Newsdesk Archive

Millions of years ago, there may have been three times as many species of tiny, flesh-tearing dinos roaming the United States and Canada than previously believed, researchers say.Only seven species of small, two-legged carnivores had been identified from the period between 85 and 65 million years ago, just before all dinosaurs were wiped out by a mass extinction. But a new analysis of hundreds of fossilized teeth found in different formations across North America shows that there might have been at least 23 of these meat-eating little critters, some of which were cousins of the Velociraptor.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are credited for co-discovering evolution by natural selection in early 1858. But on one morning back in the summer of 1852, as Wallace had just finished his breakfast, evolution nearly went up in smoke.Wallace was on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, relaxing in his cabin, when the captain strolled in and announced, perhaps too calmly: "I am afraid the ship's on fire. Come and see what you think of it".

The origins of HIV can be traced back millions rather than tens of thousands of years, research suggests.HIV, which causes Aids, emerged in humans in the 20th Century, but scientists have long known that similar viruses in monkeys and apes have existed for much longer.A genetic study shows HIV-like viruses arose in African monkeys and apes 5 million to 12 million years ago.

Hundreds of chimpanzees at NIH facilities should no longer be used as test subjects, the panel said, but 50 should be kept as a contingency, adding that all the chimps should be housed more comfortably.A senior scientific advisory panel at the National Institutes of Health, in a step toward phasing out the use of chimpanzees in federally funded medical research, has found "no compelling evidence" to support keeping hundreds of chimpanzees at NIH facilities and recommends that all but about 50 chimps be retired.

A team led by USC Dornsife Ph.D. student Maureen McCarthy found evidence that chimpanzees are aware of the attention and responsiveness of the chimp they're communicating with, modifying their method of communication to suit.The research adds to a growing body of work exploring how socially aware chimps are and is continually eroding old notions about what separates humans from their evolutionary cousins.

A pink domed object captured in the sky by Google Street view is the second UFO sighting by the trolling cameras in mere months according to experts - but that's by going by its literal definition.The mysterious object seen over the skies of St Peters, Missouri, first caught the attention of a woman looking for directions on the popular search engine along Dingledine Road.When she pulled the camera's angle a little too high on her computer screen she saw what she felt needed immediate attention.

Scientists have discovered a puzzling spinning star that is spontaneously switching between two very different personalities, flipping between emitting strong X-rays and emitting intense radio waves.While radio frequencies are known to vary as the star changes personalities, the newfound star is the first time example of variability in X-rays as well. The star, called a pulsar because it appears to pulse, has astronomers perplexed.

Humanity has made substantial progress in the hunt for near-Earth asteroids that could potentially pose a grave threat to the planet, NASA's chief space rock hunter said Monday (Jan. 14).Don Yeomans, head of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, told a crowd here at the American Museum of Natural History that it is the smaller asteroids, not giant space rocks, that are difficult to spot.

VANCOUVER - Construction has begun on a new radio telescope in British Columbia's south Okanagan that will act like a type of time machine and help astrophysicists travel back to better understand the composition of our expanding universe.The $11-million project is being built at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory southwest of Penticton, B.C., and will use components from the cellphone industry to capture and turn radio waves emitted six to 11 billion years ago into a three-dimensional map.

Italian researchers have unearthed a marble benchmark which was once used to measure the shape of Earth in the 19th century.Called Benchmark B, the marker was found near the town of Frattocchie along one of the earliest Roman roads which links the Eternal City to the southern city of Brindisi.Placed there by Father Angelo Secchi (1818-1878), a pioneer of astrophysics, the marker consisted of a small travertine slab with a metallic plate in the middle. The plate featured a hole at its center.

The sweet potato was one of a number of crops domesticated in the Andes and, like many of the rest, it became a global crop in the colonial era. But there were some hints that the sweet potato may have already started its global sweep before the Europeans ever took a bite out of one. Some of the early European explorers, including Captain Cook, reported finding it in places like Hawaii. All of which implies that the Polynesians, who managed to spread widely across the Pacific, had made it all the way to South America.

It's smaller than your thumb: a little piece of mammoth ivory delicately carved into the shape of a woman's head. But this miniature sculpture, with one wonky eye and rather elongated, slightly Modigliani-esque proportions, is the oldest known portrait in the world, and is about to go on show to the public for the first time in Britain in a new exhibition at the British Museum, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind.

A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

A dolphin tangled in fishing line sought help from a diver in the waters of Hawaii.The amazing encounter on January 11 was captured on video and the diver, Keller Laros, spent the better part of eight minutes tending to the needy mammal who readily accepted the help.Mr Laros was leading a group of snorkelers for a manta ray dive experience off the Big Island's Kona International Airport when the dolphin squealed out.The diver explained, 'The way he came right up and pushed himself into me there was no question this dolphin was there for help.'.

