Newsdesk Archive

So-called "cold springs" in Canada's high arctic may be similar to active springs that could potentially exist on Mars, scientists studying the springs suggest.Researchers probed the makeup of several salt-laden pools in the arctic permafrost, similar to salt environments that spacecraft orbiting Mars have spotted on the Red Planet. The arctic pools contain microbial life, and could give primitive life a haven if they exist on Mars, researchers say.

OSLO (Reuters) - Valuable mangrove forests that protect coastlines, sustain sealife and help slow climate change are being wrecked by the spread of shrimp and fish farms, a U.N.-backed study showed on Wednesday.About a fifth of mangroves worldwide have been lost since 1980, mostly because of clearance to make way for the farms which often get choked with waste, antibiotics and fertilizers, according to the study.Intact mangroves were almost always more valuable than shrimp farms, said its authors, who drew on forestry and conservation expertise from several U.N. organizations.

A new study has found that participating in an 8-week meditation training program can have measurable effects on how the brain functions even when someone is not actively meditating. In their report in the November issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston University (BU), and several other research centers also found differences in those effects based on the specific type of meditation practiced.

Can our bodies predict future events that matter to us, even if we're unaware of it? Some evidence suggests they can. The basic scientific observation is that human physiology differs between two situations: just before an unpredictable exciting/scary event happens (like seeing a picture of a snake about to strike) versus just before a boring event happens (like seeing a picture of a lamp). This phenomenon is sometimes called presentiment (as in "sensing the future"), but because I'm not entirely sure we're really sensing the future, I like to call the phenomenon anomalous anticipatory activity (AAA; imagine the motor club, but the complimentary roadmaps could be maps of the future).

The top two spots on the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers have both been captured by the US.The last time the country was in a similar position was three years ago.The fastest machine - Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee - is an upgrade of Jaguar, the system which held the top spot in 2009.

A new fossil discovery has helped quell 150 years of debate over the origin of great white sharks.Carcharodon hubbelli, which has been described by US scientists, shows intermediate features between the present-day predators and smaller, prehistoric mako sharks.The find supports the theory that great white sharks did not evolve from huge megatooth sharks.The research is published this week in the journal Palaeontology.

Grasshoppers that live in noisy urban environments are having to change their song, a study has found.Researchers suggest that high levels of background noise may affect the grasshoppers' mating process.They say the insects are forced to increase the volume of the low-frequency sections of their call.Results of the study, by scientists from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, are published in the journal Functional Ecology.

At a rock shelter on a coastal cliff in South Africa, scientists have found an abundance of advanced stone hunting tools with a tale to tell of the evolving mind of early modern humans at least 71,000 years ago.The discovery, reported in the current issue of the journal Nature, lends weight to the hypothesis that not only did anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerge in Africa but also, to a previously unsuspected extent, their cognitive capacity for abstract and creative thought and the conception of increasingly complex technologies associated with modern human behavior.

Before the Conrad Hotel overlooking the Nile Corniche, where an exact replica tomb of the ancient Egyptian mysterious king Tutankhamun is located, thousand of journalists, TV cameras and photographers gathered to witness on Tuesday the unveiling of the tomb by European Commission Vice President Catherine Ashton and the Minister of Tourism Hisham Zaazou.The tomb was immediately opened to public after its official inauguration within the framework of the two-day-long EU Task Force Conference on Tourism and Flexible Investments.

There is more movement in the universe than astronomers can explain. The galaxies are spinning more quickly than expected, while space itself is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, which is something astronomers thought was simply impossible until they discovered it in the mid-90s.Clearly, something is missing from our knowledge of the cosmos. Rather than tinker with the gravitational theories of Newton and Einstein to cause more movement from the matter that we know exists, most astronomers prefer to believe that the universe is made up predominantly of invisible matter and energy.

The atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan is often viewed as an analog to what the Earth's atmosphere may have been like billions of years ago. Despite the 800 million miles between the two worlds, both may have had their atmospheres created through the gravitational layering and processing of asteroids and comets."We see Titan as a natural oasis of remarkable astrobiological significance to understand the environment in which origin of life took place on Earth," said Josep M. Trigo-Rodriguez, of the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC) in Barcelona, Spain.. "It seems that a plausible scenario to build life consists of a dense atmosphere, where small particles like organic haze and meteoric metals could act as catalysts for the formation of more complex organic compounds from simple precursors such as carbon monoxide and methane, thus promoting increasing complexity."

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have detected one of the rarest particle decays seen in nature.The finding deals a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry.Many researchers had hoped the LHC would have confirmed this by now.Supersymmetry, or Susy, has gained popularity as a way to explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of subatomic physics known as the Standard Model.

SO WE'VE finally found it. Or have we? Four months on, the identity of the particle snared at the Large Hadron Collider remains unclear.It may indeed be the much-vaunted Higgs boson. Or it might not. Finding out will require a welter of tests hard to do in the messy environment of the LHC's proton collisions.

