Newsdesk Archive

Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

Gold prospectors may one day use Petri dishes to help with their quests. A species of bacterium forms nanoscale gold nuggets to help it to grow in toxic solutions of the precious metal, reports a paper published online today in Nature Chemical Biology.The molecule with which the bacteria create the particles could one day be used to collect gold from mine waste, says Frank Reith, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who works on gold-processing bacteria but was not involved in the latest study.

The distress call of a young dolphin has been used to lure a large pod of the animals to safety, after it appeared they would strand themselves in shallow water.Environment officials in Western Australia caught the juvenile and took it to deeper water, where its distress calls enticed the rest to follow.One dolphin died in the incident.

He was the most reviled and misunderstood monarch in English history, but one of the last remaining mysteries of Richard III could soon be resolved with the help of modern science and a fragment of DNA.A group of scholars are gathering over the weekend to decide once and for all whether a skeleton found under a council car park in Leicester is that of the king who died in battle at nearby Bosworth Field in 1485.

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.

The space rock that slammed into Earth and wiped it clean of dinosaurs, around 65.5 million years ago, may have been a binary - two asteroids orbiting each other -according to a new study.The dino-killing asteroid is usually thought of as a single rock with a diameter of 7 to 10 kilometres, but it may really have been two widely separated rocks with that combined diameter, researchers said.

Opportunity, NASA's other Mars rover, has tooled around the red planet for so long it's easy to forget it's still alive.Some 5,000 miles away from the limelight surrounding Curiosity's every move, Opportunity this week quietly embarks on its tenth year of exploration -- a sweet milestone since it was only tasked to work for three months.

LONDON: All the ingredients that support life were present just below the surface of Mars for much of the red planet's history, a new study has claimed. However, instead of hosting little green men, our celestial neighbour was likely inhabited by simple microorganisms.The study led by the Natural History Museum, with the University of Aberdeen, found that all the ingredients for life were present just below the planet's surface for much of its history, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

A lot of people have claimed over the years that they can prove aliens are real, but very often those people are just self-proclaimed experts with no real evidence. This time, though, we're seeing real research from real scientists who think they've got fossilized evidence that life exists elsewhere in the universe. So are they right?

One of the world's "most remote" post offices has reopened in Antarctica, 54 years after it was abandoned.The Antarctic Heritage Trust reopened the Detaille Island office, to sell postcards and Antarctic stamps to fund restoration of the island's buildings.The trust's Anna Malaos, from Cambridge, Michael Powell, from Crickhowell in South Wales and Tudor Morgan, from Monmouthshire will run it.

An Aboriginal language crushed under the weight of European colonisation in Australia has been revived, thanks to the dedication of researchers and the vision of 19th Century German missionaries.The Kaurna language once thrived and was spoken by the original inhabitants of Adelaide. But it began to disappear from daily use in South Australia as early as the 1860s.

They were humble farmers who grew corn and dwelt in subterranean pit houses. But the people who lived 1200 years ago in a Utah village known as Site 13, near Canyonlands National Park in Utah, seem to have had at least one indulgence: chocolate. Researchers report that half a dozen bowls excavated from the area contain traces of chocolate, the earliest known in North America. The finding implies that by the end of the 8th century C.E., cacao beans, which grow only in the tropics, were being imported to Utah from orchards thousands of kilometers away.

Sugars are needed to provide us with energy and in moderate amounts contribute to our well-being. Sustained high levels of sugars, as is found in diabetics, damages our cells and now is shown that can also increase our chance to get cancer: The dose makes the poison as Paracelsus said.

Individual body odour plays an important role in partner selection. Humans, mice, fish and birds, and probably other vertebrates too, receive important information about a potential partner's immune system from their body odour. A partner is chosen on the bases of whether he or she offers the optimum complement to the individual's own immune genes. The aim is to pass on a wide variety of immune genes to the offspring so that they are resistant to a broad spectrum of pathogens.

Water diverted to central California's farmlands boosts rainfall in nearby states and may even exacerbate periodic flooding in some regions, a new study suggests. The phenomenon may also be happening elsewhere in the world.

The construction of a giant dam in the Amazon region of Brazil is threatening parts of the world's largest rainforest. But the indigenous tribes living here are keeping quiet in return for millions of dollars in promises.They search for dead meat, and rummage through the trash. They come from the forest and live on the city's waste. They're called "urubus" in northern Brazil, black vultures with curved beaks and lizard-like heads.

