Newsdesk Archive

At the end of February visitors to Karnak Temples will be able to admire the second chapel of the 18th dynasty Queen Hatshepsut after four years of restoration and reconstruction.The chapel was constructed in limestone to worship Thebes ancient Egyptian god Amun-Re. It includes an open court and two inner halls embellished with blocks engraved with very distinguished religious scenes depicting Hatshepsut before Amun-Re, with her husband king Thutmose II, as well as their cartouches. Some of the blocks bear the name of Hatshepsut's predecessor king Thutmose III.

Pope Benedict has shocked a billion Roman Catholics around the world, and his closest advisers, by announcing that he will resign at the end of this month.Within hours of Pope Benedict announcing his resignation, lightning struck St Peter's Basilica.

Scientists say they are sure there is no chance of the 150ft (45.7m) wide space rock hitting the planet.But there is a remote possibility that it could collide with one of more than 100 telecommunication and weather satellites in fixed orbits above the Earth.The asteroid, 2012 DA14, has been closely tracked since its discovery a year ago.

An energy company is eyeing up the gas reserves of a national park in the Peruvian Amazon whose biodiversity Unesco says "exceeds that of any other place on Earth" and is home to indigenous people who have no regular contact with the outside world, a leaked document seen by the Guardian shows.The revelation about Manú national park follows rumours and reports circulating in Peru that the government will create a gas concession bordering or including parts of the park, but which have not been publicly confirmed.

So you thought that all Einstein did was reinvent everything we thought we knew about space and time. Fool. In his spare time, Einstein wrote papers in support of another multidisciplinary badass. He studied Baer's Law, the law that governs the erosion of rivers, and gives us his version of its mechanics.We know about Einstein's paper on Special Relativity, and we know about his paper on General Relativity. Many of us even know about his paper about chemistry and Brownian Motion. What's less well know is his brief stop over in geology.

As the world faces up to the threat of rising sea levels, could building new cities entirely out at sea offer an alternative way of living?That is the idea being tested in the Netherlands where huge swathes of land already lie below sea level.

Pope Benedict XVI is to resign at the end of this month in an unexpected development, saying he is too old to continue at the age of 85.He became Pope in 2005 following John Paul II's death.Resignations from the papacy are not unknown, but this is the first in the modern era, which has been marked by pontiffs dying while in office.

Curious as to how the Defense Department could be spying on you next? PBS checked in with DARPA about the latest in drone camera technology for the NOVA special "Rise of the Drones," including the world's highest-resolution camera.Actually seeing the sensor on ARGUS-IS, or Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, is still classified, but the basics of how it works have been deemed fit for public consumption.

As well as making the grid more reliable and efficient, the technology could deliver high-speed Internet, TV, and telephony.China has begun testing smart-grid technology that could eventually be deployed nationwide to make the delivery of electricity more reliable and efficient. It might also serve as a way to deliver high-speed Internet, TV, and telephony to the farthest reaches of the country.

A genetically-engineered virus tested in 30 terminally-ill liver cancer patients significantly prolonged their lives, killing tumours and inhibiting the growth of new ones, scientists reported on Sunday.Sixteen patients given a high dose of the therapy survived for 14.1 months on average, compared to 6.7 months for the 14 who got the low dose.

Every two minutes someone in the UK has a heart attack. Every six minutes, someone dies from heart failure. During an attack, the heart remodels itself and dilates around the site of the injury to try to compensate, but these repairs are rarely effective. If the attack does not kill you, heart failure later frequently will."No matter what other clinical interventions are available, heart transplantation is the only genuine cure for this," says Paul Riley, professor of regenerative medicine at Oxford University. "The problem is there is a dearth of heart donors.".

Stressful events early in a person's life, such as neglect or abuse, can have psychological impacts into adulthood. New research shows that these effects may persist in their children and even their grandchildren.Larry Feig and Lorena Saavedra-Rodríguez, biochemists at the Tufts University School of Medicine, caused chronic social stress in adolescent mice by regularly relocating them to new cages over the course of seven weeks.

Gun laws have been back in the media recently due, largely, to the horrific events at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012 which claimed the lives of 20 children and six adults. In response President Obama has just unveiled gun control proposals.In light of this growing focus on gun legislation, some have expressed concern about the possibility of guns being manufactured in the home using 3D-printing technology (also known as "additive manufacturing" or AM).

Dogs are more capable of understanding situations from a human's point of view than has previously been recognised, according to researchers.They found dogs were four times more likely to steal food they had been forbidden, when lights were turned off so humans in the room could not see.This suggested the dogs were able to alter their behaviour when they knew their owners' perspective had changed.

For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.

