Newsdesk Archive

You might expect a robot's heartbeat to be a metallic ticking. But the pulsing in this video isn't completely artificial: it's powered by living material.Created by Peter Walters from the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, and colleagues, the pump uses the gas released by live yeast to generate pressure and distend a membrane, turning it into an artificial muscle.

The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality, in principle. The fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in. The impressive achievements of science seemed to support this confident attitude. But recent research has revealed unexpected problems at the heart of physics, cosmology, biology, medicine and psychology. Dr Rupert Sheldrake shows how the sciences are being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. Should science be a belief-system, or a realm of enquiry? Sheldrake argues that science would be better off without its dogmas: freer, more interesting and more fun.Note: See also Rupert's article Do physical constants fluctuate?CA - UK - US

The skies sure have been busy lately. In the days after the stunning meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, that injured more than 1,200 people, three more meteor events were sighted over Cuba, Florida and California.The first of the three new events occurred about 8pm local time on Friday, February 15 when people in Cuba caught site of a bright white fireball that some users said was "bigger than the sun.".

Y2K? A bust. Judgment Day 2011? As quiet as a mouse. The Mayan apocalypse? Certainly not now.As they have throughout history, failed doomsday predictions come and go. But with the Pope resigning, an asteroid whizzing near the planet Friday (Feb. 15) and a completely unrelated space rock exploding over Russia, it seems a good time to ask: What's next?Plenty, as it turns out. Previous failures have in no way shut down doomsday predictors, and dates are set for possible apocalypses in 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2080 (zeros have an appeal, apparently). One of these doomsdays was even predicted by Sir Isaac Newton himself.

With its jaw-dropping sculptures and carvings of bulbous women and half-human animals, the British Museum's Ice Age Art exhibition is a sublime reminder of the fact that the creativity of homo sapiens predates what we tend to think of as the dawn of civilisation. But for me, the most moving object in the show is one of the least obviously beautiful: a long, thin flute made from the wing-bone of a griffon vulture. Found in the Hohle Fels cave in south-west Germany, it could be 40,000 years old, making it one of the oldest instruments ever discovered. What's so striking about this ancient wind instrument is how familiar it looks. It's basically an ice age penny whistle: anyone can see it's a tool for making music, with its five finger-holes and a V-shaped notch at one end, through which a prehistoric musician would have blown.

Diet pop and other artificially sweetened products may cause us to eat and drink even more calories and increase our risk for obesity and Type 2 diabetes, researchers are learning.Former McGill University researcher Dana Small specializes in the neuropsychology of flavour and feeding at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Small said there's mounting evidence that artificial sweeteners have a couple of problematic effects. Sugar substitutes such as sucralose and aspartame are more intensely sweet than sugar and may rewire taste receptors so less sweet, healthier foods aren't as enjoyable, shifting preferences to higher calorie, sweeter foods, she said.

The 2.5 million records dating from 1770 to 1934 will enable people to find out whether any murderers, drunks or petty criminals lurk in their family tree.Described as the biggest collection of historical criminal records from England and Wales, they are being made available by family history site findmypast.co.uk in association with The National Archives.

While using comedian Eddie Izzard's DNA to trace the migration of his ancestors out of Africa and into Europe, geneticist Dr Jim Wilson has discovered that Izzard is 2.8% Neanderthal. This means he has more Neanderthal genes than most people.In 2010 scientists made a discovery that all human populations that spread out of Africa have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in them.

OSLO (Reuters) - The United Nations treated government ministers and officials to a meal of blemished African fruit and vegetables on Tuesday to highlight how perfectly edible food is being rejected by European supermarkets."We are demonstrating the colossal scale of gratuitous waste, even in countries like Kenya where there are millions of hungry people," he said. "The waste of perfectly edible, 'ugly' vegetables is endemic in our food production systems.".

Drones - or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - could soon be whizzing across our airspace on all sorts of civil and commercial missions.Rapid advances in camera, sensing, aeronautics, battery and autopilot navigation technologies have helped make UAVs affordable, easy-to-operate and increasingly reliable for individuals, civil authorities and businesses alike.Small, vertical take-off or landing (VTOL) multi-propeller helicopters equipped with hi-tech equipment are already saving big business millions of pounds.

It turns out Democrats and Republicans really do think differently.In a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE, a group of political scientists and neuroscientists have found that conservatives and liberals use different parts of their mind when making risky decisions, and that these differences in brain function can be used to predict party affiliation.

A few weeks ago I had a coffee with one of the most admired Tory thinkers. A radical libertarian, he spent his time railing against the interventions of Europe and inadequacies of government, arguing how they combined to infringe basic freedoms. Given the stridency of his views and hostility to the state, I asked if he supported the legalisation of drugs. "Oh no," he said. "That's totally different. It's just wrong.".

