Newsdesk Archive

Drained wetlands in Sweden account for the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as Swedish industry. This is shown by a summary of research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.Forests and agricultural fields on drained previous wetlands make up between five and ten percent of Sweden's surface area. When these wetlands are drained, they become a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Most explorers dream of discovering uncharted territory, but a team of Australian scientists have done the exact opposite. They have found an island that doesn't exist."Even onboard the ship, the weather maps the captain had showed an island in this location." -Dr Maria Seton, University of Sydney The island, named Sandy Island on Google Earth, also exists on marine charts and world maps and allegedly sits between Australia and New Caledonia in the south Pacific.But when the voyage's chief scientist, Maria Seton, and her crew sailed past where the island should be, they found nothing but blue ocean.

Scientists have discovered a new smell, but you may have to go to a laboratory to experience it yourself.The smell is dubbed "olfactory white," because it is the nasal equivalent of white noise, researchers report today (Nov. 19) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Just as white noise is a mixture of many different sound frequencies and white light is a mixture of many different wavelengths, olfactory white is a mixture of many different smelly compounds.

Scientists have discovered a new smell, but you may have to go to a laboratory to experience it yourself.The smell is dubbed "olfactory white," because it is the nasal equivalent of white noise, researchers reported Monday (Nov. 19) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Just as white noise is a mixture of many different sound frequencies and white light is a mixture of many different wavelengths, olfactory white is a mixture of many different smelly compounds.In fact, the key to olfactory white is not the compounds themselves, researchers found, but the fact that there are a lot of them.

It is possible to create steam within seconds by focusing sunlight on nanoparticles mixed into water, according to new research.That observation, reported Monday by scientists at Rice University in Texas, suggests myriad applications in places that lack electricity or burnable fuels. A sun-powered boiler could desalinate sea water, distill alcohol, sterilize medical equipment and perform other useful tasks."We can build a portable, compact steam generator that depends only on sunlight for input. It is something that could really be good in remote or resource-limited locations," said Naomi Halas, an engineer and physicist at Rice who ran the experiment.

A molelike mammal nicknamed the "grave robber" survived the event that killed the dinosaurs, new research finds.Necrolestes patagonensis, whose name translates in part to "grave robber," was among the mammals that lived through the dinosaur mass extinction. The new study finds that the creature lived 45 million years longer than paleontologists realized.Necrolestes was first discovered in fossil form in the Patagonia region of South America in 1891, but little was known about the animal, study researcher John Wible, a mammalogist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said in a statement.

DNA extract from ancient latrines has "opened the door" to identifying the plants and animals that existed in northern Australia's remote Pilbara region more than 30,000 years ago.Significantly, says co-author Daithi Murray, of Murdoch University's Ancient DNA Laboratory, the genetic material has been collected from what is believed to be the oldest sample yet uncovered in Australia's arid environment.

Less than 2% of Earth's fossils are preserved in volcanic rock, but researchers have identified a new one: the skull of a rhino that perished in a volcanic eruption 9.2 million years ago.The find is described in a paper published Nov. 21 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Pierre-Olivier Antoine and colleagues from the University of Montpellier, France.The fossil, found in Turkey, is thought to be that of a large two-horned rhino common in the Eastern Mediterranean region during that period. According to the researchers, unusual features of the preserved skull suggest that the animal was 'cooked to death' at temperatures that may have approached 500° C, in a volcanic flow similar to that of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Italy in 79 A.D.

Deep in the South American rainforest, katydids perk up their tiny ears to listen for the clicking of bats. Apart from being on the insects' forelegs, those ears are remarkably similar to our own, new research shows. And by imitating the tiny structures, researchers speculate, engineers might create microscopic acoustic sensors.Mammalian ears have three distinctive features: a tympanic membrane, or eardrum, that vibrates with incoming sound waves; three delicate ear bones that transmit the vibrations into the inner ear; and the cochlea, a fluid-filled coil of sensor cells that respond to vibrations at different frequencies, arranged from high to low like the keys on a piano.

Dogs learning to associate words with objects form these associations in different ways than humans do, according to research published November 21 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Emile van der Zee and colleagues from the University of Lincoln, UK.Previous studies have shown that humans between the ages of two to three typically learn to associate words with the shapes of objects, rather than their size or texture. For example, toddlers who learn what a 'ball' is and are then presented other objects with similar shapes, sizes or textures will identify a similarly-shaped object as 'ball', rather than one of the same size or texture.

Whether living with pirates or in the wild, parrots have exceptional abilities to mimic the sounds they hear. One species, the orange-fronted conure, may have evolved this ability in order to communicate with specific individuals in other flocks, according to research published November 21 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Thorsten Balsby from the University of Aarhus, Denmark and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen.

Blind people could soon be able to read street signs using an implant that translates the alphabet into Braille and beams an image of the Braille directly to visual neurons at the back of the eye.The implant is a modified version of a class of devices called retinal prostheses, which are used to restore partial sight to people with retinitis pigmentosa. A degenerative eye disease that kills the photoreceptor cells in the retina, RP tends to affect people in early adulthood and can lead to blindness, but leaves intact the neurons that carry visual signals to the brain.

