Newsdesk Archive

Archaeologists from the University of Leicester in the UK have uncovered one of the biggest groups of Iron Age metal artefacts to be found in the region -- in addition to finding dice and gaming pieces.A dig at a prehistoric monument, an Iron Age hillfort at Burrough Hill, near Melton Mowbray, has given archaeologists a remarkable insight into the people who lived there over 2000 years ago.

The aliens are coming and they've found the perfect landing pad, nestled among the emerald hills of an Irish suburb.That is, if you choose to believe footage made by one UFO spotter who filmed the glowing sky-balls hovering over Cork, in southern Ireland.But rather than share his discovery with the world straight away, the bashful space twitcher chose to sit on it for four months before posting a video on YouTube.Hiding behind the pseudonym Naktis Ireland, the alien enthusiast uploaded the grainy footage, taken on a mobile phone, last month, but claimed to have filmed it in December.

The mummified remains of what looks like a 6-inch space alien has turned "Sirius" into the most eagerly awaited documentary among UFO enthusiasts.The findings, however, might come as a disappointment.In early publicity, filmmakers claimed the documentary would reveal that the DNA of the creature with an oversized alien-looking head couldn't be medically classified.In fact, the film, which premiered Monday in Hollywood, features a scientist who concluded the little humanoid was human.

France has become the 14th country to approve a law allowing gay marriage.The bill, which also legalises adoption by same-sex couples, was passed by 321 votes to 225 in the French parliament.The decision follows a divisive public debate with some of the biggest protests seen in France in recent years.Hundreds of opponents of the measure rallied outside the National Assembly building in central Paris as the result was announced.

We recently had the chance to chat with Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that has been at the forefront of the country's marijuana legalization and decriminalization efforts."With the marijuana reform movement, we really feel like our big brother is the gay rights movement. The issues are so similar. First of all, if you look at the public opinion polls Look at the Gallup poll on gay marriage legalization and look at the public opinion poll for marijuana legalization. They line up almost exactly between 2006 and 2011."

I have a stripy animal on my mantelpiece which is a 3D printed model of a drawing that my seven-year-old daughter made for me.There is some dispute about what it is - the original artists claims it is an elephant while the firm that made it described it as a pig - but there is no dispute about how treasured it will be.It was created by Crayon Creatures, a Barcelona-based firm which offers to turn children's pictures into solid objects. Customers need only send, scan or email their treasured scrawls.

It sounds like the ultimate do-it-yourself project: the print-your-own-home.In place of bricks and mortar and the need for a construction crew, a customisable building plan which transforms itself from computer screen graphics into a real-world abode thanks to the latest in 3D printing technology.That dream is still beyond our reach, but several teams of architects across the globe are engaged in efforts to take a major step towards it by creating the world's first 3D-printed homes.

The first continental-scale reconstruction of temperatures over the past 2000 years by 78 scientists from 24 countries has highlighted the unusual nature of the 20th century warming.The study published in Nature Geoscience, combining Northern and Southern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions, shows that the 20th Century warming is a global event that has produced the hottest global average temperature in 1400 years.

The strong earthquake that struck China's Sichuan province at 8:47 a.m. local time Saturday (April 20) probably hit along the same fault as the region's devastating 2008 earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.The epicenter of the magnitude-6.6 earthquake was likely on the Longmen Shan Fault, the USGS said in a report on the April 20 quake. It was centered at a relatively shallow 7.6 miles (12.3 kilometers) below the surface, similar to the 2008 temblor. The 2008 earthquake, a magnitude 7.9, killed more than 69,000 people and released 89 times more energy than yesterday's earthquake.

A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission the Fukushima power plant and urged Tepco to improve stability at the facility.The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the nuclear plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.

As drug testing bills aimed at the poor and jobless have entered several state legislatures this year, one group of lawmakers decided Monday to extend the idea to themselves.The Associated Press reports that the Minnesota House was immersed in a long-winding debate on how to finance the state's upcoming health and human services budget. Among the 87 amendments on the table was drug testing for welfare recipients, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune adds.

Last summer, British Columbia's top health official caused an uproar when he called the risks of MDMA -- the synthetic amphetamine sold as ecstasy -- overblown.According to CBC News:Provincial Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall says while the pure form of the drug has been proven safe in controlled clinical trials by psychiatrists, the type of ecstasy sold on the street is laced with potentially dangerous impurities.

