Newsdesk Archive

Earth is shaken daily by strong earthquakes recorded by a number of seismic stations worldwide. Tectonic tremor, however, is a new type of seismic signal that seismologist started studying only within the last few years. Tremor is less hazardous than earthquakes and occurs at greater depth. The link between tremor and earthquakes may provide clues about the more destructive earthquakes that occur at shallower depths. Geophysicists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) collected seismic data of tectonic tremor in California. These data are now being evaluated in order to better understand this new seismic phenomenon.

In just 10 years or so, Japanese motorists may be traveling around comfortably, free from traffic jams and accidents, in a vehicle that drives itself.Japan's the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry will soon embark on a project to realize an "autopilot system" for automatic driving, a system for guiding motor vehicles on expressways without human assistance.

The sun fired off yet another intense solar flare today (July 5), the latest in a series of storms from a busy sunspot being closely watched by space telescopes and astronomers.NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped a daunting new image of a strong M-class solar flare that peaked this morning at 7:44 a.m. EDT (1144 GMT). The M6.1 flare triggered a moderate radio blackout that has since subsided, according to officials at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

One of the world's most ancient societies has been given a legal buffer zone to guard it from the modern world.India's Supreme Court has banned all commercial and tourism activity near their habitat in the country's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Indian Ocean.The ruling bars hotels and resorts from operating within a three-mile buffer zone around the Jarawa reserve, which is home to the Jarawa tribal people. The order means resorts that had opened nearby will have to close.

'Britain's Atlantis' - a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea - has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews.Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.Divers from oil companies have found remains of a 'drowned world' with a population of tens of thousands - which might once have been the 'real heartland' of Europe.A team of climatologists, archaeologists and geophysicists has now mapped the area using new data from oil companies - and revealed the full extent of a 'lost land' once roamed by mammoths.

Last year's accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was a manmade disaster caused by poor regulation and collusion between the government, the operator and the industry's watchdog, a report has said.In a highly critical assessment published on Thursday, a Japanese parliamentary panel challenged claims by the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), that the triple meltdown at the plant in north-east Japan had been caused solely by a 14-metre tsunami on 11 March last year. The panel said the magnitude-9 earthquake that preceded the waves could not be ruled out as a cause of the accident.

Viewed with a squint, in the dark, the great slag heaps of the Nord-Pas de Calais mining basin might take on the aspect of the Egyptian pyramids. Now these monuments to fossil fuel, in some cases over 140m high, have joined more than 900 properties on Unesco's swelling list of world heritage sites. So too have the old mines of Wallonia across the border in Belgium.Britain can't get too sneery at the UN's cultural arm bowing to seven years' hard lobbying by mining officials in northern France. Unesco has already bestowed world heritage garlands on a swath of industrial Britain, including Ironbridge Gorge, Derwent Valley Mills, New Lanark, Saltaire and the Cornwall and West Devon mining landscape.

Moss plants that survive the freezing conditions of Antarctica have an unusual food source, scientists say.The vibrant green plants take nutrients from the poo left behind by penguins that lived in the same area thousands of years ago.Scientists made their discovery whilst testing the plants to find out how they manage to survive in the icy landscape.The findings were presented at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Salzburg, Austria.

Water once flowed beneath the surface of Mars - and the warmer, wetter ancient planet could have been considerably more hospitable for life.Scans by spectrometers on board the Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiters have revealed 175 outcrops in Mars's Tyrrhena Terra mountains that are unmistakably 'weathered' by water.The rocks, found in craters, seem to have been 'carved' out from beneath the crust by asteroid impacts - and offer an insight into the planet's history, and what lies beneath the surface.The find proves water flowed beneath the surface of Mars for a 'long period', say the researchers.

An adjustment of a mere second in the official global clock sent dozens of websites crashing in an incident reminiscent of the Y2K bug over a decade ago.The "leap second" was added to the Coordinated Universal Time to adjust clocks to the earth's rotation the night of June 30, delaying for one second the transition to July 1.The extra second was too much for some software to handle.

Renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking said Wednesday the Nobel Prize should be given to Peter Higgs, the man who gave his name to the Higgs boson particle.Former Cambridge University professor Hawking also joked that the discovery had actually cost him $100 in a bet.In an interview with the BBC Wednesday, Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, said: "This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize.