The average life of a webpage is around six to ten weeks. After that, the information it contains can be lost forever.This year all that may change. Landmark regulations are expected to be approved by the UK parliament that will save the content of millions of public websites for future generations.This will allow the historians of the future to understand what Scotland and the rest of the UK was like in the early part of the 21st century by studying what appeared on the internet and in e-journals and e-books.

If you give people superpowers, will they use those abilities for good?Researchers at Stanford recently investigated the subject by giving people the ability of Superman-like flight in the university's Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory (VHIL). While several studies have shown that playing violent videogames can encourage aggressive behavior, the new research suggests that games could be designed to train people to be more empathetic in the real world.

Drones could help human workers safeguard the 4 million miles of U.S. highways crisscrossing the country. The flying robots could inspect bridges and roads, survey lands with laser mapping, and even alert officials to traffic jams or accidents.One such project focused on studying the use of drones recently received $74,984 from the Federal Highway Administration and the Georgia Department of Transportation. Researchers plan to spend the next year figuring out how drones could help workers as they go about inspecting and maintaining the safety of public roads and highways.

Few people would argue with the need for air bags on the inside of a car. But on the outside?The idea comes from TNO, a car company in the The Netherlands, where there are now 1.3 bicycles for every resident. Amsterdam alone is home to a half a million riders daily.In tests, TNO researchers found that when a car hits a bicycle, the rider usually ends up landing on the windshield, with the head and shoulder leading. So they developed an air bag that inflates on the outside of the car, between the bottom edge of the front windshield and the hood.

America's carbon dioxide emissions last year fell to their lowest levels since 1994, according to a new report.Carbon dioxide emissions fell by 13% in the past five years, because of new energy-saving technologies and a doubling in the take-up of renewable energy, the report compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) said.

The destruction of tropical peatland forests is causing them to haemorrhage carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, scientists say.The destruction of tropical peatland forests is causing them to haemorrhage carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, scientists say.The research, published in Nature, suggests peatland contributions to climate change have been badly underestimated.

Conservationists are becoming increasingly alarmed by the number of seabirds being washed on to the south coast of England covered in a sticky, waxy substance.Around 200 birds have been found alive, but by Friday morning 20 dead birds had also been discovered and the RSPB was receiving many reports of distressed birds being spotted out at sea.

They may not be everybody's favourite, but pigeons have now joined that elite club of animals to have had their DNA laid bare by researchers.A team from the US, Denmark and China reports the sequencing of the genome of the rock pigeon (Columba livia) in this week's Science magazine.It has allowed the origins of some of the roughly 350 breeds to be traced.

The night-flying insects are just as important to the ecosystem as the colourful butterflies we see during the day.But in the last 40 years two thirds of teh 1,000 British species have declined and three species - the orange upperwing, bordered gothic and Brighton wainscot - all went extinct in the last ten years.

Condemned as a dead language, Manx - the native language of the Isle of Man - is staging an extraordinary renaissance, writes Rob Crossan.Road signs, radio shows, mobile phone apps, novels - take a drive around the Isle of Man today and the local language is prominent.But just 50 years ago Manx seemed to be on the point of extinction."If you spoke Manx in a pub on the island in the 1960s, it was considered provocative and you were likely to find yourself in a brawl," recalls Brian Stowell, a 76-year-old islander who has penned a Manx-language novel, The Vampire Murders, and presents a radio show on Manx Radio promoting the language every Sunday.

For centuries, the fate of the original Otomí inhabitants of Xaltocan, the capital of a pre-Aztec Mexican city-state, has remained unknown. Researchers have long wondered whether they assimilated with the Aztecs or abandoned the town altogether.According to new anthropological research from The University of Texas at Austin, Wichita State University and Washington State University, the answers may lie in DNA. Following this line of evidence, the researchers theorize that some original Otomies, possibly elite rulers, may have fled the town. Their exodus may have led to the reorganization of the original residents within Xaltocan, or to the influx of new residents, who may have intermarried with the Otomí population.

TURNS out two heads really are better than one. Two people have successfully steered a virtual spacecraft by combining the power of their thoughts - and their efforts were far more accurate than one person acting alone. One day groups of people hooked up to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) might work together to control complex robotic and telepresence systems, maybe even in space.

