Newsdesk Archive

TODD RUTHERFORD was 7 years old when he first understood the nature of supply and demand. He was with a bunch of other boys, one of whom showed off a copy of Playboy to giggles and intense interest. Todd bought the magazine for $5, tore out the racy pictures and resold them to his chums for a buck apiece. He made $20 before his father shut him down a few hours later.A few years ago, Mr. Rutherford, then in his mid-30s, had another flash of illumination about how scarcity opens the door to opportunity.

Every French schoolchild has learned about Alesia. It was the battle in which Julius Caesar beat the Gauls under Vercingetorix, thus bringing France into the Roman world. Had it gone the other way, the French might have ended up German.An impressive new museum-cum-activity centre has just opened on the official site of the battle, in northern Burgundy. Visitors come away with a thorough grounding in Gaulish fighting techniques, or in Caesar's strategic genius.What they hear little of is a controversy that questions the museum's very raison d'etre. Understandable perhaps, because after 10 years of planning, and 75m euros (£60m) of investment, who wants to be told that the battle never took place here at all?

Right-handed humans vastly outnumber lefties by a ratio of about nine to one, and the same may have been true for Neanderthals. Researchers say right-hand dominance in the extinct species suggests that, like humans, they also had the capacity for language.A new analysis of the skeleton of a 20-something Neanderthal man confirms that he was a righty like most of his European caveman cousins whose remains have been studied by scientists (16 of 18 specimens). Dubbed "Regourdou," the skeleton was discovered in 1957 in France, not far from the famous network of caves at Lascaux.

Astronomers Stephen Kane and Dawn Gelino at NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech are giving scientists and the public a chance to explore potentially habitable extrasolar planets in a way once described only in the imaginations of science writers.For example, in the Star Trek universe characters often talked of worlds categorized as "Class M" planets; Earth-like places inhabited by various aliens. Today, exoplanets have become reality and big business for budding astronomers. New detection techniques, better sensitivity, atmospheric measurements and new theoretical modeling have unveiled a host of planet more diverse that imagined in science fiction.

Squid have chromatophores, or color changing cells, on their skin. The cells can adjust their pigmentation to dramatically and rapidly absorb or reflect light.With this in mind, scientists took a suction electrode and attached it to the fin nerve of a longfin inshore squid. They then took an iPod Nano and played music into the electrode, stimulating the squid's nerve. For obvious reasons, they chose "Insane in the Membrane" by Cypress Hill. The testament should go to the musical taste of the squid.

It was a mystery 100 years in the making.On Friday, the contents of a mysterious package from Otta, Norway were finally revealed. The package, which dates back to 1912, appeared to hold a collection of historical documents, letters, newspapers and national decorations.The unveiling was part of a celebration that included musical performances and a grand opening on stage. It was live-broadcasted by the Norwegian news outlet, Verdens Gang, which had been the first to report on the package.

Current drug policy is resulting in widespread teenage cannabis use while a regulated market would make cannabis use adults-only in licensed premises.Despite strict cannabis laws, New Zealand has the highest rate of teen cannabis use in the world. Meanwhile, the Netherlands have the most relaxed cannabis laws for adults in the world but has the lowest rate of teen cannabis use.

Teens who smoke marijuana see their IQs drop as adults, and deficits persist even after quitting, according to a new study."The findings are consistent with speculation that cannabis use in adolescence, when the brain is undergoing critical development, may have neurotoxic effects," study researcher Madeline Meier of Duke University said in a statement.The study followed 1,037 New Zealand children for 25 years. Subjects took IQ tests at age 13, before any of them had smoked marijuana, and again at age 38. Throughout the study, participants also answered several surveys about their drug use.Interestingly, people who picked up the habit as adults had no IQ drop, suggesting that marijuana may not be as harmful to the mature brain.

For nearly two centuries, scientists have pulled so-called "monster larva" from the guts of fish and wondered what these thick-bodied creatures looked like as grown-ups. Now one biologist believes he has finally matched the larva with its adult counterpart."It's very exciting to have solved a nearly 200-year-old conundrum," Keith Crandall, a biology professor at George Washington University, said in a statement.Drawing from genetic evidence, Crandall reported in the journal Ecology and Evolution this month that the larva, Cerataspis monstrosa, is actually a baby version of the deep-water aristeid shrimp known as Plesiopenaeus armatus.

A song called "Reach for the Stars" will make its debut, appropriately, from space.NASA plans to broadcast the tune, written by rapper and songwriter will.i.am, from its Curiosity rover, newly landed on the surface of Mars.Though Curiosity has no speakers, it will transmit the song via radio waves back to Earth to be received at 1 p.m. PDT (4 p.m. EDT) Tuesday, Aug. 28 during an educational event at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

TREES are a gift to students of the past. An entire discipline, known as dendrochronology, is devoted to using tree rings to date ancient wooden objects and buildings. Linguistic archaeologists, it seems, share these arboreal inclinations, though the trees they examine are of an altogether different species.In 2003 a team led by Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, employed a computer to generate a genealogical tree of Indo-European languages. Their model put the birth of the family, which includes languages as seemingly diverse as Icelandic and Iranian, between 9,800 and 7,800 years ago. This was consistent with the idea that it stemmed from Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, whence it spread with the expansion of farming.