Scientists have provided insight into why unrelated chimpanzees co-operate with each other outside a sexual relationship.The team of international researchers found that increased levels of the hormone oxytocin played an intrinsic role in non-kin co-operation.Wild chimps that had taken part in a grooming session with a "bond partner" had higher levels of the hormone in their urine than after grooming with a "non-bond partner", irrespective of whether the individuals were related.

Fossilized algae recently discovered inside a Sri Lankan meteorite could finally prove the existence of extra-terrestrial life, claim the authors of the new paper.In a recently published article in the Journal of Cosmology titled "Fossil Diatoms in a New Carbonaceous Meteorite", scientists from the UK and Sri Lanka claim to have found fossilized algae in a meteorite.

LONDON, ENGLAND (Catholic Online) - Dr. Robert Symmons, curator of the Fisbourne Roman Palace in West Sussex, has announced that new research indicates the ceramic disks, once identified as gaming pieces, were used as sanitary devices, the ancient equivalent of toilet paper.The research was published in the British Medical Journal.

In a necropolis in Spain, archaeologists have found the remains of a Roman woman who died in her 30s with a calcified tumor in her pelvis, a bone and four deformed teeth embedded within it.Two of the teeth are still attached to the wall of the tumor researchers say.The woman, who died some 1,600 years ago, had a condition known today as an ovarian teratoma which, as its name indicates, occurs in the ovaries . The word Teratoma comes from the Greek words "teras" and "onkoma" which translate to "monster" and "swelling," respectively. The tumor is about 1.7 inches (44 millimeters) in diameter at its largest point.

A clash between the home secretary, Theresa May, and her expert drugs advisory group is looming after it decided against banning qat, a mild herbal stimulant, traditionally used in Britain's Somali, Yemeni and Ethiopian communities.The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs said there was insufficient evidence that Qat caused health or wider societal problems to justify a ban in Britain. The expert advisers also said they found no evidence that the qat trade was directly linked to serious or organised crime or used to fund the al-Shabab Islamist group.

The world's seemingly relentless march toward overpopulation achieved a notable milestone in 2012: Somewhere on the planet, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the 7 billionth living person came into existence.Lucky No. 7,000,000,000 probably celebrated his or her birthday sometime in March and added to a population that's already stressing the planet's limited supplies of food, energy, and clean water. Should this trend continue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a five-part series marking the occasion, by midcentury, "living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity."

The dream of El Dorado, a lost city of gold, led many a conquistador on a fruitless trek into the rainforests and mountains of South America. But it was all wishful thinking. The "golden one" was actually not a place but a person - as recent archaeological research confirms.Columbus's arrival in the Americas in AD1492 was the first chapter in a world-changing clash of cultures. It was a brutal confrontation of completely opposing ways of living and systems of beliefs.

Bulgarian archaeologists announced two major finds at the close of the 2012 excavation season, and hope to obtain state and other financial support to shed more light on the life and culture of the early Balkan civilisations.Vasil Nikolov, former head of the country's National Archaeology Institute, unearthed Europe's oldest urban settlement near Provadia, 50 kilometres west of Varna on the Black Sea, which is dated between 4700 and 4200 BC.

New bones attributed to Homo floresiensis -- aka the "Hobbit Human" -- along with other recent findings, are helping to reveal what members of this species looked like, how they behaved, and their origins.The latest findings, described in a Journal of Human Evolution paper, are wrist bones unearthed on the Indonesian island of Flores. Since they are nearly identical to other such bones for the Hobbit found at the site, they refute claims that H. floresiensis never existed.

A long lost image from the Hiroshima atomic bombing has been discovered at a Japanese elementary school.The black-and-white photograph shows the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima split into two distinctly separated parts, one on top of the other.The rare image was found at the Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima city, in a collection of about 1,000 articles on the WWII atomic bombing. The material was donated by a late survivor, Yosaburo Yamasaki, in or after 1953.

KILLING Pluto was only the beginning. The dwarf planet Eris, named for the Greek goddess of strife, could also bring down the most popular explanations for dark matter and dark energy.Many galaxies appear to have stronger gravity - and thus more mass - than can be explained by their visible matter alone. Overly massive galaxies are most often attributed to dark matter, an invisible substance that interacts with matter through gravity. To date, though, no one has directly detected dark matter particles.

Before the Industrial Revolution, our planet's atmosphere was still untainted by human-made pollutants. At least, that's what scientists thought until recently, when bubbles trapped in Greenland's ice revealed that we began emitting greenhouse gases at least 2,000 years ago.

