Newsdesk Archive

A new species of hundred-million-year-old coelacanth has been found, according to a new analysis of bone fragments.One of the world's oldest types of fish, coelacanths (pronounced SEE-la-kanths) are primitive, slow-moving fish that had been thought extinct until an individual was found off Africa in 1938. There are now over 40 known coelacanth species. The two that live today are called living fossils because they have remained virtually unchanged for 320 million years.

Humans were hunting mastodons in Mexico 250,000 years ago. This archaeological heresy is supported by finding at Hueyatlaco.Hueyatlaco is an archeological site in Valsequillo, Mexico. Several potential pre-Clovis localities were found in the 1960s around the edge of the Valsequillo Reservoir, Mexico. One of these localities is the site of Hueyatlaco. This site was excavated by Cynthia Irwin-Williams in 1962, 1964, and 1966.Note: See related article by Chris Hardaker.

There's no escaping the fact that the Human Brain Project, with its billion-dollar plan to recreate the human mind inside a supercomputer, sounds like a science fiction nightmare.But those involved hope their ambitious goal of simulating the tangle of neurons and synapses that power our thought processes could offer solutions to tackling conditions such as depression, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's.

In 1962, then President of Cuba, Fidel Castro recruited two former Nazi SS soldiers to help train his military at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to declassified documents released by Germany's secret intelligence agency, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst).Castro invited four SS officers to Havana, where he offered them quadruple the average salary a German made at that time in exchange for their expertise. Two of the four accepted his offer, the documents, dated October 26, 1962, reveal.The men served in Adolf Hitler's Waffen-SS, a force separate from the army and known as the armed wing of the Nazi party.

Water on the moon boiled away in massive quantities in a cataclysmic evaporation event during the moon's birth, bolstering the theory that a Mars-sized body collided with the Earth to form its only natural satellite, scientists say.Researchers examined rocks collected by astronauts during NASA's Apollo lunar landing missions, as well as a meteorite that originated on the moon to make the find. They looked for traces of zinc, and found the ratios of heavy to light isotopes are greater than on Earth, which suggests the moon went through an intense evaporation event early in its formation.

Researchers from China's Fudan University have found major prehistoric human population expansions may have begun before the Neolithic period, which probably led to the introduction of agriculture.Major prehistoric human population expansions in three continents may have begun before the Neolithic period -- around 15-11,000 years ago in Africa, from around 13,000 years ago in Europe and around 12-8,000 years ago in the Americas.The findings are published in Scientific Reports.

The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World was published in 2000 as part of an international effort to create a comprehensive map and a directory of all ancient places mentioned in sources and a selection of important archaeological sites.During the following decade two digitization projects based on the Barrington Atlas were produced; Pleiades, which began as a historical gazetteer of locations and the DARMC project which is a complete layered historical atlas.

Archaeologists in Guatemala have discovered the grave of an ancient king credited with laying the foundations for the Mayan civilization more than two thousand years ago, experts said on Thursday.Researchers from Guatemala uncovered the grave of King K'utz Chman, a priest who is believed to have reigned around 700 B.C., at the Tak'alik Ab'aj dig in Retalhuleu in western Guatemala.

Fossilised shoulder bones from a forerunner of humans known as Australopithecus afarensis, the species of the famous "Lucy" skeleton, suggest that their bodies were shaped by a life spent clinging on to branches with their hands.From the shape of the species' feet it has long been clear that they could walk on two legs, but experts have been unable to prove whether, like their contemporary apelike species, they also spent part of their lives in trees.

The Japanese researchers managed to decode the dreams of a group of volunteers and pinpointed when they were dreaming about such things as cars and women.They scanned the brains of three male volunteers as they slept to monitor changes in activity which could be related to the content of their dreams.They also monitored electrical patterns in the men's brain waves, so that they could wake them up whenever the signals indicated that they had begun dreaming.

It was an alien storm to dim memories of all others, wrapping all the way around a vast northern portion of Saturn, a planet that could hold about 750 Earths. And it brought with it a spike in temperature never observed before anywhere in the solar system.Think of a violent storm, NASA said, that covers all of North America and continues on around the planet -- a storm from which you could not escape for nine months.Brigette Hesman, who tracks storms on Saturn, spoke with the Los Angeles Times on Thursday morning about the super storm and its aftermath, which have marked a peak in her scientific career.

Seasonal flow patterns seen by spacecraft orbiting Mars could have been caused by salty water, new research suggests.Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring.Now two U.S.-based researchers have explained how the intriguing dark streaks could have been caused by the melting and subsequent evaporation of frozen salty water.

In a few places on Earth, sand "sings" as it falls down dunes, making a low droning sound that lies within the bottom half of a cello's musical range.For centuries the eerie humming in deserts mesmerized visitors such as explorer Marco Polo and scientist Charles Darwin, who couldn't explain the origin of the sound.Scientists suspected they were hearing vibrations in the subsurface layers of the dunes. In 2009, however, University of France researchers found that the sound is created by vibrations of the sand grains that avalanche down the dunes.

The discovery of a skeleton in a shallow grave has raised new questions about Wales in the age of the Vikings.The skeleton, found at Llanbedrgoch, Anglesey, has forced experts to revise the theory that five earlier skeletons were the victims of a Viking raid.Evidence now suggests the men may have spent the first part of their lives in Scandinavia.Experts say artefacts discovered confirm Llanbedrgoch as a 10th Century manufacture and trade centre.

