Newsdesk Archive

Always reaching for the stars, NASA often finds itself mired in earthbound politics.Born in the Cold War, beset by tragedies and buoyed by triumphs, the $17.7 billion space agency once more faces debate in the post-space shuttle era. Once again, an administration's plans for NASA face congressional criticism, scrutiny from a blue-ribbon panel and demands for more funds that set parts of the agency against one another.

Archaeology is being revolutionized by remote-scanning techniques that use lasers to detect otherwise invisible ground features. The technology digitally extracts vegetation for a clean image of the earth's surface. Archaeologists in Germany have already discovered thousands of new sites.The Glauberg is a hot spot for archaeologists. For decades, researchers have been studying the hill in the central German state of Hesse, where people settled some 7,000 years ago.

A unique social division among a population of bottlenose dolphins in Australia's Moreton Bay has ended, according to a new study.The dolphins lived as two distinct groups that rarely interacted, one of which foraged on trawler bycatch.But scientists think that a ban on fishing boats from key areas has brought the two groups together.They believe these socially flexible mammals have united to hunt for new food sources.

The amount of physical space between people may influence how they react to each other in certain situations, new research suggests.British psychologists from the University of Lincoln argue that people may actually be hard-wired to "love thy neighbor."In conducting the study, the researchers analyzed the behavior of contestants in first-round episodes of the BBC quiz show, "The Weakest Link.".

A newly discovered statue of a curly-haired man gripping a spear and a sheath of wheat once guarded the upper citadel of an ancient kingdom's capital.The enormous sculpture, which is intact from about the waist up, stands almost 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, suggesting that its full height with legs would have been between 11 and 13 feet (3.5 to 4 m). Alongside the statue, archaeologists found another carving, a semicircular column base bearing the images of a sphinx and a winged bull.

The meteors, which appear when particles of space dust collide with our atmosphere, will be visible as bright streaks across the night sky eminating from the Perseus constellation to the north.The Perseid shower, which happens each August, began on Wednesday night but will reach its most active period on Saturday with thousands of meteors expected to be seen over the coming evenings.After midnight, as the planet turns towards the stream of dust left by the Swift-Tuttle comet, as many as 90 meteors could be visible each hour from areas unspoiled by light pollution.

A sample of a bizarre crystal once considered unnatural may have arrived on Earth 15,000 years ago, having hitched a ride on a meteorite, a new study suggests.The research strengthens the evidence that this strange "quasicrystal" is extraterrestrial in origin.The pattern of atoms in a quasicrystal falls short of the perfectly regular arrangement found in crystals. Until January, all known quasicrystals were man-made. "Many thought it had to be that way, because they thought quasicrystals are too delicate, too prone to crystallization, to form naturally," study researcher Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University told LiveScience at the time.

Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snails and sea cucumbers also use this mechanism, called peristalsis, to get around, and our own gastrointestinal tracts operate by a similar action, squeezing muscles along the esophagus to push food to the stomach.Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University have engineered a soft autonomous robot that moves via peristalsis, crawling across surfaces by contracting segments of its body, much like an earthworm. The robot, made almost entirely of soft materials, is remarkably resilient: Even when stepped upon or bludgeoned with a hammer, the robot is able to inch away, unscathed.

During the Neolithic Age (approximately 10000 BCE), early man evolved from hunter-gatherer to farmer and agriculturalist, living in larger, permanent settlements with a variety of domesticated animals and plant life. This transition brought about significant changes in terms of the economy, architecture, man's relationship to the environment, and more.Now Dr. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations has shed new light on this milestone in human evolution, demonstrating a direct connection between the development of an agricultural society and the development of woodworking tools.

Having 'discovered' the basic building block of the universe, scientists are now on the lookout for a hitherto unseen world of particles that could lead to a "theory of everything".CERN scientists, who announced last month that - almost certainly - the elusive Higgs boson had been spotted, are trawling through the vast volume of material produced in the Geneva research centre's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for signs of what they call SUSY.Formally known as Supersymmetry, SUSY is the idea that every one of the elementary particles that make up the universe and everything in it has an almost, but not quite identical, "superpartner".

A huge cluster of floating volcanic rocks covering almost 26,000 square kilometres (10,000 square miles) has been found drifting in the Pacific, the New Zealand navy said Friday.The strange phenomenon, which witnesses said resembled a polar ice shelf, was made up of lightweight pumice expelled from an underwater volcano, the navy said.An air force plane spotted the rocks on Thursday about 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) offshore from New Zealand and warned a navy warship that it was heading towards them.

For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet's surface, also exists on Mars."Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse of how the early Earth may have looked and may help us understand how plate tectonics began on Earth," said An Yin, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and the sole author of the new research.

Nasa's new Mars rover has returned its first 360-degree colour panorama from the surface of the Red Planet.The Curiosity robot used its wideangle science camera placed high up on a mast to acquire the frames.The low-resolution vista shows at centre the big mountain that lies in the middle of Gale Crater, the deep depression in which the rover landed.Curiosity's ultimate goal is to drive towards this peak - informally known as Mount Sharp - to study its rocks."This is a very low-resolution panorama," explained Mike Malin, the principal investigator on the rover's Mastcam cameras.

