Newsdesk Archive

They're calling it a sea serpent, but whatever it is that raised its head and humps in a Norwegian lake, the eyewitnesses are holding fast to their story.Three men on a trip to Lake Hornindalsvatnet saw something strange break the surface of the lake on Aug. 1."We saw what we saw, no doubt about it," Andreas Solvik told NRK.no.Two of the men snapped a picture on their cell phones of something that appears to have a head and two arch-like sections of a possible long neck and body.

Unlike the Crime Scene Investigators from the popular TV series, these detectives are hired to look for evidence of rogue wood from stores increasingly worried about being duped by a global trade in illegal timber now worth billions.They take wood samples into their lab and put them through DNA tests that can pinpoint the species and origin of a piece of timber. They also track timber and timber products from forest to shop to ensure clients' shipments are legal.

Careful balancing of water nutrients could help protect coral reefs from the effects of ocean warming, research suggests.High water temperatures can lead to "bleaching" that often results in the destruction and death of coral.Around the world, mass bleaching has already had a devastating impact on coral reef ecosystems.Bleaching is caused by the loss of symbiotic algae, called zooxanthellae, that live within the coral and supply it with energy.

In a little-known dry forest in Colombia, scientists have discovered a new species of bird: the Antioquia wren (Thryophilus sernai). First seen in 2010, scientists photographed the new wren and recorded its vocalizations, from which they determined that the wren was brand new to science, according to a new paper in Auk."[It took] good ears and, good eyes, both in the correct moment and place," lead author Carlos Esteban Lara with the National University of Colombia told mongabay.com about the discovery. After the initial sighting, Lara and colleagues "started a two year study of data on natural history, distribution, vocalizations, morphology, and genetic variation.".

POLITICAL revolutionaries turn the world upside down. Scientific ones more often turn it inside out. And that, almost literally, is happening to the idea of what, biologically speaking, a human being is.The traditional view is that a human body is a collection of 10 trillion cells which are themselves the products of 23,000 genes. If the revolutionaries are correct, these numbers radically underestimate the truth. For in the nooks and crannies of every human being, and especially in his or her guts, dwells the microbiome: 100 trillion bacteria of several hundred species bearing 3m non-human genes. The biological Robespierres believe these should count, too; that humans are not single organisms, but superorganisms made up of lots of smaller organisms working together.

Wildfires sparked by lightning near Canada's Hudson Bay are threatening the habitat of polar bears, encroaching on the old tree roots and frozen soil where females make their dens, a conservation expert on the big, white bears said on Thursday.Polar bears are more typically threatened by the melting of sea ice, which they use as platforms for hunting seals, their main prey. But those who live near Hudson Bay spend their summers resting up on shore when the bay thaws, living in dens dug in the frozen soil among the roots of stunted spruce trees.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - In the two minutes it takes to read this story, an area the size of 60 football pitches will have been clear-cut by illegal loggers globally, according to Chatham House, an independent policy institute in London.Catching the loggers and their bosses has long been a problem because of corruption, lax law enforcement and limited ability to detect the crime quickly.Satellite monitoring is changing that. Powerful eyes in the sky and cheaper and more powerful data-crunching computers mean there will be no place to hide for palm oil, logging or mining firms that clear without permits or outside their concessions.

Masers, which are to microwave radiation what lasers are to light, have been more or less ignored for many years, but an almost accidental discovery by a British physicist has brought the maser back into the limelight; Mark Oxborrow's new model is 100 million times more powerful than any created before.The term MASER is actually an acronym, like LASER: Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (for laser, substitute "light" for "microwave"). Time, familiarity, and ease of pronunciation have made both into ordinary words, though in research documents they are both occasionally kept capitalized. Masers actually came first, but certain limitations prevented widespread use.

The Manchester Museum contains an intriguing object numbered 296. At 38cm long and 7.8cm in diameter, at first sight it looks like a thin pottery vessel, open at one end and with a small hole at the other. Were it not for the chance discovery of a dead bee inside (and traces of pollen), the function of this object may have gone unrecognised as an ancient Egyptian beehive.

American megachurches use stagecraft, sensory pageantry, charismatic leadership and an upbeat, unchallenging vision of Christianity to provide their congregants with a powerful emotional religious experience, according to research from the University of Washington."Membership in megachurches is one of the leading ways American Christians worship these days, so, therefore, these churches should be understood," said James Wellman, associate professor of American religion at the University of Washington. "Our study shows that -- contrary to public opinion that tends to pass off the megachurch movement as consumerist religion -- megachurches are doing a pretty effective job for their members. In fact, megachurch members speak eloquently of their spiritual growth."

It is one of Britain's most popular tourist attractions, a Unesco World Heritage Site and a relic of utmost importance in unravelling our past. It serves as an icon of Britain, its trademark trilithons a visual shorthand for heritage, hippies and unknowable mystery. It has been immortalised by Constable, Wordsworth, Hardy and Vonnegut. Spinal Tap named a song after it and in the film Help!, the Beatles sang nearby. It's also a symbol of proprietorial greed, its £7.80 entrance fee allowing passage through a dank tunnel and a walk around, rather than among, the stones; according to a random sample of visitor reactions, Stonehenge is "just a pile of rocks", "smaller than I thought it would be" and a "rip-off"..

