Newsdesk Archive

A chunk of grey rock 525 kilometres wide, the asteroid Vesta is nice for a visit but you wouldn't want to live there. Having learned as much as it could from a year-long survey, NASA's Dawn probe is now departing Vesta for Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system (so big, in fact, that these days Ceres is also classed as a dwarf planet).This will make Dawn the first ever asteroid-hopping spacecraft - a capability that could help pave the way for refuelling stations dotted throughout space and aid futuristic plans to send human explorers to an asteroid.

Scottish water voles have been found to travel enormous distances, enabling them to persist in fragmented habitats.The large rodents travel around bogs, lochs and moors in order to join, or establish, new colonies.Although the findings were based on a species adapted to a "patchy" environment, the work could help biologists understand how habitat fragmentation may affect other animals.The research was presented at the British Science Festival in Aberdeen.

The loss of Arctic ice is massively compounding the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, ice scientist Professor Peter Wadhams has told BBC Newsnight.White ice reflects more sunlight than open water, acting like a parasol.Melting of white Arctic ice, currently at its lowest level in recent history, is causing more absorption.Prof Wadhams calculates this absorption of the sun's rays is having an effect "the equivalent of about 20 years of additional CO2 being added by man".The Cambridge University expert says that the Arctic ice cap is "heading for oblivion".

It took hard work, determination and some MacGyver-esque ingenuity for a pair of spacewalking astronauts to fix a key power system aboard the International Space Station Wednesday (Sept. 5).NASA spaceflyer Sunita Williams and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide spent nearly 6 1/2 hours yesterday outside in the vacuum of space to properly install a pair of bolts that had caused problems for the pair during a previous spacewalk last week.

We wrote last week about our giant food waste problem. Here's more fuel for the fire: an infographic from U.K. food industry magazine Next Generation Food that illustrates the environmental impact of wasted food.The infographic includes some remarkable statistics taken from a peer-reviewed study about food waste in the U.S. Waste has increased by about 50% since 1974, and now accounts for nearly 40% of all food produced in the U.S. Across the supply chain, we lose 1,400 kilocalories per head per day, or 150 trillion kilocalories each year.

A quadcopter drone controlled by thought commands has taken to the skies at Zhejiang University in China. The prototype, called FlyingBuddy2, showcases the future of hands-free interaction that could allow people to pilot everything from remote-controlled toys to fighter jets with their brains.To work, the pilot wears an emotiv electroencephalography (EEG) headset that interprets brain activity as commands that are routed to a laptop via Bluetooth and then to the drone over Wi-Fi.

LONDON -- A British woman paralyzed from the chest down by a horse riding accident has become the first person to take home a robotic exoskeleton that enables her to walk.Although bionic exoskeletons have been used in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, Claire Lomas is the first to take the ReWalk suit home for everyday use.

Walking on a treadmill is no great feat, unless your legs are being moved by a robotic device connected to your brain.A new brain-computer interface allows a person to walk using a pair of mechanical leg braces controlled by brain signals (above), as reported on arXiv. The device has only been tested on able-bodied people, and while it has limitations, it lays a foundation for helping people with paralysis walk again.

(CBS News) A team from the University of Maryland has created an amazing contraption that allows for some high-flying fun using the medium of "human powered helicopter" flight. Phew, try saying that a few times in a row! And then watch the insanely awesome video.

On Mars's poles there are ice caps of ice and dust with layers that reflect to past climate variations on Mars. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have related the layers in the ice cap on Mars's north pole to variations in solar insolation on Mars, thus established the first dated climate history for Mars, where ice and dust accumulation has been driven by variations in insolation.The ice caps on Mars's poles are kilometres thick and composed of ice and dust. There are layers in the ice caps, which can be seen in cliffs and valley slopes and we have known about these layers for decades, since the first satellite images came back from Mars. The layers are believed to reflect past climate on Mars, in the same way that Earth's climate history can be read by analysing ice cores from the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica.

In a lecture marking the approaching 35th anniversary of the Voyager project, Ed Stone said it could be "days, months or years" before it finally breaks into interstellar space.Earlier this year a surge in a key indicator fuelled hopes that the craft was nearing the so-called heliopause, which marks the boundary between our solar system and outer space.Scientists were intrigued in May by an increase in cosmic rays hitting the spacecraft, which for decades has snapped images of the Earth and other planets in the solar system as it has made its long journey into outer space.

The Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out about 1,000 miles (1,610 kilometers) from the western flank of the frozen continent, is one of the fastest warming places on Earth.In the past 50 years, the air temperature has increased by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius). While this rate of warming is highly unusual, it is not unprecedented, indicates a new study.The rapid, modern warming is bringing the peninsula's temperatures close to the warmth that followed the end of the last ice age, lead researcher Richard Mulvaney, a paleoclimatologist with the British Antarctic Survey, told LiveScience.

BEIJING: Renowned astronomer and Nobel Prize laureate Brian P Schmidt predicted a "dark" future for the universe which he says will eventually fade away throwing astronomers out of work."Human beings will look to an empty universe in 100 billion years, as all the galaxies will fade away except the Milky Way we live in," Schmidt, who is attending the 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) being held here, said.Schmidt shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

"Baywatch" star Donna D'Errico was recently injured on a mountain in Turkey while on a quest to find Noah's Ark. The former model and actress was on Mount Ararat with a documentary film crew when she slipped in a rockslide; a colleague caught her before she fell off a cliff.Climbing any mountain can be dangerous, and Ararat is no exception: In addition to the dangers associated with altitude sickness, rock slides, and capricious weather, D'Errico and her team faced the possibility of abduction, since previous climbers have claimed such.

