Newsdesk Archive

A Goddard-built instrument on NASA's MESSENGER mission provided one of three new lines of evidence that water ice exists near the north pole of Mercury. Most of the ice is covered by a thin layer of material that blankets and protects the ice, but in a few areas where sunlight never reaches, some ice lies exposed on the surface, the researchers announced Nov. 29 in three papers published by Science Express and at a NASA press conference.The findings are based on reflectance measurements made by the spacecraft's laser altimeter and hydrogen concentrations from the neutron spectrometer as well as new computer modeling that explains how ice could persist for eons on the planet closest to the sun.

Astronomers have found a galaxy whose super-luminous nucleus--called a quasar--is burning 100 times as much energy as the entire Milky Way galaxy.Though theory has long predicted that quasars this powerful should exist, the newly-discovered object, known as SDSS J1106+1939, is by far the most energetic ever observed. The quasar is powered by a supermassive black hole that lies at its center.Scientists made the discovery using the X-shooter spectrograph instrument attached to ESO's Very Large Telescope.

We've known for over half a century that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but for people like University of California, Davis geologist Qing-zhu Yin, that number just isn't good enough--they need to determine what digit comes after the '5'. Yin has spent the last fifteen years trying to figure out exactly how our solar system formed--how, over a span of some tens of millions of years, a large chaotic disc of dust and gas turned itself into eight planets in orderly orbit around a central star.

Sometimes it's tough to get excited about stuff happening in quantum technologies, not because it's anything less than fascinating but because it can be so hard to wrap your head around this stuff and anyhow the practical applications often seem very far away. But this is one of those milestones that you have to appreciate: Physicists have for the first time teleported quantum information from one macroscopic object to another.

When lunar colonists need a new tool or replacement part to fix a broken spacecraft leg, all they'll need to do is scoop up some moon rocks and feed them into a 3-D printer, suggests a new proof-of-concept study.The ability to use material already on the moon to build things and fix equipment could save earthlings a bundle of money in fuel costs since they won't have to haul everything they need to their lunar outposts.

Researchers at Royal Holloway have been awarded a grant from the European Union, after identifying a tobacco tree that could produce biofuels.Scientists in the School of Biological Sciences discovered that Nicotiana Glauca produces compounds that can be used as a biodiesel. This could be used directly as fuel or cracked to produce petroleum products.Significantly, the plant is known to grow well in warm and arid climates. It does not require fertile ground and can thrive in regions that only get 200mm of rainfall a year, with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius.

Archaeologists working in Western Cyprus are raising a glass to the discovery of a Bronze Age 'micro-brewery', one of the earliest ever found.The team who excavated the two by two metre domed mud-plaster structure, led by Dr Lindy Crewe from The University of Manchester, have demonstrated it was used as a kiln to dry malt to make beer three-and-a half-thousand years ago.

The origin and dispersal of modern humans and modern human behavior are key interests in Paleolithic archaeology and anthropology.Engraved objects are usually seen as a hallmark of cognition and symbolism, which are viewed as important features of modern human behavior. In recent years, engraved ochre, bones and ostrich eggs unearthed from various Paleolithic sites in Africa, the Near East and Europe have attracted the attention of many scholars.

Deforestation in Brazil's huge Amazon region has slowed in recent years, and this week the government said it was at its lowest level since monitoring began 24 years ago. But despite tougher regulations, unscrupulous loggers are still finding ways to get timber out of the jungle and selling it as legally felled wood, locals say.Fabio Lourenco de Souza, a young Brazilian farmer, lives in a settlement known as PDS Esperanca (Hope), in the Xingu river valley in eastern Amazonia.Although the land is rich in tropical timber, along with most of the 300 families in the settlement, he wants nothing to do with loggers.

Light from the Grangemouth oil refinery and Longannet power station help migrating birds find food in winter, according to researchers.Scientists were studying how artificial light affected the common redshank's feeding habits in the Forth estuary.They found that, at night, birds in well-lit areas foraged for longer and used sight rather than touch.

One of the great origin stories in the history of mammals is the rise of primates. It's a story that scientists are still trying to write.In the early 20th century, anatomists believed primates united by big brains, grasping hands and feet, and excellent vision, among other features-evolved in response to living in trees. In the 1970s, however, biological anthropologist Matt Cartmill realized an arboreal lifestyle alone wasn't enough to explain primates unique set of characteristics. Plenty of mammals, like chipmunks, live in trees but don't have nimble hands or closely spaced, forward-facing eyes that allow for good depth perception. Instead, Cartmill suggested these features evolved because early primates were insect predators. He noted that many modern predators, such as cats and owls, have forward-facing eyes because they rely on good vision to grab prey. In the case of early primates, Cartmill said, they hunted tree-dwelling insects.

Three bizarre-looking springtails, tiny insectlike creatures, have been discovered in a Spanish cave.Springtails are amongst the most ancient and widespread animals on the planet. Like insects, they have six legs, but are small, more primitive and lack wings. They usually have a furca, or a tail used to spring away from danger, hence the name "springtails." Many cannot be seen with the naked eye; the largest species is about 0.24 inches long (6 millimeters).

