Newsdesk Archive

An Idaho scientist plans to launch an aerial search via a remote-controlled blimp to track down the creature and prove its existence once and for all. Do you believe sasquatch is real?

They are already the most endangered great apes. Now orang-utans may face an additional threat: Ebola virus, or something a lot like it. Bornean orang-utans have antibodies that recognise not just the Asian species of Ebola virus, but all four African Ebola viruses and a similar African virus called Marburg.None of the African viruses has ever been seen outside Africa before. The discovery was discussed at a conference last week by the study's leader, Chairul Anwar Nidom of Airlangga University in Surabaya, Indonesia.

About 74,000 years ago, the Toba volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumatra erupted with catastrophic force. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, it is believed to be the largest volcanic event on Earth in the last 2 million years.Toba spewed enough lava to build two Mount Everests, it produced huge clouds of ash that blocked sunlight for years, and it the left behind a crater 31 miles (50 kilometers) across. The volcano even sent enough sulphuric acid into the atmosphere to create acid rain downpours in the Earth's polar regions, which researchers have found evidence of in deep ice cores.

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - An Idaho scientist shrugging off skeptical fellow scholars in his quest for evidence of Bigfoot has turned his sights skyward, with plans to float a blimp over the U.S. mountain West in search of the mythic, ape-like creature.Idaho State University has approved the unusual proposal of faculty member Jeffrey Meldrum, an anatomy and anthropology professor ridiculed by some peers for past research of a being whose existence is widely disputed by mainstream science.

The first tests for methane performed by Curiosity have come back negative. At least during the rover's first weeks on Mars, any methane present in the air above Gale Crater was at levels lower than five parts-per-billion. But the scientists studying the Martian atmosphere haven't come away disappointed. Detailed measurements of the isotopes present in the first samples indicate that the Martian atmosphere was once much thicker, which may help explain the past existence of liquid water on its surface.

The first stars in the Universe were evidently cosmic hooligans, knocking electrons off atoms, making much of the hydrogen gas in interstellar space ionized. This reionization happened between the formation of the first atoms (about 380,000 years after the Big Bang) and some point roughly a billion years later. However, observations of this era are challenging, so the precise conditions of reionization are not well understood.

Throughout history, people have sought to understand how the world came to be and how it has changed over time. This curiosity has produced a rich legacy of science and philosophy and impacted and influenced religion and theology. In the November 2012 issue of GSA Today, David Montgomery of the University of Washington examines both the history of geology and of biblical views regarding Earth's origins.Montgomery's main premise is that throughout most of the past several hundred years, scientists and theologians engaged in extensive collaboration regarding issues like Earth's age and origin. The common bond that sustained this rich exchange of ideas was a respect for reason and a trust in the scientific process.

Laos has given the go-ahead to build a massive dam on the lower Mekong river, despite opposition from neighbouring countries and environmentalists.A formal ceremony marking the start of full construction at Xayaburi would be held on Wednesday, the government said.Countries downstream from the $3.5bn (£2.2bn) dam fear it will affect fish stocks and the livelihoods of millions.

The floodwaters whipped up by Hurricane Sandy have not yet receded but the temperature is rising on one of the toughest questions in modern science: whether we're getting more extreme weather because of global warming.Radical film-maker Michael Moore put it with characteristic bluntness. In a Tweet, he wrote: "Stop w/ the disaster porn and tell the America people the bitter truth: We have f***** up the environment & we are now paying the price."The governor of New York state, Andrew Cuomo, expressed it more politely: "Anyone who thinks there isn't a change in weather patterns is denying reality.".

"All I am is a contributor. I have no title, I'm just a Joe Blow," says Ken Mampel, a currently unemployed 56-year-old living in Ormond Beach, Florida. He's also largely responsible for the Wikipedia article about Hurricane Sandy. If it isn't already, that article will eventually become the single most-viewed document about the hurricane. On the entire internet.In an unpaid but frenzied fit of news consumption, editing, correction, aggregation, and citation, Mampel has established himself as by far the most active contributor to the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy, with more than twice the number of edits as the next-most-active contributor at the time this article was written.And Mampel made sure that the Hurricane Sandy article, for four days after the hurricane made landfall in New Jersey, had no mention of "global warming" or "climate change" whatsoever.

The Victorian period witnessed a huge surge in the number of exotic beasts in the towns and cities of England - as creatures were imported from the far reaches of the British Empire. But Victorians' enthusiasms for wild and dangerous animals had some very unpleasant consequences, says Prof John Simons.If you were born in rural England in 1837 and never travelled more than a few miles from your home, you would have been surprisingly likely to see a hippopotamus before you died.The reign of Queen Victoria saw a surge in the construction of all manner of places where exotic animals could be viewed.

Just like humans, monkeys prefer to keep their private lives private--especially when it comes to sex, according to a new study from scientists at Utrecht University and the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands.Other animals seem perfectly happy to do the nasty in public, so why exactly would monkeys prefer secrecy? The researchers suggested that the sneaky copulation happens to be opportunistic rather than intentional. That is, as males and females seek sex partners, they have a better chance of hooking up when there's no competition around to get in the way.