The New Zealand mudsnail is tiny, about the size of a pencil point, but it is colonizing the planet. The snail has spread far from its home, throughout rivers, lakes and streams in Europe, Australia, Asia and America. In the United States, where it has no natural predators or parasites, it outcompetes native snails and insects for food and is considered an invasive species.What makes this mudsnail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, such a good invader? The answer lies partly in the species' ability to reproduce quickly and amass in high densities. (Females can produce offspring -- up to 230 per year -- without males.) Now, research has found the New Zealand mudsnail can also survive without water for up to two days, meaning it could latch on to birds, fishing tools or land animals to hitch a ride to a new home.

A team at the University of Manchester in the UK has developed a carpet that can detect when someone has fallen over or when unfamiliar feet walk across it.Optical fibres in the carpet's underlay create a 2D pressure map that distorts when stepped on. Sensors around the carpet's edges then relay signals to a computer which is used to analyse the footstep patterns. When a change is detected - such as a sudden stumble and fall - an alarm can be set to sound.

How long did it take for life to get started on Earth? The planet formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, although it was uninhabitable for a while afterward. By 2.7 billion years ago, there was unambiguous evidence of complex biological communities in the form of stromatolites, microbial biofilms that can structure sediments in coastal environments. Back in 2006, a paper described evidence that these complex communities have been present as far back as 3.5 billion years ago, based on rocks at the Strelley Pool Formation in Australia.Now, a new study of rocks from Strelley Pool provides further evidence that these formations were laid down by biological activity. The isotopes of sulfur in the organic material in these rocks show a pattern similar to what we see in material with a known biological origin.

The light-years between the stars is vast -- a seemingly insurmountable quarantine that cuts our solar system off from the rest of the galaxy. But to a growing number of interstellar enthusiasts -- and a former U.S. president -- interstellar distances may not be as insurmountable as they seem.On Sept. 13, an international group of big thinkers will descend on Houston, Texas, to discuss one very big idea: making interstellar travel possible within the next 100 years.The 100 Year Starship Project (100YSS) was seeded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative, and earlier this year it was announced that ex-NASA astronaut Mae Jemison and the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence would head the project.

It looks like the rib cage of a large marine mammal, whose bones turned black as it was fossilised. The wreck was discovered in May during a dig in Antibes, on the French Riviera, prior to construction of a car park on the site of the Roman port of Antipolis.Archaeologists have gradually uncovered a 15-metre length of hull and structural timbers, in "exceptional" condition, according to Giulia Boetto, a specialist in ship design at Aix-Marseille University who is involved in the dig. Saw and adze marks are still visible on the wood. Luckily the ground in which it was found is always waterlogged so this prevented the timber from rotting and decomposing.

Spacewalking astronauts armed with brushes and other homemade tools attempted to install a critical power-switching box at the International Space Station on Wednesday and revive electrical systems.A stiff bolt prevented NASA's Sunita Williams and Japan's Akihiko Hoshide from properly securing the new unit last Thursday. The problem cut the amount of electrical power available to the space station and a variety of equipment had to be turned off.Williams and Hoshide carted out an assortment of jury-rigged tools to clean the troublesome bolt and its socket. Included in their arsenal: a blue toothbrush and a wire pipe cleaner to deal with the metal shavings discovered last week and any other debris.

Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat's dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day's events, namely running through a maze (what else).The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep -- but it also holds potential for the prospect of "dream engineering." Working at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, neuroscientist Matt Wilson was able to accomplish this feat by exploiting the way the brain's hippocampus encodes self-experienced events into memory.

The longevity diet's premise is seductively simple: cutting your calorie intake well below your usual diet will add years to your life.New research published on Wednesday, however, shows the extreme, emaciating diet doesn't increase lifespan in rhesus monkeys, the closest human relatives to try it in a rigorous, long-running study. While caveats remain, outside experts regarded the findings as definitive, particularly when combined with those from a similar study.

Big trouble lies ahead if Alzheimer's is proven to be a form of diabetesTHE human brain evolved to seek out foods high in fat and sugar. But a preference that started out as a survival mechanism has, in our age of plenty, become a self-destructive compulsion.It is well known that bad diets can trigger obesity and diabetes. There is growing evidence that they trigger Alzheimer's disease too, and some researchers now see it as just another form of diabetes.

If you were in China last week, you could have been forgiven if you believed the end of days had arrived.For one moment UFO-shaped clouds were floating across the blue skies - and then days later a halo appeared around the Sun, appearing to give it a halo for a few hours.Both are simple weather phenomena - but both are also strange and unexpected sights that baffled many onlookers.The unusual cloud above appeared over Jilin Province, China.It is known as a lenticular clouds, and their spectacular shapes are popular with UFO believers, who spot the resemblance to flying saucers.