This story spans generations and continents, and involves a man sent to a Nazi labor camp in World War II, his family back in France, and an antique letter collector in the United States who reunited the lost notes with the family.Here's what happened. Marcel Heuzé, a French tool worker, was deported to a German work camp in 1942 during the war. He built engines, armored vehicles and tanks at the Daimler-Benz factory, from where he sent letters back home to his wife and three daughters.

Contrary to popular belief, the Cuban missile crisis did not end with the agreement between the US and Soviet Union in October, 1962. Unknown to the US at the time, there were 100 other nuclear weapons also in the hands of Cuba, sparking a frantic - and ingenious - Russian mission to recover them.In November 2011, aware that the 50th anniversary of the most dangerous few weeks in history was less than a year away, my Russian colleague Pasha Shilov and I came across several new accounts that changed our perspective on the Cuban missile crisis and how much we thought we knew about it.

Humans have explored only a tiny fraction of the deep-sea floor, but the deep-diving submersible vehicle Alvin gets credit for a considerable share of what humanity has seen in the water's dark, alien depths.Alvin, which can ferry three people into the deep sea, has made 4,664 dives since its first in 1965. Alvin has explored the wreckage of the doomed Titanic, revealed otherworldly life flourishing at hydrothermal vents and their cooler counterparts, cold seeps. Most recently, Alvin was dispatched to investigate the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.After all of these missions, Alvin is getting an upgrade.

Fusion-fueled power generation has been the energy of the future for several decades."There's always been this sense that fusion is fifty years away," Saskia Mordijck says, but she adds that the horizon for safer and more efficient fusion-based electricity in our homes is really, truly getting closer.

MADISON -- Troy, the palatial city of prehistory, sacked by the Greeks through trickery and a fabled wooden horse, will be excavated anew beginning in 2013 by a cross-disciplinary team of archaeologists and other scientists, it was announced today (Monday, Oct. 15).The new expedition will be led by University of Wisconsin-Madison classics Professor William Aylward, an archaeologist with long experience digging in the ruins of classical antiquity, including Troy itself. The new international project at Troy, to be conducted under the auspices of and in cooperation with Turkey's Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, will begin a series of summer-time expeditions beginning in 2013.

One of the oldest Mayan tombs ever found has been uncovered in western Guatemala, say archaeologists.Located at a temple site in Retalhuleu province, the grave is thought to be that of an ancient ruler or religious leader who lived some 2,000 years ago.Carbon-dating indicated the tomb had been built between 700 and 400 BC, said government archaeologist Miguel Orrego.A rich array of jade jewels, including a necklace depicting a vulture-headed human figure, were found.

Amid the hills of western Madagascar, villagers have long been aware of a thick sticky substance naturally seeping out of the ground.But it is only recently that these unconventional oil deposits in the region of Melaky have attracted the attention of investors.The rising prices of oil on world markets, coupled with new technologies aim to turn the Indian Ocean island - famous for its unique habitat and wildlife - into a significant oil producer.Tsimiroro is extremely remote - even by the vast island's standards - and most of Madagascar Oil's estimated 100 employees are flown by small plane from the capital, Antanarivo, 300km (about 185 miles) to the east of the oil field.

Levels of radioactive contamination in fish caught off the east coast of Japan remain raised, official data shows.It is a sign that the Dai-ichi power plant continues to be a source of pollution more than a year after the nuclear accident.About 40% of fish caught close to Fukushima itself are regarded as unfit for humans under Japanese regulations.The respected US marine chemist Ken Buesseler has reviewed the data in this week's Science journal.

Dinosaurs may have wooed potential mates with flashy feathers, peacock style. Researchers have discovered lengthy wisps on a sexually mature adult, but absent in the toddler specimen of the same dinosaur species.These findings shed light on the origin of wings and feathered flight, scientists added.Birds are the last living lineage of dinosaurs. Their predatory dinosaur ancestors and relatives apparently were covered in feathers as well. These downy coats probably helped to keep them warm at first.

Scientists in Southampton are now able to change the colour of gold.The technique involves embossing tiny raised or indented patterns on the metal's surface which alters the way it absorbs or reflects light.Prof Nikolay Zheludev, who leads the nanophotonics and metamaterials team at Southampton University, said it means gold can be made red or green or a multitude of other hues.

The ability of deep-sea corals to harbor a broad array of marine life, including commercially important fish species, make these habitat-forming organisms of immediate interest to conservationists, managers, and scientists. Understanding and protecting corals requires knowledge of the historical processes that have shaped their biodiversity and biogeography.While little is known about these processes, new research described in the journal Molecular Ecology helps elucidate the historical patterns of deep-sea coral migration and gene flow, coincident with oceanic circulation patterns and events.

Counter to expectations, groups of related marine species with large population sizes have just the same risk of extinction as those with small population sizes, according to new research.The new analysis of marine fossil records across 500 million years shows that ocean invertebrates (animals without backbones) limited to small geographic ranges typically bear the brunt of extinction, regardless of their abundance there. The findings offer a potentially important clue for present-day conservationists.

