Newsdesk Archive

As Europe and the United States struggle through the worst economic crisis in decades, Japan has emerged as the great hope for the future of particle physics. An international consensus is rapidly forming that the island nation is the only possible host for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a multi-billion-dollar machine that will sustain the next generation of researchers."Japan is it," says physicist Barry Barish, the head of the global design effort for the ILC.

Scientists at Cern who successfully found the Higgs Boson particle earlier this year might have accidentally found two.According to data just released by researchers working at the Atlas and Large Hadron Collider experiments, there seem to be two Higgs Boson particles with extremely similar, but different, mass.The results - which are intriguing although unconfirmed - have emerged out of an oddity in the original data which showed the particle, which put simply 'gives mass' to other particles, decaying into two photons more often than it should.

Astronauts are limited to spending six months on the International Space Station, around 200 miles above Earth, for a good reason.The loss of bone and muscle mass they experience in space is so profound that they cannot stay any longer.But what about the health impact of forthcoming suborbital flights for space tourists who are not fit, highly-trained individuals?According to North American scientists writing in the British Medical Journal article, GPs should be prepared to answer patients' queries about their suitability for space travel in the near future.

Unrivalled control of a robotic arm has been achieved using a paralysed woman's thoughts, a US study says.Jan Scheuermann, who is 53 and paralysed from the neck down, was able to deftly grasp and move a variety of objects just like a normal arm.Brain implants were used to control the robotic arm, in the study reported in the Lancet medical journal.Experts in the field said it was an "unprecedented performance" and a "remarkable achievement".

Nasa is to test colour-changing lights on the International Space Station (ISS) as part of efforts to help astronauts on board sleep.The US space agency will initially swap a fluorescent panel with a solid-state lighting module (SSLM) containing LEDs which produces a blue, whitish or red-coloured light depending on the time.It says the move may help combat insomnia which can make depression, sickness and mistakes more likely.

Members of the Anonymous-affiliated Team GhostShell hacking collective have published what they claim is stolen information for 1.6 million accounts linked to government agencies, including the Pentagon, NASA and the Federal Reserve.The hackers appear to have breached the database with a malicious SQL code injection, ZDNet reported, stealing passwords and corresponding email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses and notes from defense tests.

An encrypted World War II message found in a fire place strapped to the remains of a dead carrier pigeon may have been cracked by a Canadian enthusiast.Gord Young, from Peterborough, in Ontario, says it took him 17 minutes to decypher the message after realising a code book he inherited was the key.Mr Young says the 1944 note uses a simple World War I code to detail German troop positions in Normandy.GCHQ says it would be interested to see his findings.

According to an international team of astronomers, bright X-ray flares in nearby galaxies, once assumed to indicate the presence of black holes, can in fact be produced by white dwarf stars.A short-lived X-ray flare, labeled XRF111111 and MAXI J0158-744, was detected in 2011 with the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) mission on the International Space Station.Using optical telescopes in South Africa and Chile, the astronomers showed that MAXI J0158-744 was located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The flare was so luminous that astronomers initially thought it was likely to be a black hole producing X-rays but further study by the team revealed that its X-ray temperature was so low that it had to be a white dwarf instead.

The largest ancient Egyptian sarcophagus has been identified in a tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, say archaeologists who are re-assembling the giant box that was reduced to fragments more than 3,000 years ago.Made of red granite, the royal sarcophagus was built for Merneptah, an Egyptian pharaoh who lived more than 3,200 years ago. A warrior king, he defeated the Libyans and a group called the "Sea Peoples" in a great battle.

A team of chemists at USC has developed a way to transform a hitherto useless ozone-destroying greenhouse gas that is the byproduct of Teflon manufacture and transform it into reagents for producing pharmaceuticals.The team will publish their discovery in a paper entitled "Taming of Fluoroform (CF3H): Direct Nucleophilic Trifluoromethylation of Si, B, S and C Centers," in the Dec. 7 issue of Science.

Physicists at the University of Calgary and at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo have published new research in Nature Physics which builds on the original ideas of Einstein and adds a new ingredient: a third entangled particle.Quantum entanglement is one of the central principles of quantum physics, which is the science of sub-atomic particles. Multiple particles, such as photons, are connected with each other even when they are very far apart and what happens to one particle can have an effect on the other one at the same moment, even though these effects can not be used to send information faster than light.

A former Nazi concentration camp guard who has lived quietly in western Pennsylvania for more than 50 years took his fight against deportation to the nation's highest immigration court Thursday, arguing that he shouldn't be punished because he served in Hitler's army against his will.The Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church heard the appeal from 88-year-old Anton Geiser of Sharon, Pa., who acknowledges serving in the Nazi SS as a guard in the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps. A federal judge ordered him deported in 2010.

