Newsdesk Archive
With typical flair, Sir Richard Branson today announced that he and his children will be the first passengers when the Virgin Galactic space tourism programme begins.Virgin boss Sir Richard and son Sam and daughter Holly are expected to be flying 60 miles up into space on the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) aircraft by the end of next year.Today, Sir Richard joined around 120 other tourists who have signed up for the two-hour flights, at 200,000 US dollars (£128,000) a trip.
Two new feature articles are now up, by Kashyap Vasavada, Emeritus Prof. of Physics at Indiana Purdue University.1- Science, Creation and Hinduism2- Modern Physics and Hindu PhilosophyOpening paragraph of article 1:Recently there has been a resurgence of discussions on teaching creationism in science classes as a result of the Indiana senate bill. I would like to emphasize strongly that science teachers should not be required to teach these ideas in science classes. Such ideas have not met rigorous standards of scientific research. Let scientists decide what should be taught in science classes. Just saying that God created everything hardly explains anything. Everyone is welcome to challenge a scientific model, but then one has to provide an alternate model which explains the same or more data in a better way. People happily use results of scientific progress, such as technological products, drugs and medical procedures. Then they should also accept conclusions that follow from the scientific method. In science, you cannot pick and choose only the conclusions that are consistent with your beliefs. In addition, school children are not mature enough to understand the difference between rigorously established scientific models and individual beliefs. I am writing this as a scientist and a longtime member of the Hindu temple of central Indiana who believes that religion has a very important place in life, but it is not in the science classroom.
Australian scientists have found that two different vaccines used to control an infectious disease in chickens can recombine to create new lethal virus strains.The research, to be published today in the journal Science, has prompted authorities to review vaccine use in animals.But the scientists, from the University of Melbourne, say the findings are not only important for vaccines in chickens, but also for any vaccine which might be able to multiply - including those used in humans.
Current research from the University of Luxembourg, found that when participants were asked to select gift products after they had played a violent video game, inexperienced players selected more hygienic products, such as shower gel, toothpaste and deodorant, compared to those who played violent video games more often. Inexperienced players also felt higher moral distress from playing violent games.
CHILDREN bring many things to their parents' lives: happiness, sleepless nights... and viruses. But although parents do catch infections from their kids, it seems parents are also more resistant to colds and flu.Sheldon Cohen and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reviewed three studies in which researchers put either a flu virus or a rhinovirus, which causes colds, into people's noses, then tracked who fell ill. Cohen's team found that parents were only 48 per cent as likely to develop an infection as people with no kids.
Whether comets or asteroids were the source of Earth's water has long been the subject of debate. Now an analysis of the composition of meteorites suggests the water did not originate in the outer solar system, a finding that favours asteroids as the vehicle for its arrival.Both asteroids and comets are found in a region of the solar system known as the asteroid belt, which occupies a wide swathe of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. However, comets with their icy tails would have been born in the chillier region of space between Saturn and Jupiter and then migrated into the asteroid belt.
A German academic who found a letter proving that Adolf Hitler personally intervened to protect a Jewish man who had been his commanding officer during World War One, told Haaretz on Saturday that she found the letter "by coincidence," while carrying out research on Jewish jurists.The letter, composed in August 1940 by Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazis' feared paramilitary SS, said that Ernst Hess, a judge, should be spared persecution or deportation "as per the Fuehrer's wishes." It was published for the first time by the Berlin-based Jewish Voice from Germany newspaper.
CLIMATE scientists have long held that the past 2000 years were almost uniformly cool. Now it seems they were wrong. The 1st century AD looks to have been as warm as today, and the world gradually cooled from then on, right up until the industrial era (see "Tree rings suggest Roman world was warmer than thought").Climate change denialists, who have never accepted that we are in unusually warm times, will say "told you so". They may also claim that scientists are trying to have it both ways - whatever past temperatures were, they are still evidence of global warming today.
The Badger Trust lost its judicial review of the government's controversial plan to allow the killing of thousands of badgers on Thursday. The result means culls, aimed at reducing tuberculosis (TB) in cattle, could begin as early as September in Somerset and Gloucestershire.Pat Hayden, vice-chair of the trust, expressed deep disappointment but said: "How we feel is much less important than the impact on the species we exist to protect. We owe it to our members to do our utmost to protect badgers." The trust is now considering an appeal.
Urban beekeepers often keep their operations on the downlow for fear of violating local ordinances, but a new adjustable-height hive prototype being tested in Europe could mean sweet success all-around. Meet the "Sky Hive."The Dutch city Maastricht, population around 120,000, is currently testing out a new system that places beehives on an adjustable stand that beekeepers crank up to the top of a pole nearly 20 feet tall. The bees get to do their thing while staying far above the potentially allergic and freaked-out public.
Why be really, really round? It turns out that the precisely circular carapace of a newly discovered species of fossil turtle may have made the ancient creature too wide to be swallowed by predators - and helped it warm up in the sun.Edwin Cadena at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and colleagues, uncovered the 1.5 metre long fossil buried at the Cerrejón Coal Mine in north-western Colombia.