Welding bits and pieces from various microbes and the camphor tree into the genetic code of Escherichia coli has allowed scientists to convince the stomach bug to produce hydrocarbons, rather than sickness or more E. coli. The gut microbe can now replicate the molecules, more commonly known as diesel, that burn predominantly in big trucks and other powerful moving machines.

Doctors may begin regularly using computer predictions in judging how to treat cancer patients after scientists constructed mathematical formulas that outperformed human experts in forecasting how sufferers will respond to treatment.A computer model of lung cancer made consistently better predictions of the future symptoms suffered by a set of patients undergoing radiotherapy or chemotherapy than the doctors who actually treated them, scientists said, in a study that demonstrates the increasingly important role of mathematics in cancer medicine.

A single equation grounded in basic physics principles could describe intelligence and stimulate new insights in fields as diverse as finance and robotics, according to new research.Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, developed an equation that they say describes many intelligent or cognitive behaviors, such as upright walking and tool use.

California's giant redwoods will now be found in six foreign countries. A new non-profit group is shipping 18-inch (46 centimeters) saplings of the trees for people to plant to help fight deforestation and climate change, according to USA Today.The trees are actually clones of enormous redwoods that were cut down more than a century ago. But these hardy trees have kept sprouting shoots, from which these trees were cloned by Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a non-profit group spearheading the project. "This is a first step toward mass production," David Milarch, the group's co-founder, told USA Today. The trees will be planted today (April 22), Earth Day, in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Germany and the United States.

Some say the marshes of southern Iraq are the origin of the Garden of Eden story. Why did Saddam Hussein drain them?He said it was to make dry land for agriculture. He dug canals and diverted the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, causing 90 per cent of the marshes to dry out. But really, he saw the Marsh Arabs who lived there, fishing, cutting reeds and tending water buffalo, as opponents. He couldn't send in heavy tanks to flush them out. Drains worked better.

A major global cooling event 34 million years ago chilled land as well as sea, according to climate clues found in an unusual place: fossil snail shells.The new research, published today (April 22) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals the historical links between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and surface temperatures on Earth. Between about 333.5 million years ago and 34 million years ago, the climate transitioned from the balmy, carbon-dioxide-rich Eocene epoch climate to the cooler, low-carbon-dioxide Oligocene epoch. Scientists estimate that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dropped from 1,000 parts per million to about 600 to 700 parts per million in this time frame.

Ocean biology alters the chemical composition of sea spray in ways that influence its ability to form clouds over the ocean. That's the conclusion of a team of scientists using a new approach to study tiny atmospheric particles called aerosols that can influence climate by absorbing or reflecting sunlight and seeding clouds. By engineering breaking waves of natural ocean water under purified air in the lab, they were able to isolate and analyze aerosols from the spray and determine how life within the water altered the chemistry of the particles.

Astronomers using an observatory in Hawaii kicked off a month-long campaign to study the northern lights on Saturn study Sunday (April 21) in a live webcast from Hawaii's iconic Keck Observatory.During a three-hour webcast, scientists discussed everything from the ringed planet's atmosphere to new discoveries made about the gas giant in the last year. While speaking with the public via social media, the researchers also used the Keck Observatory to observe auroras on Saturn to understand how the mysterious phenomenon works. The scientists weren't able to show live-video of the observations, but they did review some major Saturn discoveries during the webcast.

Organizers of the Dutch-based Mars One project opened up their website on Monday to take applications for a one-way trip to Mars in 2022.That's right: These astronauts won't be coming back. The idea is to jump-start a permanent settlement on Mars, with more supplies and settlers arriving every couple of years.The organizers say the $6 billion cost for the first landing would be covered through reality-TV deals and merchandising, but they skirted pointed questions about the plan's financial feasibility.

A private Mars colony project will do its best to avoid disturbing potential Red Planet life rather than aggressively hunt it down.The Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, which opened its astronaut-selection process today (April 22), plans to land four people on the Red Planet in 2023 as the vanguard of a permanent human colony on the Red Planet, with new crews arriving every two years thereafter.Human explorers and their trillions of microbes will doubtless contaminate whatever site is chosen for the settlement, Mars One officials said, so the organization will try to pick a place unlikely to host indigenous life.

Ants have a complicated social structure, so much so that it's almost impossible to track their interactions. Now, researchers have individually tagged every single worker ant within an entire colony and tracked them with a computer in order to learn more about how they network. The result is the largest-ever data set of ant interactions.

An excavation funded with redundancy money shows Stonehenge was a settlement 3,000 years before it was built.The archaeological dig, a mile from the stones, has revealed that people have occupied the area since 7,500BC.The findings, uncovered by volunteers on a shoestring budget, are 5,000 years earlier than previously thought.Dr Josh Pollard, from Southampton University, said the team had "found the community who put the first monument up at Stonehenge".