Young children who attend daycare on a regular basis are 50% more likely to be overweight compared to those who stayed at home with their parents, according to a study by researchers at the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Centre. "We found that children whose primary care arrangement between 1.5 and 4 years was in daycare-center or with an extended family member were around 50% more likely to be overweight or obese between the ages of 4-10 years compared to those cared for at home by their parents," said Dr. Marie-Claude Geoffroy, who led the study. "This difference cannot be explained by known risk factors such as socioeconomic status of the parents, breastfeeding, body mass index of the mother, or employment status of the mother."

A French archaeological mission from the French Institute for Archaeological Studies have unearthed a yet unidentified royal statue of a New Kingdom king during routine excavations at Monthu Temple, northeast of Karnak Temple in Luxor.The statue is 125 centimetres tall and made of black granite and depicts a standing king wearing short dress with hands aside.Christopher Tiers, head of the archaeological mission, said that early studies of the statue suggest that the artistic features of the depicted king confirm its royalty.

On Thursday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs handed over two Old Kingdom sandstone engravings to the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA), which were for decades in the possession of a New Zealand photographer.The blocks depict two scenes; one shows the lioness goddess of war Sekhmet wearing the Cobra crown, while the second is a hieroglyphic text uncovering a title of an Old Kingdom king saying: "King of Upper and Lower Egypt and the core of the two lands, Horus."

A field full of pyramids, but on a micro scale. Each of the pyramids hides a living cell. Thanks to 3D micro- and nano scale fabrication, promising new applications can be found. One of them is applying the micro pyramids for cell research: thanks to the open 'walls' of the pyramids, the cells 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 Small journal of the beginning of December.Most of the cell studies take place in 2D: this is not a natural situation, because cells organize themselves in another way than in the human body.

IF YOU gaze long enough into the void, the void might begin to speak to you. Giant regions of near-empty space known as cosmic voids could help us get a handle on dark energy, the mysterious stuff that is speeding up the expansion of the universe.If gravity were the dominant force at work, the expansion would be slowing down, as matter gives in to the pull of other matter. But more than a decade ago, supernovae studies revealed that the expansion is speeding up. This suggests the vacuum of space-time must have an inherent energy that is repulsing gravity.

Up in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in a tiny village nestled amid breathtaking landscapes and eagles in flight, a man in a woolly hat pushes a wheelbarrow up a narrow street whistling to himself as the smell of woodsmoke drifts out of chimneys. The only sight slightly out of place are 20 zombies, staggering wild-eyed and bleeding, down the mountain path. But, unlike most of the bizarre things said about this place, the zombies at least make sense. "We're making a pastiche film about the apocalypse for our university leaving do," says Joel, 23, a pharmacy student from Montpellier dressed in a torn grey suit with two black eyes and a dribble of blood from his mouth. His student friend, a dwarf in a cow suit, adds: "Bugarach was the perfect setting. Everyone knows this village as the world centre of armageddon, we couldn't resist.".

The Department of Conservation (DOC) warned hikers to avoid the summit of Mount Ruapehu, saying that temperature readings by scientists indicated there was an increased risk of eruption at New Zealand's largest active volcano."The current situation can't continue, Ruapehu is so active that the temperatures have been going up and down a lot," DOC volcanic risk manager Harry Keys told Radio New Zealand.

Atmospheric volumes of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change hit a new record in 2011, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin on Tuesday.The volume of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, grew at a similar rate to the previous decade and reached 390.9 parts per million (ppm), 40 percent above the pre-industrial level, the survey said.It has increased by an average of 2 ppm for the past 10 years.

The Fermi Space Telescope has detected close to 2,000 gamma ray sources in space, and nearly 600 are complete mysteries. Researchers are speculating on the nature of the mystery sources, including the possibility that they are made of dark matter. In 2011 NASA's Fermi team released the second catalog of gamma ray sources from its satellite's Large Area Telescope and have no idea where nearly one-third of gamma rays originated.

Io, the innermost of Jupiter's large satellites and the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with plumes of matter rising up to 186 miles (300 km) above the surface, is considered a prime candidate as a hotspot for extreme extraterrestrial life.In the image above Two sulfurous eruptions are visible on Io from the robotic Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. At the image top, over Io's limb, a bluish plume rises about 140 kilometers above the surface of a volcanic caldera known as Pillan Patera.

NASA is serious about sending astronauts back to the moon's neighborhood and will likely unveil its ambitious plans soon now that President Barack Obama has been re-elected, experts say.The space agency has apparently been thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon's far side, both to establish a human presence in deep space and to build momentum toward a planned visit to an asteroid in 2025.

WASHINGTON: Nasa has tested a new rotor landing system in an attempt to enable its future space capsules to land like helicopters.The idea behind the new landing system, tested in the 550 foot fall Vehicle Assembly Building at the space agency's Kennedy Space Center, is to replace parachutes with spinning blades to enable soft and controlled landings on land instead of the ocean.