The discovery of a new bird-like dinosaur from the Jurassic period challenges widely accepted theories on the origin of flight.Co-authored by Dr Gareth Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Southampton, the paper describes a new feathered dinosaur about 30 cm in length which pre-dates bird-like dinosaurs that birds were long thought to have evolved from.

There is no more iconic image in biology than that of DNA's double-stranded helix, which coils and supercoils on itself to form dense chromosomes.But a quite different, square-shaped type of DNA structure can easily be created in the laboratory by the folding of synthetic DNA strands rich in guanine, one of the building blocks of DNA. Scientists have long believed that these so-called 'G-quadruplex structures' may occasionally form in the DNA of living cells. A G-quadruplex comprises four guanines from different places along a G-rich strand held together by a special type of hydrogen bonding to form a compact square structure that interrupts the DNA helix.

The architectural feats of animals - from beaver dams to birds' nests - not only make for great nature television, but, since the plans for such constructions seem largely inherited, they also offer an opportunity for scientists to tackle the profoundly difficult question of how genes control complicated behavior in animals and humans.A long-term study of the construction of burrows by deer mice has the beginnings of an answer. Hailed as innovative and exciting by other scientists, the report, in the current issue of Nature, identifies four regions of DNA that play a major role in telling a mouse how long a burrow to dig and whether to add an escape tunnel.

Europeans raced across oceans and continents during the Age of Exploration in search of territory and riches. But when they reached the South Pacific, they found they had been beaten there by a more humble traveler: the sweet potato. Now, a new study suggests that the plant's genetics may be the key to unraveling another great age of exploration, one that predated European expansion by several hundred years and remains an anthropological enigma.

His words have touched the lovelorn and been pored over by brooding teenagers for more than four hundred years, but now some of the most romantic poems ever penned have been written into the code of life.The entire collection of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets has been spelled out in DNA by scientists in Cambridge to demonstrate the vast potential of genetic storage. Huge quantities of information could be written into specks of DNA and archived for tens of thousands of years, the researchers claim.

Anyone who owns a dog knows that it will rummage around in the kitchen bin looking for food, given half a chance.But this annoying behaviour may have a more profound undercurrent than we realise, according to scientists.A new study of dog genetics reveals numerous genes involved in starch metabolism, compared with wolves.

Fossilized track marks from a stampede of dinosaurs in Australia actually may have come from swimming animals, new research suggests.The finding, published in the January issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, upends the traditional interpretation of the world's only dinosaur stampede.

Trees do not grow in the deep sea, nevertheless sunken pieces of wood can develop into oases for deep-sea life - at least temporarily until the wood is fully degraded.A team of Max Planck researchers from Germany now showed how sunken wood can develop into attractive habitats for a variety of microorganisms and invertebrates. By using underwater robot technology, they confirmed their hypothesis that animals from hot and cold seeps would be attracted to the wood due to the activity of bacteria, which produce hydrogen sulfide during wood degradation.

A few years ago, manufacturers of water bottles, food containers, and baby products had a big problem. A key ingredient of the plastics they used to make their merchandise, an organic compound called bisphenol A, had been linked by scientists to diabetes, asthma and cancer and altered prostate and neurological development. The FDA and state legislatures were considering action to restrict BPA's use, and the public was pressuring retailers to remove BPA-containing items from their shelves.

Chemical engineers at UC Berkeley have created a new, cleaner fuel out of an old concoction that was once used to make explosives.The fuel, which uses a century-old fermentation process to transform plant material into a propellant, could eventually replace gasoline and drastically cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, according to the team of Berkeley scientists."It's a much more efficient way of (creating renewable fuel) than many of the other products being considered," said Harvey Blanch, a professor of chemical engineering at Berkeley. "This product is one that may be closest to commercialization." .

In 1959, a Soviet geneticist named Dmitry K. Belyaev began somewhat secretively experimenting with breeding domesticated foxes. More than five decades, thousands of foxes, and one collapse of the Soviet Union later, the program continues at The Institute of Cytology and Genetics at Novosibirsk, Siberia. Belyaev wanted to unlock the secrets of domestication, the links between behavior and breeding and physical traits, but plenty of non-scientists are aware of the project for a different reason: foxes are adorable, and we want to hug them, and we want them to like it.

Dumping huge quantities of olivine into the oceans isn't a cost-effective method of sequestering carbon emissions, according to a new study.Olivine (a pretty green magnesium iron silicate) is commonly found across the Earth's surface, and has been considered a potential tool for geoengineering. However, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremen have concluded that the difficulties in manufacturing and disseminating the required quantities of olivine make it an impractical geoengineering method.The mineral, which can give beaches distinctive green sand, is a natural carbon sink.

A new study by an international team of scientists analyzing ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet going back in time more than 100,000 years indicates the last interglacial period may be a good analog for where the planet is headed in terms of increasing greenhouse gases and rising temperatures.