Germany plans to slap a fine of up to 25,000 euros on people having sexual relations with pets, but zoophiles plan to fight the move. They say there's nothing wrong with consensual sex and that the true violations of animal rights are taking place in the farming industry.The German government plans to ban zoophilia -- sex with animals -- as part of an amendment to the country's animal protection law, but faces a backlash from the country's zoophile community, estimated to number over 100,000.

The largest animal eradication project the world has ever seen is set for its next phase.The Habitat Restoration Project on the Atlantic island of South Georgia aims to wipe out millions of rats that first arrived on sealing and whaling ships.A test mission to spread poison pellets in 2011, aiming to rid 128 sq km of the rodents, seems to have been successful.

The family of a US government scientist who fell to his death from a New York hotel window six decades ago have launched a lawsuit for damages against the CIA, alleging the agency was involved in his murder and a subsequent cover-up.In one of the most notorious cases in the organisation's history, bioweapons expert Frank Olson died in 1953, nine days after he was given LSD by agency officials without his knowledge.In the lawsuit, filed in the US district court in Washington on Wednesday, Olson's sons Eric and Nils claim their father was murdered after he witnessed extreme interrogations in which the CIA killed suspects using the biological agents he had developed.

A GIRL, 8, will be given vaccinations against the objections of her mother after a Family Court ruling.News of the judgment comes after a group of Australia's top scientists warned this week that the anti-immunisation lobby was endangering children's lives.The Victorian mother, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was resorting to homeopathic methods to try to protect her child against disease.

A young man in dire need of a heart transplant shocked doctors and loved ones alike when his failing heart mended itself, the Omaha World-Herald reports.Michael Crowe, 23, was admitted to a Nebraska hospital last month with a life-threatening heart problem. Suffering from acute myocarditis (an inflammation of the heart muscle), Crowe's heart was functioning at only 10 percent efficiency, and his other organs were starting to fail.Crowe needed a heart transplant. But when doctors found a match, Crowe was diagnosed with blood poisoning, and the transplant was deemed too risky, the World-Herald reports.But it was then, doctors say, that a "miracle" occurred.

After more than 4,000 years - almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor - man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived "Thus Spoke Zarathustra": "Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . ."

An estimated 10 wolves from Yellowstone National Park have been killed by hunters this month, adversely affecting the park's wolf research program, one of the longest studies of its kind."Losing the wolves has been a big hit to us scientifically," says wildlife biologist Douglas Smith, leader of Yellowstone's wolf project, which has tracked the wolves since their reintroduction in 1995. The killings came just as researchers, who are partly funded by a 5-year U.S. National Science Foundation grant, were set to begin the wolf project's annual winter survey of the canids' predatory habits.

In 1997, the Bloop was heard on hydrophones across the Pacific. It was a loud, ultra-low frequency sound that was heard at listening stations underwater over 5,000km apart, and one of many mysterious noises picked up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Several articles in the years that followed popularised a hunch of marine geophysicist Christopher Fox that the Bloop might have been the sound of an unknown animal, a theory that elevated the Bloop to the level of a great unsolved mystery.However, the NOAA is pretty sure that it wasn't an animal, but the sound of a relatively common event -- the cracking of an ice shelf as it breaks up from Antarctica.

As a young theorist in Moscow in 1982, Mikhail Shifman became enthralled with an elegant new theory called supersymmetry that attempted to incorporate the known elementary particles into a more complete inventory of the universe."My papers from that time really radiate enthusiasm," said Shifman, now a 63-year-old professor at the University of Minnesota. Over the decades, he and thousands of other physicists developed the supersymmetry hypothesis, confident that experiments would confirm it. "But nature apparently doesn't want it, he said. "At least not in its original simple form."

Collisions between particles inside the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher have created what looks like a new form of matter.The new kind of matter is called color-glass condensate, and is a liquidlike wave of gluons, which are elementary particles related to the strong force that sticks quarks together inside protons and neutrons (hence they are like "glue").Scientists didn't expect this kind of matter would result from the type of particle collisions going on at the Large Hadron Collider at the time. However, it may explain some odd behavior seen inside the machine, which is a giant loop where particles race around underneath Switzerland and France.

After a decade of legal wrangling and spending $4.5bn (£2.8bn), this year Shell Oil was given permission to begin exploratory drilling off the coast of Alaska. But many in the local Inuit community are concerned it could have a devastating impact on one of their main sources of food - the bowhead whale.Marie Casados shows me the contents on her freezer. Inside there's whale meat, muktuk - frozen whale skin and blubber - a selection of fish and a polar bear foot, which looks like a human hand. She describes it as a real delicacy. But it's more than that - this is her food supply for the winter.See Related: BP suspended from new US federal contracts over Deepwater disaster

When floodwaters rise there aren't a lot of places to hide, and in the oft-rainy UK that can spell big problems and major property damage. So in an attempt to mitigate the problem, British authorities have just built the country's first amphibious house on the banks of the River Thames. When the river rises, the house rises with it. Bring on the Biblical deluge.

