 140 ancient burials including men, women, teenagers and children have been recovered from the site in the Thanh Hoa province in Northern Vietnam.

Mercury, traveling in its 88-day-long orbit around the Sun with basically zero axial tilt, has many craters at its poles whose insides literally never see the light of day. These permanently-shadowed locations have been found by the MESSENGER mission to harbor considerable deposits of ice (a seemingly ironic discovery on a planet two-and-a-half times closer to the Sun than we are!*).

Kids like to taunt each other with the cry, "Last one there is a rotten egg!" In Earth's case, that might be more true of the first ones there, according to a new study suggesting that millions of years ago, the planet emanated such a stench.The research, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds fossil evidence of microbes snacking on other microbes, a form of feeding called heterotrophy. Heterotrophs can't make their own organic nutrients, so they have to eat other life forms. This is in contrast with autotrophs (think plants), which can synthesize their own food from sunlight or inorganic chemicals.

SCHRÖDINGER'S cat, both dead and alive at once, was always meant to be a thought experiment, but will ordinary objects or your favourite feline ever enter the quantum world? No one knows, but now there is a way to measure how close physicists are to realising the thought experiment.The laws of quantum mechanics should apply to everything, from the tiniest particle to the entire universe. However, their effects are usually too small to see on everyday scales. Physicists are continually testing quantum effects at increasing scales, to probe the divide between the classical and quantum realms. But without a ranking system it wasn't clear how far they had got.

MIND reading can be as simple as slapping a sticker on your forehead. An "electronic tattoo" containing flexible electronic circuits can now record some complex brain activity as accurately as an EEG. The tattoo could also provide a cheap way to monitor a developing fetus.The first electronic tattoo appeared in 2011, when Todd Coleman at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues designed a transparent patch containing electronic circuits as thin as a human hairMovie Camera. Applied to skin like a temporary tattoo, these could be used to monitor electrophysiological signals associated with the heart and muscles, as well as rudimentary brain activity.

More than 160 researchers across 10 European countries joined together, in what is being hailed as the first international project to focus on ocean acidification and its consequences.According to the partners in the EPOCA project ('European Project on Ocean Acidification') marine research was a relatively new field when they initiated the project four years ago. It brought together scientists who were concerned about the possible risks associated with ocean acidification for marine organisms and ecosystems.

Europe will enforce the world's first continent-wide ban on widely used insecticides alleged to cause serious harm to bees, after a European commission vote on Monday.The suspension is a landmark victory for millions of environmental campaigners, backed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), concerned about a dramatic decline in the bee population. The vote also represents a serious setback for the chemical producers who make billions each year from the products and also UK ministers, who voted against the ban. Both had argued the ban would harm food production.

Researchers have solved the riddle of how one of Africa's greatest civilisations survived a catastrophic drought which wiped out other famous dynasties. Geomorphologists and dating specialists from The Universities of Aberystwyth, Manchester, and Adelaide say that it was the River Nile which made life viable for the renowned Kerma kingdom, in what is now northern Sudan.Kerma was the first Bronze Age kingdom in Africa outside Egypt.Their analysis of three ancient river channels where the Nile once flowed shows, for the first time, that its floods weren't too low or too high to sustain life between 2,500 BC and 1,500 BC, when Kerma flourished and was a major rival to its more famous neighbour downstream.

Children born outside the United States have a lower risk of asthma, skin and food allergies, and living in the United States for a decade or more may raise the risk of some allergies, said a study Monday.The research in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that certain environmental exposures could trigger allergies later in life, overcoming the protective effects of microbial exposure in childhood.

Imagine if this Swedish invention were to become a part of stop-and-frisk. US News and World Report writes:Police might soon be able to detect more than just alcohol on their breathing test devices. A new Swedish-designed device can detect 12 different controlled substances, including methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, morphine and marijuana.

