Newsdesk Archive

In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science, Sarah Stewart and Matija Cuk said their theory would explain why the Earth and Moon have similar composition and chemistry.The Earth was spinning much faster at the time the Moon was formed, and a day lasted only two to three hours, they said.With the Earth spinning so quickly, a giant impact could have launched enough of the Earth's material to form a moon, the scientists said in an explanation published on a Harvard website.

Speaking truth to power has always been a high-risk strategy in China. Its rulers tend to prefer flattery, and writers who forget this do so at their peril. China's "grand historian" - 2,000 years ago - was one of many who have paid a terrible price."Among defilements, none is so great as castration. Any man who continues to live having suffered such a punishment is accounted as a nothing."The man who wrote those words is by no means a nothing today. In a nation obsessed by its history, Sima Qian was the first and some say the greatest historian.

Αrchaeologists from the 28th Ephorate of Antiquities unearthed a tomb in the city of Amphipolis, near Serres, northern Greece, which they believe could belong to the wife and son of Alexander the Great, Roxane and Alexander IV.The circular precinct is three meters, or nearly 10 feet high and its perimeter is about 500 metes, or 1,640 feet surrounding the tomb located in an urban area close to the small city of Amphipolis. The head of the team, Katerina Peristeri noted that it is too soon to talk with certainty about the identities of the discovery.

Few forms of conflict are so damaging to a country or its people as a prolonged civil war. By 1939, when Franco's forces had finished mopping up the last Republican resistance in Spain, more than half a million lay dead and some of the most beautiful city centres in Europe had been destroyed.A similar pattern played out in 1970s Lebanon, which saw 150,000 casualties and the almost complete destruction of the elegant villas of Ottoman Beirut. In Afghanistan it was not Soviet invasion or occupation that killed most people or wrecked Kabul, but the internecine street fighting that followed in the early 1990s. In a few years, as Masood's rockets fell on Pashtun neighbourhoods of Kabul, and Hekmatyar's forces emptied the Tajik suburbs, palaces and museums were looted; while in the Shomali plain, Gandharan Buddhist sites were serially plundered of their treasure.

In the past 10 years we've seen cell phones transform into electronic Swiss army knives with a wild variety of functions and features. They are replacing the watch, the camera, the standalone GPS, the alarm clock, and many other tools.But what will the smartphones of the future look like?Here's what we envision ...In five years, the Patent Wars are over and Apple emerges victorious. The company has trademarks of many design features, including many types of curves. As a result, competing smartphone manufacturers resort to triangular or angular forms.

Commuting is the focus of today's Great California ShakeOut, which is being billed as the "largest earthquake safety drill in U.S. history."Across the state in schools, offices, hospitals and -- for the first time -- Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, people will be asked to drop, cover and hold on during the annual drill. Metro trains will also slow down at 10:18 a.m. as if a real earthquake occurred.More than 9.3 million Californians are expected to take part.

The UK has experienced its "weirdest" weather on record in the past few months, scientists say.The driest spring for over a century gave way to the wettest recorded April to June in a dramatic turnaround never documented before.The scientists said there was no evidence that the weather changes were a result of Man-made climate change.But experts from three bodies warned the UK must plan for periodic swings of drought conditions and flooding.The warning came from the Environment Agency, Met Office and Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) at a joint briefing in London.

The world's northernmost lake, situated near the coast of Greenland (map), is coming back to life.Populations of microscopic algae, called diatoms, have been absent from the lake Kaffeklubben Sø for over 2,000 years. But a new study has found that the diatoms are returning, thanks to global warming."It's a pure climate change story," said study co-author Bianca Perren, a paleoecologist at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, France, who specializes in Arctic environmental change.

A team of archaeologists and students are excavating a site in the Nile Delta region of Egypt where, set within desert desolation, ruins still bespeak an important port city that flourished by the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. Near the present-day city of El-Mansoura, a clearly human-made rise with visible ruins mark the spot of Tel Timai, what remains of the city of Thmuis, an ancient port city and capital of the Ptolemies.

Ban Non Wat, or "Village of the Temple Mound", is a village in central Thailand located near the city of Phimai. The countryside is dotted with villages much like it, and rice fields dominate the landscape, interspersed with groves of trees. A broad range of bird species, from bee-eaters, to hawks, to water birds, inhabit the area. Throughout the area are richly decorated Buddhist temples from which attending monks make their rounds among the villages for alms early in the morning, and during January and February many of the temples host public festivals open to the locals and visiting public. In many ways, it is a typical rural landscape in Thailand.

David Wineland, who won the Nobel Prize for work in quantum physics with Serge Haroche of France, said our limited computers will "eventually" give way to super-fast, revolutionary ones.The pair, both 68, were honored for pioneering optical experiments in "measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems," the Nobel Physics jury said in its citation on Tuesday."Most science progresses very slowly," Wineland told AFP."On the computing side, we are able to think about applying these quantum systems to solve other problems that we try to do on computer now but our computers are limited.

WARSAW -- There are very few places that can accurately be described as hell on Earth. One of these is the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, where as many as 1.5 million people died during the five years the camp was in operation.The Polish resistance had been hearing horrific first- or second-hand accounts about the conditions inside Auschwitz. These early accounts came primarily from released prisoners, but also from casual observers like railway employees and residents of the nearby village of Oswiecim. The resistance decided they needed someone on the inside.