Over 13,000 years ago a stalagmite began to grow in a cave in Oregon.Each winter rainwater from the land above made its way through the cave's ceiling and dripped onto the floor. As each layer of the stalagmite formed, oxygen and carbon isotopes within these raindrops were captured and preserved inside the rock.Now, thousands of years later, a team led by Oxford University scientists is using the data locked inside this stalagmite to get a glimpse of the ancient winter climate of Western North America.

Nuclear war, climate change, lab-created viruses and out-of-control machines need to be understood, but there are risks to lumping threats togetherCALL them the modern horsemen of the apocalypse: nuclear war, climate change, doomsday viruses and out-of-control machines. These are the subjects of the proposed Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), which this week attracted much media attention. "We're talking about threats to our very existence stemming from human activity," says Martin Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge who wants to found the centre with philosopher Huw Price and Skype inventor Jaan Tallinn.

Seeing someone scratch an itch could make you feel itchy too, a study suggests.The British Journal of Dermatology paper looked at whether images such as those of others scratching or ants crawling on skin, made people scratch.The study of 30 people asked them how they felt looking at these and "non-itch" images - and found visual cues did provoke a "scratch response".Experts said the work could help understand skin disorders.

Expectant parents in Japan who can't wait to show the world what their baby will look like can now buy a three-dimensional model of the foetus to pass around their friends.The nine-centimetre resin model of the white foetus, encased in a transparent block in the shape of the mother's body, is fashioned by a 3D printer after an MRI scan."As it is only once in a lifetime that you are pregnant with that child, we received requests for these kind of models from pregnant women who... do not want to forget the feelings and experience of that time," said Tomohiro Kinoshita of FASOTEC, the company offering the service.

Scientists are developing new materials which could one day allow people to print out custom-designed personal electronics such as games controllers which perfectly fit their hand shape.The University of Warwick researchers have created a simple and inexpensive conductive plastic composite that can be used to produce electronic devices using the latest generation of low-cost 3D printers designed for use by hobbyists and even in the home.

Forget a large cup of coffee or a can of red bull behind the wheel - a simple blue light could be enough to keep drivers awake.Researchers from the Université Bordeaux Segalen, France, and their Swedish colleagues demonstrated that constant exposure to blue light is as effective as coffee at improving night drivers' alertness.The findings could pave the way for the development of an electronic anti-sleep system to be built into vehicles - which could be crucial in preventing fatal crashes.Sleepiness is responsible for one third of fatalities on motorways as it reduces a driver's alertness, reflexes and visual perception.

Light pollution can have positive effects on some wildlife by helping migratory birds find more food at night, a new study has shown, contrasting with previous research which has emphasised the negative effects of artificial light.A team from the University of Exeter studied how electrical lighting and gas flares affected the feeding habits of the common redshank (Tringa totanus) in the Forth estuary, eastern Scotland.

Terence McKenna was one of a kind. For all of us who never knew him personally but have heard his unique and mesmerizing voice, been touched by his eloquence, and persuaded by the power of his insights and the courage of his imagination, *The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss* is the fireside chat with the man himself we always wished we'd had. Dennis McKenna has done something very special here. Not only has he written a compelling, highly readable and honest account of the life and death of his remarkable and amazing brother, but also he seasons his narrative with an acute social history of our times and offers us penetrating insights into the mysteries of consciousness and the magic of reality. E-book here.-Graham

SEATTLE- In two weeks, adults in this state will no longer be arrested or incarcerated for something that nearly 30 million Americans did last year. For the first time since prohibition began 75 years ago, recreational marijuana use will be legal; the misery-inducing crusade to lock up thousands of ordinary people has at last been seen, by a majority of voters in this state and in Colorado, for what it is: a monumental failure.That is, unless the Obama administration steps in with an injunction, as it has threatened to in the past, against common sense. For what stands between ending this absurd front in the dead-ender war on drugs and the status quo is the federal government. It could intervene, citing the supremacy of federal law that still classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug.But it should't. Social revolutions in a democracy, especially ones that begin with voters, should not be lightly dismissed.

Hemp, once a major US crop, has been banned for years because of its close association with cannabis. But several states now want to resume hemp farming, and two states voted this month in favour of legalisation of cannabis. Could change be in the air?There's an all-American plant that weaves its way throughout the nation's history.The sails of Columbus' ships were made from it. So was the first US flag. It was used in the paper on which the Declaration of Independence was printed.Today, however, industrial hemp is effectively banned by the federal government, damned by association with cannabis, its intoxicating cousin.

Smoking "rots" the brain by damaging memory, learning and reasoning, according to researchers at King's College London.A study of 8,800 people over 50 showed high blood pressure and being overweight also seemed to affect the brain, but to a lesser extent.Scientists involved said people needed to be aware that lifestyles could damage the mind as well as the body.

Sea levels are rising faster than predicted as a result of climate change, scientists said today.Satellite measurements show sea levels rose 3.2mm a year between 1993 and 2011, 60% above the 2mm estimate in central projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its most recent review of climate science.

The destruction of Amazon rainforest has reached its lowest level since monitoring began 24 years ago, the Brazilian government says.Environment minister Izabella Teixeira said it was thanks to government action against offenders.Figures show the rate of deforestation fell 27% in the year to July compared with the previous 12 months.Even so, more than 4,600 sq km (1,780 sq miles) of rainforest have been lost in a year.