Brazil's Supreme Court has approved the resumption of work on the huge Belo Monte dam in the Amazon, which was halted earlier this month after protests from indigenous groups.The preliminary ruling on Monday overturns an earlier ruling that ordered construction of the dam across the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, to be stopped until indigenous peoples can testify before Congress.However, the decision by Supreme Court President Carlos Ayres Britto could be revised when the court examines the case further, its website said.

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.

The drought parching the United States is one of the worst in the nation's history, but it hasn't been as destructive as the drought that may have withered ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom. Pollen and charcoal buried in the Nile Delta 4,200 years ago tell the tale of a drought of literally Biblical proportions associated with the fall of the pyramid builders."Even the mighty builders of the ancient pyramids more than 4,000 years ago fell victim when they were unable to respond to a changing climate," said U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt in a press release. "This study illustrates that water availability was the climate-change Achilles Heel then for Egypt, as it may well be now, for a planet topping seven billion thirsty people."

Chinese astronomers are actively searching for Earth-like planets using survey instruments in Antarctica, as they believe efforts to seek an extra-solar planet that that harbors life will soon be rewarded. "It's highly possible that human beings might find such a planet in the coming few years," said Wang Lifan, director of the Chinese Center for Antarctic Astronomy. "Such planets likely exist in the Milky Way, with a possible distance of thousands of light years from us."Chinese astronomers installed the first of three Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3-1) at Dome Argus, located at the highest elevation on the Antarctic continent, at the beginning of the year. One of its primary missions is to search for extra-solar planets suitable for life.

A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet.On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet.".

For many decades, students across the world have been told that human civilization started some 5,000 years ago on the banks of Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Mesopotamia, Nile River in Egypt, and Indus River in the Indian Subcontinent. However, some researchers currently believe that human civilization might have started in Iran.Archeologists who have been working on the crescent-shaped area comprising Russia, Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, have found new evidence of the existence of a complex urban network in Iran which show that this area might have been very prosperous some 5,000 years ago.

Along with allowing users to take looks at some of the most famous locales in the U.S. and Europe, Google Inc. is adding interactive images of dozens of pre-Hispanic ruins to the "Street View" feature on its Google Maps website.Google Mexico and Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History announced Thursday that 30 sites have been added to Street View, and dozens more will be coming online this year. The eventual goal is 90 sites.

Duluth, MN (Northlands Newscenter) -- It will be one year ago tomorrow that lightning ignited one of Minnesota's largest wildfires.The Pagami Creek Fire covered 93,000 acres in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wildness. Now, scientists are finding a goldmine of clues to the region's past unearthed by the fire."This is what folks used to make stone tools out of in what's now known as the boundary waters."Thanks to the Pagami Creek Fire, Archeologist Lee Johnson's job is a lot easier.

A 63-year-old former engineer may not fit the typical image of a dark-clad assassin with deadly weapons who can disappear into a cloud of smoke. But Jinichi Kawakami is reputedly Japan's last ninja.As the 21st head of the Ban clan, a line of ninjas that can trace its history back some 500 years, Kawakami is considered by some to be the last living guardian of Japan's secret spies.

England's King James I gave us Jamestown and the King James Bible. But historians have long suspected he also gave his descendant King George III an inherited case of madness.Best known from the 1994 movie, The Madness of King George, the bouts of insanity afflicting George III, the bad guy in the American Revolution, have long been blamed on his predecessor, James. James was a bit odd, and porphyria, an inherited affliction of the nervous system and skin linked to unusual behavior in some cases, has long been suspected as the culprit.But historians and porphyria experts who have looked through the medical letters surrounding King James have run the monarch's symptoms through diagnostic software and suggest another syndrome better explains the oddness of King James I.

Sierra Energy is developing a new kind of gassifier that could take in garbage and turn it into natural gas, diesel fuel and a saleable construction material called slag. Their prototype gassifier in Sacramento demonstrates how landfills could easily turn into gold mines.

An international group of prominent scientists has signed The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in which they are proclaiming their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware to the degree that humans are -- a list of animals that includes all mammals, birds, and even the octopus. But will this make us stop treating these animals in totally inhumane ways?While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it's the open acknowledgement that's the big news here. The body of scientific evidence is increasingly showing that most animals are conscious in the same way that we are, and it's no longer something we can ignore.

Certain apes appear to be much smarter than others, with at least one chimpanzee now characterized as being "exceptional" when compared to other chimps.The standout chimp, an adult female in her 20's named Natasha, scored off the charts in a battery of tests. The findings, published in the latest Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, suggest that geniuses exist among non-humans, but that no one attribute constitutes intelligence.Instead, a perfect storm of abilities seems to come together to create the Einsteins of the animal kingdom. Natasha's keepers at the Ngamba Island chimpanzee sanctuary in Uganda knew she was special even before the latest study.

A week after Australia upheld its world-first laws plain packaging laws, Tasmania's upper house unanimously passed a motion to introduce the ban from 2018.The measure was proposed by Ivan Dean, a Tasmanian independent MP, who said the ban would be easy to enforce because the state already has restrictions on sales of cigarettes to minors. It would be the world's first such age-based ban and is also reportedly being considered in Singapore and Finland.