If there are extraterrestrial rewards for perseverance, the organisers of the UFO conspiracy hearings that are under way at the National Press Club in Washington this week deserve a visit from space.Five former US congressmen and one former senator have been paid $20,000 each to lend credibility to the event, which calls on the government to release supposed secret documents showing alien incursions dating back decades.Related: Steve Bassett on UFO / ET / Alien Disclosure

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is emerging as the most habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it. "It has liquid water, organic carbon, nitrogen [in the form of ammonia], and an energy source," says Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Besides Earth, he says, "there is no other environment in the Solar System where we can make all those claims.".

New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience has revealed how Saturn keeps itself looking young and hotAs planets age they become darker and cooler. Saturn however is much brighter than expected for a planet of its age - a question that has puzzled scientists since the late sixties. New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience has revealed how Saturn keeps itself looking young and hot.

Nearly all the water present in Jupiter's upper atmosphere today comes from the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which collided with the planet in July 1994. Using ESA's Herschel telescope, the discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by a researcher from the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux (CNRS/Université Bordeaux 1). It is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics dated 23 April 2013.

The mysterious bias of life on Earth toward molecules that skew one way and not the other could be due to how light shines in star- and planet-forming clouds, researchers say.If correct, these findings suggest the molecules of life on Earth may initially have come from elsewhere in the cosmos, scientists added.The organic molecules that form the basis of life on Earth are often chiral, meaning they come in two forms that are mirror images, much as right and left hands appear identical but are reversed versions of each other.

A site near Stonehenge has revealed archaeological evidence that hunters lived just a mile from Stonehenge roughly 5,000 years prior to the construction of the first stones, new research suggests.What's more, the site, which was occupied continuously for 3,000 years, had evidence of burning, thousands of flint tool fragments and bones of wild aurochs, a type of extinct giant cow. That suggests the area near Stonehenge may have been an auroch migration route that became an ancient feasting site, drawing people together from across different cultures in the region, wrote lead researcher David Jacques of the Open University in the United Kingdeom, in an email.

Soaring pyramids, ceremonial platforms and ritual plazas, signatures of the ancient Maya, owe their origin to a broad cultural shift in Central America around 1,000 B.C., the ruins of Ceibal suggest.The ancient Maya started building their storied cities amid a construction boom in Central America as early as 1000 B.C., archaeologists reported Thursday.New radiocarbon date samples from the ruined plazas and pyramids of Ceibal, in modern-day Guatemala, point to an earlier spread in growth of ancient Maya city building than people had previously believed, suggests a team led by archaeologist Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona-Tucson.

As potentially game-changing as the steam engine or telegraph were in their day, 3D printing could herald a new industrial revolution, experts say.For the uninitiated, the prospect of printers turning out any object you want at the click of a button may seem like the stuff of science fiction.But 3D printing is already here, is developing fast, and looks set to leap from the labs and niche industries onto the wider market.

smh.com.auCarbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere are on the cusp of reaching 400 parts per million for the first time in 3 million years.The daily CO2 level, measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, was 399.72 parts per million last Thursday, and a few hourly readings had risen to more than 400 parts per million.

Humans lived in South America at the height of the last ice age, thousands of years earlier than we thought, according to a controversial study. A team claims to have found 22,000-year-old stone tools at a site in Brazil, though other archaeologists are disputing the claim.Christelle Lahaye of Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 University in France and colleagues excavated a rock shelter in north-east Brazil and found 113 stone tools.

It's well known that plants can help mitigate global warming, by absorbing carbon dioxide and trapping it, via photosynthesis, in things like leaves, stalks, and branches.But it turns out that plants help cool the planet in another way, by releasing tiny particles into the atmosphere that help reflect sunlight back into space.Yes, it's true: Plants pass gas. A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience found that vapors emitted by plants scatter and absorb radiation from the sun, and that they help form cloud droplets that also reflect the sun's rays.

Two types of fish have been shown to use gestures, or sign language, to help one another hunt. This is the first time these types of gestures have been found to occur in animals other than primates and ravens.Both types of fish, grouper and coral trout, are known for hunting cooperatively with other kinds of animals. Whereas the grouper hunts with giant moray eels and a fish called the Napoleon wrasse, coral trout partner up with octopuses to snag prey. A study published last week in the journal Nature Communications found that the fish are able to "point" their heads toward prey, to help out their hunting buddies.

