Newsdesk Archive

A few months ago someone asked me (via email) which populations I would love to get typed (genetically that is). There is one population which did not come to mind at the time: the Sumerians. Why? Because these are arguably the first historic nation. The first self-conscious ethnic group which operated by the rules which we define as the fundamentals of literate civilization. Strangely, they are an ethno-linguistic isolate. My own assumption until lately has been that this is not too surprising, in that prior to the rise of expansive civilizations (Sargon of Akkad) there was much more linguistic and ethnic diversity than we currently see around us. Or, was evident even in the early Iron Age. In other words, the ancient Fertile Crescent may have resembled the highlands of Papua, with Hurrians, Akkadians, Gutians, Elamites, Sumerians, etc., all speaking mutually unintelligible dialects which diverged very far back in the mists of antiquity.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- Antarctica's Ross Sea is often described as the most isolated and pristine ocean on Earth, a place where seals and penguins still rule the waves and humans are about as far away as they could be. But even there it has proven difficult, and maybe impossible, for nations to agree on how strongly to protect the environment.The United States and New Zealand have spent two years trying to agree on an Alaska-sized marine sanctuary where fishing would be banned and scientists could study climate change. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton took a strong interest in the outcome, regularly prodding diplomats, and New Zealand recently sent a delegation to Washington to hash out a tentative deal.

As we debate the obvious visual difference between 1080p and 4K video, we can't help but notice that it wasn't that long ago in the scope of time that color motion film wasn't even a thing.In 1899, British photographer and inventor Edward Raymond Turner patented the first color moving picture process, but it was so complicated that it was never replicated. Following Turner's blueprints and instructions for the process, researchers at the National Media Museum digitally copied three frames of film taken from two rolls that were discovered in 2009.

The days of electronic circuitry with stiff circuit boards are a thing of the past; stretchable electronics are taking over. We already saw microelectronics used in sutures to monitor for infection, and now stretchable skin with microelectronics for monitoring health conditions is readying for a debut.The key to creating sensing, stretchable skin relies on gold electrodes and other wires that are a few hundred nanometers thick. They are deposited in a serpentine fashion onto thin films of silicon wafers, then applied to the stretchable polymers. The serpentine nature of the sensor wires allows the wires to stretch with the patch.

By his own admission, Bob Ballard is a heretic. "If I were in Tunisia, I'd be toast," he said. He likes to disprove conventional wisdom, and throw out textbooks (metaphorically speaking).In graduate school in the 1960s he was part of a wave of young researchers who established the existence of plate tectonics. In 1979 he found black smokers, vents on the ocean floor that spew out water from within the Earth, which wasn't previously thought possible. He has helped find new and unknown life forms around deep sea vents, which "threw out the textbook" on biology and the origin of life, which was previously thought to have originated from energy captured from sunlight.

From ancients who worshiped the Red Planet as a fierce war god in the sky, to scientists like Percival Lowell and fantasists like Ray Bradbury, Mars has taunted Earth's adventurers with the ultimate challenge.Now that the fear of imaginary invaders has been replaced by a frustrating search for chemicals, a more fundamental question is emerging.Could humans walk the sands of Mars, and actually live and work there?

Depending on where you live, dropping litter out of your car window is a very unsavory habit -- at worst, it's a crime. But when you're in the business of dominating another planet, litter-dropping is the inevitable downside of doing awesome stuff in space.Enter Curiosity: The one ton, nuclear-powered, laser-armed, six-wheeled rover. And now, unashamed interplanetary litterbug.While we were being distracted by the Red Bull Stratos skydive attempt yesterday (that ended up being aborted), Curiosity was busy playing with a scoopful of Mars dirt. Although this particular sample won't be analyzed for science, it is being used to "clean" any terrestrial contaminants from the robotic arm-mounted scoop.

EUGENE, Ore. -- (Sept. 18, 2012) -- An interdisciplinary team of scientists from seven U.S. institutions says a disregard of three critical protocols, including sorting samples by size, explains why a group challenging the theory of a North American meteor-impact event some 12,900 years ago failed to find iron- and silica-rich magnetic particles in the sites they investigated.Not separating samples of the materials into like-sized groupings made for an avoidable layer of difficulty, said co-author Edward K. Vogel, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon.

Properly designed, robots can be useful in a lot of practical, everyday scenarios. Still, although they can be taught to make pancakes, fold towels, and perform other specialised tasks, the long-awaited general-purpose automaton has remained tantalisingly out of reach.That looks set to change, with today's unveiling of Baxter, an all-purpose robot built by the Boston-based firm Rethink Robotics.Baxter won't be coming to a kitchen near you any time soon - according to the company's release, it is designed to excel at fast, repetitive labour in manufacturing jobs. And at $22,000 a pop, you probably can't afford one in your house anyway.

It really happened: Six generations of inbreeding spanning the years 1800 to 1960 caused an isolated population of humans living in the hills of Kentucky to become blue-skinned.The startlingly blue people, all descendants of a French immigrant named Martin Fugate and still living near his original settlement on the banks of Troublesome Creek when hematologists studied them in the 1960s, turned out to have a rare blood condition called methemoglobinemia. A recessive gene was pairing with itself to change the molecular composition of their blood, making it brown as opposed to red, which tinted their skin blue.

