Newsdesk Archive

Scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are embarking on an ambitious project to produce the first accurate computer models of a honey bee brain in a bid to advance our understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how animals think.The team will build models of the systems in the brain that govern a honey bee's vision and sense of smell. Using this information, the researchers aim to create the first flying robot able to sense and act as autonomously as a bee, rather than just carry out a pre-programmed set of instructions.

An amateur astronomer has created the first-ever homemade brightness map of Jupiter's huge moon Ganymede in a magnificent display of how non-professional skywatchers can contribute to the field of observational astronomy.Greek skywatcher Emmanuel Kardasis of the Hellenic Amateur Astronomy Association created the new Ganymede map using a common "hobby" telescope and off-the-shelf camera and computer equipment. His map matches up well with images of Ganymede's surface taken by professionals, said officials with the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC), which is meeting this week in Madrid.

Detailed observations of Saturn's moon Titan have now spanned 30 years, covering an entire solar orbit for this distant world. Dr. Athena Coustenis from the Paris-Meudon Observatory in France has analyzed data gathered over this time and has found that the changing seasons of Titan affect it more than previously thought.Coustenis explains, "As with Earth, conditions on Titan change with its seasons. We can see differences in atmospheric temperatures, chemical composition and circulation patterns, especially at the poles. For example, hydrocarbon lakes form around the north polar region during winter due to colder temperatures and condensation.

For one of this weekend's features, we thought it would be interesting to revisit Carl Sagan's question: "What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque."

MEASURING Earth's hidden structures could soon be as simple as looking at your watch - provided it's a super-accurate atomic clock.Such clocks are nearly good enough to deliver a detailed geoid, says Ruxandra Bondarescu at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and her colleagues. The geoid is a model of Earth's density variations - from the surface down to the mantle - as revealed by anomalies in the planet's gravitational pull. Knowing the geoid's shape can aid studies of deeply buried geological structures and show how mass is being redistributed over time, such as by the melting of polar ice sheets.

Remember when we said that "Doctor Who" fans eager to build their own TARDIS would first need to obtain an odd little item called a trachoid time crystal? The exotic item was first mentioned in a 1976 episode called "The Hand of Fear" as being key to the machine's ability to travel through space and time.Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek (MIT) suggested such a thing might be mathematically possible, giving hope to aspiring Time Lords everywhere.

In the tribal societies of the Amazon forest, violent conflict accounted for 30 percent of all deaths before contact with Europeans, according to a recent study by University of Missouri anthropologist Robert Walker. Understanding the reasons behind those altercations in the Amazon sheds light on the instinctual motivations that continue to drive human groups to violence, as well as the ways culture influences the intensity and frequency of violence."The same reasons - revenge, honor, territory and jealousy over women - that fueled deadly conflicts in the Amazon continue to drive violence in today's world," said Walker, lead author and assistant professor of anthropology in MU's College of Arts and Science. "Humans' evolutionary history of violent conflict among rival groups goes back to our primate ancestors. It takes a great deal of social training and institutional control to resist our instincts and solve disputes with words instead of weapons. Fortunately, people have developed ways to channel those instincts away from actual deadly conflict. For example, sports and video games often involve the same impulses to defeat a rival group."

When it comes to human spaceflight, what goes up does indeed need to come down, typically at significant expense on both legs of the journey.A team of NASA engineers and scientists thinks there is a better way -- turning all that trash into rocket gas and other useful items."The goal is to make sure what you ship up in space you actually use," said chemist Paul Hintze, who oversees the Trash to Supply Gas project at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It was November 1971. The scene at Nasa was a tense one, similar to that of Curiosity's landing back in August. Ground controllers held their collective breath as Mariner 9 approached Mars. If everything went to plan, the spacecraft would make history by being the first manmade object to go into orbit around Earth's neighbouring planet.Mariner 9 was an octagonal spacecraft just less than a metre and a half across, with four cross-like solar panels sticking out another two metres from its body. Its mission was to map Mars. At the appointed time, the retrorockets fired and Mars' gravity took hold of the spacecraft.

Over the next few months, NASA will map out a strategy for returning bits of Martian rock and soil to Earth, so scientists can study them for signs of past Red Planet life.That ambitious goal should drive the space agency's next steps at Mars, according to a report released Tuesday (Sept. 25) by the Mars Program Planning Group. The report also lays out several ways Mars sample-return can be accomplished over the next decade or two, and NASA is reviewing those options now.The agency may reveal its chosen path in February, after the White House releases its federal budget request for fiscal year 2014, NASA officials said Tuesday. In the meantime, here's a brief rundown of the scenarios they're looking at.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin believes that "self-driving cars will be far safer than human-driven cars" but who trusts them enough to drive in them or even alongside them?Drivers will not need a driving licence by 2040.At least that is what the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers believes. It thinks autonomous cars capable of driving to any destination are set to become the norm.With an estimated 90% of current car accidents thought to be caused by human error, taking people out of the equation is seen by many car companies as a massive boost to safety.

Fish species are expected to shrink in size by up to 24% because of global warming, say scientists.Researchers modelled the impact of rising temperatures on more than 600 species between 2001 and 2050.Warmer waters could decrease ocean oxygen levels and significantly reduce fish body weight.The scientists argue that failure to control greenhouse gas emissions will have a greater impact on marine ecosystems than previously thought.