The glaciers of the Andes Mountains have retreated at an unprecedented rate in the past three decades, with more ice lost than at any other time in the last 400 years.That's according to a new review of research that combines on-the-ground observations with aerial and satellite photos, historical records and dates from cores of ice extracted from the glaciers. The retreat is worse in the Andes than the average glacier loss around the world, the researchers report today (Jan. 22) in the journal The Cryosphere.

University of Central Lancashire's Dr Robert Walsh says the new pictures will provide vital clues to predicting powerful bursts of radiation which can knock out GPS and communications signals.The University of Central Lancashire in collaboration with Nasa, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and other partners have captured the highest resolution images ever achieved of the Sun's outer atmosphere (corona).Note: See also Sun's major heat source discovered

Deep Space Industries hopes to land spacecraft on asteroids and have them scrape up material for return to Earth for saleA US company has unveiled plans to launch a fleet of spacecraft to hunt for small asteroids that pass close to Earth which might one day be mined for their precious resources.Deep Space Industries aims to fly a series of low cost prospecting satellites in 2015 on missions of two to six months, with larger spacecraft embarking on round-trips to collect material a year later.

Some people have described the sound as a low, humming drone. Others say it changes into a heavy "whump, whump, whump" sound. Still others have compared it to the bass rumblings of soul singer Barry White.But whatever the mysterious sound known as the "Windsor Hum" is compared to, the residents of this small city in Ontario, Canada (directly adjacent to Detroit) agree that it's driving them bonkers.

A new study of 152 Vietnam veterans with combat-related brain injuries offers the first detailed map of the brain regions that contribute to emotional intelligence -- the ability to process emotional information and navigate the social world.The study found significant overlap between general intelligence and emotional intelligence, both in terms of behavior and in the brain. Higher scores on general intelligence tests corresponded significantly with higher performance on measures of emotional intelligence, and many of the same brain regions were found to be important to both.

Using genetic analyses, scientists have discovered that Northern European populations -- including British, Scandinavians, French, and some Eastern Europeans -- descend from a mixture of two very different ancestral populations, and one of these populations is related to Native Americans. This discovery helps fill gaps in scientific understanding of both Native American and Northern European ancestry, while providing an explanation for some genetic similarities among what would otherwise seem to be very divergent groups.This research was published in the November 2012 issue of the Genetics Society of America's journal Genetics.

An international team of researchers including Svante Paabo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China. Analyses of this individual's DNA showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans. In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is not higher than in people living in this region nowadays.

Illusion cloaks that make one object look like another are a fascinating type of invisibility device. The general idea is that such a device would make an apple look like a banana or a fighter plane look like an airliner. Clearly this would have important applications.But while materials scientists have made great strides in building ordinary invisibility cloaks that work in the microwave, infrared and optical parts of the spectrum, making illusion cloaks is much harder. That's because the bespoke materials they rely on require manufacturing techniques that seem like a distant dream.Today, Tie Jun Cui and buddies at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, say they'e designed and built a practical alternative to illusion cloaks, which they call a 'ghost cloak'.

Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous, especially in the U.K.. and in the United States, Congress has already approved the use of drones for domestic surveillance. Then there's the 'Stingray' tool used by the FBI to track cell phones. It's enough to make even those who've gotten nothing hide feel nervous.New York-based artist Adam Harvey doesn't like it one bit. So he's taken it upon himself to design anti-surveillance clothing to foil government snoopers.Harvey has been looking at the effects of such surveillance on culture for some time. Last year he designed a kind of face makeup called CVDazzle to avert face-recognition software.

The Solar Ship is designed to shorten the distance between doctors and patients in the developing world, where poor infrastructure often means that remote sick people don't stand a chance.Not long ago, the idea of building a solar-powered air-blimp to deliver things to remote places would have seemed a bit nuts. And, probably, it still is a bit nuts. But solar-driven air travel actually has credibility these days. Solar Impulse, a well-funded project based in Switzerland, has already flown a plane day and night using just the sun. It's scheduled to go West Coast to East Coast this summer, and, eventually, around the world.

Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) researchers together with researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), have developed a special treatment for cotton fabric that allows the cotton to absorb exceptional amounts of water from misty air: 340% of its own weight. What makes this 'coated cotton' so interesting is that the cotton releases the collected water by itself, as it gets warmer. This property makes of the coated cotton materials a potential solution to provide water to the desert regions, for example for agricultural purposes. The results of this research will be published next month in the scientific journal Advanced Materials.

NASA astronaut Stan Love is having a hard time right now. Not in space, but on the forbidding East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Together with a group of dedicated volunteers, Love is looking for meteorites - rocks from space that have fallen to Earth. And it's not your usual vacation."Being on the Antarctic ice is very much like being in space," Love told SPACE.com in December over dinner at the American McMurdo Station on the coast of the frozen continent. "Without proper protection, the environment would kill you within a few hours, and there's little hope of rescue if something goes terribly wrong.".