The simplicity of modern life is making us more stupid, according to a scientific theory which claims humanity may have reached its intellectual and emotional peak as early as 4,000 BC.Intelligence and the capacity for abstract thought evolved in our prehistoric ancestors living in Africa between 50,000 and 500,000 years ago, who relied on their wits to build shelters and hunt prey.But in more civilised times where we no longer need to fight to survive, the selection process which favoured the smartest of our ancestors and weeded out the dullards is no longer in force.

Cairo (CNN) -- I took a long stroll through the cavernous Egyptian Museum, just off Tahrir Square, this month.It was the first time I went though the museum without breathless Egyptologists yanking me around, impatient children or a looming deadline.The place was packed, not with tourists, but mostly with Egyptian schoolchildren. They were led around by amazingly patient guides explaining the most minute of details about every little bit and piece on display.

The coldest of cold cases may have emerged from the bottom of a Stone-Age well in Israel as archaeologists uncovered two 8,500-year-old human skeletons deep inside the structure.Belonging to a woman aged about 19 and an older man between 30 and 40, the skeletal remains were found in a 26-foot-deep well in the Jezreel Valley in Israel's Galilee region.With the upper part built of stones and the lower hewn in the bedrock, the impressive well was connected to a Neolithic farming settlement.

Bad news dragon riders: Your dragon can't take off.A new analysis of the largest of pterodactyls suggests they were too big and their muscles too weak to vault into the air and fly. Instead, they were right at the upper limit of animal flight and needed a hill or stiff breeze so they could soar like hang gliders.The new analysis was done on the enormous pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus from Late Cretaceous rocks of Big Bend, Texas. Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan of about 35 feet (10.6 meters), or about the wingspan of a F-16 fighter. It was among the last pterodactyls to look down on dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Our ancestors began eating grass half a million years earlier than thought, soon after they started leaving the trees. Early hominins, living 3 to 3.5 million years ago, got over half their nutrition from grasses, unlike their predecessors, who preferred fruit and insects.This is the earliest evidence of eating savannah plants, says Julia Lee-Thorp at the University of Oxford. She found high levels of carbon-13 in the bones of Australopithecus bahrelghazali, which lived on savannahs near Lake Chad in Africa. This is typical of animals that eat a lot of grasses and sedges.

Internet searches may reveal when allergy suffering in the United States is at its worst, a new study suggests.The results show searches for allergy symptoms such as "sneezing" and "itchy nose," peak during the second week in May.This may be because allergy sufferers are experiencing both spring and summer allergy symptoms during this time, said study researcher Dr. Leonard Bielory, an allergist in New Jersey.

Children from wealthy families may more likely to have peanut allergies than those less well-off, a new study finds.In the study, children ages 1 to 9 from high-income families had higher rates of peanut allergies compared with children these ages from lower income families.The researchers analyzed information from 8,306 children and adultswhose blood samples were taken as part of a national health survey in 2005 to 2006. About 9 percent of participants had an elevated levels of antibodies to peanuts, indicating they had the potential to be allergic to peanuts.

Scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) published a study today in Nature Climate Change showing that besides marine inundation (flooding), low-lying coastal areas may also be vulnerable to "groundwater inundation," a factor largely unrecognized in earlier predictions on the effects of sea level rise (SLR).

On Thursday, space.com reported that Nasa could soon unveil ambitious plans for a return to the Moon. The mission would not be to the surface but to a gravitational sweet spot behind the Moon that offers free parking for spacecraft.Known as a Lagrangian point, such balance points occur naturally because of the interplay of Earth's gravitational field with the Moon's. To send a mission there would allow Nasa to test its Orion Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle in deep space before committing it to longer missions, such as Obama's plan to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025.

Nasa is likely to announce new plans to send astronauts back to the moon following the outcome of the US presidential race, according to reports.Space policy expert John Logsdon, claims that such plans were kept under wraps in case Mitt Romney, who lost to the incumbent Barack Obama, won earlier this week.In an interview with space.com, Logsdon claimed Nasa intends to establish a manned outpost on the Moon with a view to visit an asteroid in 2025.

The discovery of a skeleton found with metal spikes through its shoulders, heart and ankles, dating from 550-700AD and buried in the ancient minster town of Southwell, Notts, is detailed in a new report.It is believed to be a 'deviant burial', where people considered the 'dangerous dead', such as vampires, were interred to prevent them rising from their graves to plague the living.

The mystery of the expansion of sea ice around Antarctica, at the same time as global warming is melting swaths of Arctic sea ice, has been solved using data from US military satellites.Two decades of measurements show that changing wind patterns around Antarctica have caused a small increase in sea ice, the result of cold winds off the continent blowing ice away from the coastline."Until now these changes in ice drift were only speculated upon using computer models," said Paul Holland at the British Antarctic Survey. "Our study of direct satellite observations shows the complexity of climate change.