The Earth's oceans and the water that once flowed on Mars likely came from a similar source: meteorites that landed on the planets when they were first forming, new research suggests.Scientists analyzed the makeup of two rare Mars rocks that crashed into Earth as meteorites, and found that Martian water probably came from planetary building blocks similar to those that formed Earth. The two planets likely formed in parallel ways, but then took divergent evolutionary paths.

By examining art printed from woodblocks spanning five centuries, Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has identified the species responsible for making the ever-present wormholes in European printed art since the Renaissance. The hole-makers, two species of wood-boring beetles, are widely distributed today, but the "wormhole record," as Hedges calls it, reveals a different pattern in the past, where the two species met along a zone across central Europe like a battle line of two armies.The research, which is the first of its kind to use printed art as a "trace fossil" to precisely date species and to identify their locations, will be published in the journal Biology Letters on Nov. 21.

Mumbai: Rock sculptures dating back to between 4,000-7,000 BC have been found in a well-preserved condition in the forests near Kudopi village in Sindhudurg district of coastal Konkan region, an official said here Tuesday.There are more than 60 big and small images of Mother Goddess, birds and animals, found in a single location of around 20,000 square feet, considered one of the biggest such concentration anywhere in the country, Satish Lalit, leader of an expedition team which made the discovery last May, told reporters.

Saw-wielding thieves have stolen a series of ancient carvings from a California cliff side.At least four of the carvings, known as petroglyphs, were taken over a period of several hours, US officials said, with others badly defaced.The petroglyphs are thought to have survived for thousands of years at the desert site near Bishop, California.Petroglyphs, or rock engravings, are created by removing the surface layer of rocks to reveal the colours below.

With its protective sea ice barrier melted away, Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier grows ever closer to finally dropping its New York City-sized iceberg into the ocean, according to NASA.The giant crack in Pine Island Glacier was first spotted by scientists with NASA's IceBridge mission in 2011 as they surveyed the massive ice shelf in their specially equipped DC-8 plane. A second rift also formed and joined the northern side of the crack in May 2012, as captured on satellite images that track the incipient iceberg.

The benefits of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) persist years after the first treatment with the drug (also known as ecstasy), according to a follow-up study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.The finding gives hope to people with PTSD who do not respond to conventional treatments. However, the results come from a small-scale pilot study, and the outcomes have not been so convincing in other recently published work.

An ambitious plan to provide 15% of Europe's power needs from solar plants in North Africa has run into trouble.The Desertec initiative hoped to deliver electricity from a network of renewable energy sources to Europe via cables under the sea.But in recent weeks, two big industrial backers have pulled out.And the Spanish government has baulked at signing an agreement to build solar power plants in Morocco.Desertec was set up in 2009 with a projected budget of 400bn euros to tap the enormous potential of solar and other renewables in North Africa.

Australia Friday created the world's largest network of marine reserves, protecting a huge swathe of ocean environment despite claims it will devastate the fishing industry.The announcement, after years of planning and consultation, will significantly expand the protection of creatures such as the blue whale, green turtle, critically endangered populations of gray nurse sharks, and dugongs.

A group of Tasmanian devils will be transferred to a small Australian island to start what is hoped will be a self-sustaining population, free from the facial tumor that has devastated their species.Tasmania's Environment Minister Brian Wightman said 14 of the marsupials, carefully selected from captive breeding programs across Australia, would be released Thursday on Maria Island, a nature sanctuary off the state's east coast.

If you've ever struggled to control a remote control helicopter and sent it crashing into a wall, help could be hand.A US firm is raising money for a remote control helicopter maneuvered not by a joystick, but by the mind.The Puzzlebox Orbit uses a headset to monitor brainwave readings.For the past two years Puzzlebox has been producing brain-controlled helicopters for classrooms and television, and has now turned to online site Kickstarter to begin selling its $299 product.

Einstein's brain had extraordinary folding patterns in several regions, which may help explain his genius, newly uncovered photographs suggest.The photographs, published Nov. 16 in the journal Brain, reveal that the brilliant physicist had extra folding in his brain's gray matter, the site of conscious thinking. In particular, the frontal lobes, regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had unusually elaborate folding, analysis suggests.

IN LATE August 2009, a tiny, solitary bat fluttered about in the rainforest near Australia's infamous Christmas Island detention camp. We don't know precisely what happened to it. Perhaps it landed on a leaf at dawn after a night feeding on moths and mosquitoes and was torn to pieces by fire ants; perhaps it succumbed to a mounting toxic burden placed on its tiny body by insecticide spraying. Or maybe it was simply worn out with age and ceaseless activity, and died quietly in its tree-hollow. But there is one important thing we do know: it was the last Christmas Island pipistrelle (Pipistrellus murrayi). With its passing, an entire species winked out of existence.

A dozen kung fu nuns from an Asian Buddhist order displayed their martial arts prowess to bemused scientists at CERN this week as their spiritual leader explained how their energy was like that of the cosmos.The nuns, all from the Himalayan region, struck poses of hand-chops, high-kicks and punches on Thursday while touring the research centre where physicists at the frontiers of science are probing the origins of the universe.