Minerals found underground on Mars are the "strongest evidence yet" that the planet may have supported life, according to new research.The team, led by the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Aberdeen, said the ingredients for life could have been in a zone up to 5km down for much of the planet's history.They used data from the US space agency (Nasa) and European Space Agency (Esa).Nature Geoscience has published the research.

If every living cell had an equal chance of becoming cancerous, whales and elephants should have a greater risk of developing cancer than do humans or mice. But across species, the occurrence of cancer does not show a correlation with body mass. According to a new model, the paradox could be explained if animals were striking a balance between reducing cancer risk and other priorities, such as maximising the number of offspring.

Sperm whales are fierce squid hunters, but they also have a softer side. In a serendipitous sighting in the North Atlantic, researchers have discovered a group of the cetaceans that seem to have taken in an adult bottlenose dolphin with a spinal malformation, at least temporarily. It may be that both species simply liked the social contact.Creatures form "friendly" connections with members of other species throughout the animal kingdom. These often short-lived relationships can offer increased protection from predators and more effective foraging. Some particularly unusual alliances illustrate that they can also satisfy a social craving. For example, the signing gorilla Koko had a pet cat named All Ball; in a Kenyan nature park, a hippopotamus, Owen, grew close to a giant tortoise, Mzee.

A young red deer has joined a flock of sheep on the Suffolk coast and seems to have been adopted.The deer appears to have lost his herd and joined 100 sheep which graze on National Trust land at Dunwich Heath and Orford Ness in Suffolk.Andrew Capell, the flock's shepherd, said: "I've been involved with sheep all my life but I've never seen deer interact with them."They seem to have accepted him as one of their own."

New Zealand's kea are among the most devastatingly intelligent birds on the planet. For instance, animal cognition researchers say kea are as smart as crows at solving mechanical puzzles. So it comes as a shock to learn that much of what we know about the kea's unusual behavior in the wild comes from studies of birds stultified by lead poisoning.

Endangered Mexican howler monkeys are consuming more leaves and less fruit as a result of habitat disturbance by humans, which is forcing them to invest much more time foraging for sustenance and leading to increased 'stress' levels, as detected through hormone analysis.The research, published January 22 in the International Journal of Primatology, took place in the tropical rainforests of the Mexican state of Veracruz, which are being deforested and fragmented by human activity -- primarily the clearing of forest for cattle raising. It shows that increases in howler monkey 'travel time' -- the amount of time needed to find requisite nourishment -- are leading to increases in levels of stress hormones called glucocorticoids.

It was a day off from the field, an opportunity for a bit of mental respite and physical relaxation. The quiet peace of the day was halted, however, when I received an alarming text message from my field assistant, Nick. In it, he relayed the news he'd just heard on the local radio station: a chimpanzee attacked a six-month old infant in a nearby village. The infant had been taken for medical care in town. The parents sought compensation from the government and a local NGO.

TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough has warned that human beings have become a "plague on the Earth".The 86-year-old broadcaster said the negative effects of climate change and population growth would be seen in the next 50 years.He told the Radio Times: "It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so."It's not just climate change. It's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde.

Growing swarms of facial recognition software can identify people whose faces end up in pictures posted online without their permission. But a new "privacy visor" aims to beat such software by using a dazzling light display to restore a sense of privacy.The wearable technology takes privacy measures a step beyond the baseball cap and sunglasses worn by celebrities, or even the asymmetrical face paint and hairstyles proposed by a Web designer studying art at New York University. Instead, it embeds LED lighting inside a pair of commercially available goggles to confuse facial recognition software with dazzling near-infrared light "noise.".

South Korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey.The project is provisionally named K-DEMO (Korean Demonstration Fusion Power Plant), and its goal is to develop the design for a facility that could be completed in the 2030s in Daejeon, under the leadership of the country's National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI).

Few passing London tourists would ever guess that the premises of Bulgari, the upmarket jewellers in New Bond Street, had anything to do with the pope. Nor indeed the nearby headquarters of the wealthy investment bank Altium Capital, on the corner of St James's Square and Pall Mall.But these office blocks in one of London's most expensive districts are part of a surprising secret commercial property empire owned by the Vatican.

Geologic evidence shows that truly massive floods, caused by rainfall alone, have occurred in California every 100 to 200 years. Such floods are likely caused by atmospheric rivers: narrow bands of water vapor about a mile above the ocean that extend for thousands of kilometers.The atmospheric river storms featured in a January 2013 article in Scientific American that I co-wrote with Michael Dettinger, The Coming Megafloods, are responsible for most of the largest historical floods in many western states.