If recent reports are to be believed, the North Sea cod's days are numbered. But should we believe these reports? What do the experts say about the numbers of fish that are left?The Daily Telegraph recently ran the headline: "Just 100 cod left in the North Sea". It sounded fishy. Trawlermen were furious."It just makes my blood boil - 100 cod in the North Sea?" fumes Brian Buchan, who's been fishing in the North Sea for more than 30 years. "More like 100 million cod in the North Sea."It's not a trivial issue. Over-exploitation and conflicts over fisheries cause major problems worldwide.

Summers on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard are now warmer than at any other time in the last 1,800 years, including during medieval times when parts of the northern hemisphere were as hot as, or hotter, than today, according to a new study in the journal Geology."The Medieval Warm Period was not as uniformly warm as we once thought--we can start calling it the Medieval Period again," said the study's lead author, William D'Andrea, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "Our record indicates that recent summer temperatures on Svalbard are greater than even the warmest periods at that time."

Three separate 'sightings' of yetis have been made in Siberia in recent weeks, say fishermen and an official in Russia.All were in the remote Kemerovo region, where around 30 'abominable snowmen' live, according to the country's leading researcher on the creatures.In one previously undisclosed case last month near Myski village, fishermen in a boat on a river initially mistook distant figures first for bears and then people, said the Siberian Times'We shouted to them - do you need help?,' said fisherman Vitaly Vershinin.'They just rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making their way through the bushes and with two other limbs, straight up the hill.'He said: "What did we think? It could not be bears, as the bear walks on all-fours, and they ran on two.... so then they were gone.'

It is easy to marvel at a beautiful fossil specimen that is illustrated in a scientific article, in a book or online, or is on display in a museum, and overlook the time-consuming and often painstaking work that went into getting it into that condition. Exhibitions and documentaries often show the dramatic scenes of fossils wrapped in protective plaster jackets being dragged or even airlifted out of the field site, but then mention only in passing the weeks or even months of effort required to extract the bones (or shells or whatever) from the rock.

It's not as glamorous as cocaine or diamonds, but the illegal logging industry has become very attractive to criminal organisations over the past decade. A new report finds that up to 90 per cent of tropical deforestation can be attributed to organised crime, which controls up to 30 per cent of the global timber trade.For years, environmental regulators thought that illegal logging was decreasing worldwide. But they were just looking in the wrong places, says Christian Nelleman, author of the 27 September report from the United Nations Environment Programme.

It was the start of a trial which has all the elements of a Dan Brown novel and threatens to lift the lid on power struggles and skulduggery at the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church.The central question, as in all good thrillers: did the butler do it?The Pope's butler appeared in a Vatican court for the first time yesterday to face charges that he stole confidential and compromising documents, some of them allegedly from the desk of Benedict XVI himself.

A group of British UFO-watchers is celebrating 50 years of searching for spacecraft in the sky. What keeps them looking for extra-terrestrial life?There are no windows in the functional-looking basement hall beneath a north London hotel. But everyone gathered here is gazing to the heavens.Figuratively speaking, that is.The annual conference of the British UFO Research Association (Bufora), is a gathering of enthusiasts for unexplained aerial phenomena that might, they speculate, be evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

On April 11 of this year, an extraordinary cluster of earthquakes struck off Sumatra. The largest shock, magnitude 8.7, produced stronger ground-shaking than any earthquake ever recorded. And it surprised seismologists by triggering more than a dozen moderate earthquakes around the world.The quakes are also a sign of big changes to come in the Earth's crust.

A component of chocolate, wine and green tea can enhance memories -- in snails, at least.A new study, released Wednesday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, showed that modest concentrations of the flavonoid epicatechin caused snails' memories to last longer and be harder to overwrite.In nature, flavonoids are found in many species of plants, often adding color to plant skin by serving as pigments.

A new species of night monkey (pictured) is one of eight new mammals found during an expedition to northern Peru's Tabaconas Namballe National Sanctuary (map), scientists announced recently.A team of Mexican and Peruvian biologists found this "new heaven of unknown biodiversity" during a 2009-2011 expedition, according to a press statement.Rarely seen and little-studied, night monkeys are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and endangered by the Peruvian government, making the new discovery especially notable.

Time travel is a staple of science fiction, with the latest rendition showing up in the film "Looper." And it turns out jumps through time are possible, according to the laws of physics, though traveling into the future looks to be much more feasible than traveling into the past."Looper" stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe, an assassin who kills targets sent back in time by the mob. Things get complicated when Joe is assigned to kill his future self, played by Bruce Willis. The movie, produced by TriStar Pictures, opens today (Sept. 28).In this imagining, time travel has been put to nefarious uses by people operating outside the law. But could such a thing ever happen in real life?"It's actually consistent with the laws of physics to change the rate at which clocks run," said Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. "There's no question that you can skip into the future".

Neanderthals may have lived side by side with early humans and possibly interbred with them, according to new research.Stone axes and sharp flint arrowheads of both branches of the human race have been discovered in limestone caves in northern Israel.The findings, reported in the Times, have led archeologists to believe the two sub-species found harmony in a coastal mountain range that today is in a state of war with its neighbours.None of the bones uncovered at Nahal Me'arot - a World Heritage site - had lethal wounds which suggested prehistoric men lived in peace with each other 80,000 years ago.