Fully draped in a black veil, Irish blonde Angela Miskelly stares out in awe as she strolls through Al-Hijr, the ancient Saudi city of tombs carved into rose-coloured sandstone mountains. "Spectacular... wonderful... breathtaking," she says. "But where are the tourists? If we had a site like this in my country, we would have millions of tourists!"Dating back to the second century BC, the Nabataean archaeological site, also known as Madain Saleh, has long been hidden from foreign visitors in this ultra-conservative kingdom that rarely opens up to tourists.Saudi Arabia is thought to have been wary of archaeologists and scientists seeking to study its ancient ruins for fear their findings could shine the spotlight on pre-Islamic civilisations that once thrived there.

Archaeologists have unearthed gruesome evidence of brutal Aztec rituals by uncovering 50 skulls and over 250 jaw bones at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City).Found at one sacrificial stone below a ceremonial platform called the "cuauhxicalco," the human remains date back more than 500 years and represent the largest number of skulls ever found in one offering.Used in rituals associated with the worship of Mictlantecuhtli, god of death, the skulls were unearthed in different locations: 45 appeared to have just been dumped on top of the stone, while the remaining five were buried under it.

A man has died after winning a live cockroach-eating competition in Florida.32-year-old Edward Archbold became ill after eating dozens of live cockroaches, worms and other bugs at Ben Siegel Reptile Store, near Miami. The grand prize in the competition was a python.Mr Archbold won the competition, in which 30 other people took part, but was taken ill within minutes of it ending. He collapsed in front of the shop shortly after, and was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he's long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven."According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent," Alexander writes in the cover story of this week's edition of Newsweek.So what exactly does heaven look like?.

The lost crown of Henry VIII has been recreated in minute detail, down to the last pearl and thumbnail-sized enamelled sculpture, almost 400 years after the original was melted down along with every scrap of royal regalia Cromwell's government could lay its hands on.In 1649 Charles was beheaded in Whitehall and the crown was broken up at the Tower of London. The gold went straight to the mint for coinage, and the jewels were sold off in mixed packets like loose sweets. Of the heap of centuries-old treasures, only one 12th-century spoon escaped the melting pot.

The digital currency exchange network now includes more than 1,000 merchants and at least tens of thousands of unaffiliated users, as it tries to solve barriers to participation.Cowrie shells, strips of leather, huge stone discs, decorated rectangles of paper. They all share something in common: at one time, people used them as currency. In 2009, when Bitcoin went live, ones and zeros were added to the list. And like each new format that preceded it, this digital currency has changed a few of money's core concepts, including who controls it and how and where it gets spent.

Designers have come up with a jacket that actively gives you a cuddle when someone says they like you on the social network site.The "Like-A-Hug" jacket inflates when someone clicks on the "Like" button putting a little more reality into virtual reality.Designed by MIT student Melissa Chow, who said it "allows us to feel the warmth, encouragement, support, or love that we feel when we receive hugs".Hugs can also be sent back to the original sender by squeezing the vest and deflating it.Miss Chow said: "We came up with the concept over a casual conversation about long-distance relationships and the limitations of video chat interfaces like Skype.

Married couples will be in the minority in little more than a generation, a new report has claimed.The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) found marriage was increasingly the preserve of the middle and upper classes, while only about 50 per cent of new parents on low incomes were married.This rose to nearly 80 per cent for couples earning £21,000 to £31,000 a year, and to nearly 90 per cent for those earning over £50,000 a year.

A major analysis of referee's decisions in the Premier League has shown that officials are around 15% more likely to book foreign players who are from the same background as the most sizable ethnic minority groups in the UK.The analysis by researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge and Oxford used the extensive in-match dataset collected by OPTA Sportsdata for the 2006-07 and 2007-08 seasons covering 760 games in total.

Arthur C Clarke once wrote that a trillion years from now an advnaced civilization will look back at us with envy and say "They knew the Universe when it was young."We may soon discover that intelligent life, indeed, may be in it's "very young" stage in the observable Universe. Its 200 billion galaxies show a clear potential to continue on as we see them today for hundreds of billions of years, if not much longer. Because planets and life are so young in our Universe, says Harvard's Dimitar Sasselov, perhaps "the human species are not late comers to the party. We may be among the early ones."That may explain why we see no evidence of "them" and may go a long way to explaining the famous Fermi Paradox, which asks if there's advanced intelligent life in the Universe, where are they? Why haven't we discovered any evidence of their existence.

The politicians of Cumbria County Council have cooled on the idea of burying hundreds of thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste but a kilometre beneath their feet.Initially tempted by the huge economic benefits a £12bn nuclear research and disposal would bring, councillors now seem dismayed that the waste wouldn't be considered safe for another 100,000 years.

In 1938 one of the world's greatest scientists withdrew all his money and disappeared during a boat trip from Palermo to Naples. Whether he killed himself, was murdered or lived on under a different identity is still not known. But no trace of The Italian physicist Ettore Majorana has ever been found.Majorana was a brilliant theorist who in the 1930's showed great insight into physics at a young age. He discovered a hitherto unknown solution to the equations from which quantum scientists deduce elementary particles: the Majorana fermion. Majorana deduced from quantum theory the possibility that there must be a special particle that would be right on the border between matter and antimatter.Fast forward to February 2012, the mysterious Majorana fermion was detected in a nanowire, according to Dutch nanoscientist Leo Kouwenhoven. The discovery could confirm the theory that assumes that dark matter, which is thought to form about 73 percent of the Universe, is composed of Majorana fermions.

A piece of space junk that may buzz the International Space Station Monday has NASA weighing plans to move the orbiting lab, even as a private space capsule stands poised to launch toward the station on Sunday night.The space debris will pass near enough to the space station on Monday morning (Oct. 8) to require an avoidance maneuver as a safety precaution, NASA space station program manager Mike Suffredini said in a briefing today (Oct. 6).The decision on whether to move the station is not yet final, but if such a maneuver is required it will not affect the scheduled launch of a private Dragon space capsule to the station, Suffredini said.

The Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner will attempt to become the first human to break the sound barrier unaided by a vehicle.He is going to jump out of a balloon at more than 120,000ft (36.5km) above Roswell, New Mexico.In the near vacuum at that altitude, he should accelerate beyond about 690mph (1,110km/h) within 40 seconds.If all goes well, he will open a parachute near the ground to land softly in the desert, 10 minutes later.

The living slime that may have been the muse for the 1958 science-fiction film The Blob just got creepier: Evidence has emerged that slime mold, a brainless single-celled organism, has a form of memory.In experiments with the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, scientists at the University of Sydney noticed that the life-form avoided retracing its own paths. They began to suspect that the slime was using "externalized spatial memory" to navigate."The slime mold leaves behind a trail of slime everywhere it goes, which it can then detect later to recognize areas it has already been," said biologist Chris Reid.Note: See a Video on Wired.

Historical accounts from all over the world describe a spectacularly bright "guest star" in the night sky during the spring of 1006 -- what we now know as a supernova (SN 1006). Now astronomers think they have pinpointed the probable cause of that massive explosion, one thousand years later: a merging of two white dwarf stars.SN 1006 made quite a splash on its debut around May 1, 1006, in the constellation Lupus (the Wolf) just south of Scorpio. The critics raved! Monks in a Benedictine abbey in Switzerland marveled at the star's brightness, and commented on the variability of its light, "sometimes contracted, sometimes diffused, and moreover sometimes extinguished" -- likely due to atmospheric conditions, since the star was visible fairly low in the southern horizon.

A few years ago Paolo Guidetti was leafing through a book on ancient art when he came across a Roman mosaic showing a man's legs dangling from the mouth of an enormous fish. Struck by the picture, Guidetti, a biologist at the University of Salento in Italy, recognized the fish as one that he studies: the dusky grouper.Today fishers would be hard-pressed to find a dusky grouper that large and so close to the sea's surface. The fish, found throughout the Mediterranean, are endangered. While they can grow to a length of more than four feet and a weight of 100 pounds, most are much smaller, and at sites where fishing pressures are highest they occupy waters too deep to leap out and eat anyone.

Stem cells made from skin have become "grandparents" after generations of life were created in experiments by scientists in Japan.The cells were used to create eggs, which were fertilised to produce baby mice. These later had their own babies.If the technique could be adapted for people, it could help infertile couples have children and even allow women to overcome the menopause.But experts say many scientific and ethical hurdles must be overcome.

At the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy, young recruits learn a new language at a very fast pace. By measuring their brains before and after the language training, a group of researchers has had an almost unique opportunity to observe what happens to the brain when we learn a new language in a short period of time.At the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy in the city of Uppsala, young people with a flair for languages go from having no knowledge of a language such as Arabic, Russian or Dari to speaking it fluently in the space of 13 months. From morning to evening, weekdays and weekends, the recruits study at a pace unlike on any other language course.

A team of researchers in South Korea has developed a method to cause cell death in both living fish and lab bowel cancer cells (in vivo and in vitro) using a magnetic field. The application of the magnetic field, as described in their paper published in the journal Nature Materials, triggers a "death signal" that leads to programmed cell death.A major problem with treating cancer is how to effectively and efficiently apply a therapy, one that discriminates between cancer and healthy cells: killing the bad while retaining the good. Numerous methods have been tried over the years with varying degrees of success.

There is a new theory about your mind -- about where your decisions and experiences come from before you are aware of them. This theory has solid science behind it, and it suggests that there is a lot more going on in your mind than you realize.Parts of this theory are familiar. Research has told us that brain events stand behind every thought we think and lead to them. And we have learned that many implicit psychological processes precede our experiences too, processes like subliminal sensations, stored memories and long-term values. These things aren't conscious in themselves, but the unconscious mind uses them to help lead to whatever we do become conscious of.

In 1960, mathematician, physicist, and all-around genius Freeman Dyson predicted that every civilization in the Universe eventually runs out of energy on its home planet, provided it survives long enough to do so. Dyson argued that this event constitutes a major hurdle in a civilization's evolution, and that all those who leap over it do so in precisely the same way: they build a massive collector of starlight, a shell of solar panels to surround their home star. Astronomers have taken to calling these theoretical megastructures Dyson Spheres. Dyson's insight may seem like nothing more than a thought experiment, but if his hypothesis is sound, it has a striking implication: if you want to find advanced alien civilizations, you should look for signs of Dyson Spheres.

The Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (Askap), with an array of 36 antennas each 40 feet across, started peering into the universe on Friday from a far-flung cattle station in Western Australia state.The A$152 million (£96m) telescope will "listen" to radio waves from the cosmos that might give astronomers insights into the beginnings of the universe.

Europe and Russia are working together to bring samples of frozen moon dirt to Earth in the next decade.The unmanned mission, called Lunar Polar Sample Return (LPSR), aims to bore into the moon's surface at either the north or south pole, where nearly permanent sunlight would allow a robot to operate in manageable conditions."Scientists wanted a sample from the bottom of an unilluminated crater, but this would be practically impossible with the technology we have today," said European Space Agency official Bruno Gardini.

THE next time humans set foot on an alien world, they may not travel alone. Small, lightweight "bug boxes" packed full of engineered microbes could make life on hostile planets a lot more liveable.Pioneering settlers on a distant world will require food, fuel and shelter if they are to survive, but bringing bulky supplies from Earth is far too costly. Synthetic biology offers another option. Microbes weigh precious little, and would take up next to no space on a spacecraft, but once the mission lands - on Mars, say - they could multiply by feeding on the materials available there. The products of their labour could provide the building blocks essential for a human settlement.

