Newsdesk Archive

The forest really does hum with life.Though often too low or too high for human ears to detect, insects and animals signal each other with vibrations. Even trees and plants fizz with the sound of tiny air bubbles bursting in their plumbing.And there is evidence that insects and plants "hear" each other's sounds. Bees buzz at just the right frequency to release pollen from tomatoes and other flowering plants. And bark beetles may pick up the air bubble pops inside a plant, a hint that trees are experiencing drought stress.

The man and woman aboard the Inspiration Mars mission set to fly-by the Red Planet in 2018 will face cramped conditions, muscle atrophy and potential boredom. But their greatest health risk comes from exposure to the radiation from cosmic rays. The solution? Line the spacecraft's walls with water, food and their own faeces.

The weightlessness of outer space can make germs even nastier, increasing the dangers astronauts face, researchers say.These findings, as well as research to help reduce these risks, are part of the ongoing projects at the International Space Station that use microgravity to reveal secrets about microbes.

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama spoke glowingly of 3D printing, saying the technology "has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything." At NASA, the revolution is already under way. Engineers are now testing 3D printing (more broadly known as additive manufacturing) for making engine parts for the Space Launch System (SLS), the vehicle slated to take mankind back to the moon, to asteroids, and someday to Mars. A 3D printer will soon head to the International Space Station. And in the future, NASA hopes 3D printers will let astronauts fabricate tools, spare parts, or virtually anything their mission requires throughout the solar system.

EVER since we took our first steps out of Africa, human exploration has been driven by the desire to secure resources. Now our attention is turning to space.The motivation for deep-space travel is shifting from discovery to economics. The past year has seen a flurry of proposals aimed at bringing celestial riches down to Earth. No doubt this will make a few billionaires even wealthier, but we all stand to gain: the mineral bounty and spin-off technologies could enrich us all.

Eighteen-year-old Taylor Wilson has designed a compact nuclear reactor that could one day burn waste from old atomic weapons to power anything from homes and factories to space colonies.The American teen, who gained fame four years ago after designing a fusion reactor he planned to build in the garage of his family's home, shared his latest endeavor at a TED Conference in southern California on Thursday.

Native Americans on an oil-rich North Dakota reservation have been cheated out of more than $1 billion by schemes to buy drilling rights for lowball prices, a flurry of recent lawsuits assert. And, the suits claim, the federal government facilitated the alleged swindle by failing in its legal obligation to ensure the tribes got a fair deal.

A first scientific expedition to post-revolution Libya has returned with more news of humanity's earliest monkey-like ancestors.Once the Sahara Desert bloomed, a vast plain filled with curious creatures, crocodiles, elephants and the spindly predecessors to today's monkeys, apes and people.

Life's building blocks can form in the harsh environment of deep space, a new study suggests, bolstering the odds that a comet or meteorite strike may have jump-started biological evolution on Earth.Linked pairs of amino acids called dipeptides can take shape in spacelike conditions, a team of chemists found. Dipeptides brought to Earth aboard a comet or meteorite billions of years ago may have then catalyzed the formation of even more complex molecules necessary for life as we know it, such as proteins and sugars, researchers said.

Like Alaska's mighty Yukon, a broad river once flowed across Antarctica, following a gentle valley shaped by tectonic forces at a time before the continent became encased in ice. Understanding what happened when rivers of ice later filled the valley could solve certain climate and geologic puzzles about the southernmost continent.

OSLO, March 10 (Reuters) - A melt of Greenland's ice is washing large amounts of the nutrient iron into the Atlantic Ocean where it might aid marine life in a rare positive side-effect of climate change, a study showed on Sunday.Greenland's thaw, which is raising world sea levels, is also adding about 300,000 tonnes of iron a year to the North Atlantic, based on projections from the muddy melt water of three glaciers in the southwest, it said.

Russian scientists on Saturday dismissed initial reports that they had found a wholly new type of bacteria in a mysterious subglacial lake in Antarctica.Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics had said Thursday that samples obtained from the underground Lake Vostok in May 2012 contained a bacteria bearing no resemblance to existing types.