On an unseasonably hot morning this fall, my 11-year-old son and I set off for Hoover Dam, his first time to tour the American engineering wonder that draws nearly 1 million visitors a year.In recent years, I'd visited the dam and adjacent reservoir, Lake Mead, as a journalist who reports on water. But I hadn't been there as a tourist since my own childhood. I looked forward to hearing how the dam's minder, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, would tell such a big story to such a big audience.

Rising carbon dioxide levels at the edge of space are apparently reducing the pull that Earth's atmosphere has on satellites and space junk, researchers say.The findings suggest that manmade increases in carbon dioxide might be having effects on the Earth that are larger than expected, scientists added.In the layers of atmosphere closest to Earth, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat from the sun. Rising levels of carbon dioxide due to human activity are leading to global warming of Earth's surface.

The announcement of the discovery of exoplanet Alpha Centauri Bb on Oct. 16 is a testimony to how far planetary detection techniques have come over the last few decades.It brings the total of confirmed exoplanets -- or "extra-solar planets" -- to a staggering 825. However, the search for planets in our own solar system has subsided since the pioneering days at the end of the 18th century with the discovery of Uranus and almost one hundred years later with the identification of Neptune. The idea of another planet, dubbed 'Planet X,' inspired astronomers to keep searching for yet another 100 years in a hunt that was full of twists and turns.

Something is buzzing around the sky in Denver. It has been captured by at least two videographers and has at least one aviation expert baffled.According to a FOX TV affiliate, KDVR, a Denver man, wishing to remain anonymous, gave the television station home video that, he claimed, showed unidentified flying objects quickly zig-zagging and maneuvering in the sky over a populated section of the mile-high city.The man told the station that the UFOs have been appearing several times a week, generally between noon and 1 p.m., and launching and landing somewhere in the Denver metro area.

An old nuclear technology is getting another look, and it could clean, emission-free electricity, while at the same solving the problem of nuclear waste. It's called a molten salt reactor, and it's an idea that dates to the late 1950s. A start-up called Transatomic Power, based in Cambridge, Mass., is working on a newer version that uses nuclear waste as fuel. Transatomic's founders are Russ Wilcox, formerly the CEO of E-Ink, and Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, two MIT students.

Male alcoholics appear to have a great deal of difficulty recognizing emotions in verbal language, a small European study suggests. The researchers also found that the men have a weakened ability to show empathy.Because empathy plays a key role in interpersonal relationships, an empathy deficit might explain part of the wider relationship problems commonly seen in alcoholics, said study author Simona Amenta, a psychology researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

"Marauding pack of booze-addled elephants wreak havoc on Indian village." It's a story, or at least a headline, that's surprisingly common.A few representative samples from the news reports on the latest incident: "Herd of Elephants Go on Drunken Rampage After Mammoth Booze Up," and, of course, "Trunk and Disorderly!" .

Earth's magnetic field reversed extremely rapidly soon after modern humans first arrived in Europe, completely flip-flopping in less than a thousand years, new research suggests.These findings, detailed Oct. 15 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, could shed light on how and why magnetic field reversals happen, and how they leave Earth vulnerable to solar and space radiation, the study scientists said.

Massive waves of energetic particles pose a serious hazard to astronauts in space. To help understand the radiation around Earth, the moon and Mars, a team of scientists has developed a program to characterize the dangerous particles in near-real time.Known as PREDICCS, the program relies on measurements taken by a wide variety of space-based telescopes to characterize radiation at regions in the solar system likely to be frequented by astronauts in the not-too-distant future.

Martin Reinhardt is taking the "eat local" movement to a whole new level that is rooted in history. In an effort to closely replicate his Native American ancestors' way of life prior to colonization, he and a diverse group of volunteers are adhering to a diet consisting of foods indigenous to the Great Lakes region and a complementary exercise regimen They are more than halfway through the one-year Decolonizing Diet Project (DDP). Recognizing that others might be curious to try it, but unable to commit for an extended period, Reinhardt invites the general public to follow the list of DDP-eligible foods for one week, Nov. 2-9.

Al Qaeda-linked rebels in northern Mali destroyed historic and religious landmarks in Timbuktu on Thursday, claiming the relics are idolatrous, residents told CNN.Three four-wheel-drive trucks carrying at least 30 armed fighters arrived Thursday morning at three mausolea -- all U.N. World Heritage sites -- in the southern Timbuktu neighborhood of Kabara, two residents told CNN by phone.

It lurks just inches below the surface coiled and ready to strike - and yet you wouldn't know it was there.These remarkable images show the enormous 26-foot (eight metre) anacondas of Mato Grosso in Brazil searching for prey in the murky depths.They were captured by brave diver and snake enthusiast Franco Banfi, 53, who joined the beasts in their natural habitat armed only with a camera. In another shot, Banfi gets up close to a huge anaconda that is lying on the riverbank and glistening in the ferocious tropical heat.