Longer, warmer growing seasons associated with a changing climate are altering growing conditions in temperate rain forests, but not all plant species will be negatively affected, according to research conducted by the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station.Research featured in the January 2013 issue of Science Findings -- a monthly publication of the station -- reveals a complex range of forest plant responses to a warming climate.

British scientists seeking to tap more efficient forms of solar power are exploring how to mimic the way plants transform sunlight into energy and produce hydrogen to fuel vehicles.They will join other researchers around the world studying artificial photosynthesis as governments seek to cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.The research will use synthetic biology to replicate the process by which plants concentrate solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is then released into the atmosphere.

A new space company will announce plans to mine the minor planets at a press conference in Santa Monica, California, tomorrow, 22 January.Deep Space Industries intends to build a fleet of commercial asteroid-prospecting spacecraft that can harvest and process these chunks of space rock.Until the 22 January event, the company's founders are keeping a tight lid on further information about their plans to plunder precious resources for profit.

When another new oil field was found beneath the Amazon jungle, campaigners feared the worst. But a radical and daring plan to ransom the drilling rights could save the planet's most biodiverse area.American biologist Kelly Swing thwacks a bush with his butterfly net and a dozen or so bugs and insects drop in. One is a harvester, or daddy-long-legs, another a jumpin.Last month, some Yale University undergrads stumbled across a mushroom capable of eating polyurethane plastic. It could revolutionise landfills. "Frankly," says Swing, "no one knows what is here."

Trees in Brazil's Amazon rainforest are being fitted with mobile phones in an attempt to tackle illegal logging and deforestation.Devices smaller than a pack of cards are being attache d to the trees in protected areas to alert officials once they are cut down and the logs are transported. Location data is sent from sensors once the logs are within 20 miles of a mobile phone network to allow Brazil's environment agency to stop the sale of illegal timber. The technology, called Invisible Tracck, which is being piloted by Dutch digital security company Gemalto, has a battery life of up to a year and has been designed to withstand the Amazonian climate.

The key to exposing past life on Mars may lie in watery, underground channels, a group of planetary geologists has proposed after studying a 92km crater on its surface.The team used images and data captured by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to draw their conclusions, after identifying sedimentary rock layers at the base of McLaughlin Crater (located on the western side of Arabia Terra) containing clay and carbonate minerals. These two minerals are formed on Earth through an interaction with water, however, an analysis of the crater's topography revealed a flat surface and no large inflow channels -- indicators that any water present in the crater billions of years ago came from beneath the surface.

The cold, dead asteroid Vesta might have had a very active inner life early in the solar system's history, according to an unusual analysis of a Saharan meteorite.Vesta might have had a magma ocean underneath its rocky exterior, allowing bits of mineral to rise and fall between softer and harder layers of material, according to a study published online Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience. If confirmed, that would make it more like Earth and the solar system's other rocky planets than scientists had realized.

In space opera, it's not uncommon for the hero's ship to be snagged by a tractor beam that pulls him towards the enemy -- think of the famous scene in Star Wars where Darth Vader's Death Star captures Hans Solo's spaceship, the Millennium Falcon in an invisible grasp. Scientists have now made a real tractor beam, that while not capable of snaring spacecraft yet, is able to tug on tiny particles.

When you buy some beef at the butcher's, you know it comes from cattle that once mooed and chewed.But imagine if this cut of meat, just perfect for your Sunday dinner, had been made from scratch - without slaughtering any animal.US start-up Modern Meadow believes it can do just that - by making artificial raw meat using a 3D bioprinter.

It's pretty much accepted that the origin of the theory of natural selection lies in the writings of Charles Darwin. But it seems the long-known scientific theory on evolution was itself subject to survival of the fittest. Experts are now claiming that at least some of the credit for everything we believe about how species develop should have gone to someone else.Alfred Russel Wallace, they say, was the first to write a paper on the theory, but his efforts were crushed by the greater fame of the "gentleman naturalist" Darwin.

In a SPIEGEL interview, synthetic biology expert George Church of Harvard University explains how DNA will become the building material of the future -- one that can help create virus-resistant human beings and possibly bring back lost species like the Neanderthal.George Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field whose aim is to create synthetic DNA and organisms in the laboratory. During the 1980s, the Harvard University professor of genetics helped initiate the Human Genome Project that created a map of the human genome. In addition to his current work in developing accelerated procedures for sequencing and synthesizing DNA, he has also been involved in the establishing of around two dozen biotech firms. In his new book, "Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves," which he has also encoded as strands of DNA and distributed on small DNA chips, Church sketches out a story of a second, man-made Creation.