The United States planned to blow up the moon with a nuclear bomb during the cold war, according to reports.The secret project, dubbed 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' or 'Project A119', was allegedly devised by US military chiefs at the height of the space race in the late 1950s as a show of strength over the Soviet Union, scientists claim.According to reports, the US would have used an atom bomb because a hydrogen bomb would have been too heavy.Note: Longer report over at Huff Post

It is seven times as salty as the sea, pitch dark and 13 degrees below freezing. Lake Vida in East Antarctica has been buried for 2800 years under 20 metres of ice, but teems with life.The discovery of strange, abundant bacteria in a completely sealed, icebound lake strengthens the possibility that extraterrestrial life might exist on planets such as Mars and moons such as Jupiter's Europa."Lake Vida is a model of what happens when you try to freeze a lake solid, and this is the same fate that any lakes on Mars would have gone through as the planet turned colder from a watery past,"...

Collisions between protons and lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced surprising behavior in some of the particles created by the collisions. The new observation suggests the collisions may have produced a new type of matter known as color-glass condensate.When beams of particles crash into each other at high speeds, the collisions yield hundreds of new particles, most of which fly away from the collision point at close to the speed of light. However, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) team at the LHC found that in a sample of 2 million lead-proton collisions, some pairs of particles flew away from each other with their respective directions correlated.

UNSOLVED MYSTERY - Greenland's viking settlers, the Norse, disappeared suddenly and mysteriously from Greenland about 500 years ago. Natural disasters, climate change and the inability to adapt have all been proposed as theories to explain their disappearance. But now a Danish-Canadian research team has demonstrated the Norse society did not die out due to an inability to adapt to the Greenlandic diet: an isotopic analysis of their bones shows they ate plenty of seals.

A scrappy family of mammals with unusual, mismatched features moved underground and, like living in a perpetual bomb shelter, managed to survive the mass extinction event 65 million years ago that wiped out the world's non-avian dinosaurs.We know this thanks to new research on the fossil mammal Necrolestes patagonensis, whose name translates to "grave robber," referring to its burrowing and underground lifestyle. The animal, described in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, had an upturned snout, a sturdy body structure, and short, wide legs.

Discovering a new species must be a heady experience -- the collection in the field, the "eureka" moment when you realize you've got something new, the jubilant announcement to the rest of the scientific community.Well, not quite.In fact, an average of 21 years pass from the time a new specimen is discovered until the time it's identified and reported to the world, a new study finds. The individual steps may still be very exciting, but they're often incredibly slow. And at this rate, species may go extinct in the wild while the specimens that might have identified them languish unstudied on museum shelves.

A United Nations rights investigator said Monday that Japan hasn't done enough to protect the health of residents and workers affected by the Fukushima nuclear accident.Anand Grover, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to health, said the government has adopted overly optimistic views of radiation risks and has conducted only limited health checks after the partial meltdowns at several reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant caused by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

The first space telescope to hunt for transiting exoplanets may be on its deathbed.On 2 November, the COROT satellite, which launched in 2006Movie Camera, lost the use of its only remaining onboard computer. The spacecraft can no longer receive data from its 30-centimetre telescope, which searches for the telltale dimming of stars as planets cross in front of them.The culprit was too much radiation, says project scientist Malcolm Fridlund of the European Space Agency. The orbiting spacecraft had spent a long time in a harsh particle environment called the South Atlantic Anomaly.

Astronomers find planets in strange places and wonder if they might support life. One such place would be in orbit around a white or brown dwarf. While neither is a star like the sun, both glow and so could be orbited by planets with the right ingredients for life.No terrestrial, or Earth-like planets have yet been confirmed orbiting white or brown dwarfs, but there is no reason to assume they don't exist. However, new research by Rory Barnes of the University of Washington and René Heller of Germany's Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam hints that planets orbiting white or brown dwarfs will prove poor candidates for life.

Who runs the Internet? For now, the answer remains no one, or at least no government, which explains the Web's success as a new technology. But as of next week, unless the U.S. gets serious, the answer could be the United Nations.Many of the U.N.'s 193 member states oppose the open, uncontrolled nature of the Internet. Its interconnected global networks ignore national boundaries, making it hard for governments to censor or tax. And so, to send the freewheeling digital world back to the state control of the analog era, China, Russia, Iran and Arab countries are trying to hijack a U.N. agency that has nothing to do with the Internet.

Biomarkers found in human poo are being used to track historical human presence in areas of Norway.By observing changes in the levels of a compound called coprostanol in sediment cores taken from Lake Liland in the Lofoten Islands just north of the Arctic Circle Robert D'Anjou, a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts was able to measure human presence in the vicinity.Coprostanol is a biomarker formed when cholesterol is broken down during digestion. Faecal matter containing the marker washes into the lake and ends up as part of the sediment. Coprostanol can be found in a number of higher mammals but, as D'Anjou explains, "When you find these molecules at certain concentrations and in specific ratios, it provides an unmistakable indicator that people were living in the area.".