A Russian scientist believes a remote Siberian rock formation may be the first place that humanity began to follow the movements of the heavens.Sunduki, known as the Siberian Stonehenge, is a series of eight sandstone outcrops on a remote flood plain on the bank of the Bely Iyus river in the republic of Khakassia.Professor Vitaly Larichev, of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claims that the 16,000-year-old site was not only a place of huge religious significance in the ancient world, but also its stargazing capital.

Over four millennia ago, the fortress town of Gonur-Tepe might have been a rare advanced civilisation before it was buried for centuries under the dust of the Kara Kum desert in remote western Turkmenistan.After being uncovered by Soviet archaeologists in the last century, Gonur-Tepe, once home to thousands of people and the centre of a thriving region, is gradually revealing its mysteries with new artifacts being uncovered on every summer dig.

The Arab world has given birth to many thinkers and many inventions - among them the three-course meal, alcohol and coffee. The best coffee bean is still known as Arabica, but it's come a long way from the Muslim mystics who treasured it centuries ago, to the chains that line our high streets.Think coffee, and you probably think of an Italian espresso, a French cafe au lait, or an American double grande latte with cinnamon.In fact, coffee comes from the highland areas of the countries at the southern end of the Red Sea - Yemen and Ethiopia.

From 1971 to 2000, the world's land areas were the warmest they have been in at least 1,400 years, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. The massive new study, involving 80 researchers from around the world with the Past Global Changes (PAGES) group, is the first to look at continental temperature changes over two thousand years, providing insights into regional climatic changes from the Roman Empire to the modern day. According to the data, Earth's land masses were generally cooling until anthropogenic climate change reversed the long-term pattern in the late-19th Century.

When it comes to preserving history, a group of archaeologists and historians are hoping to boldly go where no archaeologist has gone before.Researchers are increasingly urging humanity to protect off-Earth cultural resources. That may well mean preserving NASA's Apollo landing sites on the moon as national historic landmarks, regarding far-flung spacecraft as mobile artifacts and even working to preserve some pieces of space junk.

PML researchers are on the verge of reaching a long-sought major goal: Providing the world with a programmable quantum voltage standard that has an uncertainty of less than 1 part per billion, never needs calibration, and is sufficiently automated that it can be used in developing countries by non-experts.

Unless space debris is actively tackled, some satellite orbits will become extremely hazardous over the next 200 years, a new study suggests.The research found that catastrophic collisions would likely occur every five to nine years at the altitudes used principally to observe the Earth.And the scientists who did the work say their results are optimistic - the real outcome would probably be far worse.To date, there have been just a handful of major collisions in the space age.

A few months before he died, Carl Sagan recorded a message of hope to would-be Mars explorers, telling them: "Whatever the reason you're on Mars is, I'm glad you're there. And I wish I was with you."On Monday, 17 years after the pioneering astronomer set out his hopeful vision of the future in 1996, a company from the Netherlands is proposing to turn Sagan's dreams of reaching Mars into reality. The company, Mars One, plans to send four astronauts on a trip to the Red Planet to set up a human colony in 2023. But there are a couple of serious snags.

The discovery of three new super-Earths by scientists with NASA's Kepler mission is helping to reveal the bounty of extrasolar planets across the Milky Way.Now another team is set to build a new orbiting planet hunter that, during a two-year mission, will search for other worlds closer to our sun's neighborhood.The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which NASA approved under its Explorer program earlier this month, will be the first orbiting observatory to hunt for planets all around the sky.

The moment a meteor exploded into a ball of light last night as it entered the Earth's atmosphere has been captured on video.The footage was taken by a music fan at a gig in Argentina and shows the giant fireball turn night into day for a moment as it shoots across the sky.Locals said the object caused the ground to shake in Santiago del Estero and its light could be seen for hundreds of miles.

Diseased ancestor or mini-me? The debate over where the so-called "hobbit," or Homo floresiensis, came from has raged since researchers discovered its remains on the remote Indonesian island of Flores (map) in 2003. Some researchers said its diminutive size was the result of disease, while others believed it descended from a small-bodied human ancestor.But a new study, published April 17 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, says that clues to the hobbit-like human's ancestry lies in the size of its brain. The hobbit's gray matter is actually slightly larger than previously thought, according to the study's authors.