Rats use a sense that humans don't: whisking. They move their facial whiskers back and forth about eight times a second to locate objects in their environment. Could humans acquire this sense? And if they can, what could understanding the process of adapting to new sensory input tell us about how humans normally sense? At the Weizmann Institute, researchers explored these questions by attaching plastic "whiskers" to the fingers of blindfolded volunteers and asking them to carry out a location task.

Is light made of waves, or particles?This fundamental question has dogged scientists for decades, because light seems to be both. However, until now, experiments have revealed light to act either like a particle, or a wave, but never the two at once.Now, for the first time, a new type of experiment has shown light behaving like both a particle and a wave simultaneously, providing a new dimension to the quandary that could help reveal the true nature of light, and of the whole quantum world.

From our cities, to our farms, to our rubbish, humans have firmly stamped their mark across the planet. In part two of a two-part feature, Andrew Luck-Baker, from the BBC's Radio Science Unit, explores the legacy our civilisation will leave in the rocks of the future. You can read part one here.Humanity's impact on the globe is so great and varied that we have launched a new geological time period in the Earth's history. Its name is the Anthropocene - the human epoch.

Liberals and conservatives who are polarized on certain politically charged subjects become more moderate when reading political arguments in a difficult-to-read font, researchers report in a new study. Likewise, people with induced bias for or against a defendant in a mock trial are less likely to act on that bias if they have to struggle to read the evidence against him.The study is the first to use difficult-to-read materials to disrupt what researchers call the "confirmation bias," the tendency to selectively see only arguments that support what you already believe, psychology professor Jesse Preston said.

This paper rewrites the early history of Britain, showing that while the cultivation of cereals arrived there in about 4000 cal BC, it did not last. Between 3300 and 1500 BC Britons became largely pastoral, reverting only with a major upsurge of agricultural activity in the Middle Bronze Age.This loss of interest in arable farming was accompanied by a decline in population, seen by the authors as having a climatic impetus.

The graceful ash woodlands that line the valleys and outcrops of the Peak District and Yorkshire Dales are among the most evocative landscapes in the country.Beneath their leafy canopies, hundreds of plants, insects, birds and mammals rely upon the shelter they provide. Yet they are now all threatened by a deadly new disease that is starting to spread around Britain.

Effects similar to those for people, only drunk birds have much further to fallBut unsteadiness on the feet, a tendency to fall over, and losing the ability to steer is considerably more of a problem when life is normally spent in trees or in the air.

China plans to implement a new national donation system which will allow the government to phase out next year the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners to be used in transplant operations.China's health ministry said yesterday that a new national organ donation system is being developed after officials said using organs from death-row prisoners was neither ethical nor sustainable."Now there is consensus among China's transplant community that the new system will relinquish the reliance on organs from executed convicts," Wang Haibo told the World Health Organisation's journal Bulletin.

Egypt's ancient Coptic Christian church chose a new pope in an elaborate ceremony today in which a blindfolded boy drew the name of the next patriarch from a crystal chalice.Bishop Tawadros, 59, an aide to the acting pope, was selected to become Pope Tawadros II, replacing Pope Shenouda III who died earlier this year after 40 years at the helm of the church.All three senior clerics whose names were in the chalice were considered consensus candidates who stayed out of disputes both within the church and with other groups.

"It once was a small step... now it's six big wheels," exclaimed Curiosity's Twitter account after the Nasa rover landed on Mars in early August.The message itself took a fraction of a second to post on the social network.But the media team at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab - who wrote it - had had to wait about a quarter of an hour for the signal sent by the vehicle confirming its touchdown to travel from the Red Planet to Earth via radio waves.

Asteroid belts similar to the one between Mars and Jupiter appear to be rare beyond our solar system, implying that complex alien life may be rare as well, a new study reports.Fewer than 4 percent of known alien solar systems are likely to have an asteroid belt like the one in our own neck of the woods, researchers found. Belts that look like ours may help spur the evolution of life, seeding rocky planets with water and complex chemicals but not pummeling the worlds with a constant barrage of violent impacts.

An undetonated bomb was found Tuesday near a runway at a northern Japanese airport. The 550-pound bomb, thought to be a dud, is believed to have been dropped from U.S. forces during the Second World War. The device still appears to have a working detonator, so officials are proceeding with caution.Sendai Airport canceled all of its 92 domestic and international flights on Tuesday. The airport reopened Wednesday, but not before building a 10-foot high concrete wall to prevent the bomb from being triggered. While experts figure out how to discard or safely detonate the bomb, authorities have re-directed all traffic to the main runway.

Jonathan Mitchell, a Ph.D. student on the University of Chicago's Committee on Evolutionary Biology, Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences, and Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum have collaborated to produce a fascinating simulations-based analysis of the factors that helped dinosaurs go extinct en masse at the close of the Cretaceous era.The authors used a food web program they wrote, which looked at dozens of species. They looked to lay to rest debates about dinosaurs' diet (e.g. did a T. rex eat Triceratops, Duck-Billed dinosaurs, or a mixture of both?) by carrying out a number of simulations with each possibility considered. A total of 17 food webs, based on species alive at the time, were inspected.