The GHMB Community Interview with John Anthony West is now open, and you can put your questions to him. John is the author of several books and the TV series 'Magical Egypt'.Please see the community interview page for past and upcoming interviews.If you would like to add your voice and suggest someone as a future community interviewee, please do so on the messageboards in the community interview suggestions thread.

When one thinks of England in the 1600s, feminism probably isn't the first word to come to mind. But a researcher says a newly transcribed text shows that some Renaissance women launched battles for equality, which they sometimes won.Jessica Malay recently put together a complete edition of a 600,000-word text by one of Britain's earliest feminist figures, Lady Anne Clifford, finding the so-called Great Books of Record "challenge the notion that women in the 16th and 17th centuries lacked any power or control over their own lives.".

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of three major wildfires in Idaho and the thick smoke from the blazes, which is billowing over neighboring Wyoming, on Aug. 14.In some places it is so thick you cannot see the ground, meaning people on the ground likely cannot see the sky.The largest of the wildfires is the Halstead Fire, which as of today (Aug. 17) has already charred more than 131 square miles (339 square kilometers) and is only three percent contained, according to the National Forest Service. It was sparked by lightning in July, and is fueled by beetle-killed stands of lodgepole pine.

Hey, cyclists! Want to look more stylish while riding and still avoid the inconvenience of a cracked skull?Then a pair of Swedish designers have got just the helmet for you - provided you're willing to fork over about $600 and aren't afraid of looking a little like a deployed airbag when you fall.The newly released Hovding (no, Americans, that's not a futon from Ikea) is billed as The Invisible Bicycle Helmet. Begun in 2005 as a project for a master's-level industrial design course, the blow-up helmet is housed in a pouch that, when wrapped around your neck, looks a little like a puffed-up ski-jacket collar.

IT WORKED for the ancient Greeks, so why shouldn't it work for us? Some cancers are resistant to chemotherapy, but we can attack them successfully by hiding drugs inside folded-up DNA.DNA origami involves folding a single strand of DNA into a complex pattern, creating a 3D structure. Baoquan Ding at the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing, China, and colleagues loaded a tubular piece of folded DNA with doxorubicin, a chemotherapy drug. The DNA Trojan horse delivered a dose of the drug that proved lethal to human breast-cancer cells, even though they had developed resistance to doxorubicin.

University of Sheffield scientists have decoded the processes which create proteins in all forms of life which - for the first time - opens the door to fixing these problems which can cause fatal health problems like Motor Neuron Disease, myotonic dystrophy and cancer.Decoded process could hold the key to future treatments for a wide range of chronic health problems including Motor Neuron Disease, myotonic dystrophy and a wide range of cancers, University of Sheffield scientists have revealed.

New wearable electronics could become smart surgical gloves that allow surgeons to feel and do everything using their fingertips. Such electronics could even include electronic "socks" wrapped snugly around a patient's heart to monitor cardiac health.The idea of stretchy smart materials fitting the hands of surgeons or human hearts comes from researchers who have discovered how to transform hard semiconductors into soft, flexible electronics. A U.S.-China team has published its blueprint for designing and making smart devices that can wrap around 3D objects like the human fingertip.

The Mars rover Curiosity is beginning its fifth day on the red planet, and it's been performing flawlessly from the moment it landed. That's been especially gratifying for NASA landing engineer Adam Steltzner. Last Friday, while Steltzner was still on pins and needles waiting for the landing to take place, I told the story of Steltzner's decision as a young man to give up his life as a rocker and go for a career in space engineering.After the landing, I wanted to check in with Steltzner again to find out what those fateful moments were like for him during the landing.

PASADENA, Calif. -- As NASA's Curiosity rover prepares to get its wheels in motion on Mars, the space agency is set to issue a new look at where exploration of the Red Planet could go in the years and decades to come - based on the theme "Seeking the Signs of Life."The report, stemming from a Concepts and Approaches for Mars Exploration meeting in Houston in June, is headed for a late August/September release. Former veteran NASA program manager Orlando Figueroa has been leading the appraisal under the wing of a newly established Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG), which was tasked with reformulating the agency's Mars Exploration Program.

Arctic sea ice is vanishing much faster than generally expected, according to preliminary data from European Space Agency satellite Cryosat.UK scientists combined results from Cryosat, which uses radar to measure ice thickness, with data from Nasa's IceSat, which uses lasers.Their preliminary analysis suggests an annual ice loss of up to 900 cubic km a year from 2004.Projections of Arctic ice melt vary widely.But the new results are some 50% higher than projected in most scenarios.

Engineers at Oregon State University have made a breakthrough in the performance of microbial fuel cells that can produce electricity directly from wastewater, opening the door to a future in which waste treatment plants not only will power themselves, but will sell excess electricity.The new technology developed at OSU can now produce 10 to 50 more times the electricity, per volume, than most other approaches using microbial fuel cells, and 100 times more electricity than some.

Najaf, Iraq -- A hundred yards or so from taxiing airliners, Iraqi archaeologist Ali al-Fatli is showing a visitor around the delicately carved remains of a church that may date back some 1,700 years to early Christianity.The church, a monastery and other surrounding ruins have emerged from the sand over the past five years with the expansion of the airport serving the city of Najaf, and have excited scholars who think this may be Hira, a famous Arab Christian center."This is the oldest sign of Christianity in Iraq," said al-Fatli, pointing to the ancient tablets with designs of grapes that litter the sand next to intricately carved monastery walls.