Maybe you know it as the angel's trumpet, or Hell's bells, or simply Brugmansia, a genus of flowering plant with seven recognized species. Whatever the case, toé is notorious. Every part of the plant is toxic, seeping alkaloids like atropine, hyoscyamine, and VICE's old friend scopolamine, or Colombian devil's breath. And it's reportedly now in the hands of slimy pseudo shamans looking to cash in on the South American drug-tourism boom.

It's astonishing to think that anatomically modern humans walked on this planet for nearly two hundred millennia before they realized that it was moving.Then again, you can't really blame us. Even though the equator is spinning at more than a thousand miles per hour, even though our planet is hurtling around our sun at about 66,000 miles per hour, even though our solar system and everything in it is careening around our galaxy at nearly half a million miles per hour, and even though our galaxy is whirling through space at a mind-blowing 1.2 million miles an hour, the very fact that you're not currently clinging to the ground for dear life makes it only natural to think of the Earth as 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe did, as a "hulking, lazy body, unfit for motion.".

The scientist leading one of the most expensive experiments ever put into space says the project is ready to come forward with its first results.The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was put on the International Space Station to survey the skies for high-energy particles, or cosmic rays.Nobel Laureate Sam Ting said the scholarly paper to be published in a few weeks would concern dark matter.This is the unseen material whose gravity holds galaxies together.

Scientists say they may be able to determine the eventual fate of the cosmos as they probe the properties of the Higgs boson.A concept known as vacuum instability could result, billions of years from now, in a new universe opening up in the present one and replacing it. It all depends on some precise numbers related to the Higgs that researchers are currently trying to pin down.A "Higgs-like" particle was first seen at the Large Hadron Collider last year.

Dwindling church attendance and dire financial straits are forcing the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Germany to sell off church buildings en masse. Some are demolished, while others are turned into restaurants or indoor rock climbing centers.The crew tasked with demolishing the Holy Family Church in the northern German town of Barmstedt arrived bright and early and began by removing the baptismal font. Next, a bulldozer moved in and knocked down the main church hall and the bell tower. In the space of a just a few hours, this house of worship to the Almighty was reduced to a pile of rubble.

Whispers has learned that a member of Congress is about to introduce legislation today to decriminalize marijuana.The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2013 will be introduced by Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, from Colo., whose office did not immediately respond to request for comment.The legislation, which would regulate marijuana like alcohol, is similar to another bill introduced by former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts in July 2011. That bill died in the House.

The majority of Britons support a softer stance on cannabis laws, according to a survey by an independent think-tank.More than half the public - 53% - support legalising the production and supply of cannabis or decriminalising its possession, a survey ordered by the Transform Drug Policy Foundation found.Just one in seven support heavier penalties and more being spent on enforcement for cannabis offences, the campaign group found, while around two thirds - 67% - support an in-depth review of policy options for controlling all drugs.

Climate change, believed to have contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire (PDF) when drought forced villagers into a nomadic life in the late 16th century, is once again having an adverse affect on the Middle East. Precipitation has dropped off and temperatures have climbed for the past 40 years, with conditions growing especially severe in the last decade. A 2012 Yale study (PDF) showed that a drought from 2007 to 2010 so seriously stunted agriculture in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins that hundreds of thousands of people fled Iran, eastern Syria and northern Iraq.

If Hollywood hasn't hammered this into you enough by now, here's one more reminder: A giant asteroid slamming into Earth is a bad thing. After all, how many dinosaurs have you heard reminiscing about the K-T boundary extinction event? The catalyst for the mass extinction of the human race could be hurtling toward Earth right now. In fact, many scientists would guarantee it. Fortunately, we already have at least 10 rough game plans on how to deal with the threat of near earth asteroids (NEAs). Sorry, movie fans, but none of them involve Bruce Willis.

A weird "slime" has invaded a British nature park - and RSPB experts have appealed for help in identifying the mysterious substance.The clear jelly has baffled experts so far, with explanations including the idea it is the regurgitated innards of frogs, or 'crystal brain fungus'.RSPB officials said the slime bore the appearance of "something living" - and the public have been warned not to touch any of the pools of slime.Local folklore suggests that the jelly appears in the wake of meteor showers.

The question of if Bigfoot exists has graduated from mysterious footprints and fuzzy images to the forensics of DNA research.News reports last week suggesting that Bigfoot DNA evidence had been analyzed and confirmed through the peer-reviewed DeNovo Scientific Journal raised questions over the legitimacy of the publication.Questions were also raised -- and have still not been fully answered -- about Texas veterinarian Melba Ketchum's involvement with the journal, threatening the credibility of her five-year study of various alleged Bigfoot DNA samples.