The only modern humans whose ancestors did not interbreed with Neanderthals are apparently sub-Saharan Africans, researchers say.New findings suggest modern North Africans carry genetic traces from Neanderthals, modern humanity's closest known extinct relatives.Although modern humans are the only surviving members of the human lineage, others once roamed the Earth, including the Neanderthals. Genetic analysis of these extinct lineages' fossils has revealed they once interbred with our ancestors, with recent estimates suggesting that Neanderthal DNA made up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes. Although this sex apparently only rarely produced offspring, this mixing was enough to endow some people with the robust immune systems they enjoy today.

NASA's Curiosity rover has taken significant steps toward understanding how Mars may have lost much of its original atmosphere. Learning what happened to the Martian atmosphere will help scientists assess whether the planet ever was habitable. The present atmosphere of Mars is 100 times thinner than Earth's. A set of instruments aboard the rover has ingested and analyzed samples of the atmosphere collected near the "Rocknest" site in Gale Crater where the rover is stopped for research.

If we want to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it might be wise to look for stars with asteroid belts similar the one in our own Solar System.According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, evolution goes faster and further when life has to make rapid changes to survive new environments -- and few things have as dramatic an effect on the environment as an asteroid impact. If humans evolved thanks to asteroid impacts, intelligent life might need an asteroid belt like our own to provide just the right number of periodic hits to spur evolution on. Only a fraction of current exoplanet systems have these characteristics, meaning places like our own Solar System -- and intelligent aliens -- might be less common than we previously thought.

The hunt for life on Mars took a new turn today (Nov. 2), with the news that NASA's Mars rover Curiosity detected no methane in its first few sniffs of Red Planet air.The search for Red Planet life has long been intertwined with the search for methane, which is why so many scientists and laypeople alike were probably disappointed by the initial atmospheric readings from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM.

Brazil's Salto Morato Nature Preserve is a haven for scientists studying the dwindling Atlantic rainforest, an area less renowned than the Amazon forest but just as biologically diverse and equally threatened by human encroachment.The preserve in Guaraquecaba, in the southeastern state of Parana, covers a corner of what was once a huge littoral rainforest known as the Mata Atlantica.The Mata covered 1.3-million square kilometers, or about a quarter the size of the Amazon rainforest, when Portuguese colonizers arrived in the 16th century.

A mysterious grid of dots spanning several miles of Western China's sand dunes like a giant chessboard may be the result of geological surveys for nickel mines, according to new analysis of satellite images of the area."In the satellite maps, we can see a man-made texture on the soil, a huge band which seems created by relatively small holes or mounds," wrote the study author, Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, a physicist at Italy's Polytechnic University of Turin, on Oct. 25 on the website arXiv.org, ahead of publication to a scientific journal. "This curious texture on the desert soil was probably produced by the pinpointing of geophysical [research].".

The brain holds in mind what has just been seen by synchronizing brain waves in a working memory circuit, an animal study supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests. The more in-sync such electrical signals of neurons were in two key hubs of the circuit, the more those cells held the short-term memory of a just-seen object.Charles Gray, Ph.D., of Montana State University, Bozeman, a grantee of NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and colleagues, report their findings Nov. 1, 2012, online, in the journal Science Express.

PALAKOLLU, WEST GODAVARI: The 150-feet 'dwajasthambham' of the 300-year-old Ksheera Ramalingeswara Swamy temple in Palakollu of West Godavari collapsed in the early hours of Friday due to heavy rains. The temple is one of the five famous Pancharamams in the state."When I saw it collapsing on power lines at around 7.30 am, I immediately called up electricity department officials and asked them to switch off power supply," temple priest Suribabu said.

By twisting light beams, engineers could produce the fastest Internet ever. Today, for the speediest broadband, fiber-optic cables transmit information in pulses of light. Since the early 2000s, physicists have been working to make data travel even faster by bouncing light off a liquid crystal to twist it. Several coiled beams can nest within one another and move through the same space at the same time.

Experimental concrete that patches up cracks by itself is to undergo outdoor testing.The concrete contains limestone-producing bacteria, which are activated by corrosive rainwater working its way into the structure.The new material could potentially increase the service life of the concrete - with considerable cost savings as a result.The work is taking place at Delft Technical University, the Netherlands.

IBM's Watson supercomputer is to help train doctors at a medical school in Cleveland, Ohio.The machine gained fame when it beat two human contestants on the US quiz show Jeopardy last year.Its technology will now be put to a more practical use helping students to consider challenging cases and offering potential diagnoses.

Stars may burn out and die, but their light goes on forever. All the light ever produced by stars is still circulating through the universe, a phenomenon known as extragalactic background light or EBL. This light is a kind of cosmic "fog" that dims light from distant stars passing through it, much like the beams from a lighthouse are dimmed by real fog. Now, for the first time, astronomers have been able to measure the sum total of EBL and to calculate the spacing of stars in the cosmos. They reported Thursday in the journal Science that the average density of stars in the universe is about 1.4 per 100 billion cubic light-years. That means that the average distance between stars is about 4,150 light-years.