The home secretary, Theresa May, defied the American authorities on Tuesday by halting the extradition of British computer hacker Gary McKinnon, a decision criticised by the US state department but welcomed with delight by campaigners and politicians across parties in the UK.In a dramatic House of Commons statement, May told MPs she had taken the quasi-judicial decision on human rights grounds because of medical reports warning that McKinnon, 46, who has Asperger's syndrome and suffers from depressive illness, could kill himself if sent to stand trial in the US.

A new series of radiocarbon measurements from Japan's Lake Suigetsu will give scientists a more accurate benchmark for dating materials, especially for older objects, according to a research team that included Oxford University's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.The research team extracted cores of beautifully preserved layers of sediment, containing organic material (such as tree leaf and twig fossils), from the bottom of the Japanese lake where they had lain undisturbed for tens of thousands of years.

Ice sheets retreating due to global warming often suddenly stabilise for "decades to centuries" no matter that the warming is still going on, scientists have found. The new research would seem likely to have an impact on forecasts seeking to predict sea-level rise in coming times.Boffins at Cambridge, Durham and Sheffield universities and others at the British Antarctic Survey came together to produce the new investigation, which sought to examine the way in which fast-moving "ice streams" move from major ice sheets - such as the Greenland and Western Antarctic ones - to the sea. The streams are very important, as they carry 90 per cent of the ice moving into the ocean.

A controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July, a Guardian investigation can reveal.Lawyers, environmentalists and civil society groups are calling it a "blatant violation" of two international moratoria and the news is likely to spark outrage at a United Nations environmental summit taking place in India this week.

Scientists have put a new turn on the theory of how the Moon was created.It has long been thought that the lunar body resulted from an impact between the early Earth and another planet-sized object 4.5 billion years ago.But this theory predicts Earth and its satellite should have a quite different chemical make-up - and the data shows in fact they are very similar.Now, new modelling reveals that if the Earth had a much faster spin before the impact, the theory fits the chemistry.

Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has made some dramatic transformations in recent years, a new study reveals.Huge belts in the giant planet's atmosphere have changed color, radiation hotspots have faded and flared up again, and cloud levels have thickened and dissolved, all while space rocks have been hurtling into it the gas giant, astronomers said."The changes we're seeing in Jupiter are global in scale," Glenn Orton, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement today (Oct. 17). Orton and his colleagues have been snapping infrared images of Jupiter from 2009 to 2012 and comparing them with amateur astronomers' visible images.

An Ecuadorean shaman and his British wife will embark this week on a house-to-house campaign in their Amazonian village to dissuade locals from granting exploration rights to an oil company in an area of pristine forest close to the Yasuni national park.Patricio Jipa and Mari Muench hope to thwart the advances of PetroAmazonas, which has promised villagers from the Kichwa indigenous group that they will get cash, new schools, a new eco-lodge, better healthcare and university education for their children if they accept plans for a seismic survey.

Greenpeace activists have dived to the bottom of the Indian Ocean to highlight the need to protect sea waters.The dive comes as 70 environment ministers from around the world are meeting in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad to discuss biodiversity.On Tuesday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged $50m (£30.96m) towards conservation schemes.India has taken over the presidency of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) until 2014.

Scientists have found support for the controversial idea that global warming is causing more frequent and destructive hurricanes, a subject that has been hotly debated during the past decade.Data gathered from tide gauges, which monitor the rapid changes to sea levels caused by storm surges, show a significant link between both the frequency and intensity of tropical storms and increases in annual temperatures since the tidal records began in 1923.

Joe Waldman is saying goodbye to corn after yet another hot and dry summer convinced him that rainfall won't be there when he needs it anymore."I finally just said uncle," said Waldman, 52, surveying his stunted crop about 100 miles north of Dodge City, Kansas. Instead, he will expand sorghum, which requires less rain; let some fields remain fallow; and restrict corn to irrigated fields.

INDORE: Defying the claims of CERN, which had recently told the world that it has found the god particle, a person from Indore claims that Higgs Boson (the real name of God's particle) is an Indian discovery as it finds mention in Vedas.The most important discovery of the decade Higgs Boson is the Golden Embryo Hiranyagarbha in the Vedas, and foundation of Vedic Science. Vedic scientists have traced and knew the building block of the creation 18000 years ago.

Our solar system is shaped like a thin-crust pizza, with most of the planets traveling around the sun close to the same plane, and it's apparently not alone. A new study suggests the majority of alien planetary systems are much like ours, "flatter than pancakes," scientists say.UCLA astronomers looked at data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope and found that more than 85 percent of alien planets have inclinations of less than 3 degrees. This means they orbit around a star near the same axis as other planets in their system.

After getting off to a rocky start with an engine failure during launch Sunday, a commercial cargo capsule loaded with a half-ton of equipment and supplies, including ice cream, carried out a flawless final approach to the International Space Station early Wednesday, pulling up to within 60 feet so Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, operating the lab's robot arm, could pluck it out of open space for berthing.