The discoverers of Pluto's fourth and fifth moons are letting Internet users have a say in what they should be named, by throwing the question open for a non-binding advisory vote.The "Pluto Rocks" project, organized by the SETI Institute, is part of a trend pointing toward getting the public involved in the outer-space naming process. NASA, for example, has solicited name suggestions for the asteroid due to be visited by the OSIRIS-REx probe, and for one of the modules on the International Space Station (more on that later).

The main day of bathing is being held at India's Kumbh Mela, with 20 million pilgrims already taking a dip at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna.This is the most auspicious of six bathing days at the event, billed as the world's biggest human gathering.Some 30 million bathers are expected before Sunday ends, and 100 million in total across the 55-day festival.

A woman has been tortured and burned alive in Papua New Guinea after being accused of using sorcery to kill a young boy, local media report.The woman, a mother aged 20 named as Kepari Leniata, was stripped, tied up and doused in petrol by the boy's relatives in Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands, said the National newspaper.She was then thrown onto a fire in front of hundreds of people.

he universe may grow like a giant brain, according to a new computer simulation.The results, published Nov.16 in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports, suggest that some undiscovered, fundamental laws may govern the growth of systems large and small, from the electrical firing between brain cells and growth of social networks to the expansion of galaxies."Natural growth dynamics are the same for different real networks, like the Internet or the brain or social networks," said study co-author Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at the University of California San Diego.

Let's take a peek at the neighbours. The closest Earth-like planet is probably orbiting a dim red star just 13 light years away. While that's too far for a visit, future telescopes might be able to see it and probe for signs of life.At a press event today, Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics presented a new analysis of planets orbiting red dwarf stars seen by NASA's Kepler telescope. Kepler looks for exoplanets by watching stars dim as their planets pass in front of them, or transit, as seen from Earth.

NASA's Curiosity rover has, for the first time, used a drill carried at the end of its robotic arm to bore into a flat, veiny rock on Mars and collect a sample from its interior. This is the first time any robot has drilled into a rock to collect a sample on Mars.The fresh hole, about 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) wide and 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) deep in a patch of fine-grained sedimentary bedrock, can be seen in images and other data Curiosity beamed to Earth Saturday. The rock is believed to hold evidence about long-gone wet environments. In pursuit of that evidence, the rover will use its laboratory instruments to analyze rock powder collected by the drill.

For more than fifteen years, Thierry Jamin, French Archaeologist and adventurer, explores the jungles of South Peru in every possible direction, searching for clues of the permanent presence of the Incas in the Amazonian forest, and the legendary lost city of Paititi. After the discovery of about thirty incredible archeological sites, located in the North of the department of Cuzco, between 2009 and 2011, which include several fortresses, burial and ceremonial, centers, and small Inca cities composed by hundreds of buildings, and many streets, passages, squares..., Thierry Jamin embarks on an incredible journey in Machu Picchu.

By day, Janet Stephens is a hairdresser at a Baltimore salon, trimming bobs and wispy bangs. By night she dwells in a different world. At home in her basement, with a mannequin head, she meticulously re-creates the hairstyles of ancient Rome and Greece.Ms. Stephens is a hairdo archaeologist.Her amateur scholarship is sticking a pin in the long-held assumptions among historians about the complicated, gravity-defying styles of ancient times. Basically, she has set out to prove that the ancients probably weren't wearing wigs after all.

By day, Janet Stephens is a hairdresser at a Baltimore salon, trimming BURIED beneath a dirt road in the middle of the New South Wales central tablelands lie a few thousand of our ancestors. About 370 million years ago, a billabong teaming with ancient fish promptly dried up, preserving an ancient aquarium in layers of earth.When an Australian Museum palaeontologist, Alex Ritchie, excavated the road in 1993 he unearthed 80 tonnes of material and discovered 4000 fish of eight different species, making the site one of Australia's richest fossil deposits.

Football matches played during the Christmas truce of World War I could be recreated for next year's centenary celebrations.Ministers are working on plans to commemorate the anniversary with a match on the battlefields of Flanders.They are in discussion with the Football Association and the National Children's Football Alliance.

In the fertile inshore waters of the west coast conflict is brewing between small-boat fishermen and the industrial trawlers, with tales of sabotage, bullying and livelihoods at stake.The trawler was a mass of battered metal looming high above our little boat, a great bucket of rust on the bright blue Hebridean sea. For two days last July we watched it plough up and down a shallow patch inshore, just where we'd been used to seeing a school of basking sharks feeding.

There are many times that humanity could stand to learn a little something from nature.This is one of those times.In 2011, the behavioral ecologists Alexander Wilson and Jens Krause set out to observe sperm whales off the island of Pico, in the Azores. But as they began their research, they saw something unexpected: a dolphin -- adult, male, bottlenose -- hanging out with the pod of larger, flat-nosed cetaceans.