A Perthshire loch has become home to a beaver for the first time in about 200 years.The Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT) has been monitoring the animal at the Loch of the Lowes since it was first spotted in August.It's thought the beaver may be related to one of many beavers in the River Tay catchment that have escaped or were illegally released from captivity.The animals became extinct in the UK towards the end of the 18th century.

Large hyena populations are living alongside human communities in Africa without coming into conflict, a recent study has found.An international team of scientists surveyed the population size and diet of spotted hyenas in northern Ethiopia.The study found a large hyena population with a diet that consisted almost exclusively of domestic animals.Humans and hyenas are able to coexist because the cost of livestock predation to the local people is relatively low.The results are published in the journal of Mammalian Biology.

Mice Sniff Out Landmines: About 70 countries have landscapes filled with hidden landmines. These unexploded bombs are difficult to detect and wreak havoc and death to residents. Currently, metal detectors, radar, magnetometers and sniffer dogs are used to search for them. Now researchers are proposing an inexpensive solution: genetically modified mice who are 500 times more sensitive than their natural counterparts to the smell of explosives from mines.

Adult dogs learn to copy the yawns of their tired owners, "catching" them in a similar way to humans in a show of empathy, a study has shown.The research, by a Swedish university, suggests dogs can accurately identify human emotions and find yawning socially contagious.The subsequent yawn is not just a sign of tiredness or boredom, scientists found, but of a measure of empathy.

Marina Chapman learnt to catch birds and rabbits with her bare hands after being abandoned in the jungle by kidnappers, it was reported.The Tarzan-like episode was brought to an end when she was discovered by hunters but by her ordeal continued when she was sold to a brothel in the city of Cucuta, and groomed for prostitution.She escaped and spent years on the streets, sometimes being arrested and kept in a cell, but was eventually taken in by a Colombian family to work as a maid in her mid-teens, and took the name of Marina Luz, according to the account given to a newspaper.

It might sound like something from Dracula, but old brains have been made sprightly again thanks to young blood.Giving ageing mice blood from much younger animals rejuvenated connections between brain cells and improved memory, experiments have shown.The treatment is so effective that 18-month-old animals did as well in memory tests as those of only four months. Mice usually live to between 18 months and two years.

Bottlenose dolphins using sponges to protect their noses while foraging is a technique that the animals discovered in the 19th century, a study has found.cientists analysed data on the dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, to model the appearance and transmission of the skill over generations.The study found that "sponging" could have begun with a single "innovation event" between 120 and 180 years ago.It suggested that mothers passed on the skill by teaching their offspring.

Add all of us up, all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds. That, says Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is more than 100 times the biomass of any large animal that's ever walked the Earth. And we're still multiplying. Most demographers say we will hit 9 billion before we peak, and what happens then?

All of a sudden, DNA has no reason to feel special. For decades it seemed that only a handful of molecules could store genetic information and pass it on. But now synthetic biologists have discovered that six others can pull off the same trick, and there may be many more to find.The ability to copy information from one molecule to another is fundamental to all life. Organisms pass their genes to their descendants, often with small changes, and as a result life can evolve over the generations. Barring a few exceptions, all known organisms use DNA as the information carrier.

The ozone hole above the Antarctic has hit its maximum extent for the year. Due to warm temperatures, the opening in the protective atmospheric layer was the second smallest it has been for 20 years, scientists said Wednesday (Oct. 24).Stretching to 8.2 million square miles (21.2 million square kilometers), an area roughly the size of all of North America, the ozone hole reached its peak on Sept. 22. The largest one recorded to date spanned 11.5 million square miles (29.9 million square km) in 2000.

Guatemala's Mayan people accused the government and tour groups on Wednesday of perpetuating the myth that their calendar foresees the imminent end of the world for monetary gain."We are speaking out against deceit, lies and twisting of the truth, and turning us into folklore-for-profit. They are not telling the truth about time cycles," charged Felipe Gomez, leader of the Maya alliance Oxlaljuj Ajpop.Several films and documentaries have promoted the idea that the ancient Mayan calendar predicts that doomsday is less than two months away, on December 21, 2012.

BEIJING, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- China plans to build its first vessel capable of retrieving archaeological findings from the sea by the end of 2013, a major step to strengthening the underwater search abilities of Chinese archaeologists who currently rely on rented shipping boats.The 4.8-metre wide and 56-metre long boat, to be powered by an integrated full electric propulsion system, will "basically" meet China's underwater archaeological needs, according to a statement released by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) on Wednesday.

The sun unleased a powerful solar flare late Monday (Oct. 22), releasing waves of radiation into space that have already caused a short radio blackout on Earth.The flare erupted from the sunspot AR 11598 (short for Active Region 11598), and reached peak brightness at 11:22 p.m. EDT (0322 GMT this morning, Oct. 23), according to scientists working on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a space telescope that constantly monitors the sun with high-definition cameras. It ranked as an X1.8 solar flare, one of the strongest types of solar flares, according to the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) run by NOAA and the National Weather Service.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced plans Tuesday to launch a pilot epidemiological study of cancer risks near six nuclear power plants, including San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in north San Diego County.The commission is acting out of growing concern that using uranium to produce electricity may be dangerous even without accidents at nuclear plants. In addition, recent epidemiological studies in Germany and France suggest that the children living near nuclear reactors are twice as likely to develop leukemia.