British singer Sarah Brightman is to travel as a space tourist to the International Space Station.The classical recording artist, once married to Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, will be part of a three-person crew flying to the ISS.After completing a tour in 2013, Ms Brightman will embark on six months of preparation at the Star City cosmonaut training centre in Moscow.She will be the seventh space tourist to visit the ISS.The last space tourist, Cirque du Soleil chief executive Guy Laliberte, paid around $35m for the privilege.

Former President Bill Clinton recently expressed his support for interstellar travel at the 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating for human expansion into other star systems. Interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission. The knowledge of those factors may be improved by the solution a University of Missouri researcher found to a puzzle that has stumped astrophysicists for decades.

The Mongol empire in the 13th century conquered great swaths of Asia, the Middle East and even parts of Europe at staggering speed, but how did Genghis Khan and his armies manage to conquer so much and so fast? The answer may lie in some ancient dead trees found recently in an old volcanic lava flow in Mongolia. The trees were so well preserved that their annual growth rings were still visible and gave an astonishing insight into the climate of the 1200s. The wood rings were spaced wide apart showing that the trees grew well, thanks to plenty of rain. And because the trees did well, the chances are that the grasslands of the vast Mongolian plains also grew lush in the wet climate. Those rich grasslands would have fuelled the Mongol armies, giving plenty of grazing land for the thousands of horses that the troops relied on, and livestock to feed the soldiers.

When Alex unexpectedly passed away after only thirty-one years of life, his last words to his dearest friend were, "You be good. See you tomorrow. I love you." A touching sentiment indeed, but all the more impressive because Alex was an African Grey Parrot. Over the course of thirty years of work between psychologist Irene Pepperberg and Alex, purchased from a Chicago pet store at one year of age, the parrot amassed a vocabulary of some 150 words. According to one report, he was able to recognize fifty different objects, could count quantities up to six, and could distinguish among seven colours and five shapes. He also understood the ideas of "bigger" and "smaller", and "same" and "different".

Sifting through soil on Mars, NASA's rover Curiosity paused to take a picture - and exposed its own bad behaviour. The shot included a bright object lying in the Martian dirt, and a closer look suggests that the rover is guilty of littering: it appears the object is a piece of plastic wrapper that has fallen from the robot.The discovery has put a twist on the rover's current mission to scrub out its soil scoop and take its first sample of Martian dirt for analysis. More bright specks of unidentified matter in the soil - at first thought to be from Curiosity shedding - may actually be Martian in origin, although what they might be is a mystery.

On Oct. 12, 1979, Super Typhoon Tip's central pressure dropped to 870 mb (25.69 inches Hg), the lowest sea-level pressure ever observed on Earth, according to NOAA. Peak wind gusts reached 190 mph (306 kph) while the storm churned over the western Pacific.Besides having unsurpassed intensity, Super Typhoon Tip is also remembered for its massive size. Tip's diameter of circulation spanned approximately 1,380 miles (2,220 km), setting a record for the largest storm on Earth. The storm's huge diameter was exactly the same as the distance from New York City to Dallas.

A new article is now available on the articles section. Opening lines: Most of us tend to think of geometry as a relatively dry, if not altogether boring, subject remembered from our Middle school years, consisting of endless axioms, definitions, postulates and proofs, hearkening back, in fact, to the methodology of Euclids Elements, in form and structure a masterly exposition of logical thinking and mental training but not the most thrilling read one might undertake in their leisure time. While the modern, academic approach to the study of geometry sees it as the very embodiment of rationalism and left brain, intellectual processes, which indeed it is, it has neglected the right brain, intuitive, artistic dimension of the subject. Sacred geometry seeks to unite and synthesize these two dynamic and complementary aspects of geometry into an integrated whole.:

Astronomers have found a planet whose skies are illuminated by four different suns - the first known of its type.The distant world orbits one pair of stars and has a second stellar pair revolving around it.It remains a mystery how the Neptune-like world avoids being pulled apart by the gravitational forces generated its four stars.The find was made by volunteers using the Planethunters.org website along with a team from UK and US institutes.A scientific paper outlining the quadruple star system has been posted on the Arxiv pre-print server.

This image is a stunning example of one of the most intriguing practices in the history of mathematics.Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the Japanese used to hang up pictures of maths theorems at their shrines.Called "sangaku", the pictures were both religious offerings and public announcements of the latest discoveries.It's a little like as if Isaac Newton had decided to hang up his monographs at the local church instead of publishing them in books.More than 700 sangaku are known to have survived, and the above shape is a detail from the oldest one that exists in its complete form.

The password is becoming passé. Every week it seems, someone is proposing a new method for authenticating computer users when they attempt to access email or a bank account. There are finger swipes, brain patterns, palm prints, and even butt-prints. Now we can add eye movements to the list.Oleg Komogortsev, an assistant professor in the computer science department at Texas State University-San Marcos thinks that how a person's eyes focus when he looks at an object can be as individual as a fingerprint.

Wildlife officials in Florida are examining a lone blue eye the size of a softball that washed ashore on Pompano Beach this week. While test results are pending, some researchers have speculated that the mysterious eye belonged to a large swordfish.Though some had also suggested it came from a deep-sea squid, experts contacted by LiveScience lean toward a swordfish as the likely eyeball owner.Marine scientist Heather Bracken-Grissom, of Florida International University in Miami, told LiveScience that the shape of the eyeball's lens and pupil is similar to that of a giant squid.