There are lots of organisms that don't have a brain, but can still communicate. Bacteria coordinate their growth, plants signal distress and lure insects in with scents and coloring. Now, researchers have listened in on some of the communication going on in a coral reef, and found that the organisms are saying the equivalent of things like "help me!" and "die!" Finding Nemo, this isn't.At the root of these communications is a competition between corals and an algae called Chlorodesmis fastigiata. In the wild, the algae can start growing on reefs, where it is able to send a simple message to nearby coral: die.

Scientists have pinpointed a new treasure trove in our oceans: micro-organisms that contain millions of previously unknown genes and thousands of new families of proteins.These tiny marine wonders offer a chance to exploit a vast pool of material that could be used to create innovative medicines, industrial solvents, chemical treatments and other processes, scientists say. Researchers have already created new enzymes for treating sewage and chemicals for making soaps from material they have found in ocean organisms.

Software that can translate spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly has been demonstrated by Microsoft.The software preserves intonation and cadence so the translated speech still sounds like the original speaker.Microsoft said research breakthroughs had reduced the number of errors made by the instant translation system.It said it modelled the system on the way brains work to improve its accuracy.

Archaeologists discovered an Egyptian scarab dated to the 10th century B.C.E. during ongoing excavations in the Ophel area just south of the Jewish Temple Mount (or Islamic Haram-Ash Sharif).Under the direction of Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University, a team of Israeli archaeologists, along with a group of archaeologists, students and volunteers from the Herbert W. Armstrong College in the U.S., uncovered the small but telling artifact, shedding additional light on ancient Jerusalem and the Ophel, an area adjacent to the Temple Mount that was central during the Judahite kingships described in the Biblical accounts.

The first functional "cloaking" device reported by Duke University electrical engineers in 2006 worked like a charm, but it wasn't perfect. Now a member of that laboratory has developed a new design that ties up one of the major loose ends from the original device.These new findings could be important in transforming how light or other waves can be controlled or transmitted. Just as traditional wires gave way to fiber optics, the new meta-material could revolutionize the transmission of light and waves.Because the goal of this type of research involves taming light, a new field of transformational optics has emerged.

Prof Cox, who hosts the show with comedian Dara O'Briain, said he had hoped to point the Jodrell Bank telescope at the planet Threapleton Holmes B after it was discovered live on air last year and listen for signs of life.But he claimed he was prevented from doing so because the Corporation was concerned that a discovery of aliens could violate BBC regulations.

Drops of gel full of a protein mix can move themselves, mimicking a key feature of lifeMovie Camera. The mobile drops could one day have medical uses, and might help untangle the laws that govern how patterns emerge from chaos.The drops are made from a special gel containing ingredients extracted from real cells: nano-sized protein tubes from cow brains and motor proteinsMovie Camera from bacteria. The motor proteins can "walk" along the tubes at a rate of about 8 nanometres per step, feeding on adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the same energy source they use in living bodies.

Millions of GM insects developed by British scientists could be released into food crop fields without proper safety checks, it is claimed.The British company Oxitec is working on genetically modified insects that are designed to kill off pests that feed on crops such as cabbages, broccoli, tomatoes and fruit.The firm insists the technology is a green alternative to the use of chemical sprays, which have their own dangers for human health and the countryside.It accused critics of scaremongering and said there is zero chance of its insects being used on farms without thorough checks on all aspects of their safety.

Ash dieback is already present in 115 sites around Britain and expected to spread further.Professor Ian Boyd, Chief Scientist at the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs, said ash dieback will gradually kill off the native common ash over many, many years.

Bad news dragon riders: Your dragon can't take off.A new analysis of the largest of pterodactyls suggests they were too big and their muscles too weak to vault into the air and fly. Instead, they were right at the upper limit of animal flight and needed a hill or stiff breeze so they could soar like hang gliders.

Our famous ancestor Lucy may have had difficulty keeping up with other members of her species, new research reveals.Comparisons of the well-known Australopithecus afarensis specimen with fossilised remains of a male of the same species found nearby have shown she may have walked much slower than him.The results have raised new questions about the lives of early hominids, particularly about how the different sexes travelled and worked together when they may have had vastly different walking speeds.

Bulgarian archaeologists have discovered bracelets with snake heads, a tiara with animal motifs and a horse-head piece in a hoard of ancient golden artefacts unearthed during excavations at a Thracian tomb in the north of country.The artefacts have been dated to the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third century BC. They were found in the biggest of 150 ancient tombs of the Getae people, a Thracian tribe that was in contact with the Hellenistic world. The hoard also yielded a golden ring, 44 female figure depictions and 100 golden buttons.

An unsuspecting worker ant in Brazil's rainforest leaves its nest one morning. But instead of following the well-worn treetop paths of its nest mates, this ant stumbles along clumsily, walking in aimless circles, convulsing from time to time.At high noon, as if programmed, the ant plunges its mandibles into the juicy main vein of a leaf and soon dies. Within days the stem of a fungus sprouts from the dead ant's head. After growing a stalk, the fungus casts spores to the ground below, where they can be picked up by other passing ants.