The recent Italian court ruling that respected seismologists are guilty of manslaughter and should serve six years in prison for failing to predict the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake has sent shockwaves through the scientific community.Please forgive the questionable choice of metaphor in the last sentence there.The decision has been widely decried by the scientific community as poorly thought out bordering on ridiculous, largely due to the quite reasonable argument that earthquakes cannot be predicted with any useful degree of accuracy, despite all the modern technology and understanding at our disposal. Therefore, it is ridiculous for scientists to be jailed for not doing something that it's impossible to do. The ability to predict an earthquake accurately would be truly groundbreaking.

Scientists have unlocked the secrets behind the intricate pattern on cauliflowers.In a new study, researchers have discovered a mathematical formula to describe the processes that dictate how cauliflower-like patterns - a type of fractal pattern - form and develop.The term fractal describes a pattern that, when you take a small part of it, looks similar, although perhaps not identical, to its full structure.For example, the leaf of a fern tree resembles the full plant and a river's tributary resembles the shape of the river itself.Nature is full of fractal patterns; they can be seen in clouds, lightning bolts, crystals, snowflakes, mountains, and blood vessels.

Computer simulations provide new mathematical support for the "grandmother hypothesis" -- a famous theory that humans evolved longer adult lifespans than apes because grandmothers helped feed their grandchildren."Grandmothering was the initial step toward making us who we are," says Kristen Hawkes, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah and senior author of the new study published Oct. 24 by the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The director of Nasa's Mars exploration programme has spoken of hopes that one day the rover Curiosity might be brought back to Earth by astronauts.Doug McCuistion said it was his personal hope that humans would visit the Red Planet in the 2030s or 2040s.He said he could imagine astronauts walking up to Curiosity.McCuistion said the roving laboratory's mission was scheduled to last two years, but it could have enough power for 20 years.

Some people may actually see sounds, say researchers who found this odd ability is possible when the parts of the brain devoted to vision are small.These findings points to a clever strategy the brain might use when vision is unreliable, investigators added.Scientists took a closer look at the sound-induced flash illusion. When a single flash is followed by two bleeps, people sometimes also see two illusory consecutive flashes.

Chimpanzee innovations may be low tech by human standards, but they get the job done and are gradually improving and spreading, a new study co-authored by famed primatologist Jane Goodall suggests.The study, published in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, presents the first documented case of successful transmission of a novel cultural behavior -- ant fishing -- between wild chimpanzee communities."Ant fishing in this case is using twigs, leaf midribs or grass probes to extract carpenter ants from their nests in living trees or dead wood," lead author Robert O'Malley, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kenyon College, told Discovery News.

The Transportation Security Administration has been quietly removing its X-ray body scanners from major airports over the last few weeks and replacing them with machines that radiation experts believe are safer.The TSA says it made the decision not because of safety concerns but to speed up checkpoints at busier airports. It means, though, that far fewer passengers will be exposed to radiation because the X-ray scanners are being moved to smaller airports.

The Cretaceous-age Hell Creek Formation of Montana is best known for the discovery over a century ago of Tyrannosaurus rex. It also has produced some of the best fossils from the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. At that time, the planet experienced a mass extinction that wiped out many species including non-avian dinosaurs. However, for many mammals, including our own ancestors, this marked a beginning rather than the end.

It was 12.15am on a Sunday morning last month, in the first floor lobby of an identikit business hotel in north-east Argentina, that a very unlikely deal was done. Two of the last chiefs of that nation's indigenous Guaraní people, hundreds of miles and a world away from their forest home, put their signatures on an A3 print-out of a map, next to those of a local government minister, a lawyer, the young head of an Argentinian logging dynasty and two British conservationists.

Biologists record increasing amounts of plastic litter in the Arctic deep sea: studies confirm that twice as much marine debris is lying on the seabed today compared to ten years agoBremerhaven, 22nd October 2012. The seabed in the Arctic deep sea is increasingly strewn with litter and plastic waste. As reported in the advance online publication of the scientific journal Marine Pollution Bulletin by Dr. Melanie Bergmann, biologist and deep-sea expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association. The quantities of waste observed at the AWI deep-sea observatory HAUSGARTEN are even higher than those found in a deep-sea canyon near the Portuguese capital Lisbon.

AUSTRALIA'S $46 million Antarctic airstrip is melting, leaving the government scrambling to find a new air link to the frozen continent.The Wilkins runway - carved into ice near Casey station, about 3400 kilometres south-west of Hobart - was commissioned under the Howard government and hailed at its 2008 opening by the then Environment Minister, Peter Garrett.But unexpected surface melt has sharply curtailed use of the summer airstrip.

An eel undulating through coastal waters, powered by batteries and checking for mines. A jellyfish is actually a surveillance robot, powered by the atoms around it. Fins pick up intelligence while propelling a robot bluegill sunfish.The Office of Naval Research is supporting baby steps toward making those visions of the future a reality. For instance, the jellyfish work in Texas and Virginia is focused on how the creatures move in water, and how to mimic or even surpass their abilities. The robojellyfish is currently tethered to hydrogen and oxygen tanks, and ONR project manager Robert Brizzolara said he doesn't plan to try making it move autonomously yet.