Until fairly recently, many scientists thought that only humans had culture, but that idea is now being crushed by an avalanche of recent research with animals. Two new studies in monkeys and whales take the work further, showing how new cultural traditions can be formed and how conformity might help a species survive and prosper. The findings may also help researchers distinguish the differences between animal and human cultures.

About 2,000 monkeys at a Harvard Medical School research center will be moved to other laboratories around the country as the school shuts down the troubled center, an official with the National Institutes of Health said Wednesday.The school announced Tuesday that it would close the facility, the New England Primate Research Center in Southborough, Mass., over the next two years. Harvard said financial uncertainties were behind the move, but the laboratory has been cited in recent years by the federal Department of Agriculture for failing to comply with the Animal Welfare Act, and four primates have died there since mid-2010.

A controversial theory that humans evolved from amphibious apes has won new support.The aquatic ape theory, whose supporters include David Attenborough, suggests that apes emerged from the water, lost their fur, started to walk upright and then developed big brains.While it has been treated with scorn by some scientists since it first emerged 50 years ago, it is backed by a committed group of academics, including Sir David.

Researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have spent many years studying the remains of a Stone Age community in Karleby outside the town of Falköping, Sweden. The researchers have for example tried to identify parts of the inhabitants' diet. Right now they are looking for evidence that fertilisers were used already during the Scandinavian Stone Age, and the results of their first analyses may be exactly what they are looking for.

The European Commission will restrict the use of pesticides linked to bee deaths by researchers, despite a split among EU states on the issue.There is great concern across Europe about the collapse of bee populations.Neonicotinoid chemicals in pesticides are believed to harm bees and the European Commission says they should be restricted to crops not attractive to bees and other pollinators.

With over 800 mini-hydroelectric plants awaiting approval in Switzerland, the biodiversity of Swiss river ecosystems could be at stake. More enlightened policies could help preserve the environment.As nuclear power production is phased out in several countries in the wake of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plants, renewable energy is expected pick up much of the slack.

Sunflower seed husks, a huge waste product of the vegetable oil and food industry, could be used as an environmentally friendly filler, or aggregate, for concrete according to Turkish researchers writing in the International Journal of Environment and Waste Management. The team demonstrated that the use of husks reduces the density of concrete as well as boosting the material's resistance to cracking after exposure to icy then thawing conditions.

A new species of dinosaur from the island of Madagascar has been identified.Dubbed Dahalokely tokana by its discoverers, the dinosaur was a member of a group called abelisauroids, carnivorous dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period that were common in the Southern Hemisphere, according to a news release. In fact, the dinosaur is the oldest abelisauroid to date found on the island of Madagascar, the researchers write online April 18 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

The oldest ancient Maya ceremonial compound ever discovered in the Central American lowlands dates back 200 years before similar sites pop up elsewhere in the region, archaeologists announced today (April 25). The recently excavated plaza and pyramid would have likely served as a solar observatory for rituals.The finding at a site called Ceibal suggests that the origins of the Maya civilization are more complex than first believed. Archaeologists hotly debate whether the Maya -- famous for their complex calendar system that spurred apocalypse rumors last year -- developed independently or whether they were largely inspired by an earlier culture known as the Olmec. The new research suggests the answer is neither.

Archaeologists fear for pyramid sites as illegal building gathers pace in wake of Arab springIn Manshiet Dahshur, 25 miles south of Cairo, the villagers recently extended the boundaries of the cemetery. For Ahmed Rageb, a carpenter who buried his cousin in the annexe, it was a logical decision. "We want to bury the dead," he said, strolling through the new cemetery after visiting his cousin's tomb. "The old cemetery is full. And there is no other place to bury my family.".

Last-ditch lobbying to sway vote in Brussels to halt use of killer nerve agentsEurope is on the brink of a landmark ban on the world's most widely used insecticides, which have increasingly been linked to serious declines in bee numbers. Despite intense secret lobbying by British ministers and chemical companies against the ban, revealed in documents obtained by the Observer, a vote in Brussels on Monday is expected to lead to the suspension of the nerve agents.