Proposals to cull up to 750,000 deer in Britain have been denounced by furious gamekeepers who claim the move would also be a death knell for rural communities throughout the country, particularly remote villages in Scotland.The association was reacting to reports that scientists believe that up to half of an estimated population of 1.5 million deer in Britain should be culled to protect the countryside from damage caused by herds of animals eating and trampling plants and crops.

Experts agree that rising Chinese labor costs and improving U.S. technology will gradually cause significant manufacturing activity to return to the United States. When it does, a new interdisciplinary manufacturing venture called the Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMTecH) group at the University of Iowa College of Engineering's Center for Computer Aided Design (CCAD) will likely help lead the charge.

People may in future be able to have missing or diseased teeth replaced with ones grown from cells taken from their own mouth, scientists have predicted.Hybrid teeth created by combining human gum cells and stem cells from mouse teeth have been grown in laboratory mice by researchers who hope the work could lead to dentures being superseded by new teeth grown on a patient's jaw.

Centuries before the first massive sarsen stone was hauled into place at Stonehenge, the world's most famous prehistoric monument may have begun life as a giant burial ground, according to a theory disclosed on Saturday.More than 50,000 cremated bone fragments, of 63 individuals buried at Stonehenge, have been excavated and studied for the first time by a team led by archaeologist Professor Mike Parker Pearson, who has been working at the site and on nearby monuments for decades. He now believes the earliest burials long predate the monument in its current form.

Have you ever seen a UFO? If you have, did you report it to the government? Well, according to a new report from CBC News, if you did that now, they wouldn't be interested.Although government agencies such as the RCMP, Transport Canada and the Department of National Defence used to make some effort to investigate UFO reports, documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show that these reports are now being handed off to civilian volunteer investigators, like writer and UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski.

Astronomers should beware of the danger to their eyes if they try to catch a glimpse of a comet which won't be seen on earth again until the year 112,000.The C/2011 L4, also known as Comet Pan-Starrs, is making a rare visit to the inner solar system in the middle of this week, and will fly past the sun.But experts have warned that amateur stargazers not to try and see it too soon.

NASA has recently come up with a bizarre finding. Warning has been raised by the space administration that the sun has been going through something unexpected.It has told that solar activity is highly low. However, the same was expected to be at the maximum this year. The year was being hoped to be `solar maximum' year i. e. the 11-year sunspot cycle's peak.

The glaciers of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago will undergo a dramatic retreat this century if warming projections hold true.A new study suggests the region's ice fields could lose perhaps as much as a fifth of their volume.Such a melt would add 3.5cm to the height of the world's oceans. Only the ice of Greenland and Antarctica is expected to contribute more.The assessment is reported in the Geophysical Research Letters journal.

Common garden plants are to be used to clean polluted land, with the waste produced used to further medical research.Scientists will use plants such as alyssum, ferns and a type of mustard called sinapi to soak up metals from derelict land previously occupied by factories, mines and landfill sites.

Scientists are beginning to understand how people tune in to a single voice in a crowded, noisy room.This ability, known as the "cocktail party effect," appears to rely on areas of the brain that have completely filtered out unwanted sounds, researchers report in the journal Neuron. So when a person decides to focus on a particular speaker, other speakers "have no representation in those [brain] areas," says Elana Zion Golumbic of Columbia University.

Humans seem to have a predilection for fake quartz-crystal Aztec skulls. Since the 1860s, dozens of skull sculptures have appeared on the art market purporting to be pre-Columbian artifacts from Mesoamerica, that is, created by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. Three such skulls have graced the collections of major museums on both sides of the Atlantic: the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the British Museum in London, and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

Scientists have unearthed six fishhooks, the oldest of which was made from a 19,000-year-old mammoth tusk.Hunters of ice age reindeer around 12,300 years ago likely left the fishhooks, along with mammal and fish bones, in an open field in what is now Wustermark, Germany. The fishhooks, which are the oldest found in Europe, suggests humans developed fishing tools earlier than previously thought, probably to catch fast-moving fish that appeared in lakes as the climate warmed.

While any Catholic male could theoretically become the next pope, there's one group who's not even in the running: women.That means as the cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel for conclave, scheduled for Tuesday (March 12), to elect the next pope after the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, women don't have a chance.