It's official: A giant marine reptile that roamed the seas roughly 150 million years ago is a new species, researchers say. The animal, now named Pliosaurus funkei, spanned about 40 feet and had a 6.5-foot-long skull with a bite four times as powerful as Tyrannosaurus rex."They were the top predators of the sea," said Patrick Druckenmiller, a paleontologist at the University of Alaska Museum and co-author of the study, published in the Oct. 12 issue of the Norwegian Journal of Geology. "They had teeth that would have made a T. rex whimper.".

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Leaders of a tiny, native village off Canada's remote northwest coast on Friday defended their decision to dump 120 tons of iron dust into the ocean as a legal experiment to revive salmon stocks, but Canada said it was investigating a possible breach of environmental law.The village council conducted its C$2.5 million ($2.52 million) experiment in August in the waters around Haida Gwaii, an archipelago some 130 kilometers (81 miles) off the British Columbian coast.

Annual to decadal changes in the earth's magnetic field in a region that stretches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean have a close relationship with variations of gravity in this area. From this it can be concluded that outer core processes are reflected in gravity data. This is the result presented by a German-French group of geophysicists in the latest issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States).

A study relating climate to conflict in East African nations finds that increased rainfall dampens conflict while unusually hot periods can cause a flare-up, reinforcing the theory that climate change will cause increased scarcity in the region. The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Politicians and many scientists have called climate change a security risk, based on the idea that unusual variations in weather are likely to put immense strain on rural societies dependent on farming and livestock for survival. But the results of studies trying to confirm such a hypothesis have been mixed.

The president of Uruguay, José Mujica, has announced plans to legalise the production and sale of marijuana under a state monopoly, triggering a lively controversy in Montevideo. The relevant bill will soon be tabled in parliament, where the governing centre-left coalition led by the Broad Front (FA) enjoys a majority but is divided on this issue.Possessing and consuming marijuana was decriminalised in 2000. "There is no question of Uruguay producing and distributing drugs, but the state will control and regulate the market," said interior minister Eduardo Bonomi.

The discovery sounded like a sensation: A statue of a Buddha, allegedly 1,000 years old and collected by the Nazis in Tibet, had been carved out of a piece of meteorite. Now, however, it looks as though only the latter detail is true. The work is likely a fake produced at some point during the 20th century.It was a story that rapidly circled the globe at the end of September. A statue of Buddha, allegedly collected by the Nazis during a late 1930s expedition to Tibet, had been carved out of meteorite. Referred to as the "Iron Man," the 24 centimeter-tall figure with a swastika on its chest was thought to be 1,000 years old. The statue's previous owner, researchers wrote in their Sept. 27 report, had said that it was brought to Germany by the SS expedition led by ethnologist Ernst Schäfer.

Ancient DNA preserved in the teeth of the first known New Zealanders, who died more than 700 years ago, is helping shed new light on the settlement of Polynesia, researchers report.Scientists think New Zealand was the last major landmass to be permanently settled by humans, drawing to a close a dispersal process that began in Africa around 65,000 years ago.

Eating a raw food diet is a recipe for disaster if you're trying to boost your species' brainpower. That's because humans would have to spend more than 9 hours a day eating to get enough energy from unprocessed raw food alone to support our large brains, according to a new study that calculates the energetic costs of growing a bigger brain or body in primates. But our ancestors managed to get enough energy to grow brains that have three times as many neurons as those in apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. How did they do it? They got cooking, according to a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team of scientists has created what it believes is the first really accurate reconstruction of Neanderthal man, from a skeleton that was discovered in France over a century ago.In 1909, excavations at La Ferrassie cave in the Dordogne unearthed the remains of a group of Neanderthals. One of the skeletons in that group was that of an adult male, given the name La Ferrassie 1.These remains have helped scientists create a detailed reconstruction of our closest prehistoric relative for a new BBC series, Prehistoric Autopsy.La Ferrassie 1 is one of the most important discoveries made in the field of Neanderthal research.

The invention of musical instruments came about accidentally, suggests an Australian physicist. Developing instruments depended on the materials available, and sometimes the stimulus came from the clamor of battle.No one knows where music came from, or who Elvis' singing predecessors were, or even when the first instruments were invented, but Neville Fletcher, a retired scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra who has made a hobby of studying the physics of instruments, thinks the key to the invention of instruments is the materials available in each civilization. The people used what they had.

A giant wave of super-hot solar plasma larger than the Earth erupted from the sun on Friday in a spectacular display captured by a NASA spacecraft.The huge solar prominence occurred at 4:15 a.m. EDT (0815 GMT) and was recorded in amazing detail by the high-definition cameras aboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory before escaping the sun."Once it started breaking away, the process only took 10 hours before it was out of sight," NASA media specialist Steele Hill explained in a photo description. "The prominence stretched out many times the size of Earth."Note: see also Space.com's video article 'Solar Flares: Storms On The Sun Can Make Our Electronics Go Haywire'.