The uneventful nine-month, 150,000,000-mile journey of the Mars Science Laboratory Rover, which also goes by the whimsical name Curiosity, ended with a harrowing 7-minute landing in Gale Crater. Getting the fourth Mars Rover into space was a piece of cake compared with setting it back down. Curiosity will explore Gale Crater for one Martian year (687 Earth days) to 1) look for evidence of extraterrestrial life and to 2) evaluate the habitability of the planet.

Much to the delight of NASA/JPL's Mars Science Lab team, the laser instrument has fired nearly 500 shots so far that have produced strong, clear data about the composition of the Martian surface. "The spectrum we have received back from Curiosity is as good as anything we looked at on Earth," said Los Alamos National Laboratory planetary scientist Roger Wiens, Principal Investigator of the ChemCam Team.

The recent Antarctic Peninsula temperature rise and associated ice loss is unusual but not unprecedented, according to research.Analysis of a 364m-long ice core containing several millennia of climate history shows the region previously basked in temperatures slightly higher than today.However, the peninsula is now warming rapidly, threatening previously stable areas of ice, the study warns.The work is reported in Nature journal.

Researchers have used a video game projected into a fish tank to study the behaviour of predatory bluegill sunfish.The team at Princeton University developed a simulation based on the type of prey favoured by the species.The simple "game" featured red dots which moved and swarmed in different ways against a translucent screen.They found that the fish were less likely to try to attack the dots when they moved in a group formation.

Pieces of Amelia Earhart's plane might have been located in the depths of the waters off Nikumaroro island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to a preliminary review of high-definition video taken last month at the uninhabited coral atoll believed to be Earhart's final resting place.Carried out by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 75 years ago, the underwater search started on July 12 and relied on a torpedo-shaped Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV).

On Aug. 15, 1962, Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich landed 295 miles from one another in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. The pair had just returned from a landmark mission that secured a new record for the Soviet Union in space: they were the first two cosmonauts to fly together and meet in orbit.The idea came from Sergei Korolev's, the Soviet Chief Designer and mastermind behind the program's early successes. He designed missions to follow an unwritten rule that every flight had to be better than the last -- longer, do more science, or achieve some goal that would advance the Soviet space program overall. That's why after Yuri Gagarin made a single orbit on April 12, 1961, Gherman Titov followed with a full day in space on August 6.

Renewable energy technologies generally consist of two distinct processes: energy generation (using sources such as coal, solar, wind, etc.) and energy storage (such as batteries). These two processes are always accomplished through two separate units, with the first process converting the original form of energy to electricity, and the second process converting electricity to chemical energy. Now for the first time, engineers have demonstrated that energy can be generated and stored in a single device that converts mechanical energy directly to chemical energy, bypassing the intermediate step of electricity generation. The device basically acts as a hybrid generator-battery unit, or in other words, a self-charging power cell.

A Cambridge University study suggests that offshore wind farms could be 100 per cent more efficient in terms of energy payback if manufacturers embraced new methods for making the structures that support the turbines.As wind farms are increasingly sited offshore rather than on land, and installed at water depths of up to 40 metres, a Cambridge University engineer is urging the wind power industry to look again at the design of the heavy supporting towers and foundations used out at sea in order to improve the energy payback achieved

Do you have a cochlear implant? An intraocular lens in your eye? A prosethetic leg with microservos? You may not realize it, but you're standing on the front line of a new age of medical augmentation, one that's raising a host of complex questions.Who owns the expensive implant that allows you to hear or see better or the sleek thin blades that let you sprint faster? How are upgrades to your device handled? What happens to you and your device if that company goes out of business? Do the answers change if the procedure is elective rather than life-saving?

For years, the military has worked on exoskeletons to help turn soldiers into heavy-lifting cyborgs. Now with the first civilian exoskeleton manufactured using a 3-D printer, the budding robosuit industry may someday get a little more DIY. If the military gets in on the trend, it means that soldiers could one day make their own combat exoskeletons using desktop computers.

Despite evidence that the earliest examples of creatures such as mammals and reptiles gave birth to live young, they actually may have laid eggs, a scientist argues."These eggs are probably out there, but nobody has looked hard enough for them or they have not been recognized," says University of Bonn, Germany, paleobiologist P. Martin Sander, who details his analysis in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Science.

Right-handed humans vastly outnumber lefties by a ratio of about nine to one, and the same may have been true for Neanderthals. Researchers say right-hand dominance in the extinct species suggests that, like humans, they also had the capacity for language.A new analysis of the skeleton of a 20-something Neanderthal man confirms that he was a righty like most of his European caveman cousins whose remains have been studied by scientists (16 of 18 specimens). Dubbed "Regourdou," the skeleton was discovered in 1957 in France, not far from the famous network of caves at Lascaux.

A robot named Nico could soon pass a landmark test - recognising itself in a mirror.Such self-awareness would represent a step towards the ultimate goal of thinking robots.Nico, developed by computer scientists at Yale University, will take the test in the coming months.The ultimate aim is for Nico to use a mirror to interpret objects around it, in the same way as humans use a rear-view mirror to look for cars.

Pigeon racers are mystified after hundreds birds disappeared in an area dubbed they have now dubbed the Bermuda Triangle.Only 13 out of 232 birds released in Thirsk , North Yorkshire, on Saturday by a Scottish pigeon racing club made it back to Galashiels, Selkirkshire.It follows a summer on which hundred more have vanished in the same area.Keith Simpson, of the East Cleveland Federation, said pigeon racers across the region had all suffered massive losses since the season started in April - with many losing more than half of their birds.