The death of first moonwalker Neil Armstrong and the success of NASA's Curiosity rover have reignited interest in the idea of taking a spin on the moon and Mars, at least virtually. It may be a decade or two before astronauts once again walk on the moon, or take the next giant leap to the Red Planet. In the meantime, 360-degree interactive panoramas give you a sense of what those walks will be like. Here's a quick roundup of the coolest 360-degree views.

If you haven't booked for the party of the year, which marks the start of a new era for humanity, you'd better hurry.Hotels near the Mayan city of Tikal are preparing for "a full sell-out" for the events planned on December 21 to mark the start of a new era for humanity in the Maya cosmology."We have more than 95 per cent of the rooms occupied, tours sold, airline seats reserved. The interest keeps rising as we get closer to December 21," said Guatemalan National Tourism Institute director Pedro Duchez.Lodging in Peten, where Tikal is located, is nearly all booked, the tourism department chief said.

THIS makes for a depressing game of spot the difference. These two images of Rondônia, a state in western Brazil, show the impact of deforestation on this part of the Amazon rainforest since 1975, when the picture on the left was taken. Human activity in the area began with the construction of a main highway (orange line in left-hand image), which cut deep into the rainforest. As settlers and farmers moved in, secondary roads were built at right angles to the initial road, resulting in the distinctive fishbone pattern visible in the right-hand image, taken in 2012.

When musician and naturalist Bernie Krause drops his microphones into the pristine coral reef waters of Fiji, he picks up a raucous mix of sighs, beats, glissandos, cries, groans, tones, grunts, beats and clicks.The water pulsates with the sound of creatures vying for acoustic bandwidth. He hears crustaceans, parrot fish, anemones, wrasses, sharks, shrimps, puffers and surgeonfish. Some gnash their teeth, others use their bladders or tails to make sound. Sea anemones grunt and belch. Every creature on the reef makes its own sound.But half a mile away, where the same reef is badly damaged, he can only pick up the sound of waves and a few snapping shrimp. It is, he says, the desolate sound of extinction.

We've been waiting on the prospect of a bionic eye for a while now; being able to surgically give sight to the sightless would be a medical breakthrough, and we're right on the cusp. Exhibit A: In a world first, scientists have successfully implanted a prototype bionic eye that has helped a woman see shapes.Researchers from the government-funded consortium Bionic Vision Australia made the announcement in a statement yesterday; in it the implantee said she "didn't know what to expect, but all of a sudden, I could see a little flash--it was amazing." The team is hoping they can start to "build" shapes based on what she sees, eventually creating a bionic eye that works like its organic counterpart.

During construction work carried out by the Ministry of Endowments at the Al-Khamis market area, which is next to the archaeological site of Matariya in northern Cairo, workers stumbled upon a part of an ancient Egyptian stele.Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim explained that the newly-discovered stone artefact is the right section of a New Kingdom stele, on which is displayed a complete, illustrated list of various offerings to ancient Egyptian deities. A collection of geese, vegetables, fruits, bread, and cattle is depicted.Lotus flowers are also shown, as well as religious worship poetry in hieroglyphic form.

Global warming is a scientific reality, whether we want to ascribe it to natural processes or man-made effects. One of the questions raised by this phenomenon is how will it affect biodiversity on the planet.A new study by the Universities of York, Glasgow and Leeds, reveals answers that conflict with past studies. The new research involved analysis of fossil and geological records going back 540 million years and it suggests that biodiversity on Earth generally increases as the planet warms.The catch, according to the researchers, is that this increase in biodiversity depends on the evolution of new species over millions of years. This is normally accompanied by extinctions of existing species.

In just a few weeks, some kind of UFO-related secrets will be revealed at a Smithsonian Institution affiliated museum.That's the implied promise in the title of a special lecture coming up at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas on Sept. 22.The secrets haven't yet been revealed, but the players involved certainly present the potential for something intriguing to emerge from this one-night event that's part of the museum's ongoing Area 51 lecture series.

Coconut oil attacks the bacteria behind tooth decay and could be used in dental care products, according to research.Scientists found that coconut oil which had been treated with enzymes stopped the growth of Streptococcus bacteria - a major cause of tooth decay.Tooth decay affects 60% to 90% of children in industralised countries.

"Bioplastics" that are naturally synthesized by microbes could be made commercially viable by using waste cooking oil as a starting material. This would reduce environmental contamination and also give high-quality plastics suitable for medical implants, according to scientists presenting their work at the Society for General Microbiology's Autumn Conference at the University of Warwick.

TREATING waste water is energy intensive. In the US, it sucks up the equivalent output of four of the country's biggest power plants every year. But it needn't be such a drain on resources - soon it might be able to earn its keep.A team led by Hong Liu from Oregon State University in Corvallis has plans for microbial fuel cells that will reclaim energy from waste water and produce around 2.87 watts per litre of waste water. That is almost double the amount of electrical power usual for such a cell.And its by-products could be harnessed to create cheap, biodegradable plastics.

Peruvian authorities say wastewater laced with heavy metals from a major zinc mine has spilled into a tributary of the Amazon, contaminating at least six miles of the waterway.Pasco regional mining enviromental engineer Juan Escalante tells The Associated Press that an unknown quantity of toxic wastewater from the Atacocha mine escaped from a sedimentation well Wednesday into the Huallaga River. The mine is owned by the Brazilian company Votorantim.