Archeologist's Elsa Redmond and Charles Spencer of the American Museum of Natural History report on new developments at the ongoing excavation site in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico. In a paper they've had published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two describe a temple complex found at the site that appears to be similar to those described by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. The people that lived in the valley at the time were part of a group known as the Zapotec Civilization.

The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation, the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers' town near the pyramids.The workers' town is located about 1,300 feet (400 meters) south of the Sphinx, and was used to house workers building the pyramid of pharaoh Menkaure, the third and last pyramid on the Giza plateau. The site is also known by its Arabic name, Heit el-Ghurab, and is sometimes called "the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders.".

A hardy band of Neanderthals may have made a last stand for their species at a remote outpost in subarctic Russia, a newfound prehistoric "tool kit" suggests.The Ural Mountains site "may be one of the last [refuges] of the Neanderthals, and that would be very exciting," said study leader Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at France's Université de Toulouse le Mirail.

Three years ago researchers added a new branch to the human family tree: Australopithecus sediba, a nearly two-million-year-old relative from South Africa. By all accounts it was a dazzling find-- two partial skeletons, an adult female and young male, from a site called Malapa just outside Johannesburg. And it has been making headlines regularly since then whenever scientists release results of new studies of the material, as they did earlier this month. Any time human fossils, especially skeletons, are unearthed it's a big deal, because such remains are so incredibly rare. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that A. sediba may just be the most important hominin (modern humans and their extinct relatives) discovery yet.

A billionaire-backed asteroid-mining company aims to start putting its big plans into action soon, launching its first hardware into space by this time next year.Planetary Resources, which counts Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt among its investors, plans to loft a set of tiny "cubesats" to Earth orbit in early 2014, to test out gear for its first line of asteroid-prospecting spacecraft.

A NASA plan to send astronauts to an asteroid was met with skepticism Wednesday when NASA Chief Charlie Bolden presented the idea to top space officials in Congress - though their doubts may not be enough to sink the program.The asteroid mission, unveiled a few weeks ago, would send a NASA probe to capture a small asteroid and drag it to a point near the moon so astronauts riding a new rocket and capsule could visit it, possibly as soon as 2021.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid."For solar and wind power to be used in a significant way, we need a battery made of economical materials that are easy to scale and still efficient."

While everyone is familiar with water in the liquid, ice, and gas phases, water can also exist in many other phases over a vast range of temperature and pressure conditions. One lesser known phase of water is the superionic phase, which is considered an "ice" but exists somewhere between a solid and a liquid: while the oxygen atoms occupy fixed lattice positions as in a solid, the hydrogen atoms migrate through the lattice as in a fluid. Until now, scientists have thought that there was only one phase of superionic ice, but scientists in a new study have discovered a second phase that is more stable than the original. The new phase of superionic ice could make up a large component of the interiors of giant icy planets such as Uranus and Neptune.

Sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years, according to the latest Ecosystem Advisory issued by NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). These high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are the latest in a trend of above average temperature seen during the spring and summer seasons, and part of a pattern of elevated temperatures occurring in the Northwest Atlantic, but not seen elsewhere in the ocean basin over the past century.

A lost ancient Egyptian city submerged beneath the sea 1,200 years ago is starting to reveal what life was like in the legendary port of Thonis-Heracleion.For centuries it was thought to be a legend, a city of extraordinary wealth mentioned in Homer, visited by Helen of Troy and Paris, her lover, but apparently buried under the sea.In fact, Heracleion was true, and a decade after divers began uncovering its treasures, archaeologists have produced a picture of what life was like in the city in the era of the pharaohs.

All bets are off. A prominent physicist has just announced that he's developed a proof for "time crystals" that can move thanks to a break in the symmetry of time. And now he's about to test his proof in the real world.

The speed of light is constant, or so textbooks say. But some scientists are exploring the possibility that this cosmic speed limit changes, a consequence of the nature of the vacuum of space.The definition of the speed of light has some broader implications for fields such as cosmology and astronomy, which assume a stable velocity for light over time. For instance, the speed of light comes up when measuring the fine structure constant (alpha), which defines the strength of the electromagnetic force. And a varying light speed would change the strengths of molecular bonds and the density of nuclear matter itself.