Scientists are working to reduce the noise levels experienced by whales from North Atlantic shipping.The blare is making it difficult for the animals to communicate with each other, which in turn is affecting their ability to find food and mates.The researchers have persuaded shipping companies to change their routes in and around the Boston area.Sea captains use an iPad App that helps them to understand the locations of the whales and when to slow down.

The discovery of "significant amounts" of water in moon rock samples collected by NASA's Apollo astronauts is challenging a longstanding theory about how the moon formed, scientists say.Since the Apollo era, scientists have thought the moon came to be after a Mars-size object smashed into Earth early in the planet's history, generating a ring of debris that slowly coalesced over millions of years.

The mysterious substance has teased physicists for decades, challenging the very notions of the cosmos.But now, with the help of a multi-billion-dollar tool, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has coyly teased they may have finally solved one of the biggest puzzles in the universe.Exciting developments in the search for dark matter may be coming in a matter of weeks, the leader of a space-based particle physics experiment has said.

A new article is now available on the articles page by Jan Peter de Jong, titled 'The Cosmogony of the Three Worlds 'See here: http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/JongJP2.php

Mesolithic hunter-gatherers living on a meat-dominated, grain-free diet had much healthier mouths that we have today, with almost no cavities and gum disease-associated bacteria, a genetic study of ancient dental plaque has revealed.The international team of researchers, led by a group at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, University of Adelaide, publish their findings in today's Nature Genetics.

Hu Li's heart sank when she realised that she could gauge how close she was to home by the colour of the air. Driving 140 kilometres from Tianjin City to Beijing last week, she held her breath as the chalky-white horizon became a charcoal grey haze. The 39-year-old businesswoman has lived in Beijing for a decade, and this past month, she said, brought the worst air pollution she has ever seen. It gave her husband a hacking cough and left her seven-year-old daughter housebound. "I'm working here and my husband's working here, so we have no choice," she said. "But if we had a choice, we'd like to escape from Beijing.".

CAN YOU imagine feeling Earth's magnetic field on the tip of your tongue? Strangely, this is now possible, using a device that converts the tongue into a "display" for output from environmental sensors.Gershon Dublon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised a small pad containing electrodes in a 5 × 5 grid. Users put the pad, which Gershon calls Tongueduino, on their tongue. When hooked up to an electronic sensor, the pad converts signals from the sensor into small pulses of electric current across the grid, which the tongue "reads" as a pattern of tingles.

The Arctic needs to be better protected from a rush for natural resources as melting ice makes mineral and energy exploration easier, the United Nations' Environment Programme (UNEP) said.The UNEP Year Book 2013 was released on Monday to accompany the opening of talks in Nairobi attended by environment ministers or senior officials from around 150 nations, aimed at making the world economy greener at a time of weak economic growth.

A group of over 100,000 dolphins spotted off the coast of San Diego caused a spectacle for nature watchers as they traveled together in an enormous pack.'They were coming from all directions, you could see them from as far as the eye can see,' Joe Dutra said after seeing the spectacle first hand.Mr Dutra, who captains Hornblower Cruises, was out on his daily tour with a boat full of nature watchers when he spotted the massive group of dolphins.

There is something odd about this scan of a patient's lung. Have you spotted it yet? How about the dancing gorilla on the right?It is not an everyday finding for radiologists, who are skilled at searching scans for tiny anomalies with potentially life-threatening consequences.But in one study, more than three-quarters of specialist tumour spotters were caught out by the greatest anomaly of their career.

The first bionic hand that allows an amputee to feel what they are touching will be transplanted later this year in a pioneering operation that could introduce a new generation of artificial limbs with sensory perception.The patient is an unnamed man in his 20s living in Rome who lost the lower part of his arm following an accident, said Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

The world will have to live with surprise asteroid attacks on the scale of Friday's Russian fireball, at least for a while.The meteor that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk without warning Friday (Feb. 15), damaging hundreds of buildings and wounding more than 1,000 people, was caused by a space rock about 50 feet (15 meters) wide, researchers said.

In Cuba on Tuesday, residents reported seeing a bright light in the sky and a loud explosion that shook windows and walls, although there were no reports of any injuries or damage.One resident of the city of Rodas, near Cienfuegos, described the light as "bigger than the sun". He said: "On Tuesday we left home to fish around five in the afternoon, and around 8:00 we saw a light in the heavens and then a big ball of fire, bigger than the sun." .