The rich Islamic site of Istabl Antar in Old Cairo is saved from urban encroachment, though late in the daySerenity has returned to the rich Islamic site of Istabl Antar in Al-Fustat area in Old Cairo after almost a month of uproar and turmoil. Early this month an armed gang led by wealthy residents of the area invaded the four feddans wide archaeological site, covered the excavation area with sand and began to bulldoze it. The gang divided the land and distributed it among its members in parcels of approximately 800 square metres each. Every member surrounded his part with blocks of stones in order to separate it from the others and started to built mud brick houses.

According to the fringe sector of the Internet, Mars is practically teeming with aliens.Since NASA's Curiosity rover touched down on the Red Planet two weeks ago and powered up its cameras, it has already managed to photograph several alleged UFOs and other "anomalies" in the surrounding landscape.From classic flying saucers to an absurdly out-of-place fossilized human finger, here's a rundown of what UFO believers claim to have found in Curiosity photos so far.

Researchers found that even when desperate for a drink, people who were given a glass of water but told that their colleagues would be given more chose to reject the opportunity altogether.The study shows that humans, unlike our closest animal relatives, have an inbuilt sense of fairness which has to be balanced against self-interest, scientists said.In the study, published in the Scientific Reports journal, 21 participants were made to feel thirsty either by administering a salty solution via a drip or drinking an isotonic solution.

A burger grown in a laboratory. Sounds like science-fiction? Well up until very recently it probably was but now the prospect of lab-grown meat appearing on our supermarket shelves is closer than ever.Synthetic or test-tube meat involves taking a small amount of cells from a living animal and growing it into lumps of muscle tissue, which can then, in theory, be eaten as meat for human consumption.As well avoiding killing animals, scientists believe it could help reduce the environmental impact of meat production.

There are a whole series of biases in the fossil record that affect which organisms were preserved and how, and thus affects how we as palaeontologists can investigate the life of these ancient worlds. The key of course is to understand and recognise these biases and account for them and how they affect things, and to make allowances as far as possible for their effects.To become a fossil, the remains of an organism must not decay away to nothing, but instead be buried in some medium (mud, sand, ash) which generally (but not always) happens in water. This must lie undisturbed for long enough and under enough pressure from additional sediments for the material to become mineralised and turn into a fossil.

What was your reaction when you first heard about Planetary Resources' plan to mine the asteroids?My interest was initially piqued by the fact that they also want to study space objects with their small space telescopes. That's my background: the discovery of these bodies and their orbits. I view mining asteroids as quite difficult. A lot of the technology required to do that has not yet been demonstrated. Of course, that's what somebody would have told you about brain surgery or heart surgery before it was actually done. So while this hasn't been demonstrated yet, the only way to do so is to throw a whole lot of money at the problem and to undertake a lot of experiments on Earth and in space.

Only two per cent of Canadians who responded to a new opinion poll believe climate change is not occurring.The findings are in a survey conducted by Insightrix Research, Inc. for IPAC-CO2 Research Inc., a Regina-based centre that studies carbon capture and storage.The online poll of 1,550 people was done between May 29 and June 11. The results were to be released on Wednesday."Our survey indicates that Canadians from coast to coast overwhelmingly believe climate change is real and is occurring, at least in part due to human activity," said centre CEO Carmen Dybwad.Respondents were asked where they stood on the issue of climate change.

When Tupac Shakur rose from the stage in the California desert earlier this year, it was not only a jaw-dropping resurrection, but also the beginning of a new form of live entertainment."Come with me," the digital Shakur called out, not just to tens of thousands of screaming fans but seemingly to other artists.Follow, they will. Elvis Presley's estate announced it has authorized holograms of the King of Rock, Marilyn Monroe's estate has expressed interest and there's no shortage of other beloved stars whose fans would die to see them perform again.

DISCOVER MAGAZINEDeep in the frozen tundra of northeastern Siberia, a squirrel buried fruits some 32,000 years ago from a plant that bore white flowers. This winter a team of Russian scientists announced that they had unearthed the fruit and brought tissue from it back to life. The fruits are about 30,000 years older than the Israeli date palm seed that previously held the record as the oldest tissue to give life to healthy plants.

Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whisky.Or so an intergalactic photo finish would suggest.Physicist Robert Nemiroff of Michigan Technological University reached this heady conclusion after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that had been recorded by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009.The photons originated about 7 billion light years away from Earth in one of three pulses from a gamma-ray burst and arrived at the orbiting telescope just one millisecond apart, in a virtual tie.

(Reuters) - U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong, who took a giant leap for mankind when he became the first person to walk on the moon, has died at the age of 82, his family said on Saturday.Armstrong died following complications from heart-bypass surgery he underwent earlier this month, the family said in a statement, just two days after his birthday on August 5.As commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. As he stepped on the dusty surface, Armstrong said: "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind."

Research presented Aug. 23, 2012 at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Beijing has found the first group of galaxies that is just like ours, a rare sight in the local Universe.The Milky Way is a fairly typical galaxy on its own, but when paired with its close neighbours -- the Magellanic Clouds -- it is very rare, and could have been one of a kind, until a survey of our local Universe found another two examples just like us.