Managing livestock with fences and gates is so medieval. The future, says one USDA scientist, is equipping cows with GPS units and coraling them via augmented reality. It may sound crazy, but it could be the best thing to happen to the industry in a century.The millions of cattle who roam the world's pastures are generally enclosed in fences of wood or wire, a technique that has worked well for hundreds of years. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Dean Anderson thinks that it's time to bring the industry up to 21st century standards.

Poachers have killed more than 11,000 elephants in Gabon since 2004, it has been revealed.The country is home to more than half of Africa's 40,000 forest elephants, which are prized for the quality of their pink-tinged ivory. Campaigners said the situation was "out of control" and blamed high demand for ivory jewellery in Asia.

There are thought to be fewer than 1,600 giant pandas in the wild today and the beloved bears' home in the mountains of China is increasingly threatened by climate change and human activity.While China has made achievements in saving the pandas in recent years, a group of conservations says the government's plans to free up forests for commercial use could be a blow to the endangered species.

GEOENGINEERING is being tested - albeit inadvertently - in the north Pacific. Soot from oil-burning ships is dumping about 1000 tonnes of soluble iron per year across 6 million square kilometres of ocean, new research has revealed.Fertilising the world's oceans with iron has been controversially proposed as a way of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to curb global warming. Some geoengineers claim releasing iron into the sea will stimulate plankton blooms, which absorb carbon, but ocean processes are complex and difficult to monitor in tests.

One evening a little over a fortnight ago, a mysterious illuminated object appeared without warning in the dark sky above the world's largest oil refinery in Jamnagar, Gujarat. It circled over the complex before disappearing just as suddenly as it had appeared.RIL has reported the sightings to the government, along with the pictures. The Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard have been put on alert, and the defence ministry is beefing up security for the refinery, sources said.

After years of research, the first bionic eye has seen the light of day in the United States, giving hope to the blind around the world.Developed by Second Sight Medical Products, the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System has helped more than 60 people recover partial sight, with some experiencing better results than others.Consisting of 60 electrodes implanted in the retina and glasses fitted with a special mini camera, Argus II has already won the approval of European regulators. The US Food and Drug Administration is soon expected to follow suit, making this bionic eye the world's first to become widely available.

A British man who lost his nose to skin cancer is now growing a new one in his arm.Scientists helping the unnamed 56-year-old businessman said that the man's new nose will look exactly like his original, slightly crooked nose. Experts at the University College London say that they hope the new, artificial nose will give the man feeling and sense of smell.

Earth's gravity may not have the gravitas of Jupiter, but the planet regularly plucks small asteroids passing by and pins them into orbit. The mini-moons don't stay for long. Within a year or so they resume their looping, twisting paths like crazy straws around the sun. But others arrive to take their place.Simulations show that two asteroids the size of dishwashers and a dozen half-meter (1.6 feet) in diameter are orbiting Earth at any given time. Every 50 years or so something the size of a dump truck arrives. So far, there's been just one confirmed sighting.

Despite being among the brightest objects in the sky, Mercury is a planet very rarely seen by even experienced stargazers. The next couple of weeks offer the best opportunity in 2013 for observers in the Northern Hemisphere to spot Mercury's tiny speck of light in the evening twilight sky.The trick for spotting Mercury is first to find an observing location with a low unobstructed western horizon, wait for half an hour after sunset for the sky to darken, and then sweep to the left of the sunset with binoculars. Once you've initially located the planet with binoculars, you can usually see Mercury with the unaided eye. Don't wait too late, or Mercury will have set. In a telescope, Mercury appears as a tiny "half moon.".

It's been more than 30 years since UC Berkeley researchers first suggested that the extinction of the dinosaurs was probably linked to a massive comet or asteroid impact, known as Chicxulub, off the Yucatan coast. The idea was that the collision from space, which left a 110-mile-wide crater off the coast of Mexico, would have cast off debris that wrapped all the way around Earth, altering the climate and resulting in the global extinction.

Experts at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) are in the process of analysing Indian Buddhist texts that are over 2000-year-old which have recently come to light. The precious manuscripts have already yielded some surprising results.The oldest surviving Buddhist texts, preserved on long rolls of birch-tree bark, are written in Gandhari, an early regional Indic language that is long extinct. The scrolls originate from the region known in ancient times as Gandhara, which lies in what is now Northwestern Pakistan.For researchers interested in the early history of Buddhism, these manuscripts represent a sensational find, for a number of reasons.

Observers say work on the Goguryeo stele is an attempt to incorporate it into Chinese historyChina continues its closed research into a recently unearthed Goguryeo stele, or memorial stone, that is attracting interest as the second Gwanggaeto Stele. The Hankyoreh confirmed that the research team includes a large number of scholars who took part in the Northeast Project, which was controversial for its distortions of Goguryeo history.Goguryeo was one of the three kingdoms of ancient Korea, along with Baekjae and Silla. Parts of its territory are in present day North Korea, North eastern China and Russian Far East.