Relatively recently, water blasted out from an underground aquifer on Mars, carving out deep flood channels in the surface that were later buried by lava flows, radar images complied from an orbiting NASA probe shows.The channels are at least twice as deep as previous estimates for Marte Vallis, an expanse of plains just north of the Martian equator that is the youngest volcanic region on the planet.

Astronomers have their fingers crossed that within the haul of data collected by NASA's Kepler mission, which has already detected nearly 3,000 possible exoplanets, hide the signatures of the very first exomoons.The discovery of alien moons will open up an exciting new frontier in the continuing hunt for habitable worlds outside the solar system. With the confirmation of exomoons likely right around the corner, researchers have begun addressing the unique and un-Earthly factors that might affect their habitability.

As the U.S. government draws up plans to use surveillance drones in domestic airspace, opposition to what many consider an unwarranted and significant invasion of privacy is mounting across the country, from rural Virginia to techopolis Seattle. Although officials debate anti-drone legislation at federal, state and local levels, one man is fighting back with high-tech apparel.

Sausages, ham, bacon and other processed meats appear to increase the risk of dying young, a study of half a million people across Europe suggests.It concluded diets high in processed meats were linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer and early deaths.The researchers, writing in the journal BMC Medicine, said salt and chemicals used to preserve the meat may damage health.

A National Institute of Health report recently recommended retiring most government lab chimps. So what's next for them? Well, over the next year or so more than 100 will go to Chimp Haven, a sanctuary for the animals in Keithville, Louisiana. This footage shows some of the animals arriving, and seeing the sky, for the first time. Others are shown getting used to real, natural ground.

Using the technique that created Dolly the sheep, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan have identified a way to produce healthy mouse clones that live a normal lifespan and can be sequentially cloned indefinitely.Their study is published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

A cup of coffee doesn't just provide a jolt for people in the morning. Bees may crave a buzz too. Scientists have found that some plants, like the coffee plant (Coffea), use caffeine to manipulate the memory of bees. The nectar in their flowers holds low levels of caffeine that pollinators find highly rewarding.Bitter-tasting caffeine primarily arose in plants as a toxic defense against herbivores like garden slugs. At high doses, caffeine can be toxic and repellent to pollinators.

A common image of ancient Egyptian royalty depicts an opulent lifestyle of palatial comforts and daily feasts. But new research suggests that high government officials typically suffered from malnutrition and infectious diseases, and that most died before they were 30 years old.

Ancient human ancestors, like humans today, had trends in fashion that came and went. In Blombos Cave in South Africa, researchers uncovered shell beads from 75,000 to 72,000 years ago that show relatively rapid changes in how they were designed, ScienceNOW reported.

One of the world's biggest uranium producers has found a significant deposit in a remote tropical Australian mountain range near sandstone galleries holding some of the oldest and most spectacular rock art on the planet.After years of drilling, Canadian-based mining company Cameco has reported the find in the Wellington Range, where the thousands of Aboriginal artworks adorning cliffs and caves include a painting of the extinct dog-like creature, the thylacine, made in a style that is at least 15,000 years old.

The base pairs that hold together two pieces of RNA, the older cousin of DNA, are some of the most important molecular interactions in living cells. Many scientists believe that these base pairs were part of life from the very beginning and that RNA was one of the first polymers of life. But there is a problem. The RNA bases don't form base pairs in water unless they are connected to a polymer backbone, a trait that has baffled origin-of-life scientists for decades.

Russian scientists believe they have found a wholly new type of bacteria in the mysterious subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on Thursday.The samples obtained from the underground lake in May 2012 contained a bacteria which bore no resemblance to existing types, said Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics.

Physicists in Italy said Wednesday they are achingly close to concluding that what they found last year was the Higgs boson, the elusive "God particle." They need to eliminate one last remote possibility that it's something else. The long theorized subatomic particle would explain why matter has mass and has been called a missing cornerstone of physics.

For decades, archaeologists have struggled with understanding the emergence of a distinct South American civilization during the Late Archaic period (3000-1800 B.C.) in Peru. One of the persistent questions has been the role of agriculture and particularly corn (maize) in the evolution of complex, centralized societies.