Last week on Wired.co.uk we covered the Dutch architects who are planning on building the world's first 3D-printed house. It turns out that the European Space Agency (ESA) and architecture firm Foster + Partners have also been working on the same idea -- though they'll be building lunar colonies using 3D-printed bricks made out of moon dust.

The risk of hospitalisation or death from heart disease is 32% lower in vegetarians than people who eat meat and fish, according to a new study from the University of Oxford.Heart disease is the single largest cause of death in developed countries, and is responsible for 65,000 deaths each year in the UK alone. The new findings, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggest that a vegetarian diet could significantly reduce people's risk of heart disease.

Even babies as young as a year-and-a-half can guess what other people are thinking, new research suggests.The results, published today (Jan. 29) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: B, come from a study of children spanning the globe, from rural China to the more remote islands of Fiji. Previously, scientists thought this ability to understand other people's perspectives emerged much later in children.

Young bonobos console their fellow apes with hugs and sex, say scientists.Although bonobos are known as the "empathic" apes, researchers previously thought that comforting behaviour was too complex for juveniles to grasp.But studies at the Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary in DR Congo, revealed that the youngsters often consoled the losers of social squabbles.Researchers also found that apes raised by their mothers were more likely to offer comfort than orphans.

Chimps can learn more efficient ways to use a tool by watching what others do, according to research published Jan. 30 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Shinya Yamamoto and colleagues from Kyoto University and Kent University, UK. Their study presents the first experimental evidence that chimps, like humans, can watch and learn a group member's invention of a better technique.

The mystery of how homing pigeons are able to navigate home may have been solved. The birds use low-frequency sound waves to make a mental map of their location, new research suggests.The findings, published Wednesday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, may shed light on why the normally amazing navigators sometimes get completely lost: the low-frequency waves from their current location don't reach their home loft.

The European Commission has proposed that member states restrict the use of certain classes of pesticide that are believed to be harmful to bees.Sprays that use neonicotinoid chemicals should only be used on crops that are not attractive to the insects they said.The sale of seeds treated with these chemicals should also be prohibited.Bayer, one of the companies who make the pesticides, says they are convinced they can be used without harm to bees.

Growing oil palm to make 'green' biofuels in the tropics could be accelerating the effects of climate change, say scientists.Researchers from Bangor University found the creation of oil palm plantations are releasing prehistoric sources of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.The findings throw into doubt hopes that biofuels grown in the tropics could help cut greenhouse gas emissions.

It's been estimated that up to one in ten species could go extinct by the end of this century as a result of climate change. Conservation professionals are working hard to understand how climate change will influence species and to develop strategies to manage the risks, but migratory species pose a particular challenge. These long-distance migrants spend parts of their annual cycle in different habitats, at different latitudes, and often cross geopolitical boundaries.

Thousands of cows were abandoned in the evacuated zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Tohoku region of Japan and released radioactive materials from the plant.Now, nearly two years after the disaster, those abandoned cattle were found to be contaminated with radioactive elements. Traces of radioactive cesium, silver and tellurium were found in the 79 cattle analyzed by a scientific team led by Nagoya University engineer Toshio Fukuda and published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The first signs of potentially exotic life have been spotted in a sample of water drawn from Antarctica's hidden Lake Whillans, a half-mile beneath the surface, according to reports from the scene.The telltale green glow of cells stained with a DNA-sensitive dye could be seen when water from the lake was put under the microscope on Monday, Discover Magazine's Crux blog reported. "It was the first evidence of life in an Antarctic subglacial lake," science journalist Douglas Fox reported for The Crux. Fox is an embedded journalist reporting from Lake Whillans under the auspices of a National Science Foundation program.

Four US states are considering new legislation about teaching science in schools, allowing pupils to to be taught religious versions of how life on earth developed in what critics say would establish a backdoor way of questioning the theory of evolution.Fresh legislation has been put forward in Colorado, Missouri and Montana. In Oklahoma, there are two bills before the state legislature that include potentially creationist language.

Modern humans left Africa twice as early as previously thought, spreading in a number of climate-driven waves, new research suggests.The paper, published in Quaternary International, pours fresh doubt on the previously-held consensus that humans spread from Africa in a single cohort.'The consensus view has been that modern humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago by a coastal route, skirting around some very arid places, and spread to Australia very quickly,' explains Professor Michael Petraglia of the University of Oxford, one of the study's authors.