The Byzantine Empire once ruled the world. As the empire grew in size, so did its bureaucracy and structural complexity. This resulted in diminishing efficiency, until the empire reached the point where it collapsed under its own weight. Thus was created the pejorative adjective "Byzantine."There are those who argue that organizations naturally grow in size and complexity, such that they inevitably become Byzantine. There are those who would argue that NASA has already reached that point.

NASA's top expert on near-Earth objects says that new telescope systems, including a "last alert" system that's just now being set up, are gradually getting a handle on potentially threatening asteroids. But comets? That's a completely different story."We can do something about asteroids. Comets are a problem," said Donald Yeomans, the head of the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Robots are taking over the world. Robo-nurses have been around for a while, but in the quest to make healthcare more efficient, another medical robot could soon be coming to a hospital near you.The FDA has just cleared RP-VITA, a telemedicine robot that can navigate autonomously, for hospital use. The doc-bot allows a doctor to consult with patients and hospital staff remotely through an iPad interface.

SMH.COM.AUIt makes most people a little foggy-headed, but scientists are investigating whether an active ingredient in cannabis could actually stave off dementia.A team from Neuroscience Research Australia is in the early stages of research examining if one of the main active ingredients in cannabis, called cannabidiol, could reverse some of the symptoms of memory loss in animals.

PARIS, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- Satellite imagery confirmed the ozone hole over Antarctica in 2012 was the smallest seen in the past decade, scientists with the European Space Agency reported.The ozone sensor on Europe's MetOp weather satellite surveyed the hole over Antarctica in 2012, adding to the long-term monitoring of atmospheric ozone started by its predecessors on the ERS-2 and Envisat satellites, a release form ESA's Paris headquarters said Friday.

Researchers working on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project have completed their first "directed" search of a part of space and report in a paper they've uploaded to the preprint server arXiv that they've found no signs of life emanating from another planet. The search focused on a patch of sky that included 86 stars over a period of three months in 2011.

Mars One wants to land four astronauts on the Red Planet in 2023, and it's come up with a creative way to fund this ambitious undertaking.The Netherlands-based nonprofit plans to stage a global reality-TV event that follows the colonization effort from astronaut selection through the settlers' first years on the Red Planet. Mars One thinks revenues from broadcasting rights and sponsorships will cover most of the one-way mission's estimated $6 billion cost.

In a chilling case report, doctors in Turkey have described what they claim to be a real-life vampire with multiple personalities and an addiction to drinking blood.The 23-year-old married man apparently started out slicing his own arms, chest and belly with razor blades, letting the blood drip into a cup so he could drink it. But when he experienced compulsions to drink blood "as urgent as breathing," he started turning to other sources, the doctors said.

Nasa's Mars rover Curiosity has turned its drill in rock for the first time.The big rover had previously used just the hammer action on the tool, but it has now progressed to operating the device in a rotary mode as well.New pictures sent back from the robot show a small, shallow, rounded hole that is surrounded by fine tailings.Soon, Curiosity will be commanded to drill up to 5cm into rock to obtain a powdered sample that can be delivered to the vehicle's onboard labs.

Scientists have unearthed a jawbone from an ancient human ancestor in a cave in Serbia.The jawbone, which may have come from an ancient Homo erectus or a primitive-looking Neanderthal precursor, is more than 397,000 years old, and possibly more than 525,000 years old. The fossil, described Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, is the oldest hominin fossil found in this region of Europe, and may change the view that Neanderthals, our closest extinct human relatives, evolved throughout Europe around that time.

At least 35 small pyramids, along with graves, have been discovered clustered closely together at a site called Sedeinga in Sudan.Discovered between 2009 and 2012, researchers are surprised at how densely the pyramids are concentrated. In one field season alone, in 2011, the research team discovered 13 pyramids packed into roughly 5,381 square feet (500 square meters), or slightly larger than an NBA basketball court.

Marine biologist Erica Staaterman is tuned in to the sounds of the undersea world. She records and analyzes the noise of life underwater, and as a result can tell you what a lobster sounds like, or a mantis shrimp (it rumbles)."Most people don't really consider anything beyond whales and dolphins, maybe seals, as sound producers, but it turns out that a lot of things in the ocean make sound," she says.

The mystery of how our brains perceive sound has deepened, now that musicians have smashed a limit on sound perception imposed by a famous algorithm. On the upside this means it should be possible to improve upon today's gold-standard methods for audio perception.Devised over 200 years ago, the Fourier transform is a mathematical process that splits a sound wave into its individual frequencies.