US astronomers looking for life in the solar system believe that Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which has an ocean, is much more promising than desert-covered Mars, which is currently the focus of the US government's attention."Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to possess .... life," said Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The meteor that exploded over the Ural Mountains in Russia Friday now appears to have been a small asteroid clearly unrelated to 2012 DA14, which flitted past Earth Friday afternoon.Initially, the Russian Academy of Science estimated the object's mass at about 10 metric tons (11 US tons). With more data in hand, researchers now say the object had a mass of 7,000 metric tons (7,700 US tons) and a diameter of about 50 feet.

The shock wave from Friday's (Feb. 15) meteor explosion above Russia sent subsonic waves through the atmosphere halfway around the world.Up to 11 sensors in Greenland, Africa, Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and other far-flung regions detected the Russian meteor blast's infrasound, or low-frequency sound waves. The sensors are part of the global network of 60 infrasound stations maintained by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).

Scientists working on Nasa's Messenger probe to Mercury have shown off a stunning new colour map of the planet.It comprises thousands of images acquired by the spacecraft during its first year in orbit.This is not how we would see Mercury, which would look like a dull, brownish-grey globe to our eyes.

You really don't want to mess with your Achilles tendons. Trust us, injury to these tendons can take months to heal, and even then recovery is often not complete.A big reason the Achilles is such a foot-dragger at getting better is that the tendon tissue we have as adults is basically the same as we had when we were teenagers.That finding was published earlier this week in The FASEB Journal.

Want to protect buildings from earthquakes? Turn the surrounding ground into Swiss cheese. Scientists have for the first time shown that a grid of holes in the ground can act as a kind of seismic wall, a development that could lead to technologies that protect buildings from the dangerous tremors of earthquakes."It's very cool stuff," says Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the study. "It's a step toward manipulating seismic waves and done in a genius way." .

NOT just cruel, but a waste of money too. Japanese government statistics reveal that the country's whaling fleet makes a loss and has to be subsidised by taxpayers.According to a report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Japan's whaling fleet has been unable to cover its costs since 2006. The Fisheries Agency of Japan has been propping it up with public money, giving 715 million yen ($8.9 million) in 2011.

Scientists are set to release the first batch of data from a project designed to create the first map of the human brain.The project could help shed light on why some people are naturally scientific, musical or artistic.Some of the first images were shown at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.I found out how researchers are developing new brain imaging techniques for the project by having my own brain scanned.

When it comes to sticking power under wet conditions, marine mussels are hard to beat. They can adhere to virtually all inorganic and organic surfaces, sustaining their tenacious bonds in saltwater, including turbulent tidal environments.Northwestern University's Phillip B. Messersmith will discuss his research in a talk titled "Mussel-Inspired Materials for Surgical Repair and Drug Delivery" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston.

A new study has linked exposure to two common perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) with osteoarthritis. PFCs are used in more than 200 industrial processes and consumer products including certain stain- and water-resistant fabrics, grease-proof paper food containers, personal care products, and other items. Because of their persistence, PFCs have become ubiquitous contaminants of humans and wildlife. The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first to look at the associations between perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), and osteoarthritis, in a study population representative of the United States.

Researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) have shown that alcohol is a major contributor to cancer deaths and years of potential life lost. These findings, published in the April 2013 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, also show that reducing alcohol consumption is an important cancer prevention strategy as alcohol is a known carcinogen even when consumed in small quantities.

Aberdeen University researchers are hoping to find the next generation of infection-fighting drugs in the depths of the sea.A team, led by Mercel Jaspars, will sail to a number of deep ocean trenches around the globe and drop sampling equipment to the bottom, dredging it for potential new treatments.The first target is the Atacama trench in the eastern Pacific, followed by trenches off New Zealand, Antarctica and Norway.

Thousands of years ago, a hurt and confused Babylonian man used a triangular stylus to jab a message to his lover into a small piece of wet clay:To Bibea: May the gods for my sake preserve your health. Tell me how you are. I went to Babylon but I did not see you. I was greatly disappointed. Write my the reason for your leaving, and let me be cheered. For my sake keep well always. Gimil.

Pope Benedict's decision to live in the Vatican after he resigns will provide him with security and privacy. It will also offer legal protection from any attempt to prosecute him in connection with sexual abuse cases around the world, Church sources and legal experts say."His continued presence in the Vatican is necessary, otherwise he might be defenseless. He wouldn't have his immunity, his prerogatives, his security, if he is anywhere else," said one Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Your genes are the same, whether in a test tube or inside your body. But the very act of removing them makes them a patentable invention, according to Australia's Federal Court. Today, it handed down the country's first decision on gene patenting.By isolating a human gene from the body, even assuming it has "precisely the same chemical composition and structure as that found in the cells of some human beings", Justice John Nicholas said an "artificial state of affairs" had been created, making the gene patentable material.