Richard York, a researcher with the Department of Sociology and Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon, has found that a measured reduction in CO2 emissions during economic downturns is not on par with the increase in CO2 emissions that is apparent during boon times. York made this discovery after analyzing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of several nations during the period 1960 to 2008, and then comparing these values with the countries' corresponding annual measures of CO2 emissions. The results are published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

This year's dismal UK summer could be part of a run of poor summers caused by a major warming of the North Atlantic Ocean that occurred back in the 1990s.According to new research at the University of Reading published in Nature Geoscience, the North Atlantic warming in the 1990s coincided with a shift to wetter summers in the UK and northern Europe and hotter, drier summers around the Mediterranean. The patterns identified match those experienced this summer (2012), when the UK had the wettest summer in 100 years, while the Mediterranean suffered with temperatures as high as 40 degrees centigrade or more.

Expanding production of palm oil, a common ingredient in processed foods, soaps and personal care products, is driving rainforest destruction and massive carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new study led by researchers at Stanford and Yale universities.The study, published online Oct. 7 in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that deforestation for the development of oil palm plantations in Indonesian Borneo is becoming a globally significant source of carbon dioxide emissions.

Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell talk about ancient cataclysms, comet impacts, and the Göbekli Tepe ruins. Audio from The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast. Animated by Paul Klawiter. Direct video link here*Warning*: Adult language is used.Note: See also Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan Podcast

"In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue." And with that benign little mnemonic many people sum up their working knowledge of the endeavors of the Genoan sailor who discovered America (even though he didn't) for the glory of the Spanish crown (which later imprisoned him for his "atrocities").But even if you know the Santa Maria from the Mayflower, if you live in the U.S. there's a good chance that you'll be enjoying a day off work this coming Monday in honor of a man who's traditionally celebrated regardless of his accidental discovery, dubious motivations and more-than-questionable actions across the islands of the Caribbean. There are a few people who'd like to change that.

From studying slices of his brilliant brain to probing profound physics theories, scientists and enthusiasts alike have long been spellbound by Albert Einstein. Now, an auction is offering the world a peek at Einstein's thoughts on what may be humanity's most profound question: the existence of God.The private letter written by Einstein expressing his views on God and religion will go up for auction Monday (Oct. 8) on eBay. In the letter, he calls belief in religion and God "pretty childish" and ridicules the idea that the Jews are a chosen people.

In a forensic twist on astronomy, scientists turned sleuths are trying to track down the stellar victim of a supernova explosion that occurred last year.An exploded star was discovered on May 31, 2011, in the famous nearby Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), which lies about 23 million light-years from our own Milky Way. Supernovas are thought to occur when massive stars reach the end of their lives, running out of fuel to power their inner furnaces and collapsing in on themselves to form dense neutron stars or black holes.

Modern Europeans interbred with Neanderthals as recently as 37,000 years ago, a study has found.Scientists from Harvard and the Max Planck Institute made the estimate in an attempt to work out why the Neanderthals are more closely related to peoples from outside Africa.Their findings suggest that when modern humans emerged from that continent they encountered these other hominids and had children with them, who are the ancestors of people across Europe and Asia.The new study backs up recent research which suggests that early humans and Neanderthals lived side by side in caves in northern Israel.When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010 it revealed that people outside Africa share slightly more genetic variants with Neanderthals than Africans do.

UFO believers have been mulling over a cellphone video shot from a Wal-Mart parking lot in Cincinnati recorded Friday evening (Sept. 28), in which a trio of bright lights can be seen blinking in the night sky, moving relative to one another, and slowly descending to the ground.The so-called Cincinnati UFO case seemed perplexing indeed, but in the days since YouTube user Galuyasdi posted his video, he and fellow YouTubers have worked together to solve the mystery. Instead of alien spacecraft, the UFOs appear to have been skydivers putting on a pyrotechnics show.Note: For more on UFOs, see the Nick Pope interview for the GHMB community.

Mars Curiosity is about to take its first sip of the red planet's sand. But only after NASA's rover plays bartender to make sure the dry dust is shaken, not stirred.The rover's scoop will dig into the sand Saturday. Then the action starts. The end of the rover's 220-pound arm will shake "at a nice tooth-rattling vibration level" for eight hours, like a Martian mixer gone mad, said mission sampling chief Daniel Limonadi said."It kind of looks and feels like if you open the hood of your car with the engine running," Limonadi said, making engine noises in a Thursday NASA telephone press conference.

Drive west from Orkney's capital, Kirkwall, and then head north on the narrow B9055 and you will reach a single stone monolith that guards the entrance to a spit of land known as the Ness of Brodgar. The promontory separates the island's two largest bodies of freshwater, the Loch of Stenness and the Loch of Harray. At their furthest edges, the lochs' peaty brown water laps against fields and hills that form a natural amphitheatre; a landscape peppered with giant rings of stone, chambered cairns, ancient villages and other archaeological riches.

First it was foxes, skunks and raccoons. Now coyotes are setting up shop in increasing numbers within urban settings in North America. Are larger carnivores next?A professor of wildlife ecology at Ohio State University says urban coyotes, the largest of the mid-size carnivores, may be setting the stage for their larger brethren to start migrating to cities."They're the ones that are kind of pushing the envelope right now," Stan Gehrt said, suggesting animals like bears, wolves and mountain lions may be next."It used to be rural areas where we would have this challenge of co-existence versus conflict with carnivores," said Gehrt, who gave a talk on the topic Friday at a conference in Columbus, Ohio.