A new Yeti resort is to be opened in Russia to encourage tourists to find the elusive creature.The planned Yeti Park in Sheregesh, Siberia will include a hotel and a museum, and is intended to attract those keen to be the first to prove the existence of the yeti.The region's governor Aman Tuleyev has offered a £20,500 reward - one million roubles - to anyone who can catch a yeti and prove its existence. 'I'll sit down with him, chat and have a cup of tea,' he promised.

See these articles recently written by Graham-1- Giving up the Green Bitch: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers2- War God Background Article 1. FORCE OF PERSONALITY OR FORCES OF HISTORY?3- War God Background Article 2. CENTRAL CHARACTERS IN WAR GOD

The car had been the sole property of its creator, legendary car customizer George Barris, since its creation. It was sold at collector car auction company Barrett Jackson's annual auction near the company's Scottsdale, Ariz., headquarters. The final price includes a 10% sales commission.There had been some question as to whether the car would fetch a large sum. Craig Jackson, chief executive of the auction firm, said he expected the car to sell for millions.Others pointed out, though, that many imitation Batmobiles had been built over the years, a good number of them virtually indistinguishable from the original. That raised the question of whether collectors would be willing to pay a huge sum for this Batmobile simply because it was the first.

People claim to videotape UFOs in the sky above Earth. They also spot unusual-looking objects in NASA camera feeds at the International Space Station.Now, a growing number of individuals insist they're using their telescopes and cameras to reveal UFOs around the moon, according to the International Business Times.

PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies. The scientists used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, in which NASA plays an important role.The discovery of an asteroid belt-like band of debris around Vega makes the star similar to another observed star called Fomalhaut. The data are consistent with both stars having inner, warm belts and outer, cool belts separated by a gap. This architecture is similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our own solar system.

PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have probed the stormy atmosphere of a brown dwarf, creating the most detailed "weather map" yet for this class of cool, star-like orbs. The forecast shows wind-driven, planet-sized clouds enshrouding these strange worlds.Brown dwarfs form out of condensing gas, as stars do, but lack the mass to fuse hydrogen atoms and produce energy. Instead, these objects, which some call failed stars, are more similar to gas planets with their complex, varied atmospheres. The new research is a stepping-stone toward a better understanding not only of brown dwarfs, but also of the atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system.

Storms over the east coast have resulted in several unusual relics from World War II washing up on a beach in north east Scotland.Staff at St Cyrus nature reserve said four large, barrel-shaped pieces of lard have appeared on the shore.The fat is believed to have escaped from the wreck of a merchant vessel that was bombed in WW II.

On April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought toward the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in street-to-street combat, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and fired. Berlin quickly surrendered and World War II in Europe was effectively over. Yet Hitler's chosen successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, decamped with others of the Nazi Party faithful to northern Germany and formed the Flensburg Government.

Becoming bound by eternal, unquestioning servitude as someone's property is not likely most people's career of choice. 2200 years ago, however, it seems some Egyptians voluntarily signed up to become temple slaves.Not only that, they even paid a monthly fee for the "privilege."The revelation comes from the work of Egyptologist Kim Ryholt of the University of Copenhagen, who has been studying papyrus slave contracts found in a rubbish dump in the ancient Egyptian temple city of Tebtunis.

Analyses of Stone Age settlements reveal that the hunters were healthy and would gladly eat anything they could get their hands on, including carbohydrates - contrary to the modern definition of the Paleolithic, or Stone Age diet.The Stone Age hunter's food contained large amounts of protein from fish, lean mean, herbs and coarse vegetables and has formed the basis of one of today's hottest health trends: the paleo diet.

An infusion of feces from a healthy person is much more effective than an antibiotic in treating C. difficile, a recurrent intestinal infection, researchers find.A new study has found that an infusion of feces from a healthy person into an ailing patient's gut was significantly more effective than a traditional antibiotic treatment - raising hopes that the unconventional approach could one day help combat obesity, food allergies and a host of other maladies.

We all know that getting a good night's sleep is good for our general health and well-being. But new research is highlighting a more surprising benefit of good sleep: more feelings of gratitude for relationships."A plethora of research highlights the importance of getting a good night's sleep for physical and psychological well-being, yet in our society, people still seem to take pride in needing, and getting, little sleep," says Amie Gordon of the University of California, Berkeley. "And in the past, research has shown that gratitude promotes good sleep, but our research looks at the link in the other direction and, to our knowledge, is the first to show that everyday experiences of poor sleep are negatively associated with gratitude toward others -- an important emotion that helps form and maintain close social bonds.".

New research links loneliness to a number of dysfunctional immune responses, suggesting that being lonely has the potential to harm overall health.Researchers found that people who were more lonely showed signs of elevated latent herpes virus reactivation and produced more inflammation-related proteins in response to acute stress than did people who felt more socially connected.