A small furry creature with dependable toilet habits is proving useful in attempts to chart the Earth's past climate change.The Rock Hyrax is about the size of a guinea pig and lives in crevices in rock faces in Africa and Asia. Communities tend to stay in one place for a long time, and each generation teaches the next where to pee.The result is layer upon layer of dried urine, which contains pollen, bits of leaves, grasses and bubbles of air that can give a picture of the Earth's climate at a certain point in history. In one location in South Africa, a urine layer was found that stretches back 55,000 years.

While the process of natural selection allowed humans to become much more advanced than other primates, it is also to blame for many of the maladies we suffer from today.For all our success as a species, the problems we still experience as a result of our evolution demonstrates that humans are in fact "not very well designed", researchers explained.

At a former paper-printing factory in Hong Kong, a 20-year-old wunderkind named Zhao Bowen has embarked on a challenging and potentially controversial quest: uncovering the genetics of intelligence.Mr. Zhao is a high-school dropout who has been described as China's Bill Gates. He oversees the cognitive genomics lab at BGI, a private company that is partly funded by the Chinese government.At the Hong Kong facility, more than 100 powerful gene-sequencing machines are deciphering about 2,200 DNA samples, reading off their 3.2 billion chemical base pairs one letter at a time. These are no ordinary DNA samples.

A British academic has stumbled upon a 500-year-old "most wanted" notice for the arrest of Niccolo Machiavelli, the infamous Renaissance political operator who wrote The Prince.Prof Stephen Milner from Manchester University discovered the historic document by accident while researching town criers and the proclamations they read out in archives in Florence. The 1513 proclamation, which called for the arrest of Machiavelli, eventually led to his downfall and death."When I saw it I knew exactly what it was and it was pretty exciting," said Prof Milner.

My 18-minute free TEDx video on the war on consciousness and our right to make fundamental choices about our lives:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WaeMyC86Dw.

Police are set to be given new powers to seize confidential material from journalists.In a worrying blow to Press freedom, the changes may also mean journalists will be forced to identify whistleblowers to the police.Critics said the Home Office proposals, which follow recommendations made by Lord Justice Leveson, would undermine investigative journalism and free speech.It is feared that the changes will remove legal protections for anyone who releases material to reporters unless journalists can show their source did not breach confidentiality or act illegally.

Last week, we told you that CISPA was coming back, and it's now been confirmed that it is coming back tomorrow and it will be identical to the extremely flawed bill that passed the House last year.You can, of course, understand why the sponsors would bring back the identical bill. After all, it passed (fairly easily), even with tremendous protests. Many tech companies like the bill, because it puts no specific requirements on them, and also (more importantly) frees them from liability for sharing info on their users. But that's the really problematic part. It's disappointing that tech companies have not realized that standing up for their users' privacy rights is a smart business decision on its own. Tragically, they're taking the short term view on this one.See: EFF Take Action Site

How fast is your home broadband? Seventy to 80 Mbps if you're one of the few with the very fastest fibre broadband services? Perhaps 10Mbps if you've got an average connection, maybe under 2Mbps if you live some miles from your nearest exchange. So how would you fancy a 500Mbps download scheme?That is what I've seen on Harry Ball's quite ancient computer - not in the heart of London but in a village in rural Lancashire. Arkholme is hardly a teeming metropolis but Harry is one of the first local residents to be hooked up to the B4RN community broadband network.

Good grades could be contagious.Students surrounded by friends who earn better grades than they do tend to see their own grades rise over the next year, according to a new study."The smarter that your friends are today, there's a higher chance for you to become smarter as well tomorrow," said study co-author Hiroko Sayama, a systems scientist at the State University of New York in Binghamton.

Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability, a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found.Associate Professor Neil McLachlan from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences said previous theories about how we appreciate music were based on the physical properties of sound, the ear itself and an innate ability to hear harmony.

The genes activated for human speech are similar to the ones used by singing songbirds, new experiments suggest.These results, which are not yet published, show that gene products produced for speech in the cortical and basal ganglia regions of the human brain correspond to similar molecules in the vocal communication areas of the brains of zebra finches and budgerigars. But these molecules aren't found in the brains of doves and quails -- vocal birds that do not learn their sounds.

Humans who cheat on a loved one aren't the only ones to change their behavior to avoid discovery.New research documents for the first time how wild gelada monkeys tactically conceal their infidelity from dominant leader males.

Dogs pick out faces of other dogs, irrespective of breeds, among human and other domestic and wild animal faces and can group them into a category of their own. They do that using visual cues alone, according to new research by Dr. Dominique Autier-Dérian from the LEEC and National Veterinary School in Lyon in France and colleagues. Their work, the first to test dogs' ability to discriminate between species and form a "dog" category in spite of the huge variability within the dog species, is published online in Springer's journal Animal Cognition.