Statistics obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union provides additional evidence that government surveillance of Americans has skyrocketed in recent years. The government is legally obligated to release reports about its surveillance activities, but it refused to do so until the ACLU sued to compel the production of the documents.The reports concern what lawyers call "pen register" and "trap and trace" records. These terms originally referred to hardware devices law enforcement could attach to the phone network to capture information about (but not the contents of) phone calls. Pen registers recorded outgoing phone numbers. Trap and trace devices recorded incoming phone numbers.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle turns up everywhere in quantum mechanics. The idea is that certain types of measurements like position and momentum are paired. By measuring one of the pair, we generate uncertainty in the other. This is also referred to as quantum back-action: the thing you are measuring pushes back on the measuring system, which generates uncertainty in some other property. This fundamental idea has some serious consequences when it comes to measuring very small stuff, like gravitational waves.

DRAINING an infected abscess on Earth is a straightforward procedure. On a spaceship travelling to the moon or Mars, it could kill everyone on board.Blood and bodily fluids cannot be contained in zero gravity, which means there is currently no way to perform surgery in space without contaminating the cabin. This makes an extended stay problematic, says James Antaki at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."Based on statistical probability, there is a high likelihood of trauma or a medical emergency on a deep space mission," he says.

The next steps in NASA's Mars exploration strategy should build toward returning Martian rocks and dirt to Earth to search for signs of past life, a new report by the space agency's Red Planet planning group finds.The report, released today (Sept. 25) by the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG), lays out a series of options that NASA could employ to get pieces of the Red Planet in scientists' hands here on Earth. The space agency is now mulling those options and could announce its chosen path by early next year, when the White House releases its proposed budget for fiscal year 2014.

Our solar system's planets may have formed at differing times, determined by shock waves flowing from the young sun, one astronomer suggests.This theory posits that Earth is one of the youngest planets in the solar system, along with Mercury, Venus and Mars.In a new paper, Tagir Abdylmyanov, an associate professor from Kazan State Power Engineering University in Russia, describes his idea and suggests it presents a possible new way of predicting where planets will form in young star systems.

We're enjoying a relatively long and stable period of pleasant weather at the moment. And by that, I don't mean the past few years or decades. I mean the past 12,000 years or so. For around 2.6m years, the Earth has experienced a fluctuating climate, swinging between icy glaciations and warm interglacials. It's an uneven division, with glaciations lasting around 100,000 years, and interglacials just 10,000 to 15,000. So just imagine the impact on plants and animals of these switches from long, wintry glaciations to brief, summery interglacials. The differences in climate are extreme. At the peak of the last ice age, just 20,000 years ago, vast ice sheets descended over the northern parts of Europe and North America. For any animals adapted to a temperate climate, glaciations posed something of a challenge. Hibernation and woolly jumpers would not be enough to ride out 100,000 years of winter. Those warm-loving animals (and humans) cleared out of the north and sought refuge in the south.

The parasitic mite Varroa destructor is a major contributor to the recent mysterious death of honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology finds that specific proteins, released by damaged larvae and in the antennae of adult honey bees, can drive hygienic behavior of the adults and promote the removal of infected larvae from the hive.V. destructor sucks the blood (hemolymph) of larval and adult bees leaving them weakened and reducing the ability of their immune systems to fight off infections. Not that honey bees have strong immune systems in the first place since they have fewer immunity genes than solitary insects such as flies and moths. These tiny mites can also spread viral disease between hosts. This double onslaught is thought to be a significant contributor to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Many wheelchair users have never walked, but now a robotic exoskeleton could allow them to move around upright for the first time. Last week at the Wellcome Collection in London, Sophie Morgan, who was paralysed in a car accident, demonstrated bionic legs after just two short practice sessions.The exoskeleton, developed by Richard Little and colleagues at Rex Bionics, has lithium batteries that can power up to 2 hours of walking.

Animals that move backwards usually require a lot of energy, so Nir Sapir from the University of California Berkeley, USA, was surprised when he realized that hummingbirds execute this maneuver routinely. Wondering how hummingbirds perform the feat, he analyzed their flight and the amount of oxygen they consume and found that reversing is much cheaper than hovering flight and no more costly than flying forward.

A very hazardous volcano at the border of China and North Korea is growing more active, and might erupt in the next few decades, researchers studying the area say.About 1,100 years ago, the Changbaishan volcano in northeastern China erupted, shooting superheated flows of ash and gas up to 30 miles (50 kilometers) away and blasting a 3-mile-wide (5 km) chunk off the tip of the volcano. The explosion, known as the Millennium eruption because it occurred close to the turn of the first millennium, was one of the largest volcanic events in the last 2,000 years.

OSLO (Reuters) - Swift action is required to save many of the world's fisheries that are declining faster than expected, a study in a leading scientific journal shows.A recovery of fisheries could increase worldwide landings by up to 40 percent, helping to feed a global human population that is forecast to rise from 7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, according to the report in Friday's edition of Science.Coastal fisheries and sharks are among those hardest hit by overfishing, while flounder, herring and sardine are suffering less, the scientists wrote in the journal run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

THE vastness of Earth's oceans and the limited extent of our knowledge and occupation of them often invites comparisons with space. But they are much more attainable than the moon or Mars. Hence the enduring fascination with "seasteading", the idea of building permanent settlements at sea (see "Brave new sea worlds to redefine society").Those who push the idea are often dismissed as libertarian fantasists. The seasteading movement has its fair share of those, but it is also home to pioneers longing to conquer a new frontier.