The destruction of great swaths of the Brazilian Amazon has turned scores of rare species into the walking dead, doomed to disappear even if deforestation were halted in the region overnight, according to a new study.Forest clearing in Brazil has already claimed casualties, but the animals lost to date in the rainforest region are just one-fifth of those that will slowly die out as the full impact of the loss of habitat takes its toll. In parts of the eastern and southern Amazon, 30 years of concerted deforestation have shrunk viable living and breeding territories enough to condemn 38 species to regional extinction in coming years, including 10 mammal, 20 bird and eight amphibian species, scientists found.
Who were the first humans to enter the North American continent? Were they humans who founded what is known as the Clovis culture over 13,000 years ago? Or did other, totally unrelated peoples precede the Clovis immigrants?This issue has been intensely, if not bitterly debated for decades. The Clovis culture has been seen as the cradle of North American indigenous culture. Now new international research shows that people of another culture and technology were present concurrently or even previous to those of Clovis.
Ancient stone projectile points discovered in a Central Oregon cave complex have cast new light on the identity of the first Americans.While scientists agree they crossed the Bering Strait during an ice age, no one knows the identity of the first people to spread across the North American continent.For some time, these first Americans were believed to have belong to a single group, called the Clovis culture, named for the New Mexican site where their distinctive, 13,000-year-old projectile points were first found.
The remains of a juvenile hominid skeleton, of the newly identified Australopithecus (southern ape) sediba species, are the "most complete early human ancestor skeleton ever discovered," according to Lee Berger, a paleontologist from the University of Witwatersrand."We have discovered parts of a jaw and critical aspects of the body including what appear to be a complete femur (thigh bone), ribs, vertebrae and other important limb elements, some never before seen in such completeness in the human fossil record," said Prof Berger.
Antarctica and its surrounding waters are under pressure from a variety of forces that are already transforming the area, scientists warn.The most immediate threats are regional warming, ocean acidification and loss of sea ice, all linked to global levels of carbon dioxide. Sea ice cover, crucial to the survival of virtually every animal that lives on and near the continent, already has been reduced by warming, according to a new study published in the July 13 issue of the journal Science. Visits by tourists, researchers and other people also threaten to change Antarctica, as does the harvesting of animals like krill that are key to the Antarctic food chain.
Millions of people suffering from multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries or amputees could soon interact with their computers and surroundings using just their eyes, thanks to a new device that costs less than £40.Composed from off-the-shelf materials, the new device can work out exactly where a person is looking by tracking their eye movements, allowing them to control a cursor on a screen just like a normal computer mouse.
Continuing its increasingly active trend, the sun erupted with another X-class solar flare on Thursday. Only last week, another active region (AR1515) delivered an impressive parting shot -- an X1.1 flare -- as it rotated toward the solar limb. Today's more energetic X1.4 flare, however, was directed right at us.Today's fireworks were courtesy of another magnetically dominated active region called AR1520 that has been ominously crackling with flare activity. The active region has produced an impressive and beautiful grouping of sunspots (right).
Asteroids from the inner solar system are the most likely source of the majority of Earth's water, a new study suggests.The results contradict prevailing theories, which hold that most of our planet's water originated in the outer solar system and was delivered by comets or asteroids that coalesced beyond Jupiter's orbit, then migrated inward.
Sometimes I wonder what the Wright brothers would think if they time-traveled to the present and experienced commercial air travel. They might be horrified and depressed about the fact that, rather than marveling at the wonder of flight, we get annoyed when our seat-mates don't close the window shades while we're trying to watch a movie.Wednesday's announcement from CERN that physicists believe they've observed evidence of the Higgs boson particle is no doubt the first tender step into fabulous worlds of discovery.
Divers exploring a 'UFO-shaped' object in the Baltic sea say that the strange, curved object might be a Nazi device lost beneath the waves since the end of the Second World War.Sonar scans have shown that the device, raised 10ft above the seabed and measuring 200ft by 25ft, could be the base of an anti-submarine weapon.The weapon was built with wire mesh which could have baffled submarine radar, leading enemy craft to crash - much in the same way as turning out a lighthouse could be used as a weapon against shipping.But now former Swedish naval officer and WWII expert Anders Autellus has revealed that the structure - measuring 200ft by 25ft - could be the base of a device designed to block British and Russian submarine movements in the area.
Britain's defence intelligence agency considered the possibility of alien craft visiting Earth and asked "UFO desk officers" to monitor any potential threat from outer space, hitherto top secret documents released on Thursday show.Thousands of pages of highly classified files document how officials in the Ministry of Defence were worried they would be accused by the public of not taking UFOs seriously enough, and how some thought there really could be someone out there. "It was important to appreciate that what is scientific 'fact' today may not be true tomorrow," a defence intelligence officer warned in August 1993.Related: See the Nick Pope interview by the GHMB community.
Prime Minister Tony Blair was briefed on the UK's files about UFO sightings in 1998, newly declassified MoD documents have revealed.Writer Nick Redfern urged him to "consider making available for public scrutiny all of the many and varied UFO reports compiled by the government".The request came as the government began to implement Freedom of Information (FOI requests).
If you want your kids to stay away from drugs, then you might want to keep teenagers off alcohol because a new study says that long term drug abuse is likely to occur due to alcohol, not marijuana, use.The present study included data on more than 14,500 high-school students from 120 schools across U.S. The data was obtained from Monitoring the Future study.Researchers analyzed the data to find out what substances were being tried by students. They checked for use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, amphetamines, tranquilizers and other narcotics. Alcohol was the first substance to be tried by students, the results showed.