A new species of owl has been found on an Indonesian island, identified by its unique birdsong. It had escaped scientific detection for so long partially because it looks very similar to a related species.While on a field expedition in 2003, two members of a research team on opposite ends of the Indonesian island of Lombok independently realized that the owl's calls were unique, according to a PLOS ONE study published today (Feb. 13).

A single honeybee visits hundreds, sometimes thousands, of flowers a day in search of nectar and pollen. Then it must find its way back to the hive, navigating distances up to five miles (eight kilometers), and perform a "waggle dance" to tell the other bees where the flowers are.A new study shows that long-term exposure to a combination of certain pesticides might impair the bee's ability to carry out its pollen mission.

In the depths of winter, nothing seems as tempting as the inability to feel how frostbitten your toes are. Thanks to a group of neuroscientists at the University of California, that could soon be possible (though maybe not advisable.) They were able to identify the specific neurons that transmit cold sensations and shut them off in adult mice.In his previous research, neurobiologist David McKemy had found a link between the ability to sense cold and the receptor for menthol (the ingredient that makes mint cool), a protein called TRPM8.

In the Arctic Ocean, algae is manna from heaven. Clumps of the aquatic life drop from the sea ice to the ocean floor below, occasionally feeding otherworldly creatures that live there, such as sea cucumbers and brittle stars.During 2012's record ice melt in the Arctic, when the ice cover over the ocean shrank to the lowest levels ever seen, researchers explored the region's seas with remotely operated vehicles. They discovered the thinning ice was speeding up algal growth.

A strike from a big asteroid more than 300 million years ago left a huge impact zone buried in Australia and changed the face of the earth, researchers said on Friday."The dust and greenhouse gases released from the crater, the seismic shock and the initial fireball would have incinerated large parts of the earth," said Andrew Glikson, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.

Paranormal investigators say they have proof that a U.S Navy aircraft carrier is haunted.The Californian ghostbusters, who call themselves the 'Chill Seekers', recorded a 12-minute video of their investigation last month aboard the USS Hornet, birthed in Alameda, California.The video appears to show spirit voices communicating with them and at one point telling them 'We are under attack' and to 'Get off the ship'.In one scene they say that an audible tapping sound is Morse Code, translated to read 'Hi, I.T', which they suggest is a message from the I.T technicians who used to work aboard the ship on which more than 300 people died.

London - Vets usually hope to X-Ray live animals and make them better. But when B&B owner Robert Gray turned up at his local practice in Portscatho, Cornwall, it was 2,000 years too late.Mr Gray, 56, had rediscovered an Ancient Egyptian cat mummy in his loft which had been given to his Egyptologist father in the 1970s.

MEXICO CITY -- Did the rulers of the ancient city of Teotihuacan dedicate their largest pyramid to the god of fire, the so-called old god with a signature beard and fire atop his head?Mexican archaeologists announced this week that a figure of the god, called Huehueteotl, was found in a covered pit at the apex of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, a popular archaeological site north of Mexico City.

A team of Australian scientists in Canberra are celebrating a discovery that could potentially save more than 1 million lives every year.Dr Natalie Spillman and Professor Kiaran Kirk from the Australian National University had for years been studying how the parasite that causes malaria works.Recently they noticed a tiny pump the parasite uses to expel salt from its body.

Desert soil microbes could help halt desertification and boost agriculture in arid regions of the Middle East and North Africa, according to a study.Scientists from the United Arab Emirates [UAE] have isolated local salt- and drought-tolerant strains of Rhizobia, soil bacteria that fix nitrogen when they become established inside the root nodules of legumes.

A Plymouth University professor has joined calls for plastic waste to be classed as hazardous.Prof Richard Thompson, of the Marine Biology and Ecology centre, is among a team of international academics who say waste plastics threaten the environment and wildlife.Their report in Nature magazine says more than 370 marine species ingest or become entangled in plastic debris.They add that the benefits of plastic outweigh its "negative impacts".

A study has shown that anti-depressants can be used to help former lab chimps combat depression and trauma.Researchers say that the treatment should be considered for hundreds of other chimps that have been used in scientific research.The finding comes as a US funding body thinks about retiring the more than 300 chimps it uses for medical research.The study was presented in Boston at the at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting.

Space rock 2012 DA14 is only 50 metres across. It will pass the Earth on Friday evening (UK time) just 17,100 miles above our heads. There is no danger of a collision. Nevertheless, this is closer to the Earth than many artificial satellites.It will pass from the southern to northern hemisphere and set the record for the closest pass of any known asteroid since systematic surveys of the sky began in the mid-1990s.