The main ingredient of wood, cellulose, is one of the most abundant organic compounds on Earth and a dream source of renewable fuel. Now, bioengineers suggest that it could feed the hungry as well. In a new study, researchers have found a way to turn cellulose into starch, the most common carbohydrate in the human diet.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- The U.S. Department of Energy and the state of Alaska will collaborate on future research of unconventional energy resources in the Arctic, including abundant reservoirs of methane hydrate.The DOE's acting assistant secretary for fossil energy, Christopher Smith, and Alaska Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Dan Sullivan announced the agreement Tuesday and spoke to reporters from Houston, Texas, where they are attending LNG 17, a natural gas conference.

Today on Earth Day, scientists have announced a collaboration to develop an affordable photovoltaic system capable of concentrating, on average, the power of 2,000 suns, with an efficiency that can collect 80 percent of the incoming radiation and convert it to useful energy. The proposed system can be built anywhere sustainable energy, drinkable water and cool air are in short supply at a cost of three times lower than comparable systems.

A widespread critique of science is that it tells us that the more we know, the more insignificant we are. It's the famous after-Copernicus blues: everything went downhill ever since Earth was moved from the center of the cosmos. Since then, the Sun was pushed out from the center too, our Milky Way galaxy is but one among hundreds of billions of others in an expanding Universe. Even the atoms we are made of are less than 5% of the total stuff out there.

When Avner Goren walks in your door, thousands of years of history come sweeping in like the desert sands.After Israel captured the Sinai peninsula from Egypt in the 1967 war, Dr. Goren was appointed chief archaeologist of Israel. He moved his young family to the rugged mountainous region and began getting to know the local Bedouin. By the time he left in 1982, after Egypt and Israel made peace, he had learned Arabic and become thoroughly integrated into the Bedouin culture.

RESEARCH INTO THE rate of erosion of Pilbara rocks has put an upper limit on the possible age of up to a million ancient Aboriginal engravings in the Burrup Peninsula of Western Australia.The peninsula and surrounding Dampier Archipelago have the highest concentration of rock art in the world. The carvings, called petroglyphs, include depictions of human-like figures, human faces and animals that no longer inhabited the region, including the Tasmanian tiger.

Chilean cult leader and instigator of the murder of a three-day-old burned alive in Colliguay still at large, believed to be in Peru.Investigative Police (PDI) arrested four people Thursday and are looking for the remaining members of a cult that sacrificed a three-day-old last November in the Valparaíso Region.Note: Graham has addressed some of the issues raised by this story in two posts on his faceboook page today: here and here

William VanderGraaf is a retired 29-year veteran of the Winnipeg Police Service, and a member of the Canadian chapter of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. LEAP is comprised of former and current police officers and law enforcement professionals from around the world who hope to see all drugs legalized and regulated by the government.

Armed drone aircraft have been operated remotely from Britain for the first time, the Ministry of Defence has said.It said Reaper drones had flown missions controlled from RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire, where campaign groups are holding a protest rally against the practice.The MoD said it respected people's rights to protest peacefully.

In the struggle to prevent illegal poaching of endangered African rhinos, wildlife managers believe they've found a new weapon: poison.So far this year, more than 200 rhinos have been killed by poachers in South Africa alone, according to the Guardian, and conservationists fear that number will climb to about 1,000 before the end of this year.

New measurements suggest the Earth's inner core is far hotter than prior experiments suggested, putting it at 6,000C - as hot as the Sun's surface.The solid iron core is actually crystalline, surrounded by liquid.But the temperature at which that crystal can form had been a subject of long-running debate.Experiments outlined in Science used X-rays to probe tiny samples of iron at extraordinary pressures to examine how the iron crystals form and melt.

The classic Maya civilization, which flourished in Central America for more than 600 years, has been celebrated for its vast city states adorned with monumental pyramids and for its technological feats such as the development of an elaborate written language and impressively accurate astronomical observations.