Remains of a prehistoric enclosure have been discovered by archaeologists in Truro, Cornwall.It is understood the enclosure was built during the early Neolithic period (3800 BC to 3600 BC).Archaeologists say it was built at the same time as Carn Brea, a tor enclosure near Redruth.The team will now take samples to verify the date of the enclosure, before re-burying the site, in line with national guidelines.

Great white sharks have killed an unprecedented number of surfers and swimmers off Australia's west coast in the past year.The government last month announced a new catch-and-kill policy for sharks that stray too close to beaches after five fatalities in 10 months. But it is also funding research into other measures, including technology to repel them.University of Western Australia shark researcher Kara Yopak, who has dissected the brains of more than 150 species, said new studies of the great white shark's brain had revealed important similarities to human brains.

The yellowing government survey map of San Nicolas Island dated from 1879, but it was quite clear: There was a big black dot on the southwest coast and, next to it, the words "Indian Cave."For more than 20 years, Navy archaeologist Steve Schwartz searched for that cave. It was believed to be home to the island's most famous inhabitant, a Native American woman who survived on the island for 18 years, abandoned and alone, and became the inspiration for "Island of the Blue Dolphins," one of the 20th century's most popular novels for young readers.

Murdoch University researchers have caught bottlenose dolphins on camera repeatedly raiding trawler fishing nets for food in northern Western Australia.The recording of this behaviour could help with the modification of trawler fishing nets so that fewer dolphins are killed as bycatch say researchers Vanessa Jaiteh, Simon Allen and Professor Neil Loneragan of the Murdoch University Cetacean Research Unit and Professor Jessica Meeuwig of the University of Western Australia.

Biologists are well-known for using lab rats in experiments, but a few may now have the chance to work with rats in a unique way.A team of engineers has set up a system that lets lab rats control a human-shaped avatar in a virtual environment, while humans control a rat-size robot inside the rat's cage. The result? A six-foot human and a six-inch rat get to interact with each other remotely, and they get to each get to see either a virtual avatar or a robot that's close to their own size.

An elephant in a South Korean zoo is using his trunk to pick up not only food, but also human vocabulary.An international team of scientists confirmed Friday what the Everland Zoo has been saying for years: Their 5.5-ton tusker Koshik has an unusual and possibly unprecedented talent.The 22-year-old Asian elephant can reproduce five Korean words by tucking his trunk inside his mouth to modulate sound, the scientists said in a joint paper published online in Current Biology. They said he may have started imitating human speech because he was lonely.

Pilots have been seeing unexplained things outside their cockpit windows since the dawn of aviation.One of the most legendary examples happened near the end of World War II when both Allied and German pilots reported seeing fiery glowing objects that followed their planes and then disappeared in wild maneuvers.The sky phantoms were nicknamed foo-fighters (long before the 1990s alternative rock band), and thought to be secret military weapons. The term "UFO" didn't appear until a few years later -- at the height of anticipation over the eventuality of human space travel.

A federal judge has ruled that police officers in Wisconsin did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they secretly installed cameras on private property without judicial approval.The officers installed the cameras in an open field where they suspected the defendants, Manuel Mendoza and Marco Magana, were growing marijuana. The police eventually obtained a search warrant, but not until after some potentially incriminating images were captured by the cameras. The defendants have asked the judge to suppress all images collected prior to the issuance of the search warrant.

AS New Scientist goes to press, north-east North America is reeling in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy. People are dead, millions are without electricity and damage estimates top $20 billion. And that is far from the full impact. Over the next few weeks, the true extent will become clear to millions of people who must now clean up. Whether the implications are clear to their leaders is another question.Oddly, the lesson of Sandy is the same as the lesson of the Eurozone crisis and other recent events such as the Egyptian revolution: complex systems play by their own rules. You can't manage them in a linear way. We live in a web of systems: if one falls, it takes others with it.

One of New York University's medical research facilities has lost thousands of laboratory mice to Hurricane Sandy's storm surge, a research setback that could take years to correct, according to scientists.The NYU Langone Medical Center confirmed on Wednesday that the Smilow Research Center, one of three animal research facilities on campus, "was adversely impacted by the severity of the flood surge and the speed with which it came on.".

Mathematics anxiety can prompt a response in the brain similar to when a person experiences physical pain, according to new research at the University of Chicago.Using brain scans, scholars determined that the brain areas active when highly math-anxious people prepare to do math overlap with the same brain areas that register the threat of bodily harm -- and in some cases, physical pain."For someone who has math anxiety, the anticipation of doing math prompts a similar brain reaction as when they experience pain -- say, burning one's hand on a hot stove," said Sian Beilock, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on math anxiety.

A skeleton found in the same boneyard where English King Richard III may have been buried might be one of the founders of the Church of the Grey Friars, archaeologists announced Tuesday.Scientists have yet to examine the female skeleton, though they are subjecting a male skeleton suspected to be Richard III's to rigorous testing. Nevertheless, the researchers said it was no surprise to find a woman buried at the medieval church in Leicester, England.