Electric cars might pollute much more than petrol or diesel-powered cars, according to new research.The Norwegian University of Science and Technology study found greenhouse gas emissions rose dramatically if coal was used to produce the electricity.Electric car factories also emitted more toxic waste than conventional car factories, their report in the Journal of Industrial Ecology said.However, in some cases electric cars still made sense, the researchers said.

The Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, had a question: What are the most meaningful innovations in humanity's culinary history? What mattered more to the development of civilization's cultivation of food: the oven? The fridge? The plough? The spork?To answer that question, the Society convened a group of its Fellows -- including, yup, a Nobel Prize Winner -- and asked them to whittle down a list of 100 culinarily innovative tools down to 20. That list was then voted on by the Fellows and by a group of "experts in the food and drink industry," its tools ranked according to four criteria: accessibility, productivity, aesthetics, and health.

Bisphenol A or BPA is a synthetic chemical widely used in the making of plastic products ranging from bottles and food can linings to toys and water supply lines. When these plastics degrade, BPA is released into the environment and routinely ingested.New research, however, from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests it is the metabolic changes that take place once BPA is broken down inside the body that pose the greater health threat.More than 90 percent of all Americans are believed to carry varying levels of BPA exposure.

Providing birth control to women at no cost substantially reduced unplanned pregnancies and cut abortion rates by 62 percent to 78 percent over the national rate, a new study shows.The research, by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, appears online Oct. 4 in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The claim is dramatic: An alternative nuclear fuel that could offer a safer and more abundant alternative to the uranium that powers conventional reactors. That is what supporters have to say about thorium, a mildly radioactive element that occurs naturally, with reserves in Australia, the United States, Turkey, India, Brazil and Venezuela. Scientists promoting thorium as an alternative nuclear fuel believe it is a safer, more economical way of generating nuclear power than uranium. A new report out in the UK, however, begs to differ.

Thanks to an ambitious conservation project and some tiny pieces of plastic, the ancient Egyptian mummy case of Hor is now on display in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.The conservation of the cartonnage mummy case was undertaken with the assistance of the Department of Engineering, who helped construct clever frames to support the delicate case during conservation and a new display case with internal supports using LEGO.

The Lozoya River Valley, in the Madrid mountain range of Guadarrama, could easily be called "Neanderthal Valley," says the paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga."It is protected by two strings of mountains, it is rich in fauna, it is a privileged spot from an environmental viewpoint, and it is ideal for the Neanderthal, given that it provided the with good hunting grounds."This is not just a hypothesis: scientists working on site in Pinilla del Valle, near the reservoir, have already found nine Neanderthal teeth, remains of bonfires and thousands of animal fossils, including some from enormous aurochs (the ancestor of cattle, each the length of two bulls), rhinoceros and fallow deer.

Similar characteristics have not been observed in other constructions of the Bronze Age, with three-metre thick walls, square towers originally measuring up to seven metres, a monumental entrance and an ogival arched postern gate; a fully conserved architectural element unique in Europe in that period.The wall protected a city measuring 4 hectares located on top of a hill. With architectural elements reminiscent of people with Eastern styled military skills, its model is typical of ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean, such as the second city of Troy.

Hidden within desert desolation near the Dead Sea region of Ein Gedi, Israel, are two caves that at least one archaeologist suggests may possibly contain what remains of the lost archive of the Jewish Second Temple. The famous temple became one of King Herod's greatest architectural achievements and was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. at the time of the First Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire.

By burning wood, humans have been significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions as far back as the Roman Empire, researchers say.The finding may lead scientists to rethink some aspects of climate change models, which assume humans weren't responsible for much greenhouse gas before the Industrial Revolution."It was believed that emissions started in 1850. We showed that humans already started to impact greenhouse effects much before," study co-author Célia Sapart of Utretcht University in the Netherlands said.

Nothing kills a career faster than being branded a kook, and in many circles, that's what you are when you admit you've seen a UFO. The stakes are raised, of course, if we're talking about academic communities, and even more so among astronomers -- people who study the skies. Many astronomers say there's nothing of any scientific merit that could result in the study of UFOs.With the career suicide stakes for astronomers so high, some UFO researchers believe many of them are hesitant to step forward. Certainly, the Air Force's Project Bluebook -- the last officially announced government study of unidentified flying objects -- concluded that five percent of the cases investigated could not be immediately explained away.

Veteran skydiver Felix Baumgartner plans to take a supersonic tour of Earth's atmospheric layers on Monday (Oct 8). The Austrian daredevil will attempt the world's highest skydive, a daring leap from 23 miles up that will send him plummeting earthward faster than the speed of sound.On the way down, Baumgartner, 43, will pass through the stratosphere and troposphere, two of the four gaseous layers that enshroud and protect our planet. Each of these layers has unique properties.

Mexican archaeologists say they have determined that the ancient Mayas built watchtower-style structures atop the ceremonial ball court at the temples of Chichen Itza to observe the equinoxes and solstices, and they said Friday that the discovery adds to understanding of the many layers of ritual significance that the ball game had for the culture.The structures sit atop the low walls of the court, where the Mayas played a game that consisted, as far as experts can tell, of knocking a heavy, latex ball with their elbows, knees or hips, through a stone ring set in the walls.