The grand Mycenaens, the first Greeks, inspired the legends of the Trojan Wars, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." Their culture abruptly declined around 1200 B.C., marking the start of a Dark Ages in Greece.The disappearance of the Mycenaens is a Mediterranean mystery. Leading explanations include warfare with invaders or uprising by lower classes. Some scientists also think one of the country's frequent earthquakes could have contributed to the culture's collapse. At the ruins of Tiryns, a fortified palace, geologists hope to find evidence to confirm whether an earthquake was a likely culprit.

A team of archaeologists from the University of Southampton have used the latest in digital imaging technology to record and analyse carvings on the Easter Island statue Hoa Hakananai'a.James Miles, Hembo Pagi and Dr Graeme Earl from the Archaeological Computing Research Group at the University of Southampton teamed up with archaeologist and editor of British Archaeology Mike Pitts to examine the statue at the Wellcome Trust Gallery in the British Museum, London.

First discovered during a survey two years ago, disk-shaped copper plates found by archaeologists near the ancient site of Hippos-Sussita just east of the Sea of Galilee continue to mystify them.Now, archaeologists involved in the ongoing excavations at the site are reaching out to scholars and the public alike to help them find the answer to the riddle.

Archaeologists have found a tomb in eastern China that may be the grave of the notorious Emperor Yang of Sui, according to news reports.With inscriptions revealing the surprising identity of the deceased, the burial chamber measures about 215 square feet (20 square meters). It was uncovered in Yangzhou, a city about 175 miles (280 kilometers) southeast of Shanghai, China's state news agency Xinhua reported.

Many original Tibetan texts were lost or destroyed amid the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950. Thanks to centuries of contact with Tibet, however, Mongolia is believed to have some of the few remaining originals. In addition to ancient Tibetan and Mongolian documents, rare Sanskrit manuscripts, including 800 verses by Nagarjuna, a 2nd-century Indian Buddhist philosopher, inscribed on birch bark, have been identified in the collection.

The genetic lineage of Europe mysteriously transformed about 4,500 years ago, new research suggests.The findings, detailed today (April 23) in the journal Nature Communications, were drawn from several skeletons unearthed in central Europe that were up to 7,500 years old.

"I feel like I have been dropped into my body. I know this is my voice and these are my memories, but they don't feel like they belong to me."It happened out of the blue. Louise Airey was 8 years old, off sick from school, when suddenly she felt like she had been dropped into her own body. "It's just so difficult to verbalise what this feels like," she says. "All of a sudden you're hyper aware, and everything else in the world seems unreal, like a movie.".

A classic arcade game could help adults with lazy eye, according to a small new study.Researchers from McGill University found that Tetris, a puzzle-type game invented in 1984 that involves matching falling blocks, could help train the eyes of people with adult amblyopia (the scientific name for lazy eye).Amblyopia occurs when the central vision in one eye isn't developed properly, and can lead to having crossed eyes or near- or far-sightedness, according to the American Optometric Association.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

Nadim Chebli remembers well the first of his customers who decided to pay for the records they bought with virtual currency rather than cash or credit cards."I'd only just agreed to accept Bitcoins," said the 36-year-old owner of the Long Player record shop, "and the first sales I made in it came pretty quickly, from a guy about my age who bought Tom Waits's The Big Time and a young woman who bought a Beatles compilation from 1967."See the Guardian video on this story here.

DVICERe:char is a small company using technology to tackle some serious real word problems. Their main goal is to help farmers grow more food. It may sound simple, but they're using a high-tech process to get the job done.

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, the nursery rhyme advises.And some 72,000 ladybugs have found a home within the Mall of America, where mall managers have released the insects inside the fully enclosed shopping and entertainment complex.The Bloomington, Minn., mall, which is so huge it could hold seven Yankee Stadiums, also has more than 30,000 live plants, including about 400 trees, which act as natural air purifiers for the indoor mall.

Human tendency to adopt the behaviour of others when on their home territory has been found in non-human primates. Researchers at the University of St Andrews observed 'striking' fickleness in male monkeys, when it comes to copying the behaviour of others in new groups.The study has been hailed by leading primate experts as rare experimental proof of 'cultural transmission' in wild primates to date.