The Djehuty Project, led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has discovered on the hill of Dra Abu el-Naga in Luxor (ancient Thebes), the burials of four personages belonging to the elite of the 17th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, who lived about 3.550 years ago. These findings, discovered during the 12th campaign of archeological excavations of the project, shed light on a little-known historical period in which Thebes becomes the capital of the kingdom and the empire's foundations become established with the dominance of Egypt over Palestine and Syria to the north, and over Nubia to the south.

An earthquake of preliminary magnitude 6.0 struck today east of the Kuril Islands, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).The temblor's epicenter was 82 miles (133 kilometers) southeast of Severo-Kuril'sk, Russia and 206 miles (333 km) south of Vilyuchinsk, Russia. It originated 11.6 miles (18.6 km) deep and struck at 19:58:40 UTC (06:58:40 a.m. local time, April 20), the USGS reports.

BEIJING, April 21 (Xinhua) -- More than 1.5 million people in southwest China's Sichuan Province have been affected by Saturday's strong earthquake, said the Ministry of Civil Affairs here Sunday.The quake has affected 69 counties in the province, said the statement from the ministry.Related: Magnitude 6.6 Earthquake Strikes China

NASA's Kepler planet-hunting probe has identified two potentially habitable planets only a little bigger than Earth, circling a star that's 1,200 light-years away. The planets could conceivably be covered by a global ocean, and they may well lead the growing list of alien worlds that can host life as we know it."These two planets are our best candidates for planets that might be habitable," said Bill Borucki, a space scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who is the principal investigator for the $600 million Kepler mission.

A new paper led by a NASA researcher shows that hydrogen peroxide is abundant across much of the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. The authors argue that if the peroxide on the surface of Europa mixes into the ocean below, it could be an important energy supply for simple forms of life, if life were to exist there. The paper was published online recently in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

cbc.caA small group of soldiers, police officers and sexual assault victims suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder will soon see if the rave party drug ecstasy can ease their symptoms.The research group that will oversee the Vancouver-based study just received 9 grams of MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as ecstasy) from Switzerland after obtaining a long-awaited import permit for the prohibited drug.

See Graham's commentary on the latest developments regarding the TEDx video removal here:http://www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock/posts/10151614950877354."In brief it looks like TED Curator Chris Anderson opened Pandora's Box -- further details below -- when he authorised the removal of talks by myself and Rupert Sheldrake from the TEDx Youtube channel..."

Recent developments within the TEDx conference (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) community of organizers are indicative of a rising tide of intolerance in the world of science. Historically, TED has provided an influential forum for cutting edge ideas that may not otherwise have had a fair hearing in the public arena. Recent events, however, should cause one to question the credibility of TED and are a reflection of the increasingly polarized debate between science and religion in American culture.

Odds are you carry DNA from a Neandertal, Denisovan or some other archaic human. Just a few years ago such a statement would have been virtually unthinkable. For decades evidence from genetics seemed to support the theory that anatomically modern humans arose as a new species in a single locale in Africa and subsequently spread out from there, replacing archaic humans throughout the Old World without mating with them. But in recent years geneticists have determined that, contrary to that conventional view, anatomically modern Homo sapiens did in fact interbreed with archaic humans, and that their DNA persists in people today.

retaining pier wall, four shrines and an unusual circular structure dating to over 1000 years old, have recently been found by archaeologists of the National Institute of anthropology and history (INAH) in the pre-Hispanic site of Tabuco in Veracruz.According to María Eugenia Maldonado Vite, responsible for the archaeological rescue excavation, these remains represent a mooring pier or dock where goods and maritime traffic would land and be controlled by elites. If this is the case, then it represets the first discovery of a pre-Columbian port on the Gulf Coast.

The hunt for the universe's tiniest particles has required the construction of the largest and most sophisticated machine ever built.It is an irony I can't help but notice as I travel the 17 miles around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the underground loop of tunnels, caverns and computer monitoring stations which saddles the Swiss-French border a few miles north-west of Geneva.

Ants don't have a career ladder, they have a career hole, and only the wiliest of the insects can avoid falling down it according to the latest research.A particular genus of carpenter ants (Camponotus fellah) exist in a complex social structure, where their first jobs see them caring for the queen and her offspring, and as the ants age many of them wind up working at more and more of a distance from the big cheese, according to an academic paper released this week.

King Richard III may not have been a hunchback as portrayed by Shakespeare, but he did suffer from the spine-curving condition scoliosis, and he may have undergone painful medical treatments to straighten it out, scientists report today (April 19).Archaeologists announced in February that bones excavated from underneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, belonged to the medieval king. Since this confirmation, examination has continued on the bones and historical records, which have suggested the king was a control freak who had a friendly face.