You know that case-sensitive password you have? The "unguessable" alphanumeric cipher you think is safeguarding your private accounts? Well, the jig is up.That's because a team of researchers from the University of Oxford in Geneva and the University of California in Berkeley just showed how easy it is to hack a human brain and pluck things such as bank details from your head. Not only that, they did so using an off-the-shelf Emotiv brain-computer interface that only cost a few hundred dollars.Volunteers for the security experiment were asked to wear an Emotiv BCI head piece and sat in front of a computer screen that showed images of maps, banks and card PINS.

An ancient tablet unearthed in Kent has turned out to be inscribed with curses intended to bring bad luck to more than a dozen people.The rolled up lead tablet found in East Farleigh, on the site of a Roman farmstead, was found in a 3rd to 4th Century building that may have been some kind of temple.Inscribed on the lead in capital letters are the names of 14 people, which an Oxford University expert says were the intended victims of the curse.It was discovered by the Maidstone Area Archaeological Group during excavations three years ago and has since undergone a series of detailed tests to determine its purpose.

Farmers may have fuelled the obesity epidemic by using antibiotics to fatten up livestock, a new study suggests.Researchers found evidence that low exposure to the drugs upsets the delicate balance of gut bacteria which in turn alters metabolism.The findings indicate a possible link between rising rates of obesity and modern farming methods.

Archaeologists are hoping to find the lost grave of King Richard III under a Leicester car park, which they believe was once the site of a church where the medieval monarch was buried more than 500 years ago.Richard III, the last Plantagenet, ruled England from 1483 until he was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. It is believed his body was stripped and despoiled and brought to Leicester, where he was buried in the church of the Franciscan Friary, known as Greyfriars.

London: Code cracked? Leonardo da Vinci used his own face for two apostles, Thomas and James the Lesser, in his popular painting 'the Last Supper' , according to a new theory. The theory presented by a renowned art historian Ross King suggests Leonardo used his own face for two of the apostles.King believes he has uncovered new evidence that the master artist inserted himself not once, but twice, into his famous mural, 'The Last Supper'.

A just-deciphered ancient Greek poem discovered in Egypt deifies Poppaea Sabina, the wife of the infamous Roman emperor Nero, showing her ascending to the stars.Based on the lettering styles and other factors, scholars think the poem was written nearly 200 years after Nero died (about 1,800 years ago), leaving them puzzled as to why someone so far away from Rome would bother composing or copying it at such a late date.In the poem, Poppaea ascends to heaven and becomes a goddess. The ancient goddess Aphrodite says to Poppaea, "my child, stop crying and hurry up: with all their heart Zeus' stars welcome you and establish you on the moon."

The uplift measured at Ny-Ålesund in Svalbard reflects changes in the regional ice cover during the last Ice Age, after the Little Ice Age and today. But the geodetic observatory operated in this Arctic settlement by the Norwegian Mapping Authority (NMA) has long shown the rise to be higher than predicted by geophysical modelling.Comparing gravimetric readings with measurements by GPS and very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) makes it possible to understand the suprisingly large uplift in Svalbard and why this is so much bigger than the models predict.At the moment, the uplift in Ny-Ålesund is about 8.5 millimetres per year. But this figure also varies considerably from year to year.

Nasa's Curiosity rover has captured a strange white light dancing across the horizon of Mars and four blobs hovering in the sky, which UFO hunters claim are alien ships monitoring humans' baby steps into the universe.While the images are certainly a curiosity, Nasa and photography experts insist they are nothing more than blemishes on the images, picked up by the camera lens sitting on the rover at a distance of 350 million miles away.Nasa has not commented on any of the strange sightings so far, but alien hunters have suggested that these are alien ships monitoring humans' baby steps into the universe, the Daily Mail reported.

When Curiosity first touched down on Mars, Internet pranksters were quick to mock up photographs of alien life on the alien landscape.But it seems Nasa has itself captured something very strange on camera, including a strange white light dancing across the horizon of the red planet, and four blobs hovering in the skyWhile the images are certainly a curiosity, Nasa and photography experts insist that these are nothing more than blemishes on the images, picked up by the camera lens sitting on the rover at a distance of 350 million miles away.

Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon officially launched America's "war on drugs". Generations of US politicians since have continued to crack down on illegal substances, including marijuana.In his new book, Too High To Fail (see NYT book review), author Doug Fine argues that the campaign against cannabis has been expensive and counterproductive.Critics of the law have questioned both the effectiveness and the morality of it, but Mr Fine - a strong advocate for legalisation - makes an economic case against it.

Music is not just something we listen to on our iPods. Music has the ability to influence how we feel and even how we think. Giving your child the opportunity to take part in musical training can be a great investment in his or her future. New research reveals that providing your child with music lessons early in life can have long-term benefits on the brain.A study conducted at Northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Lab, found music courses had enhanced neurological responses to sounds, a characteristic linked to improved learning and listening abilities.

NASA's next low-budget planetary mission will land a probe on Mars in 2016 to study why the Red Planet went down such a different evolutionary path than Earth did, the agency announced today (Aug. 20).The new mission, called InSight, will attempt to determine whether Mars' core is liquid or solid, and why the Red Planet's crust does not appear to be composed of drifting tectonic plates like Earth's is. Such information could help scientists better understand how rocky planets form and evolve, researchers said.