It may sound like snake oil, but a new study suggests scorpion venom contains a substance that can fend off drug-resistant bacteria, including the deadly MRSA.Drug resistance is increasingly rendering our antibiotic arsenal ineffective against bacteria. According to a CDC study, MRSA caused 36 percent of staphylococcal infections in U.S. hospital intensive-care units in 1992, and as much as 64 percent of infections in 2003. But new research in mice suggests a solution may be hiding right under our feet.
The location of an excavated Viking town, believed to be a fabled strategic military stronghold of ancient Scandinavian kings, suggests local chieftans may have controlled urban growth say archeologists.Aarhus University archeologists date the settlement to as far back as 700AD, and they believe it was used for 300 years. This tallies with descriptions of the ancient chieftan settlement of Sliasthorp in the 804AD Royal Frankish Annals -- the first known written account of Danish history. The town, the text says, was setup as a military base by King Godfred, and is located near the modern town of Füsing in Northern Germany on the border with Denmark. Surrounded by wetlands, it made for an ideal defensive foothold in the region.
As ever, the verdict from the visitors arriving by the coach-load at Stonehenge was mixed: wonderful monument, poor access, disappointing facilities.And what is it with those two busy roads rumbling within a few metres of the stones?But finally, after years of planning, scheming and wrangling, changes are afoot.On Wednesday work officially began on a £27m project to transform the area around Britain's most famous monument from a "national embarrassment" into a tranquil and dignified setting.
Negative suggestion can induce symptoms of illness. Nocebo effects are the adverse events that occur during sham treatment and/or as a result of negative expectations. While the positive counterpart -- the placebo effect -- has been intensively studied in recent years, the scientific literature contains few studies on nocebo phenomena. In the latest issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, Winfried Häuser of the Technical University of Munich and his co-authors present the underlying neurobiological mechanisms and highlight the relevance of the nocebo effect in everyday clinical practice.
TECHNOLOGY has helped Stephen Hawking in many ways, and now it might allow him to communicate using thought alone. The cosmologist is trialling a device that monitors brain activity with the ultimate aim of transforming it into speech.Hawking has motor neurone disease - nerve decay that has left him almost completely paralysed. He currently communicates using a series of cheek twitches to select words from a screen. "It is a very, very slow process," says Philip Low at Stanford University in California, who is founder of healthcare company NeuroVigil.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security may soon embrace super-fast, laser-based molecular scanning technology that can detect anything on or in your body in an instant.The technology holds promise to make airports, borders and other points of interest to terrorists more secure, but comes with a host of new personal privacy concerns, Gizmodo reports.
The early human colonisation of islands might not have been plain sailing. Instead of using boats to deliberately settle on Indonesian islands, hominins may have arrived as castaways, carried on floating debris after floods.David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University and Graeme Ruxton of the University of St Andrews, both in the UK, used population estimates from the early settlement of Polynesia to model the likely success of island settlement attempts in human prehistory.
Its actions may go in direct contrast with those of the man who fought for peace and equality, but a recently discovered Caribbean crustacean species was named after reggae legend Bob Marley, researchers announced Tuesday.It turns out that Gnathia marleyi is more of a "Buffalo Soldier" fighting for survival than a peaceful, "One Love"-espousing coral dweller: The parasitic, bloodsucking crustacean lives aboard certain species of small fish that live near the Caribbean's coral reefs.According to Paul Sikkel, the Arkansas State University marine biologist who discovered and named the creature, it's the first new species of animal found in the Caribbean in more than 20 years.
Images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show a concentration of high-altitude haze and a vortex materializing at the south pole of Saturn's moon Titan, signs that the seasons are turning on Saturn's largest moon. "The structure inside the vortex is reminiscent of the open cellular convection that is often seen over Earth's oceans," said Tony Del Genio, a Cassini team member at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, N.Y. "But unlike on Earth, where such layers are just above the surface, this one is at very high altitude, maybe a response of Titan's stratosphere to seasonal cooling as southern winter approaches. But so soon in the game, we're not sure."Cassini first saw a "hood" of high-altitude haze and a vortex, which is a mass of swirling gas around the pole in the moon's atmosphere...
(Reuters) - A 1,000-year-old hoard of gold coins has been unearthed at a famous Crusader battleground where Christian and Muslim forces once fought for control of the Holy Land, Israeli archaeologists said on Wednesday. The treasure was dug up from the ruins of a castle in Arsuf, a strategic stronghold during the religious conflict waged in the 12th and 13th centuries.The 108 coins - one of the biggest collections of ancient coins discovered in Israel - were found hidden in a ceramic jug beneath a tile floor at the cliff-top coastal ruins, 15 km (9 miles) from Tel Aviv."It is a rare find. We don't have a lot of gold that had been circulated by the Crusaders," said Oren Tal, a professor at Tel Aviv University who leads the dig.
The volume of a small brain region influences one's predisposition for altruistic behavior. Researchers from the University of Zurich show that people who behave more altruistically than others have more gray matter at the junction between the parietal and temporal lobe, thus showing for the first time that there is a connection between brain anatomy, brain activity and altruistic behavior.Why are some people very selfish and others very altruistic? Previous studies indicated that social categories like gender, income or education can hardly explain differences in altruistic behavior. Recent neuroscience studies have demonstrated that differences in brain structure might be linked to differences in personality traits and abilities. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich headed by Ernst Fehr, Director of the Department of Economics, show that there is a connection between brain anatomy and altruistic behavior.