41,000 years ago, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occured. Magnetic studies of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on sediment cores from the Black Sea show that during this period, during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed to the south instead of north. Moreover, data obtained by the research team formed around GFZ researchers Dr. Norbert Nowaczyk and Prof. Helge Arz, together with additional data from other studies in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and Hawaii, prove that this polarity reversal was a global event. Their results are published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Last fall, fishermen in the Northeast United States noticed stronger currents and higher water temperatures than usual, so they tapped scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts to help them find out what was going on.A study by the scientists, published recently in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests the cause was a change in the direction of the Gulf Stream, the current that ferries warm water from the Gulf of Mexico northeast into the Atlantic and along the U.S. East Coast. The scientists found that the center, or core, of the Gulf Stream was diverted as much as 125 miles (200 kilometers) to the north of its average position, according to a WHOI statement.

Claims global warming stopped 15 years ago are based on "cherry-picked" data and don't account for natural fluctuations in climate, according to climate scientists responding to an article that appeared Saturday (Oct. 13) in the British newspaper, The Daily Mail.The article cites combined global land and sea-temperature data compiled by British climate researchers, claiming that between August 1997 and August 2012, "there was no discernable rise in aggregate global temperatures.".

The lawyers who took on the big US tobacco companies, and won, have now set their sights on the food industry. Newsnight's science editor, Susan Watts, asks one of them why he has chosen this particular fight.Don Barrett likes his opponents powerful, and rich. He is the lawyer whose decade-long battle to force the tobacco companies to admit they knew cigarettes were addictive and pay the medical costs of victims was depicted in the film The Insider.

For many, the question of whether it is possible to communicate with the dead is very much a settled issue.On one side there are the passionate, unshakeable believers, for whom no amount of argument will convince them that their dear departed grandmother didn't get in touch to remind them of a man they used to know who was like a father figure, but who passed away due to a health problem in the head, chest or stomach region. For these people, it is an undeniable truth that psychics regularly contact the dead.

A German woman who feared the Earth would be sucked into oblivion in a black hole failed Tuesday in her court bid to stop the work of the world's most powerful atom smasher.The higher administrative court in Muenster, western Germany, rejected her claims, ruling there was no evidence the work of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) posed a danger to public safety."The plaintiff ... was worried that the experiments could produce so-called 'black holes' which could eventually lead to the destruction of all life on Earth," the court said.

In one of the largest art heists in recent years, thieves in the Dutch city of Rotterdam made off with seven works by renowned artists such as Matisse, Monet, Picasso and Gauguin. Experts say the paintings could be worth up to 100 million euros altogether.The list of artists is impressive: Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso. But rather than originating from a museum brochure advertising a modern art exhibition, the name registry comes from the Rotterdam police website.

We think we want more. We actually want less: less variety, less confusion, less options. This counterintuitive Paradox of Choice (watch the TED talk by Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz to understand how this works) is driving a new movement by supermarkets, restaurants, and others to slash some of the billions of dollars in food waste every year, and save hundreds of millions of dollars, by doing something simple: offering less.In 2008, total food loss in the U.S. climbed to $165.6 billion (at retail prices), about one-third of it in the nation's supermarkets. Yet our waste stream keeps on growing: Today, up to 40% of the nation's food supply is tossed, up from 30% in 1974. While the national trend isn't reversing, companies armed with massive data sets about what sells and what doesn't have found ways to increase profits and cut waste.

The moon's top layer of crushed rock and soil may hold far more water than previously estimated, according to a new study.Most of that water can trace its origin to protons streaming from the sun, the researchers show, confirming in samples of lunar soil a mechanism for making lunar water that until now largely had been the province of theoretical models.The find "represents an unanticipated, abundant reservoir" of water on the moon, according to researchers from three US universities, who formally reported their results Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience. And it could help explain the presence of water on other airless planets and asteroids in the inner solar system.

The Egyptian city of Alexandria, home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, may have been built to align with the rising sun on the day of Alexander the Great's birth, a new study finds.The Macedonian king, who commanded an empire that stretched from Greece to Egypt to the Indus River in what is now India, founded the city of Alexandria in 331 B.C. The town would later become hugely prosperous, home to Cleopatra, the magnificent Royal Library of Alexandria and the 450-foot-tall (140 meters) Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world. Today, more than 4 million people live in modern Alexandria.

The water found locked inside soil on the moon's surface derives from hydrogen in the solar wind - meaning there could be water on other apparently-dry bodies in the solar system too.Over the last few years, scientists have realized that the moon isn't as dry as thought, with NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing satellite, LCROSS, finding material that was surprisingly rich in water ice in a permanently shadowed lunar crater in 2009.Water and related compounds have also been detected in the lunar regolith, the layer of fine powder and rock fragments that coats the lunar surface. Where it came from, though, remained a mystery, with many scientists suggesting that it derived from water-bearing comets and other chunks of space debris.

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.

Writing in 1925, British scientist A.M. Low predicted that we'd eat breakfast via feeding tubes and bald would be beautiful. This guy totally augured Go-Gurt and Vin Diesel.In 1925, British professor A.M. Low wrote a rollicking forecast of life in the coming century. The Future, as Popular Science wrote two years later, was full of flying cars! One-piece suits! Radios everywhere! Much of which sounds downright absurd with the conveniences of hindsight. But here's the thing: Low was actually right.Partially, anyway. No, we don't zip to work in aerial Priuses, but we've all seen enough onesies to last us until the 23rd century. Even more intriguing than the predictions that haven't come true are the ones that nearly did.