"IT'S there," says an archaeologist pointing to the ground, where fragments of a Buddha statue from the ancient Gandhara civilisation have been covered up to stop them being stolen or vandalised.Just months before the US-led invasion in 2001, the Taliban regime shocked the world by destroying two giant, 1500-year-old Buddhas in the rocky Bamiyan valley, branding them un-Islamic.More than 10 years on Western experts say Afghanistan's ancient Buddhist and early Islamic heritage is little safer.At the foot of the cliff where the two Buddhas used to stand 130 kilometres west of Kabul, an archaeological site has been found and parts of a third Buddha, lying down, were discovered in 2008.

A new report based on input from the science community outlines the most pressing objectives over the next decade for studying the sun and the far-reaching effects of solar activity. The report, which was released yesterday (Aug. 15) by the National Research Council, identifies specific science goals and provides recommendations for how to maintain robust and effective programs despite budgetary constraints.The study is the council's second decadal survey for solar and space physics. The committee that wrote the 454-page report, led by Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado in Boulder, pinpointed the top research priorities in heliophysics for the decade spanning 2013 to 2022.

Google is expanding its Street View offerings to include dozens of 360-degree photo tours of ancient Mexican monuments such as Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza and Palenque.The additions are aimed at helping Mexico "open a window to the world, to encourage physical visits to the pre-Hispanic sites and thus in turn benefit cultural tourism," Miguel Angel Alva, director of marketing for Google Mexico, said this week in an announcement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH.

With gas prices rising and the massive drought making ethanol a tough sell as a gas alternative, India's Tata Motors has hit on the perfect time to debut the Airpod, a small urban vehicle that, as its name suggests, runs on air. If you don't know much about how regular cars use fuel, natural gas or, alternatively, hydrogen is compressed in a pressurized tank, hence the 'pssf' sound when you unscrew the gas cap. Now think about air rifles.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Authorities in Cambodia say children bathing in a newly dug pond accidentally unearthed six ancient Buddhist statues believed to be around 1,000 years old.Provincial Culture Department official Prak Sakhon says the statues were found Wednesday in Khleng Por, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of capital Phnom Penh.Sakhon says the statues are believed to be from the ninth to the 12th centuries, with the biggest just over a half-meter (half-yard) tall and weighing about nine kilograms (20 pounds).

Nasa's Curiosity rover is getting ready to zap its first Martian rock.A small stone lying just to the side of the vehicle at its landing site on the floor of Gale Crater has been selected as a test target for the ChemCam laser.The brief but powerful burst of light from this instrument will vaporise the surface of the rock, revealing details of its basic chemistry.Dubbed N165, the object is not expected to have any science value, but should show ChemCam is ready for serious work.

If androids dream of electric sheep, what do Mars rovers dream about? Their fiery descents through the Red Planet's atmosphere? Or maybe their Earthly home, so many million miles away?The seemingly silly question is worthy of a few minutes' consideration, for researchers revealed Tuesday (Aug. 14) that NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on the Red Planet has a "dream mode." This state allows the 1-ton robot to save energy while performing vital functions, scientists said."It's sort of the reptile brain for the rover," Curiosity chief avionics engineer Jim Donaldson, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters Tuesday.

A self-described "satellite archaeology researcher" has garnered widespread media attention with claims that she has found two possible pyramid complexes in Egypt using Google Earth. But experts say her pyramids are nothing more than eroded hills infused with a heavy dose of wishful thinking.Angela Micol, a North Carolina-based woman who blogs at Google Earth Anomalies, says she discovered the two clusters of mysterious, angular mounds in the Egyptian desert while surveying satellite images of the terrain using Google Earth, the virtual map program. In its coverage, Gizmodo asserts that the desert structures look as if they have been "very deliberately arranged," and that they "bear all the hallmarks of ancient pyramid sites."

Two new owl species have been identified in the Philippines, and researchers say the birds' songs led them to the discovery."More than 15 years ago, we realized that new subspecies of Ninox hawk-owls existed in the Philippines," zoologist Pam Rasmussen of Michigan State University said in a statement. "But it wasn't until last year that we obtained enough recordings that we could confirm that they were not just subspecies, but two new species of owls."In fact, the researchers found that the Philippine hawk-owl (Ninox philippensis) consists of seven allopatric species, or those that emerge as a consequence of individuals being isolated geographically, or temporally. They also identified one subspecies.

When the area of the brain responsible for processing vision is destroyed, does some visual ability still remain? The answer is yes, surprising even to human patients who have experienced this condition, but researchers are looking to monkeys to determine what, and how much, exists.The long-documented phenomenon of blindsight has shown that though much is lost, much can abide. Even though a blindsight patient doesn't consciously know it, his or her visual attention is still being guided by stimuli like movement in their "blind" field, according to Laurent Itti, a researcher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who studies blindsight.

Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana is looking to streamline lunch payments by implementing a palm vein scanner program, but some parents aren't pleased.A letter to parents this week informed them of the new scanner that will allow the school's nearly 1,000 students to move through the lunch line faster and with fewer payment mistakes -- an issue that had arisen in the past, KPLC-TV reports.

The development of a museum dedicated to the life and works Nikola Tesla has moved one step closer after an online campaign raised more than $500,000 in 48 hours.The fundraising effort, called "Let's build a goddamn Tesla museum", was devised by web comic The Oatmeal on behalf of the Tesla Science Center.It is hoping is hoping to raise $850,000 from its appeal on the money-raising website Indiegogo.