LONDON (Reuters) - A British hacker whose extradition to face charges of accessing nearly 100 U.S. government computers in a quest for UFOs was halted on grounds he might harm himself will not be tried in Britain, the prosecution office said on Friday.Gary McKinnon, 46, who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, has admitted hacking into Pentagon and NASA computers under the pseudonym "Solo", saying he was looking for evidence of flying saucers and other extraterrestrial activity.

It was one of the most enduring hoaxes in history and fooled scientists into believing a crucial evolutionary 'missing link' had been found in England.Now 100 years after the discovery of the Piltdown Man, a team of archeologists and anthropologists will finally be able to expose the truth behind the scam, and pinpoint who was responsible.The Geological Society will meet this week to discuss the results of their investigation into the elaborate hoax, almost a century to the day after the same society hailed its importance to the world.

Despite a seaside home overlooking the Mediterranean, the very first human settlers of Sicily weren't seafood lovers, new research finds.In an analysis published today (Nov. 28) in the journal PLOS ONE, skeletal remains of the people who occupied the site around 10,000 years ago show no telltale signs of seafood eating. Instead, researchers say, these hunter-gatherers chowed down on game such as deer and boar.

The scientific community is on edge. On Wednesday, a British team of scientists and engineers will use a special hot water drill to bore through to a lake buried under three kilometers of Antarctic ice. Sediments taken from the lake bed could revolutionize what we know about past climates and the fortitude of life forms.Life on Earth can sometimes seem unvanquishable. It blossoms even in the deepest oceans and on the highest mountains. It thrives in boiling hot springs and inside cold rocks. At least when it comes to microbes, it seems like they find almost nowhere too extreme, too toxic or too dark to live in. Or is there?

Grab hold of your thinking fedoras, everyone -- it's mystery solving time.The University of Chicago received a bizarre package on Tuesday (pictured above) addressed to a "Henry Walton Jones, Jr." At first, nobody thought twice about it. Whatever, they figured, we get the wrong mail all the time.But then it clicked. This wasn't just any "Jones" the sender was hoping to reach. This was the whip-snapping, Nazi-fighting, Holy Grail-hunting legend of a professor himself: the Indiana Jones.

A brain-removal tool used by ancient Egyptian embalmers has been discovered lodged in the skull of a female mummy that dates back around 2,400 years. Removal of the brain was an Egyptian mummification procedure that became popular around 3,500 years ago and remained in use in later periods.Identifying the ancient tools embalmers used for brain removal is difficult, and researchers note this is only the second time that such a tool has been reported within a mummy's skull.

Human rights legislation that has overturned the convictions of terrorists and rapists could now rob the British Museum of sculptures created for one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.A Turkish challenge in the European court of human rights will be a test case for the repatriation of art from one nation to another, a potential disaster for the world's museums.

Norwegian Roald Amundsen and Englishman Robert Falcon Scott were the explorers who led teams of their countrymen on grueling journeys across the frigid continent in an effort to be the first to go where no man had gone before. Amundsen won the race, reaching the pole on Dec. 14, 1911. Scott also made it there, on Jan. 17, 1912, but perished with the remainder of his crew on the arduous trek back to the edge of the continent.Scott and his team camped on the slopes of Mount Erebus, the southernmost volcano, during their journey. The spot was known as "the highest camp," according to a National Science Foundation release.

Mother's milk may be the first food, but it is not created equal. In humans and other mammals, researchers have found that milk composition changes depending on the infant's gender and on whether conditions are good or bad. Understanding those differences can give scientists insights into human evolution.Researchers at Michigan State University and other institutions found that among 72 mothers in rural Kenya, women with sons generally gave richer milk (2.8 percent fat compared with 0.6 percent for daughters).

Wheat and grain-based foods are all around us. We love our bagels, pasta, bread and breakfast cereals. For many, the thought of eliminating these staples from our diets seems wholly unreasonable, if not ludicrous. But a growing number of people are switching to wheat-free diets -- and for very good reason. As science is increasingly showing, eating wheat increases the potential for a surprising number of health problems. Here's why you should probably stop eating wheat.Without a doubt, wheat plays a major role in our diets. It supplies about 20 percent of the total food calories worldwide, and is a national staple in most countries.

In the year 2030, Asia will surpass North America and Europe and become the global economic powerhouse it once was during the Middle Ages. Deaths from communicable disease will drop by 40 percent. The majority of the world's population won't be poor and among them will walk bionic superhumans with neuro-pharmaceutical drugs coursing through their veins.These are just a very small fraction of the predictions made by the soothsayers over at the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a US coalition of 17 government intelligence agencies. The NIC's prophecies were recently detailed in Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, a 140-page report that identifies "megatrends" expected to emerge over the next 18 years and radically alter the world as we know it today. The report is the fifth installment of NIC's Global Trends series, which seeks to provide a proactive framework for thinking about the future.

The dream of a bionic eye is closer than ever: Researchers at Ghent University have created an LCD display the same shape and thickness of a contact lens. There's still a long way to go, but this is a major breakthrough.Many research institutions are working on electronics that can be worn on the surface of the eye. While there is the possibility of having a private display overlaid on your vision, there are other applications as well. An electronic contact lens could monitor the eye for problems like cataracts, and a safety lens could block out unwanted radiation, acting as automatic sunglasses.