British Divers and Marine Life Rescue said the mammals were among a group of 26 pilot whales stranded at Pittenweem, in eastern Scotland."This is very unusual. We have members of our rescue team who have been around these coasts all their lives and haven't known this type of thing to happen before. We've had occasional single animals beaching, but not a whole pod like this," he said.

From June 1 through Nov. 30 each year, the coastal United States comes under threat from the ferocious winds and floodwaters of the hurricanes that form in the Atlantic Ocean basin.In 2005, one of the most devastating storms ever to hit U.S. soil, Hurricane Katrina, all but destroyed parts of New Orleans, as the surging ocean waters it pushed to land overtopped the city's protective levees, inundating a vast region, displacing millions of residents and killing more than 1,800 people.

A limited edition whisky has been launched to mark a unique experiment in space.A rocket carrying vials of chemical compounds from Ardbeg's Islay distillery was blasted up to the International Space Station last year to test the effects of near zero gravity on the maturation process.Ardbeg has now released "Ardbeg Galileo" to celebrate the event.The experiment is believed to be the first of its kind.

Nasa has awarded $100,000 in funding for a team designing a new 'sideways' super-sonic plane.The aircraft, which looks like a four-point ninja star, was developed at Florida State University.The new plane could fly much faster than traditional commercial jets, with a greatly reduced 'sonic boom' when it reaches super-sonic speeds.

Since its discovery at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in May 2011, the anomaly has fascinated observers.The apparently man-made object sits at the bottom of the ocean, looking for all intents and purposes like a drowned Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars movies.Theories have ranged over its purpose since the Ocean X Team discovered the object on sonar scans.To some observers, it is a UFO - The 'Roswell of the Ocean', while others speculate that it is a Nazi anti-submarine defence, or a plug to the underworld.But according to one expert, the 'strange' and 'mysterious' object, as described by the team who found it, is nothing more than glacial rocks that have been dragged across the ocean floor.

The Moon is believed to have formed from a collision, 4.5 billion years ago, between Earth and an impactor the size of Mars, known as "Theia." Over the past decades scientists have simulated this process and reproduced many of the properties of the Earth-Moon system; however, these simulations have also given rise to a problem known as the Lunar Paradox: the Moon appears to be made up of material that would not be expected if the current collision theory is correct. A recent study published in Icarus proposes a new perspective on the theory in answer to the paradox.

SPRINGFIELD, IL (IRN) - A hot day in Springfield a month ago led Tony Blisset and his family to take a dip in the Sangamon River. That led to the discovery of what could have been, as his wife guessed, an old piece of wood.Fortunately for history, she was wrong and his hunch was correct: it was a fossilized bone.

The discovery of medieval walls shows a search for the lost grave of Richard III is "on the right track", archaeologists have said.Richard's body was brought to Leicester after his death in battle in 1485 but the grave's location was lost.A University of Leicester team started digging in a city car park last week after research pinpointed the area.

A pair of eyeless, cave-dwelling fish species, separated millions of years ago, have turned up on either side of the Indian Ocean.A study published in PLoS One showed that blind Madagascan and Australian cave fish share a common ancestor.Their forebears probably lived in caves on the prehistoric southern super-continent Gondwanaland.Then continental drift tore this family apart - transporting them to their current locations.

A lotion that cures male-pattern baldness could be for sale in as little as two years. University of Pennsylvania dermatologist George Cotsarelis says the lotion works by inhibiting a single enzyme, prostaglandin D2 (PGD2), which he says is the "major" enzyme connected to hair loss.And the cure would also extend to men of all ages who have already lost their hair."We really do think if you remove the inhibition, you get longer hair," Cotsarelis told the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The University of Strathclyde team made 40 per cent of human skin cancer tumours disappear using the compound, in a laboratory study.Green tea has long been suspected of having anti-cancer properties and the extract, called epigallocatechin gallate, has been investigated before.However, this is the first time researchers have managed to make it effective at shrinking tumours.Previous attempts to capitalise on its cancer-fighting properties have failed because scientists used intravenous drips, which failed to deliver enough of the extract to the tumours themselves.

The Amazon basin is an important sink of carbon dioxide, but it is also a substantial source of atmospheric methane. Tropical wetlands, including those in the Amazon, are one of the largest sources of biogenic methane and globally represent roughly 13 percent of annual emissions of the greenhouse gas. Other sources of methane include fossil fuel or biomass burning. Through two intensive atmospheric methane sampling campaigns, Beck et al. determine the sources of Amazonian methane.

Seven billion years ago, three cosmic travelers set out together on an epic journey to Earth. They just arrived, and the trio has a surprising tale to tell about the structure of the universe. Their story could overturn decades of work by theoretical physicists.But first, an introduction: Scientists have long wondered about the nature of space and time. Albert Einstein envisioned the two concepts as an interwoven fabric that extends smoothly and continuously throughout the universe, warping under the weight of the matter it contains. The smoothness of this stretchy "space-time" fabric means that no matter how closely one inspects it, no underlying structure emerges. The fabric is completely pure even at infinitesimal scales.

Some birds, it seems, hold funerals for their dead.When western scrub jays encounter a dead bird, they call out to one another and stop foraging.The jays then often fly down to the dead body and gather around it, scientists have discovered.The behaviour may have evolved to warn other birds of nearby danger, report researchers in California, who have published the findings in the journal Animal Behaviour.The revelation comes from a study by Teresa Iglesias and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, US.