The biology of aphids is bizarre: they can be born pregnant and males sometimes lack mouths, causing them to die not long after mating. In an addition to their list of anomalies, work published this week indicates that they may also capture sunlight and use the energy for metabolic purposes.Aphids are unique among animals in their ability to synthesize pigments called carotenoids. Many creatures rely on these pigments for a variety of functions, such as maintaining a healthy immune system and making certain vitamins, but all other animals must obtain them through their diet. Entomologist Alain Robichon at the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France, and his colleagues suggest that, in aphids, these pigments can absorb energy from the Sun and transfer it to the cellular machinery involved in energy production.

Curses! eBay has banned magic spells and potions.A small paragraph in the new eBay 2012 Fall Seller Update (h/t Tecca) is proving to be a big bummer for purveyors of the occult -- and for other believers. As of Aug. 30, eBay wrote on its site, the following merchandise is prohibited: "spells; curses; hexing; conjuring; magic; prayers; blessing services; magic potions; healing sessions."Ebay also banned "advice."

The remains of hundreds of warriors have resurfaced from a Danish bog, suggesting that a violent event took place at the site about 2,000 years ago.Discovered in the Alken Enge wetlands near Lake Mossø in East Jutland, Denmark, the skeletal remains tell the story of an entire army's apparent sacrifice.Following work done in 2009, archaeologists have so far unearthed the hacked bones of more than 200 individuals.

Verdant green carpets of moss that emerge during the brief Antarctic summer have an unusual food source, a new study reports: The mosses eat nitrogen from fossilized penguin poop.Plant biologist Sharon Robinson, who has studied the mosses for 16 years, sought to find their nutrient source; Antarctic soil generally lacks nourishment for plants. "Most of the soil is very, very poorly developed; it's mostly just gravel," said Robinson, a professor at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity may seem like the strong, silent type, but the 1-ton robot was making a lot of noise during its harrowing Red Planet touchdown on Aug. 5.Curiosity phoned home throughout its daring and unprecedented landing sequence that night, giving its nervous handlers step-by-step status and health updates. The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter recorded some of this chatter, and now we can hear what Curiosity had to say.

Buried deep under a hill in central China, surrounded by an underground moat of poisonous mercury, lies an entombed emperor who's been undisturbed for more than two millennia.The tomb holds the secrets of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died on Sept. 10, 210 B.C., after conquering six warring states to create the first unified nation of China.The answers to a number of historical mysteries may lie buried inside that tomb, but whether modern people will ever see inside this mausoleum depends not just on the Chinese government, but on science.

The rise of one of the highest, flattest places on Earth, the Tibetan Plateau in China's Sichuan province, began much earlier than thought, according to a new study."Our study suggests that high topography began to develop as early as 30 million years ago, and perhaps was present even earlier," Penn State researcher Eric Kirby said in a statement.Most researchers believe the high mountains in eastern Tibet developed during the past 10 million to 15 million years as deep crust beneath the centralTibetan Plateau flowed to the surface, thickening the Earth's crust and causing the area to rise, Kirby said. But Kirby and his colleagues used radioactive dating to find the uplift began twice as early.

Because black holes are impossible to see, one of scientists' best hopes to study them is to look for the ripples in space-time, called gravitational waves, that they are thought to create.Gravitational waves would be distortions propagating through space and time caused by violent events such as the collision of two black holes. They were first predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity; however, scientists have yet to find one.That could change when the latest version of a gravitational wave-hunting facility gets up and running. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is actually a pair of observatories, in Louisiana and Washington state, that began operating in 2002. Newly sensitized detectors are being added to both.

Cambridge University researchers concluded that the DNA similarities were unlikely to be the result of human-Neanderthal sex during their 15,000-year coexistence in Europe.People living outside Africa share as much as four per cent of their DNA with Neanderthals, a cave-dwelling species with muscular short arms and legs and a brain slightly larger than ours.The Cambridge researchers examined demographic patterns suggesting that humans were far from intimate with the species they displaced in Europe almost 40,000 years ago.

The sun is the most perfectly round natural object known in the universe, say scientists who have conducted precise measurements of its dimensions.As a spinning ball of gas, astronomers had always expected our nearest star to bulge slightly at its equator, making it very slightly flying-saucer shaped. The planet Jupiter demonstrates this effect well. Its high rate of spin - once every 10 hours - means that it is almost 7% wider across its equator than the distance from pole to pole.

Professor Julian Savulescu said that creating so-called designer babies could be considered a "moral obligation" as it makes them grow up into "ethically better children".The expert in practical ethics said that we should actively give parents the choice to screen out personality flaws in their children as it meant they were then less likely to "harm themselves and others".The academic, who is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, made his comments in an article in the latest edition of Reader's Digest.

Just in case any aliens out there in the universe are listening, more than 10,000 Twitter messages, plus videos from celebrities such as comedian Stephen Colbert, have been beamed into space as a big "Hello!" from Earth.The messages are intended as a response to what's called the Wow! signal, an intriguing radio signal detected on Aug. 15, 1977 that some thought was a call from extraterrestrials. The 72-second transmission was picked up by the Big Ear radio observatory at Ohio State University, coming from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

In a new perspective on ocean health, one that looks through the lens of both humans and the natural world, scientists give Earth's seas a grade of 60 out of 100, meaning there's lots of room for improvement, they say.The new index ranks oceans' health and the benefits they provide to humans using 10 categories, such as biodiversity, clean waters, ability to provide food for humans and support of the livelihood of people living in coastal regions.In addition to assessing the present, the index provides a benchmark against which to measure progress in the future, writes the research team led by Benjamin Halpern at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in California.