The 25,000-plus signers of a "We the People" petition calling on the federal government to start building a Death Star by 2016 must be feeling as peppy as the Rebel Alliance, now that they've put their plea over the threshold that will trigger a response from the White House.Campaigns on 4chan, Reddit and Twitter helped put it over the top with a day to spare. This means someone at the White House will have to take a good look at the Death Star issue and draw up a response (unless officials decide it would be improper to speak out on something that's more appropriately addressed by, say, the Defense Department, NASA or Lord Vader).

A 2,000-year-old copy of the 10 Commandments and other key religious manuscripts have been digitised and put online by the University of Cambridge.The fragile Nash Papyrus, as it is known, is one of the oldest manuscripts containing text from the Hebrew Bible.Other uploaded pieces include the 10th Century Book of Deer, believed to be the oldest surviving Scottish script.The university said it had now uploaded a total of 25,000 new images online for people to view around the world.

With the ancient Mayan calendar nearing its end, doomsday phobia is up. About 10 percent of Americans have sort of phobia, from the common fears of spiders and heights to a few more exotic anxieties.Video by Yahoo! News.

On a dim February evening, seven people crowded around a row of television monitors in a shack on the rear deck of the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer. The research icebreaker was idling 30 kilometres off the coast of Antarctica with a cable as thick as an adult's wrist dangling over the stern. At the end of that cable, on the continental shelf 1,400 metres down, a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) skimmed across the sea floor, surveying a barren, grey mudscape. The eerie picture of desolation, piped back to the television monitors, was the precursor to an unwelcome discovery.

Tamerlane - derived from his nickname Timur the Lame - rose from obscurity to become a 14th Century conqueror of nations, who piled high the skulls of his enemies. It was quite a feat at a time when physical prowess was prized, writes Justin Marozzi.Think of the greatest conquerors of all time and chances are you'll quickly list Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. It is rather less likely, unless you come from Central Asia or the Muslim world more widely, that you'd spare a thought for Tamerlane.Yet in many ways this Tartar warlord, born near Samarkand in 1336 in what is now Uzbekistan, outshone both the Macedonian king and the Mongol warlord.

Thousands of jumbo squid have beached themselves on central California shores this week, committing mass "suicide." But despite decades of study into the phenomenon in which the squid essentially fling themselves onto shore, the cause of these mass beachings have been a mystery.But a few intriguing clues suggest poisonous algae that form so-called red tides may be intoxicating the Humboldt squid and causing the disoriented animals to swim ashore in Monterey Bay, said William Gilly, a marine biologist at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, Calif.

Life may have first emerged on land about 100 million years earlier previously thought, suggests a study that has scientists up in arms, many of whom are arguing that the research paper should never been published in the first place.The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that ancient fossilized creatures found in Southern Australian sediments actually came from land, not from the ocean. If the findings are true, the fossils would have been lichenlike plants that first colonized land, not ocean-dwelling ancestors of jellyfish.

A team of archaeologists have unearthed additional evidence of what may have been Europe's first civilization at a site located near the town of Pazardzhik in southern Bulgaria. Known as Yunatsite, it is a Tell (mound containing archaeological remains) about 110 meters in diameter and 12 meters high, rising above fields next to a small Bulgarian village by the same name. The Tell contains remains of an urbanized settlement dated at its earliest to the early fifth millenium BC.Directed by Yavor Boyadzhiev of the National Institute of Archaeology and Museums, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, excavators have unearthed artifacts such as weapons, Spondylus jewels, decorated fineware pottery, shards marked by characters/pictograms, and evidence of structures dated to 4900 BC...

GravityLight is a revolutionary new approach to storing energy and creating illumination. It takes only 3 seconds to lift the weight which powers GravityLight, creating 30 minutes of light on its descent. For free.Following the initial inspiration of using gravity, and years of perspiration, we have refined the design and it is now ready for production. We need your help to fund the tooling, manufacture and distribution of at least 1000 gravity powered lights. We will gift them to villagers in both Africa and India to use regularly.

A new species of primate, a "big-eyed" and venomous slow loris, has been identified in Borneo by researchers.But the new loris is already under threat from the Asian pet trade in part because its "teddy-bear face" make it attractive for illegal poaching, the team of UK and US scientists said.Analysing the facial markings of slow loris in the Indonesia island, the researchers concluded that the nocturnal Nycticebus kayan is new to science, and two others that were previously considered sub-species should be recognised as unique species in their own right.

The most comprehensive survey of a tropical rainforest ever undertaken has estimated that one rainforest in Panama is home to over 25,000 different species of insects and other arthropods. It's the most thorough study of any arthropod habitat undertaken to date.Arthropods are the most common phylum in the natural world, but their sheer diversity and ubiquity makes it difficult to grasp exactly how many of them are scurrying around the ecosystems of the world. Previous studies have relied on samples of a few thousand insects, spiders or beetles at once, and extrapolated from there to form estimates over wider areas.