A lump of space rock that shattered the predawn calm of the Moroccan desert with a fireball and double sonic boom last year was knocked off Mars in a cosmic collision roughly 700,000 years ago.The date of the Martian impact means the rock was flung into space and began its journey to Earth when the shared ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals was still alive and well in Africa.Scientists dated the collision through a fresh analysis of the remains of the meteorite, based on the exposure of its elements to intense cosmic rays during its journey through space.

Models of our solar system's formation suggest that the inner rocky planets were built in stages, as small objects combined to create planetesimals, which merged to protoplanets. Collisions among these built the planets we're familiar with. Although this process happened over four billion years ago, it may still be possible to understand this era. Some evidence implies that Saturn's moon Phoebe may be a planetesimal, while some of the largest asteroids appear to be protoplanets. By studying them, we can look back to the earliest stages of our Solar System's history.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, said on Friday it could have dealt better with the plant's meltdowns if broad preparations were taken, reversing the previous management's view that the disaster was unavoidable due to an unexpected force of nature.The comments were contained in a draft plan for the reform of nuclear power organization a Tepco task force submitted to an independent advisory body, which held the first meeting on Friday, to improve safety and safety culture at Tepco.

The third and fourth spacecraft in Europe's satellite navigation system have gone into orbit.The pair were launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket from French Guiana.It is an important milestone for the multi-billion-euro project to create a European version of the US Global Positioning System (GPS).With four satellites now in orbit - the first and second spacecraft were launched in 2011 - it becomes possible to test Galileo end-to-end.

China now eats twice as much meat as the United States and must rein in its appetite or face a food crisis, one of the country's leading farm experts has warned."It is not possible to feed everyone so much meat," said Wen Tiejun, the dean of Renmin university's Agriculture school a leading advocate of rural reform. "People must simply eat less".In the last 30 years, Chinese demand for meat has quadrupled, according to figures from the US Agriculture department. The country now eats a quarter of the world supply, or 71 million tons a year.

David Nutt, a prominent and often controversial investigator at Imperial College London, has landed about $800,000 from the U.K.'s Medical Research Foundation to test the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" as a possible new treatment for depression.Working with the knowledge that psilocybin has been linked to long-term relief for cases of serious depression, Nutt has lined up a manufacturer able to produce a dose that can be injected in about 30 patients. Investigators will take brain scans of the volunteers to help determine how the therapy works.

A huge geoglyph in the shape of an elk or deer discovered in Russia may predate Peru's famous Nazca Lines by thousands of years.The animal-shaped stone structure, located near Lake Zjuratkul in the Ural Mountains, north of Kazakhstan, has an elongated muzzle, four legs and two antlers. A historical Google Earth satellite image from 2007 shows what may be a tail, but this is less clear in more recent imagery.Excluding the possible tail, the animal stretches for about 900 feet (275 meters) at its farthest points (northwest to southeast), the researchers estimate, equivalent to two American football fields. The figure faces north and would have been visible from a nearby ridge.

Austrian Felix Baumgartner has broken the record for the highest ever skydive by jumping out of a balloon 128,000ft (39km) above New Mexico.The 43-year-old was hoping also to break the sound barrier during his descent - although that mark awaits confirmation.Video cameras relayed the moment Baumgartner stepped from his balloon capsule to begin his fall to Earth.It took 10 minutes for him to reach the desert surface below.

A Japanese scientist has warned Mount Fuji is due for a "big-scale explosive eruption" that could affect millions of people and cause billions of dollars worth of damage.Last month a study found the which could even trigger a volcanic eruption.It said the added pressure could have been caused by last year's earthquake, which was followed a few days later by another large tremor directly underneath Fuji.Professor Toshitsugu Fujii, the head of Japan's volcanic eruption prediction panel, says an eruption could cause chaos and carnage all the way to Tokyo.

Meteorologists know mixing cold air and warm air triggers powerful thunderstorms. Now, geologists have discovered a similar phenomenon at work beneath one of Europe's most hazardous volcanoes.The Las Cañadas volcano, on the island of Tenerife near Spain, last exploded approximately 170,000 years ago, and is due for another eruption. Researchers believe they have identified what happens in the volcano's magma chamber just prior to such massive eruptions, which could help scientists predict the next blast before it happens.

MIAMI -- A new study by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science shows that corals may be more severely impacted by climate warming when they contain too many symbiotic algae. The single-celled algae living inside corals are usually the key to coral success, providing the energy needed to build massive reef frameworks. However, when temperatures become too warm, these algae are expelled from corals during episodes of coral 'bleaching' that can lead to widespread death of corals. Until now, it was thought that corals with more algal symbionts would be more tolerant of bleaching because they had 'more symbionts to lose.' The new study shows that the opposite is true.

Early humans used to eat pandas, a Chinese scientist has claimed.Wei Guangbiao said prehistoric man ate the bears in what is now part of the city of Chongqing in south-west China.Wei, head of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, said excavated panda fossils "showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man".