Nasa has reported its first setback in the Curiosity rover mission to Mars.A sensor on the robot's weather station that takes wind readings has sustained damage.The mission team stresses this is not a major problem and will merely degrade some measurements - not prevent them.It is not certain how the damage occurred but engineers suspect surface stones thrown up during Curiosity's rocket-powered landing may have struck sensor circuits and broken the wiring.

A little more than two weeks after its arrival on Mars, Nasa's Curiosity rover will on Wednesday make its first "test drive" before setting off on its Red Planet mission, the US space agency said.The $2.5 billion rover, which landed on Mars on August 6, has performed a battery of tests and appears ready to embark on its two-year mission to explore the Red Planet in the hunt for signs of life, Nasa said on Tuesday.On Monday, NASA "did the wheel steering test," said the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission manager, Mike Watkins, at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Making clean energy fit into a person's pocket would be a neat trick, and two inventors have begun working on the solution. They envision tiny automated factories that make solar panels as small as a person's fingers.The table-size Solar Pocket Factory could churn out a solar panel every 15 seconds, giving full-size factories in China a run for their money, say Shawn Frayne and Alex Hornstein, who are hoping to raise $50,000 on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to finish their prototype and prepare for a product launch in 2013..

OSLO (Reuters) - Temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula started rising naturally 600 years ago, long before man-made climate changes further increased them, scientists said in a study on Wednesday that helps explain the recent collapses of vast ice shelves.The study, reconstructing ancient temperatures to understand a region that is warming faster than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere, said a current warming rate of 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 Fahrenheit) per century was "unusual" but not unprecedented."By the time the unusual recent warming began, the Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves were already poised for the dramatic break-ups observed from the 1990s onwards," said the British Antarctic Survey, which led the study published in the journal Nature.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Nikola Tesla wanted to save the world from fuel dependency. Now, an Internet cartoonist wants to save Tesla's last remaining laboratory as a tribute to the futurist inventor.The structure, a 94-by-94-foot building, was the location where Tesla hoped to develop wireless communications and clean, free energy for everyone in the early 1900s. He moved his operation to the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York, in 1902 -- so named because of a 187-foot tower rising from the ground (as well as being sunk 120 feet below it) that was to be one of the great transmitters for his wireless energy dream.

News headlines over the past few years have linked cat ownership to everything from cancer to craziness, but new studies suggest that cats are actually beneficial to human health, and may even reduce our risk for cancer and other diseases.Reports in this week's issue of Biology Letters, for example, counter the tabloid-suggested link between cats and human brain cancer.Marion Vittecoq of the Tour du Valat research center and her colleagues conclude that cats should not be blamed for human cancer. In fact, studies show just the opposite.

The Arctic ice cap is on course for a record-breaking melt session following a summer of unstable conditions, says the National Snow and Ice Data Center."The numbers are coming in and we are looking at them with a sense of amazement," the center's director Mark Serrez said. "If the melt were to just suddenly stop today, we would be at the third lowest [ice level] in the satellite record. We've still got another two weeks of melt to go, so I think we're very likely to set a new record."

The Golden Ratio, usually denoted by the Greek letter [phi] (phi), has the propensity of popping up where least expected, in a variety of natural phenomena and works of art. In its decimal representation, [phi] is equal to the never-repeating, never-ending number 1.6180339887... Where can such an irrational number show up in astronomy? First, it appears in an astronomical symbol. Most people use the pentagram -- the five-pointed star (Figure 1) -- as a symbol for a star (this reflects the twinkling of stars due to the Earth's atmosphere).

As Greece sinks ever deeper into the most severe economic depression in living memory, some young people are taking drastic action to change their lives.In the foothills of Mount Telaithrion on the Greek island of Evia, Mr Sianos and three other like-minded Athenians set up an eco-community.The idea was to live in an entirely sustainable way, free from the ties of money and cut off from the national electricity grid."What others saw as a global economic crisis, we saw as a crisis of civilisation," Mr Sianos explains."Everything seemed to be in crisis - healthcare, the environment, education. So we made the decision to try something different.".

As the United States' extended heat wave and drought threaten to raise global food prices, energy production is also feeling the pressure. Across the nation, power plants are becoming overheated and shutting down or running at lower capacity; drilling operations struggle to get the water they need, and crops that would become biofuel are withering.While analysts say the US should survive this year without major blackouts, more frequent droughts and increased population size will continue to strain power generation in the future.

A large scale study of Scottish people's DNA is threatening to "rewrite the nation's history", according to author Alistair Moffat.Scotland, he told the Edinburgh international book festival, despite a long-held belief that its ethnic make-up was largely Scots, Celtic, Viking and Irish, was in fact "one of the most diverse nations on earth"."The explanation is simple. We are a people on the edge of beyond; on the end of a massive continent. Peoples were migrating northwest; and they couldn't get any further. We have collected them.".

One hears epic accounts of people surviving bullets to the brain, 10-story freefalls or months stranded at sea. But put a human anywhere in the known universe except for the thin shell of space that extends a couple of miles above or below sea level on Earth, and we perish within minutes. As strong and resilient as the human body seems in some situations, considered in the context of the cosmos as a whole, it's unnervingly fragile.