New study of sea floor core samples sheds light on how mammals and the Antarctic environment evolved in icy conditions.The emergence of mammals such as whales and penguins and the ecosystem that we are familiar with today in the seas off Antarctica can be traced back to when it was transformed into an icy world approximately 33.5 million years ago, according to research published today in the journal Science.

Resurgent pop colossus David Bowie can look forward to even more royalties from Life on Mars? if a Dutch project called Mars One goes according to plan. This week it announced it would start taking video applications from members of the public who want to go on a one-way trip to Mars in 2023 for a reality TV show. Among the hopefuls might be British people forced out of their council flats by the "bedroom tax".

When the addicts enter the room, they haven't met the people inside. They've never been there before, but the setting is familiar, and so is the pipe on the table, or the bottles of booze on the ground. Soon enough, someone's offering them a hit, or a drug deal's going down right in front of them.They've been trying to get better--that's why they're doing this--but now they have cravings.It's about then that a voice instructs them to put down the joystick and look around the room without speaking, "allowing that drug craving to come and go like a wave.".

Parents know that crying babies usually calm down when they are picked up and carried, but why is that? In a study published today, researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute show that human babies and mouse pups alike automatically relax deeply when they are carried.Their study, published in the journal Current Biology, is the first one to demonstrate that the infant calming response to maternal carrying is a coordinated set of nervous, motor and cardiac regulations. Kumi Kuroda and colleagues Gianluca Esposito and Sachine Yoshida, who carried out the research, propose that it might be an evolutionarily conserved, and essential, component of mother-infant interaction.

It's a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards.By looking at specks of dust carried to earth in meteorites, scientists are able to study stars that winked out of existence long before our solar system formed.

In the global aftershock zone that followed the major April 2012 Indian Ocean earthquake, seismologists noticed an unusual pattern. The magnitude (M) 8.6 earthquake, a strike-slip event at intraoceanic tectonic plates, caused global seismic rates of M≥4.5 to rise for several days, even at distances thousands of kilometers from the mainshock site. However, the rate of M≥6.5 seismic activity subsequently dropped to zero for the next 95 days.

Today, methane sloshes around in pools on the surface of Titan, but the hydrocarbon may eventually vanish from Saturn's giant moon, according to a new study.Images and data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the compound doesn't seem to be getting replenished fast enough on Titan's surface to keep the methane cycle sustainable, scientists say.Besides Earth, Titan is the only known place in our solar system to have stable liquids on its surface. The huge moon's clouds, lakes and rain are made up of hydrocarbons, or molecules composed of hydrogen and carbon, such as methane and ethane.

Textbooks often cite that planetary nebulae (PNe, plural) represent an endstate for lower-mass single stars. But conversely, recent research suggests that most PNe stem from binary systems. The lowest mass star theorized to form the typical PN is near 1 solar mass, and thus without a companion the Sun may not surpass the mass limit required to generate the hot glowing (ionized) nebula typically tied to PNe. New research continues to question our original understanding of how the Sun's life may end.

When Superstorm Sandy struck the United States on 30 October, it didn't just devastate the Eastern Seaboard, it shook the ground as far away as the West Coast, producing tiny vibrations in Earth's crust that were picked up by seismometers there. Scientists can use this activity to track the path of the storm. Now, they say that analyzing past records of these vibrations may help them discern whether climate change has influenced the amount of storminess over the world's oceans in recent decades.

Campaigners say the Brazilian government is failing to protect one of the world's most endangered tribes.The Awa people are believed to number just 450, but their territory has attracted thousands of loggers and settlers.Last year a judge ordered all outsiders should leave the area within 12 months.But the deadline has passed and no evictions have taken place, says indigenous rights group Survival International.

Scientists have discovered a new material that can capture and concentrate methane, a potent greenhouse gas.While carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas, can be captured using a variety of techniques, methane capture has proved elusive primarily because it interacts weakly with other materials, according Amitesh Maiti, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Because all the workers in an ant colony look the same, tracking their movements and interactions by eye is fiendishly difficult. Instead, Danielle Mersch and her colleagues tagged every single worker in entire colonies and used a computer to track them, accumulating what they say is the largest-ever data set on ant interactions.