Twenty-five teams are officially in the running for the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP), the $30 million prize for soft-landing a privately funded unmanned spacecraft on the moon. As the 2015 deadline approaches, however, it has become clear which teams are the early leaders in the chase to pull off a feat achieved only by two world superpowers, and not since the 1970s."This is really a predictable watershed year for the competition," says Bob Richards, co-founder and CEO of Moon Express, one of the top contenders in the competition. Richards spoke to PM by phone as he drove to his team's headquarters at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Bay Area. A rocket launch must be booked two years in advance, according to Richards, "so if you don't have a launch contract 24 months before the expiry of the prize, you're just not credible." .

3-D printers are already being used to create machine parts and small toys, but engineers have now used the technology to build an entire vehicle: a plastic, unmanned airplane that actually flies.The plane, created by engineering students at the University of Virginia (U.Va.), has a 6.5-foot wingspan, and was made from assembled printed parts.The team tested their creation during four flights in August and early September at Milton Airfield near Keswick, Va. The aircraft, which is only the third 3-D-printed plane known to have been built and flown, achieved a cruising speed of 45 mph.

Eastern Kentucky University has acquired a 33-pound meteorite from an eastern Tennessee family that used the space rock as a doorstop and flower bed ornament over the years.The meteorite was initially found in a cow pasture near Tazewell, Tennessee, in the 1930s by Tilmon Brooks, the late grandfather of Donna Lewis, a school secretary in Pineville, Kentucky.Tests at the University of Tennessee concluded that the meteorite likely came from a known meteorite strike that had first turned up evidence in Tazewell in 1853.EKU's Department of Physics and Astronomy Chairman, Jerry Cook, announced that the meteorite would makes its debut at the Kentucky Academy of Science annual conference on campus over the weekend.

Scientists have genetically modified mice to enable them to sniff out landmines. They hope the GM mouse, known as MouSensor, could one day become a useful tool to help deal with the dangerous legacies of past wars.More than 70 countries are contaminated by landmines, a constant reminder of previous conflicts. "Long after wars have ended, communities are still impeded from going back to their normal, daily activities because of all these mines still affecting their land," said Charlotte D'Hulst of Hunter College, New York, who led the team that developed the MouSensor.

Rome may not exactly be short of catacombs, but one discovered this week is more deserving of the name than the city's countless other subterranean burial chambers. For Mirko Curti stumbled into a 2,000-year-old tomb piled with bones while chasing a wayward moggy yards from his apartment building.Curti and a friend were following the cat at 10pm on Tuesday when it scampered towards a low tufa rock cliff close to his home near Via di Pietralata in a residential area of the city. "The cat managed to get into a grotto and we followed the sound of its miaowing," he said.

Some of Europe's most prominent scientists have opened a debate with philosophers and theologians over the origins of everything.The event, in Geneva, Switzerland, is described as a search for "common ground" between religion and science over how the Universe began.It will focus on the Big Bang theory.The conference was called by Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in the wake of its Higgs boson discovery.

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Wouldn't it be amazing if our bodies prepared us for future events that could be very important to us, even if there's no clue about what those events will be?Presentiment without any external clues may, in fact, exist, according to new Northwestern University research that analyzes the results of 26 studies published between 1978 and 2010.Related: See Rupert Sheldrake's GHMB community interview

A new, comprehensive review of humans' anthropological and genetic records gives the most up-to-date story of the "Out of Africa" expansion that occurred about 45,000 to 60,000 years ago.This expansion, detailed by three Stanford geneticists, had a dramatic effect on human genetic diversity, which persists in present-day populations. As a small group of modern humans migrated out of Africa into Eurasia and the Americas, their genetic diversity was substantially reduced.

The world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has so far defied attempts to uncover its 5,000-year-old secrets, could be about to be decoded by Oxford University academics.This international research project is already casting light on a lost bronze age middle eastern society where enslaved workers lived on rations close to the starvation level."I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.

The ruins of the ancient city of Petra lay hidden until 1812, when a Swiss explorer stumbled upon them in modern-day Jordan. Two centuries later, a new exhibition in Basel brings together some 150 artifacts that shed light on how this mysterious culture of spice traders carved a luxurious oasis into the rocks of the desert.In the stifling heat, the intruder squeezed his way through the Siq, a narrow gorge flanked by steep rock walls. The man walked through the dark gorge for 1.2 kilometers (0.75 miles). Suddenly, he laid eyes on a magnificent scene.

Here we go again. Yet more research has been published in the world's most prestigious, peer-reviewed journals showing that extremely widely-used pesticides have very damaging effects on bees, yet the only response from the government is inaction.The new paper, published in Nature, shows that bumblebees foraging naturally and exposed to realistic doses of pesticides suffer in two key ways. First they are about twice as likely to die: two-thirds of the bees are lost when exposed to two pesticides compared to only a third when not exposed. Second, the exposed bees are half as successful in gathering food.

Mud is not renowned for its clarity, but the murky gloop at the bottom of a Japanese lake could provide the clearest, most accurate way yet of calibrating radiocarbon dates. The finding promises to help us pin down exactly when important events in prehistory occurred, including periods of climate change and the date of the Neanderthals' extinction.

Craig Venter helped crack the human genome, created the first synthetic cell and has scoured the sea for novel genomes. Now he has set his sights on Mars.Earlier this week at the Wired Health Conference in New York, he outlined plans to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit, or "biological teleporter", to the Red Planet in order to sequence the genome of alien life that may be there. He's not the first to suggest doing this. Do any of these missions stand a chance?.