Small cylindrical clay objects discovered in recent decades in the north of Israel and Jordan Valley are believed to be the earliest matches, dating back some 8,400 years, Israeli archaeologists say.Until recently the rods - some 10 centimeters long and 1 centimeter thick - were assumed to be phallus-like ritual artifacts. But a study led by archaeologist Professor Naama Goren-Inbar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests they are the earliest fire-lighting devices discovered so far.

Researchers in Canada's western Arctic have found evidence of a crater that formed when a huge meteorite slammed into Earth millions of years ago.Measuring about 15 miles (25 kilometers) across, the formation was named the Prince Albert impact crater after the peninsula where it was discovered. Researchers don't know exactly when it was created, but evidence suggests the crater is between 130 million and 350 million years old, according to a statement from the University of Saskatchewan.

The NASA Curiosity team had to overcome many obstacles to land their robot safely on the surface of the Red Planet. But one obstacle they were probably not expecting to encounter was an accusation of copyright infringement.The American space agency has been posting videos related to the Curiosity mission on its official YouTube page. But the Motherboard blog noticed that one of the videos had disappeared. In its place was the message "This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.".

Double rainbows had their fifteen minutes of fame on the Internet. Now get ready for their even more mysterious cousins: twinned rainbows. New research has suggested an explanation for these exotic shows of color.Rainbows are known to form when sunlight interacts with tiny water drops in the atmosphere. As sunlight gets both reflected and refracted within the drops, it gets separated into its basic color components. Still, all the secrets of the more complex behavior of rainbows have long remained a puzzle.

Being born by Ceasarian section may have a lasting effect on the brain, at least in mice, according to a new study.In the study, mice born by a vaginal birth produced a brain protein called UCP2, which is important for the development of the hippocampus, a brain area responsible for short- and long-term memory.However, in mice born by C-section, production of UCP2 was impaired, and these mice had less of this protein in their brains compared to vaginally-born mice, said study researcher Tamas Horvath, chair of the department of comparative medicine at Yale School of Medicine.

When we think about the smartest animals, chimpanzees are usually the first to come to mind. Experiments show that they can memorize sequences of numbers, learn the meaning of words and associate particular voices with specific faces. Crucially, previous studies have found that chimps and other apes are the only non-human animals capable of making abstract logical inferences based on cues from their environment.A new experiment, though, might make us recognize that an entirely different species belongs in this exclusive group: the African grey parrot.

Innovative problem solving requires trying many different solutions. That's true for humans, and now Michigan State University researchers show that it's true for hyenas, too.The study, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, presented steel puzzle boxes with raw meat inside to wild spotted hyenas in Kenya. To get the meat, the hyenas had to slide open a bolt latch. Even though most of the animals had many opportunities to open the box, only nine out of 62 hyenas succeeded. The successful hyenas tried more solutions, including biting, flipping or pushing the box, than the ones that failed, said MSU zoology graduate student Sarah Benson-Amram.

The stereotypical view of how Neolithic men and women lived is misleading according to Dr. Karina Croucher, who has studied the buried remains of people living between 7,500 and 10,000 years ago across the Middle East.One of the conclusions she reaches in her new book Death and Dying in Neolithic Near East is that it was normal in early Neolithic society for men and women to show compassion towards each other, and gender was not so clearly defined as it is today.Croucher argues that it is a male bias in archaeology that has distorted our understanding of how ancient peoples lived within a sedentary society.

Coping with climate change presents a number of challenges, but we may be able to get some hints from our ancestors.A study of tools from an archaeological site outside Jerusalem provides new information about land use patterns at the times of extreme climate change that may have helped the population adapt to their changing environment. The full results are published Aug. 8 in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

Their bones were buried deep within the Jaguar Paw Temple in the ancient Maya city of El Mirador, Guatemala. Perhaps ritually sacrificed, possibly eaten, seven turkeys met their untimely ends more than 2000 years ago and more than 400 miles from their native range in Central Mexico. Now, in addition to providing clues about ancient Maya culture and trade, their skeletons may help resolve another mystery: When were the turkeys we eat today first domesticated?

Mexican archaeologists say they have found an unprecedented human burial in which the skeleton of a young woman is surrounded by piles of 1,789 human bones in Mexico City's Templo Mayor.Researchers found the burial about five metres (15ft) below the surface, next to the remains of what may have been a sacred tree at one edge of the plaza, the most sacred site of the Aztec capital.The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the find was the first of its kind, noting the Aztecs were not known to use mass sacrifice or the reburial of bones for the interment of a member of the ruling class.

Fossils from Northern Kenya show that a new species of human lived two million years ago, researchers say.The discoveries suggests that at least three distinct species of humans co-existed in Africa.The research adds to a growing body of evidence that runs counter to the popular perception that there was a linear evolution from monkey to ape to modern human.The research has been published in the journal Nature.

CHARSADDA: When a Pakistani family dispute over land degenerated into cold-blooded murder, Zaman Khan was quickly in over his head.As cousins killed cousins, he borrowed more than $18,500 to buy guns, ammunition and guards. But soon debtors were demanding repayment, leaving him so depressed he contemplated suicide. Then a friend came up with an idea.He took Khan to a site in northwest Pakistan which dates back to the ancient Gandhara civilisation where they dug up 18 pieces of statue, selling them to market traders for two million rupees ($20,700).