Lemmings became "regionally extinct" five times due to rapid climate change during the last Ice Age, scientists have found.Each extinction was followed by a re-colonisation of genetically different lemmings, according to the study.It investigated how Europe's small mammals fared during the era when large numbers of megafauna became extinct.Previously, experts believed that small mammals were largely unaffected during the Late Pleistocene.

Moon rocks from mankind's first landing more than 43 years ago have been discovered tucked away in a government storage area in St. Paul, and officials are at a loss to explain how they ended up there.The five encased rocks -- little more than pebbles -- are part of a desktop display that includes a small Minnesota flag that was among those from every state that made the trip aboard Apollo 11.Each state received a moon rock display from President Richard Nixon to commemorate the mission that put Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.

The end is not nigh, but it could be unless we constrain our own technological ingenuity. That's the warning from an initiative in Cambridge, UK, that wants to create a centre to focus on huge, technological hazards that could wipe out the human race at a stroke.These dangers would include robots that escape our control, nuclear war, doomsday plagues designed in laboratories, and devastation from climate change triggered by human activity.

Genetic testing confirms the legendary Bigfoot is a human relative that arose some 15,000 years ago -- at least according to a press release issued by a company called DNA Diagnostics detailing supposed work by a Texas veterinarian.The release and alleged study by Melba S. Ketchum also suggests such cryptids had sex with modern human females that resulted in hairy hominin hybrids, but the scientific community is dubious about her claim.

New research into the world's major river systems has found that too much water is being taken out, and the situation is likely to get worse with climate change.The findings, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, reveal that environmental flows are not being met in the Colorado and Orange-Senqu Rivers and that the Murray-Darling and Yellow Rivers remain under pressure despite government intervention.

Biomimicry is the term given to using nature as an inspiration for sustainable technology ideas, and a young company has joined the biomimicry brigade with its prototype self filling water bottle, which mimics the Namib desert beetle. NBD Nano, a startup of four graduates with degrees in biology, organic chemistry, and mechanical engineering, hopes to bring their prototype to market. They say that, like this beetle, their bottle can pull water from the air. Their self-filling water bottle is said to be capable of storing up to three liters every hour.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- If you want to get rid of unwanted, negative thoughts, try just ripping them up and tossing them in the trash.In a new study, researchers found that when people wrote down their thoughts on a piece of paper and then threw the paper away, they mentally discarded the thoughts as well.On the other hand, people were more likely to use their thoughts when making judgments if they first wrote them down on a piece of paper and tucked the paper in a pocket to protect it.

A centre for 'terminator studies', where leading academics will study the threat that robots pose to humanity, is set to open at Cambridge University.Its purpose will be to study the four greatest threats to the human species - artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will be co-launched by Lord Rees, the astronomer royal and one of the world's top cosmologists.

Prototypes of what would be the world's first fully 3D-printable plastic weapon could go into testing before the end of the year, the organization behind the controversial project has claimed."We're ready," said Cody Wilson, a spokesman for Defense Distributed, the company that hopes to manufacture the "Wiki Weapon". "We're sitting on the logistics, time, resources and money. We're just waiting on a little piece of paper."That little piece of paper is a federal firearms license , the permit that is needed to legally make and manufacture firearms in the United States.

One of the key components of quantum communication is quantum teleportation, a technique used to transfer quantum states to distant locations without actual transmission of the physical carriers. Quantum teleportation relies on entanglement, and it has so far been demonstrated between single photons, between a photon and matter, and between single ions. Now for the first time, physicists have demonstrated quantum teleportation by entangling two remote macroscopic atomic ensembles, each with a radius of about 1 mm.

The American science programs that landed the first man on the moon, found cures for deadly diseases and bred crops that feed the world now face the possibility of becoming relics in the story of human progress.American scientific research and development stands to lose thousands of jobs and face a starvation diet of reduced funding if politicians fail to compromise and halt the United States' march towards the fiscal cliff's sequestration of federal funds.

NASA is mapping out a strategy to return bits of rock and soil from the Martian surface to Earth, but the most intriguing Red Planet samples lie in underground caverns, some scientists say.The space agency's next steps at Mars are geared toward mounting a sample-return mission, which is widely viewed as the best way to look for signs of Red Planet life. Such signs are perhaps more likely to be found in material pulled from the subsurface, so some researchers hope NASA's first Martian sample-return effort won't be its last.

Europe and Russia are cementing their plans to explore Mars together.European Space Agency member states have approved the agreement that would see Russia take significant roles in Red Planet missions in 2016 and 2018.The former is a satellite that will look for methane and other trace gases in the atmosphere; the latter will be a surface rover.

Sending astronauts to a deep-space outpost beyond the moon's far side could help lay the groundwork for more ambitious manned missions to Mars, some researchers say.Such a lunar effort would take humanity farther from Earth than it's ever been before, allowing scientists and engineers to work their way up to even more distant targets such as asteroids and Mars in a stepwise fashion, advocates say.

WASHINGTON: A new theory the suggests that one young star may yank another's developing solar system has shed light on a long-standing puzzle - why Earth's orbit is tipped 7 degree relative to the sun's equator.In 1995, Swiss astronomers made the shocking discovery of the first "hot Jupiter," a gas giant circling close to its star.