Early weather reports from Mars are showing some surprisingly mild temperatures during the day.For through-out the Curiosity rover's mission, its on-board weather station - the 'Remote Environment Monitoring Station' - has measured temperatures rising to above 0C for more than half of the days since Curiosity landed on Mars.Mars has reached above 6C - and it may even reach the 20C as the Martian 'summer' continues, making Mars very exciting from a habitat point of view.It also follows on from the discovery that Mars, in all likelihood, had waist-high streams running across its surface.

In 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama got himself into trouble by saying "bitter" voters "cling to guns or religion" in response to hard times. Obama later apologized and recanted the statement, but new research suggests he may not have been entirely wrong.People do turn to spirituality after a bad day, according to a study published online Aug. 1 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. And good news for spiritual folks, it works.

Forget PowerPoint: It turns out the secret to improving productivity at your job might be puppies.A new study out of Hiroshima University found that people performed a variety of tasks faster or more accurately after looking at pictures of kittens and puppies. These test subjects also beat out others who looked at pictures of adult animals or gourmet meals instead."Viewing cute images improved performance on tasks that required carefulness," researchers concluded.

Scientists at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography have made the first observation of a predator avoidance behavior by a species of phytoplankton, a microscopic marine plant. Susanne Menden-Deuer, associate professor of oceanography, and doctoral student Elizabeth Harvey made the unexpected observation while studying the interactions between phytoplankton and zooplankton.Their discovery will be published in the September 28 issue of the journal PLOS ONE."It has been well observed that phytoplankton can control their movements in the water and move toward light and nutrients," Menden-Deuer said. "What hasn't been known is that they respond to predators by swimming away from them. We don't know of any other plants that do this.".

The fish we eat for dinner may soon be fit and healthy, not because they spend their lives swimming out in the open ocean, but because a robot of sorts gave them a daily workout in an aquaculture pen.Fish farms are far from perfect. Some research has shown, for example, that sea lice from salmon farms are detrimental to migrating wild salmon. And inside the farm, mortality can creep up to around 20 percent due to illness and wounds.Fish farms are far from perfect. Some research has shown, for example, that sea lice from salmon farms are detrimental to migrating wild salmon. And inside the farm, mortality can creep up to around 20 percent due to illness and wounds.

The Curiosity rover team announced yesterday that they'd found the mission's first potentially habitable environment on Mars: an ancient river bed. But why do they think flowing water created the formation?What exactly did the rover find?Curiosity's telephoto camera snapped shots of three rocky outcrops not far from the rover's landing site inside Gale Crater. One of them, called "Goulburn", had been excavated by the rover's own landing gear. The other two were natural outcrops dubbed "Link" and "Hottah". All three, and Hottah in particular, were made of thin layers of rock that had been cemented together.

Nasa's Mars rover, Curiosity, dispatched to learn if the most Earth-like planet in the solar system was suitable for microbial life, has found clear evidence its landing site was once awash in water, a key ingredient for life, scientists said.Curiosity, a roving chemistry laboratory the size of a small car, touched down on 6 August inside a giant impact basin near the planet's equator. The primary target for the two-year mission is a three-mile-high mound of layered rock rising from the floor of Gale Crater.

The deserts of Utah and Nevada have not always been dry. Between 14,000 and 20,000 years ago, when large ice caps covered Canada during the last glacial cooling, valleys throughout the desert southwest filled with water to become large lakes, scientists have long surmised. At their maximum size, the desert lakes covered about a quarter of both Nevada and Utah. Now a team led by a Texas A&M University researcher has found a new water cycle connection between the U.S. southwest and the tropics, and understanding the processes that have brought precipitation to the western U.S. will help scientists better understand how the water cycle might be perturbed in the future.

America's early space pioneers and moon voyagers have now been confirmed as the legal owners of the equipment and spacecraft parts they saved as souvenirs from their missions.President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed a bill into law granting NASA's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo crew members "full ownership rights" to the artifacts they received and retained more than 40 years ago.

Since the beginning of August, NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, has been roaming all over the distant planet learning as much as it can about the Martian terrain. The mission control team back on Earth has also learned what it may be like on Mars by trying to live and work on a Martian day, which is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. This 'day' length causes havoc with the internal 24-hour body clock but researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have developed and tested a fatigue management program which is successful at controlling this space-age jetlag.

After three years of documentary and archaeological research, the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA) has discovered the location of the Battle of Hungry Hill, also known as the Battle of Grave Creek Hills, in the remote mountains of southwest Oregon.The team led by Professor Mark Tveskov (SOULA) that included Colonel (Ret.) Daniel Edgerton (U.S. Army Center of Military History), Robert Kentta (historian, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians), Chelsea Rose (SOULA), and other scholars discovered the Rogue River War battlefield. Their work included combing document archives in Washington D.C., Seattle, Wash., Berkeley, Calif., and elsewhere, as well as extensive field survey by Southern Oregon University students and community and Tribal volunteers.

The first traces of plastic debris have been found in what was thought to be the pristine environment of the Southern Ocean, according to a study released in London by the French scientific research vessel Tara.The finding comes following a two-and-a-half-year, 70,000-mile voyage by the schooner across the Atlantic, Pacific, Antarctic and Indian Oceans, to investigate marine ecosystems and biodiversity under climate change."We had always assumed that this was a pristine environment, very little touched by human beings," said Chris Bowler, scientific co-ordinator of Tara Oceans. "The fact that we found these plastics is a sign that the reach of human beings is truly planetary in scale.".