A small, two-wheeled robot has been driven by a male silkmoth to track down the sex pheromone usually given off by a female mate.The robot has been used to characterise the silkmoth's tracking behaviours and it is hoped that these can be applied to other autonomous robots so they can track down smells, and the subsequent sources, of environmental spills and leaks when fitted with highly sensitive sensors.

Researchers from the University of Granada have found a direct relationship between exposure to pesticides in food, air and water and prevalence of type 2 diabetes in adults. This direct relationship exists regardless of age, gender and body mass index, according to the new study. Researchers note, however, that these substance tend to concentrate in body fat, and may be one of the reasons why obese people are more likely to develop diabetes.

Stranger Visions is an art project which tries to determine what we look like based on a single strand of hair.How much information about ourselves do we leave behind in public, as we shed saliva, hair, and sweat throughout the day? It's a question that drives the artwork of Heather Dewey-Hagborg, whose project Stranger Visions reconstructs the faces of the anonymous as 3D-printed sculptures, using genetic detritus found in chewing gum, cigarette butts, and wads of hair around New York City.

OSLO (Reuters) - The Amazon rainforest is less vulnerable to die off because of global warming than widely believed because the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide also acts as an airborne fertilizer, a study showed on Wednesday.The boost to growth from CO2, the main gas from burning fossil fuels blamed for causing climate change, was likely to exceed damaging effects of rising temperatures this century such as drought, it said.

Neanderthals sang opera, British archaeologist Steven Mithen, originator of the theory that music was used as a form of pre-linguistic communication by these pre-historic people, told EFE."The musicality of the Neanderthals can be identified more with opera than with rap because in addition to music, these hominids also used dance and body language as forms of communication," said Mithen, author of "The Singing Neanderthals"."Rap is associated with a particular type of music based on words and phrases, something the Neanderthals lacked," Mithen said.CA - UK - US

If the gift-giving habits of jays are anything to go by, we may be surrounded by birds whose minds are in some ways remarkably similar to our own.Male Eurasian jays, a common member of a bird family that also includes blue jays, crows and ravens, passed a food-giving test of whether they knew what their mates wanted to eat.

A new finding has cast doubt on the theory that ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals over thousands of years. Scientists have re-dated fossil bones from two sites in southern Spain and discovered they are much older than previously thought.According to the new evidence, it is unlikely Neanderthals and modern humans ever lived together in the region. Researchers now think the Neanderthals had long gone before the arrival of the first Homo sapiens.

The Richard III Society will today unveil the world's only facial reconstruction of the human remains found at the Greyfriars in Leicester, yesterday confirmed as belonging to Richard III.The reconstruction project, led by Caroline Wilkinson, Professor of Craniofacial Identification at the University of Dundee, was commissioned and funded by the Richard III Society.

A nearby short duration gamma-ray burst may be the cause of an intense blast of high-energy radiation that hit the Earth in the 8th century, according to new research led by astronomers Valeri Hambaryan and Ralph Neuhauser. The two scientists, based at the Astrophysics Institute of the University of Jena in Germany, publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Mythical King Midas was ultimately doomed because everything he touched turned to gold. Now, the reverse has been found in bacteria that owe their survival to a natural Midas touch.Delftia acidovorans lives in sticky biofilms that form on top of gold deposits, but exposure to dissolved gold ions can kill it. That's because although metallic gold is unreactive, the ions are toxic.

A new study indicates some 60 percent of the galaxy's most ubiquitous stars likely host planets smaller than Neptune and about 6 percent host Earth-size worlds orbiting in the so-called "Goldilocks" zone where liquid water -- and life as we know it -- are possible, astronomers announced Wednesday.The stars in question are red dwarfs with a quarter the mass of the sun and just 2 percent the luminosity. But they are commonplace, making up about 75 percent of the stars closest to the sun.

An asteroid will give Earth a historically close shave next week, but there's no chance that the space rock will slam into our planet on this pass, experts say.The 150-foot-wide (45 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 will zoom within 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers) of our planet on Feb. 15, coming nearer than the ring of satellites in geosynchronous orbit. While the flyby will be the closest ever known in advance for such a large asteroid, there's no reason to retreat to the doomsday bunker.

Over the weekend, a tiny spot on the sun erupted into a moderately sized solar flare that was particularly loud in radio waves. With the sound of a roaring wave, it completely drowned out radio communication all over the Earth between 28 MHz and 21.1 MHz.

The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea, analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign from Google, Microsoft and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor.

For a muscular agency that combats vicious drug criminals, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration acts like a terrified and obstinate toddler when it comes to basic science. For years, the DEA and the National Institute for Drug Abuse have made it all but impossible to develop a robust body of research on the medical uses of marijuana.