Autistic children may learn better from robots than from human teachers, according to evidence emerging from a trial at a school in Birmingham.Two humanoid robots, Max and Ben, have been helping teach children with autism at Topcliffe Primary since March.The school is the first in the UK to try the technology.

The interplanetary internet has been used by an astronaut at the International Space Station (ISS) to send commands to a robot on Earth.The experimental technology, called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol, could be a future way to communicate with astronauts on Mars.Currently, if there is a problem when data is sent between Earth and Mars rovers, information can be lost.

Climate change could severely reduce the areas suitable for wild Arabica coffee before the end of the century.That is the conclusion of work by a UK-Ethiopian team published in the academic journal Plos One.It supports predictions that a changing climate could damage global production of coffee - the world's second most traded commodity after oil.Wild Arabica is important for the sustainability of the coffee industry because of its genetic diversity.

You might think that finding a planet orbiting a distant star would simply require a bigger telescope -- after all, bigger telescopes reveal fainter and finer details. So why not build a really, really big 'scope and you can chalk up dozens of exoplanetary discoveries! Right? Not quite.Detecting these alien worlds is made difficult because of their close proximity to bright stars, making them incredibly challenging to see directly. Also, if the exoplanet is located far enough away from its host star, the meager light it reflects would be too faint for even the biggest optical telescope. It is for these reasons that increasingly ingenious indirect techniques of detection are being relied upon. Only 7 percent of exoplanets discovered so far have been observed directly.

The Royal Society, along with the Academy of Medical Sciences, British Academy, and Royal Academy of Engineering, recently concluded a workshop called Human Enhancement and the Future of Work in which they considered the growing impact and potential risks of augmentation technologies.In their final report, the collaborative team of scientists and ethicists raised serious concerns about the burgeoning trend, and how humanity is moving from a model of therapy to one in which human capacities are greatly improved. The implications, they concluded, should be part of a much wider public discussion.

Meth kills brain cells, fuels tooth decay, loads the body with toxins and weakens the heart, muscles and immune system. But the otherwise body-wrecking drug may also have flu-fighting properties, new research suggests.A group of scientists from the National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan set out to study how methamphetamine interacts with influenza A virus in lung cells. Previous research has suggested that chronic meth abuse makes individuals more susceptible to pathogens such as HIV. The team wanted to investigate how the drug might reduce users' resistance to flu viruses.

Paying attention to dreams can provide insights into mental health problems and may help with their treatment, according to forthcoming study in the International Journal of Jungian Studies.As the name of that journal suggests, the theory goes back to the work of psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung. In the early 1900s, he proposed that many images in dreams stem from the human collective unconscious. He believed that dream symbols carried meaning about a patient's emotional state that could improve understanding of the individual and also aid in their treatment.

Patterns of activity on Wikipedia can predict the opening box office takings of blockbuster movies a month before they are released, according to scientists.Taha Yasseri, a physicist at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, has created a mathematical model that takes into account data such as the number of readers and editors for the Wikipedia page of an upcoming movie and shown that it correlates with takings on the film's opening weekend.

In the wake of superstorm Sandy, climate change is on a lot of people's radar. By some accounts, warmer ocean temperatures intensified the hurricane as it plowed up the Gulf Stream, and rising seas may have exacerbated flooding.Now, a new climate-change study in the journal Science says warming is here to stay. And future warming will likely be on the high side of predictions, the researchers conclude.

When one kind of coral is under attack from killer seaweed, it sends chemical signals to little fish "bodyguards" that come to its rescue and handily take care of the problem, new research shows.In their experiments, a group of scientists exposed sets of a rapidly growing coral from around Fiji (Acropora nasuta), to filaments of the seaweed species Chlorodesmis fastigiata, which is chemically toxic to corals. Some corals in the study were occupied by one-inch fish called gobies, which, within minutes, would begin neatly biting away at the offending seaweed.

Clownfish, the orange-, black- and white-striped fish made famous in the movie "Finding Nemo," are a gossipy bunch, popping and clicking amid their anemone homes to defend and reinforce their social status, according to new research.Unlike the 360 other species of territorial marine fish in the Pomacentridae family, clownfish don't make a peep when mating. Researchers wondering why clownfish would bother to make noise in other circumstances discovered that their chatter helps maintain the rank and file among group members.

People who have lived in the dark from birth have now found they don't need their eyes to see. A new device developed by Amir Amedi from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and colleagues is giving congenitally blind adults the ability to interpret visual information from sound.In this video, you can watch people listen to sounds that illustrate an object or a facial expression, then describe what they are "seeing". The system can also be used to read by assigning sounds to letters.

A 300-year-old, leather-bound instruction manual contains some of the earliest examples of attempts to teach the deaf to communicate.The manual belonged to Alexander Popham, a deaf teenager from a noble English family who was taught to speak in the 1660s. The leather-bound notebook was discovered in 2008 at a stately English manor called Littlecote House.