Saturn's icy medium-size moons were born when a few much bigger satellites collided to form the ringed planet's huge moon Titan, a new study suggests.The Saturn system started out with a family of several relatively large moons like the Galilean satellites of Jupiter (Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io), according to the new theory. But things changed with a few dramatic moon mergers, which created the Titan we know today and shed enough material to form satellites such as Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Iapetus, researchers said.

Public opposition to the use of animals in medical research is growing and trust in both scientists and the rules governing the controversial practice is falling, new government-funded research shows.More than one in three people (37%) now class themselves as "objectors" to the practice. Their number has been rising steadily since the 29% recorded in 2006 and 35% seen in 2010, though is still lower than the 39% found in 2002, according to the latest research into public attitudes on the issue by Ipsos MORI.

On a windswept Swedish mountain, a 10,000-year-old spruce with a claim to be the world's oldest tree is getting a new lease of life thanks to global warming, even as many plants are struggling.Scientists are finding that the drift of growing areas for many plants out toward the poles is moving not in a smooth progression but in fits and starts, causing problems for farmers aiming to adapt and invest in cash crops that are more sensitive to climate than is this ancient conifer known as "Old Tjikko".At a range of latitudes, but especially in the far north, climate change is bringing bigger than expected swings, putting billions of dollars at stake in a push to develop varieties with resilience to frost and heatwaves, drought or flood.

For nearly a decade, scientists and Northwest tribes in Washington state fought bitterly over whether to bury or study the 9,500-year-old bones known as Kennewick Man. Scientists won the battle, and now, after years of careful examination, they're releasing some of their findings.For starters, Kennewick Man was buff. I mean, really beefcake. So says Doug Owsley, head of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and the man who led the study of the ancient remains.

Conservators and scientists studying illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge say their work could help uncover ancient techniques used by artists.The Fitzwilliam Museum worked with scientists at Cambridge University to analyse the composition of manuscripts.Fibre optic and X-ray technology was used to analyse pigments and reveal sketches beneath the paintings.The museum said it could provide insights into their production and help conservators repair "priceless" art.

Nasa's Curiosity rover has ingested its first Martian soil sample.The robot has taken a pinch of dust into the CheMin instrument, one of its two big onboard analytical tools.It is a key moment for the $2.6bn mission - Curiosity's internal apparatus will play a central role in its investigation of the Red Planet."The most important thing about our mobile laboratory is that it eats dirt - that's what we live on," chief scientist John Grotzinger told the BBC.

Egypt has reopened one of its great pyramids as it attempts to revive a tourism industry hit by last year's uprising.Antiquities Minister Muhammad Ibrahim reopened the Pyramid of Chefren (Khafre) and six ancient tombs at Giza after a long restoration project.He said he was keen to stress that Egypt is a safe country for tourists.The BBC's Jon Leyne in Egypt says visitor numbers have only just begun to pick up after last year's revolution.The problem, he says, is that many Westerners still see Egypt as something of a war zone.

If you believe in that sort of thing, humanity can expect a mere two months left of existence before the Mayan apocalypse hits Dec. 21.Today (Oct. 21) starts the two-month countdown toward doomsday, according to an interpretation of the Mayan calendar that has taken hold in some New Age and spiritualist communities online.Two ancient texts confirm the end date of the Mayan Long Count calendar on the winter solstice of this year, which is Dec. 21, 2012. That day is the last day of the 13th bak'tun, or 144,000-day cycle, of the calendar. Ancient Maya would have seen the end of the 13th bak'tun as the end of a full cycle of creation.

IT IS never too late to find a shortcut. Centuries after the construction of Cambodia's Angkor Wat, archaeologists have uncovered traces of a series of canals that suggest the 5 million tonnes of sandstone used to build the temples took a far shorter route than previously thought.The sandstone blocks each weigh up to 1.5 tonnes and originate from quarries at Mount Kulen. It was thought they were taken 35 kilometres along a canal to Tonlé Sap Lake, rafted another 35 km along the lake, then taken up the Siem Reap River for 15 km, against the current.

A symphonic note lit three strands of deep-red light trickling like water in my right visual field. Deeper tones were huge blue clouds in the middle distance, pouring from above. A prolonged violin solo turned the sky yellow, and brought with it a comet's tail of body parts flying from the upper left of my visual field to the lower right, disappearing behind me.This happened within the first hour of my swallowing a capsule of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in "magic mushrooms". I'd volunteered to be a scientific-research-study subject at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Behavioural Pharmacology Research Unit (BPRU) as part of a clinical trial to test the hypothesis that psilocybin can help cancer patients to regain a sense of existential meaning in the face of their disease.

Until 1949, when archaeologists dug up prehistoric bones, stone points, charcoal remnants or other artifacts from early human history, they had no way of knowing exactly how old these objects were. Chemist Willard Libby changed that, devising an ingenious method for dating ancient objects based on the types of carbon atoms contained within them.Libby and his colleagues based their idea on the fact that living things incorporate tiny amounts of a certain isotope of carbon (C-14) from the atmosphere into their structure; when they die, they stop adding new C-14, and the quantity left inside slowly degrades into a different element, nitrogen-14. By figuring out that the half-life of C-14 (the amount of time it takes for half of a given quantity of C-14 to decay into N-14) is 5,730 years, they could chemically analyze the ratio of C-14 to N-14 inside a piece of wood or bone and determine just how long it had been dead.