Members of Congress will introduce historic legislation today to permit for the regulated production and retail sales of cannabis to adults in states that have legalized its consumption.Representative Jared Polis, (D-CO) is sponsoring legislation that seeks to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol.Separate legislation to be introduced by Rep. Earl Bluemenauer (D-OR) seeks to establish a federal tax structure for retail cannabis production and sales.

TUCSON (KGUN-9) - It was a normal Sunday in Vail for Geradine Vargas. Normal, until she and her husband stumbled upon something kind of weird."We were taking photos around the area and we just.... I mean, how could you miss this?" Geradine said. "It was just like glittering in the sun."Thousands of tiny, purple-hued spheres piled in the middle of nowhere."It's just one of those things that you've never seen before."

The ever changing story of Europe's relationship with biotechnology took another twist recently when the giant German chemical firm BASF announced it was halting the development of all its GM potato varieties in Europe.The company was approved to grow a commercial GM potato called Amflora in 2010. This variety had been modified to produce more of a type of starch that is useful for papermaking and other industrial processes.

For centuries, strange reports of a large, underwater creature have come from people living near the remote Lake Labynkyr in Siberia.Now, a team of scientists from the Russian Geographical Society report they've found the skeletal remains of an animal that fits the description of the "Devil" of Lake Labynkyr, according to the Siberian Times, though skeptics have yet to be convinced of the legendary creature's existence.

Scientists say they've discovered the fossilized bones of a new type of pterosaur, a flying dinosaur-age reptile, which lived about 68 million years ago and had a wingspan of nearly 10 feet (3-meters).The skeletal bits of the midsized pterosaur were found in Sebes-Glod in Romania's Transylvanian Basin, famous for its rich array of Late Cretaceous fossils, including crocodylomorphs (ancient relatives of crocodiles), mammals, turtles and dinosaurs like the dwarf sauropod Magyarosaurus dacus and the dromaeosaurBalaur. Scientists dubbed the new reptile Eurazhdarcho langendorfensis and say it belonged to a group of pterosaurs called the azhdarchids.

The town of Midland City, Ala., is dotted with peanut farms and cotton fields -- and 2,400 people who believe in the power of prayer.So when a 5-year-old boy was taken hostage last week, the town held candlelit prayer vigils. And when he was rescued this week, many residents credited prayer and thanked God."It's by the grace of God, he's OK," Dale County Sheriff Wally Olson told AL.com.While scientists have tried to quantify possible effects of prayer, there are far more questions than answers. Many published studies have been discredited and refuted. The growing field of neurotheology shows some insight into the brains of people who pray, but that focuses on the effects of those who pray, not those for are prayed for.

A trillion. A googol. A centillion. TREE(3). Somewhere between zero and infinity is a host of finite, but mind-bogglingly huge numbers.But while mathematicians have dreamed up large numbers for ages and they pop up frequently in physics and math, gigantic numbers are bafflingly hard to fathom."Really big numbers are in every piece of technology we look at, in every organism we look at," said John Borwein, an applied mathematician at the University of Newcastle in Australia. And yet, "These are enormous numbers that no human being is intuitively equipped to understand." .

BEHOLD, the beating heart of a time machine! Or "clock", as most people call them, but this one is nothing like your grandfather's. This super-accurate timekeeper is an optical atomic clock built by the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and its tick is governed by a single ion of the element strontium.The ion is trapped in an electromagnetic field within the small cube at the centre and cooled with lasers to just a fraction above absolute zero. The lasers are fired through three of the glass shafts emanating from the cube, but must be carefully directed out of the other side to prevent them scattering within the clock, which is why there are six shafts in total.

Cellphones' talents are many and diverse. Mobile phones have been used to map the spread of malaria in east Africa, and now cellular technology has even been turned to measuring rainfall.Network operators use microwaves to link cellular towers together. When it rains, the signal received at the next tower down the line can be weakened by reflection off raindrops.

Printing blobs of human embryonic stem cells is the latest step towards being able to grow organs on demand.Researchers had already used inkjet printers to print out 2D cultures of living cells. But printing blobs of cells rather than flat sheets is closer to real tissue.Human embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, which means they are capable of becoming a cell in any type of tissue, making them attractive to those who are trying to grow new organs.

A chunk of space rock 50 metres wide, weighing 130,000 tonnes and travelling at 17,400mph is set to make its closest fly-by of earth ever later this month.The snappily named 2012 DA14 will miss earth by a mere 17,200 miles when it passes the planet inside the orbit of many of our geosynchronous communication satellites.Despite its relatively small size the rock would produce the equivalent of 2.5 megatons of TNT if it hit earth.