The cause of rapid sea level rise in the past has been found by scientists at the University of Bristol using climate and ice sheet models.The process, named 'saddle-collapse', was found to be the cause of two rapid sea level rise events: the Meltwater pulse 1a (MWP1a) around 14,600 years ago and the '8,200 year' event. The research is published today in Nature.Using a climate model, Dr Lauren Gregoire of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences and colleagues unearthed the series of events that led to saddle-collapse in which domes of ice over North America became separated, leading to rapid melting and the opening of an ice free corridor. Evidence of these events has been recorded in ocean cores and fossil coral reefs; however, to date the reason behind the events was unclear and widely debated.
Using a process called paleo-experimental evolution, Georgia Tech researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli(E. coli) bacteria. This bacterium has now been growing for more than 1,000 generations, giving the scientists a front row seat to observe evolution in action."This is as close as we can get to rewinding and replaying the molecular tape of life," said scientist Betül Kaçar, a NASA astrobiology postdoctoral fellow in Georgia Tech's NASA Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution. "The ability to observe an ancient gene in a modern organism as it evolves within a modern cell allows us to see whether the evolutionary trajectory once taken will repeat itself or whether a life will adapt following a different path."
Four hundred million more plastic bags were handed out by supermarkets last year as the campaign to reduce their use went backwards, official figures from the waste reduction body Wrap showed today.Shoppers in the UK used 7.96 billion single-use bags in 2011, a rise of 5.4 per cent on the previous year - with each person taking 10 throwaway carriers a month.Plastic bag use rose steeply across most of the UK but in Wales, which introduced a 5p charge per bag last October, it fell by 22 per cent.
Launched at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, it said the threat was substantially more than the global average of 60 per cent and urged greater efforts to reduce destructive fishing and run-off from land."When these threats are combined with recent coral bleaching, prompted by rising ocean temperatures, the per cent of reefs rated as threatened increases to more than 90 per cent," the report said.The Coral Triangle covers Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, The Solomon Islands, and East Timor and contains nearly 30 per cent of the world's reefs and more than 3,000 species of fish.
How did the Romans manage to grow grapes in northern England when most climate studies suggest the weather was much cooler then? We may now have an answer: it wasn't that cold at all.Long-term temperature reconstructions often rely on the width of tree rings: they assume that warmer summers make for wider rings. Using this measure, it seems that global temperatures changed very little over the past two millennia. Such studies are behind the famous "hockey stick" graph, created by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, which shows stable temperatures for a millennium before the 20th century.
In what is perhaps a sign of the growing Islamic extremism in the country, Pakistan's only Nobel laureate, who helped develop the theoretical framework that led to the apparent discovery of the subatomic "God particle" last week, is being largely scorned in his homeland because of his religious affiliation.Adbus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and his contribution to Pakistan's nuclear programme. Now his name is stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.
Amid the rocky Israeli hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee, a Trinity University professor and a student have helped researchers excavate an ancient Jewish village and a monumental synagogue possibly dating back 1,700 years.About two weeks ago, the crew unexpectedly uncovered portions of a colorful mosaic floor on one of the synagogue's aisles, said Chad Spigel, assistant professor of religion at Trinity.
The mixing of remains may have been done to combine different ancestries into a single lineage.Mummies found off the coast of Scotland are Frankenstein-like composites of several corpses, researchers say.This mixing of remains was perhaps designed to combine different ancestries into a single lineage, archaeologists speculated.
Salmon, turtles and many birds migrate up to thousands of miles at a time, presumably by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. Now, scientists have identified cells in the nose of trout that respond to magnetism, offering a biological explanation for how animals orient themselves and find their way, even when it's dark or foggy.The discovery -- and particularly the new method that enabled it -- opens up avenues for all sorts of futuristic applications, including miniaturized GPS systems or gene therapies that would restore sight, hearing or smell to people who have lost those senses.
A volcanic eruption around 579 million years ago buried a 'nursery' of the earliest-known animals under a Pompeii-like deluge of ash, preserving them as fossils in rocks in Newfoundland, new research suggests.A team from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in collaboration with the Memorial University of Newfoundland, looked for evidence of life from the mysterious Ediacaran period (635-542 million years ago) in which the first 'animals' -- complex multicellular organisms -- appeared.
In a slightly creepy but undoubtedly impressive feat of DIY electronics, an evidently lonely Japanese hacker has put together a virtual girlfriend through a combination of motion-tracking hardware, video goggles, and some scavenged 3-D game assets.A video on YouTube, originally posted at Hack a Day, shows the view through a pair of video goggles that have been augmented with an Asus Xtion motion-tracking tool, essentially an off-brand Microsoft Kinect. This helps track his motion and the environment, and is assisted by some augmented-reality software that places virtual items on the image.
In a landmark 2010 study, researchers found that bumblebees were able to figure out the most efficient routes among several computer-controlled "flowers," quickly solving a complex problem that even stumps supercomputers. We already know bees are pretty good at facial recognition, and researchers have shown they can also be effective air-quality monitors.Bumblebees can solve the classic "traveling salesman" problem, which keeps supercomputers busy for days. They learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they find the flowers in a different order, according to the British study.