ANSA MEDATHENS, OCTOBER 4 - An accidental meeting in 1982 between a well-known Greek archaeologist, Yannis Sakellarakis, and a shepherd from Crete has led to an archaeological discovery of great importance – Zominthos, a settlement from the Minoan era on the plain by the same name, 1.187 metres above the sea. The settlement is at the feet of the highest mountain in Crete, Mount Psiloritis, eight kilometres from the village of Anogia along the road which led from Knossos to Ideon Andron, the cave where Zeus was born according to Greek mythology.

Fossilised skulls of dome-headed dinosaurs retain signs of injuries from violent head butting or head shoving, say US scientists.The dinosaurs, known as pachycephalosaurs (meaning "thick-headed lizards") have long puzzled paleontologists, who wondered why the heads of these dinosaurs looked to have built-in football helmets.It's been suspected that dome-headed dinosaurs fought with their heads, but the latest investigation provides some of the most direct evidence for this antagonistic behaviour.

A fossil bird's nest has been discovered in Spain, cradling at least five eggs that scientists believe belonged to an ancient flamingo some 18 million years ago.The nest was found in a limestone block in the Ebro Basin in northeastern Spain. The researchers think it was abandoned and sunk to the bottom of a shallow, salty lake (which once also housed snakes, turtles and crocodiles) before being covered in mud and fossilizing during the early Miocene.

Newly discovered fossilized bones for the world's oldest and most primitive known primate, Purgatorius, reveal a tiny, agile animal that spent much of its time eating fruit and climbing trees, according to a study.The fossils, described today in a presentation at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's 72nd Annual Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, are the first known below-the-head bones for Purgatorius. Previously, only teeth revealed its existence.

LONDON (Reuters) - A small British company has developed a way to create petrol from air and water, technology it hopes may one day contribute to large-scale production of green fuels.Engineers at Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) in Teeside, northern England, say they have produced 5 litres of synthetic petrol over a period of three months.The technique involves extracting carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water, and combining them in a reactor with a catalyst to make methanol. The methanol is then converted into petrol.

A new material inspired by butterfly wings repels water and gleams with brilliant color. Like iridescent butterflies, the material uses tiny structures on its surface to achieve both qualities.A material that's both colorful and water-repelling could someday go into sensors that regulate the interior temperature of "smart buildings," said Shu Yang, a University of Pennsylvania chemist whose research group made the new material.

Thinking like a physicist can improve your chances of winning at roulette, say researchers.A paper in a recent issue of the journal Chaos shows how a computer program can be used to give an expected return of at least 18 per cent, instead of the usual -2.7 per cent."It's a fairly simple model that we're using and the result we get is the one you would expect to get," says lead author, mathematician Professor Michael Small of the University of Western Sydney.

Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep.A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG).The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep.

The "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" papyrus, which may or may not be a forgery, seems to be in limbo, as the Harvard Theological Review has pulled the scientific article describing the discovery from their January 2013 issue.This withdrawal, however, doesn't mean the journal will never publish the scientific paper by Harvard historian Karen King on the supposed lost Gospel. "Harvard Theological Review is planning to publish Professor King's paper after testing is concluded so that the results may be incorporated," Kit Dodgson, director of communications at Harvard Divinity School, wrote in an email to LiveScience.Even so, the announcement has garnered both anger and elation.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of a Stone Age tomb near the site of a megalithic monument known as Sweden's Stonehenge.Remains of a burial site thought to be 5,500 years old were found near to Ale's Stones, an arrangement of 59 boulders on a cliff on the Swedish Baltic coast.According to local folklore the stones are the final resting place of a legendary leader known as King Ale, but other theories say it could be an astronomical calendar with the same underlying geometry as Stonehenge.Researchers from the Swedish National Heritage board discovered the traces of the ancient tomb after digging a trial trench at the centre of the stone circle, which itself is thought to be between 1,000 and 2,500 years old.'The findings confirm what we have believed; that this has been a special place for a very long time,' archaeologist Bengt Söderberg told Swedish news agency TT.

Dolphins can stay alert and active for 15 days or more by sleeping with one half of their brain at a time, scientists in the United States have learned.The trick of keeping half the brain continuously awake is vital to the sea mammals' survival, experts believe.It allows them to come to the surface every so often to breath, and remain constantly vigilant for sharks.

Feverishly hot ocean surface waters potentially reaching more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) may have helped cause the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history, researchers say."We may have found the hottest time the world has ever had," researcher Paul Wignall, a geologist at the University of Leeds in England, told LiveScience.

Although climate change is expected to lead to slightly more rainfall at the global level, the timing and distribution of that rain is likely to change, increasing the chance of drought in some regions. The details are very difficult to predict, however. This is partly because regional climate impacts are strongly dependent on large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns like the jet stream, which are hard to model in climate simulations. There is some indication from climate modelling that the Mediterranean, Central America and Western Australia regions may experience reduced precipitation, but there is still considerable uncertainty as climate models do not all agree, because local features such as mountains and rainforests can be important, and because of the large range of natural variability.