Michelangelo's Sistine chapel frescoes are threatened by the effects of too many visitors, experts have warned on Wednesday, as the masterly painted ceiling celebrated its 500th anniversary."The anthropic pressure with dust, the humidity of bodies, carbon dioxide produced by perspiration can cause discomfort for the visitors and, in the long run, damage to the paintings," Antonio Paolucci, director of the Vatican Museums, wrote in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

Archaeologists in Bulgaria say they have uncovered the oldest prehistoric town found to date in Europe.The walled fortified settlement, near the modern town of Provadia, is thought to have been an important centre for salt production.Its discovery in north-east Bulgaria may explain the huge gold hoard found nearby 40 years ago.Archaeologists believe that the town was home to some 350 people and dates back to between 4700 and 4200 BC.

Plant roots are surrounded by thousands of bacteria and fungi living in the soil and on the root surface. To survive in this diverse environment, plants employ sophisticated detection systems to distinguish pathogenic microorganisms from beneficial microorganisms.Here the so-called chitin molecules from microorganisms, along with modified versions, play an important role as they are detected by the plant surveillance system. Legumes, for example, build a defence against pathogenic microorganisms in response to simple chitin molecules.

DEPRESSION and anxiety are easily two of the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric ailments. But if they are so prevalent across so many cultures and societies, where did they come from? Are we experiencing an epidemic? Or is it simply a case of mislabelling a common, though unpleasant, life experience as a disorder in order to medically whisk away the tough bits of what it means to be human?In psychiatrist Jeffrey Kahn's new book, Angst, he examines the origins of depression and anxiety and, using current research in psychology and evolutionary biology, carefully applies a unique anthropological perspective for why these conditions exist.He reasons, for example, that social anxiety - the fear of interactions with strangers - may have evolved to enable a natural social ranking system in which some people feel most comfortable towards the bottom of the totem pole. This natural shuffling would have made for a less aggressive, more survivable living situation and reduced fighting for leadership.

A woman has been convicted of giving cannabis to her 3-month old baby through her breast milk, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in New Zealand.The 29-year-old Wanganui woman was charged with administering a class C controlled drug, namely cannabis, to a person under the age of 18.

The massive sandstone bricks used to construct the 12th-century temple of Angkor Wat were brought to the site via a network of hundreds of canals, according to new research.The findings shed light on how the site's 5 million to 10 million bricks, some weighing up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kilograms), made it to the temple from quarries at the base of a nearby mountain."We found many quarries of sandstone blocks used for the Angkor temples and also the transportation route of the sandstone blocks," wrote study co-author Estuo Uchida of Japan's Waseda University, in an email.

When 4,000 years ago the people living on a windy stretch of magnificent Northumbrian coastline looked for a place to bury their dead, they chose a beautiful spot - a low hillock of dry land above marshes and creeks, in sight of the sea but a kilometre safely inland.Now the sea is lapping at the ancient graves, and the Heritage Lottery Fund will on Tuesday announce a £300,000 grant to excavate the entire site at Low Hauxley, and rescue what remains of its ancient secrets.

Residents of what is thought to be Europe's oldest town cut their dead in half and buried them from the pelvis up, according to archaeologists.The newly discovered ancient settlement, thought to date back to 4700BC, is near the Bulgarian town of Provadia, about 25 miles from the country's Black Sea coast.Archaeology professor Vassil Nikolov led the dig which focused on the town itself and its necropolis, where the strange and complex burial rituals were discovered.'Now we can say that the Provadia salt pans location is the oldest town in Europe, [dating from] roughly 4700 to 4200BC,' he told CNN

New flying fish fossils found in China provide the earliest evidence of vertebrate over-water gliding strategy.Chinese researchers have tracked the "exceptionally well-preserved fossils" to the Middle Triassic of China (235-242 million years ago).The Triassic period saw the re-establishment of ecosystems after the Permian mass extinction.The fossils represent new evidence that marine ecosystems re-established more quickly than previously thought.The Permian mass extinction had a bigger impact on the earth's ecological systems than any other mass extinction, wiping out 90-95% of marine species.

A hitherto unknown polar bear sanctuary in the Arctic has been discovered by the makers of a BBC documentary.An estimated 20 of the bears were seen on the Peterman Iceberg in Baffin Bay, 50km off the Canadian coast.For most of the year, polar bears live on the frozen sea water where they hunt seals.So the finding challenges received wisdom about where polar bears spend the summer months, when the sea ice melts.

Climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer stood along the Hudson River and watched his research come to life as Hurricane Sandy blew through New York.Just eight months earlier, the Princeton University professor reported that what used to be once-in-a-century devastating floods in New York City would soon happen every three to 20 years. He blamed global warming for pushing up sea levels and changing hurricane patterns.New York "is now highly vulnerable to extreme hurricane-surge flooding," he wrote.

Climate change could lead to crops from the banana family becoming a critical food source for millions of people, a new report says.Researchers from the CGIAR agricultural partnership say the fruit might replace potatoes in some developing countries.Cassava and the little-known cowpea plant could be much more important food crops as temperatures rise.People will have to adapt to new and varied menus as traditional crops struggle, say the authors.

A scientific experiment has found that two mediums were unable to demonstrate that they had special psychic powers.The test by researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London, tried to establish whether mediums could use psychic abilities to identify something about five unseen volunteers.The results, carried out under test conditions, did not show evidence of any unexplained powers of insight.