You would be forgiven for thinking that shrinking space budgets are a total disaster. Certainly, they're not good news but the irony is that having less money may force us into missions that might previously have been overlooked, yet still have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of the universe.In March this year, the European Space Agency issued a call for small mission ideas. This is something of a departure for the ESA, which in the past has only used smaller missions to test technology, such as with Smart-1 and Proba.

Beloved of spiritualists and bored teenagers on a dare, the Ouija board has long been a source of entertainment, mystery and sometimes downright spookiness. Now it could shine a light on the secrets of the unconscious mind.The Ouija, also known as a talking board, is a wooden plaque marked with the words, "yes", "no" and the letters of the alphabet. Typically a group of users place their hands on a movable pointer , or "planchette", and ask questions out loud. Sometimes the planchette signals an answer, even when no one admits to moving it deliberately.

South Korea is proposing to hunt whales under regulations permitting scientific research whaling, echoing the programmes of its neighbour, Japan.Hunting would take place near the Korean coast on minke whales. How many would be caught is unclear.The South Korean delegation to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) said the research was needed "for the proper assessment of whale stocks".Many governments at the IWC meeting condemned the Korean announcement.

Conservationists on Tuesday appealed to countries to urgently address new threats to whales, dolphins and other cetaceans as climate change opens up previously inaccessible areas of the Arctic and industries move in to new areas.As emotional arguments broke out in the annual International Whaling Commission's (IWC) conference between pro- and anti-whaling nations over the right of small, indigenous groups to hunt a few whales each year, WWF appealed to countries to better regulate fishing and stop the oil and gas industries devastating populations.

All science begins in a star trek mode: go where no one has gone before and discover new things without knowing in advance what they might be. As researchers complete their initial surveys and accumulate a long list of questions, they shift to a Sherlock Holmes mode: formulate specific hypotheses and develop ways to test them. The exploration of Mars is now about to make this transition. Orbiters have made global maps of geographic features and composition, and landers have pieced together the broad outlines of the planet's geologic history. It is time to get more sophisticated.

On the centenary of Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole, a study to be presented at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting on July 1 has shown that Scott's men starved to death because they were consuming far too few calories to fuel their daily exertion.The researchers, environmental physiologist Dr Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton and polar explorer and physician Dr Mike Stroud, examined the voyage in light of today's knowledge of nutrition and how our bodies respond to extreme exercise, cold, and high altitude. They determined that their rations, which consisted of biscuits, pemmican, butter, sugar, chocolate, cereals and raisins, and were supplemented by pony meat at the start of the expedition, were inadequate.

A favorite theme of science fiction is "the portal"--an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed...It turns out that they do, sort of, and a NASA-funded researcher at the University of Iowa has figured out how to find them."We call them X-points or electron diffusion regions," explains plasma physicist Jack Scudder of the University of Iowa. "They're places where the magnetic field of Earth connects to the magnetic field of the Sun, creating an uninterrupted path leading from our own planet to the sun's atmosphere 93 million miles away."

Where is the experience of red in your brain? The question was put to me by Deepak Chopra at his Sages and Scientists Symposium in Carlsbad, Calif., on March 3. A posse of presenters argued that the lack of a complete theory by neuroscientists regarding how neural activity translates into conscious experiences (such as redness) means that a physicalist approach is inadequate or wrong. The idea that subjective experience is a result of electrochemical activity remains a hypothesis, Chopra elaborated in an e-mail. It is as much of a speculation as the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that it causes brain activity and creates the properties and objects of the material world.

Google glasses that overlay the Internet on daily lives should hit the market within two years -- technology the tech giant hopes will someday make fumbling with smartphones obsolete.Google co-founder Sergey Brin offered the estimated timeline after a project update that included sky divers dropping in with a new version of "Glass" wearable computers.

In one month's time, millions of tourists from across the world will descend on London for the 2012 Olympics, creating the perfect test bed for a new speech translation iPhone app.The app, dubbed VoiceTra4U-M, is a bit of a mouthful to say, but lets people converse with foreigners in their own language. It was developed by the Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium (U-STAR), which is made up of researchers from 23 different countries, and supports full voice translation for 13 different languages, with text translation for a further 10.