When a UFO spotter sent a local news team his film of mysterious spacecraft whizzing above Denver, Colorado, they sent their own cameraman out to prove it was a hoax.But after a few hours of filming from the exact same spot, the team captured footage that, far from debunking the strange sighting, appears to confirm it.The city's Fox-affiliated TV station KDVR have no explanation, even after drafting in an aviation expert in a final bid to disprove the phenomenon.But after reviewing the footage, Steve Cowell told the team: 'That is not an airplane, that is not a helicopter, those are not birds, I can't identify it.'.

The language we use affects the decisions we make, according to a new study. Participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language that they had learned in a classroom setting than when they were asked in a native tongue.To study how language affects reasoning, University of Chicago psychologists looked at a well-known phenomenon: people are more risk-averse when an impersonal decision (such as which vaccine to administer to a population) is presented in terms of a potential gain than when it is framed as a potential loss even when the outcomes are equivalent. In the study, published online in April in Psychological Science, native English speakers who had learned Japanese, native Korean speakers who had learned English and native English speakers studying French in Paris all surrendered to the expected bias when they encountered the question in their native tongue. In their foreign language, however, the bias disappeared.

The completion of human and primate genome sequences (including some close, extinct relatives) reveals a great deal about the evolutionary innovations behind modern humans. All indications are a large collection of relatively subtle genetic changes added up to considerable differences in our brains and anatomy.So, it was a bit shocking to see a headline claiming a single gene separated us from our fellow apes. The article behind the headline turned out to be wrong, of course. But there was an additional research paper behind that article. The story this told turned out to be rather interesting, even after the hype was stripped away.

An international team of scientists have observed the behaviour of various groups of cetaceans in the Strait of Gibraltar and Cape Breton in Canada belonging to the Globicephala melas species, which are also known as long-finned pilot whales. These results show that these whales use synchronised swimming when they identify the presence of an external threat.There are 300 pilot whales inhabiting the Straight of Gibraltar. Here these cetaceans remain throughout the entire year in the water of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. But, little is known about their social structure.

The European parliament on Thursday called a definitive halt to shark finning, the long contested practice of fishermen slicing off fins and throwing the live body overboard to drown.The EU prohibited shark finning in 2003, but an exemption allowed fishermen with special permits to remove the fins from their carcass out at sea and bring back the remainders or land them in different ports.

Motion detectors mounted on emperor penguins have revealed that sea ice plays a critical role in the birds' long food odyssey.Emperor penguins rely on sea ice for breeding and feeding. Shifting patterns of sea ice due to changing climate in the Antarctic could alter the penguin's behavior and ecology, said study author Shinichi Watanabe, an animal ecologist and professor at Fukuyama University in Hiroshima, Japan.The Antarctic sea ice hit a record maximum this year, but the sea ice distribution around the continent is changing, while the penguins nest in the same place every year.

I'd hate to be the IT guy fixing this network. By dropping electronic devices into the stomachs of cows and networking them together, researchers hope to reduce the climate-warming farts and burps they produce.Emissions from livestock - much of which is methane released when they burp - are a serious component of global greenhouse gas emissions. But some individuals are a little more, erm, 'gassy' than others. By breeding "low methane" animals, and modifying farming practices slightly, their emissions could be lowered by up to 50 per cent, says Chris McSweeny from the CSIRO's Sustainable Agriculture Flagship in Brisbane, Australia.

Italian archaeologists say they have discovered a cemetery that reveals complex funeral rites dating back more than 3,000 years in Pakistan's Swat valley, recently controlled by the Taliban.The Italian mission began digging in the 1950s at Udegram, a site of Buddhist treasures in Swat, the northwestern district formerly known as the Switzerland of Pakistan for its stunning mountains, valleys and rivers.Archaeologists were aware of a pre-Buddhist grave site in Udegram, but only recently discovered the collection of almost 30 graves, tightly clustered and partially overlapping.

Imagine a field full of pyramids, but on a micro scale. Each of the pyramids hides a living cell. Thanks to 3-D micro- and nano-scale fabrication, this is possible and there are promising new applications in the offing. One of them is applying the micro pyramids for cell research: thanks to the open 'walls' of the pyramids, the cells can interact.Scientists of the research institutes MESA+ and MIRA of the University of Twente in The Netherlands present this new technology and first applications in the journal Small.

Planets beyond the solar system that are bigger than Earth but smaller than gas giants like Neptune could have oceans of liquid metal and life-protecting magnetic shields.Under the heat and pressure that exist inside super-Earths, magnesium oxide and other minerals commonly found in the rocky mantles of the terrestrial planets, transform into liquid metals, laboratory tests show.The research has implications for understanding conditions on super-Earths, including whether they might be favorable for supporting life.

Within supersized alien versions of Earth, a common transparent ceramic may become a flowing liquid metal, perhaps granting those distant worlds magnetic fields to shield life from harmful radiation, researchers say.Among the hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that astronomers have discovered in recent years are so-called "super-Earths," which are rocky planets like Earth but larger, at up to 10 times its mass. Scientists have discovered super-Earths that may support oceans of water on their surfaces on their surfaces, and others that may even be planets made of diamond.