Astonishing claims were made in Russia today that DNA tests on suspected 'Yeti hair' reveals the existence of 'an unknown mammal closely related to man'.The 'tests' were conducted on samples of hair found in a Siberian cave during an international expedition last year.'We had ten samples of hair to study, and have concluded that they belong to mammal, but not a human,' said Professor Valentin Sapunov, of the Russian State Hydrometeorological Institute.Nor did the hair belong to any known animal from the region such as a bear, wolf, or goat, he claimed.

NASA's first commercial cargo flight ended with a splash today (Oct. 28), when the SpaceX Dragon capsule landed after a landmark mission to the International Space Station.The unmanned Dragon space capsule, built by the U.S. company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), splashed down into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California at 3:22 p.m. EDT (1922 GMT), ending a three-week visit to the orbiting laboratory.Dragon began its descent with a de-orbit burn at 2:28 p.m. EDT (1828 GMT), after departing the station at 9:29 a.m. EDT (1329 GMT) as both spacecraft sailed 255 miles (410 kilometers) above Burma. The station's crew used the outpost's robotic arm to release the spacecraft.

TSUKUBA, Ibaraki Prefecture--Scientists say a flattened section of the moon, 3,000 kilometers wide, was likely caused by a collision with an asteroid the size of Austria.The moon's Procellarum basin, the dark part as seen from Earth, is what remains of the impact crater, they said. Its vast size is apparent in relation to the moon's diameter: 3,476 km. (The basin is likened in Japanese folklore to the shape of a rabbit pounding rice cakes.).

In the first inventory of minerals on another planet, Nasa's Mars rover has found soil that bears a striking resemblance to the weathered, volcanic sand of Hawaii, say scientists.The rover, named Curiosity, uses an x-ray imager to reveal the atomic structures of crystals in the Martian soil. It was the first time the technology, known as x-ray diffraction, was used to analyse soil not on Earth."This was a 22-year journey and a magical moment for me," said David Blake, Nasa's lead scientist for the rover's mineralogical instrument.

Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object and is thought to have recently escaped the sun's sphere of influence. The probe, launched 35 years ago, is therefore mankind's first interstellar vehicle careening into the vast expanse of space between the stars.Needless to say, as one of two deep space probes launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has explored previously unknown regions of the solar system, making groundbreaking discoveries as it went. Now, in a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, scientists analyzing data streaming from the spacecraft have uncovered a small mystery right at the solar system's magnetic boundary with the interstellar medium. She may be old, but you can't keep a good probe down.

DNA sequencing of 36 complete Y chromosomes has uncovered a previously unknown population explosion that occurred 40 to 50 thousand years ago, between the first expansion of modern humans out of Africa 60 to 70 thousand years ago and the Neolithic expansions of people in several parts of the world starting 10 thousand years ago. This is the first time researchers have used the information from large-scale DNA sequencing to create an accurate family tree of the Y chromosome, from which the inferences about human population history could be made.

Fossils and artefacts pulled from the Grotte du Renne cave in central France present anthropologists with a Pleistocene puzzle. Strewn among the remains of prehistoric mammals are the bones of Neanderthals, along with bladelets, bone points and body ornaments belonging to what archaeologists call the Châtelperronian culture. Such complex artefacts are often attributed to modern humans, but a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that Neanderthals created the objects in imitation of their Homo sapiens neighbors.

Honeybees are also discerning art critics, according to scientists from UQ's Queensland Brain Institute, the UQ School of Psychology and the Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil.The study, published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A, found honeybees had remarkable visual learning and discrimination abilities that extended beyond simple colours, shapes or patterns.QBI researcher Dr Judith Reinhard said honeybees had a highly developed capacity for processing complex visual information, and could distinguish landscape scenes, types of flowers, and even human faces.

Green cars in the future may still run on gas, but instead of pulling petroleum from the ground the source of fuel may come from the air. Carbon capture techniques are still hugely expensive (about $650 per ton of carbon dioxide), but a small British Company claims to have produced five liters (1.3 gallons) of petrol since August by extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and mixing it with hydrogen from water vapor.How cool is that? "It sounds too good to be true, but it is true. They are doing it and I've been up there myself and seen it," reported Tim Fox, head of energy and the environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, in the Independent.

To save lives and reduce costs, there would be tremendous advantage if science had a way to stop a devastating hurricane like Sandy. And scientists have thought of it before.One idea that rears its head almost every hurricane season recently is the notion of bombing a hurricane into submission. The theory goes that the energy released by a nuclear bomb detonated just above and ahead of the eye of a storm would heat the cooler air there, disrupting the storm's convection current.

The oldest nuclear power plant in the United States, Oyster Creek Generating Station, is girding for the full force of Hurricane Sandy's expected landfall in Southern New Jersey this evening.Oyster Creek, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north of Atlantic City, generates 630 megawatts (MW), or enough electricity to power 600,000 households. Situated about a mile inland from the brackish inlet of the Atlantic Ocean known as Barnegat Bay, it shares the same design as Japan's tsunami-crippled coastal nuclear plant, Fukushima Daiichi. But industry officials and regulators argued today that Oyster Creek and two dozen other nuclear plants in the path of the unprecedented storm were prepared to withstand the worst.