The international scientific community faces the exciting challenge of discovering the origin of America's first settlers. A new publication shapes some alternatives to the hypothesis of a single migration movement, as a model to describe the origin of America's population.The most generally supported traditional hypothesis contends that the earliest well-established human culture in the North American continent were the Clovis, a population of hunters who arrived about 13,000 years before present from North-East Asia through the Bering Strait, and scattered over the continent.

Dinosaur fossils unearthed in Madagascar are of a new species that roamed the Earth about 90 million years ago, say US researchers.The remains date back to a time when India and Madagascar were one landmass cut off from the rest of the world.Revealing the discovery in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists say the dinosaur was a bi-pedal meat-eater about the size of a large cow.It has been named Dahalokely tokana, which means "lonely small bandit".

Dinosaurs laid eggs, of that there is no doubt. But what scientists haven't been as clear on is whether they brooded over their eggs like birds or buried them like crocodiles.Now, a new study finds that at least one dino took a birdlike approach to hatching eggs. Troodon was a small, meat-eating dinosaur that grew to be about 8 feet (2.4 meters) long. The dinosaurs date back to the Late Cretaceous, about 75 million years ago, and they apparently incubated their eggs much like modern birds.

The biggest earthquakes make the Earth ring like a bell. But do earthquakes that rock the world increase the risk of new temblors?Not by much, according to two reports presented today (April 19) at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting in Salt Lake City. In fact, one recent quake near Sumatra, Indonesia, seemed to actually quiet global earthquakes.

Most of my day job involves simulating the behavior of molecules like drugs and proteins using computer models. The field is more an art than a science, partially because the systems that are being modeled are too complex and ill-understood to succumb to exact solutions. Success often depends on experience and intuition gained by working on similar systems. That does not mean there are no correct predictions, but it does mean that surprises are more common than we think and that many phenomena are impossible to model within a very precise window of accuracy. The failure of a model can sometimes be traced to a simple inability to simulate the behavior of an essential component of the system.

Is this the case UFO skeptics have been dreading?Sightings of mysterious flying craft with capabilities unknown on Earth have confounded mankind throughout recorded history. Most have been convincingly explained away as unfamiliar aircraft, natural phenomena or illusions. But then there are the others, witnessed in our time by pilots and air traffic controllers, military leaders, scientists, law enforcement officers and other trained observers, sometimes with physical evidence, including corroboration on film and video.

A British astrobiology conference has revived a years-old debate over the best place to look for life elsewhere in the solar system: Mars, or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn?"For reasons I don't really understand, the wider solar system and the potential for life there has not been high priority," The Telegraph quoted Robert Pappalardo, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as saying on BBC Radio 4.

Want to go to Mars? Dutch organisation Mars One says it will open applications imminently. It would be a one-way trip, and the company hopes to build a community of settlers on the planet.Uncharted waters, mountains or far away lands have always drawn explorers. History books show that desire for adventure, even in the face of extreme danger, did not deter the likes of Columbus or Magellan.

Geneticists Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida and Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore have proposed, in a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, that if the evolution of life follows Moore's Law, then it predates the existence of planet Earth.

In the beginning, there was a righteous bass.So says physicist John Cramer, who has not only found evidence of the sound created during the Big Bang, but has also created a simulation of the low, deep noise emitted as the universe came into being.The effect would have been similar to that of a magnitude-9 earthquake that caused the entire planet to actually ring, Cramer said. However, in this case, the ringing covered the entire universe.

More than half of samples of ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef collected from supermarkets for testing by the federal government contained a bacteria resistant to antibiotics, according to a new report highlighting the findings.

Roman-era toiletry sets consisting of tweezers, scrapers and other artifacts have long been interpreted as beauty aids. But it's possible the tools had a more gruesome use: to treat a type of Chlamydia that infects the eye.The tools are found across Great Britain and date back to around A.D. 43 to A.D. 410, a time when much of the island was under Roman control. They do bear resemblance to modern-day cosmetic kits, but they're also similar to tools used in folk treatments of trachoma, the leading cause of preventable blindness around the world today, said Wendy Morrison, a graduate archaeology student at the University of Oxford.

Super slow-motion footage of a moth in flight has revealed how the insects use their bodies to hover.The moth moves its body by pivoting its abdomen up and down to fine-tune the effect of the forces that keep the insect airborne.The researchers are studying insect flight to "distil the biological principles of flight control".

When faced with impossible circumstances beyond their control, animals, including humans, often hunker down as they develop sleep or eating disorders, ulcers, and other physical manifestations of depression. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 18 show that the same kind of thing happens to flies.