Researchers say they have unlocked the genetic secrets of honey bees' high sensitivity to environmental change.Scientists from the UK and Australia think their findings could help show links between nutrition, environment and the insects' development.It could, they suggest, offer an insight into problems like Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious cause of mass bee deaths globally.The findings appear in Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

The safety of the world's most widely used insecticide has been questioned by a parliamentary inquiry, with MPs accusing regulators of "turning a blind eye" to the risk for bees.A growing body of scientific evidence has linked the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides on crops to a serious decline in the bees and other pollinators, which are vital in producing a third of all food. The inquiry has uncovered evidence, apparently ignored by regulators, that the toxic insecticide can build up in soil to levels likely to be lethal to most insects, including the bees that overwinter in soil.

If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

A proposed global telecoms treaty that would give national governments control of the internet has been blocked by the US and key western and African nations. They said they are "not able to sign the agreement in its current form" at the end of a International Telecoms Union (ITU) conference in Dubai.The move seems to safeguard the role of the internet as an unregulated, international service that runs on top of telecoms systems free of direct interference by national governments.

Japanese company Ibasei has unveiled a new idea in hydroelectricity generation; a turbine that can be placed in virtually any fast moving stream or river to generate small amounts of electricity for immediate use or as a charging station. Called the Cappa, it resembles an engine on a jet aircraft and can be easily placed into a location in just minutes.

Twin lunar-orbiting NASA spacecraft that have allowed scientists to learn more about the internal structure and composition of the moon are being prepared for their controlled descent and impact on a mountain near the moon's north pole at about 2:28 p.m. PST (5:28 p.m. EST) Monday, Dec. 17.

Female fish are attracted to males that "flirt" with other males, a study has found.Scientists in Germany studied the behaviour of tropical fish Poecilia mexicana, known as Atlantic mollies.The female fish are known to "mate copy" - preferring to mate with males they have seen interacting sexually with other fish.Researchers found that females still took an interest in males when their flirtations were with the same sex.

Some good news, for a change: a new genetic analysis indicates that many Amazon tree species are likely to survive global warming in the coming century, contrary to previous findings.But things are never that easy, and University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Christopher Dick and his colleagues warn that extreme drought and forest fires will have an impact, and that over-exploitation of the region's resources continues to be a problem.

Less than 90 years after the last skirmishes of the Apache Wars, branches of the U.S. government signed an agreement to protect what's left of Native American's sacred sites for the next five years.The agreement, called a memorandum of understanding, was signed by cabinet secretaries from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Interior and the chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

AROUND 251 million years ago, over 90 per cent of the species on Earth suddenly went extinct. Their killer may not have been a devastating meteorite or a catastrophic volcanic eruption, but a humble microbe.The prevailing theory is that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period was triggered by volcanic eruptions over a vast area of what is now Siberia. This led, among other things, to a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured a crisp image of a long river cutting across Saturn's huge moon Titan.The hydrocarbon-filled river stretches more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) from its source to a large sea near frigid Titan's north pole. Cassini's radar image is the first high-resolution shot ever taken of such a vast river system on a world beyond Earth, researchers said, and scientists are comparing it to Earth's Nile River in Egypt."Though there are some short, local meanders, the relative straightness of the river valley suggests it follows the trace of at least one fault, similar to other large rivers running into the southern margin of this same Titan sea,"...

The 12 matter particles we know about are all the types there are, according to researchers analysing CERN data.Matter particles, also called fermions, are the elementary components of the universe, making up everything visible in the universe."For a long time, however, it was not clear whether we know all components," says Professor Ulrich Nierste of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The standard model of particle physics puts the number of fermions at 12 and, based on their properties...

In a new twist to string theory, scientists are suggesting that black holes have properties that resemble the dynamics of both solids and liquids.Niels Obers, a professor of theoretical particle physics and cosmology at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, says that a black hole can be looked at like a particle. A particle has in principle no dimensions. If you give it an extra dimension, it becomes a string; and adding another dimension turns it into a plane, known as a 'brane'.

Archaeologists have unearthed the great ancient monuments of Ostia, but the location of the harbour which supplied Rome with wheat remained to be discovered. Thanks to sedimentary cores, this " lost " harbour has eventually been located northwest of the city of Ostia, on the left bank of the mouth of the Tiber. Stratigraphy has revealed that at its foundation, between the 4th and 2nd century BC, the basin was deeper than 6.5 m, the depth of a seaport.This research was carried out by a French-Italian team of the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée (CNRS / Université Lumière Lyon 2), the Ecole Française de Rome and Speciale per i Beni Soprintendenza Archeologici di Roma -- Sede di Ostia* and will be published in the Chroniques des Mélanges de l'Ecole Française de Rome in December 2012.