Researchers have discovered two compounds from cannabis leaves that can increase the amount of energy the body burns.Test in animals have already shown the compounds can help treat type two diabetes while also helping to reduce levels of cholesterol in the blood stream and fat in key organs like the liver.
For so many important outcomes in life -- applying for jobs, waiting for medical test results -- there comes a point when you just have to sit back and hope for the best. But that doesn't mean we always behave that way. New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that even when an outcome is out of our control we often act as though we can still get on the good side of fate by doing good deeds.According to lead researcher Benjamin Converse, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at the University of Virginia, the research was inspired by the kinds of deals many of us seem to make in which we promise ourselves that, if we can just make it through some trying situation, we'll be better citizens in the future.
Happy anniversary, Roswell, N.M. It was 65 years ago today that the Roswell Daily Record blasted an infamous headline claiming local military officials had captured a flying saucer on a nearby ranch. And now, a former CIA agent says it really happened."It was not a damn weather balloon -- it was what it was billed when people first reported it," said Chase Brandon, a 35-year CIA veteran. "It was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet, it crashed and I don't doubt for a second that the use of the word 'remains' and 'cadavers' was exactly what people were talking about."
The discovery of an arsenic-loving microbe that NASA said would rewrite biology textbooks and offered hope of life on other planets now looks like a case study in how science corrects its mistakes, researchers report.In findings released Sunday by the journal Science, two research teams take aim at the "arseniclife" bacteria. The microbe was announced by the journal in 2010 at a NASA news briefing as "the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic." The new findings show that was not the case.
According to a report issued by Purdue University, quoted by SpaceRef, a mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, may provide evidence of microbial life on Mars for far less trouble and expense than a sample return mission to the Martian surface.According to NASA, Phobos is the larger and innermost moon of Mars. It is an irregularly shaped object 27 by 22 by 18 kilometers in diameter. It orbits Mars three times per day. It may be a captured asteroid, though some scientists dispute this.
FThe biggest rover ever launched to another planet is just one month away from its target: the Red Planet, Mars.NASA's huge Curiosity rover is hurtling toward a planned late-night landing on Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (early Aug. 6 EDT), and the anticipation on the science team is high. The reasons are clear: At 1 ton, Curiosity is the largest rover ever aimed at Mars. It will land in a completely new way, using a giant parachute and a rocket-powered sky crane. And it is carrying a sophisticated set of tools to find out if its Martian drop zone could once have been home for life.
When a monkey bares its teeth, flattens its ears and tightens its throat muscles, it is cornered, afraid and bracing for a fight. When a human bares his teeth, flattens his ears and tightens his throat muscles, he is smiling. How did this odd evolutionary divergence happen?Strange as it may seem, the friendly human smile probably evolved from that much more aggressive display of fangs, said Janice Porteous, a professor of philosophy at Vancouver Island University in Canada who studies the evolution of humor and laughter. The main evidence comes from "missing link" facial expressions made by primates that signify neither "you're my enemy," nor "you're my friend.".
The UN's cultural agency, Unesco, has voted to add the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and its pilgrimage route to the list of World Heritage Sites.The Palestinian delegation welcomed the approval of its bid to get protected status for the church, built on a site some believe was Jesus's birthplace.Israel and the US opposed the move, saying it was politically motivated.It was the first such approval since Palestine was controversially granted membership of Unesco last year.
You and your family are on holiday, driving round a mountainous part of Greece, when suddenly a tyre bursts. You roll over and over down some 100 metres before a large olive tree blocks your fall. Amazingly, you all emerge from the battered heap. Some days later, at work, you recount the tale, struggling to capture for your colleagues one of the odder aspects of the experience. It was, you say, a bit like a dream - or maybe a slow-motion movie, it was like being outside yourself, unreal...
Neuroscientists unveiled a way to potentially communicate with paralyzed or seemingly comatose patients using brain imaging machines in a report out today.The finding follows on two decades of neuroscientists looking for ways to translate brain signals into messages to help "locked-in" paralyzed patients, such as those with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. Researchers have made increasing advances in using devices that detect brain activity to help paralyzed patients, ones who often are forced to rely on eye blinks or facial muscle twitches to slowly send messages.
A team of astronomers says it has detected one of the threads of dark matter that scientists have long believed serve as the scaffolding for the cosmos.Three-dimensional astronomical maps developed since the late 1980s show that the vast majority of the universe's galaxies are distributed as threads and sheets that span the universe, with galaxy clusters as well as superclusters of thousands of galaxies appearing where threads and sheets intersect. These structures were thought to have formed on a framework of dark matter, the unseen form of matter that scientists believe binds galaxies together.
Humanity will survive the supposed December 2012 apocalypse, but, unfortunately, so will irrational doomsday fears, scientists say.Doomsayers around the world are gearing up for armageddon on Dec. 21, based on predictions supposedly made by the Mayans more than 1,000 years ago. Even after the sun rises Dec. 22, however, many folks will be only momentarily reassured, quickly latching onto another scenario purported to bring about the apocalypse within their lifetime.
We've just come one step closer to making "Avatar" a reality.Scientists with the international Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment project have, for the first time, enabled a person to control a small automaton thousands of miles away using nothing but thoughts.According to New Scientist, by using an fMRI machine to scan the brain in real-time, roboticists were able to give a university student in Israel the ability to control a small robot at the Béziers Technology Institute in France.