My 18-minute TEDx presentation, "Giving up the Green Bitch," has just been put online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WaeMyC86Dw.From the video description: "Graham Hancock tells the story of his 24-year relationship with cannabis brought to an abrupt halt in 2011 after an encounter with ayahuasca, the sacred visionary brew of the Amazon. Along the way he explores the mystery of death, the problem of consciousness, and the implications for the human future of a society that wages total war on true cognitive liberty."

LIMA, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Archaeologists in Peru say they've uncovered a 5,000-year-old temple near Lima at an ancient site known as El Paraiso.With 10 ruins, El Paraiso is one of the most extensive archaeological sites in central Peru.Researchers said they made entry into the 22-foot by 26-foot rectangular structure of the temple by way of a narrow passageway, and found a hearth at its center they believe was used to burn ceremonial offerings.The temple was the first structure of its kind to be found on Peru's central coast, they said.

Even though Tyrannosaurus rex is arguably the most recognizable dinosaur, college students asked to draw the prehistoric beast tend to get it all wrong, researchers say.The average student's idea of T. rex more closely matches Barney the purple dinosaur, standing upright instead of pitched all the way forward like the real thing, a new survey showed."Our conclusion was that maybe students are imprinted with this image from their very earliest years," Cornell paleontologist Robert Ross said in a statement. "Even after they've seen 'Jurassic Park,' it doesn't change.".

Scientists revealed the reconstructed head of French King Henri IV (1553-1610) during a press conference in Paris on Tuesday. This reconstruction was made three years after a panel of forensic scientists identified the skull of the king, who was murdered by a fanatic, at the age of 57 on May 14, 1610.Scientists headed by France's Philippe Charlier found a common genetic profile between the mummified head of Henri IV and dried blood from his descendant, Louis XVI.

A common vitamin supplement appears to dramatically reduce a woman's risk of having a child with autism.A study of more than 85,000 women in Norway found that those who started taking folic acid before getting pregnant were about 40 percent less likely to have a child who developed the disorder, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The appendix may not be useless after all. The worm-shaped structure found near the junction of the small and large intestines evolved 32 times among mammals, according to a new study. The finding adds weight to the idea that the appendix helps protect our beneficial gut bacteria when a serious infection strikes.

When many countries are choosing their next generation of power stations, they will be tempted to pick wind turbines. Thanks to better design, building wind farms can now be cheaper than building new coal or gas power stations.Figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance show that this is already the case in Australia. Any wind farms built now would generate electricity for between A$80 (about US$80) and A$113 per megawatt-hour, whereas new coal plants would cost A$176/MWh.

Black holes are created when a supernova explosion destroys a massive star. Scientists have discovered dozens of black holes, but all of them are already formed. So, when scientists recently saw different distorted remains of a supernova, they knew it something special.What the scientists believe they observed was the infant phases of a black hole, or the youngest black hole ever recorded in the Milky Way galaxy.Caught on film by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the "remnant," or W49B, is seen as a vibrant swirl of blues, greens, yellows, and pinks. As seen from Earth, it is about 1,000-years-old and is located roughly 26,000 light years away. A typical black hole, like SS433, is thought to be between 17,000- and 21,000-years-old, as seen from Earth.

A "supervolcano" forming deep below the Earth's crust north of New Zealand, will have the power to destroy the world, but scientists are urging people not to worry - it could be 100 million years away.University of Utah seismologist Michael Thorne has been studying seismic waves beating through the Earth's crust, and says the ingredients are there for a "cataclysmic" eruption."What we may be detecting is the start of one of these large eruptive events that - if it ever happens - could cause very massive destruction on Earth." .

Perhaps there was peace in the valley, after all. Thousands of years ago, foragers and early farmers in the Balkans lived in peaceful coexistence, according to a new study of skeletal remains. But this cozy picture, which includes cultural exchange and also apparently intermating, may not apply to the spread of farming everywhere, other researchers caution.The transition from hunting and gathering to farming was one of the most momentous upheavals in human prehistory.

Archaeologists have long debated how farming spread into Europe; the first agrarian societies appeared in the 7th millennium BCE, attested by one of the earliest farming sites of Europe, discovered in Vashtëmi in southern Albania.Now, new data gleaned from the teeth of prehistoric farmers and the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers with whom they briefly overlapped shows that agriculture was introduced to Central Europe from the Near East by colonisers who brought farming technology with them rather than as a concept that was adopted by the local populations.

The zombie drama "The Walking Dead" normally airs on the American cable-television channel AMC on Sunday evening.But on Monday, residents of two small American cities got treated to a zombie apocalypse over the air, courtesy of pranksters who apparently hacked into the Emergency Alert System at three broadcast stations."Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living," said an ominous voiceover that interrupted programming yesterday afternoon on KRTV-TV, a CBS affiliate in Great Falls, Mont., and on a KRTV subchannel that carries a CW network feed.