A little face peering up from a clod of frozen mud in Denmark has proved to be a unique find: the only known 3D Viking representation of a valkyrie.The figurine, believed to date from about AD800, was found in December and has gone straight from conservation to display in the National Museum in Copenhagen. It will then be included in the exhibition on the Viking age that opens there in June and at the British Museum in 2014.

Polish archaeologists working in Sudan have found remains of human settlements that appear to date back as far as 70,000 years.If confirmed, the discovery in the Affad Basin of northern Sudan will challenge existing theories that our distant ancestors only began building permanent residences on leaving Africa and settling in Europe and Asia.

Stretching the breadth of northern England, Hadrian's Wall is a majestic reminder of the ambition and might of the Roman Empire's conquest in Britain. Now, new archaeological evidence has suggested, contrary to previous belief, that the Romans far from co-existing peacefully with the locals, ejected them by force in order to build the 73-mile divide.

Archaeologists have uncovered 20 Stone-Age skeletons in and around a rock shelter in Libya's Sahara desert, according to a new study.The skeletons date between 8,000 and 4,200 years ago, meaning the burial place was used for millennia."It must have been a place of memory," said study co-author Mary Anne Tafuri, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. "People throughout time have kept it, and they have buried their people, over and over, generation after generation." .

For now, the Neanderthal genome is an abstract string of billions of DNA letters stored in computer databases. But it naturally sparks the imagination: Could scientists use that genetic blueprint to create neo-Neanderthals in the flesh?In the not-so-distant future, advances in genetic engineering might enable that feat, experts say. But whether such a resurrection should happen is another story.

Mars clearly had a watery history, with strong evidence of flowing streams and even some indications that an ocean was present in the distant past. The fate of Mars' water isn't understood, but there's evidence that some of it may have gone underground and is currently circulating in the bedrock of the red planet.

A German travel agency is selling tickets for a flight to give 88 astronomy buffs a close-up view of one of two rare comets expected to pass Earth this year.Eclipse Travel, based in Bonn, has joined charter agency Air Partner and airline Air Berlin to organize flight AB1000 on March 16 as comet Pan-STARRS passes through the solar system, 100 million miles from Earth.

The quest for rare earths vital to some of modern life's most indispensable technologies may see mining robots jet to the stars within decades, a world-first conference in Australia was told Wednesday.Yttrium, Lanthanum and the other 15 minerals which make up the group of elements known as rare earths are crucial to everything from wind turbines and hybrid cars to cruise missiles and the ubiquitous smartphone.

Crocodilian fossil skulls found in the Panama Canal may provide the missing link between the mouthy reptiles of North America and their kin in South America, scientists say.The skulls belong to two new species of ancient crocodilians (a group that today contains alligators, crocodiles, caimans and gharials) that lived about 20 million years ago during the Miocene epoch. These new findings, detailed in the March issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, suggest these alligator brethren slinked between the continents using ancient seaways much earlier than once thought.

Scientists studying an exceptionally well-preserved woolly rhinoceros have revealed details of what Britain's environment was like 42,000 years ago.The beast's remains were discovered in Staffordshire in 2002, buried alongside other preserved organisms such as beetles and non-biting midges.The research team used these climate-sensitive insects to calculate that summer temperatures in Britain would have averaged just 10C, and dropped to -22C in winter.

When does a monkey turn down a free treat? When it is offered by a selfish person, apparently.Given the choice between accepting goodies from helpful, neutral or unhelpful people, capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) tend to avoid individuals who refuse aid to others, according to a study published today in Nature Communications.

"The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language," Charles Darwin wrote in "The Descent Of Man" (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak. Language, he speculated, might have had its origins in singing, which "might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions."Now researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo, say that Darwin was on the right path. The balance of evidence, they believe, suggests that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals.

How music could be used as mental health medicineTo the musical ear, life has a rhythm comparable to grand opera or simple folk tunes. Our ability to understand that rhythm and synchronise with each other is at the core of every human interaction.That's why researchers in San Diego believe that learning to play musical instruments can help us focus attention and improve our ability to interact with the world around us.

It's hard to say what's crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles' tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles COULD ACTUALLY SEE OUT OF THE EYES ON THEIR TAILS.