A feature on the floor of the Baltic Sea that was discovered last summer by Swedish treasure hunters is making headlines once again. The latest media coverage draws upon an hour-long radio interview with Peter Lindberg, head of the Ocean X Team (which made the "discovery"), in which Lindberg delivers a string of cryptic and titillating statements about the "strange" and "mysterious" seafloor object his team has been exploring for a year.Lindberg discusses various possibilities for what the object might be: "It has these very strange stair formations, and if it is constructed, it must be constructed tens of thousands of years ago before the Ice Age," he said in the radio interview. (The peak of the most recent Ice Age occurred some 20,000 years ago.).

An international team of researchers looking to understand the way nature originally caused cloud formation and subsequent rain to fall, have undertaken a study in the Amazon River basin, where scientists say, the air is much closer to its natural state than in other areas due to the constant influx of fresh air from over the ocean and nearly constant rainfall. There they have found, as they describe in their paper published in the journal Science, that fungi spores covered with organic gel, attract moisture leading to cloud formation and rain, which results in a form of feedback loop as the water evaporates.

There are tiny bugs closely related to spiders living in the pores of your face. They have long been considered mere passengers, doing no harm beyond upsetting the squeamish. But they may be causing an ancient skin disease that is estimated to affect between 5 and 20 per cent of people worldwide, and 16 million in the US alone.People aged between 30 and 60, especially women, sometimes develop rosacea: red inflamed skin, with swelling, roughness and fine, visible blood vessels, usually in the central zone of the face. Severe cases can resemble acne, irritate the eyes and lead to the bulbous red nose seen in caricatures of the elderly.

YOU might not have noticed, but the face a person makes when they sneeze or yawn is remarkably similar to the one they pull at orgasm. Similarly, being prevented from completing any of these three actions once they are under way is extremely frustrating. Are they linked in their function?In Curious Behavior, neuroscientist Robert Provine discusses common yet seemingly strange actions, such as crying, tickling and yawning - subjects often overlooked by science. Beyond explaining how each of these actions work anatomically, Provine explores their functions, similarities and whether they might be linked by some higher, social purpose.

When William Hutton of Birmingham walked along Hadrian's Wall in 1801, he wrote: "I am the first man that ever travelled the whole length of the Wall, and probably the last that ever will attempt it".Nothing about his experience of the 73-mile Roman frontier, running through the wild landscape of Cumbria and Northumberland, hinted to him at what it would become: one of Britain's most famous ancient monuments, a hugely popular pilgrimage for walkers, and, on Friday and Saturday night, the site of a hi-tech art installation by the New York digital arts collective YesYesNo.

A bid to find the remains of England's King Richard III is starting more than 500 years after his death on a Leicestershire battlefield.A University of Leicester archaeological team is digging in the city's Grey Friars car park where they think he may have been buried.King Richard III was killed at Bosworth in 1485 and his body taken to a Franciscan Friary in the city.Over time, the exact location of the grave has been lost.

Three of the largest and deadliest earthquakes in recent history occurred where earthquake hazard maps didn't predict massive quakes. A University of Missouri scientist and his colleagues recently studied the reasons for the maps' failure to forecast these quakes. They also explored ways to improve the maps. Developing better hazard maps and alerting people to their limitations could potentially save lives and money in areas such as the New Madrid, Missouri fault zone.

SPACE.COMPart of Curiosity's Martian mission is to determine if methane is still being created on Mars. It might be tectonic activity deep underground, but it's also possible that something living beneath the martian surface could be creating the gas.

As Germany celebrates the centennial of the discovery of Queen Nefertiti bust on 6 December - the day when it was discovered a hundred years ago - can Egypt wrench back such a unique bust?A century later and the dispute over its ownership has stepped from one level to another with no concrete solution in sight. Although Egypt provided all the documents supporting its ownership and that its German discoverer, Ludwig Borchardt, took it by fraud, Germany refuses all restitution requests proposed.The story of the iconic bust began in 1912 at the archaeological dig of what was the workshop of king Akhenaton's court sculptor, Thuthmosis...

Our ancestors didn't walk alone: Neanderthals and other ancient peoples shared Earth with them tens of thousands of years ago.Now, using new technology, scientists have sequenced with high precision the genome of one of those close but little-known relatives: an extinct people known as the Denisovans, who lived in and around modern-day Siberia.The Denisovan genome, reported online Thursday in the journal Science, was derived from tiny quantities of shredded DNA extracted from a finger bone found in a Russian cave in 2008, as well as a tooth found later.

The bones could be between 10,000 and 12,000 years old and may include a human tooth from the late Pleistocene period, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said on Thursday.Tusks, skulls, jawbones, horns, ribs, vertebrae and shells were discovered 65 feet deep in Atotonilco de Tula, a town in the state of Hidalgo, as workers built a drain, the institute said.These remains belong to a range of species including mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, deer and glyptodons, the armadillo's ancestor. Some bones may belong to bison, while others have not been identified.