Sir Bernard Lovell, a pioneer in radar and radio telescopes from the days when the technology helped save Britain in World War II until the beginning of the space age, died Monday at his home in Swettenham Village, England. He was 98.His son, Bryan, confirmed the death.Mr. Lovell, who became widely known through his books, lectures and BBC television appearances, was especially renowned for creating the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, the only antenna that could track rockets in space in the early years of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The first controlled studies of extremely hot, dense matter have overthrown the widely accepted 50-year-old model used to explain how ions influence each other's behavior in a dense plasma. The results should benefit a wide range of fields, from research aimed at tapping nuclear fusion as an energy source to understanding the inner workings of stars.The study also demonstrates the unique capabilities of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. While researchers have created extremely hot and dense plasmas before, LCLS allows them to measure the detailed properties of these states and test a fundamental class of plasma physics for the first time ever.

Invisible to the human eye, cryptotephra is a fine volcanic glass that is blasted out of erupting volcanoes along with ash. It leaves behind a hidden layer, in the earth, which has now been detected, giving clues about why the Neanderthals died out.About 40,000 years ago, a layer of cryptotephra particles carpeted a huge area of Central and Eastern Europe after a massive volcanic eruption in Italy called the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI). This eruption, and the resulting environmental and climatic disruption, has been suggested as a factor in the extinction of the Neanderthals.

The lightning re-conquest of France by the wolf has provoked a civil war within French Greens, pitting one of the country's most renowned campaigners against environmentalists, some of whom are demanding his ousting from the movement.Wolves have been seen this summer for the first time since the 1920s in the sheep-rearing area in Lozère in the southern Auvergne, the home of Roquefort cheese.José Bové , sheep farmer-turned-environmental campaigner, has called publicly for the wolves to be shot, provoking protest from other French Greens, who point out that the grey wolf is a protected by European law. One wildlife protection group has filed a legal complaint against Mr Bové for "inciting the destruction of an endangered species".

THERE were explosions of outrage throughout the Church of England yesterday after it emerged that the Bishop of Durham, Dr David Jenkins, had made two perfectly orthodox statements.Dr Jenkins denied that sinners were tortured for all eternity in hell, and that descriptions of the Second Coming should not be taken literally. As the controversy intensified, he described as 'psychopathic' the imagery of the book of Revelations, in which the wicked are thrown into a lake of fire and 'tormented night and day for ever and ever'. Instead, he argued in a series of media interviews, that those who turn away from God at the end of time will be annihilated, rather than tortured; and the Second Coming would be 'God's general clear up and gather up of everything worthwhile in human history'.

The 1947 UFO controversy of Roswell, N.M. is like a bad penny: It keeps turning up.The legend, rehashed by conspiracy theorists in countless documentaries, revolves around allegations that an unusual object fell from the sky -- an object so bizarre that the U.S. Air Force issued a press release that a flying saucer had crashed.That story was quickly recanted, creating what would become one of the greatest urban legends in American history.Until now, most debunkers doubted that there was even one crash. Now, in an exclusive interview, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard French told The Huffington Post that there were actually two crashes.

Inside a third-floor office a few blocks from the hudson river in yonkers, N.Y., a small biotechnology company called ContraFect prepares to test a remarkable new way to kill bacteria in humans. Antibiotics, after many years of use and overuse, have lost their edge against rapidly evolving bacteria, with everything from staph infections to tuberculosis becoming more devastating, deadly and difficult to treat. Whereas traditional antibiotics have mostly been derived from chemicals produced by soil bacteria and fungi, ContraFect has found an alternative in bacteriophages: viruses that infect bacteria and hijack their internal machinery. In nature, phages produce enzymes called lysins, causing the bacteria fall to pieces and new phages to tumble out by the hundreds. ContraFect believes it can harness these lysins to treat bacterial infections in humans.

Mexican archaeologists have found an unprecedented human burial in which the skeleton of a young woman is surrounded by piles of 1,789 human bones.Researchers found the burial about five meters (15 feet) below the surface in Mexico City's Templo Mayor. It was discovered next to the remains of what may have been a "sacred tree" at one edge of the plaza, the most sacred site of the Aztec capital.The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the find was the first of its kind, noting the Aztecs were not known to use mass sacrifice or the reburial of bones as the customary ways to accompany the interment of a member of the ruling class.

The largest ever three dimensional map of galaxies and black holes was released by astronomers today. It will help explain the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that they know makes up 96 percent of the universe.The map is the creation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) an international project mapping the Milky Way in which a team from the University of Portsmouth is the only UK institution. Early last year, the SDSS-III released the largest-ever image of the sky and astronomers have used new data to expand this image into a full three-dimensional map.Data Release 9 (DR9) includes images of 200 million galaxies and spectra of 1.35 million galaxies...