Even sharks can get a tan. Sharks' skin turns from dark brown to black as the pigment melanin increases in direct response to radiation. In other fish, the exposure can lead to skin cancer. Sharks, however, just seem to tan.What's their secret? The answer could hold the key to preventing skin disease in humans."As far as I'm aware, sharks appear very robust to skin damage and disease," said Michael Sweet, lead author of a study about shark tanning in the journal PLoS ONE. "There have been a lot of attempts to induce melanomas in sharks to no affect.".

According to the United Nations' 2011 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, global urban population is expected to gain more than 2.5 billion new inhabitants through 2050. Such sharp increases in the number of urban dwellers will require considerable conversion of natural to urban landscapes, resulting in newly developing and expanding megapolitan areas. Could climate impacts arising from built environment growth pose additional concerns for urban residents also expected to deal with impacts resulting from global climate change?

The ancient mummy of a mysterious young woman, known as the Ukok Princess, is finally returning home to the Altai Republic this month.She is to be kept in a special mausoleum at the Republican National Museum in capital Gorno-Altaisk, where eventually she will be displayed in a glass sarcophagus to tourists.For the past 19 years, since her discovery, she was kept mainly at a scientific institute in Novosibirsk, apart from a period in Moscow when her remains were treated by the same scientists who preserve the body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin.

Scientists have demonstrated that they can operate a solid-state 'MASER' at room temperature for the first time using new technology.The team from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Imperial College London say they have paved the way for the widespread adoption of MASER technology, in research published in the journal Nature.MASER stands for Microwave Amplification Stimulated Emission of Radiation and it was invented by scientists more than 50 years ago, before LASER technology was developed. Instead of creating intense beams of light, as in the case of LASERs, MASERs deliver a concentrated beam of microwaves.

With a thin sliver of diamond, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have transformed the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) into an even more precise tool for exploring the nanoworld. The improvements yield laser pulses focused to higher intensity in a much narrower band of X-ray wavelengths, and may enable experiments that have never before been possible.

The wreck of the ship that carried Captain Robert Scott on his doomed expedition to the Antarctic a century ago has been discovered off Greenland.The SS Terra Nova was found by a team from a US research company.Scott and his party set off from Cardiff aboard the Terra Nova in 1910 with the aim of becoming the first expedition to reach the South Pole.The ship had a life after the polar trek, sinking off Greenland's south coast in 1943.

An experiment five years ago suggested that babies are equipped with an innate moral compass, which drives them to choose good individuals over the bad in a wooden puppet show. But new research casts doubt on those findings, demonstrating that a baby's apparent preference for what's right might just reflect a fondness for bouncy things.In the original study, conducted by Yale researchers in 2007, groups of 6-month-olds and 10-month-olds watched a puppet show with neutral wooden figures, where one figure, the climber, was trying to get up a hill. In one scenario, one of the other figures, called the helper, assisted the climber up the hill. In the other scenario, a third figure, called the hinderer, pushed the climber down.

A daring supersonic "space jump" that would shatter the world record for the highest skydive in history has been delayed until October due to a damaged balloon capsule, project organizers say.Austrian daredevil skydiver Felix Baumgartner, 43, was expected to make the historic skydive sometime this month over the New Mexico desert as part of the Red Bull Stratos project. The dive, which organizers have dubbed a "space jump," will send Baumgartner more than 120,000 feet (36,575 meters) up by balloon so he could leap into the sky from a custom-built capsule.

Marine reptiles that cruised the planet's oceans millions of years ago may have suffered from their own version of the bends, studies of their fossils suggest. But scientists are in disagreement over why this happened.Human divers today get the bends, or decompression sickness, when they surface too quickly from the high-pressure environment of deep water. Nitrogen bubbles form in the body and can cause immediate symptoms like joint pain and headaches. But the bends can also leave permanent scars, in the form of bone lesions from a disease called dysbaric osteonecrosis, or DON.

The night sky may glow bluer as yellow-orange streetlights are gradually replaced by whiter, energy-saving lights, a new study says.Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, cast a bluish glow in the sky and are about 20 percent more efficient than industry-standard streetlamps, which generate red-colored light pollution.With LED efficiency expected to double to 40 percent in a few years, it's inevitable that governments worldwide will opt to save energy by switching to LEDs, which also last longer and require less maintenance, experts say.

AN UNUSUAL cluster of Stone Age skulls with smashed-in faces has been found carefully separated from the rest of their skeletons. They appear to have been dug up several years after being buried with their bodies, separated, then reburied.Collections of detached skulls have been dug up at many Stone Age sites in Europe and the Near East - but the face-smashing is a new twist that adds further mystery to how these societies related to their dead.

So many scientific studies are making incorrect claims that a new service has sprung up to fact-check reported findings by repeating the experiments.A year-old Palo Alto, California, company, Science Exchange, announced on Tuesday its "Reproducibility Initiative," aimed at improving the trustworthiness of published papers. Scientists who want to validate their findings will be able to apply to the initiative, which will choose a lab to redo the study and determine whether the results match.