A group of scientists is reluctantly recommending that the U.S. shut off its last giant atom smasher, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in the face of declining federal funds. With the Tevatron at Fermilab dismantled, RHIC represented a last bastion of high-energy particle colliding in this country. It must be sacrificed so that other particle acceleration projects might live.

An early warning system for California earthquakes could soon get a much-needed dose of money, a state lawmaker announced today (Jan 28).State Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) introduced legislation to fund a California-wide earthquake early warning system during a press conference at Caltech. The technology for a warning system already exists, through a prototype called the California Integrated Seismic Network, but scientists need more money to take it public. Other earthquake-prone countries with public warning systems include Japan, Mexico, Taiwan and Turkey.

Geopolitical issues are driving up the cost of oil and eroding U.S. energy security and could trigger another recession, according to energy experts.But fuels derived from natural gas could help avoid a future oil crisis if they're poised to effectively compete in the oil-dominated transportation sector, members of the U.S. Energy Security Council said yesterday at a meeting of energy industry leaders.

BEIJING -- Those searching for answers to China's chronic smog should consider this: Coal consumption in the world's second-largest economy is nearly on par with the rest of the world combined.That's according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which released data Tuesday showing Chinese coal usage growing 9% in 2011 to 325 million tons. That means Chinese coal demand accounts for 47% of global consumption.

A team of storm-chasing scientists sampling rarefied air has found a world of bacteria and fungi floating about 30,000 feet above Earth. The findings, detailed Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that microbes have the potential to affect the weather.Scientists have long studied airborne bacteria, but they typically do so from the ground, often trekking to mountain peaks to examine microbes in fresh snow. Beyond that, they don't know much about the number and diversity of floating microbes, said study coauthor Athanasios Nenes, an atmospheric scientist at Georgia Tech.

One of the biggest challenges of space travel has very little to do with the traveling itself, and more to do with everything that happens afterward. How will humans sustain themselves if we send them back to the moon (and, as planned, to Mars)? Food, even freeze-dried, is heavy. Water, too. Maintenance is expensive, in every sense of the word. So if manned space travel is to become a long-term reality, we'll need to find ways to cultivate the places and planets we visit: to mine their soil for nutrients, to find the water hidden in their depths, to generate the air that will make everything else possible.

Networks of narrow ridges found in impact craters on Mars appear to be the fossilized remnants of underground cracks through which water once flowed, according to a new analysis by researchers from Brown University.The study, in press in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, bolsters the idea that the subsurface environment on Mars once had an active hydrology and could be a good place to search for evidence of past life. The research was conducted by Lee Saper, a recent Brown graduate, with Jack Mustard, professor of geological sciences.

Scientists have unearthed and dated some of the oldest stone hand axes on Earth. The ancient tools, unearthed in Ethiopia in the last two decades, date to 1.75 million years ago.The tools roughly coincided with the emergence of an ancient human ancestor called Homo erectus, and fossilized H. erectus remains were also found at the same site, said study author Yonas Beyene, an archaeologist at the Association for Research and Conservation of Culture in Ethiopia. Collectively, the finding suggests an ancient tool-making technique may have arisen with the evolution of the new species.

Arrayed in crypts and churches, with leering skulls and parchment skin, the desiccated dead of Sicily have long kept mute vigil.But now, centuries later, these creepy cadavers have plenty to say.Five years into the Sicily Mummy Project, six macabre collections are offering scientists a fresh look at life and death on the Mediterranean island from the late 16th century to the mid-20th.

An ancient tsunami caused dramatic long-term ecological changes in the Caribbean more than 3,000 years ago, new research suggests.Scientists investigated sediments from a coastal lagoon on the Caribbean island of Bonaire about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of the Venezuelan coast. The Caribbean is highly vulnerable to coastal hazards such as hurricanes, tsunamis, mudslides and floods.

Rebutting a speculative hypothesis that comet explosions changed Earth's climate sufficiently to end the Clovis culture in North America about 13,000 years ago, Sandia lead author Mark Boslough and researchers from 14 academic institutions assert that other explanations must be found for the apparent disappearance.

By analysing satellite images, oceanographers have found that small oil spills in the heavily drilled northern Gulf of Mexico are often much larger than reported. The researchers presented their results last week at the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Missing oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill may have ended up at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.The Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 spewed more than 600 million litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. While microbes processed the vast majority within months, US government assessments failed to account for the fate of about one-quarter of the spilled oil.