The unique discovery at the east end of Lake Mossø of a slaughtered army dating to around two thousand years ago, was revealed by Danish archaeologists in 2009.They had found skeletal material from up to 200 warriors, who may have all come from the same battle. Cuts and slashes on the skeletons showed they had died violently but nothing is as yet known about the identity of the killers, or their victims.
XI'AN, July 5 (Xinhua) -- Liquid inside an ancient wine vessel unearthed in Shaanxi province is considered to be the earliest wine in China's history, archaeologists told Xinhua Thursday.The wine vessel made of bronze was unearthed in a noble's tomb of the West Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC - 771 BC) in Shigushan Mountain in Baoji city.The liquid is likely the oldest wine discovered in China, said Liu Jun, director of Baoji Archaeology Institute, who is in charge of the project.
This panoramic shot of the surface of Mars shows an impact crater blasted billions of years ago - and the fresh tracks created by Nasa's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. Use the zoom tool to see the view in more detail.The scene, which is made up of 817 images taken between December 2011 and May 2012, also includes the rover's own solar arrays and deck in the foreground. Its publication coincided with Opportunity completing its 3,000th day on Mars.
Robot avatars have got a step closer to being the real world doubles of those who are paralysed or have locked-in-syndrome.Scientists have made a robot move on a human's behalf by monitoring thoughts about movement, reports New Scientist.The man-machine link joined a man in a brain scanner in Israel and a robot wandering a laboratory in France.The person controlling the robot could also see through the eyes of his electronic surrogate.
US experts have developed what they say are the most biologically-accurate robotic legs yet.Writing in the Journal of Neural Engineering, they said the work could help understanding of how babies learn to walk - and spinal-injury treatment.They created a version of the message system that generates the rhythmic muscle signals that control walking.A UK expert said the work was exciting because the robot mimics control and not just movement.
(CBS News) And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac . . . July 8th, 1947, 65 years ago today - a day many believe was truly out of this world. For that was the day Public Information Officer Walter Haut of the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico told the local press about an object recently found in the desert:"On July 8th, 1947, he issued a press release under orders from Col. William Blanchard, saying basically, 'We have in our possession a flying saucer.'".Julie Shuster is the daughter of Haut, and the director of the International UFO Museum in Roswell. Just one day later, she says, came an official change of tune...
The coca leaf, the unrefined source of cocaine, holds special significance for Bolivian President Evo Morales. A former cultivator of the plant himself, Morales was swept into office in 2006 with the backing of Bolivia's cocaleros movement, a syndicate of coca-growers' unions Morales has helmed for decades.Since then, his defense of his countrymen's right to grow the leaf, which is considered an illegal substance under the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, has brought him into conflict with the United States, which is seeking to eradicate coca production in the Andean region.
An expedition to find out what happened to celebrated US woman pilot Amelia Earhart is setting sail from Hawaii on Tuesday, 75 years to the day since search teams went looking for her.The expedition is to set out one day late, once a customs official arrives in Hawaii and boards the ship.Researchers will dive around an uninhabited Pacific island where they believe Earhart crashed in 1937.Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, in 1932.
LONDON (Reuters) - Rising sea levels cannot be stopped over the next several hundred years, even if deep emissions cuts lower global average temperatures, but they can be slowed down, climate scientists said in a study on Sunday.A lot of climate research shows that rising greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for increasing global average surface temperatures by about 0.17 degrees Celsius a decade from 1980-2010 and for a sea level rise of about 2.3mm a year from 2005-2010 as ice caps and glaciers melt.
A new study indicates that mass extinctions affect the pace of evolution, not just in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, but for millions of years to follow. The study's authors, University of Chicago's Andrew Z. Krug and David Jablonski, will publish their findings in the August issue of the journal Geology.Scientists expected to see an evolutionary explosion immediately following a mass extinction, but Krug and Jablonski's findings go far beyond that.
Spacefaring worms undergo genetic changes associated with longer lives in their Earth-bound cousins, research has shown.A number of Caenorhabditis elegans worms were carried aboard a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) and brought back for study.Researchers found reduced activity of five genes in the worms that, when suppressed in the species on Earth, lead to longer lifetimes.The work appears in Scientific Reports.
The European Space Agency is continuing to prepare for the launch of its Gaia spacecraft set for 2013. Gaia's mission will see it creating a 3D map of a billion stars in the Milky Way using a 1.5-gigapixel camera.In this photo, taken at the EADS CASA test facility in Madrid, Spain, checks are being made on Gaia's 1.5-metre-wide antenna panel to ensure data will reach Earth safely. The foam spikes on the walls of the test room block radio signals to simulate space. Electronic steering will ensure the antenna is always directed towards its target while the spacecraft rotates in space as it maps the stars, asteroids, extrasolar planets and other objects.
LONDON: Stem cells taken from amniotic fluid can be transformed into a more versatile state similar to embryonic stem cells and may offer an alternative to the medically valuable but controversial cells, scientists said on Tuesday.British researchers said they had succeeded in reprogramming amniotic fluid cells without having to introduce extra genes.
When the Bronze Age arrived in Scandinavia around 3,500 years ago, it was the advent of a new technology. Combining copper with the elements tin or arsenic made an alloy which is stronger and more durable; Bronze.The region of modern-day Norway was then, as now, at the periphery of Europe and although the population had the skills and know-how to create bronze metalwork, according to current scientific consensus they would have had to import all the copper they needed from abroad.