Imagine...as you wake later than usual rolling over towards the window, you notice that it's a gorgeous day outside. Warm, yellow sunlight shines in through glass illuminating floating "dust angles." On the other side of the glass, past the oak tree with yellowing leaves, you see a brilliant blue sky. For the first time it occurs to you that a blue sky is a contradiction: the sky at night is devoid of color, so why during the day does the world seem to be shrouded in a blanket of blue? Years previously as a child full of questions you asked your parents, but the answer they offered seemed somehow inadequate at the time...less than magical. And so the question remains...as it does the most of us.The answer is this: The sky isn't actually colored at all (not blue or yellow or red or green). Rather, it's your mind that's colored.

An unusual video of mysterious dark objects moving very quickly and erratically over the skies of Denver, Colo., has local residents buzzing.Fox affiliate KDVR reporter Heidi Hemmat described "an unusual object that appears to launch and land in the metro area." The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had no record of anything unusual in the skies at the time, either visually or on radar.

Ultraprecise portable atomic clocks are on the verge of a breakthrough. An international team lead by scientists from the University of Zurich shows that it may be possible to use the latest generation of atomic clocks to resolve structures within the Earth.

Singapore is taking local farming to the next level, literally, with the opening of its first commercial vertical farm.Entrepreneur Jack Ng says he can produce five times as many vegetables as regular farming looking up instead of out. Half a ton of his Sky Greens bok choy and Chinese cabbages, grown inside 120 slender 30-foot towers, are already finding their way into Singapore's grocery stores.The idea behind vertical farming is simple: Think of skyscrapers with vegetables climbing along the windows. Or a library-sized greenhouse with racks of cascading vegetables instead of books.

What if you could take greenhouse gas and convert it to fuel for an energy-hungry world?"That's currently a 'holy grail' of science," says Utah State University biochemist Lance Seefeldt. "Imagine the far-reaching benefits of capturing environmentally damaging byproducts of burning fossil fuels and using them to make alternative fuels.".

About 25,000 years ago, the Earth was a very different planet. It was deep in the midst of a geological period referred to as the "last glacial maximum," meaning the last time when the planet was so cold that glaciers reached down from the North Pole into North America, Europe and Asia.With so much water frozen solid, the ocean levels were much lower. And that was good news for a huge population of bats who ruled the considerably larger Caribbean islands of that age. While there are still many bats in the Caribbean today, the population 25,000 years ago was a lot richer and more diverse.

Patricia Ann Kramer, professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, has found that the walking gait between two of our early ancestors was likely so different that it's doubtful they would have done so together, despite being two members of the same species living during roughly the same time period. In her paper published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Kramer outlines how she compared the natural walking speeds of modern humans to those of two members of the Australopithecus afarensis species and found that such large differences existed between two members of our early ancestors that walking together would have been troublesome.

The UK bird population has declined by 44 million since 1966, according to a report by conservation groups.The study is the first of its kind to give an overall view of how birds in the UK have fared over the decades.It found that while certain species had increased in number, populations of some common birds had diminished dramatically.The report, "State of the UK's Birds 2012", was compiled from volunteers' observations of birds since the 1960s.

Which Palaeolithic images and artefacts have been described as pornography?The Venus figurines of women, some with exaggerated anatomical features, and ancient rock art, like the image from the Abri Castanet site in France that is supposedly of female genitalia.You take issue with this interpretation. Who is responsible for spreading it, journalists or scientists?People are fascinated by prehistory, and the media want to write stories that attract readers - to use a cliché, sex sells. But when a New York Times headline reads "A Precursor to Playboy: Graphic Images in Rock", and Discover magazine asserts that man's obsession with pornography dates back to "Cro-Magnon days" based on "the famous 26,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf statuette...[with] GG-cup breasts and a hippopotamal butt", I think a line is crossed. To be fair, archaeologists are partially responsible - we need to choose our words carefully.

New Delhi, Nov. 4 -- The beginning of India's history has been pushed back by more than 2,000 years, making it older than that of Egypt and Babylon. Latest research has put the date of the origin of the Indus Valley Civilisation at 6,000 years before Christ, which contests the current theory that the settlements around the Indus began around 3750 BC.Ever since the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the early 1920s, the civilisation was considered almost as old as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The tiny, all-female bdelloid rotifers have endured the past 80 million years without sex. New research shows that gobbling up foreign DNA from other simple life-forms might be the asexual animal's secret to survival.In the study, scientists discovered that up to 10 percent of the active genes in microscopic bdelloids comes from bacteria and other organisms like fungi and algae. The finding adds to "the weirdness of an already odd little creature," said Alan Tunnacliffe, a University of Cambridge professor and lead author of the study.

Tick bites have long been synonymous with bad news, responsible for transmitting diseases such as Lyme disease, Ehrlichiosis, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but this must be a carnivore or BBQ lover's worst nightmare. A growing body of research suggests that bites from a particular tick are causing an unusual allergic reaction to meat. At an allergy meeting last week, for example, a diagnostics lab presented evidence that the highest prevalence of the allergy is in the southeastern United States, where the tick primarily thrives. Yet American BBQ lovers and carnivores elsewhere may not rest easy; the allergy mysteriously afflicts people living in parts of the United States, even Hawaii, where the tick does not live.