The arrest of Rimsha Masih, a Christian girl in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, has once again raised the risk of violence committed in the name of religion.The girl accused of burning pages of the Quran - according to some reports she burnt pages of the Noorani Qaida which is the beginner's guide for reciting the Quran with a correct accent and pronunciation - is being held under Pakistan's anti-blasphemy laws.There are conflicting reports about the details of her arrest as well as her age and mental state. Some reports say she is just 11 and suffers from Down syndrome.Note: related Avaaz Petition here

"Go forth and multiply" might be poor advice for parents who want to ensure their descendants' economic success. A study in Sweden spanning five generations confirms that the wealthiest families tend to remain small, despite evolutionary pressures to have as many offspring as possible.Evolutionary biologists are aware of a curious phenomenon that kicks in when societies become industrialised: the wealthiest families begin to have fewer children, suggesting they are no longer concerned with maximising their reproduction.

A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.Almost 80% of the world's species are invertebrates, meaning they lack a spinal column.Reviewing over 12,000 species known to be threatened, biologists found that freshwater ones are most at risk.Researchers urged for comprehensive studies of those vulnerable, to help inform conservation and protect species.

Plants are the original carbon capture and storage solution: as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, plants absorb more of the gas to fuel photosynthesis, and more carbon is stored in the soil. At least that's the theory. But the fungi that live on the plant roots might undo some of that extra work by releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere again.It's long been known that as levels of CO2 in the atmosphere rise, plants can increase their rate of photosynthesis. This should result in more carbon being stored away in the soil.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has left its landing site, embarking upon a weeks-long Martian road trip toward its first major science target, mission officials announced today (Aug. 29).Curiosity headed off eastward Tuesday (Aug. 28) toward a spot called Glenelg, where three different types of terrain come together in one place. The 52-foot (16-meter) drive marks the rover's first big move away from "Bradbury Landing," where Curiosity touched down on the night of Aug. 5.

An enormous sun eruption, shaped like a giant glowing light bulb, was captured by a veteran spacecraft that closely monitors our nearest star. NASA scientists dubbed the sun storm a solar "Eureka! moment."The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which is a joint mission by NASA and the European Space Agency, snapped the new photos of the bulbous, light bulb-shaped coronal mass ejection as it erupted from the sun's surface on Aug. 20.

Sixteen feet (five meters) below street level in Mexico City, archaeologists have found a jumble of 1,789 bones from children, teenagers, and adults along with the complete skeleton of a young woman.The burial, dating to the 1480s, lies at the foot of the main temple in the sacred ceremonial precinct of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, founded by the Aztecs in 1325. The Aztecs dominated central Mexico until falling to Spanish conquistadores in 1521.Although several burials with multiple remains have been uncovered previously in this precinct, this is the first that includes human bones from such a wide span of ages.

Workers have discovered hundreds of bones belonging to Ice Age animals, including mammoths, mastodons and glyptodons, while digging to build a wastewater treatment plant north of Mexico City.The bones could be between 10,000 and 12,000 years old and may include a human tooth from the late Pleistocene period, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said Thursday.

A glowing green cockroach would seem much easier to kill than our more familiar kitchen pests, but this particular insect evolved its own set of lights to avoid exactly such predatory attention, according to a new study.Luchihormetica luckae glows to mimic the bioluminescent click beetle, whose glow warns predators of its toxicity.Found in rain forests around an active volcano in Ecuador, the inch-long (2.5-centimeter-long) cockroach is unique for a few reasons, scientists say.

Do black bears count in the woods? Possibly, according to a recent study that shows the mammals are as smart as primates.In experiments, captive bears showed that they could perform numerical tasks, including distinguishing the number of dots on an image.Even though bears have the largest relative brain size of any carnivore (still not as big as primates), surprisingly little research has been done on their cognitive abilities, according to the study.

Scientists have been dreaming of an elevator that will take us to outer space without the use of rockets for more than 50 years.Michael Laine has spent much of the last 11 years working on making that dream a reality.He started his work at NASA as part of an Institute for Advanced Concepts research team in 2001, and then continued work on the space elevator as part of the privately held company LiftPort Group.But in 2007 the company shut down.

nstead of the healthy cries of newborns, hospitals are now hearing an increase in shrieking just after birth -- just one sign in a rising epidemic of infants born addicted to prescription drugs.Nationally, the rate of newborns suffering withdrawal, or "neonatal abstinence syndrome," rose 330 percent from 2000 to 2009, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last spring.

A vast reservoir of the potent greenhouse gas methane may be locked beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, a study suggests.Scientists say the gas could be released into the atmosphere if enough of the ice melts away, adding to global warming.Research indicates that ancient deposits of organic matter may have been converted to methane by microbes living in low-oxygen conditions.The organic material dates back to a period 35m years ago when the Antarctic was much warmer than it is today and teeming with life.

Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world's population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world's leading water scientists.

HAVE you ever wondered what the grass under your feet feels, what an apple tree smells, or a marigold sees? Plants stimulate our senses constantly, but most of us never consider them as sensory beings too. In fact senses are extremely important to plants. Whatever life throws at them, they remain rooted to the spot - they cannot migrate in search of food, escape a swarm of locusts or find shelter from a storm. To grow and survive in unpredictable conditions, plants need to sense their environment and react accordingly. Some people may not be comfortable describing what plants do as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. They certainly lack noses, eyes, ears, mouths and skin, but in what follows, I hope to convince you that the sensory world of plants is not so very different from our own.