I asked materialist scientist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Magic of Reality, if he would be willing to experiment with psychedelics and perhaps challenge his own concept of what is real. His answer is interesting and is on my Youtube channel here: http://youtu.be/5UwvaSLbIgc-Graham

Researchers have detected a solar system 10,000 light years away that is very much like our own, with planets that have aligned orbits close to a parent star.Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California at Santa Cruz discovered the faraway system by examining data from NASA's Kepler space telescope.The centre of this mirror system is a massive, bright star named Kepler-30, which operates much like our sun.

Fiona McLaren, 59, had kept an old painting in her Scottish farmhouse for decades. She reportedly didn't think much of the painting, which had been given to her as a gift by her father. But after she finally decided to have the painting appraised, some experts are speculating that it may in fact be a 500-year-old painting by Leonardo da Vinci and potentially worth more than $150 million."I showed it to him [auctioneer Harry Robertson] and he was staggered, speechless save for a sigh of exclamation," said Ms. McLaren, according to The People.

The UK's biggest book retailer Amazon now sells more ebooks than hardbacks and paperbacks combined, the company has said.For every 100 print books sold through the site, Amazon said it sold 114 titles for its Kindle e-reader device.It added that the average Kindle owner bought up to four times more books than they did before owning the device.

Elephants' deepest calls can thunder up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) away. Now, researchers have learned for the first time how the massive animals produce these sounds.It turns out that they do it in the same way that humans talk, pushing air through their vocal cords to make them vibrate. Elephants can go much lower than humans, however, because their vocal cords are eight times longer."The sounds the elephants make are off the piano keyboard," said study researcher Christian Herbst, a voice scientist at the University of Vienna, Austria. In fact, at less than 20 hertz in frequency, the main components of these ultra-deep calls aren't detectable to the human ear.

As hydrofracturing, also known as fracking, has become more widespread, it has also grown more controversial.Beyond groundwater pollution and environmental contamination, the multi-step process of extracting natural gas from the Earth by injecting liquids deep underground has raised concerns that parts of the process may be triggering earthquakes.In fact, found a new study, small earthquakes are more common than expected near wells that are used for injecting waste fluids from fracking, as well as from other processes, including oil extraction and geothermal energy production.

Tree loss in areas with elephants is up to six times higher than in regions without the voracious pachyderms, suggests a new aerial survey.Humans have essentially engineered the problem by relocating, either directly or indirectly, pachyderm populations. According to the survey, described in the journal Ecology Letters, elephants prefer toppling trees in the 16- to 30-foot range, with annual losses of up to 20 percent in these height classes.A strong elephant can topple over a tree in mere seconds. If you jump to around the 1:45 mark in the video below, you can see a mother elephant knocking over a tree so that her calves can enjoy the leaves and fruit.

Previously unseen passages from Charles Dickens's manuscripts are being revealed for the first time, thanks to digital technology which removes his crossings-out and corrections.The new technique allows researchers to discover how the author shaped and reshaped his prose.The Victoria & Albert Museum pilot study focused on his Christmas story, The Chimes, using technology developed by Ian Christie-Miller, a former visiting research fellow at London University. Although no dramatic revelations emerged from deletions in that short story, scholars are excited by the technology's potential on novels such as Bleak House.

The Sun wanted to let us know there was action going on in other places in the Solar System besides Mars.A huge, dark-colored filament stretched across nearly half the solar face on August 5th.Estimates are this filament was about 800,000 km in length! Wow!Paul Andrew took six images to create a composite, full image of the Sun, and below is an 11-panel mosaic by Leonard Mercer from Malta to show the surrounding region with the main sunspots 1535, 1538, 1540 present.

Thousands of humans weren't the only ones with eyes trained on NASA's newest Mars rover last night: one of the robot's orbiting relatives captured this lucky shot as Curiosity descended onto the Red Planet.The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was in position to observe Curiosity as it plunged through the Martian atmosphere during its harrowing Entry, Descent and Landing phase, also called the "7 minutes of terror".Seen about a minute before touchdown, Curiosity is still tucked into its backshell, part of the larger spacecraft that encased the rover during its roughly eight-month trek from Earth to Mars.

Two unidentified, possible pyramid complexes have been located with satellite imagery from Google Earth.One of the complex sites contains a distinct, four-sided, truncated, pyramidal shape that is approximately 140 feet in width. This site contains three smaller mounds in a very clear formation, similar to the diagonal alignment of the Giza Plateau pyramids.The second possible site contains four mounds with a larger, triangular-shaped plateau. The two larger mounds at this site are approximately 250 feet in width, with two smaller mounds approximately 100 feet in width. This site complex is arranged in a very clear formation with the large plateau, or butte, nearby in a triangular shape with a width of approximately 600 feet.

Washington: US weather has been lousy this year, with droughts, heat and killer storms. But a solar superstorm could be far worse.A monster blast of geomagnetic particles from the sun could destroy 300 or more of the 2,100 high-voltage transformers that are the backbone of the US electric grid, according to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Even a few hundred destroyed transformers could disable the entire interconnected system.There is impetus for a group of federal agencies to look for ways to prepare for such a storm this year as the sun moves into an active period called solar maximum, expected to peak in 2013.