I want to tell you about a special place on the surface of Mars. Back in the solar system's early days, a large object slammed into the red planet, leaving behind a hundred-mile crater -- a dent large enough to withstand three billion years of erosion. The Gale Crater, as the site is known, is almost as wide as Earth's Chicxulub crater, the impact zone of the asteroid that is thought to have killed the dinosaurs. Because Mars orbits close to the solar system's main asteroid belt, it's not unusual to find impact craters there; just recently, a group of geophysicists counted more than 600,000.

Hints of the Higgs boson detected last year by a US "atom smasher" have become even stronger, scientists have said.The news comes amid fevered speculation about an announcement by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider on Wednesday.Finding the particle would fill a glaring hole in the widely accepted theory of how the Universe works.This 30-year hunt is reaching an end, with experts confident they will soon be able to make a definitive statement about the particle's existence.

The sun is unleashing some powerful solar flares today (July 4) in an impressive celestial fireworks display just in time for the U.S. Independence Day holiday.The latest solar flare erupted at 5:47 a.m. EDT (0947 GMT) and hit its peak strength eight minutes later. The flare fired off from the active sunspot AR1515 and registered as a class M5.3 solar storm on the scale used by astronomers to measure space weather, according to the Space Weather Prediction Group operated by NOAA.Class M solar flares are powerful, but still medium-strength, sun storms that can supercharge northern lights displays on Earth. The weakest of the sun's strong solar flares are C-class storms.

The B612 Foundation announced the first privately Funded Deep Space Mission yesterday morning. It's called Sentinel, a half-meter infrared telescope designed to look for any asteroids whose orbits will cross the Earth's in the next hundred years, down to thirty meters in size. Construction is expected to begin this fall, and the nearly complete design will be similar to the already-successful Spitzer and Kepler telescopes, albeit slightly smaller. It's still 1 1/2 tons and 25 feet tall. The prime contractor will be Ball Aerospace, contractor for Spitzer and Kepler.The B612 Foundation unofficially began in 2001. Astrophysicist Piet Hut and former astronaut Ed Lu held a 2001 workshop on Near-Earth Asteroids in Houston. The workshop attendees concluded that something needed to be done...

It is a journey that will never end and it began on August 20 1977, at the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida when a Titan-Centaur rocket blasted into a clear blue sky.Back then the excited scientists had what now seem like relatively limited hopes for the payload spiralling above them in a plume of white smoke.Voyager One, which was launched two weeks after its sister probe Voyager Two, was meant to exploit a rare geometric arrangement of the outer planets occurring just once every 175 years.

FORTY years after NASA ditched the idea of landing Apollo 17 on the far side of the moon, the forbidden fruit is being sought once again. Not by astronauts this time, but by astronomers seeking a quiet spot from which to observe the universe's "dark ages".This was an epoch in the development of the cosmos, which lasted for a few hundred million years after the big bang, before stars and galaxies began to form. The only way to observe the dark ages is to look for faint radio signals from neutral hydrogen - single protons orbited by single electrons - which filled the early universe.

For centuries, the villagers around the Shennongjia forest of China's central Hubei province, a forbidding 1,000 square mile reserve of high mountains and deep forests, have believed that the "Wild Man", or Yeren, lives among them.Standing just under seven feet tall (2.15 metres) and covered in dark grey hair, this Chinese incarnation of Bigfoot or the yeti has been spotted hundreds of times.Size 12 primate-like footprints have been documented in the area, and long thick strands of hair have been tested by scientists, who concluded that they did not belong to any of the known creatures inside the reserve.

A huge area of land which was swallowed up into the North Sea thousands of years ago has been recreated and put on display by scientists.Doggerland was an area between Northern Scotland, Denmark and the Channel Islands.It was believed to have been home to tens of thousands of people before it disappeared underwater.Now its history has been pieced together by artefacts recovered from the seabed and displayed in London.

For the first time a new technique has allowed astronomers to study the atmosphere of an exoplanet in detail -- even though it does not pass in front of its parent star. An international team has used ESO's Very Large Telescope to directly catch the faint glow from the planet Tau Boötis b, solving a 15-year-old problem. The team also finds that the planet's atmosphere seems to be cooler higher up, differently from the expected.

An ancient landscape of stone circles, alignments and possible tombs lies out in the Syrian Desert, according to a Royal Ontario Museum archaeologist who has dubbed the mysterious structures "Syria's Stonehenge.""These enigmatic arrangements are not especially imposing, they are not megaliths or anything like that, but they are very intriguing and clearly deliberately aligned," Robert Mason of Canada's Royal Ontario Museum told Discovery News.