In recent years, physicists have amused themselves by calculating the properties of quantum machines, such as engines and refrigerators.The essential question is how well these devices work when they exploit the rules of quantum mechanics rather than classical mechanics. The answers have given physicists important new insights into the link between quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.The dream is that they may one day build such devices or exploit those already used by nature.

Paleontologists in Canada have discovered fossils of a new 2-ton, 20-foot-long horned dinosaur that roamed the Earth about 80 million years ago. And its headgear would've put on quite a show for the ladies.The dinosaur, a distant cousin of Triceratops called Xenoceratops foremostensis, is one of the oldest specimens known to date of the ceratopsid group. The beast's name, Xenoceratops, translates to "alien horned-face," referring to its strange pattern of horns on its head and above its brow, and the rarity of such horned dinosaurs in this part of the fossil record.

Thick-skinned crocodilians are actually more sensitive to touch than humans, according to scientists.US researchers investigated the dome-shaped dots along the jaws of alligators and crocodiles.They discovered the bumps were made of specialised cells and were more sensitive than human fingertips.The neuroscientists suggest the sensitive spots play a major part in the aquatic reptiles' impressive reaction times when hunting.

New research has uncovered how saber-toothed cats and bear dogs managed to cohabitate peacefully more than nine million years ago.A team of paleontologists from the University of Michigan and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Spain took tooth enamel samples from two species of sabre-toothed cats and one species of bear dog that had been unearthed at sites near Madrid.

The suave and sensitive Edward Cullen of "Twilight" may be the norm for vampires these days, but fictional monsters such as Dracula originally sprang from the fear of inexplicable diseases and the mysteries of death in the natural world.So argues science journalist Matt Kaplan in "Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters," an examination of monsters around the world and throughout history - the science behind their origins, and why they matter to us even now.

A long-abandoned fermentation process once used to turn starch into explosives can be used to produce renewable diesel fuel to replace the fossil fuels now used in transportation, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have discovered.Campus chemists and chemical engineers teamed up to produce diesel fuel from the products of a bacterial fermentation discovered nearly 100 years ago by the first president of Israel, chemist Chaim Weizmann. The retooled process produces a mix of products that contain more energy per gallon than ethanol that is used today in transportation fuels and could be commercialized within 5-10 years.

Researchers have discovered which bacteria species are most commonly found in our bellybuttons, but have still not discovered what governs which species will be found on which people. These are the first published findings of the Belly Button Biodiversity project led by NC State's Dr. Rob Dunn.The researchers swabbed the belly buttons of 66 study participants, and then processed the samples using high-throughput genetic sequencing to identify each of the phylotypes present in a sample and how prevalent each phylotype was.

The Army troops deployed along the China border from Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh in northeast have reported more than 100 sightings of "Unidentified Flying Objects" (UFOs) in the last three months.Agencies including the Army, DRDO, NTRO and the ITBP have not yet been able to identify these luminous flying objects.

As the U.S. consumed itself in campaigns and ballots, scientists using NASA's 70-meter wide Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., released images of something that should put all of our Earthly politics into perspective.Over three days, Goldstone "pinged" a 1.6-kilometer (1-mile) wide asteroid that approached our planet from Oct. 28 to Oct. 30. The huge space rock, called 2007 PA8, was 9 million kilometers (5.6 million miles) from Earth on Oct. 30. It made closest approach on Nov 5. (Monday), coming within 17 times the Earth-moon distance (4 million miles or 6.5 million kilometers).

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.

The first Polynesian settlers sailed to Tonga between 2,830 and 2,846 years ago, according to new research.The findings, published Nov. 7 in the journal PLoS One, relied on ultraprecise dating of coral tools found at Tonga's first settlement."The technique provides us with unbelievable precision in dating quite ancient materials," said David Burley, a co-author of the study and an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. "This stuff is almost 3,000 years old, and the date range is within 16 years.".

The tomb of an ancient Egyptian princess has been discovered south of Cairo hidden in bedrock and surrounded by a court of tombs belonging to four high officials.Dating to 2500 B.C., the structure was built in the second half of the Fifth Dynasty, though archaeologists are puzzled as to why this princess was buried in Abusir South among tombs of non-royal officials. Most members of the Fifth Dynasty's royal family were buried 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) to the north, in the central part of Abusir or farther south in Saqqara.

A well dating from 8,500 years ago, with the bones of two prehistoric people inside, was uncovered during recent excavations in the Jezreel Valley, the Israel Antiquities Authority said on Thursday.Archaeologists working on the Neolithic-period site found the skeletal remains of a young woman estimated to be about 19 years of age along with those of an older man at the bottom of the eight-meter deep well. Researchers do not know how the two came to their resting place at the bottom of the pit.

A pair of world-renowned quantum scientists say they can prove the existence of the soul.American Dr Stuart Hameroff and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose developed a quantum theory of consciousness asserting that our souls are contained inside structures called microtubules which live within our brain cells.Their idea stems from the notion of the brain as a biological computer, "with 100 billion neurons and their axonal firings and synaptic connections acting as information networks".