Hampi is a village in the northern Karnataka state of southern India. Located within the ruins of Vijayanagara, the former capital of the Vijayanagara Empire (from 1336 to 1565), its history hails back to the 1st century C.E. It has been identified with the mythical kingdom of Kishkindha, the Vanara (monkey) kingdom mentioned in the hindu epic, Ramayana. Ruled by King Sugriva, the Vānara were ape-like humanoids described in the epic as possessing supernatural powers, able to change their shapes.
THE AUSTRALIANArchaeologists in Peru have discovered a sundial, an underground tunnel and a reception room in a complex dating back to the Wari civilisation.ONE of the relics is believed to be a precursor to an Incan sundial, while 18 niches painted in white on the walls may have held ancestral mummies, Joseph Ochatoma, leading the excavation, El Comercio newspaper told the newspaper.
A rare 17th-century Latin American document that was "lost" for nearly a century resurfaced earlier this year. The kicker: It was right where it should have been all along -- in the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).But it's a wonder that the document -- a pictorial history-map of Santa Catarina Ixtepeji, a village in Mexico -- was rediscovered at all.
A LACK of cash could end the only survey dedicated to searching the southern skies for Earth-grazing comets and asteroids. That would create a blind spot in our global view of objects that could cause significant devastation should they hit Earth.The Siding Spring Survey uses images from the Siding Spring observatory in Australia as part of the global Catalina Sky Survey, an effort to discover and track potentially dangerous near-Earth objects. Astronomers sift through virtually identical images of the sky, looking for moving objects.
A century after Albert Einstein came up with his theories of relativity, a constellation of Global Positioning System satellites is orbiting Earth, making practical use of his ground-breaking understanding of time.If the discovery of the Higgs boson particle pans out, will even more mind-bending technologies result?It's theoretically possible, says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss, but practically, unlikely.
Oregon will soon qualify as the third U.S. state to ask voters in November to legalize marijuana for recreational use in a move that could put the state on a collision course with the federal government, proponents said on Friday.Backers of the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act said they have collected 165,000 signatures on petitions seeking to put the measure on the ballot, nearly double the 87,000 they were required to submit by Friday's deadline to qualify.
Maria Josefa Macz and Daniel Pascual were called at five in the morning, and asked to come quickly to the Polochic valley in southern Guatemala. Ethnic Maya Q'eqchi communities of smallholder farmers said they were being violently evicted by state security forces from land they had farmed for generations. Helicopters with armed men leaning out were flying overhead, private security guards and paramilitary forces were attacking people, and houses and crops were being burned. The farmers could not speak Spanish and needed help dealing with the police, as well as legal advice on how to stop giant biofuel companies taking their land.
If your plan for escaping climate change is to hide in the shade of a tree, you might be out of luck. It turns out the leaves of some plants are shrinking in response to the warmer weather.But bad news for shade-lovers may be good news for plant conservation. The changes could indicate that plants are evolving rapidly to changing conditions, suggesting they have a better chance at survival.
Squid-like cuttlefish are known for their amazing camouflage abilities, thanks to specialized skin cells that allow them to change color in the blink of an eye. Now research finds that these clever mollusks use their color-changing abilities in creative ways: by pretending to be the other gender.Well, half-pretending, that is.
Boffins were bewildered when a star's dust belt mysteriously disappeared, but they now think that the vanishing fragments could have used up in some superfast planet formation.Researchers had spotted the cloud of dust circling the young star in the Scorpius-Centaurus stellar nursery in data gathered by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite while it was was surveying the sky back in 1983.It would usually take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years for the amount of dust orbiting the lengthily named TYC 8241 2652 1 (we're going to call it TYC for short) to dissipate, so when the boffins saw the star again in 2008 using the mid-infrared imager at the Gemini South Observatory in Chile, they weren't surprised to see things were just the same as 25 years ago.
Stone Age tools uncovered in Yemen point to humans leaving Africa and inhabiting Arabia perhaps as far back as 63,000 years ago, archaeologists report."The expansion of modern humans out of Africa and into Eurasia via the Arabian Peninsula is currently one of the most debated questions in prehistory," begins an upcomingJournal of Human Evolution report led by Anne Delagnes of France's Université Bordeaux. The archaeologists report from the site of Shi'bat Dihya located in a wadi, or gully, that connects Yemen's highlands to the coastal plains of the Red Sea.
In May, SpaceX became the first of the new generation of commercial aerospace companies to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. The cargo delivery was part of the first flight test of the integrated Falcon-9 launch vehicle and the Dragon capsule spacecraft with rendezvous and berthing mechanism systems.By all accounts, the major test objectives were successfully achieved. Previously, such spacecraft and operations had only been achieved by governments. What made this a historic first was that a commercial company had done it. The news was widely covered in the international media, especially in the United States.
Smokers could one day be immunised against nicotine so they gain no pleasure from the habit, according to researchers in the US.They have devised a vaccine that floods the body with an antibody to assault nicotine entering the body.A study in mice, published in Science Translational Medicine, showed levels of the chemical in the brain were reduced by 85% after vaccination.