When a carnivore becomes extinct, other predatory species could soon follow, according to new research. Scientists have previously put forward this theory, but a University of Exeter team has now carried out the first experiment to prove it.Published today (15 August 2012) in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the study shows how the demise of one carnivore species can indirectly cause another to become extinct. The University of Exeter team believes any extinction can create a ripple effect across a food web, with far-reaching consequences for many other animals.

Scientists have succeeded for the first time in impregnating an elephant with frozen sperm, ultrasound pictures presented by Vienna's Schoenbrunn Zoo showed on Tuesday.The scan shows a 10.6-centimetre-long (4.2 inch), five-month-old elephant foetus with its trunk, legs, tail, eyes and ears clearly discernible.The foetus, which was scanned in April, is likely now 20 cm long, the zoo said, and is due to be born to 26-year-old African elephant Tonga in or around August 2013 after a pregnancy of about 630 days.

Petko Angelov grabs an old, rusted sickle and leads peope clad in folk costumes to a ritual harvest in his fields in southern Bulgaria sown with the first ever wheat planted by humanity - the einkorn.The popularity of the ancient grain, whose origins can be traced back some 10,500 years to the dawn of agriculture, is mounting in the Balkan country as people seek out healthier food, sustainable farming methods and national pride.

One group of UFO believers have packed their bags, tents, photo and video cameras and are on a cross-country trek in Russia, hoping to capture photographic evidence of possible alien activity, reports todaysthv.com.Dubbed the "Trans-Eurasian UFO-Search Expedition," the 50 participants have been watching the skies above the southern tip of Lake Baikal, the world's oldest and deepest fresh water lake, located in southern Siberia.Lake Baikal was one of the group's first UFO target areas, based on local news of UFO sightings.

NEW DELHI: Public outcry against genetically modified crops in India has hit the headlines several times since 2010. They were categorised as unfounded and baseless fears by the biotech industry and some sections of the agricultural scientific community. But now the thirty seventh reports by the Parliamentary committee on agriculture, 'Cultivation of Genetically Modified Food Crops-Prospects and Effects' released on August 9 has thrown up some dramatic revelations.

Why Mark Peters and his friends Jeremy, Dave and William had a torpedo onboard their fishing boat, I don't know.These four guys were looking for tuna 20 miles off Santa Cruz, and not doing too badly. In the first minute of this video, shot last week on Aug. 6, they catch a nice fish. Then they take the torpedo, which Mark built to carry a GoPro high-definition camera, drop it in the water, and something crazy happens.

Mexican archaeologists discovered a pre-Columbian grave containing human skeletal remains along with relics of a "sacred tree" near the archaeological site of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan in the historical downtown area of Mexico City, the Mexican National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.Found in the burial ground dating back more than 500 years were the complete skeleton of a woman and over a thousand human bones of children, young people and adults.

As the world marvels at the latest US Mars landing, a Dutch start-up is aiming to beat NASA at its own game by sending the first humans to the red planet -- and film all as a reality show.The big hitch: it's a one-way trip.Fact, fiction or publicity stunt from the land that launched reality TV?The start-up, called "Mars One", says it is dead serious about landing four astronauts on Mars by 2023, seven years ahead of the US space agency's target, and plans to start the search for volunteers next year.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers may have discovered a new method to predict solar flares more than a day before they occur, providing advance warning to help protect satellites, power grids and astronauts from potentially dangerous radiation.The system works by measuring differences in gamma radiation emitted when atoms in radioactive elements "decay," or lose energy. This rate of decay is widely believed to be constant, but recent findings challenge that long-accepted rule.

A NASA spacecraft has beamed home a spectacular new view of the sun, a photo that captures a vast tendril of solar plasma reaching across the surface of our nearest star.NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the huge solar filament between Aug. 6 and 8, which rises up above the sun's surface in an arc that stretches across more than 500,000 miles (804,672 kilometers)."Filaments are cooler clouds of solar material that are tethered above the sun's surface by unstable magnetic forces," NASA officials wrote in a photo description.

The genetic code of the fruit fly Drosophila has been hacked into, allowing it to make proteins with properties that don't exist in the natural world. The advance could ultimately lead to the creation of new or "improved" life forms in the burgeoning field of synthetic biology.The four letters of the genetic code, A, C, T and G, are read in triplets, called codons, by the cell's protein-making machinery. Each codon gives an instruction for the type of amino acid that gets added next in a protein chain, or tells the machinery to stop.

Freakishly huge and uncomfortably bright, a quartet of stars sits huddled in the Tarantula Nebula, outcasts in a universe that says they shouldn't exist.Nestled in the R136 star cluster, the giants are each around 300 times as massive as our sun. They're surrounded by more conservative neighbours, stars no heftier than 150 solar masses. According to generally accepted norms, that's as big as a star should be.

It was the discovery that challenged what it is to be human. The Neanderthal genome revealed that our extinct cousin's genes live on in many modern humans, implying that the two species interbred. But a controversial new study casts doubt on those claims of interspecies hanky-panky.In 2010, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues sequenced the Neanderthal genome. Their analysis concluded that many modern humans carry a few Neanderthal genes. Only native Africans lack the Neanderthal genes, because Neanderthals did not live in Africa.