About 68 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period, a dinosaur flew through the skies. Known as Eurazhdarcho langendorfensis, the giant lizard belonged to a group of pterosaurs called the azhdarchids. They possessed long necks and long beaks, and had wings that were specifically designed for soaring. Yet before now, researchers didn't even know this particular flying creature existed. Scientists from the Transylvanian Museum Society in Romania, the University of Southampton in the UK and the Museau Nacional in Rio de Janiero have recently identified the pterosaur as a new species of azhdarchid.The remains of the pterosaur were found in the Transylvanian Basin, which is world-famous for its many Late Cretaceous fossils which range from mammals to ancient relatives of crocodiles.

Want to see Mercury? You're in luck. The planet is due to make an appearance right before Valentine's Day, and you should be able to see it with your naked eye.The best time to view this planet will be about 30 minutes after sunset between Feb. 12 and 20. The planet will position itself at least 10 degrees above the horizon in the west-southwest, so make sure you have an unobstructed view of the horizon.Mercury isn't the only planet that will put on a show, though. Mars will join Mercury this Friday just after sunset. The Red Planet will hang just beneath Mercury, though it may be difficult to see since it will appear dimmer than usual.

A chunk of stone bearing dinosaur footprints has been carefully lifted from the grounds of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., scientists report.The dino tracks, thought to have been left by three separate beasts more than 100 million years ago, were discovered by amateur paleontologist Ray Stanford in August 2012.The feature that first caught Stanford's eye was a dinner-plate-sized footprint of a nodosaur, a tanklike dinosaur studded with bony protuberances that roamed the area about 110 million years ago during the Cretaceous period...

An ultra-small Japanese satellite is being spotted from the ground, thanks to a set of lights that flash brightly in Morse code.The novel cubesat, known as FITSAT-1, has been orbiting Earth since early October of last year. Though it tips the scales at less than 3 pounds, FITSAT-1's powerful light-emitting diodes (LEDs) make it a compelling target for skywatchers."As long as the LEDs are active, then you will be able to see it using binoculars," veteran Canadian satellite watcher Kevin Fetter told SPACE.com

When doctors at the University of Iowa prepared a patient to inhale a panic-inducing dose of carbon dioxide, she was fearless. But within seconds of breathing in the mixture, she cried for help, overwhelmed by the sensation that she was suffocating.The patient, a woman in her 40s known as SM, has an extremely rare condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease that has caused extensive damage to the amygdala, an almond-shaped area in the brain long known for its role in fear. She had not felt terror since getting the disease when she was an adolescent.

Thanks to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, quantum computers would be able to carry out certain computational tasks much faster than conventional computers. Among the most promising technologies for the construction of a quantum computer are systems of single atoms, confined in so-called ion traps and manipulated with lasers. In the laboratory, these systems have already been used to test key building blocks of a future quantum computer. "Currently, we can carry out successful quantum computations with atoms," explain Andreas Stute and Bernardo Casabone, both PhD students at the University of Innsbruck's Institute for Experimental Physics. "But we are still missing viable interfaces with which quantum information can be transferred over optical channels from one computer to another."

Theories about when the last Neanderthals walked the Earth may have to be revised, according to a study that suggests they became extinct in their last refuge in Spain much earlier than previously thought.Previous dating of bone fossils found at Neanderthal sites in the region put the youngest at about 35,000 years. But researchers from Australia and Europe re-examined the bones using an improved method to filter out contamination and concluded that the remains are about 50,000 years old.If true, the study, casts doubt on the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed...

Pieces of the Moon and Mars have been found on Earth before, as well as chunks of Vesta and other asteroids, but what about the innermost planet, Mercury? That's where some researchers think this greenish meteorite may have originated, based on its curious composition and the most recent data from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft.NWA 7325 is the name for a meteorite fall that was spotted in southern Morocco in 2012, comprising 35 fragments totaling about 345 grams. The dark green stones were purchased by meteorite dealer Stefan Ralew (who operates the retail site SR Meteorites) who immediately made note of their deep colors and lustrous, glassy exteriors.

Mapping the surface of Mars in 3D is now 90% finished by the high-resolution stereo camera on the European Space Agency's Mars Express, about 9 years after the orbital insertion of the satellite.The mosaic of the map consists of 2702 individual swaths of the martian surface, providing a record of all locations observed by the camera simultaneously in red, green, blue and nadir channels. Making those took the satellite 10 821 orbits, with 61.5% of the surface now mapped at a resolution of 20 m per pixel or better.

There may never be another scientific genius on the level of Einstein, Newton, Darwin or Copernicus, one prominent US psychology professor claims in a recently published article.In that paper, which was published by the journal Nature, Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California-Davis (UC Davis) wrote that individuals who possess what he refers to as the ultimate level of scientific creativity could be an extinct species, primarily because the way that the discipline itself is conducted in the modern era, Rebecca Boyle of PopSci wrote on Friday.