During a recent mapping of rare virgin forest in and around the Øvre Dividalen National Park in Troms, Norway, scientists noticed significant scarring on the trees.Many pine trees had some of their bark cut away on one side, leaving marks that were hard to explain. They came up with three possibilities:The first suggestion was the cuts had been made by settlers who started farms in the Dividalen valley in 1850, but the scars seemed to be older than that date.

(Reuters) - Danish archaeologists said on Tuesday they had re-opened a mass grave of scores of slaughtered Iron Age warriors to find new clues about their fate and the bloody practices of Germanic tribes on the edge of the Roman Empire.Bones of around 200 soldiers have already been found preserved in a peat bog near the village of Alken on Denmark's Jutland peninsula. Experts started digging again on Monday, saying they expected to find more bodies dating back 2,000 years to around the time of Christ."I guess we will end up with a scale that is much larger than the 200 that we have at present," Aarhus University archaeologist Mads Kahler Holst told Reuters.

A new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) shows the candle-like Flame Nebula lighting up a cavern of dust. The Flame Nebula is part of the Orion complex, a turbulent star-forming area located near the constellation's star-studded belt.The image is being released today along with a new batch of data from the mission. Last March, WISE released its all-sky catalog and atlas containing infrared images and data on more than a half-billion objects, including everything from asteroids to stars and galaxies. Now the mission is offering up additional data from its second scan of the sky."If you're an astronomer, then you'll probably be in hog heaven when it comes to infrared data,"...

Like Moses seeing the Promised Land but not being able to go there, physicists from Fermilab said Monday that its Tevatron, now shuttered but once the most powerful physics machine in the world, had fallen just short of finding a long-hypothesized particle.Known as the Higgs boson, it explains why things in the universe have mass, and is a cornerstone of modern physics despite never being seen.The news from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory added more buzz and hype about the long-sought particle as physicists and many others are standing by for an announcement on Wednesday from CERN...

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from New Guinea, en route to Howland Island. It was to be one of the final stops on their attempt to circumnavigate the globe--but they never arrived. The following is United Press's coverage of the disappearance, 75 years ago.Earhart down in Pacific; coast picks up new SOSSAN FRANCISCO, July 3, 1937 (UP) -- Miss Earhart's husband, George Palmer Putnam, maintaining a ceaseless vigil at Oakland airport, was not convinced today that the voices heard by amateur radio operators were those of either Miss Earhart or Captain Noonan, her navigator. He also was not certain that the plane actually had sent out earlier dot and dash signals picked up by Coast Guard stations, by the British cruiser Achilles and the freighter New Zealand.

Researchers from UAB and CSIC have discovered the oldest Neolithic bow in Europe at La Draga Neolithic site in Banyoles yields. The complete bow measures 108 cm long and was constructed of yew wood.Archaeological research carried out at the Neolithic site of La Draga, near the lake of Banyoles, has yielded the discovery of an item which is unique to the western Mediterranean and Europe. The item is a bow dating from the period between 5400-5200 BCE, corresponding to the earliest period of settlement. It is the first bow to be found intact at the site. It can be considered the most ancient bow of the Neolithic period found in Europe.

Serbian archaeologists have discovered the remains of at least seven mammoths at a dig at an open pit mine, which could turn out to be a mammoth cemetery, lead archaeologist Miomir Korac told AFP Friday."We are at the start of the excavations. We first found the remains of one mammoth and then every 30 metres or so the bones of six more animals at the same depth," said Korac, who leads the team carrying out the dig.The bones, including an almost 2-metre (6.5-foott) tusk, were found in the Kostolac mine some 70 kilometres (45 miles) to the east of Belgrade.

A supernova may have actually been the mysterious "Red Crucifix" in the sky that is cited in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle for the year 774. New correspondence between a university student and Nature carries interesting observations that astronomers could be looking at a previously unrecognized supernova. Historical texts like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have made reference to astronomical events before and a sighting in 774 told of a red crucifix in the sky in Britain during evening hours. Some say the sighting could have been what was the result of a supernova explosion.