Religion and gender politics is often a toxic mix. First, the Church of England tied itself in knots over the ordination of women bishops. And then, Pope Francis got in trouble with the traditionalists by washing two young women's feet over Easter. Apparently, the liturgies dictate he should only have washed the men's feet.

In 1992, at the age of 70, a US citizen suffered a severe case of viral encephalitis, a swelling of the brain caused by infection. After he recovered two years later, he appeared completely average based on an IQ test (indeed, he scored 103). Yet in other ways, he was completely different. Several decades of his past life were wiped completely from his brain. His only accessible memories came from his 30s, and from the point of his illness to his death, he would never form another memory that he was aware of.

Individuals who work in creative fields are diagnosed and treated with a mental illness more frequently than the general public, showing an important link between writing and schizophrenia.The finding came from a team of experts at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Their extensive research on the Swedish registry is currently the most inclusive in its area.

The current Chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, the largest producer of food products in the world, believes that the answer to global water issues is privatization. This statement is on record from the wonderful company that has peddled junk food in the Amazon, has invested money to thwart the labeling of GMO-filled products, has a disturbing health and ethics record for its infant formula, and has deployed a cyber army to monitor Internet criticism and shape discussions in social media.See the video here

A global rights group launched a campaign on Tuesday to ban Terminator-style "killer robots" amid fears the rise of drone warfare could lead to machines with the power to make their own decisions about killing humans.Human Rights Watch said it was creating an international coalition to call for a global treaty that would impose a "pre-emptive and comprehensive ban" on artificially intelligent weapons before they are developed.

There is now so much debris in orbit that the space environment is close to a cascade of collisions that would make space extremely hazardous, a major international meeting has concluded.Its summary position stated there was an "urgent need" to start pulling redundant objects out of the sky.Scientists estimate there are nearly 30,000 items circling the Earth larger than 10cm in size.

Life may well lurk beneath the Martian surface today, but it'll be tough to detect without sending humans to the Red Planet, some experts say.It could be a long time before robots are able to drill deep into the Martian underground, explore caves and investigate other potentially life-supporting habitats on the Red Planet. So if humanity wants to satisfy its curiosity about potential life on Mars anytime soon, it should work to get boots in the red dirt, advocates say.

Radiation emitted in the vicinity of black holes could be used to measure distances of billions of light years, says TAU researcherA few years ago, researchers revealed that the universe is expanding at a much faster rate than originally believed -- a discovery that earned a Nobel Prize in 2011. But measuring the rate of this acceleration over large distances is still challenging and problematic, says Prof. Hagai Netzer of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy.

Astronomers have found a galaxy turning gas into stars with almost 100 percent efficiency, a rare phase of galaxy evolution that is the most extreme yet observed. The findings come from the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The quest to understand why our Universe is made of matter rather than antimatter has received a boost at the Large Hadron Collider.The LHCb experiment has for the first time observed decays of particles known as Bs mesons that preferentially end up as matter, rather than antimatter.However, the difference is still not enough to explain the preponderance of matter over antimatter in the cosmos.

On May 9, 1926, famed American explorer Richard Byrd took off from the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen along with his pilot, Floyd Bennett, in an attempt to be the first to fly to the North Pole. About 16 hours later, the pair returned to the island in their Fokker tri-motor airplane, the Josephine Ford, saying they had indeed accomplished the feat.

SCIENTISTS may have to sharpen their pencils and re-do a lot of math: It seems the speed of light may not be constant after all.In a finding that can potentially affect everything from the age of the universe to calculating the orbit of satellites, two new studies suggest the speed of a photon in a vacuum may fluctuate by as much as 50 quintillionths of a second per square meter.

A pair of neutrinos detected in Antarctica may be the first of these ghostly particles seen coming from outside the solar system since 1987. If the finding is confirmed, it could lead to a new way of looking at the universe that may solve a number of cosmic puzzles.Neutrinos have no charge and negligible mass, which means they can travel through space largely unimpeded by matter and electromagnetic fields. Detecting astrophysical neutrinos would offer an unprecedented way of studying comic objects across vast distances, similar to the way infrared light allows us to peer into opaque cosmic dust clouds to see stars forming.