A quick and simple breath test can diagnose stomach cancer, study findings reveal.Scientists from Israel and China found the test was 90% accurate at detecting and distinguishing cancers from other stomach complaints in 130 patients.The British Journal of Cancer says the test could revolutionise and speed up the way this cancer is diagnosed.

Nearly half of all of Africa's lion populations could face extinction in the next 40 years if conservation measures aren't changed, according to a new study.The study, published Wednesday in the journal Ecology Letters, found that lion populations that were fenced into conservation areas rebounded in recent years, whereas lions in open preserves were challenged by prey loss and predation by human neighbors.

Forest elephant numbers have decreased by 62% across Central Africa over the last 10 years, according to a study.The analysis confirmed fears that African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) are heading for extinction, possibly within the next decade.Conservationists said "effective, rapid, multi-level action is imperative" in order to save the elephantss.

The road that runs along the edge of Shangpu village in south China is littered with the hulks of burned-out cars. Farmers have built tents and simple barricades made of rocks and wire. Police have set up their own cordon in a standoff that is approaching two weeks.The villagers are demanding free elections following yet another government land grab. They say armed thugs sent by their own village chief attacked the community to pave the way for a new factory on their farmland.

A conservation group claims that Google has something in common with illicit ivory traders in China and Thailand: It says the Internet search giant is helping fuel a dramatic surge in ivory demand in Asia that is killing African elephants at record levels.The Environmental Investigation Agency, a conservation advocacy group, said in a statement Tuesday that there are some 10,000 ads on Google Japan's shopping site that promote the sale of ivory.

Zimbabwe's foremost land degradation expert has come up with a readily available solution for reversing the spread of deserts around the planet and slowing climate change in the process: He wants to let cows and sheep eat their way through the problem.In a provocative appearance on the video blog Ted Talks, biologist Allan Savory said desertification of the world's grasslands may be releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than burning fossil fuels. Savory should know: He has been studying the spread of deserts for more than 50 years.

Coastal regions around the United States respond differently to ocean acidification, a large-scale study finds.In the new study, scientists from 11 U.S. institutions measured levels of carbon dioxide and other forms of carbon in waters off the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. If the same amount of carbon dioxide entered both the Gulf of Maine and the Gulf of Mexico, it would have a greater effect on the Gulf of Maine's ecosystem, the scientists found.

Rapidly melting ice has already remade shipping possibilities in the Arctic. Over the past decade, commercial use of the Northern Sea Route (the blue shipping lane along the northern coast of Russia in the map above) during late summer has become commonplace, dramatically shortening the journey from Europe to the Far East.

Fossil hunters have unearthed fragments of leg bone belonging to a giant camel that lived in the forests of the High Arctic more than three million years ago.The ancient beast stood almost three metres tall at the hump, about a third higher than its modern descendant, the single-humped dromedary, or Arabian camel.

They blew into Cairo over the weekend, riding winds from the south. Swarms of noisy desert locusts disrupted traffic, buzzed Cairo Stadium, crawled over golf courses, and even landed at the airport."Ancient Egyptian plagues!" one eyewitness joked.Mostly a nuisance to city dwellers, the swarms were just passing through on their spring migration, a spokesman from the Ministry of Agriculture said. He urged Cairo residents not to set tires on fire in an effort to disperse the insects. "It will not drive them away, but will only cause damage," he warned.

Scientists hoping to help prevent car crashes have created a computer system which they say was inspired by a swarm of locusts.The scientists, from the universities of Lincoln and Newcastle, have discovered that the inspiring-insect has a fast and accurate warning system which enables it to detect approaching objects and avoid them while in flight.

If the Arab Spring taught us something, it is that the effects of climate change can serve as stressors, contributing to regional instability and conflict, experts said.In a report published last week, researchers from the Center for American Progress, the Center for Climate and Security and the Stimson Center examined the role of climate change in the Middle East's upheaval during 2010 and 2011. Looking at long-term trends in rain, crops, food prices and migration, they were able to determine how these factors contributed to social instability in the region.