Describing how living organisms emerged from Earth's abiotic chemistry has remained a conundrum for scientists, in part because any credible explanation for such a complex process must draw from fields spanning the reaches of science.A new synthesis by two Santa Fe Institute researchers offers a coherent picture of how metabolism, and thus all life, arose. The study, published December 12, 2012, in the journal Physical Biology, offers new insights into how the complex chemistry of metabolism cobbled itself together, the likelihood of life emerging and evolving as it did on Earth, and the chances of finding life elsewhere.

SpaceX founder/Tony Stark movie inspiration Elon Musk made some heads turn this week, as heads are wont to do when they hear someone plans to ship 80,000 people to Mars. In a talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society, Musk offered early ideas on how to start a colony on the Red Planet. Then, yesterday, he doubled down with a tweet.

It's no secret that China's space program is progressing at fast rate, but could the nation leapfrog the US in the realm of human spaceflight by landing the first extraterrestrial "greenhouse" on Mars?The plan, as reported by the Chinese state media on Monday, saw a 300 cubic meter "ecological life support system" test being carried out in Beijing -- an experiment that was supported by German scientists. In this trial run, four types of vegetables were grown and two people lived inside. It is not clear how long the test lasted or whether the test subjects remained healthy for the duration.

When, a few weeks ago, astronomers announced that an Earth-sized planet had been detected orbiting a Alpha Centauri B, a star in the closest system of stars to our own, and that this planet might, just might, mean that there is another planet, maybe another Earth-sized one, maybe, just maybe, in that magical distance from a sun that could give rise to life, and that all this was taking place right there in our galactic backyard, the next thought was inevitable: What if there is life there?What if we, the people of the early 21st century, could be among the generation -- the first and only of all the generations ever -- that would be first to know that we were not alone?

Up to 9% of deaths in the capital's most polluted areas are down to air pollution, a new London Assembly paper has reported.The paper highlights the percentage of deaths attributable to man-made airborne particles is highest in the City of London.Research has shown air pollution contributes to problems including lung and heart conditions.

Neolithic pottery fragments from Europe reveal traces of milk fats.Traces of dairy fat in ancient ceramic fragments suggest that people have been making cheese in Europe for up to 7,500 years. In the tough days before refrigerators, early dairy farmers probably devised cheese-making as a way to preserve, and get the best use out of, milk from the cattle that they had begun to herd.

According to one interpretation of a Mayan prophecy, the world will end on December 21 - but it seems there might be two destinations where you could escape Armageddon.Flight search website Skyscanner says believers are flocking to two small villages - Bugarach in the south of France and Sirince, Turkey - in a bid to escape impending doom.Searches for flights to the south of France have increased by 41 per cent in the week around December 21 compared to the week before. Sirince, in the Turkish province of Izmir, has similarly seen a hike of 30 per cent in one-way flight searches.The French farming village of Bugarach has been a focal point for doomsday cults as a place where they could escape the end of the world. Similarly, Sirince, near the ancient Greek city of Ephesus, has seen a tourism boom as a result of the predictions.

No, this isn't a candy forest. This is the Peruvian Amazon as seen by the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), an instrument-laden aircaft that is mapping tropical ecology in unprecedented detail.The plane carries the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System, or AToMS, which uses an imaging spectrometer that engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, helped to build. It detects chemical signals and recognises the signatures of plant species, while a laser-ranging system draws up a 3D model of the landscape below. The CAO can reach every tropical region on the planet and scan 50,000 hectares a day.

Drive anywhere in the Cuban countryside and you will spot the marabu lining the road: a dense, woody weed that grows as tall as trees and has invaded vast swathes of agricultural land.The land-grab began in the 1990s when Cuba was in economic crisis following the collapse of its great benefactor, the Soviet Union. The mighty sugar industry slumped too, and cane fields were overrun by marabu.But to one British firm, the aggressive weed is less a problem than a valuable resource.

Skeletal remains in an island cave in Favignana, Italy, reveal that modern humans first settled in Sicily around the time of the last ice age and despite living on Mediterranean islands, ate little seafood. The research is published November 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Marcello Mannino and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany.

A team of archaeologists are uncovering remains of an ancient city that, until recently, had been unknown to most of the outside world for centiuries. Known today as Ciudad Perdida (or Teyuna), Spanish for "Lost City", it is one of Colombia's most spectacular heritage sites, despite the fact that relatively few of the world's travelers have even known of its existence. Inhabited by the Tayrona people until the end of the 16th century and tucked away within the lush jungles of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta not far from the Colombian coastline, it is made up of hundreds of stone terraces and rings, which archaeologists believe were used as foundations for temples, dwellings and plazas.

German excavators discovered the famous bust of Nefertiti in Egypt 100 years ago. As an anniversary exhibition kicks off in Berlin, new findings are altering old ideas about Germany's controversial acquisition of the bust and the story of the legendary beauty herself.In wartime, the course of the world is often accelerated in odd ways. To the sounds of sword thrusts and the thunder of cannons, entire empires have been dispersed, and fates brought together and accumulated. As if in stop motion, heroes have been born and destroyed once again.