Earth is constantly crashing through huge walls of dark matter, and we already have the tools to detect them. That's the conclusion of physicists who say the universe may be filled with a patchwork quilt of force fields created shortly after the big bang.Observations of how mass clumps in space suggest that about 86 per cent of all matter is invisible dark matter, which interacts with ordinary matter mainly through gravity. The most popular theory is that dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles.

Astronauts in space can grow up to 3 percent taller during the time spent living in microgravity, NASA scientists say. That means that a 6-foot-tall (1.8 meters) person could gain as many as 2 inches (5 centimeters) while in orbit.While scientists have known for some time that astronauts experience a slight height boost during a months-long stay on the International Space Station, NASA is only now starting to use ultrasound technology to see exactly what happens to astronauts' spines in microgravity as it occurs.

As the cheerless skies and grim economy sap all will to return to work, take heart that even on a trip to Mars, it is hard to get out of bed in the morning.The drudge of interplanetary travel has emerged from research on six men who joined the longest simulated space mission ever: a 17-month round trip to the red planet in a pretend spaceship housed at a Moscow industrial estate.

On July 20, 2011, at 5:57 a.m. EDT, the space shuttle Atlantis made its final touchdown on the runway of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA's storied shuttle program wasn't the only thing that came to its official end that day; the intervening year-and-a-half has also seen the slow obsolescence of the tools that allowed the program to be what it was: the rocket launch pads and the equipment hangers and the buildings of Cape Canaveral.

It is now more than 40 years since a human ventured beyond Earth orbit. The last three astronauts to slip our world's gravitational tethers were those on Apollo 17. They crossed 385,000 kilometres of space to land on the moon and then returned to splashdown in the Pacific on 19 December 1972.Since then, no human has been higher than about 600 kilometres above Earth's surface. Now it is time to reach out again.

Google has been investigating alternatives to typed passwords, which includes a Yubico log-on device slid into a USB reader as part of Google's quest to help strengthen password security. Google's eyes are on future login techniques that will be primarily device-centric. Wired, in a sneak peek at the research paper set for publication, reported that the paper explores several physical device options, to make a password process that will be easy to accommodate but also sufficiently secure.

If a group of scientists are correct, tiny fossils uncovered inside a meteorite found in Sri Lanka in December are proof of extraterrestrial life.In a detailed paper called "Fossil Diatoms In A New Carbonaceous Meteorite" that is appearing in the Journal of Cosmology, Chandra Wickramasinghe claims to have found strong evidence that life exists throughout the universe.

Nobody ever needs a flashlight until they desperately need a flashlight, and the rest of the time, flashlights are little more than handy devices from which to cannibalize batteries for more immediate use. So when the apocalypse comes, you'll be scrambling to repower all your lights for zombie deterrence, and this clever model from Panasonic makes it easy.Panasonic's BF-BM10 Any Battery Light does not look cool. It does not incorporate any fancy new features, and will not double as a back massager or clock radio. What it will do is let you stuff it with an AA, AAA, C, or D battery: in short, anything but a nine volt.

Call it the paper tablet. Or flexible e-paper touchscreen. Or an all in one computing experience made up of a cluster of papery, tablet screens, each behaving like an app. However you look at the PaperTab, it is difficult to avoid the word "revolutionary," and the prototype was Tuesday's talk at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.PaperTab is,a 10.7 inch, e-ink, flexible touchscreen display powered by an Intel Core i5 processor. The tablet looks and feels like a sheet of paper. Its "bendiness" delivers durability and also interactions, as by bending the sides, one can flip through pages.

Who was Eve? A plain reading is that she is the ancestor of all humans, and more importantly, the singular ancestress of all humans back to the dawn of time. This is a concept which the public grasps intuitively. Who is mtDNA Eve? A woman who flourished 150,000 years ago, who happened to carry the mtDNA lineage which would drift to fixation in the ancestors of modern humans. I think this is a very different thing indeed. For purposes of poetry and marketing the utilization of the name Eve is justifiable. But on scientific grounds all it does is confuse, obfuscate, and mislead.

When you think about it, animals are weird. They ignore the abundant source of energy above their heads - the sun - and choose instead to invest vast amounts of energy in cumbersome equipment for eating and digesting food. Why don't they do what plants do, and get their energy straight from sunlight?The short answer is that many do.

Ever wonder what a blue monkey sounds like, or a bearded seal? What about a scaly-breasted wren? To find out, surf over to the world's largest archive of animal vocalizations ever put online and have a listen.

One of the largest emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica was discovered last month by a team from the International Polar Foundation's Princess Elisabeth station.The penguin colony had previously been identified through satellite imagery by researchers from the British Antarctic Survey. The penguins themselves didn't show up very clearly, but their excrement stains on the ice did.