Scientists have known for years that human medications, from anti-inflammatories to the hormones in birth-control pills, are ending up in waterways and affecting fish and other aquatic organisms. But researchers are only beginning to compile the many effects that those drugs seem to be having. And it isn't good news for the fish.One such drug, fluoxetine, is the active ingredient in the antidepressant Prozac. Like some other pharmaceuticals, fluoxetine is excreted in the urine of people taking it, and reaches lakes and waterways through sewage-treatment plants that are unequipped to remove it.

It will come as no surprise to proud Merseysiders, but a recent discovery of worked flints and charred timber suggests that when stone age people reached Lunt Meadows, a beautiful site at Sefton, they liked it so much that instead of continuing as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they settled down and built permanent dwellings.Archaeologists are still working on the site, discovered this summer during work for the Environment Agency, but preliminary carbon-dating results suggest that they are almost 8,000 years old, from the Mesolithic period, and come from at least three structures, suggesting family groups living together in a settlement which may have lasted for centuries.

The ancient dwelling was uncovered during an archaeological excavation in a field on the outskirts of Edinburgh.A large oval pit nearly seven metres in length and studded with postholes is all that remains of the dwelling that has been dated to the Mesolithic period, around 10,252 years ago.A survey of the site was being conducted in preparation for the building of the Forth Replacement Crossing in a field in Echline, South Queensferry, just north of Edinburgh.

During a trance-like session of psychography, experienced mediums in Brazil allow themselves to become receptive to spirits or dead souls. Then they write automatically, channeling the voices of those they believe to be speaking to them.As these mediums communicate with the dead, found a new study, parts of their brains involved in language and purposeful activity shut down, alongside other patterns of increased and decreased activity.The findings add to our limited understanding of how the spiritual brain works, though for now, science cannot speak to the existence of the spirit world.

The 16th-Century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is unlikely to have been poisoned, according to a researcher studying his remains. The body was exhumed in 2010 in a bid to confirm the cause of his death.Brahe was thought to have died of a bladder infection, but a previous exhumation found traces of mercury in hair from his beard. However, the most recent tests have found the levels of mercury were not high enough to have killed him.Some have speculated that he was killed on the orders of the Danish king, or by fellow astronomer Johannes Kepler, who also later gained fame.

During routine excavations in Abusir South, 30km north of Giza plateau, Czech excavators from the Czech Institute of Egyptology of the Charles University in Prague, unearthed a collection of fifth dynasty ancient Egyptian statues.Miroslav Barta, the head of the Czech mission told Ahram Online that the statues were found in a hidden tunnel located inside a rock-hewn tomb of Iti, the crew inspector. His tomb is located between two rock-hewn tombs of two fifth dynasty high officials: the overseer of the crew scribe, Nefer, and the chief of justice of the Shepespuptah great house.Although the exploration of the tunnel suggests that it was subjected to looting in antiquity, nine wooden and painted limestone statues were found inside.

A unique project about Henry VIII's warship the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545, is providing information about life in medieval times, thanks to 21st century technology.For the past 18 months the Mary Rose Trust has been working with sports scientists from the College of Engineering at Swansea University to discover more about the lives of the medieval archers on board the ship.When the ship was raised from the Solent in 1982, many thousands of medieval artefacts along with 92 fairly complete skeletons of the crew of the Mary Rose were recovered.

THE ATLANTICIn March of 1903, the Wright brothers applied for a patent, swearing that "they verily believe themselves to be the original, first, and joint inventors of improvements in flying machines." It was granted three years later. But now it's nowhere to be found, according to a recent 60 Minutes report.

A rare Enigma encoding machine has sold at auction in London for £85,250.That is more than its £40,000-£60,000 estimate, but less than the £131,180 price an Enigma sold for last year.The typewriter-like devices were used by the Nazis in World War II to encrypt and decode messages sent between the military and their commanders.

A group of researchers led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has discovered the first scientific evidence of genetic blending between Europeans and Asians in the remains of ancient Scythian warriors living over 2,000 years ago in the Altai region of Mongolia. Contrary to what was believed until now, the results published in PLoS ONE indicate that this blending was not due to an eastward migration of Europeans, but to a demographic expansion of local Central Asian populations, thanks to the technological improvements the Scythian culture brought with them.

Cell phones as thin and flexible as a sheet of paper. Energy-storing house paint. Roll-up touch screen displays. These are the sorts of devices that the engineering industry is preparing for and expecting. But if any of them is to work, said Northeastern University mechanical and industrial engineering professor Yung Joon Jung, experts also need to create a thin and flexible energy-storage system. His lab has developed such a system.

The space between stars is not empty. It contains copious but diffuse amounts of gas and dust; in fact about 5-10% of the total mass of our Milky Way galaxy is in interstellar gas. About 1% of the mass of this interstellar material, quite a lot in astronomical terms, is in the form of tiny dust grains made predominantly of silicates (sand too is made of silicates), though some grains are also composed of carbon and other elements. Dust grains are important.