A reindeer engraved on the wall of a cave in south Wales has been confirmed as the oldest known rock art in Britain.The image in Cathole Cave on Gower, south Wales was created at least 14,000 years ago, said Bristol University.Archaeologist Dr George Nash found the engraving while exploring a rear section of the cave in September 2010.He said uranium dating showed it was the oldest rock art in the British Isles, if not north-western Europe.The reindeer was engraved over a mineral deposit known as a speleothem, carved using a sharp-pointed tool, probably made of flint, by an artist using his or her right hand.
Years before the Mongolian president intervened in the auction of a tyrannosaur skeleton thought to have been illegally taken from that country, a fossilized dinosaur with similarly controversial origins followed a very different path.Once removed from the rock, the bones of this dinosaur would, to some, reveal the existence of a new species of tiny but unmistakable predator. However, given few clues as to where these fossils came out of the ground, paleontologists have yet to resolve the debate about the dinosaur's true identity.
At 2,000 pounds and six and a half feet in length, leatherback turtles are the largest living reptiles. Their size, however, belies their fragility: among the leatherbacks that live in the Pacific Ocean, populations have dropped by 90 percent in the past 20 years. Biologists already knew that fishing gear posed a problem for the endangered turtles, which can get entangled in trawlers' nets, but they were not sure exactly where and when they were running into trouble.
Until now it was thought that such close-in binary stars could not exist.About half of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy are, unlike our Sun, part of a binary system in which two stars orbit each other. Most likely, the stars in these systems were formed close together and have been in orbit around each other from birth onwards. It was always thought that if binary stars form too close to each other, they would quickly merge into one single, bigger star. This was in line with many observations taken over the last three decades showing the abundant population of stellar binaries, but none with orbital periods shorter than 5 hours.
Even Dr Who might be taken aback at the sight of these aliens.The bizarre jellyfish-like beings were dreamed up by a British scientist as an example of life "not as we know it".This is what evolution might have come up with on a world such as Saturn's moon Titan, Dr Maggie Alderin-Pocock believes. She envisages creatures that float through clouds of methane, scooping chemical nutrients into their gaping mouths.
As time passes and more research is done, more evidence is compiled supporting the theory that suggests that dark matter is a real thing, even though no direct evidence for its existence has ever been found. Instead, the evidence comes about as measurements of other phenomenon are taken, generally involving gravitational pull on objects in the universe we can see that cannot be explained by other means. One of these instances is where weak gravitational lensing occurs, which is where light appears to bend as it passes by large objects. Theory suggests that in cases where lensing occurs but there is no detectable object behind its cause, the reason for it is dark matter exerting a gravitational influence. That has been the case with what are known as filaments; gravitational effects that connect galactic superclusters, keeping them bound together.
Britain's volcanic fires may be no more, but remnants of an enduring eruptive past can be found throughout the country, writes Professor Iain Stewart."So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between me the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow - the total mountain.
What is known as Wenlock Edge, a great palisade, almost 1,000 feet high, running for 15 miles through the county of Shropshire, overlooks, near its eastern end, the tidy town of Much Wenlock. (Much Wenlock being so named, you see, to distinguish it from its even wee-er neighbor, Little Wenlock.) However, to this quaint backwater village near Wales came, in 1994, Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, the grandiose president of the International Olympic Committee.
Animals have helped many kids with autism improve their speech and social skills, but these cases have been largely isolated. Now the first scientific study of horse therapy finds its many benefits may have to do with rhythm.A study of 42 children with autism, six to 16 years old, found that riding and grooming horses significantly bettered behavioral symptoms. Compared with kids who had participated in nonanimal therapy, those exposed to horses showed more improvement in social skills and motor skills, rated via standard behavioral assessment surveys, according to the study published in the February issue of Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Psychologist Robin Gabriels of the University of Colorado Denver, who led the study, speculates that the calming, rhythmic motion of the horses played a role.
Now nearly 5 years old, DNSChanger still infects hundreds of thousands of computers. If you've got it, you'll probably lose your Internet connection on Monday. Read our FAQ to learn what this malware is and how to stop it.How can I tell if I'm infected?If you're in the United States, go to dns-ok.us or its parent site, the DNSChanger Working Group for computers based outside of the U.S. Click on the URL appropriate to your country, and you'll see an image with a green background if you're clean. A red background means you're infected.
It was a breakthrough that took almost half a century of deep thought, more than 30 years of painstaking experimentation and a massive £2.6bn machine. Yesterday, scientists said they believed they had found the subatomic particle that confirms our understanding of how the universe works.Discovering the so-called "Higgs boson" particle would be one of the greatest achievements in science, rivalling the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the Apollo Moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s. It can explain why some particles have mass, but why others, such as photons of light, do not.
A Canadian teen's message in a bottle has been found on an island in Maine 12 years after it was first tossed into the ocean, the Welland Tribune reports.In 2000, 3-year-old Taryn McKee was on vacation with her family in Letete, New Brunswick, when her mother suggested she write a note to send out to sea.With her mother's help, McKee composed the message and the bottled note was tossed into the Atlantic Ocean. Neither of them expected to ever see it again.
Colorado's devastating Waldo Canyon Fire has left a massive scar on the Earth that is visible from space.A false-color image snapped by a satellite yesterday (July 4) shows the blackened scar covering the mountainous terrain west of Colorado Springs, where the fire continues to burn.The Waldo Canyon fire was first reported on June 23. So far, it has burned 18,247 acres and destroyed 346 homes, making it the most destructive fire in Colorado's history.