Mexico City plans to draw drinking water from a mile-deep aquifer, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The Mexican effort challenges a key tenet of U.S. clean water policy: that water far underground can be intentionally polluted because it will never be used.U.S. environmental regulators have long assumed that reservoirs located thousands of feet underground will be too expensive to tap. So even as population increases, temperatures rise, and traditional water supplies dry up, American scientists and policy-makers often exempt these deep aquifers from clean water protections and allow energy and mining companies to inject pollutants directly into them.

Architects and designers have utilized 3D printing technology as part of their work for many years, but it is only now that an architect has come forward with a design for an actual, habitable residence using that same technology.Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architects has designed a residence in collaboration with mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs that they hope to begin construction on using a 3D printer by 2014.

Last summer, when filming for a series to be broadcast next year, a team from the BBC's Natural History Unit saw first-hand how discarded plastic can end up thousands of miles away from where people live when they visited French Frigate Shoals, an island north west of Hawaii.There they found turtles nesting amongst plastic bottles, cigarette lighters and toys. And they discovered dead and dying albatross chicks, unwittingly killed when their parents fed them plastic carried in as they foraged for food in the sea.

Thanks to cultural evolution, male Savannah sparrows are changing their tune, partly to attract "the ladies."According to a study of more than 30 years of Savannah sparrows recordings, the birds are singing distinctly different songs today than their ancestors did 30 years ago -- changes passed along generation to generation, according to a new study by University of Guelph researchers.

Whether animals have language is the nature mystery people most want solved, according to a poll.Asked to choose from 10 unanswered questions about the natural world, almost a third (31%) said whether animals use language was one of the issues they most wanted answered.The second most burning question was about how the dinosaurs died out, with 29% of the 2,000 people polled putting that as one of their top queries.

Do new recordings from Oregon's Blue Mountains offer good evidence of the mysterious bipedal creature known as Bigfoot? That's what some are claiming after hearing a recording of strange roars and shrieks given to The Oregonian newspaper.When people think of Bigfoot evidence, casts of big footprints and blurry photos and films often come to mind. But someof the more interesting bits of evidence are sound recordings of alleged vocalizations. One company, Sierra Sounds, markets a CD called "The Bigfoot Recordings: The Edge of Discovery." Narrated by "Star Trek" actor Jonathan Frakes, the recording claims to have captured vocalizations among a Bigfoot family. The sounds include a series of guttural grunts, howls and growls.

Michael Trimble, a British professor at the Institute of Neurology in London, begins his new book with Gana the gorilla. In the summer of 2009, 11-year-old Gana gave birth to a boy at a Muenster zoo. But one day in August, the baby suddenly and mysteriously died. Gana held up her son in front of her, staring at his limp body. She held him close, stroking him. To onlookers it appeared that Gana was trying to reawaken him, and, as the hours passed, that she was mourning his passing.

Good doctors really do feel their patients' pain.A study, published today (Jan. 29) in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, shows that when doctors see their patients experiencing pain, the pain centers in the physicians' own brains light up. And when the doctors give treatment to relieve pain, it activates the physicians' reward centers.

The identity of a mysterious patient who helped scientists pinpoint the brain region responsible for language has been discovered, researchers report.The new finding, detailed in the January issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, identifies the famous patient as Monsieur Louis Leborgne, a French craftsman who battled epilepsy his entire life.

Washington: Primates modify their body movements to be in tune with others, just like humans do, according to Japanese researchers.Humans unconsciously modify their movements to be in synchrony with their peers. For example, we adapt our pace to walk in step or clap in unison at the end of a concert. This phenomenon is thought to reflect bonding and facilitate human interaction.

Last summer, the Iranian Space Agency announced their plan to send a monkey into space - and now they've apparently done it.According to Iranian state-run television, a press release (in Farsi) on the space agency's website, and photos of the event, Iran sent a live rhesus monkey into sub-orbital space aboard a small rocket called Pishgam, or Pioneer. There's even a video posted on YouTube that appears to be of the launch (though New Scientist could not confirm its authenticity).The report has not been confirmed independently, however, and the US air force's North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has not reported seeing any missile launches from Iran.

On the eve of science writer Katie Worth's experiment to live on Mars time and blog about how it feels, she explains how living between time zones across the universe can prove disastrous without guidance from sleep scientists"Mutinous" is not a word frequently used to describe teams of NASA scientists and engineers.But that's precisely the term employed by Harvard University sleep scientist Charles Czeisler to explain what happened when the group operating the Pathfinder mission's rover in 1997 was required to live indefinitely on Mars time.