Live carp floating in tubs at traditional Czech Christmas markets like to align their bodies north-south, researchers say. The finding suggests the fish use the geomagnetic field to orient themselves and possibly even navigate through freshwater.For their study, a team of scientists photographed common carp being sold out of containers at 25 holiday markets in Prague and elsewhere in Bohemia in December 2011. In total, they collected 817 pictures and documented more than 14,000 fish.

Research by scientists at the Univ. of Bath is being used to help inform new EU legislation on levels of underwater noise, with the aim of reducing the impact of noise pollution on marine wildlife.Shipping, seismic surveys for oil exploration and even the installation of offshore wind turbines all produce underwater noise that has been shown to increase stress levels of wildlife. This can affect the long-term health of marine animals, creating a negative impact on the marine food chain and the fishing industry.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have taken another step towards creating a robot with a faithfully recreated human skeleton and muscle structure. Called Kenshiro, the robot has been demonstrated at the recent Humanoids 2012 conference in Osaka, Japan.

A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water.The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford.

For tiny shrimp-like creatures that are 425 million years old, they look in pretty good shape.The two "special" fossils unearthed in Herefordshire include not only the animals' shells but also their soft parts including body, limbs, eyes, gills and guts.Luckily for the scientists who found them, the ostracods were preserved by a fall of volcanic ash at a time when Britain had a subtropical climate.

Scientists trying to unravel the mystery of life's origins have been looking at it the wrong way, a new study argues.Instead of trying to recreate the chemical building blocks that gave rise to life 3.7 billion years ago, scientists should use key differences in the way that living creatures store and process information, suggests new research detailed on Tuesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Some parts of Russia, which is often said to have a penchant for mystical thinking, appear to have been spooked by the Mayan predictions.As the 21st of December nears, Russian authorities are attempting to quell fears that the world will come to end amid panic over what some experts claim are the predictions of the Mayan Calendar.According to the New York Times, there have been scattered reports of unusual behaviour from across Russia, reportedly prompted by predictions of Armageddon.The reports include "collective mass psychosis" in a women's prison on the Chinese border, panic buying of matches, kerosene, sugar and candles, and the building, out of ice, of a Mayan-style archway in Chelyabinsk in the south.

With just ten days to go before the Mayan apocalypse supposedly spells the end of the world, many believers may be looking for ways to dodge doomsday.But one farmer in China believes he is ready for any eventuality after building seven emergency survival pods.Liu Qiyuan created the fibreglass shells - dubbed Noah's Ark - after being inspired by the apocalyptic Hollywood movie 2012.Building them around a steel frame in a yard at his home in the village of Qiantun, Hebei province, south of Beijing, he says the pods can offer life-saving shelter during natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes.

The presenter of the Royal Institution's 2012 Christmas Lectures, Peter Wothers, will use the series to argue against wasting valuable helium gas in party balloons.In a number of lectures entitled The Modern Alchemist, Wothers, a chemist at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, warns that frivolous uses of our diminishing supplies of helium are a great concern."The scarcity of helium is a really serious issue," Wothers will say. "I can imagine that in 50 years time our children will be saying 'I can't believe they used such a precious material to fill balloons'.

The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events.In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC News, Robert Ballard, one of the world's best-known underwater archaeologists, talked about his findings. His team is probing the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah.

Contrary to previous understanding, lizards and snakes were nearly wiped out along with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, say researchers.Palaeontologist Dr Nicholas Longrich, of Yale University, and colleagues, report their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a group of insects called green lacewings, larvae often make a habit of decorating themselves with bits of vegetation, insect carcasses, or whatever else the young pick up from their surroundings to use as a disguise as they sneak up on prey and to hide from predators such as birds.Researchers had long speculated that this was an ancient behavior, but just how ancient was difficult to say until a recent find in Spain. There, in a forest 110 million years ago, a lacewing larvae was encased in amber along with its collection of fern pieces tangled on protrusions on its back.

A bundle of recent genetic studies have suggested modern humans had sex with Neanderthals thousands of years ago when the two populations roamed the planet alongside each other. However, the bones left behind by the two species don't bear any obvious traces of interbreeding, and a new study of monkeys in Mexico shows why we shouldn't expect them to.

The tip of a single quill on a porcupine holds as many as 700 backwards-facing barbs that can lodge into the flesh of any animal that wanders too close.For the first time, scientists have figured out how those barbs work together to make it is so easy for quills to penetrate tissue but so hard to pull them out.The discovery could inspire a slew of useful medical devices, including needles that hurt less going in or adhesive patches that would prevent gut leakage after gastric bypass surgeries and related procedures. Already, the researchers have created model quills that work like their natural counterparts.