Don't forget to contact aliens this evening.All Twitter messages composed between 8 p.m. EDT Friday (June 29) and 3 a.m. EDT Saturday (June 30) tagged with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs will be collectively beamed up to space Aug. 15, toward a spot in the sky from which a possible alien signal originated.The cosmic tweet is a belated reply to the Wow! signal, a mysterious radio transmission that was detected at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio in 1977 coming from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. At its peak, the 72-second transmission was 30 times more powerful than ambient radiation from deep space, prompting the volunteer astronomer Jerry Ehman to scrawl "Wow!" next to the data on a computer printout, giving the signal its name

Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman in space, returned to Earth today as the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft landed safely in Inner Mongolia at 10:05 local time (02:05 GMT). The descent was slowed by parachutes, as well as rockets which fired when the capsule was 1 metre above the ground, slowing the capsule to a touchdown speed of 3.5 metres per second. Upon exiting the Shenzhou-9 capsule, Liu said "It feels so good to stand on Earth, and it feels even better to be home".

Cambodian villagers demonstrated on Friday against a controversial Lao hydropower dam that activists say is being built in defiance of an agreement to assess its potentially damaging impact on millions of people first.About 200 villagers whose livelihoods depend on the Mekong River urged a halt to the Thai-led construction of the $3.5 billion Xayaburi dam, which has angered Cambodia's government and triggered a rare rebuke by Laos's biggest ally, Vietnam.

A confrontation between the insatiable appetite for energy and the enduring need for habitability is under way in Brazil as it moves aggressively to harness the power of its rivers with plans for dozens of hydroelectric dams.Such projects are engineering and aesthetic marvels that provide hydroelectric power and can also control floods and direct water for irrigation. But they also divert rivers, destroy animal habitat, displace entire communities and drown vast amounts of land beneath reservoirs.

Scientists were at a loss Friday to explain the mysterious deaths of more than 70 green turtles that have washed up on beaches in northeast Australia over the last week.Queensland state authorities said 62 of the vulnerable species were confirmed dead and another 10 were spotted floating at sea by a helicopter.Marty McLaughlin, operations manager at Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services, said the turtles were nourished and had no obvious signs of illness.

The "emerging, next-generation plant-based meat (alternatives) promise to deliver the sensory experience of conventional animal proteins for specific culinary applications," said Nicholas J. Genovese, PhD, visiting scholar and consultant at the University of Missour¬i-Columbia. In addition, scientists are growing in-vitro meat cells and muscle that may someday replace chicken, beef and pork.The average American eats 864 pounds of meat each year, according to visualeconomics.com, a consumption level that cannot be sustained economically or environmentally, said Genovese.

Modern technology may have resurrected the oldest sound recording in the world from an image in a German magazine from 1890. The recording is the muffled voice of the father of the gramophone, Emile Berliner he recites Friedrich Schiller's ballad ''Der Handschuh.'' Ben Gruber reports.

A teensy sluglike animal that wriggled around the sediment in search of food at least 585 million years ago didn't die in vain. The tiny mover left behind tracks that researchers now say represent evidence of the earliest known bilateral animal, or multicellular life with bilateral symmetry.The finding, detailed in the June 29 issue of the journal Science, pushes back the date for the existence of advanced multicellular animal life by at least 30 million years. The oldest evidence before this discovery came from Russia and dated to 555 million years ago.

Islamists armed with Kalashnikovs and pick-axes have destroyed the centuries-old mausoleums of saints in the Unesco-listed city of Timbuktu in front of shocked locals, witnesses say.The attack by the al-Qaida-linked Ansar Dine group came days after Unesco placed Timbuktu on its list of heritage sites in danger and will recall the 2001 dynamiting by the Taliban of two sixth-century statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan.

Archaeologists working at the site of La Corona in Guatemala have discovered a 1,300-year-old-year Maya text that provides only the second known reference to the so-called "end date" of the Maya calendar, December 21, 2012. The discovery, one of the most significant hieroglyphic finds in decades, was announced June 28 at the National Palace in Guatemala."This text talks about ancient political history rather than prophecy," says Marcello A. Canuto, director of Tulane's Middle American Research Institute and co-director of the excavations at La Corona.

Archaeologists excavating an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Cambridgeshire say the discovery of a woman buried with a cow is a "genuinely bizarre" find.The grave was uncovered in Oakington by students from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Central Lancashire.At first it was thought the animal skeleton was a horse.Student Jake Nuttall said: "Male warriors might be buried with horses, but a woman and a cow is new to us."