OSLO (Reuters) - Temperatures high in the Norwegian Arctic are above those in a natural warm period in Viking times, underscoring a thaw opening the region to everything from oil exploration to shipping, scientists said on Thursday.Last week, sea ice on the Arctic Ocean set a record low since satellite observations began in the 1970s. In recent years, mussels have been found off the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard for the first time since the Viking era 1,000 years ago.

Salt marshes which form a natural defence against the impact of climate change could die out before the end of the century, scientists have warned.A study into coastal vegetation predicts that warmer temperatures will encourage the plants to grow until around 2075, but a simultaneous rise in sea levels means they are likely to drown by the year 2100.Researchers said salt marshes are effective at removing carbon dioxide from the air and lock away as much carbon as about a third of the world's forests.

Great apes, such as gorillas, chimps and bonobos, are running out of places to live, say scientists.They have recorded a dramatic decline in the amount of habitat suitable for great apes, according to the first such survey across the African continent.Eastern gorillas, the largest living primate, have lost more than half their habitat since the early 1990s.Cross River gorillas, chimps and bonobos have also suffered significant losses, according to the study.

Girls exposed to the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) while in the womb may be at increased risk for reproductive problems later in life, a new study in monkeys suggests.In the study, female monkeys exposed to BPA in the womb were at higher risk for abnormal egg development compared with those not exposed to BPA. In female monkeys, as in humans, egg formation begins before birth.However, it's not known whether BPA could have the same effect on egg development in people.

Male DNA is commonly found in the brains of women, a study has found.The cause of the phenomenon is most likely being pregnant with a boy, say scientists.No one yet knows the medical implications of the discovery. But there is a suggestion that male DNA in the female brain might protect against Alzheimer's disease.Other kinds of "microchimerism", the harbouring of genetic material and cells swapped between foetus and mother during pregnancy, have been linked to both beneficial and harmful effects.

Science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills, a new study by researchers at Yale concluded.As a result, the report found, the professors were less likely to offer the women mentoring or a job. And even if they were willing to offer a job, the salary was lower.The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.

A piece of nettle cloth retrieved from Denmark's richest known Bronze Age burial mound Lusehøj may actually derive from Austria, new findings suggest. The cloth thus tells a surprising story about long-distance Bronze Age trade connections around 800 BC.2,800 years ago, one of Denmark's richest and most powerful men died. His body was burned. And the bereaved wrapped his bones in a cloth made from stinging nettle and put them in a stately bronze container, which also functioned as urn.Now new findings suggest that the man's voyage to his final resting place may have been longer than such voyages usually were during the Bronze Age: the nettle cloth, which was wrapped around the deceased's bones, was not made in Denmark, and the evidence points to present-day Austria as the place of origin.

The service was held by Bishop Iakov on the ice alongside the nuclear icebreaker Rossiya during a polar expedition titled "Arctic-2012", organised by the country's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute.The metal capsule carried the blessings of the church's leader, bearing the inscription: "With the blessing of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, the consecration of the North Pole marks 1150 years of Russian Statehood."The Kremlin is keen to claim the hydrocarbon riches off its northern coast despite territorial claims from other governments, and is gradually re-militarising the area.

VATICAN CITY (AP).- The Vatican newspaper has added to the doubts surrounding Harvard University's claim that a 4th century Coptic papyrus fragment showed that some early Christians believed that Jesus was married, declaring it a "fake."The newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, published an article Thursday by leading Coptic scholar Alberto Camplani and an accompanying editorial by the newspaper's editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, an expert in early Christianity. They both cited concerns expressed by other scholars about the fragment's authenticity and the fact that it was purchased on the market without a known archaeological provenance.

Humanity has landed a rover on Mars. Now, say scientists, it's time to land a boat on Titan. This outlandish scenario could become reality, according to scientists presenting their proposals at the European Planetary Science Congress on Sept. 27.Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is one of the most Earth-like bodies in the Solar System. With a thick atmosphere, a diameter between that of Earth and the planet Mercury, and a network of seas, lakes and rivers, it is in many respects more like a planet than a moon like Earth's.

WAITING for solar fireworks to reach a grand finale next year? Um, sorry, looks like you already missed them. Structures in the sun's corona indicate that the peak in our star's latest cycle of activity has been and gone, at least in its northern hemisphere.The southern hemisphere, meanwhile, is on a sluggish rise to solar maximum and may not hit its peak until 2014.This bizarre asymmetry strengthens a theory that has been bubbling among sun watchers for the past few years: our star is headed for hibernation. Having the sun's outbursts turned off for a while would provide a better baseline for studying how they influence Earth's climate.

Based on two new studies by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, regeneration of a new limb or organ in a human will be much more difficult than the mad scientist and supervillain, Dr. Curt Connors, made it seem in the Amazing Spider-man comics and films.As those who saw the recent "The Amazing Spiderman" movie will know, Dr. Connors injected himself with a serum made from lizard DNA to successfully regrow his missing lower right arm - that is, before the formula transformed him into a reptilian humanoid.

A mouse that escapes predators by shedding patches of its skin may shed light on regeneration and could lead to research that one day helps people heal from wounds and disease, scientists say.Humans and other mammals are generally very limited when it comes to regeneration, but one mammal, the African spiny mouse, can heal wounds much faster than lab mice can, which drew the attention of Ashley Seifert, a regeneration biologist at the University of Florida at Gainesville."Mammals have no problem regenerating blood cells or epidermis, or regrowing hair that is plucked out," Seifert said, "but following injury, like the severing of a finger, mammals generally just seal off the wound site and produce scar tissue.