In early February, scientists announced that they'd found our long-lost common ancestor: a tiny, furry creature with a tail that emerged after the dinosaurs disappeared. This ancient animal, about the size of a shrew or a rat, was the grand-mammal of all placentals that came after it. But because the scientists pieced together their knowledge of the animal from a deep stash of data rather than bones or fossils, they didn't get to give it a neat Latin name.

Harvard University professor Jeffrey Miron has advocated the legalization of drugs for decades. In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview, he explains why prohibition is more dangerous than selling drugs in supermarkets.SPIEGEL: Mr. Miron, why should heroin, cocaine and marijuana be legal?Miron: The prohibition of drugs is the worst solution for preventing abuse. Firstly, it brings about a black market that is corrupt and costs human lives. Secondly, it constrains people who wouldn't abuse drugs. Thirdly, prohibiting drugs is expensive.SPIEGEL: How expensive?Miron: If it legalized drugs, the United States could save $85 billion to $90 billion per year.

There is no valid scientific basis for denying same-sex couples the right to legal marriage, or to deprive them of considerable benefits of the institution, according to legal briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by the American Psychological Association and other leading mental health associations."Empirical research demonstrates that the psychological and social aspects of committed relationships between same-sex partners largely resemble those of heterosexual partnerships," the briefs state. "Like heterosexual couples, same-sex couples form deep emotional attachments and commitments. Heterosexual and same-sex couples alike face similar issues concerning intimacy, love, equity, loyalty and stability, and they go through similar processes to address those issues.".

Female chimpanzees are more "negative" when communicating with other females, research has found.The study analysed the different gesturing strategies used by a group of females at Chester Zoo.In female-female interactions, the chimps used more aggressive signals and "apologised" less often with gestures of reassurance.

A comet crashing into the Earth some 13,000 years ago was thought to have spelled doom to a group of early North American people, and possibly the extinction of ice age beasts in the region.But the space rock was wrongly accused, according to a group of 16 scientists in fields ranging from archaeology to crystallography to physics, who have offered counterevidence to the existence of such a collision.

Rising carbon dioxide levels may have caused Antarctic warming in the past, new research strongly suggests.The findings, published today (Feb. 28) in the journal Science, just add to the body of evidence that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions will lead to climate change."It's new evidence from the past of the strong role of CO2 [carbon dioxide] in climate variation," said study co-author Frédéric Parrenin, a climate scientist at the CNRS in France.

olcanic eruptions, even small and moderate ones, might counter some of the effects of global warming, new research suggests.The planet didn't heat up as much as scientists expected it to from 2000 to 2010 (though it was still the warmest decade on record), and a new study finds that chemical compounds spewed during modest eruptions around the globe could be behind the trend.

One of the most useless-but-cool things about physics is the post-hoc information it offers for the field of biology. I suspect that these physics-focused explanations really piss biologists off, and rightly so, since they tend to offer an explanation for observations, but have no predictive power to point us beyond what we already know.

Some 2.5 billion gallons of water are used to frack oil or gas wells in the U.S. Every day. Nearly all of that water is lost, either in the fracking or by disposing it down a borehole. And industry's water consumption is dwarfed by agriculture, responsible for more than 80 percent of this country's enormous water use.With climate change beginning to affect water supplies, what can be done?.

The deepest ocean on Earth is the Pacific Ocean's Marianas Trench, which reaches a depth of 6.8 miles awesomely trumped by the depth of the ocean on the Jupiter's moon, Europa, which some measurements put at 62 miles. Although Europa is covered in a thick crust of scarred and cross-hatched ice, measurements made by NASA's Galileo spacecraft and other probes strongly suggest that a liquid ocean lies beneath that surface.

A proposed space-junk removal system would hop from one piece of debris to the next without burning much fuel, potentially making a de-clutter mission economically feasible with current technology.The TAMU Space Sweeper with Sling-Sat, or 4S for short, would harness the momentum imparted by capturing and ejecting one object to slingshot on to the next chunk of space junk, its developers say.

The World Health Organization this morning released a relatively reassuring report suggesting few health impacts from the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. But the accident is likely to cause small, but significant, increases in cancers in populations in a few hotspots exposed to higher radioactive doses.