It took no less than 30 minutes after the Boston Marathon bombings, before conspiracy theories started wildly circulating around the Internet. From the totally absurd to the suspiciously plausible, here's our wrap up of the most popular theories being thrown around.Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who runs the websites InfoWars and PrisonPlanet, launched the first shot across the bow with a sympathetic and skeptical Tweet ending with the hash tag "falseflag." The term originates from the days of naval warfare when ships would fly different national flags to subvert or escape enemy vessels.

By Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, Stuart Hameroff, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., and Neil Theise, MDOne of modern science's great strengths is that any questionable finding dies a quick death if it's invalid. The safeguards are mainly two: Your new finding must be repeatable when other researchers run the same experiments, and peer review by qualified scientists subjects every new finding to microscopic scrutiny. So it surprised the millions of admirers of TED, whose conferences attract wide attention to new, cutting-edge ideas, when that organization decided to practice semi-censorship.

Hobbit humans, the tiny folks who lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores until about 12,000 years ago, had bigger brains than previously thought, according to a new paper that strengthens the theory that hobbits evolved from own own ancestor, Homo erectus.Homo erectus, in turn, is thought to have evolved into our own species in Africa. The new study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals how location and environment could mean the difference between an individual who looked like us, and someone who wound up a hobbit.

A Paris auction house has gone ahead with a contested sale of dozens of Native American tribal masks after winning a court ruling, despite appeals for a delay by the Hopi tribe, its supporters and the US government.Shortly after the court announced its decision, auctioneers began selling dozens of brilliantly coloured masks made of wood, leather, horsehair and feathers at the Drouot auction house on Friday.

According to a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society the ancient pigment known as Egyptian blue may have important new applications in nanotechnology. Researchers at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia in the US were surprised to discover that Egyptian blue breaks into thin nanosheets, 1/1000th the width of a human hair which could be printed using ordinary ink-jet printer techniques. This along with other Egyptian blue properties may have important applications in medical science, telecommunication and lasers.

Piles of ash leftover from incinerated trash may be a viable source of hydrogen gas that can be used to generate electricity and power cars, suggests a process pioneered in a research lab.The trick? Just add water, which reacts with residual metallic aluminum in the ash, explained Aamir Ilyas, a water resource engineer at Lund University in Sweden, who developed the technique.

ICE melt in parts of Antarctica is at its highest level this millennium, with ice melting 10 times faster each summer than it did 600 years ago. What's more, most of that increase has occurred since the mid-20th century.Satellite images show Antarctic ice is melting, but scientists weren't sure how unusual this was. To find out, Nerilie Abram, of the Australian National University in Canberra, and colleagues examined a 364-metre-long ice core spanning 1000 years. The core came from the tip of the west Antarctic Peninsula, an area that is warming rapidly.

In January 2010, a crew of scientists voyaged by ship from the southern tip of Chile into the frigid Antarctic to search for clues to one of the great unknowns of climate change. They planned to crisscross a remote patch of sea near the spot where, a year earlier, another crew had injected a tankful of an inert chemical one mile below the surface. The new crew had seven weeks of funding and good weather to sample the seawater throughout the region and discover where the chemical went.

A Stanford team has designed an entirely new form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. Such a panel could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by radiating sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don't heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.

While studying rats' ability to navigate familiar territory, Johns Hopkins scientists found that one particular brain structure uses remembered spatial information to imagine routes the rats then follow. Their discovery has implications for understanding why damage to that structure, called the hippocampus, disrupts specific types of memory and learning in people with Alzheimer's disease and age-related cognitive decline. And because these mental trajectories guide the rats' behavior, the research model the scientists developed may be useful in future studies on higher-level tasks, such as decision-making.

Just as light does, ants traveling through different materials follow the fastest path, not the shortest one.A recent study found that when fire ants (Wasmannia auropunctata) crossed different surfaces, the insects chose the route that would minimize their total walking time, rather than the distance traveled. The ants' behavior offers a window into how groups of social insects self-organize, the scientists say.

The warp drive proposed by Miguel Alcubierre would achieve faster-than-light speeds by distorting space-time. The device would generate a field of negative energy that would squeeze or stretch space-time, creating a bubble. The bubble would ride the distortions like a surfer on a wave. As evidenced in the big bang, space-time can expand so quickly that objects move faster than the speed of light.