THOSE who hoped the study would go away will be disappointed. Claims that eating genetically modified maize gives rats tumours have provoked a storm in Europe.The French government says it will suspend imports of the maize if its National Health and Safety Agency finds the results valid. The maize, made by Monsanto and modified to resist the herbicide Round-Up, is imported as animal feed to Europe but cannot be grown there due to continuing hostility to GM crops.

The father of a Sebastopol man who died in August while on a hallucinogenic retreat in the Peruvian jungle has raised $8,300 to bring the body back to the United States for an autopsy that the father thinks will prove his son was murdered.Kyle Josef Nolan, 18, died in late August while participating in a ritual that involves the drinking of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea, according to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. When Nolan's mother arrived in Peru to find out what happened to her missing son, the retreat's "shaman" told her that Nolan had walked away."I believe my son was murdered," he told the newspaper, "because people don't die from ingesting ayahuasca."

The two tombs - 'Serapeum' and 'Akhethotep & Ptahhotep' - had undergone ten years of renovation, with an estimated cost of £1.2 million.Discovered by archaeologist Auguste Mariette in 1851, the tomb of Serapuem's significance lies in the sarcophagus of the bull 'Apis', which pharaohs considered sacred.Mariette however only found one untouched tomb which at the time was blown open by dynamite.

Excavations at the mammoth hunting site of Breitenbach near Zeitz uncover 35,000 year old ivory workshopIn an international co-operation project, archaeologists from the Monrepos Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for the Evolution of Hominin Behaviour, part of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, (RGZM) and the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege and Archäologie in Saxony-Anhalt are excavating the 35,000 year old site of Breitenbach, close to Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt.

When we wipe out the most sensitive species, human beings reduce the resilience of ecosystems to climate change, reveals a new study from biologists at the University of Gothenburg, published today in the journal Ecology Letters.High biodiversity acts as an insurance policy for nature and society alike as it increases the likelihood that at least some species will be sufficiently resilient to sustain important functions such as water purification and crop pollination in a changing environment.

The waters of Australia's Great Barrier Reef are getting warmer, satellite measurements show, which spells bad news for the myriad creatures that dwell in this rain forest of the ocean.The satellite measurements of ocean temperatures show that the waters in the reef have warmed by 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) on average over the past 25 years. The change was even more pronounced in certain areas. For example, waters off the coast of Rockhampton, Australia, warmed by 0.9 F (0.5 C).The warming increases the risk of coral bleaching, wherein the symbiotic organisms that allow coral to thrive are expelled.

Only movie stars and select consumers have been able to get their hands on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the United States over the past few years, but now these zero-emissions cars are poised to bust onto the scene in a big way around 2015 to 2017.A limited number of fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) are available for lease today, and nearly all of them in California, where refueling stations are slowly cropping up.

I was recently interviewed by Brian Creigh of Veritas magazine. He did an excellent job and Veritas have generously allowed me to host a pdf of the full interview as it appears in the magazine on my own website here: http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG2.php. For those interested in learning more about Veritas, described as "the world's most complete consciousness magazine for awakening Mind, Body, Spirit -- Truth for our Times" -- see here: www.theveritasmagazine.com and their facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/veritasmag.

One of the stalwart units of astronomy just got a makeover. The International Astronomical Union, the authority on astronomical constants, has voted unanimously to redefine the astronomical unit, the conventional unit of length based on the distance between the Earth and the sun."The new definition is much simpler than the old one," says Sergei Klioner of the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, one of a group of scientists who worked decades toward the change, which took effect last month during an IAU meeting.

In a discovery that sounds uncannily like the plot of an Indiana Jones film, researchers have discovered that a 1,000 year old buddhist statue found by a Nazi expedition in 1938 is made from a meteorite.The findings, published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, reveal the priceless statue to be a rare ataxite class of meteorite.The statue, known as the Iron Man, weighs 10kg and is around 24cm tall.'The statue was chiseled from a fragment of the Chinga meteorite which crashed into the border areas between Mongolia and Siberia about 15,000 years ago,' said Dr Elmar Buchner from Stuttgart University, who made the discovery.'While the first debris was officially discovered in 1913 by gold prospectors, we believe that this individual meteorite fragment was collected many centuries before.'The team was able to classify it as an ataxite, a rare class of iron meteorite with high contents of nickel.

Leonardo da Vinci painted a younger and happier Mona Lisa some 10 years before painting the famous painting, art experts are claiming.Slightly larger in size than the famous portrait, which now hangs in the Louvre in paris, the painting features a darker tonality, a different and unfinished background framed by two columns, and shows a younger lady with a less enigmatic smile.

Enslaved worker ants kill the offspring of their parasites and thereby improve the chances of survival for their neighboring relativesAnts that are held as slaves in nests of other ant species damage their oppressors through acts of sabotage. Ant researcher Professor Dr. Susanne Foitzik of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany first observed this "slave rebellion" phenomenon in 2009. According to the latest findings, however, this behavior now appears to be a widespread characteristic that is not limited to isolated occurrences.

A report in a leading Japanese newspaper suggests that the country's Fisheries Agencies may suspend the so-called scientific research because the fleet's ageing factory ship needs urgent repairs. But late today the Agency said it hopes to refit the ship in time for this year's hunt.Greenpeace says the ageing mothership is another reason to shut the loss-making whaling program down, and it's accusing the Japanese government of siphoning tsunami reconstruction funds into whaling to keep the hunt afloat.