CHRONLast Tuesday one of the world's leading experts on Neanderthals, Jean-Jacques Hublin, spoke at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The founder and director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Hublin also spoke with Chronicle science writer Eric Berger about the latest research into the closest ancestor of modern humans, who died out about 30,000 years ago.

The Neanderthals are both the most familiar and the least understood of all our fossil kin.For decades after the initial discovery of their bones in a cave in Germany in 1856 Homo neanderthalensis was viewed as a hairy brute who stumbled around Ice Age Eurasia on bent knees, eventually to be replaced by elegant, upright Cro-Magnon, the true ancestor of modern Europeans.

Testosterone is considered THE male hormone, standing for aggression and posturing. Researchers working with Dr. Armin Falk, an economist from the University of Bonn, have now demonstrated that this sex hormone surprisingly also fosters social behavior. In play situations, subjects who had received testosterone clearly lied less frequently than individuals who had only received a placebo.The results have just been published in the Public Library of Science's international online journal PLoS ONE.

Spending on conservation projects must rise by "an order of magnitude" if governments are to meet their pledges to manage protected areas and halt the spectacular rate of extinctions caused by human activity.A stark assessment from an international collaboration of conservation groups and universities reveals the enormous shortfall in funds required to save species, and warns that costs are likely to increase, the longer action is delayed.

Licorice isn't just candy for kids anymore. A nano-material containing an extract from the plant can be used to protect medical devices and implants that include biological components as they are sterilized.Proteins and other active coatings have been developed for joint replacement and tracheal implants, to name two. But those coatings are sensitive to harsh chemicals, radiation and heat. Unfortunately, those three methods also happen to be the best way to sterilize the devices.

Are the longevity and vitality of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) due to its holistic approach? Indeed, Chinese medicine is not simply about treating illness, but rather about taking care of the whole person -- body, mind, and spirit. According to an analysis of TCM's origins and development by Lin Shi from Beijing Normal University and Chenguang Zhang from Southwest Minzu University in China, traditional Chinese medicine is profoundly influenced by Chinese philosophy and religion. To date, modern science has been unable to explain the mechanisms behind TCM's effects.

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer.After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. Louis neighborhood at the height of the Cold War, she wonders if her own government is to blame.In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis.

Weeks after Northside Independent School District in San Antonio rolled out its new "smart" IDs that tracks students' geographic locations, the community is still at odds with the program.The "Student Locator Project," which is slated to eventually reach 112 Texas schools and close to 100,000 students, is in trial stages in two Northside district schools. In an effort to reduce truancy, the district has issued new student IDs with an embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip that tracks the location of a student at all times.Note: Related Wired article here

Forget the diamond as big as the Ritz. This one's bigger than planet Earth.Orbiting a star that is visible to the naked eye, astronomers have discovered a planet twice the size of our own made largely out of diamond.The rocky planet, called '55 Cancri e', orbits a sun-like star in the constellation of Cancer and is moving so fast that a year there lasts a mere 18 hours.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics goes to a pair of physicists that pioneered experimental approaches to the quantum world. The two, University of Colorado-Boulder's David Wineland and Serge Haroche from the Collège de France, used coupled systems of single atoms and photons to provide ways of monitoring a quantum object without destroying its quantum nature. Like any good quantum experiment, there are multiple ways of looking at what they've done, but the Prize announcement highlights the fact that their work is already having practical applications, as it's being put to use in ultra-high-precision atomic clocks and attempts to build quantum computers.

The newly discovered geoglyph faces to the north (south is at the top of the image) and depicts an elk or deer. Visible from a nearby ridge it has four legs, two antlers and an elongated muzzle. It is made of stone and recent archaeological work indicates that it dates to somewhere between the 6th millennium and 3rd millennium BC, thousands of years before the Nazca Lines were created. Today it is covered with soil but, back when it was first constructed, it would have looked "white and slightly shiny" researchers say.

Japanese scientists managed to use eggs created from stem cells, fertilize them, and produce mouse pups, according to an article published in Science.The scientists, from Kyoto University, first produced healthy mouse pups in 2011 using stem cell-derived sperm. They have now achieved the same by using eggs which were created in the same way.Scientists are describing the Kyoto team's feat as a "significant achievement" which will have a profound impact on reproductive cell biology and genetics research.

A pride of captive lions descended from the private menagerie of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is genetically distinct from all other lions of Africa, a study has found.The Ethiopian lion has a distinctive dark mane and is slightly smaller and more compact than other African lions. Now an analysis of its DNA has revealed the Ethiopian lion is also a distinct breed.It is thought that there may be less than a few hundred Ethiopian lions living in the wild and scientists are urging that their unique genetic makeup should be preserved by a captive-breeding programme.

A whole industry dedicated to hawking DNA tests that provide insight into genetic ancestry has sprung up in the last decade or so. But with the unveiling of the second phase of National Geographic's Genographic Project, the power of what can be revealed by analyzing your spit has been taken to the next level. By submitting a sample of DNA from swabbing the inside of your cheek and having it scanned for genetic markers, you can shed light on the paths that indigenous groups traveled across the world for the past 150,000 years.