Islamist insurgents retreating from the ancient Saharan city of Timbuktu have set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the 13th century, in what the town's mayor described as a "devastating blow" to world heritage.Hallé Ousmani Cissé told the Guardian that al-Qaida-allied fighters on Saturday torched two buildings where the manuscripts were being kept. They also burned down the town hall and governor's office, and shot dead a man who was celebrating the arrival of the French military.

Turkey has been accused of cultural chauvinism and attempting to blackmail some of the world's most important museums in the wake of its demands for the return of thousands of archaeological treasures.According to cultural chiefs in Berlin, Paris and New York, Turkey has threatened to bar foreign archaeologists from excavation sites in the country by not renewing their digging permits if governments refuse to return artefacts that Ankara says were unlawfully removed from Turkish soil. It has also threatened to halt the lending of its treasures to foreign museums, they say.

U.S. scientists successfully drilled into Lake Whillans, a subglacial expanse of water hidden deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, they reported on Sunday.About a month ago, a similar British attempt to reach subglacial Lake Ellsworth had failed. Drilling operations for the WISSARD project (Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling), which is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, started on Jan. 21.

A new private company called Deep Space Industries announced today that it intends to send a fleet of small spacecraft to near-Earth asteroids with the aim of mining resources and turning them into products using space-based 3-D printers.Last year was thick with audacious private spaceflight company unveilings, including the announcement from Planetary Resources, Inc. of their plans to mine relatively valuable platinum group metals from asteroids. With the formation of Deep Space Industries, it seems that 2013 could see a new crop of private space companies with lofty goals.

Disappearing in one place and reappearing in another. Being in two places at once. Communicating information seemingly faster than the speed of light.This kind of weird behaviour is commonplace in dark, still laboratories studying the branch of physics called quantum mechanics, but what might it have to do with fresh flowers, migrating birds, and the smell of rotten eggs?Welcome to the frontier of what is called quantum biology.

A controversial theory that the way we smell involves a quantum physics effect has received a boost, following experiments with human subjects.It challenges the notion that our sense of smell depends only on the shapes of molecules we sniff in the air.Instead, it suggests that the molecules' vibrations are responsible.A way to test it is with two molecules of the same shape, but with different vibrations. A report in PLOS ONE shows that humans can distinguish the two.

Some people with certain psychiatric conditions may benefit from yoga, according to a new review.The review, which examined results from 16 well-designed studies of yoga's effect on mental illness, concluded that yoga may have positive effects for people with depression and sleep complaints even if they don't take medication, as well as for people suffering from schizophrenia and ADHD who are taking medication.However, the review did not find a benefit for people with eating or cognitive disorders.

As consumers search out a "BPA-free" label as a measure of a product's safety, science continues to indicate that such labels are not an indication that the product is risk-free. In the span of a week, three studies pointed out potential health hazards in various plastics. And without more precautionary testing and laws to safeguard against unknown toxins, experts say it's impossible for a consumer to buy a plastic product that is verifiably safe."As someone who works on this every single day, it's still hard for me to navigate the marketplace," said Lindsay Dahl, deputy director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families.In one recent study, researchers were surprised to find that one of the main alternatives to BPA seems to be equally damaging -- despite its reputation is a "safe alternative.".

Right now I have a crowdsourced appeal going on for funds to support my ongoing research into the carnivorous behaviour of those most charismatic of dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurs. The behaviour of fossil animals is one of those things that tends to do rather badly in the public eye: it is seen as mere guesswork and it's not helped by the occasional exaggeration or fictionalisation by the media or documentaries (and yes, occasionally, academics too). However, like a lot of aspects of palaeontology, an understanding of the available data and how it is interpreted reveals that much can be said for certain or at least considered highly probable.

They have long been known to be bright, friendly and intelligent creatures.Now it seems they might also be lifesavers, because for the first time dolphins have been spotted teaming up to try to rescue an injured group member.The amazing footage, filmed at Kyum Park of the Cetacean Research Institute in Ulsan, South Korea, shows 12 dolphins swimming very close together when one of their number gets into difficulty.The female long beeked common dolphin wriggles and tips from side to side, turning upside-down while her pectoral flippers seem to be paralysed.