Giant plant-eating dinosaurs may have been champion chewers up there with the likes of mammals such as horses, bison or elephants, researchers say.The finding could help explain why these behemoths dominated the plains of Europe, Asia and North America during the last part of the age of dinosaurs, scientists added.Duck-billed herbivores called hadrosaurids thundered across the world during the Late Cretaceous period, dating about 65 million to 100 million years ago. They grazed on horsetails, ferns and primitive flowering plantson the ground, and browsed on Earth's conifers.

A new study reveals that a significant amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from lakes and rivers in Southern Québec, Canada, is very old -- approximately 1,000 to 3,000 years old -- challenging the current models of long-term carbon storage in lakes and rivers.Previous studies have suggested that there is a tight coupling between the terrestrial and aquatic environment such that aquatic bacteria rapidly consume modern carbon. The new findings of the respiration of old carbon in aquatic systems suggests there may be significant lags in the coupling between these systems and further represents an additional, unaccounted for source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

British scientists are to mimic black holes in the laboratory as part of a £2.35 million project looking at how matter and energy interact.The team from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland will produce laser pulses whose energy is measured in trillions of watts.They will be used to simulate conditions found around a black hole, a place where gravity is so strong that light cannot escape and the normal laws of physics break down.

With an eye toward preparing for eventual human missions to Mars, NASA is considering doubling an astronaut's stay aboard the International Space Station from six months to one year.The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported this week that the Russian space agency and its space station partners had agreed to launch a cosmonaut and a NASA astronaut to the station in 2015 for a year-long experimental mission.NASA spokesman Rob Navias told Discovery News the U.S. space agency had been "exploring the idea," but that no agreements have been signed.

Astronomers have found a star whipping around an enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way once every 11.5 years, potentially providing them with a cosmic laboratory to test Albert Einstein's most famous theory and to learn more about how such huge black holes evolve.No known star orbits a supermassive black hole faster. Though it is among a group of stars discovered at the galactic center, it is only the second with an orbital period of less than 20 years. The other orbits once every 16 years.

It was the alchemical quest that was midwife to the birth of modern science: how to transform common elements into precious gold.Now researchers have found a bacterium that could fit the bill as a modern day philosophers' stone, by turning a toxic chemical compound found in nature into solid, 24-carat gold.A team from Michigan State University discovered that the metal-tolerant bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans can grow on massive concentrations of gold chloride, which is deadly to other creatures.They found that the tiny bugs can transform the toxic substance to produce gold nuggets.

Voters in California will decide on a proposal next month that would require the labelling of most foods made with genetically modified ingredients.Proposition 37 is supported by the organic industry but many major food suppliers oppose it saying it will drive up prices.Around $40m is expected to be spent on campaigning with the majority coming from opponents.But a recent opinion poll shows a clear majority in favour of the proposal.Note: See Yes and No on 37.

Neanderthals apparently last interbred with the ancestors of today's Europeans after modern humans with advanced stone tools expanded out of Africa, researchers say.The last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans likely occurred as recently as 47,000 years ago, the researchers added.Modern humans once shared the globe with now-departed human lineages, including the Neanderthals, our closest known extinct relatives. Neanderthals had been around for about 30,000 years when modern humans appeared in the fossil record about 200,000 years ago. Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 year ago.

There is an international quantum teleportation space race heating up. Around the world, countries are investing time and millions of dollars into the technology, which uses satellites to beam bits of quantum information down from the sky and and could profoundly change worldwide communication.This is not a maybe-sort-of-one-day quantum technology. Quantum teleportation has been proven experimentally many times over and researchers are now eyeing the heavens as their next big leap forward. Most of what remains are the nuts and bolts engineering challenges (and some more money) before it becomes a thing of the present.

With tens of thousands of pieces of "space junk" in orbit, officials and experts from the world's space agencies are meeting to discuss how to clean it up.The risk is that old spacecraft - dead satellites and used-up rockets - could collide with satellites needed for navigation, communications and weather forecasting.

Archaeologists in Guatemala say they have discovered the 7th-century tomb of Lady K'abel, one of the greatest queens of classic Maya civilization.Unearthed during excavations of the royal Maya city of El Perú-Waka' in northwestern Petén, Guatemala, the grave contained the skeletal remains of a mature individual buried with rich offerings such as dozens of ceramic vessels, numerous carved jade, shell artifacts and a small, carved alabaster jar.According to the archaeologists, the white vessel strongly suggest the tomb belonged to the warrior Queen Lady K'abel.

Fifty-five years ago today, the Soviet Union launched history's first artificial satellite.Sputnik was an innocuous satellite; Soviet scientists behind the launch were just happy to successfully put the probe into orbit. But in the United States the reaction was different. The engineering feat very quickly gave way to hysteria and paranoia. President Eisenhower initially downplayed the role of the satellite as a threat to find that he'd grossly underestimated its psychological impact.The 17 months between July 1957 to December 1958 saw a peak in solar activity.

(ANSAmed) - ATHENS, 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.

An 11-year-old Russian boy stumbled across the 30,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth, an experience that was surely either incredibly exciting or permanently traumatising.According to the Moscow News, Yevgeny Salinder found the 500-kilogram beast in the tundra of the Taymyr peninsula in northern Russia. Scientists laboured for a week with axes and steam to dig it out of the permafrost it's been encased in for centuries.Woolly mammoths have been found in the permafrost in Siberia since at least 1929, but this is one of the best preserved. Its tusks, mouth and rib cage are clearly visible.

EINSTEIN mockingly called it "spooky action at a distance": the finding that quantum particles can influence each other regardless of how far apart they are. We can only imagine his horror at a new experiment that extends the idea to time by entangling a pair of photons that never coexisted. As well as expanding the reach of quantum theory's baffling implications, the experiment could improve long-distance cryptography.At the heart of the phenomena is entanglement, in which the quantum states of two entities become linked. The implications of this for spatially distant particles stumped even Einstein, but things got still stranger last year.