The new technology, which was in part funded by the National Science Foundation, is called the Parabon Essemblix Drug Development Platform, and it combines computer-aided design (CAD) software called inSçquio with nanoscale fabrication technology."What differentiates our nanotechnology from others is our ability to rapidly, and precisely, specify the placement of every atom in a compound that we design, " said lead investigator Steven Armentrout through the NSF's official release.

A secret agent is racing against time. He knows a bomb is nearby. He rounds a corner, spots a pile of suspicious boxes in the alleyway, and pulls out his cell phone. As he scans it over the packages, their contents appear onscreen. In the nick of time, his handy smartphone application reveals an explosive device, and the agent saves the day.

Braving temperatures of minus 40 degrees, a small team of British researchers today starts drilling through three kilometres of the Antarctic in search of life-forms new to science.Their target is Lake Ellsworth - similar in size to Windemere in England but isolated from the rest of the planet by a vast covering of ice for hundreds of thousands of years, writes Channel 4 News Science Editor Tom Clarke.

There is growing scientific concern that corals could retreat from equatorial seas and oceans as the Earth continues to warm, a team of international marine researchers warned today.Working on clues in the fossil coral record from the last major episode of global warming, the period between the last two ice ages about 125,000 years ago, the researchers found evidence of a sharp decline in coral diversity near the equator.

Australia's potential to become the 'food bowl' of Asia has triggered a drive to develop robots for use in farming and agriculture and University of Sydney mechatronics experts are leading the way.Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems Salah Sukkarieh at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies leads a team that is developing robotic devices with the ability to autonomously sense, analyse and respond to their own surroundings.

The secretive U.S. Air Force X-37B robotic space plane has been cleared to lift off Tuesday (Dec. 11).The X-37B vehicle and its cargo bay packed with a classified payload is set to make the third mission of the program. Also called Orbital Test Vehicle-3, or OTV-3, the unpiloted craft is slated to be hurled into Earth orbit by an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) at 1:03 p.m. EST (1803 GMT).There's an interesting angle to the upcoming mission. This third flight will use the same X-37B spacecraft that flew the first test flight, the OTV-1 mission, back in 2010.

The oldest-known representations of a pharaoh are carved on rocks near the Nile River in southern Egypt, researchers report.The carvings were first observed and recorded in the 1890s, but only rediscovered in 2008. In them, a white-crowned figure travels in ceremonial processions and on sickle-shaped boats, perhaps representing an early tax-collecting tour of Egypt.The scenes place the age of the carvings between 3200 B.C. and 3100 B.C., researchers report in the December issue of the journal Antiquity. During that time, Egypt was transitioning into the dynastic rule of the pharaohs.

Borrowing from microfabrication techniques used in the semiconductor industry, MIT and Harvard Medical School (HMS) engineers have developed a simple and inexpensive way to create three-dimensional brain tissues in a lab dish.The new technique yields tissue constructs that closely mimic the cellular composition of those in the living brain, allowing scientists to study how neurons form connections and to predict how cells from individual patients might respond to different drugs. The work also paves the way for developing bioengineered implants to replace damaged tissue for organ systems, according to the researchers.

The government is being urged by MPs to closely consider a system of drugs decriminalisation used in Portugal.The Home Affairs Committee said it was impressed with the approach to cutting drug use where people found with small amounts are not always prosecuted.It also asks ministers to monitor the effects of cannabis legalisation in other parts of the world.The Home Office rejected its call for a Royal Commission on UK drugs policy, saying that was "not necessary". However, the Home Office minister, Jeremy Browne, said the government was "open to new ways of thinking".

In an unusual development that researchers are calling evidence of adaptive behavior, some catfish have taken to jumping on land to hunt live pigeons.Discover Magazine's Ed Yong writes, "These particular catfish have taken to lunging out of the water, grabbing a pigeon, and then wriggling back into the water to swallow their prey. In the process, they temporarily strand themselves on land for a few seconds."Researchers captured video of the European catfish, which reside in the River Tarn in southwestern France. In the footage, several of the fish, which range in length from 3 to nearly 5 feet, are seen thrusting their bodies from the shallow banks onto land where they capture pigeons and drag them back into the water.

Homo floresiensis, as the hobbit is officially known, caused a storm of controversy when it was discovered in Flores, Indonesia in 2003. Some argued the hobbit was an entirely new species, while others suggested it may have simply been a diseased specimen of an existing human species. Using techniques she has previously applied to help police solve crimes, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong and specialist facial anthropologist, Dr Susan Hayes, moulded muscle and fat around a model of the hobbit's skull to flesh out her face.

An ambitious project to catalogue every habitable planet has discovered seven worlds inside the Milky Way that could possibly harbour life.Marking its first anniversary, the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog said it had far exceeded its expectation of adding one or two new planets this year in its search for a new earth.In recent years scientists from the Puerto Rico-based Planetary Habitability Laboratory that runs the catalogue have sharpened their techniques for finding new planets outside our solar system.