Making hydrogen gas in water just got a little easier. The discovery may lead to inexpensive, practical means of harvesting sunlight to create clean-burning hydrogen for powering cars or generating electricity.Scientists would like to mimic plant photosynthesis, which harvests sunlight and splits water molecules to create fuel. It sounds simple, but even in plants the task is a highly orchestrated set of reactions, with multiple players acting in multiple places. So researchers often tackle one half of photosynthesis at a time.

CHANGIS-SUR-MARNE, France (Reuters) - French archaeologists have uncovered a rare, near-complete skeleton of a mammoth in the countryside near Paris, alongside tiny fragments of flint tools suggesting the carcass may have been cut into by prehistoric hunters.The archaeologists say that if that hypothesis is confirmed, their find would be the clearest ever evidence of interaction between mammoths and ancient cavemen in this part of Europe."Evidence this clear has never been found before, at least in France," said Gregory Bayle, chief archaeologist at the site.

There's exciting news today for those following the quest to comprehend dark energy -- the mysterious repulsive force that fills the universe, causing its expansion to accelerate. New results from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) -- part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) -- relying on data from quasars have enabled physicists to produce a detailed 3D "map" of the early universe a whopping 11.5 billion years ago.

The United States will leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's biggest producer of oil and gas in the next five years as the controversial practice of "fracking" for hydrocarbons contained in shale rocks has enabled the country to increase production massively, according to an authoritative new report.In a development that will reshape the geopolitical map, US oil and gas production is set to leap by about a quarter by 2020 as the rapid growth of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, propels the country towards providing all its own energy by 2035, according to this year's keenly watched World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency.

Videos stemming from TED, the gathering of the brilliant, famous and influential, passed the billion-view milestone on Tuesday.The number continues to rocket with more than a million TEDTalks watched daily, according to the organization behind the prestigious TED gatherings that give rise to the presentations made available free on the Internet.

The last of the artefacts taken from Machu Picchu by American archaeologist who rediscovered the Inca citadel have been returned to Peru.More than 35,000 pottery fragments and other pieces were flown from Yale University to the Andean city of Cusco.They had been taken to the US by archaeologist Hiram Bingham, who brought the site to international attention in 1911.

Investigators studying footage of a possible UFO seen above a Perthshire forest have come up with a more terrestrial explanation.The strange light was recorded above Clunie Forest near Pitlochry by Adrian Musat on 5 November.He sent the footage to the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) for analysis.

The notion of humanity exploring distant worlds has long been the substance of dreams; from early Renaissance thinkers condemned for their heretical thinking, to fodder for modern day science fiction plots.With humanity's insatiable appetite for knowledge and discovery, it is only natural that armed with enough curiosity we should seek to explore new horizons.

Scientists who study solar weather try to find patterns in the violent, chaotic motion of magnetic field lines above the sun's surface. Though the lines aren't actually visible, their patterns are illuminated by the streams of hot plasma that travel along them. But, while the giant coronal loops that form during major solar storms are easy to pick out, the field lines are generally so tangled up that it's hard to pick any one of them out.

What if someone decided to clean up Nairobi's slums and dispense with what locals call the "flying toilet," a plastic bag of feces thrown into the choked, filthy gutters?And what if that someone worked out a way to use the generated biogas as an inexpensive cooking fuel so that slum dwellers no longer needed to chop down trees for charcoal?.

Between 700,000 and one million species live in the world's oceans, according to a thorough new analysis, which also estimated that between one-third and two-thirds of those species have yet to be named and described.The new numbers are far smaller than previous estimates, which had put the tally of marine species as high as 10 million or more. By coming up with a more accurate picture of what we know and what we don't yet know about marine life, the study should help scientists better focus conservation efforts where they're needed most.

After nearly a century, archaeolgists have finally returned to excavate and conserve the ancient remains of Karkemish (Carchemish), a monumental capital city near the northwestern edge of Mesopotamia that was mentioned in both Biblical and extra-Biblical texts.Here, kings and conquerors of the Mittani, Hittite, and Neo-Assyrian empires established seats of power and here, the Babylonian forces of Nebuchadnezzar II defeated the combined troops of Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt and Assyrian allies at the Battle of Carchemish in 605 B.C.

SHIMAO, China, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- City ruins found in northwest China's Shaanxi province covering more than a thousand acres are the largest ever found dating to neolithic China, scientists say.Archaeologists studying the 4,000-year-old Shimao Ruins in Shenmu County measured the exact size of the ancient stone city, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Monday.

With the aid of a 3-D printer, researchers have fashioned soft, quarter-inch-long biological robots out of gel-like material and rat heart cells. When the cells beat, the bio-bots take a step.The robots resemble tiny springboards, each with one long, thin leg resting on a stout supporting leg. The thin leg is covered in the heart cells. When the cells beat, the long leg pulses, propelling the bio-bot forward, according to the research team from the University of Illinois.