A Montana man was struck and killed by cars Sunday night while trying to hoax a Bigfoot sighting. The Montana Highway Patrol reported that Randy Lee Tenley of Kalispell was pronounced dead at the scene on U.S. Highway 93 south of Kalispell after being hit by two cars consecutively.Tenley's death will likely reignite a long-standing debate within the Bigfoot community: Would it be ethical to shoot and kill a Bigfoot? Some say yes, because that's the only way to prove they exist, and once proof is found, funds could be made available to protect them as an endangered species. Others say no, that because Bigfoot sightings are so rare, they must have very small populations and killing one might drive the animals to extinction. Ecological ethics aside, aiming a gun at a Bigfoot could be a bad idea. You simply can't know for sure if the mysterious, burly figure you have lined up in your sights is the real beast, or a bear, or a hoaxer in a costume.

Researchers have spotted visible-light evidence for one of astronomy's most elusive targets - gravity waves - in the orbit of a pair of dead stars.Until now, these ripples in space-time, first predicted by Einstein, have only been inferred from radio-wave sources.But a change in the orbits of two white dwarf stars orbiting one another 3,000 light-years away is further proof of the waves that can literally be seen.

The film Alien popularised the phrase "In space no one can hear you scream", and with that logic, no one can hear music either. But that hasn't stopped various attempts at playing tunes in a galaxy far, far away.When Will.i.am's new single "Reach for the Stars" was broadcast via the Curiosity rover currently stationed on Mars earlier this week, and beamed back to Earth, the rapper became the latest musical act to greet extraterrestrial life.

In the wake of Curiosity's landing on Mars, artist Kelly Richardson's depictions of a post-apocalyptic Red Planet are a call for us to save our own planetIT'S 200 years from now, and the sun beats down on a barren landscape of red rock scattered with smashed satellites and dilapidated robots. NASA's battered old Curiosity rover lies wedged on a mound of dirt, its wheels whirring intermittently in futile effort, like an exhausted beetle stuck on its back.

A Scottish skipper has set a new world record after finding a message in a bottle 98 years after it was released.Andrew Leaper's discovery beat the previous record for the longest time a bottle has been adrift at sea by more than five years.And he found the bottle while skippering the same fishing boat which had set the previous record, the Shetland-based vessel Copious.Mr Leaper said: "It was an amazing coincidence.".

Some of the earliest fossils of pre-historic arthropods - dating to about 230 million years ago - have been discovered entombed in amber, PNAS journal reports.Arthropods - a highly diverse family of invertebrates, which includes insects, arachnids and crustacea - constitute more than 90% of the entire species within the animal kingdom.The previous earliest records of arthropod-containing amber dated back to the Cretaceous period, around 135 million years ago.

The genome of a recently discovered branch of extinct humans known as the Denisovans that once interbred with us has been sequenced, scientists said today (Aug. 30).Genetic analysis of the fossil revealed it apparently belonged to a little girl with dark skin, brown hair and brown eyes, researchers said. All in all, the scientists discovered about 100,000 recent changes in our genome that occurred after the split from the Denisovans. A number of these changes influence genes linked with brain function and nervous system development, leading to speculation that we may think differently from the Denisovans.

When NASA launched a wide-field, infrared telescope named WISE to survey the cosmos, scientists figured it would unearth some new objects. They didn't, however, expect to find a whole new type of galaxy.WISE scientists are calling their find "hot DOG," for hot, Dust-Obscured Galaxy, which is an apt description, considering the galaxies are twice as hot as similar objects and difficult to find since most of their radiation is blocked by shrouds of dust.But WISE ferreted out about 1,000 hot DOGS, each of which can put out more than 1,000 times the energy of the Milky Way, thus earning themselves top billing on the list of most luminous objects in the universe.

You have probably heard that the Arctic has less sea ice right now than humans have ever recorded. The new record, set yesterday, beat the previous low, which was measured in September 2007."By itself it's just a number, and occasionally records are going to get set," said National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Walt Meier in an official statement. "But in the context of what's happened in the last several years and throughout the satellite record, it's an indication that the Arctic sea ice cover is fundamentally changing."There are two odd things about this sad record of global change.

In 1978, during a bitterly cold winter on Jabal Hamrin, a hilly ridge in central-eastern Iraq, a young British archaeologist was investigating a mystery.Dr Robert Killick, 23, was part of the British archaeological expedition excavating a 2300BC Bronze Age grave believed to belong to a chieftain.In the 4 by 5 metre grave, the archaeologists dug up the kind of items one would expect inside most graves of an era that believed in life after death - more than 50 pottery vessels, several spearheads and other weapons. In addition there were the remains of a chariot, for the dead warrior to drive majestically into the other world.

The chance finding of a Stone Age toy car has led archaeologists in Turkey to even more finds. While excavating near the village of Girnavaz, located in the southeastern Turkish province of Mardin, archaeologists discovered several bronze and iron masks- the first of their kind to be found in Turkey.The Roman period masks appear to have belonged to a traveling theater group that came to the area two thousand years ago. The strong Roman influence seen in the masks design has led archaeologists to believe that the actors themselves came to the province from the Rome. It is unclear how or why the masks would have been left behind.