Two new discoveries have confirmed December 21st of this year as the final day of the Mayan Long Count calendar, but what was going on at the beginning date in 3114 BC and did the Maya really invent the calendar? Hugh Newman investigates the mysterious origins of the Olmec civilization and the ancient 'god' Quetzalcoatl to explore the genesis of this incredible 5125-year cycle.

When it comes to attracting business to California's eastern deserts, Inyo County is none too choosy.Since the 19th century the sparsely populated county has worked to attract industries shunned by others, including gold, tungsten and salt mining. The message: Your business may be messy, but if you plan to hire our residents, the welcome mat is out.So the county grew giddy last year as it began to consider hosting a huge, clean industry. BrightSource Energy, developer of the proposed $2.7-billion Hidden Hills solar power plant 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles, promised a bounty of jobs and a windfall in tax receipts. In a county that issued just six building permits in 2011, Inyo officials first estimated that property taxes from the facility would boost the general fund 17%. But upon closer inspection, the picture didn't seem so rosy.

It is not every day that astronauts can claim to return to Earth with a new species of life. But when the astronauts on ESA's CAVES underground training course returned to the surface they were carrying a special type of woodlouse.CAVES training sends astronauts from all the International Space Station partner nations underground for a week to learn about working in multi-cultural teams under extreme conditions.During their six-night stay in caves in Sardinia, Italy, their scientific research included meteorology, surveying, geology and cataloguing underground life.

Google is actively promoting its "Take Action" campaign to defend its views for building a free and open World Wide Web.As explained in a Google+ post on Tuesday morning, the Internet giant is getting its agenda out there now ahead of the meeting of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Dubai starting on Monday, December 3:"Some governments want to use this meeting in Dubai to increase censorship and regulate the Internet," Google wrote.

New research by the University of Greenwich shows 4 out of 5 Britons think that people should be supported for revealing serious wrongdoing, even if it means revealing inside information. However, under half of the respondents (47%) thought whistleblowing is an acceptable thing to do in our society. Hence, people think society is less supportive of it than it should be.Three quarters of respondents, who are employees or members of an organisation, also indicated that if they observed wrongdoing, they would feel personally obliged to report it to someone in their organisation.

Garages buckled, highways collapsed. Swift but violent, the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged buildings for miles around.But Los Angeles artist Stephen Glassman noticed one type of structure held strong: Billboards.The memory stayed with Glassman over the years. Then he had a thought. Why not entirely re-imagine those everyday pillars of steel?"Urban Air," his latest project, aims to transform billboards into suspended bamboo gardens and create "an open space" in the city skyline.

An owl glides by on silent wings. Many holiday travelers probably wish airplanes could do the same."On airplanes, the back edge of the wing is where you get most of the noise," Justin Jaworski, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, told TechNewsDaily. "My work is looking at developing theoretical models to explain trailing-edge noise."Most recently, he and his colleague Nigel Peake showed, mathematically, that the noise from airplane wings could be reduced tenfold if their designers took a few cues from the feathers that fringe the trailing edge of an owl's wings.

The majority of Canadians support the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana, a new poll shows.Sixty-five per cent of Canadians over 18 support either pot legalization and taxation, or the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana, according to the survey from Forum Research. Since December 2011, support for legalization has decreased from 40 per cent to 33 per cent, while support for decriminalization has increased from 26 per cent to 32 per cent. The poll surveyed 1,849 Canadians randomly.

From Einstein to Newton, some of the best ideas and most important scientific breakthroughs have been dreamt up during a little 'down time'.And in news that will cheer bored office workers and pupils, it is not only the geniuses among us who find inspiration in imagination - scientists have found we could all benefit from a spot of daydreaming.A study from the University of California, Santa Barbara, showed that people who returned to a difficult task after taking a break and doing an easy task boosted their performance by around 40 per cent.But there was little or no improvement for people who did another demanding task during the break, used it to rest or did not have a break at all.

In the grasslands of Namibia are millions of strangely bare circles. They're called "fairy circles." Although we know, roughly, what happens during their lifespan, no one knows why they crop up, or why they eventually fade.The term "fairy ring" means different things in different parts of the world. For some reason, they all center on botany. In some parts, they refer to a ring of mushrooms that pop out of the ground seemingly at random. In my neck of the woods, they refer to a circle of trees, most often redwoods, that surround the stump of a fallen tree. In Namibia, they refer to the strange bare patches that pepper some stretches of grassland.

An unexpected source of new, clean energy has been found: the Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell that can generate electricity from the natural interaction between living plant roots and soil bacteria. The technique already works on a small scale and will soon be applied in larger marshland areas throughout the world.On 23 November, researcher Marjolein Helder will defend her PhD research on generating electricity via plants at Wageningen University. She has also founded a spin-off company called Plant-e with her colleague David Strik.