Neanderthals, or even older Homo erectus("Upright Man") might have sailed around the Mediterranean, stopping at islands such as Crete and Cyprus, new evidence suggests.The evidence suggests that these hominid species had considerable seafaring and cognitive skills."They had to have had boats of some sort; unlikely they swam," said Alan Simmons, lead author of a study about the find in this week's Science. "Many of the islands had no land-bridges, thus they must have had the cognitive ability to both build boats and know how to navigate them.".

Citing fears that doomsday believers, curiosity seekers, and "above all" journalists, will flood a French mountaintop on Dec. 21, the supposed day of the Mayan apocalypse, local officials are banning access to the mountain.The spot, Pic de Bugarach, is rumored to be one of the only safe places on the planet on Dec. 21, according to Raw Story. On that date, a major cycle of the Maya Long Count calendar ends. The calendar is split into several chunks, including 400-year spans called b'ak'tuns. Dec. 21, 2012 on our calendar marks the end of the 13th b'ak'tun and the beginning of a new cycle.

For most people, witnessing a yawn -- or even thinking about yawning -- creates an irresistible urge to yawn, too. And contagious yawning, it turns out, is yet another feature we share in common with many species of primates.To investigate hypotheses about the cause of the phenomenon, Italian researchers looked at a group of 12 captive bonobos, which are highly social animals that cultivate strong relationships. Recent research also found that bonobo brains are relatively well developed in an area that detects distress in themselves and in others.

They do it for coal-burning power plants. So how about something for what many consider to be a walking smokestack -- the cigarette smoker?Yes, a license to smoke. Simon Chapman, a professor of public health at the University of Sydney in Australia, offers this radical proposal to help reduce the damaging health effects of tobacco, both for the user and the recipient of second-hand smoke.

Lakota warrior Crazy Horse has long been a controversial figure, so perhaps it's only appropriate that his memorial follow suit.Though he's best known for fighting against George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse led his tribe numerous times against settlers and miners in the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming and elsewhere before his 1877 death at Nebraska's Fort Robinson.But forget his disputed role in that battle or the claims that he's never been photographed or the conflicting tales of how he met his end -- the real mystery is more contemporary: When is the sculpture in his honor going to be complete?.

Anthropologist Alan Simmons of the University of Nevada has published a perspective piece in the journal Science suggesting that the Mediterranean islands were inhabited far earlier than has been thought. Rather than the first inhabitation of such islands as Cypress and Crete occurring roughly 9,000 years ago, he suggests it might have been as many as 170,000.

Israeli paleographer Ada Yardeni has recently identified 50 Dead Sea scrolls found near Qumran in Israel as having been penned by the same scribe, a scribe who also penned scrolls that have been found at the Herodian mountain-top fortress of Masada, where Jewish rebel zealots made their last suicidal stand against the Romans in 73 A.D.

We know that there's more than enough wind energy out there to power our entire civilization, but conventional wind turbines don't do that great of a job of harnessing it. They're expensive and inefficient, and we're looking for better technologies, one of which is a super efficient wind turbine that doesn't need blades.It looks like some sort of flat satellite dish-thing, but this is Saphon Energy's wind non-turbine, the Saphonian. It doesn't have blades, and nothing on it spins: it just sits there, pointing into the wind, and captures energy. The design is based on sails, the kind that pull boats around, which are very efficient (and have been for thousands of years) at turning wind energy into usable mechanical energy.

A great offshoot from commercial space companies getting a foothold in real missions to orbit is that the old entrepreneurial space spirit seems to have been revived. People are attempting to develop and build what could be breakout space technologies, sometimes in their garages or basements.A new Kickstarter project is especially exciting, as it is looking to build a prototype electric pulsed plasma jet thruster, and the engineers behind the project say this could be used for reliable, high performance, low cost interplanetary space transportation.

Come rain or shine, or even snow, some glaciers of the Himalayas will continue shrinking for many years to come.The forecast by Brigham Young University geology professor Summer Rupper comes after her research on Bhutan, a region in the bull's-eye of the monsoonal Himalayas. Published in Geophysical Research Letters, Rupper's most conservative findings indicate that even if climate remained steady, almost 10 percent of Bhutan's glaciers would vanish within the next few decades. What's more, the amount of melt water coming off these glaciers could drop by 30 percent.

Need a Zen break from obsessively checking the polls every 20 minutes? Maybe you should fly over an updated and ultra-detailed view of the Martian landscape in Google Mars looking for incredible formations.Google Mars has been available since 2009 as part of the free downloadable Google Earth. It allows viewers to zoom around the Red Planet in much higher resolution than the simpler browser version and will even render certain locations in 3-D. You can reach it by clicking the little orange Saturn-shaped button at the top of the screen in Google Earth.

UK researchers have unearthed a new argument in the yes-but-no-but-yes scientific debate about Martian water, saying that meteorite samples suggest water on the red planet was once warm enough for life.In research published in Earth an Planetary Science Letters (abstract here), Dr John Bridges (Leicester University) and Dr Susanne Schwenzer (Open University) say structures found in a group of meteorites of Martian origin called nakhlites.