A professional alternative medicine practitioner claims that homeopathy can be used to treat anxiety, aggression, and even domestic violence.Homeopathy was invented around 1796 by a doctor named Samuel Hahnemann. He believed that a small dose of a substance will cure whatever symptoms it would cause in a high dose.Hahnemann also invented a "law of infinitessimals," claiming that a substance becomes more potent the more it is diluted -- a premise which defies both common sense and the laws of physics.

Scientists have found the first evidence that the ability to learn vocalizations, a capacity so far believed to be restricted to a handful of bird and mammal species like humans and dolphins, is shared by another species: mice. The new research, published Oct. 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Erich Jarvis and Gustavo Arriaga at Duke University and colleagues, shows for the first time that mice share certain behavioral and brain mechanisms involved in vocal learning with songbirds and humans and can learn new vocal patterns.

Body hair in mammals is typically thought to have evolved to keep us warm in colder prehistoric times, but a new study suggests that it may do the opposite, at least in elephants. Epidermal hair may have evolved to help the animals keep cool in the hot regions they live in, according to new research published Oct 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Conor Myhrvold and colleagues at Princeton University.Though the idea that low surface densities of hair can help dissipate heat is a popular concept in engineering, the biological and evolutionary significance of sparse skin hair is not well known. The authors studied the effects of skin hair densities in Asian and African elephants on thermoregulation in these animals, and concluded that elephant skin hair significantly enhances their capacity to keep cool under different scenarios like higher daytime temperatures or less windy days.

This is the moment a BBC film crew were held by security teams at the notoriously secretive Area 51 - where conspiracy theorists believe the American government is hiding a flying saucer.Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell and UFO expert Darren Perks sneaked past the border at the site - and were forced to lie on the ground at gunpoint for three hours while the FBI checked their credentials.It is the same 'documentary' team that caused outrage in Britain last week when they suggested that the 7/7 London bombings were part of a government conspiracy to boost support for the Iraq war.

Governments around the world are leaving hundreds of millions of cancer patients to suffer needlessly because of their failure to ensure adequate access to pain-relieving drugs, an unprecedented new international survey reveals.The new data, released to the public during the ESMO 2012 Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology in Vienna, paints a shocking picture of unnecessary pain on a global scale, said Prof Nathan Cherny, lead author of the report from Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel, Chair of the ESMO Palliative Care Working Group.

A group of 23 impoverished west African fishing communities has driven off a fleet of illegal, unreported and unregulated "pirate" trawlers by filming and reporting them when they are found in their waters.In the 18 months since the London-based Environment Justice Foundation (EJF) raised the £50,000 needed to buy and equip a small seven-metre community surveillance boat for villages in the Sherbro river area of Sierra Leone, local fishers have filmed and identified 10 international trawlers working illegally in their protected waters and have made 252 separate reports of illegal fishing.

Modern wheat is a "perfect, chronic poison," according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who has published a book all about the world's most popular grain.Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn't the wheat your grandma had: "It's an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the '60s and '70s," he said on "CBS This Morning." "This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there's a new protein in this thing called gliadin. It's not gluten. I'm not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. I'm talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate. This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 440 more calories per day, 365 days per year.".

A German firm is hoping to radically change the electronic book market with an ebook that costs just £10 to buy.'The txtr beagle is designed to do best what eReaders are intended for: reading digital books,' the firm says on its website.To save costs, the gadget has no connectors, and books are sent to it from a mobile phone app using bluetooth.

Humans venturing beyond Earth orbit deeper into space face increased exposure to cosmic radiation, so ESA has teamed with Germany's GSI particle accelerator to test potential shielding for astronauts, including Moon and Mars soil.ESA's two-year project is assessing the most promising materials for shielding future astronauts going to the Moon, the asteroids or Mars.

The International Space Station welcomed its first commercial resupply mission Wednesday with the arrival of Space Exploration Technologies' Dragon capsule.Dragon is laden with scientific gear, replacement parts for the space station, and a welcome shipment of chocolate ripple ice cream stashed in an otherwise empty lab freezer the capsule carried up.The capsule, which launched Sunday night atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, reached the orbiting outpost about 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Using the station's robotic arm, Akihiki Hoshide, a station flight engineer, snagged Dragon at 7:56 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. A little over an hour later, Dragon was safely docked with the station.

If the Matrix left you with the niggling fear that we might indeed be living in a computer generated universe staged by a malevolent artificial intelligence using the human race as an energy farm, help is at hand.A team of physicists have come up with a test which they say could prove whether or not the universe as we know it is a virtual reality simulation - a kind of theoretical red pill, as it were.Silas Beane of the University of Bonn, Germany, and his colleagues contend that a simulation of the universe, no matter how complex, would still have constraints which would reveal it.

Archaeologists believe they have found the first physical evidence of the spot where Julius Caesar died, according to a new Spanish National Research Council report.Caesar, the head of the Roman Republic, was stabbed to death by a group of rival Roman senators on March 15, 44 B.C., the Ides of March. The assassination is well-covered in classical texts, but until now, researchers had no archaeological evidence of the place where it happened.

Scientists performing CT scans on the head of an Egyptian mummy say they have found one of the worst cases of dental problems ever seen - an a unique treatment to try and treat it.Researchers CT scanning a 2,100 year old mummy were stunned to find evidence of a sinus infection caused by a mouthful of cavities and other tooth problems.The also came across a unique find - a cavity filled with linen.Using a piece of linen, which may have first been dipped in a medicine such as fig juice or cedar oil, a form of 'packing' in the biggest and most painful cavity, located on the left side of his jaw between the first and second molars, was inserted.