For decades scientists have backed the idea of sending robots to collect Martian rocks and return them to Earth, a project that should be possible well before humans crunch their boots into the distant dunes of the Red Planet.The idea of landing, scooping up, and hauling back to our world specimens from that intriguing globe has long been endorsed as the Holy Grail of precursor missions by Mars exploration planners.

An asteroid that zooms inside the orbit of Venus has lost its magnetic mojo, perhaps after clearing out the debris along its orbital path, a new study reports.Three decades ago, NASA's Venus Pioneer Orbiter noticed that the near-Earth asteroid 2201 Oljato caused a flurry of magnetic activity whenever it arrived inside Venus' orbit. But more recent observations by the European Space Agency's Venus Express probe don't pick up the odd phenemonon, researchers said.

Rodents' cells commit mass suicide when overcrowded, preventing uncontrollable proliferation.There's more than one way for long-lived subterranean rodents to avoid cancer, and they might hold cellular clues to effective treatments in humans.Cell cultures from two species of blind mole rat, Spalax judaei and Spalax golani, behave in ways that render them impervious to the growth of tumours, according to work by Vera Gorbunova at the University of Rochester in New York and her colleagues1. And the creatures seem to have evolved a different way of doing this from that observed in their better known and similarly cancer-resistant cousin, the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber).

Doctors have long urged people with red hair, fair skin and freckles to avoid the sun and its damaging ultraviolet rays. To venture outdoors without a wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen was simply courting skin cancer, they cautioned.Now, however, a study in mice suggests that those among us with ginger hair and fair complexions face an elevated risk of the disease even when covered up.The study, published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that the same reddish-yellow pigment that gives rise to rusty locks and an inability to tan is itself a potential trigger in the development of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

A row has erupted in Russia over a biological scientist's claim that some 200 Yeti live in a large area of southern Siberia.Professor Valentin Sapunov has infuriated academics with his assertion that scientific tests, including DNA checks, found that hair samples from a remote cave belonged to a human-like mammal unknown to man.Now he has gone further by claiming a population of 200 Yeti exist in the forested Kemerovo, Khakassia and Altai regions of Siberia.This number allows them to successfully reproduce, said the academic from the Russian State HydroMeteorological University.

What would it take to get you interested in heading to remote wooded areas of America to try and prove the existence of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot? How about $10 million dollars.Spike TV is offering the largest cash prize in television history for its new reality show, "10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty."Hoping to whet the appetites of Bigfoot hunters everywhere, the cable television channel has partnered with the international insurance market, Lloyd's of London, to put teams of explorers on the track of the elusive, tall, hairy, human-like animals that allegedly live in the wilderness areas of North America.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Voters in Washington and Colorado passed ballot initiatives Tuesday to legalize marijuana for recreational use, the biggest victory ever for the legalization movement."The significance of these events cannot be understated," said NORML, a pro-legalization organization, in a news release. "Tonight, for the first time in history, two states have legalized and regulated the adult use and sale of cannabis."But in many ways, it's just the beginning of the battle. Marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of the federal government, which overrules states' rights.

Britain has invaded all but 22 countries in the world in its long and colourful history, new research has found.Every schoolboy used to know that at the height of the empire, almost a quarter of the atlas was coloured pink, showing the extent of British rule.But that oft recited fact dramatically understates the remarkable global reach achieved by this country.A new study has found that at various times the British have invaded almost 90 per cent of the countries around the globe.The analysis of the histories of the almost 200 countries in the world found only 22 which have never experienced an invasion by the British.

Humans can smell fear and disgust, and the emotions are contagious, according to a new study.The findings, published Nov. 5 in the journal Psychological Science, suggest that humans communicate via smell just like other animals."These findings are contrary to the commonly accepted assumption that human communication runs exclusively via language or visual channels," write Gün Semin and colleagues from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

When ants are confronted with information overload and face too many decisions -- about where to live, for instance -- they revert to the wisdom of the crowd.Despite having a brain smaller than the point of a pin, one ant species uses an elaborate system of sending out scouts to look for new homes. The scouts report back, and then the whole colony votes, according to researchers at Arizona State University.The ants use chemistry and crowdsourcing, wrote associate professor of biology Stephen C. Pratt and graduate student Takao Sasaki at Arizona State University, in the current issue of Current Biology.

The 2011 Mineral, Virginia M-5.8 earthquake was felt over an extraordinarily large area. A new study details landslides triggered by the earthquake at distances four times greater and over an area 20 times larger than previously documented for M-5.8 earthquakes worldwide.The study, to be published in the December issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA), describes physical confirmation of previous observations that ground shaking from earthquakes in the eastern U.S. travels farther than in the western U.S, a plate-boundary region.