A video taken of the Antarctic research station Neumayer-Station III appears to show what some are calling a UFO over the South Pole.The video posted to YouTube seems to show a round, blurry object floating above the station on Aug. 10. Speculation has run rampant, with conspiracy theorists and UFO buffs swapping explanations ranging from government collaboration with aliens to a top-secret test of some new cutting-edge secret weapon.While a definitive explanation has not been found, several elements suggest a prosaic answer.

On the rooftop of a tower block above the hustle and bustle of teeming Hong Kong, dedicated growers tend to their organic crops in a vegetable garden.Against a backdrop of skyscrapers and jungle-clad hills, earth-filled boxes are spread out on the roof of the 14-storey building, where a wide variety of produce including cucumbers and potatoes are cultivated.It is one of several such sites that have sprung up in Hong Kong's concrete jungle, as the appetite for organic produce grows and people seek ways to escape one of the most densely populated places on earth.

A pair of spacecraft in suits of armor will brave one of the toughest environments in space when they launch later this month to study radiation around Earth.NASA's Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) will fly through the thick belts of charged particles that encircle our planet to try to understand these dynamic environments. To withstand the damage such harsh radiation can inflict, the satellites are shrouded in strong layers of shielding.

Perhaps Han Solo said it best in Star Wars when, describing his hyper-fast smuggling spaceship the Millennium Falcon, he said, "It may not look like much, but it's got it where it counts."While the Air Force might take exception to being likened to the Falcon, in reality the platypus-nosed X-51A Waverider hypersonic flight test vehicle really doesn't look like much. But it definitely has it where it counts.On Tuesday, the unmanned 25-foot-long vehicle will be dropped off of the wing of a converted B-52 bomber off the California coast and try to fly for 300 seconds at science fiction-like speeds of Mach 6, over 4,500 mph - fast enough to fly from New York to London in less than an hour.

Around 12 per cent of pale grass blue butterflies that were exposed to nuclear fallout as larvae immediately after the tsunami-sparked disaster had abnormalities, including smaller wings and damaged eyes, researchers said.The insects were mated in a laboratory well outside the fallout zone and 18 per cent of their offspring displayed similar problems, said Joji Otaki, associate professor at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, southwestern Japan.That figure rose to 34 per cent in the third generation of butterflies, he said, even though one parent from each coupling was from an unaffected population.

Researchers in Chile, led by Pablo Marqueta, an ecologist with Universidad Católica de Chile have arrived at a new theory to explain why a culture that existed around seven thousand years ago suddenly began to mummify their dead.The researchers have been examining the Chinchorro, hunter-gatherers that lived in the desert region of what is now northern Chile and southern Peru, from about 10,000 to 4,000 years ago. The mummies first date to 5050 BCE and continue to be made until about 1800 BCE.

When Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman claimed to have stumbled upon a new crystalline chemical structure that seemed to violate the laws of nature, colleagues mocked him, insulted him and exiled him from his research group.After years in the scientific wilderness, though, he was proved right. And on Wednesday (early today, NZ time), he received the ultimate vindication: the Nobel Prize in chemistry.The lesson?"A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 per cent in what he read in the textbooks," Shechtman said.

New satellite images show polar ice coverage dwindling in extent and thicknessSea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far greater rate than previously expected, according to data from the first purpose-built satellite launched to study the thickness of the Earth's polar caps.Preliminary results from the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 probe indicate that 900 cubic kilometres of summer sea ice has disappeared from the Arctic ocean over the past year.

THE oceans are swirling pools of contrast: calm and tumultuous; wine dark and clear; continuous yet disjointed; givers of life and grim reapers combined. For many people, such contrasts make the sea beguiling. There's a romance in the fickleness of water. Like a temperamental lover, its unpredictable behaviour and constant contrast make it all the more seductive.To an extent, Brian Fagan's Beyond The Blue Horizon reads like the seas it seeks to describe: at once stirring and oddly flat. In it, Fagan sets out to cast light on the often overlooked early voyagers of our seas. The stories of Christopher Columbus and his ilk are well known, but the tales of ancient seafarers - from island-hopping Polynesians to the war-mongering Norse - have mostly been spared the limelight, until now.

The evolution of new dinosaur species may have surged due to the rise of the Rocky Mountains and the emergence of a prehistoric inner sea in North America, researchers say.Duck-billed and horned dinosaurs flourished in North America, reaching a peak about 75 million years ago, a time known as the Campanian. For instance, one Campanian region known as the Dinosaur Park formation in what is now Canada saw seven different duck-billed dinosaur species and five horned dinosaur species emerge. A comparable region known as the Hell Creek formation in the United States from the Maastrichtian, the time that led up to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs 65 million years ago, saw only a single duck-billed dinosaur species and maybe three horned dinosaur species at most.

A variety of public health issues plague the refugees from Burma living on the Thai border, not the least of which is drinking water contaminated by bacteria and pesticides. Yet few low-cost, sustainable and appropriate treatment technologies are available to people in rural and developing communities to ensure water safety.

LONDON: An Indian-origin scientist and his team claimed to have solved the puzzle of how giant stars, 300 times the size of the Sun were formed, laying the theory that they are the result of collisions of two stars into a single ultramassive star.

A new start-up company is hoping to ride the crowdsourcing wave to privately raise millions of dollars to fund scientific research, space exploration projects and other educational initiatives.The company, called Uwingu (which means "sky" in Swahili), was founded by a team of noted astronomers, planetary scientists, educators and other industry officials. The idea was to create new ways for people to receive funding for innovative projects beyond the existing grants infrastructure.