The next steps in NASA's Mars exploration strategy should build toward returning Martian rocks and dirt to Earth to search for signs of past life, a new report by the space agency's Red Planet planning group finds.The report, released today (Sept. 25) by the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG), lays out a series of options that NASA could employ to get pieces of the Red Planet in scientists' hands here on Earth. The space agency is now mulling those options and could announce its chosen path by early next year, when the White House releases its proposed budget for fiscal year 2014.

Over the weekend, The Orlando Sentinel reported that NASA is considering building a hovering outpost beyond the Moon at L-2 (Lagrangian point 2) that will be a 'gateway' to serve as a point for launching human missions to Mars and asteroids. The buzz among the space-related social medias ranged from "this is the greatest idea ever" to "this is make-work for the Space Launch System, (NASA's new rocket.)" The newspaper's report cited a White House briefing given in September by NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, but said "it's unclear whether it has the administration's support. Of critical importance is the price tag, which would certainly run into the billions of dollars.".

In the wake of last week's announcement that Arctic summer sea ice extent had reached its lowest level in the satellite record - and possibly the lowest for the last several thousand years - a few 'skeptic' blogs were keen to trumpet what they proclaimed to be a different sea ice record."The world's media is extremely excited at the thirty-year record low extent of sea ice at the North Pole which occurred just days ago: but almost nobody is reporting on the fact that something almost equally unusual is going on down around the coasts of Antarctica," wrote Lewis Page in The Register.

More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.As global average temperatures rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA.

Tesla Motors today unveiled its highly anticipated Supercharger network. Constructed in secret, Tesla revealed the locations of the first six Supercharger stations, which will allow the Model S to travel long distances with ultra fast charging throughout California, parts of Nevada and Arizona.The technology at the heart of the Supercharger was developed internally and leverages the economies of scale of existing charging technology already used by the Model S, enabling Tesla to create the Supercharger device at minimal cost. The electricity used by the Supercharger comes from a solar carport system provided by SolarCity, which results in almost zero marginal energy cost after installation. Combining these two factors, Tesla is able to provide Model S owners1 free long distance travel indefinitely.

California took the fast lane to the future on Tuesday when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law that lets self-driving cars onto public roads.Brown rode to the signing ceremony at Google headquarters in the passenger seat of a vehicle that steered itself, a Prius modified by Google. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and State Sen. Alex Padilla, who sponsored the bill, were along for the ride. An engineer for the technology company, Chris Urmson, sat in the driver's seat, but the car drove itself."We're looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality," Brown said just before signing the bill.

A newly-discovered comet looks likely to blaze brightly in our skies late next year. Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), is due to come within 0.012 astronomical units (AU) of the sun - just 1.1 million miles - on 29 November 2013. How brightly it will shine is still hard to determine, as there's a chance it will just boil away completely, as comet Elenin did last year.If it doesn't though, it could be brighter than any comet seen in the last hundred years - brighter than the full moon. If so, it should be visible with the naked eye for about two months, even during the daylight.

ARE animals conscious? This question has a long and venerable history. Charles Darwin asked it when pondering the evolution of consciousness. His ideas about evolutionary continuity - that differences between species are differences in degree rather than kind - lead to a firm conclusion that if we have something, "they" (other animals) have it too.In July of this year, the question was discussed in detail by a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge for the first annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference. Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, spent the latter part of his career studying consciousness and in 1994 published a book about it, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul.

Potato samples stored for more than 170 years have helped solve the mystery of why blight caused so many deaths in Ireland during the 19th Century.UK researchers have discovered that the potato blight that caused the Great Famine of 1845-48 was the same strain which caused a second outbreak some 30 years later.If the same information was available today, farmers and smallholders would be advised to harvest the crop, eat or sell it but not store any seed potatoes for planting the following year.

Crocodiles are often thought of as living fossils, remaining unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. But scientists have shown this is not always the case and that 150 million years ago, their feeding mechanisms were more similar to some mammals living today, the killer whales.An international team led by Dr Mark Young of the University of Edinburgh, and including Dr Lorna Steel at the Natural History Museum, studied two species of extinct marine dolphin-like crocodylians, Dakosaurus maximus and Plesiosuchus manselii. Their research is published today in the journal PLoS One.

Castration had a huge effect on the lifespans of Korean men, according to an analysis of hundreds of years of eunuch "family" records.They lived up to 19 years longer than uncastrated men from the same social class and even outlived members of the royal family.The researchers believe the findings show male hormones shorten life expectancy.The study is published in the journal Current Biology.

A NASA spacecraft has made the clearest record yet of choruses of noise in the Earth's magnetosphere.The chirps and whoops were captured by one of NASA's two recently launched Radiation Belt Storm Probes spacecraft, whose mission is to understand more about space weather."My wife calls it 'alien birds,'" joked experiment principal investigator Craig Kletzing, an astronomer at the University of Iowa.

Despite more than a century of observations, the orbit of the Martian moon Deimos is still not known to a high degree of accuracy, but a new study using images taken by ESA's Mars Express orbiter has provided the best orbital model to date.135 years have passed since Asaph Hall discovered Phobos and Deimos, two small companions of the planet Mars. Since that time, the satellites have been imaged innumerable times from the Earth and from spacecraft, including recent measurements by the panoramic cameras on the Mars Exploration Rovers and instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The biggest challenge in mounting a space mission to another star may not be technology, but people, experts say.Scientists, engineers, philosophers, psychologists and leaders in many other fields gathered in Houston last week for the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss launching an interstellar voyage within 100 years.