Ancient corn farmers living in pit houses among arid canyons of what is now Utah may have sweetened their lives with a chocolate derivative imported from the tropics of Central America, recent archeological findings suggest.An archeologist and team of chemists analyzing the remains of an eighth century village near present-day Moab found theobromine and caffeine, compounds found in a cacao tree native to Central America and from which chocolate is derived.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, at a time when Egypt was under the control of the Roman Empire, a young woman with an elaborate hairstyle was laid to rest only yards away from a king's pyramid, researchers report.She was 5 feet 2 inches in height, around age 20 when she died, and was buried in a decorated coffin whose face is gilded with gold. A nearby pyramid, at a site called Hawara, was built about 2 millennia before her lifetime. The location of her burial is known from archival notes.

The ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu are a door into Africa's golden age. We must not let this crisis threaten their survivalThere is an old African proverb: "When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." Once again in its 800-year history, the fabled city of Timbuktu, a Unesco world heritage site, and its rich intellectual and literary heritage are under threat from both the marauding rebel groups that now occupy the desert cities of northern Mali and the foreign troops marshalled to "liberate" it from them.

TALK about exploring your roots. Longer lifespans mean our adult teeth erupt later than they did in our early ancestors, but the memo didn't make it to the roots of our molars. They develop at the same pace as they did in Homo erectus.Christopher Dean and Tim Cole at University College London studied the microscopic structure of adult molars to reconstruct the pace of their development, much like tree rings can be used to build a picture of tree growth. They found that the roots of chimpanzee molars go through a growth spurt as the teeth erupt through the gum - probably to provide more stability for biting and chewing. The same thing happened in early hominins, but not in modern humans: by the time our molars arrive, their roots have been fully developed for at least a year.

Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman - the oldest ever found. By looking at artefacts like this as works of art, rather than archaeological finds, a new exhibition at the British Museum in London hopes to help us see them and their creators with new eyes.

Scientists may be one step closer to revealing a hidden portrait behind a 380-year-old Rembrandt painting.The masterpiece, "Old Man in Military Costume" by Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, resides at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Scientists had noticed the painting bears faint traces of another portrait beneath its surface. Researchers had previously probed the painting with infrared, neutron and conventional X-ray methods, but could not see the behind the top coat, largely because Rembrandt used the same paint (with the same chemical composition) for the underpainting and the final version.

Brazil will undertake the massive task of cataloging the trees of the Amazon, in an effort to better monitor and protect the world's largest tropical forest, the environment ministry announced Friday.The planned tree census, set to take four years, "will allow us to have a broad panorama of the quality and the conditions in the forest cover," the ministry said in a statement.The head of the national forest service said that the survey will provide a detailed knowledge of the rainforest, which has been under environmental threat from logging and climate change.

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - After years of gains against destruction of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil appears to be suffering from an increase in deforestation as farmers, loggers, miners and builders move into previously untouched woodland, according to data compiled by the government and independent researchers.Imazon, a Brazilian research institute that tracks deforestation through satellite imagery, said in a recent report that destruction in the world's largest rainforest climbed for the fourth consecutive month in December.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission is considering law to ban pesticides linked to the decline of bees, a spokesman said on Friday.A report from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) earlier this month said three widely-used pesticides made by Switzerland's Syngenta and Germany's Bayer posed an acute risk to honeybees."We could advocate measures. The Commission is looking at all the facts and the responses from the companies," its health spokesman Frederic Vincent said on Friday.

As enthusiasm grows for 3-D printers, so does a familiar complaint to just about everyone still living in a 2-D inkjet world: the maddeningly high cost and inefficiency of replacement cartridges. Enter the Filabot, a contraption that turns just about all your household plastic waste into "ink" for 3-D printers.

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 new online petition seeks to send people into space sooner, using a Kennedy-era technology that never had the chance to take flight. At We the People, a website that lets users submit petitions to the Obama Administration, one petition urges officials to "harness the full intellectual and industrial strength of our universities, national laboratories and private enterprise to rapidly develop and deploy a nuclear thermal rocket."What does that mean? And should you sign the petition? Well, nuclear thermal rockets could play a major role in sending people to other planets in the future. The rockets are at least twice as efficient as current chemical rockets, which means they could carry more supplies, support heavier shields against cosmic radiation and take astronauts to other planets more quickly.