It's been a big week for NASA, but just because Curiosity is (incredibly) now safe on the surface of Mars doesn't mean that the agency gets to take a break. Instead, it's looking ahead. Far, far ahead, by funding 28 advanced technology concepts ranging from submarines for Europa to robots for the Moon.The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, is specifically designed to give a substantial amount of money to futuristic ideas that are so crazy that they'd never find funding anywhere else, but not so crazy as to be actually impossible. Or at least, that's what NASA would have us believe, but some of these things sound pretty wild, even to us.

As the Mars rover Curiosity approached Gale Crater earlier this week, Dr Pascal Lee was struck by the scenes from mission control. "There was this incredible atmosphere, even though the engineers were landing a robot," he says. "To me, it was a glimpse into the future: of that exciting moment when humans finally make the journey to the surface."Excited as he is by Nasa's most ambitious mission to the red planet yet, this planetary scientist and explorer has long harboured more radical ambitions. Lee is chairman and co-founder of the Mars Institute, an international non-governmental organisation based at the Nasa Ames Research Center in California, which has the goal of advancing human exploration of Mars.

Archaeologists excavating the tell of Beit Shemesh in the Judaean Hills near Jerusalem disclosed they had discovered an ancient stone seal that appeared to depict the Old Testament story of Samson's fight with a lion.The tiny seal, less than an inch in diameter, shows a large animal with a feline tail attacking a human figure.The seal was discovered at a level of excavation that dates it to roughly the 11th century BC, when Israelite tribes had moved into the area after Joshua's conquest of Canaan. It was a time when the Jews were led by ad hoc leaders known as judges, one of whom was Samson.

Every now and again I receive an email message I ignore after reading the subject line. I know I'm not alone in following this rule of thumb, but today I broke down and opened a message the subject line of which read "Scientists Declare: Nonhuman Animals Are Conscious". I honestly thought it was a joke, likely from one of my favorite newspapers, The Onion. However, it wasn't.

Paris, France (CNN) -- Beneath the streets of the City of Light lies a world draped in darkness and shrouded in silence. The tunnels are narrow, the ceilings are low and death is on display.The skulls and bones lining the walls, arranged in a macabre fashion, make up what is known as the Empire of the Dead -- the Catacombs of Paris.The catacombs snake below the city, a 321-kilometer (200-mile) network of old quarries, caves and tunnels.

LONDON: In some good news for burn victims and sufferers of skin-related conditions, replacement skin may soon be easily available as scientists have engineered artificial skin by mixing biomaterials.Researchers from the University of Toronto are growing centimetres of artificial skin at a time, a huge step-up from previous techniques which could grow just microns at a time, the Daily Mail reported.

A team of EPFL scientists has developed an algorithm that can identify the source of an epidemic or information circulating within a network, a method that could also be used to help with criminal investigations.Investigators are well aware of how difficult it is to trace an unlawful act to its source. The job was arguably easier with old, Mafia-style criminal organizations, as their hierarchical structures more or less resembled predictable family trees.

They were stunned to find their homes, gardens and cars littered with the smelly marine algae after a stormy weather spout swept up the debris from a beach 20 miles away.Weather experts believe the seaweed was picked up from Clevedon Beach in North Somerset by a twister during freak weather conditions on the coast.It was then carried through the air - before being deposited on the quiet street in Berkeley, near Cheltenham, Glos.Stunned engineer Dr Richard Overton, 55, and his wife Kay, collected an entire bucket full of the green slime from their front garden.

Engineers have created a robot that mimics a worm's movements - crawling along surfaces by contracting segments of its body.The technique allows the machine to be made of soft materials so it can squeeze through tight spaces and mould its shape to rough terrain.It can also absorb heavy blows without sustaining damage.

A mysterious blotch that appeared along the horizon in a photo from the surface of Mars stirred speculation about what it might be, as two hours later it was gone.One image from the Curiosity rover as it landed on the fourth planet from the sun showed a "faint but distinctive" image on the horizon, the Los Angeles Times reported. However, a subsequent batch of images sent from the unmanned rover two hours later showed no trace of the blotch.One theory put forth by space enthusiasts in the L.A. Times story is that Curiosity had somehow snapped a photo of part of the spacecraft that escorted the rover through the Martian atmosphere crash-landing a distance away.

A plan by Uruguay's leaders to turn the government into the nation's marijuana dealer has been presented to Congress.President Jose Mujica's entire cabinet signed up to the proposed law, which aims to take over an illegal marijuana trafficking business estimated to be worth 30 million to 40 million US dollars (£19 million to £25 million) a year.The law would allow the government to control marijuana imports, production, sale and distribution, creating a legal market for people to get pot without turning to riskier illegal drugs.

A team of archaeologists excavating a palace in the ancient city of Avaris, in Egypt, has made a gruesome discovery.The archaeologists have unearthed the skeletons of 16 human hands buried in four pits. Two of the pits, located in front of what is believed to be a throne room, hold one hand each. Two other pits, constructed at a slightly later time in an outer space of the palace, contain the 14 remaining hands.They are all right hands; there are no lefts.

Scientists have proposed a fresh idea in the long-running debate about how the Moon was formed.What is certain is that some sort of impact from another body freed material from the young Earth and the resulting debris coalesced into today's Moon.But the exact details of the impactor's size and speed have remained debatable.