Solar panels make energy, but they take energy to make, too. And, until about 2010 or so, the solar panel industry used more electricity than it produced, according to a new analysis. Now, the industry is set to "pay back" the energy it used by 2020.The study looked at what went into building and installing solar panels all over the world, including everything from home installations to solar farms, says Michael Dale, a climate and energy researcher at Stanford University, in a Stanford-produced video. He and a senior scientist, Sally Benson, thought that because the solar panel industry was growing so quickly, it might actually be using more electricity than it produced. Instead, they found an industry at a crux.

Controversial geoengineering projects that may be used to cool the planet must be approved by world governments to reduce the danger of catastrophic accidents, British scientists said.Met Office researchers have called for global oversight of the radical schemes after studies showed they could have huge and unintended impacts on some of the world's most vulnerable people.The dangers arose in projects that cooled the planet unevenly. In some cases these caused devastating droughts across Africa; in others they increased rainfall in the region but left huge areas of Brazil parched.

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.

In the foreseeable future, humans might carry microscopic natural computers inside their cells that could guard against disease and warn of toxic threats based on a Stanford research achievement.A team of engineers there has invented genetic transistors, completing a simple computer within a living cell, a major step forward in the emerging field of synthetic biology.

A plan by California and Canadian universities to build the world's largest telescope at the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano won approval from the state Board of Land and Natural Resources on Friday.The decision clears the way for the group managing the Thirty Meter Telescope project to negotiate a sublease for land with the University of Hawaii.

It's time to redraw the map of the world during the reign of the dinosaurs, two scientists say.Picture the U.S. West Coast as a tortured tectonic boundary, similar to Australia and Southeast Asia today. Erase the giant subduction zone researchers have long nestled against western North America. Drop a vast archipelago into the ancient Panthalassa Ocean, usually drawn as an empty void, the kind on which medieval mapmakers would have depicted fantastical beasts.

In the last thirty years, vegetation has changed significantly the world over. Until recently, the extent to which the climate or humankind was responsible remained unclear. However, geographers from the University of Zurich and colleagues from the Netherlands now reveal that over half of these changes are climatological, humans or as yet unknown human-climate interactions cause over a third and around ten percent cannot be explained fully by either the climate or human activity.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have made functioning rat kidneys in the laboratory, a bioengineering achievement that may one day lead to the ability to create replacement organs for people with kidney disease.The scientists said the rat kidneys produced urine in the laboratory as well as when transplanted into rats. The kidneys were made by stripping donor kidneys of their cells and putting new cells that regenerate tissue into them. Stripping an organ leaves a natural scaffold of collagen and other compounds, called the extracellular matrix, which provides a framework for new cells and preserves the intricate internal architecture of the kidney as well as its basic shape.

Scientists have developed a new method of creating genetically-modified animals that addresses one of the principal objections of the anti-GM movement.The "gene-editing" technique is at least 10 times more efficient than existing GM technology and crucially does not involve the use of antibiotic-resistance genes, which has been heavily criticised by opponents.

They make up a stable fraction of the ppulation, yet their presence is often invisible: left-handers.Yet despite decades of research, very little is known about why some people are left-handed. Scientists have proposed causes ranging from genes, to damage in utero, to an edge in fistfights to explain why southpaws make up 10 percent of the world's population.And while there aren't many obvious differences between lefties and righties, southpaws tend to excel at visual and spatial tasks, and seem to be overrepresented amongst geniuses.

The "extraordinary level of conservation" of genetic data in the tulip tree remains largely unchanged since the dinosaurs, a study suggests.The species' genomic change is about 2,000 times slower than in humans, making it a "molecular fossil", a team of US researchers said.The new information has affected our understanding of flowering plants' evolution, they added.The findings have been published in the open access journal BMC Biology.

The UK's "irrational" use of biofuels will cost motorists around £460 million over the next 12 months, a think tank says.A report by Chatham House says the growing reliance on sustainable liquid fuels will also increase food prices.The author says that biodiesel made from vegetable oil was worse for the climate than fossil fuels.Under EU law, biofuels are set to make up 5% of the UK's transport fuel from today.

A report has found that the Antarctic summer ice melt is now occurring 10 times faster than it did 600 years ago.Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and the Australian National University drilled a 360-metre ice core near the northern tip of the peninsula to to identify past temperatures.The ice core gave an extraordinary insight into the temperatures, revealing the coolest conditions, and the lowest melt, occurred six centuries ago.

Global warming is exacerbating political instability as tensions brought on by food insecurity rise. With research suggesting the issue can only get worse we examine the risks around the worldWhen the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, it was in protest at heavy-handed treatment and harassment in the province where he lived. But a host of new studies suggest that a major factor in the subsequent uprisings, which became known as the Arab spring, was food insecurity.