Soldiers have unearthed 27 bodies during an archaeological dig on Salisbury Plain.Troops from The Rifles, injured in Afghanistan, were excavating the 6th Century burial site at Barrow Clump, as part of a programme of rehabilitation.The bodies, including Anglo-Saxon warriors, had been buried with a range of personal possessions.Rifleman Mike Kelly said: "As a modern day warrior, unearthing the remains... fills me with overwhelming respect.".

There are many valid reasons to be a vegetarian (see: the environment, your health, and the dismal state of the meat industry, for starters). But what if you go vegetarian to help disguise and aid an eating disorder?New research suggests a large percentage of women with eating disorders may be doing just that.Women suffering from eating disorders are four times more likely to be vegetarian than women without eating disorders, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

A new genetic map paints a comprehensive picture of the 2,000 or so years in which different Jewish groups migrated across the globe, with some becoming genetically isolated units while others seemed to mix and mingle more.The new findings allow researchers to trace the diaspora, or the historical migration, of the Jews, which began in the sixth century B.C. when the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah. Some Jews remained in Judah under Babylonian rule, while others fled to Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. Jewish migrations have continued into the present day.

Cancer-busting chemotherapy can cause damage to healthy cells which triggers them to secrete a protein that sustains tumour growth and resistance to further treatment, a study said Sunday.Researchers in the United States made the "completely unexpected" finding while seeking to explain why cancer cells are so resilient inside the human body when they are easy to kill in the lab.

An international collaboration led by physicists of the University of Vienna shines new light on the question of the resources required for achieving quantum information processing. The scientists demonstrate that less demanding resources, which are easier to prepare and to control, can be used for quantum-enhanced technologies. In the experiment, which is published in Nature Physics, the researchers achieve remote quantum state preparation without requiring entanglement as a resource.A fundamental characteristic of quantum physics is the fact that two or more particles can exhibit correlations stronger than classically allowed. This unique characteristic applies particularly to quantum entanglement...

The rise of the first complex life depended on vital metals brought up to the Earth's surface from far below in vast granite deposits, a new study argues.Metals like copper, zinc and molybdenum are essential ingredients for certain enzymes and proteins. These are needed for life forms with a complex internal structure, known as eukaryotes, to evolve. Without these metals the history of life could have been very different; plants and animals made of many cells could have taken hundreds of millions more years to develop, if they appeared at all.

Turkmenistan is allocating tens of millions of dollars to plant trees in a region neighbouring the stricken Aral Sea, state newspaper Neutral Turkmenistan said Tuesday."A project has been developed to target environmental problems in the Aral Sea zone, which entails planting greenery over 20,000 hectares on the eastern bank of the Sarygamysh lake," the newspaper said.

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has fallen again in the past 12 months, according to preliminary data published by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.The reduction follows the passing of Brazil's Forest Code in April, which green campaigners say weakened forest protection measurements, despite a partial veto by president Dilma Rouseff of the most controversial elements.Data from satellite images shows a 23% reduction in deforestation from August 2011 to July 2012 against the previous year, with 2,049 sq km being cleared compared with 2,679 sq km in the previous 12 months.

A University of California at Riverside (UCR) philosopher will be placed in charge of a new project analyzing the concept of immortality after receiving the largest grant ever presented to a humanities professor at the school, various media outlets reported last week.According to a July 31 UCR press release announcing the grant, the university announced that philosopher John Martin Fischer would oversee research on all aspects of immortality, including near-death experiences and the impact that believing in life-after-death has on human behavior.

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) -- A hundred meters (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 legendary 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 is probably the closest Australia has come to scrambling fighter jets to intercept a UFO.Documents that have just become available under the 30-year rule at the National Archives of Australia reveal how two RAAF Mirage jets were placed on the second highest level of alert to determine the cause of unidentified radar contacts seen on screens at Mascot.The ''X Files'' viewed in Canberra also give details of other unexplained sightings, some of which are supported by witness statements to police.

Rumors are running wild that a real-life Jurassic Park is in the works, but after the man behind the project has denied the claims, only one question remains: Will life find a way?Australian billionaire Clive Palmer has reportedly been discussing plans to make a theme park based on the 1993 film "Jurassic Park" that would feature real-life genetically cloned dinosaurs, the Gold Coast Bulletin reports (h/t The Daily Mail). The idea may seem outlandish, but it wouldn't be the first time the man worth an estimated $8 billion made some larger-than-life dioramas; he's already commissioned a replica of the Titanic from a Chinese shipbuilder that's slated to be done by 2016.

Using sheep to alert shepherds of an imminent wolf attack by text message might sound fanciful, but testing is already under way in Switzerland where the predator appears to be back."It's the first time that such a system has been tried outdoors," said biologist Jean-Marc Landry, who took part in testing on a Swiss meadow this week.In the trial, reported by the country's news agency ATS, around 10 sheep were each equipped with a heart monitor before being targeted by a pair of Wolfdogs -- both of which were muzzled.