It is expected to be the mother of all cyber diplomatic battles. When delegates gather in Dubai in December for an obscure UN agency meeting, fighting is expected to be intense over proposals to rewrite global telecom rules to effectively give the United Nations control over the Internet.Russia, China and other countries back a move to place the Internet under the authority of the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency that sets technical standards for global phone calls.

Members of the Flat Earth Society claim to believe the Earth is flat. Walking around on the planet's surface, it looks andfeels flat, so they deem all evidence to the contrary, such as satellite photos of Earth as a sphere, to be fabrications of a "round Earth conspiracy" orchestrated by NASA and other government agencies.

There's still a couple of days left to find that perfect geeky but interesting Hallowe'en costume. Stumped for ideas? How about going as a phantom cosmonaut.The Soviet Union's early space program was shrouded in mystery. Missions weren't announced until they were successfully off the ground, and even then details were sparse and often misleading. Like the report falsely saying Yuri Gagarin landed in his Vostok spacecraft when he actually parachuted out and landed separately.

Another government shambles. There's a new one every day. This time they've lost Henry I. Sir Tony Baldry, the MP who represents the Church Commissioners, spoke to the Commons about the bones of Richard III. MPs have been fighting over who gets the mortal remains recently discovered under a car park in Leicester, if they prove to belong to the late king. (How do the scientists decide? I know the skeleton is hunchbacked, and there are axe wounds to the head, but have they found a crown with a few hairs stuck to it for the crucial DNA test?).

The largest dark spot on the moon, known as the Ocean of Storms, may be a scar from a giant cosmic impact that created a magma sea more than a thousand miles wide and several hundred miles deep, researchers say.These findings could help explain why the moon's near and far sides are so very different from one another, investigators added.Scientists analyzed Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms, a dark spot on the near side of the moon more than 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers) wide.

NASA is planning to announce a discovery from its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on Thursday (Nov. 1) that will shed light on the early universe, officials said.The announcement will "discuss new measurements using gamma rays to investigate ancient starlight," NASA officials said in a statement today (Oct. 29). The findings, which will be published in the Nov. issue of the journal Science, will be revealed during a teleconference Thursday at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT).

Opsins, the light-sensitive proteins key to vision, may have evolved earlier and undergone fewer genetic changes than previously believed, according to a new study from the National University of Ireland Maynooth and the University of Bristol published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The Cretaceous Period of Earth history ended with a mass extinction that wiped out numerous species, most famously the dinosaurs. A new study now finds that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been. Researchers at the University of Chicago, the California Academy of Sciences and the Field Museum of Natural History will publish their findings Oct. 29 online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Honey-bees are known for their sting, but scientists have now discovered they can also bite.Bees resort to biting when faced with pests, such as parasitic mites, that are too small to sting.Close study of the biting behaviour has revealed that they secrete a chemical in their bite that stuns pests so they are easier to eject from a colony.

That image of a caveman gnawing on a hunk of bison meat may need a makeover. A new chemical analysis of modern diets suggests Stone Age humans ate less meat than thought.The findings, published in the November issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, may explain why many archaeologists estimate that prehistoric people got most of their calories from lean meat or fish when modern humans would be literally poisoned by such a protein-heavy diet.

Stephen Hawking warned recently that contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization could have dire consequences for the human species. Arthur C Clarke once made the famous observation that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.Following in their footsteps, world renowned experts from physicist Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge University to astrobiologist Paul Davis of Arizona State have asked if we were to encounter alien technology far superior to our own, would we even realize what it was. A technology a million or more years in advance of ours could appear miraculous.

The 'golden age' of the Mayan civilization may have occurred over 1,000 years ago, but more than half the population of the Central American nation of Guatemala are of Mayan descent and many still celebrate ancient customs. So, as we approach Dec. 21, 2012, it's little wonder they're pissed that one of their calendars has been hijacked and misinterpreted as a prophet of doom.But this time, the anger isn't directed at the West's "messianic thinking," Maya leaders have accused the Guatemalan government of perpetuating the myth that the Mayan Long Count calendar predicts the end of the world for financial gain.

This week six scientists and one government official were sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter, for making "falsely reassuring" comments before the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. But was this fair?First, we have to understand limits of earthquake science. Ian Main, Professor of Seismology and Rock Physics at the University of Edinburgh, was part of an international commission on earthquake forecasting set up after L'Aquila.

Sweden is hungry for trash and has turned to Norway for an offer it would find hard to refuse, no pun intended. Sweden is asking its neighbor for trash. Sweden's success is Sweden's problem. Sweden is a model recycler. Thanks to a highly efficient waste management system in Sweden, the vast majority of this household waste can be recovered or reused. As a result, Sweden has run short of garbage. Since it does not produce enough burnable waste for its energy needs, Sweden is suffering a downside to being such an enviable model of recycling. The average in Europe of trash that ends up as waste is 38 percent. Sweden's is 1 percent.