A baby girl in the US born with HIV appears to have been cured after very early treatment with standard drug therapy, doctors say.The Mississippi child is now two-and-a-half years old and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.More testing needs to be done to see if the treatment - given within hours of birth - would work for others.If the girl stays healthy, it would be the world's second reported 'cure'.

US prosecutors and other senior officials who spearheaded the war against drug cartels have quit their jobs to defend Colombian cocaine traffickers, saying their clients are not bad people and that United States drug policy is wrong.Senior former assistant US attorneys and Drug Enforcement Administration agents are turning years of experience in investigating, indicting and extraditing narcos to the advantage of the alleged traffickers they now represent.

Six hundred years before cigarettes were sold at Pleasanton's Safeway, much earlier Californians were smoking tobacco in the same area.UC Davis researchers have found nicotine in ancient pipes excavated from an Ohlone burial site in Pleasanton at the corner of Bernal Road and Highway 680, a discovery that deepens the history of humans' long relationship with tobacco.

The rate of advanced breast cancer for U.S. women 25 to 39 years old nearly doubled from 1976 to 2009, a difference too great to be a matter of chance, a study finds.Rebecca Johnson was 27 years old and had just graduated from medical school when she got the diagnosis: breast cancer. She thought she was a rare case, but then a few of her friends got it too. So did some friends of friends.Was it all just a coincidence, or was breast cancer becoming more common in younger women?

NEW YORK, March 1 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers report a link between early childhood exposure to bisphenol A -- a chemical used in can liners and store receipts -- and higher asthma risk.Lead author Dr. Kathleen Donohue, an assistant professor of Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Center for Children's Environmental Health, and colleagues tracked 568 women enrolled in the Mothers & Newborns study of environmental exposures.

BACTERIA that resist antibiotics are a growing problem worldwide, but one we thought we could limit or even reverse by better control of the drugs. The situation may be more complicated: some bacteria that have never seen an antibiotic can evolve resistance, and even thrive on it.Bacteria usually become resistant if they are exposed to drug levels too low to kill them off, but high enough to favour the survival of resistant mutants. Such resistance is growing and could make TB and other diseases untreatable again.

An isolated population of Arabian Sea humpback whales may be less sophisticated "singers" than humpbacks elsewhere.The whales' calls could be a simplified version of humpback song, scientists' preliminary findings suggest.Arabian Sea humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) are believed to have been isolated from other whale populations for around 60,000 years.

It's not just honey bees that are in trouble. The fuzzy American bumblebee seems to be disappearing in the Midwest.Two new studies in Thursday's journal Science conclude that wild bees like the American bumblebee are increasingly important in pollinating flowers and crops that provide us with food. And, at least in the Midwest, they seem to be dwindling in an alarming manner, possibly from disease and parasites.

A charity founded to save tropical rainforest the size of Wales has achieved its goal.It has raised £2m in three years to protect over two million hectares of forest, mainly in Africa."Size of Wales" was founded by Welsh environmentalists annoyed that their country was often used in the media as a comparator to gauge the scale of rainforest destruction.Copycat campaigns are now being discussed in Denmark and Ireland.

An estimated 100 million sharks are killed every year, "largely due to their inherent vulnerability, and an increasing demand, particularly for their fins, in the Asian market," a new report finds.Sharks are particularly vulnerable, National Geographic says, "because they take long periods to mature and generally produce few young over their lifetimes.".

Despite persisting concerns over genetically modified crops, a new industry report (PDF) shows that GMO farming is taking off around the world. In 2012, GMO crops grew on about 420 million acres of land in 28 countries worldwide, a record high according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, an industry trade group.If all the world's GMO crop fields in 2012 were sown together, it would blanket almost all of Alaska. As the chart from the report shows, globally GMO farming has been on an uninterrupted upward trend.

In a 2012 report, the Obama administration announced that it was "jumpstarting" the nuclear industry. Because of the industry's long history of permitting problems, cost overruns, and construction delays, financial markets have been wary of backing new nuclear construction for decades. The supposed "nuclear renaissance" ballyhooed in the first decade of this century never materialized. And then came Fukushima, a disaster that pushed countries around the world to ask: Should nuclear power be part of the energy future? In the third and final issue in a series focused on nuclear exits, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE, turns its attention to the United States and looks at whether the country's business-as-usual approach may yet lead to a nuclear phase-out for economic reasons.