An international team of astrophysicists, including UQ's Dr Holger Baumgardt, has shed light on the long-standing mystery of the binding force behind a cluster of unruly and rapidly swirling stars located in the famous Sword of Orion.Using sophisticated computer modelling programs, the team found these fast-moving stars, visible in the night sky and known as the Orion Nebula Cluster, were potentially held together through the powerful gravitational pull of a black hole up to 200 times the mass of the sun.Formed one or two million years ago, the Orion Nebula Cluster has long been known for its strange properties.

The remote Pacific islands of Tokelau have become the first territory in the world to generate their electricity entirely from solar energy, in a project hailed as an environmental milestone.Before the solar power grid was completed, the New Zealand-administered grouping of three coral atolls, with a population of just 1,500, relied on diesel generators for electricity.

November's a good month for celestial shadow play. Stargazers will get two eclipses in about as many weeks, the first a dazzling total solar eclipse that will showcase the sun's corona approaching peak activity, and the second a subtler lunar eclipse that will be visible across much of the United States.The theatrics start on Nov. 13, when residents of northeastern Australia get a false-start sunrise. Just an hour after the sun breaks the horizon in the coastal city of Cairns, it will be fully obscured by the moon, whose shadow will darken the sky and bring the stars back into view for 2 minutes there.

A pair of rare whales that boffins thought might be extinct has washed up on a New Zealand beach.Marine biologists previously only knew the spade-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii) from a few old bones: but then, not one but two of the rare cetaceans, a mother and her male calf, got stranded.Even when they did show up, researchers first thought that they were the more common Gray's beaked whales, but DNA samples showed that the mammal was indeed the rare spade-toothed breed.

A giant flood of Arctic meltwater may have triggered an ancient 1,200-year-long chill nicknamed the "Big Freeze," the last major cold age on Earth, a new study finds.These findings suggest that changes in the flow of water in the Arctic could suddenly alter the modern climate, study investigators added.Starting about 12,900 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was abruptly gripped by centuries of cold, an era technically known as the Younger Dryas. Scientists have suggested this chill helped wipe out most of the large mammals in North America as well as the so-called Clovis people.

Yesterday, the Sun erupted in a series strong solar flares, which sent out a waves of charged particles known as coronal mass ejections into space. All the action was captured on camera in an amazing video posted online by spaceweather.com. So, with blast of energy moving out into space, many are asking the question: what does this mean for us here on Earth?Answer: probably not much as only one of the blasts was directed at Earth, and this one appears aimed for only a glancing blow at that.

It was hailed as a smoking gun for dark matter, raising hopes that we might finally pinpoint the particle that is thought to make up 80 per cent of the mass in the universe. But purported evidence of dark matter interactions in the centre of our galaxy may not be as solid as hoped.Most physicists think dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, which only interact with normal matter via gravity. When two WIMPs meet, they should annihilate and spew out new particles, including high-energy gamma rays.

Your average driver spends a week each year stuck in traffic. So Ozan Tonguz, a telecommunications researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is looking to nature for an innovative solution to gridlock. His team is trying to emulate the way in which ants, termites, and bees communicate right of way in busy colonies and hives.Tonguz's company, Virtual Traffic Lights, recently patented an algorithm that directs traffic at busy junctions. As cars approach the intersection, they use dedicated short-range communications to quickly exchange information on their number and direction of travel. The largest group of vehicles is given an in-car green light. Cars in the other cluster see a red light and have to wait.

Quantum physics is the science of the very small. But physicists are making it bigger, setting records for the size and energies of objects they can get to exhibit quantum effects.Now physicists at the University of Vienna in Austria have "virtually intertwined" or entangled two particles spinning faster than ever in opposite directions. Entanglement occurs when two particles remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, despite the distance between them. (Einstein referred to this eerie connection as "spooky action at a distance.").

With its deeply embedded roots, sturdy trunk and dense profusion of branches, the Tree of Life is a structure of nearly unfathomable complexity and beauty. While major strides have been made to establish the evolutionary hierarchy encompassing every living species, the project is still in its infancy.At Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, Sudhir Kumar has been filling in the Tree of Life by developing sophisticated methods and bioinformatics tools.

Anyone flying into Melbourne from the east notices the thousands of hectares of dead Mountain Ash trees that were killed in the 2009 Black Saturday fires, which marked the culmination of an extended heatwave.Why the Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) trees in the area that survived the blaze did not die, as expected, from the heatwave is explained by research by the University of Sydney and University of Western Sydney.In addition to obvious threats to trees from fire, scientists worldwide are concerned about trees and whole forests dying during increasingly frequent drought and heatwaves, like that of 2009.

A new video that seems to show a Bigfoot-like beast rearing up in a Utah brush patch is racking up millions of views on the web, but are there any compelling facts in the compelling footage?Beard Card, the YouTube handle of the man who purportedly filmed the video while camping with his family, says he first hit "record" on his camera to document what he thought was a black bear hiding in the bushes. Indeed, the video's tranquil first half has an off-screen voice whispering, "Do you think it's a bear?".