The Industrial Revolution, which made Britain the powerhouse of the world in the 19th Century, may have been consigned to the history books but it has left a legacy of environmental problems.Experts warn it continues to pollute drinking water, poison rivers and threaten flooding and in the process it fuels climate change and affects huge swathes of the modern landscape.The mining of lead, tin and other metals is thought to have contaminated nearly 2,000 miles of waterways. Estimated repair costs run into the hundreds of millions.

The American defence department's research wing, Darpa, has awarded $500,000 (£319k) to form the 100 Year Starship initiative and help make interstellar travel a reality.Former Nasa astronaut Mae Jemison, who flew on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992, will head the new independent organisation that will strive to turn Star Trek from fiction into something resembling fact.The goal is to bring all sorts of disciplines together, from engineers to philosophers, to design a spacecraft that could set off to carry people to the stars within the next hundred years.

Time is running out to get serious about fixing the problem of space debris, experts say.As more countries around the world build up their space capabilities, U.S. lawmakers are keen to address the growing issue of potentially harmful debris in orbit. But while policies have attempted to tackle the problem, no major strides have been made.

Some of the more exciting plans for the future of space exploration are currently quite literally out of reach.The United States doesn't have the rocket power to send men to the moon or to Mars. There are some big rockets in the pipeline that will soon restore that power to the United States, but none can match the power of Nova. Nova was NASA's first heavy launch vehicle that never made it to the launch pad -- let alone off it.SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is one big rocket, and currently the only commercial one that will have the ability to send men beyond Earth orbit. And we might see it fly sooner rather than later.

A 150-foot-high garbage dump in Colombia, South America, may have new life as a public park. Researchers at the University of Illinois have demonstrated that bacteria found in the dump can be used to neutralize the contaminants in the soil.Jerry Sims, a U of I associate professor of crop sciences and USDA-Agricultural Research Service research leader and Andres Gomez, a graduate student from Medellín, Colombia, have been working on a landfill called "El Morro" in the Moravia Hill neighborhood of Medellín, which served as the city dump from 1972 to 1984.

Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London have discovered a mechanism that controls the way that organisms breathe or photosynthesise, potentially paving the way for improved biofuel production.Writing in the journal PNAS, Dr Lu-ning Lu and Professor Conrad Mullineaux from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences report that by exposing cells to different light conditions, they have changed the way in which electrons are transported.

In traditional electrical lines, a significant amount of energy is lost while the energy travels from its source to homes and businesses due to resistance. Superconductors, materials that when cooled have zero electric resistance, have the promise of someday increasing the efficiency of power distribution, but more must still be learned about superconductors before they can be widely used for that purpose.

Researchers from the Institut Français d'Etudes Anatoliennes in Istanbul and the Laboratoire de Tribologie et de Dynamiques des Systèmes have analyzed the oldest obsidian bracelet ever identified, discovered in the 1990s at the site of Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey. Using high-tech methods developed by LTDS to study the bracelet's surface and its micro-topographic features, the researchers have revealed the astounding technical expertise of craftsmen in the eighth millennium BC. Their skills were highly sophisticated for this period in late prehistory, and on a par with today's polishing techniques.

University of Tübingen and South African researchers have revealed sophisticated design and technology developed by early humans.The bow and arrow have long been regarded as a possible indicator of culture in prehistoric times. Bows and arrows appear to have been in use for some 64,000 years, given evidence from South Africa. Until recently, their significance in human cognitive ability was unclear. Now two researchers have been able to decode the conceptual foundations of the bow and arrow. The results of the study, by Miriam Haidle of the Heidelberg Academy's ROCEEH project (sponsored by the Senckenberg Research Institute) and the University of Tübingen and Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg, appear in the latest edition of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

The icon of Rome's foundation, a life-size bronze statue of a she-wolf with two human infants suckling her, is about 1,700 years younger than its city, Rome's officials admitted on Saturday.The official announcement, made at the Capitoline Museums, where the 30 inch-high bronze is the centerpiece of a dedicated room, quashes the belief that the sculpture was adopted by the earliest Romans as a symbol for their city."The new dating ranges between 1021 e il 1153," said Lucio Calcagnile, who carried radiocarbon tests at the University of Salento's Center for Dating e Diagnostics.