Suppose you could replace "Made in China" with "Made in my garage." Suppose also that every time you polished off a jug of two percent, you would be stocking up on raw material to make anything from a cell phone case and golf tees to a toy castle and a garlic press.And, you could give yourself a gold medal for being a bona fide, recycling, polar-bear-saving rock star.

Some 40 people stand ankle-deep in used plastic bottles in the yard of a recycling station in Taipei, stamping them flat in the first step of a process that will transform the junk into usable goods."Plastic bottles won't be decomposed even if they are buried for 1,000 years so we started to recycle and re-use them to reduce garbage and pollution," said Chien Tung-yuan, a spokesman for the foundation.

Archaeologists have been investigating and debating the reasons behind the emergence of a distinct South American civilization during the Late Archaic period (3000-1800 B.C.) in Peru for several decades. One of the persistent questions had been the role of agriculture and particularly corn (maize) in the evolution of these early complex, centralised societies.Until now, the prevailing theory was that marine resources, not agriculture and corn, provided the economic engine behind the development of civilization in the Andean region of Peru.

A secret chamber, hidden for 400 years and with possible links to early freemasonry, has been discovered.The entrance to the room, which has plastered walls, was found inside a cupboard at the National Trust-owned house Canons Ashby, near Daventry.It is a panelled room with walls showing crests of local families and enigmatic symbols.

Chen Yuqian, a 60-year-old resident of Pailian village in Zhejiang province, was one of at least three concerned citizens who last week called on Chinese environmental officials to brave the rivers they were supposed to be keeping clean.A businessman from the same province vowed to pay 200,000 yuan (around £20,000) to his local environmental protection chief if he dared bathe in a rubbish-clogged river near Rui'an City.

China's leading environmental watchdog has refused to disclose the results of a major national soil pollution study on grounds of state secrecy, according to a lawyer who requested the report's disclosure.The news comes amid growing public concern about the impact of years of turbo-charged growth on the environment and people's health, thanks in large part to the winter's terrible air pollution in Beijing and other areas of the country.

Most villages along the Baram River in Malaysia cannot count on round-the-clock electricity. Diesel generators hum at night near longhouses in the northwestern corner of the island of Borneo. Mobile and Internet coverage are almost nonexistent.A plan to dam the Baram River would generate power far in excess of current demand in the rain forest state: At 1,000 megawatts, the hydropower project would be large enough to power 750,000 homes in the United States.

Tornados are very energetic. But of course, they are far too unpredictable and uncontrollable to actually make use of that energy. Right?Peter Thiel, billionaire founder of PayPal and early Facebook funder, says wrong. Thiel's foundation, through its Breakout Labs fund, awarded US $300,000 to a company called AVEtec, based in Canada, to work on designs and prototypes for an "atmospheric vortex engine." .

Dust devils are swirling micro-tornadoes that pop up regularly in dry, warm climates or during the summertime. Researchers say they have figured out how to tame the tiny twisters and extract their energy using a rotating turbine blade.A team at Georgia Tech has built a small demonstration prototype about three feet wide. It looks like the inside of an aircraft engine rotor turned on its side. Warm air flows in through a series of vanes that force the buoyant ground-heated air to rotate as it rises.

Richard Turere, 13, doesn't like lions. In fact, he hates them. Yet this bright Maasai boy has devised an innovative solution that's helping the survival of these magnificent beasts -- by keeping them away from humans.Living on the edge of Nairobi National Park, in Kenya, Turere first became responsible for herding and safeguarding his family's cattle when he was just nine. But often, his valuable livestock would be raided by the lions roaming the park's sweet savannah grasses, leaving him to count the losses.

Thanks to dozens of video reports, scientists are getting a pretty good handle on the life history of the massive meteorite that exploded above Russia earlier this month. They know it is rocky and a common type, and now they know where it probably came from. Scientists are scrambling to publish papers describing its origins in the middle of the solar system.The asteroid chip that became the recent meteorite came from a spot in the asteroid belt near Jupiter, about 2.5 times further from the sun than Earth is, according to NASA.