Several years ago I found myself where I would never have expected: at a conference of string theorists. My own field is condensed matter: the study of materials such as metals and superconductors, which we cool in the laboratory to temperatures near absolute zero. That is about as far as you can possibly get from string theory without leaving physics altogether. String theorists seek to describe the universe at energies far in excess of anything experienced in a lab or indeed anywhere else in the known universe.

The seasonal thawing of carbon dioxide ice near Mars' north pole carves grooves in the region's sand dunes, three new studies reveal.The discovery, made using observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft (MRO), reinforces that the Red Planet's surface continues to be transformed today, even though Mars' volcanoes have died out and its liquid surface water apparently dried up long ago."It's an amazingly dynamic process," Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., lead author of one of the studies, said in a statement.

People who multitask all the time may be the worst at doing two things at once, new research suggests.The findings, based on performances and self-evaluations by about 275 undergraduate students, suggest many people multitask not out of a desire to boost productivity, but because they are easily distracted and can't focus on one activity. And those people turn out to be the worst at juggling different things, the researchers said.

Yoga on our minds: The 5,000-year-old Indian practice may have positive effects on major psychiatric disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, ADHD and sleep complaintsYoga has positive effects on mild depression and sleep complaints, even in the absence of drug treatments, and improves symptoms associated with schizophrenia and ADHD in patients on medication, according to a systematic review of the exercise on major clinical psychiatric disorders.

Britain's most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu or major coastal flooding.Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue should be added to the government's national risk register of civil emergencies.

When Charles Darwin first sketched how species evolved by natural selection, he drew what looked like a tree. The diagram started at a central point with a common ancestor, then the lines spread apart as organisms evolved and separated into distinct species.In the 175 years since, scientists have come to agree that Darwin's original drawing is a bit simplistic, given that multiple species mix and interbreed in ways he didn't consider possible (though you can't fault the guy for not getting the most important scientific theory of all time exactly right the first time). Using a tree-like structure is a great way to show the history of the evolution of a species, or its phylogeny. But it's not so great for showing the population history of groups within a single species, such as humans, who can move around and interbreed with each other

Singapore's latest development will finally blossom later this month, with an imposing canopy of artificial trees up to 50 meters high towering over a vast urban oasis.The colossal solar-powered supertrees are found in the Bay South garden, which opens to the public on June 29. It is part of a 250-acre landscaping project -- Gardens by the Bay -- that is an initiative from Singapore's National Parks Board that will see the cultivation of flora and fauna from foreign lands.

Hidden for a millennium, it took a 21st-century drought to reveal the ruins of a long-lost port city. Five years after archaeologists discovered its four-kilometer-long seawall on a polluted lake 20 kilometers from Istanbul, they continue to unearth Bathonea, which is yielding a wealth of rare artifacts and architecture spanning a thousand years of the Byzantine era.Excavations this year have essentially doubled Bathonea's known size, bolstering the idea that it was a well-connected, wealthy, fully outfitted harbor city that thrived from the fourth to 11th century, when a massive earthquake leveled much of it.

A collector of vintage photography equipment got an extra bonus when he picked up a French camera at an antique store: never-before-seen images circa World War I France.Anton Orlov details the story of the lucky find on his blog the Photo Palace, where all of the eight photos from the Jumelle Belllieni stereoscopic camera can be seen.

A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.Aaron Tobey claimed in a civil rights lawsuit (.pdf) that in 2010 he was handcuffed and held for about 90 minutes by the Transportation Security Administration at the Richmond International Airport after he began removing his clothing to display on his chest a magic-marker protest of airport security measures.

People living on a remote Indian reservation on Oregon have been waking up in fear to the eerie sounds of roars and screeches coming from a nearby swamp that have raised the specter of a Bigfoot in the area.The mysterious noises have been emanating at night from a marshy, brush-covered spot on the Umatilla Indian Reservation east of Pendleton.Local resident Sylvia Minthron told The Oregonian that she has seen grown men's hair stand on end when the high-pitched shrieks pierce the night air.

Archaeologists have unearthed a trove of skulls in Mexico that may have once belonged to human sacrifice victims. The skulls, which date between A.D. 600 and 850, may also shatter existing notions about the ancient culture of the area.The find, described in the January issue of the journal Latin American Antiquity, was located in an otherwise empty field that once held a vast lake, but was miles from the nearest major city of the day, said study co-author Christopher Morehart, an archaeologist at Georgia State University.