Underwater robots tasked with saving coral reefs are being developed at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland.Dubbed "coralbots", they are being designed to work in groups, in a similar manner to bees and ants.The team is still "training" the software that will control the bots to "recognise" corals and distinguish them from other sea objects.Corals are easily damaged by pollution and destructive fishing practices, and it takes decades for them to re-grow.

Saving the whales is something Argentinians take so seriously that authorities in Patagonia have launched a 100-day plan to shoot seagulls that have learned to attack the big mammals as they surface to breathe.Environmentalists say the plan is misguided. They say humans are the real problem, creating so much garbage that the gull population has exploded.Both sides agree that what was bizarre animal behaviour a decade ago has now become a real hazard for threatened southern right whales in one of their prime birthing grounds, turning whale-watching from a magical experience to something from a horror movie.

Debate over the War on Drugs and the legality of marijuana persists in the U.S., as thousands recently rallied in Seattle for legalization and millions of dollars have been raised in support of legalization measures in two states. Yet an often overlooked part of the debate is marijuana's environmental impact -- what is the carbon footprint of cannabis?According to a 2011 report, indoor marijuana growing may account for one percent of the entire country's electricity consumption. The independent report, by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher Evan Mills, Ph.D., notes that this energy use costs about $6 billion annually. The report also claims that the carbon dioxide pollution from this electricity use "plus associated transportation fuels equals that of 3 million cars.".

The total mass of life on Earth may be one-third less than thought, altering how active we think life on our planet is, researchers say.Past estimates of how much life there is on Earth suggested living organisms store about 1 trillion tons of carbon, of which about 30 percent dwells in single-celled microbes in the ocean floor, and about 55 percent rests in land plants.However, it turns out previous estimates of the amount of life in the ocean floor were based on samples taken in very nutrient-rich areas, such as close to shore. About half the world's ocean is extremely nutrient-poor, meaning that comparably little in the way of life should be found there.

Human babies enter the world utterly dependent on caregivers to tend to their every need. Although newborns of other primate species rely on caregivers, too, human infants are especially helpless because their brains are comparatively underdeveloped. Indeed, by one estimation a human fetus would have to undergo a gestation period of 18 to 21 months instead of the usual nine to be born at a neurological and cognitive development stage comparable to that of a chimpanzee newborn. Anthropologists have long thought that the size of the pelvis has limited human gestation length. New research may challenge that view.

Chimpanzees that engage in unusual hand-holding behavior during grooming may be showing off a little culture, new research suggests.These chimp handshakes, which are seen only among some of the primates, seem to differ from group to group in ways that aren't dependent on genetics or environment. That leaves cultural differences between groups as a possible explanation for why and how the hand-holding occurs.

A new study shows that planetary systems can form and survive in the chaotic environment around pairs of stars.A team reports in Science the discovery of two planets orbiting a pair of stars - a so-called binary.Gravitational disturbances generated by stellar pairs are thought to be very severe for any orbiting planets.Nasa's Kepler space telescope found two small planets around a pair of low-mass stars.Such systems have particular significance for science fiction fans. In the Star Wars films, Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine orbits a binary star.

It sounds like every student's dream: research published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that we can learn entirely new information while we snoozeAnat Arzi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and her colleagues used a simple form of learning called classical conditioning to teach 55 healthy participants to associate odours with sounds as they slept.

A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has spotted sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young Sun-like star. This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star, and the discovery shows that the building blocks of life are in the right place, at the right time, to be included in planets forming around the star.The astronomers found molecules of glycolaldehyde -- a simple form of sugar [1] -- in the gas surrounding a young binary star, with similar mass to the Sun, called IRAS 16293-2422. Glycolaldehyde has been seen in interstellar space before [2], but this is the first time it has been found so near to a Sun-like star...

Ancient Egyptian coffin lid belonging to unidentified Sixteenth Dynasty nobleman will be returned to Egypt from Israel following year of negotiationsAfter almost one year of diplomatic negotiations, Israel has offered Egypt two pieces of a painted anthropoid coffin lid that belonged to an unidentified 16th Dynasty nobleman. The lid is expected to arrive in Cairo within two weeks after having been seized by the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) from a shop showroom in Jerusalem's Old City in April of last year.

Naylea Omayra Villanueva Sanchez, 22, lives on the edge of the Amazon rain forest in Tarapoto, northern Peru."Where I live, there's only jungle," Villanueva Sanchez says through an interpreter. "A university education is inaccessible." And that's true in more ways than one. Villanueva Sanchez is in a wheelchair, the result of a motorcycle accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down.She is now enrolled in the University of the People, an online institution that claims it is "the world's first, tuition-free, nonprofit, online university." It's aimed at poor students around the globe who would otherwise not have access to higher education.

A new look at a fossil mammal with powerful front legs for digging is clearing up questions about the origin of a group of strange and scaly modern-day creatures called pangolins.First excavated in Mongolia in the 1970s, the fossil sat in storage for decades until researchers for the Russian Academy of Sciences rediscovered and analyzed it, reporting their results today (Aug. 27) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

When drilling under the Antarctic seabed, researchers discovered deposits from a 52 million-year-old rainforest. Scientists are warning Antarctica will soon be ice-free within decades.The most extreme predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are that the world would see ice receding on Antarctica "by the end of the century".