A 'new sighting' of a Yeti by an 11-year-old schoolboy is the best ever seen in Russia, an expert on the Abominable Snowman claimed today.Blurred footage taken by a mobile phone allegedly shows the snow monster in trees in the Kemerovo region of southern Siberia.When the Yeti turned sharply towards him, the boy shouted 'I'm going to be eaten' before running away.'I don't doubt it was a Yeti. It stood in a typical pose with its back slightly bent, and its long arms down,' said Igor Burtsev, director of the International Centre of Hominology in Moscow.

The day before it happened, a German page-a-day calendar prophesied the pope's resignation, and then lightning struck St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Were these mysterious events just coincidence or a sign from God?On Monday morning he tore off a page from his daily calendar, just like any other day. But then a bit later he heard the news on the radio: Pope Benedict XVI was resigning."I was a bit shocked," says Jürgen Holtfreter.

USC neuroscientists have isolated chills at a cellular level, identifying the sensory network of neurons in the skin that relays the sensation of cold.David McKemy, associate professor of neurobiology in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and his team managed to selectively shut off the ability to sense cold in mice while still leaving them able to sense heat and touch.

Vaccines could be kept for longer and administered more easily in the next few years, if research at King's College London pans out. The delivery method uses a dried vaccine and micro-needles made, amazingly, out of sugar.It's not quite a candy-coated hypodermic, but that's actually pretty close. The researchers, led by Dr. Linda Klavinskis, were attempting to solve two problems. First, hypodermic delivery can be painful and requires some expertise. Second, keeping vaccines alive and cold is difficult, especially in places like rural Africa, where such help is desperately needed.

A pair of RNA-like molecules can spontaneously assemble into gene-length chains, chemists in the United States and Spain report. Billions of years ago, related molecules may have created a rudimentary form of genetic information that eventually led to the evolution of RNA and life itself, the researchers say. Although it's likely to be difficult, if not impossible, to prove whether similar proto-RNAs were present at the dawn of life, the researchers are working to see if the proto-RNAs can indeed faithfully encode information and evolve toward RNA.

Blobs and smears of microbial life growing in clear plastic disks are confirmation of a community living in a lake buried beneath the Antarctic ice, scientists studying the lake have said.Water retrieved from subglacial Lake Whillans contains about 1,000 bacteria per milliliter (about a fifth of a teaspoon) of lake water, biologist John Priscu of Montana State University told Nature News. Petri dishes swiped with samples of the lake water are already growing colonies of microbes at a good rate, Nature News reported.

The latest bionic superhero is a rat: its brain hooked up to an infrared detector, it's become the first animal to be given a sixth sense.Developed by Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the system connects a head-mounted sensor to a brain region that normally processes touch sensations from whiskers. As shown in this video, the rat's brain is tricked when infrared light is detected, giving it a new sense organ. "Instead of seeing, the rats learned how to touch the light," says Nicolelis.

A new tool has been developed that can reconstruct long-dead languages.Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved. To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended. The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.Currently language reconstructions are carried out by linguists - but the process is slow and labour-intensive.

Perhaps there was peace in the valley, after all. Thousands of years ago, foragers and early farmers in the Balkans lived in peaceful coexistence, according to a new study of skeletal remains. But this cozy picture, which includes cultural exchange and also apparently intermating, may not apply to the spread of farming everywhere, other researchers caution.The transition from hunting and gathering to farming was one of the most momentous upheavals in human prehistory. That transition marks the beginning of the Neolithic period, which started nearly 11,000 years ago, when people of the Near East domesticated plants and animals and settled down in sedentary communities with permanent houses.

A pair of RNA-like molecules can spontaneously assemble into gene-length chains, chemists in the United States and Spain report. Billions of years ago, related molecules may have created a rudimentary form of genetic information that eventually led to the evolution of RNA and life itself, the researchers say. Although it's likely to be difficult, if not impossible, to prove whether similar proto-RNAs were present at the dawn of life, the researchers are working to see if the proto-RNAs can indeed faithfully encode information and evolve toward RNA.Origin of life researchers have long thought that RNA, the molecular cousin of the DNA that encodes our genes, may have played a starring role in the initial evolution of life from a soup of organic molecules.

The mortuary temple of the18th Dynasty Pharaoh Amenhotep III on Luxor's west bank was a hive of activity on Monday, as workers along with Egyptian and foreign archaeologists have packed a pair of colossal statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III in an attempt to transport it to an area almost 60 km far of the temple for restoration.Horig Sourouzian, head of the Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project (CMATCP), told Ahram Online that both statues once stood at the northern gate of the temple, 200 metres behind the Colossi of Memnon.