Murdoch University DNA scientists have used 30,000-year-old faecal matter known as middens to ascertain which plants and animals existed at that time in the hot, arid Pilbara region of North Western Australia.To date, this is the oldest environmental sample from which DNA has been obtained in Australia. It had previously been considered unrealistic to extract DNA from hot, arid zone samples due to the extreme heat.

At 9pm last night, with a knock on the door of a 19-year-old man, Kent police hammered another nail into the coffin of free expression in the UK. Earlier in the day the unnamed man from Aylesham had allegedly posted a photo of a poppy being burned, with a crudely worded (and crudely spelled) caption. He was arrested under the Malicious Communications Act and held in the cells overnight to await questioning.It is of course just the latest in a succession of police actions against individuals deemed to have caused offence: mocking a footballer as he fights for his life on Twitter; hoping British service personnel would "die and go to hell"; wearing a T-shirt that celebrated the death of two police officers; making sick jokes on Facebook about a missing child, the list goes on.

State lawmakers across New England are preparing legislation to legalize marijuana for recreational use, building on recent victories for the movement in Colorado and Washington last week.The Marijuana Policy Project announced Wednesday that state legislators in Rhode Island and Maine, where medical marijuana has already been legalized, are set to announce bills in their respective states that would pave a path for broader legalization of the substance.

The historian Herbert Butterfield once dismissed writers on alchemy as being "tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe". There is no danger of that slur being cast at Lawrence Principe for his new book, The Secrets of Alchemy.A historian of science and practising chemist, Principe provides a dazzling account of how scholarly opinion on the relationship between alchemy and chemistry has transformed in the last four decades. In the process he brings chemical knowledge and historical detective work to a subject that has too readily been dismissed as fraudulent nonsense.

Drinking one or two glasses of wine a week during pregnancy can influence a child's IQ, a new study led by Oxford and Bristol university researchers suggests.Lead researcher Dr Ron Gray from the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford said: 'This is a complex study but the message is simple: even moderate amounts of alcohol during pregnancy can have an effect on future child intelligence. So women have good reason to choose to avoid alcohol when pregnant.' .

CARTI SUGDUB, Panama, Nov 1 (Reuters) - Every rainy season, the Guna people living on the Panamanian white sand archipelago of San Blas brace themselves for waves gushing into their tiny mud-floor huts.Rising ocean levels caused by global warming and decades of coral reef destruction have combined with seasonal rains to submerge the Caribbean islands for days on end.Once rare, flooding is now so menacing that the Guna have agreed to abandon ancestral lands for an area within their semi-autonomous territory on the east coast of the mainland.

PROOFS are the currency of mathematics, but Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the all-time great mathematicians, often managed to skip them. Now a proof has been found for a connection that he seemed to mysteriously intuit between two types of mathematical function.The proof deepens the intrigue surrounding the workings of Ramanujan's enigmatic mind. It may also help physicists learn more about black holes - even though these objects were virtually unknown during the Indian mathematician's lifetime.

It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay.Laundry is strung outside the house. The water comes from a well in a yard, overgrown with weeds. Only two police officers and Manuela, a three-legged dog, keep watch outside.This is the residence of the president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, whose lifestyle clearly differs sharply from that of most other world leaders.

Few archaeological sites seem as entwined with conflict, ancient and modern, as the city of Karkemish.The scene of a battle mentioned in the Bible, it lies smack on the border between Turkey and Syria, where civil war rages today. Twenty-first century Turkish sentries occupy an acropolis dating back more than 5,000 years, and the ruins were recently demined. Visible from crumbling, earthen ramparts, a Syrian rebel flag flies in a town that regime forces fled just months ago.

One young star may yank another's developing solar system, a new theory suggests, accounting for planets that circle their stars on tilted paths. This idea may also explain a long-standing puzzle close to home: why Earth's orbit is tipped 7° 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. To explain the odd find, theorists proposed that the planet formed far from its star but then migrated closer, spiraling through the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust that once swirled around its sun. During this so-called disk migration, the planet remained in the disk, and so the tilt of its orbit matched that of its star.

SINCE India began its nuclear programme in the 1950s, it has aimed to tap the ample thorium reserves that lie within its borders. Construction is finally set to begin on a reactor that will produce electricity from India's most convenient fuel for the first time. But with a checkered past on the subject, the country's promises of a new dawn for nuclear rest on shaky ground.

Walking through Tsuchiyu's near-deserted streets on a rainy weekday afternoon, it's hard to imagine that this spa town of 450 could become a standard-bearer in Japan's quest to wean itself off nuclear power.Until recently, onsen (hot spring) operators were vocal opponents of geothermal power, which, along with other forms of renewable energy, is being considered as a serious alternative to nuclear power: Geothermal plants, they had once feared, would affect the level and quality of water that draws millions of Japanese to onsen resorts every year.

According to a commonly used model of drought patterns, researchers had previously assumed that higher global temperatures were causing greater evaporation of water, and therefore more droughts.But a more detailed analysis of weather data, including wind speed, humidity and radiation levels, found that in fact there has been "little change" in drought over the past 60 years.