Vertebrates' transition to living on land, instead of only in water, represented a major event in the history of life. Now, researchers reporting in the December issue of the journal Developmental Cell provide new evidence that the development of hands and feet occurred through the gain of new DNA elements that activate particular genes.

Time has proven that even 22 years ago climate scientists understood the dynamics behind global warming well enough to accurately predict warming, says an analysis that compares predictions in 1990 with 20 years of temperature records.After an adjustment to account for natural fluctuations, the predictions and the observed increases matched up, the current research found.

The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.

Given the "big bang" of exoplanet discoveries over the past decade, I predict that there is a reasonable chance a habitable planet will be found orbiting the nearest star to our sun, the Alpha Centauri system. Traveling at just five percent the speed of light, a starship could get there in 80 years.One Earth-sized planet has already been found at Alpha Centauri, but it is a molten blob that's far too hot for life as we know it to survive.The eventual discovery of a nearby livable world will turbo-boost interest and ignite discussions about sending an artificially intelligent probe to investigate any hypothetical life forms there.

Hotel owners around the pyramid-shaped Mount Rtanj, in the east of the Balkan country, say that bookings are flooding in, with believers in the prophecy hoping that its purported mysterious powers will save them from the apocalypse.Adherents of the end-of-the-world scenario think the 5,100ft-high mountain, part of the Carpathian range, conceals a pyramidal building inside, left behind by alien visitors thousands of years ago.Arthur C Clarke, the British science fiction writer, reportedly identified the peak as a place of "special energy" and called it "the navel of the world".

Bisphenol A, a substance found in many synthetic products, is considered to be harmful, particularly, for fetuses and babies. Researchers from the University of Bonn have now shown in experiments on cells from human and mouse tissue that this environmental chemical blocks calcium channels in cell membranes. Similar effects are elicited by drugs used to treat high blood pressure and cardiac arrhythmia.The results are now presented in the journal Molecular Pharmacology.

Video footage of a "fire-ball" flashing in the sky over Texas has been captured by a Nasa camera.The camera picked up the flash from Nasa's Meteoroid Environment Office in New Mexico. It was reported to have been seen from as far away as Houston and Louisiana.Nasa believes that a meteor entered earth's atmosphere somewhere between Dallas and Houston. It has tracked fragments of it which fell to Earth north of Houston.

About 200 million years ago, a leech released a slimy mucous cocoon that unwittingly encased and trapped a bizarre animal with a springy tail, preserving it until researchers discovered the teardrop-shaped creature in Antarctica recently.The cocoon looks like those produced by living leeches, such as the medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis. Encased inside was a bell animal that looked similar to species in the genus Vorticella; its body extends 25 microns (about the width of some human hairs) with a tightly coiled stalk about twice that long. And like all eurkaryotes, the organism was equipped with a nucleus -- in this case, a large horseshoe-shaped nucleus inside the main body. (A micron is one-millionth of a meter.)r.

Ancient mosquitoes are very rare and the total number of species identified is now 26.The newly identified species, called Culiseta kishenehn and Culiseta lemniscata, lived on Earth during the Eocene epoch about 46 million years ago. They are the first compression fossils identified from the genus Culiseta. They are produced in rock that is compressed over time, often creating animal fossils that are distorted, unlike the body fossils you get with amber where the whole body is often nicely preserved.But is it possible that these fossil mosquitoes from the time of the Eocene epoch could also contain blood?.

A flat-faced frogfish, bug-eating slug and carnivorous sea sponge are some of the top new species named by scientists.They appear on a "top 10" list of new species released Saturday amid warnings from the United Nations that the world is not doing enough to protect vulnerable eco-systems."Biodiversity loss is moving ecological systems ever closer to tipping point beyond which they will no longer be able to fulfill their vital functions," said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the International Day for Biological Diversity, which is being marked in 11 countries.

The US woman listed as the world's oldest person has died. She was 116.Besse Cooper died peacefully on Tuesday at a nursing home near Atlanta, Georgia, said her son, Sidney Cooper.She had recently been ill with a stomach virus, he added.The Tennessee-born teacher had had her hair set on Tuesday morning and watched a Christmas video, but then suffered breathing problems, said Mr Cooper. She was put on oxygen but died a short while later.

British astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore has died, aged 89, his friends and colleagues have said.He "passed away peacefully at 12:25 this afternoon" at his home in Selsey, West Sussex, they said in a statement.Sir Patrick presented the BBC programme The Sky At Night for over 50 years, making him the longest-running host of the same television show ever.He wrote dozens of books on astronomy and his research was used by the US and the Russians in their space programmes.

It will be a journalistic assignment like no other. Call it "the longest walk".In what is probably the longest, most arduous piece of reportage ever undertaken, Paul Salopek, an experienced writer for the Chicago Tribune and National Geographic, is embarking on the astonishing task of retracing the journey taken by early man tens of thousands of years ago.Beginning in the exotic surroundings of the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia, Salopek will take an estimated 30 million steps, reaching his destination seven years later, three continents away at the most southerly point of South America.