Until recently, a human rabies infection was considered inescapably fatal. But a teenage girl who defied this death sentence eight years ago has had doctors and scientists debating how she survived ever since. And now a surprising report from remote Amazonia is adding to the mystery.In our feature for Wired this month, we explore the controversy over the Milwaukee Protocol: an experimental treatment regimen for rabies that may have saved the teenage girl in 2004 and five more patients since then. But many top rabies scientists still doubt whether the treatment method, which involves inducing a medical coma, is the best way to treat rabies patients.Central to their doubts is the question of whether some humans might well have been surviving rabies without treatment all along. No other disease kills every single human it afflicts, after all. And studies in dogs and bats have shown that those rabies carriers, who almost always die from the infection, nevertheless will occasionally survive.

More than half of the counties in the United States have been designated as disaster areas mainly because of the ongoing drought that has been ravaging the nation, officials announced Wednesday.Disaster designations were signed for 218 more counties in 12 states, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced. That brings this year's total to 1,584 counties in 32 states; more than 90% of those designations are due to drought conditions.

Whether you're gay, straight or somewhere else on the spectrum, the truth of who attracts you could be in your eyes.Pupil dilation is an accurate indicator of sexual orientation, a new study finds. When people look at erotic images and become aroused, their pupils open up in an unconscious reaction that could be used to study orientation and arousal without invasive genital measurements.

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 heat wave is not proof of global warming, but it does seem to help convince people that global warming is real, survey data indicates.On the flip side, surveys show cool temperatures can make Americans less convinced there is "solid evidence" the planet is heating up.The new study based on five national surveys of American adults sponsored by the Pew Research Center in June, July and August 2006, January 2007 and April 2008. Respondents were asked: "From what you've read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not?.

When Nasa's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) lands its rover, Curiosity, on Mars on Monday it will be the latest in a series of missions to the red planet that began more than three decades ago. The MSL mission isn't a search for life. Curiosity will sniff for chemicals that could be relevant to life, but it won't be looking for biological organisms as such.Why is this? Given the huge public interest in life on Mars, why doesn't Nasa just go and look for it directly?

A new twist in the theory of how the moon formed claims Earth was the victim of a cosmic hit and run, and the offender may still be out there.Most scientists believe a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The impact destroyed the impactor, causing most of its core to sink and merge with the Earth's core, while lighter materials were blasted into orbit to form the Moon.However isotopic oxygen ratios on the lunar surface are identical to those on Earth, implying they came from the same source and not a planetary collision.

Scientists drilling deep into the edge of modern Antarctica have pulled up proof that palm trees once grew there.Analyses of pollen and spores and the remains of tiny creatures have given a climatic picture of the early Eocene period, about 53 million years ago.The study in Nature suggests Antarctic winter temperatures exceeded 10C, while summers may have reached 25C.Better knowledge of past "greenhouse" conditions will enhance guesses about the effects of increasing CO2 today.

A new topographical mapping method, based on fractals, is revealing new information about ancient activity at pyramid sites in EgyptSome 4500 years ago King Senefru founded the 4th Dynasty and set off building a pyramid to preserve his body for the afterlife and eternity. After a failed attempt, Senefru succeeded in building the first ever complete pyramid in Dahshour area, 40 kilometres south of Cairo.Nature subsequently erased all traces of ancient human activity in Dahshour; even archaeological excavations revealed very little of what went on at the Dahshour site during the construction of the Bent and Red pyramids.

Big Brother is watching. No kidding. And the warning is coming from none other than Google, which says government spies may be spying on you. Some believe the Google announcement may be related to the recent discovery of the data-mining virus named "Flame." In a June 3 New York Times article, Andrew Kramer and Nicole Perlroth write:"When Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Europe's largest antivirus company, discovered the Flame virus that is afflicting computers in Iran and the Middle East, he recognized it as a technologically sophisticated virus that only a government could create.He also recognized that the virus, which he compares to the Stuxnet virus built by programmers employed by the United States and Israel...

The National Museum of Afghanistan has seen the return of 843 heritage objects including items recovered in 3 separate seizures of smuggled artefacts by the UK Border Force and another group from other investigations by the Art and Antiques Unit of the Metropolitan Police.The precious cargo, weighing just over two tonnes, left RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire on the 12 July 2012 after the British Museum and the Royal Air Force worked together to make the historic repatriation possible.Travelling onboard a C17 transport aircraft, the material was first transported to Camp Bastion, the main military base in Helmand. After a short stop, it took off again on the second leg of the journey, on a C130 Hercules aircraft, to Kabul.

This week at the London Olympics, a German horse called Sam rode off with the gold in the individual equestrian eventing final. His performance was stellar, and now we're left with a new question: Will breeders clone Sam in an attempt to re-create his ride?In July 2012 the Féderation Equestre Internationale (FEI) lifted a ban on cloned horses and their progeny competing in the Olympic Games. Deep-pocketed breeders can now try their hand at copying a favorite horse to take a second shot at glory. But cloning isn't easy, it isn't cheap, and there are no guarantees that the clone will match the talent of the original.

Two of three key signs of changes expected to occur at the boundary of interstellar space have changed faster than at any other time in the last seven years, according to new data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft.For the last seven years, Voyager 1 has been exploring the outer layer of the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. In one day, on July 28, data from Voyager 1's cosmic ray instrument showed the level of high-energy cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system jumped by five percent. During the last half of that same day, the level of lower-energy particles originating from inside our solar system dropped by half. However, in three days, the levels had recovered to near their previous levels.