Iran admits that one of two official photos of Iran's first monkey in space depicted the wrong monkey. It showed an archive photo of one of the alternate monkeys. But one expert says Iran's still lying about one of the monkeys.One of two official packages of photos of Iran's famed simian space traveler depicted the wrong monkey, but a primate really did fly into space and return safely to Earth, a senior Iranian space official confirmed Saturday.The two different monkeys shown in the photos released by Iran's state media caused some international observers to wonder whether the monkey had died in space or that the launch didn't go well.

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III.Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch's family.Lead archaeologist Richard Buckley, from the University of Leicester, told a press conference to applause: "Beyond reasonable doubt it's Richard."Richard, killed in battle in 1485, will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral.

Extraordinary brightly-coloured glass jewellery believed to be from Ancient Egypt has been found in a 2,400-year-old burial mound in Siberia.Nicknamed 'Cleopatra's Necklace' by the Russians who found it, the jewellery was discovered on the skeleton of a 25-year-old woman, believed to have been a virgin priestess.Although it was discovered during a dig nine years ago, this is the first time a picture of the priceless 17-bead necklace has been shown since it was found in the Altai Mountains by archaeologist Yelena Borodovskya.

Using modern technology, a Virginia museum is working to unwrap the story behind one of the earliest surviving Egyptian mummies.The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond partnered this week with a medical imaging center to complete a CT scan on Tjeby, its 4,000-year-old mummy, in hopes of piecing together more information about the mummy itself and better understanding the early history of the mummification process.While it isn't the first time a mummy has gone under the digital knife, only a handful from the time period have been examined in this fashion.

The small near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass very close to Earth on February 15, so close that it will pass inside the ring of geosynchronous weather and communications satellites. NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office can accurately predict the asteroid's path with the observations obtained, and it is therefore known that there is no chance that the asteroid might be on a collision course with Earth. Nevertheless, the flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close.Asteroid 2012 DA14 will be closest to Earth on Feb. 15, at about 11:24 p.m. PST (2 p.m. EST and 1924 UT)...

The Aztecs who conquered the city of Xaltocan in ancient Mexico around 1435 may have fundamentally changed the genetic makeup of the people who lived there, new research suggests.The study, published in the December issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, showed that maternal DNA from 25 residents of Xaltocan prior to the conquest did not match that found after. The findings may help shed light on a long-standing debate over whether the original Otomi people who lived in Xaltocan before the conquest either abandoned the site or were assimilated into Aztec life.

A hypersonic "SpaceLiner" would whisk up to 50 passengers from Europe to Australia in 90 minutes. The futuristic vehicle would do so by riding a rocket into Earth's upper atmosphere, reaching 24 times the speed of sound before gliding in for a landing.Many challenges still remain, including finding the right shape for the vehicle, said Martin Sippel, project coordinator for SpaceLiner at the German Aerospace Center. But he suggested the project could make enough progress to begin attracting private funding in another 10 years and aim for full operations by 2050.

A NASA spacecraft is providing new evidence of a wet underground environment on Mars that adds to an increasingly complex picture of the Red Planet's early evolution.The new information comes from researchers analyzing spectrometer data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which looked down on the floor of McLaughlin Crater.

Cells containing DNA have emerged as the first evidence of life in a subglacial lake in West Antarctica. On January 28, a U.S. research team retrieved water from Lake Whillans, which sits 800 meters below the ice surface. The water hosted a surprising bounty of living cells.The scientists collected three 10-liter water samples from the lake. Preliminary tests conducted in mobile labs show that the cells are actively using oxygen. It may take months for biologists to identify the microbes present.

There's a reason we only ever see one side of the Moon. It's tidally locked to the Earth, presenting only one side to us as it orbits around the planet. Tidal locking is a fate that befalls lots of planetary bodies, and it can wreak havoc on the surface.Why does tidal locking happen? And more importantly, why hasn't Earth become a tidally locked planet? And are we doomed to go that way eventually?.

Crystals look stunning, and may be more "alive" than we once thought. Scientists have infused life into inanimate chemical compounds by flashing a blue-violet light that prompted them to assemble themselves into a crystal.A team of physicists and chemists from New York University wanted to see if they could duplicate and control collective motion in a non-living object. Inspired by the way flocks of birds and schools of fish move as if they're a single organism, they got to work.

Well-known remote viewer Paul H. Smith has announced the passing of a (perhaps *the*) pioneer in the field, Ingo Swann, aged 79. A double degree graduate from Westminster College in Utah (in biology and art), Swann also served time in Korea in the U.S Army, before later pursuing a career in art and becoming involved with research into anomalous powers of the human mind.Bio here