The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time.The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was possible...

A generation that became hooked on heroin in the 1980s and 90s is ageing, while young people are now too "savvy" to experiment with the drug, experts have said.Some 4,268 adults aged 18 to 24 started treatment for heroin addiction in 2011/12 for the first time, a fall of nearly two-thirds from 11,309 in 2005/06, figures from the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA) showed. It is the lowest recorded level of young heroin addicts.The over-40s now make up almost a third of the whole treatment population, with more than 16,000 starting a new course of treatment last year.

A think tank has made a controversial case for freezing fishing in Europe, saying most fish stocks would return to sustainable levels within five years.The London-based New Economics Foundation (Nef) argues in its report that the suspension would generate billions of pounds in profits by 2023.Private investment would compensate fishermen and maintain boats.

Honey bee brains could soon be helping robots act more independently.The way that bees smell and see is being studied in a £1m project to produce a simulation of the insect's sensory systems.The simulated bee brain will then be used by a flying robot to help it make decisions about how to navigate safely.Robots that emerge from the research project could help in search and rescue missions or work on farms mechanically pollinating crops.

Three unusual earthquakes that shook a suburb west of Dallas over the weekend appear to be connected to the past disposal of wastewater from local hydraulic fracturing operations, a geophysicist who has studied earthquakes in the region says.Preliminary data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) show the first quake, a magnitude 3.4, hit at 11:05 p.m. CDT on Saturday a few miles southeast of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport. It was followed 4 minutes later by a 3.1-magnitude aftershock that originated nearby.A third, magnitude-2.1 quake trailed Saturday's rumbles by just under 24 hours, touching off at 10:41 p.m. CDT on Sunday from an epicenter a couple miles east of the first, according to the USGS. The tremors set off a volley of 911 calls, according to Reuters, but no injuries have been reported.

Santorini locals began to suspect last year that something was afoot with the volcano under their Greek island group. Wine glasses occasionally vibrated and clinked in cafes, suggesting tiny tremors, and tour guides smelled strange gasses.Part of the municipality of Santorini, Nea Kameni ("new burnt island") is a small uninhabited (and geologically active) island within the flooded Santorini caldera. That caldera, which forms the Santorini island group today, was formed during the volcano's last major eruption, some 3,600 years ago. That was the second-largest blast in human history and may have destroyed the Minoan civilization on nearby Crete (and possibly inspired the myth of Atlantis).

U.S. farmers are using more hazardous pesticides to fight weeds and insects due largely to heavy adoption of genetically modified crop technologies that are sparking a rise of "superweeds" and hard-to-kill insects, according to a newly released study.Genetically engineered crops have led to an increase in overall pesticide use, by 404 million pounds from the time they were introduced in 1996 through 2011, according to the report by Charles Benbrook, a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University.

Turning air into liquid may offer a solution to one of the great challenges in engineering - how to store energy.The Institution of Mechanical Engineers says liquid air can compete with batteries and hydrogen to store excess energy generated from renewables.IMechE says "wrong-time" electricity generated by wind farms at night can be used to chill air to a cryogenic state at a distant location.When demand increases, the air can be warmed to drive a turbine.

At the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) in Denver, Colo., climate scientists store and study ice cores recovered from the polar regions of the world. It's minus 23.3 degrees Celsius (minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit) inside, so everyone is bundled up in ski parkas, insulated gloves and boots. And, saws are buzzing, as scientists from all over the U.S. are measuring and cutting pieces of precious Antarctic glacier ice to take back to their labs for research.

Samples from eight cedar trees in Bolivia have helped shed light on the seasonal rainfall in the Amazon basin over the past century, say researchers.A study led by UK-based scientists said the data from the trees provided a key tool to assess the natural variation in the region's climate system.It suggested that tree-rings from lowland tropical cedar provided a natural archive of rainfall data.The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Great-ape habitat in Africa has shrunk precipitously in the past two decades, according to the first continent-wide survey of the state of environmental conditions suitable for the animals.Gorilla habitat has been hit particularly hard, researchers have concluded. Since 1995, Cross River gorillas have lost 59% of their habitat; eastern gorillas have lost 52%; and western gorillas have faced a 31% loss.Bonobos have suffered a 29% loss in their habitat; central chimpanzees have experienced a 17% shrinkage, and western chimpanzees, 11%.

The most famous primatologist in the world is ape about Bigfoot. Jane Goodall made her name studying chimpanzees in Africa and by discovering that they, like humans, use tools.Since then, she has been working to preserve their decreasing numbers via the Jane Goodall Insititute. She also admitted to an interest in the mysterious creature known as Bigfoot, Sasquatch or the Yeti."I'm not going to flat-out deny its existence," Goodall said during an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post before a benefit dinner in La Jolla, Calif. "I'm fascinated and would actually love them to exist.

The 13th century BC witnessed the zenith of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean civilizations which declined at the end of the Bronze Age, ~3200 years ago. Weakening of this ancient flourishing Mediterranean world shifted the political and economic centres of gravity away from the Levant towards Classical Greece and Rome, and led, in the long term, to the emergence of the modern western civilizations.Textual evidence from cuneiform tablets and Egyptian reliefs from the New Kingdom relate that seafaring tribes, the Sea Peoples, were the final catalyst that put the fall of cities and states in motion. However, the lack of a stratified radiocarbon-based archaeology for the Sea People event has led to a floating historical chronology derived from a variety of sources spanning dispersed areas.