It wasn't quite the lowest point of the expedition. But Paolo Gasparini was decidedly uncomfortable at a banquet in the small town of Alga, Kazakhstan, when he was given the honour of dividing a boiled sheep's head among the gathering. He could sense the silent alarm of his young colleagues, fearing that soon they would be politely chewing on an eye or an ear. Fighting nausea, Gasparini, a medical geneticist at the University of Trieste, Italy, sympathetically sliced each of them just a taste of skin, passing the traditionally valued sense organs to the village elders.

The vanished early agrarian settlements of East Asia interests Gary Crawford, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, though his search is focused on seeds and grains.Crawford studies the relationships between people and the plants they once consumed, cultivated and collected. He sees more in charred millet seeds, for example, than the average person. Specifically, he pictures how well and whether communities sustained themselves and their ecosystems millennia ago. An important component of his research is exploring how agriculture developed.

VADODARA: Much is known about how the Harappan Civilization flourished on the banks of the Indus almost 5,000 years back. But now is the time to move 'ahead' of the Indus Valley Civilization.Through the largest exploration exercise ever undertaken, M S University's Department of Archaeology and Ancient History along with United States' Stone Age Institute will unearth evidence of our own ancestors.

As the Curiosity rover begins its exciting trek across the surface of Mars and up the dramatic peak of Mt. Sharp it is important to realize that the plans for this great success were incubated and acted upon more than 10 years ago. Exploration like this is not for the faint of heart -- it takes time and persistence.So what's next? What is in the funded pipeline now that will be revolutionizing our understanding of life in the solar system 10 or even 20 years from now? The short answer is -- nothing. Curiosity is it. After Curiosity there is, at present, no other mission in production that will explore potentially habitable worlds beyond Earth.But where do we want to go? Where do we hope we'll be? Along with continuing our exploration of Mars there are several moons of Jupiter and Saturn that we think might be good places for life.

How did the universe begin? The Big Bang is traditionally envisioned as the moment when an infinitely dense bundle of energy suddenly burst outward, expanding in three spatial directions and gradually cooling down as it did so.Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice.

Today, we live in an age of exploration, where robots on Mars and planet-hunting telescopes are beginning to allow us to edge closer to an answer.While we wait to establish contact, one technique we can use back on Earth is an equation that American astronomer Frank Drake formulated in the 1960s to calculate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations may exist in the Milky Way galaxy.

Scientists from Imperial College London and Oxford University have developed a seismometer that will listen for "marsquakes" on a new American Mars mission to delve under the skin of the red planet.The instrument, carried by the InSight lander, will help determine if Mars has a solid or liquid core. It will also provide clues as to why the planet's crust is not made up of tectonic plates as on Earth.InSight is due to be launched by the American space agency Nasa in 2016. After landing on Mars, the craft will deploy a thermal probe called the "tractor mole" that will drive itself 16 feet below the planet's surface. The probe will record how much heat is coming from the Martian interior.

Thousands of earthquakes occurring in rapid succession in less than a year under an Antarctic glacier may have been linked to ocean tides, new research suggests.Scientists investigated seismic activity under David Glacier, a large glacier in East Antarctica about 270 square miles (700 square kilometers) in size. The glacier serves as the outlet from which ice from 4 percent of that region's ice sheet drains out toward the sea.

For more than two weeks, retired sculptor George J. Haas has been glued to his computer, watching as NASA's "Curiosity" rover returns its first photographs from the surface of Mars.Mr. Haas and a small group of dedicated colleagues have pored over other images from the red planet for decades, looking for features that could have been created by intelligent beings.Over the years, among other things, they have seen a face they describe as half-human, half-feline. And a parrot-shaped feature on a mound of rock with "17 points of anatomical correctness.".

WASHINGTON: Just 10 days after NASA's Curiosity rover sent back its first color photos of the Martian landscape, the US space agency said on Monday it wants in 2016 to take a better look at what's happening beneath the Red Planet's surface."Does Mars have fault lines like the Earth does? How extensive are those? What kinds of 'marsquakes' are there?"These, NASA official Lindley Johnson told reporters on a conference call, are some of the important questions the project hopes to answer.

The history of pachycephalosaurs is mostly a story of domes. Even though some skeletons have been uncovered over the years, the most commonly-found part of these bipedal Cretaceous herbivores is the thickened, decorated skull. As a result, much of what we know about these dinosaurs comes from skull fragments, and this can sometimes seed confusion about which fossils represent new species and which are individuals of already-known dinosaurs.

A family and their dog named Kitty have stumbled upon one of the most significant fossil finds ever in Nova Scotia.The reptile fossil, affectionately nicknamed "Superstar," is the first of its kind to be found in the province.While out walking along Nova Scotia's fossil-rich Northumberland shore, Patrick Keating, his family, and their dog, Kitty, found a fossilized rib cage, backbone and partial sail.When they went back to the same area a week later, they found the creature's fossilized skul.

Using information about the unique mating practices of the male malaria mosquito - which, unlike any other insect, inserts a plug to seal its sperm inside the female - scientists are zeroing in on a birth-control drug for Anopheles mosquitoes, deadly carriers of the disease that threatens 3 billion people, has infected more than 215 million and kills 655,000 annually.They reported on August 19 at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia on development of an approach for screening substances that could prevent formation of the plug, thus preventing mosquitoes from reproducing and spreading malaria.