If you've ever yearned to own something from out of this world, here's your chance.On Oct. 14 in Manhattan, fragments of Mars, the moon and asteroids that have fallen to Earth go up for sale, in what auction house Heritage Auctions is billing as the largest public meteorite auction ever held.More than 125 items are for sale, a number of which have no minimum bid attached.The growing market for meteorites has driven the emergence of a meteorite prospecting industry in northwestern Africa and Oman, but even as people scour the deserts for meteorites, rocks from space remain among the most rare things on Earth.

Non-human primates may enjoy watching someone else trip on a banana peel, according to new research on laughter, which found that apes might appreciate slapstick humor.The research also helps to explain the origins of laughter and the social aspects of the behavior.Robin Dunbar, who co-authored one such study with Guillaume Dezecache, described what non-human primates might be amused by.

Trillions of bacteria living in and on the human body play a vital role in preserving health. But C-section births, antibiotics and excessive hygiene have been disturbing our microbial balance and possibly contributing to intestinal ailments, obesity, allergies and autism.Deep in the Amazon basin, where traditional hunter-gatherers still live, researchers gave the indigenous population a lesson in biology. They used posters to explain to the inhabitants of the rain forest that a human being is never alone. Invisible, tiny creatures known as bacteria live on and inside our bodies -- and they can be quite useful.

Cities can reduce the impact that an individual has on the environment by increasing the density and efficiency of human settlement, yet the cities themselves pave over nature. By 2030, hundreds of millions more people will live in cities around the world creating vast mega-metropolises and blotting out ecosystems.The area covered by cities may sprawl out over an additional 1.2 million square kilometers by 2030, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. That means the area covered by cities may triple.

From the dawn of history, and in cultures throughout the world, humans have been prone to imbue Earth's life-giving rivers with qualities of life itself -- a fitting tribute, no doubt, to the wellsprings upon which our past (and present) civilizations so heavily rely. But while modern thought has come to regard these essential waterways more clinically over the centuries, that might all be changing once again.Meet the Whanganui. You might call it a river, but in the eyes of the law, it has the standings of a person.

NAKHON RATCHASIMA - The mayor of Dan Kla district claims he was gifted with hundreds of artifacts by an unknown man he met on the street, reports said.Reporters met with the mayor Boonsong Ritdanklang at his home on Monday after receiving reports that he is in possession of more than 100 artifacts such as Buddha images, daggers, swords and sickles made from bronze and brass.Mr Boonsong told reporters that on Nov 19, 2011, his 44th birthday, he dreamed that he was in a castle full of treasure. Three days later, he said, he felt that he needed to get out of his house.

A 270-year-old Bible that ended up at a library book sale on Gabriola Island has been rescued and returned to a descendent of its original owner.Ron Pentecost of Queensland, Australia, appeared in person at the library earlier this week to receive the ancient text, published in 1742, from Friends of Gabriola Library.The book belonged to his great, great, great, great grand-father, Richard Pentecost, whose name - along with that of his wife, Grace Fawkes - is written on some of the pages.

Nasa's Mars rover Curiosity has stopped en-route to its first official destination to examine an unusual pyramid-shaped rock.The rover is around half way on its journey to an area known as Glenelg, where researchers expect to find a combination of three different types of geological terrain. Mars science Laboratory project scientist John Grotzinger said it has covered a total distance of 950 feet since landing on the red planet six weeks ago, and 100 ft of this distance was covered just last night.

Mercury has a surface unlike any other planet's in the solar system, instead resembling a rare type of meteorite, researchers say.The finding, based on an analysis of data from NASA's Messenger probe, sheds new light on the formation and history of the mysterious innermost planet, scientists add.Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, is also one of the least understood, having received much less attention from scientific missions than Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. NASA set out to change that when it launched the Messenger probe a little more than eight years ago. Messenger became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.

Archaeologists have found a collection of beads, flint and 7000-year-old ostrich drawings at Tzipori that shed new light on the life of the upper class in the Stone Age.The collection was revealed by researchers of the Israel Antiques Authority during excavations at the site in the north of the country. During the dig, carried out in cooperation with the Israel National Roads Company, while expanding route 79, a 2000-dunam prehistoric settlement was discovered.Researchers believe it is the largest site identified with "Wadi Raba Culture."

Syria's extraordinary archaeological heritage has fallen prey to the fighting ravaging the country for more than 18 months, with destruction, theft and systematic looting on the rise.In a country where corruption and trafficking of archaeological artefacts and treasures was already a chronic problem, widespread clashes and a power vacuum in some areas have led to an explosion of looting and illicit excavations."It is obvious that in such situations there is always an increase in looting, illegal excavations and smuggling," Veronique Dauge of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre told AFP by telephone.

First tops, then flops. That is one way of summing up the history of biofuels so far. A new study led by Empa gives an up-to-date picture of the ecobalance of various biofuels and their production processes. Only a few are overall more environmentally friendly than petrol.In recent years, the demand for supposedly environmentally friendly biofuels has increased significantly worldwide; on the one hand, this has resulted in the increased cultivation of so-called energy plants and, on the other hand, innovative production methods for the second generation of biofuels have been developed.