Excitement among space enthusiasts is growing as NASA prepares to land its Mars Science Laboratory robot Curiosity on the red planet this weekend.The rover is expected to touch down on Mars at 1:31 a.m. ET Monday, and NASA will begin its coverage of the event at 11:30 p.m. ET Sunday.It will be streaming the landing live from mission control at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Nasa says the big robot rover it is sending to Mars looks in excellent shape for its Monday (GMT) landing.The vehicle, known as Curiosity, was launched from Earth in November last year and is now nearing the end of a 570-million-km journey across space.To reach its intended touch-down zone in a deep equatorial crater, the machine must enter the atmosphere at a very precise point on the sky.Engineers told reporters on Thursday that they were close to a bulls-eye.

John Grotzinger is leading a march up a mountain near Death Valley, the rocks around him streaked red, brown and purple-gray.The geologist has often brought staff members up here, away from the blinking control rooms and glaring light of test beds at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory about 250 miles to the southwest.Engineers who normally fiddle with electronics will smash rocks with geologists' hammers. Planetary scientists will practice tracking layers of rock to piece together the story of the land.

A surveillance device that uses WiFi radio waves has been devised to see through walls to detect, in military and surveillance parlance, moving personnel targets. The device serves as a radar prototype designed by two UK scientists at the University College London (UCL). The scientists devised the radar prototype as a way to track Wi-Fi signals in order to spy through walls. Their device identifies frequency changes to detect the moving objects. An important feature of their work is that since the device itself does not emit radio waves, it cannot be detected; it operates in stealth.

The US military is developing micro drones, according to RT.com.Drones come in all shapes and sizes. Some rain hellfire from the sky, others buzz around your ear, masquerading as mosquitos.Back in 2007 the Telegraph reported the US had been accused of "secretly developing robotic insect spies." Government agencies admitted nothing at the time, but they're not gainsaying now.

A surveillance device that uses WiFi radio waves has been devised to see through wHarvard University researchers' review of fluoride/brain studies concludes "our results support the possibility of adverse effects of fluoride exposures on children's neurodevelopment." It was published online July 20 in Environmental Health Perspectives, a US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' journal (1), reports the NYS Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation, Inc. (NYSCOF)"The children in high fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ than those who lived in low fluoride areas," write Choi et al.

THE suggestion would be considered unbelievable - if it involved anyone other than Clive Palmer.The controversial billionaire is rumoured to be planning to clone a dinosaur from DNA so he can set it free in a Jurassic Park-style area at his new Palmer Resort in Coolum.Mr Palmer has, apparently, been in deep discussion with the people who successfully cloned Dolly the sheep to bring his dinosaur vision to life.

A tiny seal has been uncovered that could be the first archaeological evidence of Samson, the Biblical slayer of Philistines.Archaeologists discovered the ancient artifact while excavating the tell of Beit Shemesh in the Judaean Hills near Jerusalem, Israel.It appears to depict the Old Testament story of Samson, whose might was undone by his lust for the temptress Delilah, and his fight with a lion.The seal, which measures less than an inch in diameter, shows a large animal with a feline tail attacking a human figure.

Nessie hunter George Edwards waited 26 years for this moment - and he now believes he has the best picture ever taken of the Loch Ness monster.He spends his life on the loch - around 60 hours a week - taking tourists out on his boat Nessie Hunter IV, and has led numerous Nessie hunts over the years.But this image is the one that's convinced him that there really is a monster or monsters - out there. It shows a mysterious dark hump moving in the water towards Urquhart Castle.

Overabundant skepticism about genetic manipulation in sports may be as dangerous as the hype that heralded its arrival.After Ye Shiwen shocked the Olympics with her performance in the 400 meter individual medley, swimming the last 50 meters faster than Ryan Lochte, the men's champion in the event, a long-time American coach ominously hinted that perhaps a new kind of performance enhancement had arrived on the athletic scene."If there is something unusual going on in terms of genetic manipulation or something else, I would suspect over eight years science will move fast enough to catch it," John Leonard, the American executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, said.

In a series of Reviews and Perspectives currently featured in Science, the golden standard by which all hopeful science journals should measure themselves, expert astronomers are holding court over the accepted truths and credible speculations in regards to everything we know about black holes. Here's why all the scientific dogma we've been accumulating about them over the last forty years or so is about to be rocked to the core.Some of the conversation between the leading astrophysicists concerned itself with what they believe would happen if two black holes were ever to collide (it wouldn't be pretty, but it would probably be beautiful to look at).

Remember the hype surrounding Prometheus ahead of its release two months ago, and how quickly that faded when people realized it was yet another generic Hollywood sci-fi movie? Well, Cracked.com has revealed that every cliche and plot device we've grown to love and/or hate--and love to hate--came from one novel.Edison's Conquest of Mars, written in 1898 by American author and astronomer Garrett P. Serviss, is that novel. It was an unauthorized "sequel" to H. G. Wells' seminal War of the Worlds--meaning it was written to cash in on the success of another piece of work, without consent.