A new article is up on the articles page by Shunyamurti. Opening paragraph:Western thought has moved from Platonic texts to tectonic plates. We began with the unshakeable Absolute, and we are now on the very shaky ground of scientific beliefs that we once thought were solid bedrock, but that are now recognized as being subject to cataclysmic seismic shifts, as new paradigms of understanding emerge with a stunning suddenness that is overturning our conception of what we are.

An 11-year-old Florida boy died on Sunday after being struck by a bolt of lightning on his way to football practice last week. His manner of death is perhaps all the more tragic for how unusual it's becoming in America.Jesse Watlington, of Fort Myers, is the fifth person to die from a lightning strike in Florida this year, and he was hit only two days after another Floridian, Falk Weltzien, 39, of St. Augustine, was knocked unconscious by a bolt while kiteboarding with his son. Weltzien survived the ordeal with no major injuries, according to ABC News.

Several ancient Roman texts describe the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC as the result of a plot by a group of senators to kill the general. Now, 2,056 years later, a team from the National Research Council (CSIC) of Spain have located the exact spot where Caesar was stabbed to death.This assassination led to the formation of the Second Triumvirate and had repercussions that would result in civil wars and spell the end of the Roman Republic.

A collection of fossil animals discovered off the coast of Florida suggests that present day deep-sea fauna like sea urchins, starfish and sea cucumbers may have evolved earlier than previously believed and survived periods of mass extinctions similar to those that wiped out the dinosaurs. The full results are published Oct. 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Ben Thuy and colleagues from the University of Göttingen, Germany.

That is the kind of mail I am now receiving from scientists, after the revelation two days ago that I have an unusually large share of Neanderthal DNA (5%) in my genetic makeup. Plus, the accompanying revelation that my mitochondrial DNA, showing the lineage on my mother's side, resembled no other samples yet collected in a large-scale study.Some people might find this upsetting.Not me. I am going with it.

U.S. House Rep. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican, doesn't believe in evolution, the Big Bang theory, or the teachings of embryology. In fact, in a Sept. 27 talk at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Ga., the member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who is also a medical doctor, called those areas of science "lies straight from the pit of hell."But Broun also advanced his own theory of life on Earth."You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth," he said. "I don't believe that the Earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says."

It will be another giant leap for mankind when NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft becomes the first manmade object to venture past the solar system's edge and into the uncharted territory of interstellar space. But did this giant leap already occur?New data from the spacecraft indicate that the historic moment of its exit from the solar system might have come and gone two months ago. Scientists are crunching one more set of numbers to find out for sure.Voyager 1, which left Earth on Sept. 5, 1977, has since sped to a distance of 11.3 billion miles (18.2 billion kilometers) from the sun, making it the farthest afield of any manmade object. (It has 2 billion miles on its twin, Voyager 2, which took a longer route through the solar system.) Still phoning home (via radio transmissions) after 35 years, the Voyagers are the longest operating spacecraft in history.

Israel's civilian air traffic was halted for several minutes on Wednesday morning after an unidentified flying object was spotted inside Israeli air space, Israel's army radio said.Air force jets were briefly scrambled and Israeli air space was closed, it said, without saying what caused the scare. The closure was lifted several minutes later.Closing Israeli air space was an "exceptional" measure which demonstrated the level of tension in Israel after the air force shot down an unidentified and unarmed drone which had entered the country's airspace on Saturday from the Mediterranean.

WALKAWAY, Australia (Reuters) - Australia switched on its first utility-scale solar farm on Wednesday, bringing the country a small step closer to achieving ambitious renewable energy use targets that traditional coal and gas power producers are now fighting to soften.The Greenough River Solar project, just outside the small town of Walkaway in Western Australia state, is a joint-venture between Western Australian state-owned Verve Energy and U.S. conglomerate General Electric. It is expected to generate 10 megawatts, enough to power 3,000 homes.

From the beginning of 2010 until mid-2011, the average level of the world's oceans dropped by 0.2 inches (5 millimeters). But how could this happen when average sea levels have been rising for decades?A study published Oct. 4 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the decline was due to an enormous increase in the amount of rainfall in Australia, northern South America and Southeast Asia, which transferred a significant amount of water from the oceans to the land.

The well-documented presence of excessive levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere is causing global temperatures to rise and glaciers and ice caps to melt.New research, published October 11, in IOP Publishing's Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, has shown that CO2 molecules may be having a more direct impact on the ice that covers our planet.Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology have shown that the material strength and fracture toughness of ice are decreased significantly under increasing concentrations of CO2 molecules, making ice caps and glaciers more vulnerable to cracking and splitting into pieces, as was seen recently when a huge crack in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica spawned a glacier the size of Berlin.

Bad news articles in the media increase women's sensitivity to stressful situations, but do not have a similar effect on men, according to a study undertaken by University of Montreal researchers at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital. The findings were published October 10 in PLOS One. The women who participated in the study also had a clearer recollection of the information they had learned. "It's difficult to avoid the news, considering the multitude of news sources out there, said lead author Marie-France Marin. "And what if all that news was bad for us? It certainly looks like that could be the case".