The proportion of scientific research that is retracted due to fraud has increased tenfold since 1975, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of how research papers go wrong.The study, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that more than two-thirds of the biomedical and life sciences papers that have been retracted from the scientific record are due to misconduct by researchers, rather than error.The results add weight to recent concerns that scientific misconduct is on the rise and that fraud increasingly affects fields that underpin many areas of public concern, such as medicine and healthcare.

A nastier kind of salmonella infection has emerged alongside the HIV epidemic in Africa. The finding is the first evidence that HIV might be allowing new human pathogens to evolve in immunosuppressed people.Most people who get salmonella contract it from eating contaminated meat, leading to an unpleasant but brief gut upset. But in Africa, the bacteria escapes into the blood of people with suppressed immune systems, causing a fever called invasive, non-typhoidal salmonella (iNTS) that can kill in up to 45 per cent of cases. The main victims used to be children who have immune deficiency as a result of malnutrition or malaria, but iNTS is also a classic complication of HIV.

Gassy outbursts from a suborbital rocket may be the cleanest way to get rid of hazardous space debris, suggests a new US patent application filed on 27 September by aerospace giant Boeing of Chicago.Space junk - derelict rocket bodies, broken or used-up satellites and debris generated by their endless collisions - is becoming the scourge of the space age. Even tiny pieces can zip through metal at hypersonic speed, putting astronauts and spacecraft at risk.After more than 50 years of space flight, so much litter has accumulated that some experts predict near-Earth space will become difficult to navigate by mid-century unless agencies start removing the mess.

It sounds like the imaginings of science fiction writers. However cyber experts warned yesterday that hackers could send the world back to the 1960s by hijacking satellites dotted around space, creating havoc below.Our overwhelming reliance on space technology makes us acutely vulnerable were it to ever break down or be deliberately sabotaged. For those gathered at the conference on national security and space at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) yesterday it was an issue they felt needed to be confronted more openly.

Venus may be closer to the sun than Earth, but its typically hellish atmosphere has a surprisingly cold layer that's chillier than any part of our own planet's atmosphere, a new study reveals.This region may be cool enough for carbon dioxide snow or ice to form, according to new observations from Europe's Venus Express satellite. This is surprising for a planet with normally oven-hot temperatures, scientists say."The finding is very new and we still need to think about and understand what the implications will be," Hakan Svedhem, Venus Express project scientist at the European Space Agency, said in a statement today (Oct. 1).

HOUSTON -- The NASA team behind a prototype moon lander that crashed in a test flight last month is pushing forward to build a new-and-improved replacement.The program, called Project Morpheus after the Greek god of dreams, is aimed at testing new technologies for a future planetary lander, including a novel propulsion system based on liquid oxygen and liquid methane fuels, which scientists say are cheaper and safer than traditional rocket fuels. A future version of Morpheus could be used to land payloads on the moon, Mars, or some other planetary body.

For the first time, astronomers have discovered alien planets orbiting sun-like stars located in a crowded star cluster, scientists announced today.The two newfound worlds are Jupiter-like behemoths far too hot to be habitable. But their existence may hearten those searching for life beyond Earth by helping to show that planets can form in a wide range of environments, such as dense clusters, researchers said.

Humans have reached the moon and are planning to return samples from Mars, but when it comes to exploring the land deep beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet.This may be about to change with a $1 billion mission to drill 6 km (3.7 miles) beneath the seafloor to reach the Earth's mantle -- a 3000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock between the crust and the core which makes up the majority of our planet -- and bring back the first ever fresh samples.It could help answer some of our biggest questions about the origins and evolution of Earth itself, with almost all of the sea floor and continents that make up the Earth´s surface originating from the mantle.

Two mysterious and identical UFO's almost 1,000 miles apart have been observed on Google Maps - raising questions as to what they are and how they were photographed there in the first place.The red orb-like shapes are visible to all users of the application online at Jacksonville in Texas and at the Sky City Casino Hotel on 32 Indian Service Route 30, Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico.At both locations the same object appears in the sky hovering over the street and was first pointed out to ABC News affiliate KLTV in East Texas by Andrea Dover who noticed the first UFO while using Google Maps to get directions.To see the Texan UFO you don't even have to enter a street into the search bar, just Jacksonville, Texas and go to street view, pan around there it is.

Laser-emitting materials can be put onto nearly any surface through inkjet printers, which could lead to more-lifelike video displays, as well as unusual applications such as digital wallpaper, scientists say.The lasers are made using liquid crystals, the same materials found in LCDs (liquid crystal displays) now common in laptop displays, flat-screen televisions and digital watches. Liquid crystals are a broad class of what are known as self-organized materials, whose ingredients naturally assemble themselves into orderly structures.

Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has dropped by more than half over the last 27 years, according to scientists, a result of increased storms, bleaching and predation by population explosions of a starfish which sucks away the coral's nutrients.At present rates of decline, the coral cover will halve again within a decade, though scientists said the reef could recover if the crown-of-thorns starfish can be brought under control and, longer term, global carbon dioxide emissions are reduced.

Today we set out on what is to be a collaborative, interdisciplinary scientific effort to examine the links among climate, glaciers and society in the high passes of the Bhutan Himalaya.Nearly 3.2 billion people in South Asia depend on the water that originates from melting glaciers and snowpack of the high Himalaya, yet a gulf of uncertainty hinders our ability to assess the fate of this ice and snow in a warming world. Thus, the goals of this expedition are to collect data that will shed light on the sensitivity of Himalayan mountain glaciers to rising atmospheric temperatures, and to place these glaciers into the context of past climate change.