Gold usually means extravagance, but now it could be the key to making vital medical tests cheaper.People in poor countries often do not get timely treatment for cancer or infections, because diagnostic tests that can spot diseases early are too expensive. Now, a team at Imperial College London have figured out that gold could be the solution.

With greenhouse warming, rainfall in the South Pacific islands will depend on two competing effects -- an increase due to overall warming and a decrease due to changes in atmospheric water transport -- according to a study by an international team of scientists around Matthew Widlansky and Axel Timmermann at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa. In the South Pacific, the study shows, these two effects sometimes cancel each other out, resulting in highly uncertain rainfall projections.Results of the study are published in the 28 October online issue of Nature Climate Change.

The Dead Sea is shrinking at a record rate, prompting calls for Israel and Jordan to stop fertilizer makers from siphoning so much of the water whose restorative powers have attracted visitors since biblical times.The salty inland lake bordering the nations dropped a record 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) over the last 12 months because of industry use and evaporation, the Hydrological Service of Israel said. That's the steepest Dead Sea decline since data-keeping started in the 1950s. Half the drop was caused by Israel Chemicals Ltd. and Jordan's Arab Potash Co., said Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of the Friends of Earth Middle East.

NEW DELHI: Global warming just spun more out of control than thought. As much as 44 billion tons of nitrogen and 850 billion tons of carbon stored in the frozen wastes of Arctic could be released into the environment as the region begins to thaw over the next century, a new study led by the US Geological Survey said. The thawing process has already started with sea-ice levels at their lowest this summer.

The largest ever research project into mathematical patterns in flowers has proved a link between number sequences and nature, Manchester scientists said.Hundreds of volunteers worldwide grew sunflowers as part of the project led by the city's Museum of Science and Industry and university.Scientists aimed to test the theory of Manchester-based computer pioneer Alan Turing, who died in 1954.

The first "Alien" movie was promoted with the celebrated tagline, "In space, no one can hear you scream." But a group of students want to find out if this is really true, and they're asking the public for help. Students from the University of Cambridge in the UK will be loading human screams onto a smartphone that will be launched into space in December 2012 on a nanosatellite.

An epic battle between paintballs and a giant asteroid could one day save the Earth from an apocalyptic space rock impact.The novel asteroid-deflecting scheme proposes that a cloud of paintballs shot into space could knock a dangerous asteroid off a collision course with Earth.Sung Wook Paek, an MIT graduate student, says a spacecraft could fire two rounds of pellets full of white paint powder at an asteroid to cover as much of the rock's surface as possible. The strategy, unveiled Friday (Oct. 26), won the 2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition, sponsored by the United Nations' Space Generation Advisory Council.

Product designer Neil Usher has built a robot that aims to "improve the efficiency of our leisure time" by automatically scanning for faces in clouds.Usher describes the robot, called the Nimbus MkIII, as automating pareidolia -- the psychological phenomenon of ascribing significance to random or vague patterns in nature. Famous examples are the man in the moon, or hearing hidden messages on records being played backwards.Another example is spotting shapes in clouds. Usher's pareidolic robot scans the sky for patterns that resemble faces and, when it spots one, takes a photo.

The plight of the honey bee has triggered a huge increase in amateur beekeeping over the past decade, with individuals and companies rushing to put hives in their gardens or on city rooftops. But, for the first time, there are signs that the trend may be causing more harm than good.A huge surge in bee colonies in London in the past few years has created intense competition for nectar and pollen. Honey yields in the capital are considerably lower than in previous years, figures to be published on Tuesday will show, suggesting that bees are struggling to produce enough to sustain their hives because of limited supplies of wildflowers.

A disabled veteran has told an appeals court that the department of veteran affairs policy on medical marijuana has caused him pain and significant economic harm, in a development campaigners say is a positive step in the battle to push for the drug's reclassification.Michael Krawitz, one of five plaintiffs involved in a legal case before the court of appeal for the District of Columbia Circuit, told the Guardian that the VA denied him pain treatment after they discovered he had been prescribed medical marijuana while abroad.

Amateurs using metal detectors have discovered a trove of Roman artifacts, including a bust possibly depicting a male lover of a Roman emperor, a silver and gold brooch of a leaping dolphin and a penis-shaped animal bone.The wide array of art, found across Britain, dates back about 1,600 to 2,000 years, when the Romans ruled the island.This art is among almost 25,000 Roman artifacts (the bulk of them coins) reported in England and Wales in 2011. They were documented as part of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) and published recently in the journal Britannia.

Three years ago, scientists discovered electric currents running through the seabed -- but they had no idea what was causing them. But now, researchers from Denmark and the United States believe they have the answer: bacteria that function as living electrical cables. In a remarkable case of biological engineering, scientists have confirmed that each tiny section of the bacteria contains a bundle of insulated wires that leads an electric current from one end to the other.The discovery could lead to an entirely new class of organic electronics -- including devices that could be implanted in the human body.

A dystopian society supported by genetically modified clone workers stands out among the six stories that make up the sprawling film "Cloud Atlas." The idea may seem far-fetched because of political opposition to human cloning and genetic modification in today's world, but the science is closer than many people may think.