Experiments using heavy ions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are advancing understanding of the primordial universe. The ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations have made new measurements of the kind of matter that probably existed in the first instants of the universe. They will present their latest results at the Quark Matter 2012 conference, which starts today in Washington DC. The new findings are based mainly on the four-week LHC run with lead ions in 2011, during which the experiments collected 20 times more data than in 2010.

A powerful sun storm in July unleashed a wave of plasma and charged particles into space, and scientists now say this solar outburst may be one of the fastest ever recorded.On July 23, the sun blasted a massive cloud of solar material, called a coronal mass ejection(CME), into space, sending it whipping by NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft. Scientists used STEREO's observations to calculate that the speedy CME was traveling between 1,800 and 2,200 miles per second (2,900 and 3,540 kilometers per second).

The Istabl Antar excavations have been conducted within the remit of the scientific activities of the French Archaeological Institute in Cairo (IFAO) where I initiated the field of Islamic archaeology.Today, this site, which I have managed to preserve in the face of illegal urbanisation over more than a quarter of a century, is on the verge of disappearing, due to the lack of proper protection and total disrespect of law. In what follows, I give you a short description of the remains that are on the point of being destroyed. They deserve to be protected and preserved, simply because they are unique in the history of Islamic Egypt, and even in the Islamic world.

For six centuries, the ancient Maya flourished, with more than a hundred city-states scattered across what is now southern Mexico and northern Central America. Then, in A.D. 695, the collapse of several cities in present day Guatemala marked the start of the Classic Maya's slow decline. Prolonged drought is thought to have played a role, but a study published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters adds a new twist: The Maya may have made the droughts worse by clearing away forests for cities and crops, making a naturally drying climate drier."We're not saying deforestation explains the entire drought, but it does explain a substantial portion of the overall drying that is thought to have occurred," said the study's lead author Benjamin Cook, a climate modeler at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Arctic sea ice looks set to hit a record low by the end of the month, according to satellite data.Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center said data showed that the sea ice extent was tracking below the previous record low, set in 2007.Latest figures show that on 13 August ice extent was 483,000 sq km (186,000 sq miles) below the previous record low for the same date five years ago.The ice is expected to continue melting until mid- to late September."A new daily record... would be likely by the end of August," the centre's lead scientist, Ted Scambos, told Reuters.

Astronomers have found evidence for a planet being devoured by its star, yielding insights into the fate that will befall Earth in billions of years.The team uncovered the signature of a planet that had been "eaten" by looking at the chemistry of the host star.They also think a surviving planet around this star may have been kicked into its unusual orbit by the destruction of a neighbouring world.Details of the work have been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Wondering what's causing all the extreme weather we've seen lately? The short answer, scientists say, is rotten luck and a warmer planet.It's not easy to shatter a record that has lasted for more than 75 years. But that's what happened last month, when a stubborn heat wave pushed July temperatures in the United States into uncharted territory.Not since 1895, when national record keeping began, has the thermometer stayed so high. The average temperature in July was 3.3°F (1.8°C) above the 20th-century average, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), breaking a record set in 1936.

Kanzi the bonobo continues to impress. Not content with learning sign language or making up "words" for things like banana or juice, he now seems capable of making stone tools on a par with the efforts of early humans.Eviatar Nevo of the University of Haifa in Israel and his colleagues sealed food inside a log to mimic marrow locked inside long bones, and watched Kanzi, a 30-year-old male bonobo chimp, try to extract it. While a companion bonobo attempted the problem a handful of times, and succeeded only by smashing the log on the ground, Kanzi took a longer and arguably more sophisticated approach.

Nasa's Curiosity rover has zapped its first Martian rock.The robot fired its ChemCam laser at a tennis-ball-sized stone lying about 2.5m away on the ground.The brief but powerful burst of light from the instrument vapourised the surface of the rock, revealing details of its basic chemistry.This was just target practice for ChemCam, proving it is ready to begin the serious business of investigating the geology of the Red Planet.

A robot that can change colour to either blend in with or stand out from its surroundings has been created by scientists.The machine, designed by researchers at Harvard University, was inspired by the camouflage skills of sea creatures such as octopuses, cuttlefish and squid.Like these cephalopods, the robot has a soft, rubbery body and can move with flexibility.The study is published in the journal Science.

A team from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) carried out an extensive underwater survey off the western end of the tiny Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro, which was formerly a British colony known as Gardener Island, in July.Using an array of underwater technology, including multi-beam sonar used by the US Navy to construct underwater maps, TIGHAR had hoped that their seventh trip to the island where they believe Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed and subsequently died, would bear immediate fruit.

Koko the gorilla can comprehend roughly 2,000 words of spoken English. She doesn't have a vocal tract suitable for responding verbally, so the 40-year-old ape signs her thoughts using a modified form of American Sign Language. Counting her native gorilla tongue, she is, therefore, trilingual.And she doesn't just talk about food. Over the 28 years that gorilla researcher Penny Patterson has worked with Koko, the ape has expressed a whole range of emotions associated with humans, Patterson says, including happiness, sadness, love, grief and embarrassment.