Maybe it's time fish use sunblock. A new study has found the first skin cancers in wild fish, specifically in coral, bar-cheeked, and blue spotted trout swimming on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The lesions and dark patches are a scalier version of what melanomas look like on humans, but it's unclear whether they make the animals unsafe to eat.

The largest-ever experiment in space has reported the collection of some 18 billion "cosmic ray" events that may help unravel the Universe's mysteries.The data haul is far greater than the total number of cosmic rays recorded in a full century of looking to date.Run from a centre at Cern, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aims to spot dark matter and exotic antimatter.The astronauts who installed it on the space station in 2011 are in Geneva to see an update on how it is performing.

We've found small black holes and we've found really, really big black holes. But what about the "inbetweener" black holes?The very existence of this class of black hole is disputed, but a Japanese group of astronomers have found the potential locations of three intermediate black hole (IMBH) candidates inside previously unknown star clusters near the center of the Milky Way.But what are IMBHs and why are they so important?

Human diversity in Africa is greater than any place else on Earth. Differing food sources, geographies, diseases and climates offered many targets for natural selection to exert powerful forces on Africans to change and adapt to their local environments. The individuals who adapted best were the most likely to reproduce and pass on their genomes to the generations who followed.

A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University has uncovered a hoard of real-life buried treasure at the Crusader castle of Arsur (also known as Apollonia), a stronghold located between the ancient ports of Jaffa and Caesarea, in use from 1241 to its destruction in 1265. The hoard, comprised of 108 gold coins, mostly dinars dated to the Fatimid Period (ca. 900 to 1100 AD), was discovered in a pot by a university student. The coins bear the names of sultans and blessings, and usually include a date and a mint name that indicates where a coin was struck.

About 40,000 years ago, a huge volcanic eruption west of what is now Naples, Italy, showered ash over much of central and Eastern Europe. Some researchers have suggested that this super-eruption, combined with a sharp cold spell that hit the Northern Hemisphere at the same time, created a "volcanic winter" that did in the Neandertals. But a new study of microscopic particles of volcanic glass left behind by the explosion concludes that the eruption happened after the Neandertals were already mostly gone, putting the blame for their extinction on competition with modern humans.

Australian scientists said Wednesday cavers had stumbled upon a vast network of tunnels containing fossils that could offer key insights into species' adaptation to climate change.The limestone caves in Australia's far north contained what University of Queensland paleontologist Gilbert Price described as a "fossil goldmine" of species ranging from minute rodents and frogs to giant kangaroos.

New research suggests that sneezing is the body's natural reboot and that patients with disorders of the nose such as sinusitis can't reboot, explaining why they sneeze more often than others.Who would have thought that our noses and Microsoft Windows' infamous blue screen of death could have something in common? But that's the case being made by a new research report appearing online in The FASEB Journal. Specifically, scientists now know exactly why we sneeze, what sneezing should accomplish, and what happens when sneezing does not work properly.

A group of Peruvians thought to have survived untreated rabies infection have bucked the notion that the virus is universally lethal to humans.A team led by Amy Gilbert of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in collaboration with the Peruvian Ministry of Health, travelled to two communities in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon. Outbreaks of rabies infection caused by bites from vampire bats have occurred regularly in Peru over the past couple of decades.

Sometimes, history really does seem to repeat itself. After the US Civil War, for example, a wave of urban violence fuelled by ethnic and class resentment swept across the country, peaking in about 1870. Internal strife spiked again in around 1920, when race riots, workers' strikes and a surge of anti-Communist feeling led many people to think that revolution was imminent. And in around 1970, unrest crested once more, with violent student demonstrations, political assassinations, riots and terrorism.

Early on Monday morning, Nasa's Curiosity rover will attempt a hazardous landing on the Martian surface. It will take seven minutes from the capsule hitting the top of the atmosphere at six kilometres per second to the van-sized vehicle being placed gently on the ground.A heat shield to withstand heating to 1,600C, the largest and strongest supersonic parachute yet built, and finally a new piece of kit called the Sky Crane will all be used.

Experts have long thought cacao beans and pods were mainly used in pre-Hispanic cultures as a beverage, made either by crushing the beans and mixing them with liquids or fermenting the pulp that surrounds the beans in the pod. Such a drink was believed to have been reserved for the elite.But the discovery announced this week by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History expands the envelope of how chocolate may have been used in ancient Mexico.

Modern humans were likely a greater threat to the Neanderthals than major natural events like extreme cold weather or volcanoes, according to British-led research released on Monday.The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was based on an analysis of volcanic ash that showed the largest known eruption in Europe came after traces of the Neanderthals had largely disappeared.

There's enough DNA in the human body to stretch from the sun to Pluto and back. But don't confuse DNA with your genes, says writer Sam Kean."They are sort of conflated in most people's minds today but they really are distinct things," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Genes are like the story and DNA is the language that the story is written in."In The Violinist's Thumb, Kean goes inside our genetic code, looking at the stories written by the fundamental building blocks within us. The book explains things like why some people can't handle drinking coffee and why some human babies are born with tails. It also delves into the history and science of the story of DNA, a nucleic acid which contains the genetic instructions that form the basis for all living organisms.