Environmental researchers have detected excess greenhouse gas levels near the site of Australia's biggest coal seam gas field, prompting calls for halting expansion of hydraulic fracturing until scientists can determine whether it might be contributing to climate change.The reported findings of methane, carbon dioxide and other compounds at more than three times normal background levels have stirred new controversy in eastern Australia over the pros and cons of boosting natural gas output by "fracking," a process that blasts sand, water and chemicals into deep underground wells.

A team at the University of Southampton are pioneering a technique to predict when an ecosystem is likely to collapse, which may also have potential for foretelling crises in agriculture, fisheries or even social systems preventing another "Easter Island" collapse from occuring. The scientists applied a mathematical model to a real world situation, the environmental collapse of a lake in China, to help prove a theory which suggests an ecosystem 'flickers', or fluctuates dramatically between healthy and unhealthy states, shortly before its eventual collapse.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.In Musk's vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has begun its extended mission, which should keep the prolific instrument searching for alien worlds for another four years, agency officials announced Wednesday.Kepler officially embarked upon the extended mission after completing its 3 1/2-year prime mission, which aimed to determine how common Earth-like planets are throughout the galaxy. The extended phase, which NASA announced this past April, funds the instrument through at least fiscal year 2016.

The U.S. military is launching a far-out neighborhood watch. But instead of warding off burglars, these amateur watchdogs are tracking orbital debris and possible satellite collisions in Earth orbit.The sky-monitoring project, called SpaceView, is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program that enrolls the talents of amateur astronomers to help protect American space assets from orbital trash.

Researchers have developed a way to "print" cartilage that could help treat joint diseases and sporting injuries.They say that the new material is more robust and hardwearing than previous efforts to create artificial cartilage.A traditional ink-jet printer combined with a specialised spinning-machine is used to make it.

SMH.COM.AUResearchers have discovered a new gene they say helps explain how humans evolved from apes.The gene, called miR-941, appears to have played a crucial role in human brain development and could shed light on how we learned to use tools and language, according to scientists.A team at the University of Edinburgh compared it to 11 other species of mammals, including chimpanzees, gorillas, mice and rats.

A Simon Fraser University archaeologist and his colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia have significantly narrowed down the time frame during which the last major chapter in human colonization, the Polynesian triangle, occurred.SFU professor David Burley, Marshall Weisler and Jian-Xin Zhao argue the first boats arrived between 880 and 896 BC. The 16-year window is far smaller than the previous radiocarbon-dated estimate of 178 years between 2,789 and 2,947 years ago.

Neanderthals and other extinct human lineages might have been ancient mariners, venturing to the Mediterranean islands thousands of years earlier than previously thought.This prehistoric seafaring could shed light on the mental capabilities of these lost relatives of modern humans, researchers say.

Up to a million species live in the seas, and two-thirds of those ocean-dwellers may still be undiscovered, according to a new study that also cataloged all of the known species that dwell beneath the waves.The findings, published today (Nov. 15) in the journal Current Biology, suggest that the oceans remain a vast, uncharted territory. The new registry could help guide marine conservation efforts by giving scientists a universal way to describe the underwater creatures.

Evidence is mounting that modern birds descended from gliding, feathered non-avian dinosaurs.Two dinosaurs could be candidates for the bottom of the bird family tree, and each helps to reveal how feathers first evolved."The oldest known feathered dinosaurs would be Anchiornis (155 million years ago) and Epidexipteryx (between 152 million and 168 million years ago)," Yale University paleontologist Nicholas Longrich told Discovery News. "Feathers seem to have appeared initially for insulation. Basically they start out as down, and later are used to make wings.".

Argentine experts have discovered the fossils of a two-meter (6.5 foot) tall penguin that lived in Antarctica 34 million years ago.Paleontologists with the Natural Sciences Museum of La Plata province, where the capital Buenos Aires is located, said the remains were found on the icy southern continent.

The beast, nicknamed the 'Kentish Apeman', was spotted recently on the town's famous 200-acre common amid a spate of sightings over the past six months.A man said he was confronted by the creature, which had 'red demonic eyes and was covered in hair', three weeks ago as he was walking home.He said the beast roared at him in exactly the same spot it was apparently first seen more than 70 years ago, before he ran away.

A noble-but-brutal Renaissance warrior who fell to a battle wound may not have died exactly as historians had believed, according to a new investigation of the man's bones.Italian researchers opened the tomb of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, or Giovanni of the Black Bands, this week to investigate the real cause of his death. Giovanni was born in 1498 into the wealthy and influential Medici family, a lineage that produced three Popes and two regent queens of France, among many other nobles (Another branch of the family, the Medicis of Milan, boasted a fourth Pope). He worked as a mercenary military captain for Pope Leo X (one of the Medici family's Popes), and fought many a successful skirmish in his name. When Pope Leo X died in 1521, Giovanni altered his uniform to include black mourning bands, earning him his nickname.

Trees in most forests, even wet ones, live perilously close to the limits of their inner plumbing systems, a global survey of forests finds.Seventy percent of the 226 tree species in forests around the world routinely function near the point where a serious drought would stop water transport from their roots to their leaves, says plant physiologist Brendan Choat of the University of Western Sydney in Richmond, Australia. Trees even in moist, lush places operate with only a slim safety margin between them and a thirsty death.