The study is the first to give a comprehensive projection for this long perspective, based on observed sea-level rise over the past millennium, as well as on scenarios for future greenhouse-gas emissions."Sea-level rise is a hard to quantify, yet critical risk of climate change," says Michiel Schaeffer of Climate Analytics and Wageningen University, lead author of the study. "Due to the long time it takes for the world's ice and water masses to react to global warming, our emissions today determine sea levels for centuries to come."

Is it possible to live modern life without plastic? One Austrian family, concerned about dangers to the environment and health caused by the material, decided to find out. What was meant to last a month has evolved into a new way of life.Try to imagine living without plastic for just a single day. No computer, no mobile phone, no car and certainly no pre-packaged food. Modern life, marked by the ubiquity of plastic, makes avoiding the synthetic substance a nearly impossible undertaking. But concerned by a growing number of health and environmental problems that arise from constant contact with plastic, one Austrian family decided to go without.

The recent death of Lonesome George, the famed Galapagos tortoise believed to be the last representative of his subspecies, has many experts wondering how we should try to save other endangered and at-risk animals.Cloning is one option. While cloning methods for reptiles are not as advanced as those for mammals, scientists also say they face other incredible obstacles.

To study the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, astronomers have had two choices: pick one that flies across the face of its parent star relative to Earth's perspective (an event known as a transit), or wait for a new generation of more sensitive space telescopes that can directly capture the planet's faint light.Now, there's a third option.Using a cryogenically-cooled infrared detector on a telescope in Chile, astronomers ferreted out beams of light coming directly from Tau Boötis b, a massive planet about 50 light-years from Earth.

GHMB moderator, and part-time author Dave Sproull is currently writing a free online fictional story featuring Graham Hancock and Ancient-Civilization related themes that newsdesk readers may find of interest. It's coming in regular installments, but you can read the first four parts here:Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Stay tuned for part 5 and future installments.

The poet wrote that at the mere thought of the flowers "my heart with pleasure fills", and now scientists say they could help treat medical conditions in the brain.Studies have found that compounds in Crinum and Crytanthus - South African species of snowdrops and daffodils - are able to pass through the blood brain barrier, the defensive wall which keeps the brain isolated.The wall is a major problem in treating brain diseases including depression because drugs are pumped out as quickly as they are put it, say scientists from the University of Copenhagen.

For a few hundred dollars, anyone can now buy time to run their own experiments aboard a small satellite set to launch next year. A physicist and two engineers are building a 4-inch (10 centimeters) cubic satellite designed to carry hobbyist processors into space and run citizen-written programs.The researchers, including consultants to NASA's Ames Research Center, want to develop a cheap spacecraft that makes space science affordable to everyday people, according to their Kickstarter page. They're now gathering donations for spaceworthy hardware, assembly and launch.

Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius and codebreaker born 100 years ago on 23 June, may not have committed suicide, as is widely believed.Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland has questioned the evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest.He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict.Indeed, he argues, Turing's death may equally probably have been an accident.What is well known and accepted is that Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning.

As anyone who has played with a powerful laser or just suffered a bad sunburn can attest, light has an impressive power to physically change objects. And now we know that light can make nanoparticles expand and contract like miniature Hoberman Spheres. MIT and Harvard researchers engineered nanoparticles that shrink to less than a third of their original size when exposed to ultraviolet rays; in the darkness or under visible light, they open back up to their more stable, larger size.

The West Coast will see an ocean several inches (centimeters higher in coming decades, with most of California expected to get sea levels a half foot higher by 2030, according a report released Friday.The study by the National Research Council gives planners their best look yet at how melting ice sheets and warming oceans associated with climate change will raise sea levels along the country's Pacific coast. It is generally consistent with earlier global projections, but takes a closer look at California, Oregon and Washington.

Pottery fragments found in a south China cave have been confirmed to be 20,000 years old, making them the oldest known pottery in the world, archaeologists say.The findings, which will appear in the journal Science on Friday, add to recent efforts that have dated pottery piles in east Asia to more than 15,000 years ago, refuting conventional theories that the invention of pottery correlates to the period about 10,000 years ago when humans moved from being hunter-gathers to farmers.

Every so often, if you ride Moscow's crowded subways, you notice that the commuters around you include a dog - a stray dog, on its own, just using the handy underground Metro to beat the traffic and get from A to B.Yes, some of Moscow's stray dogs have figured out how to use the city's immense and complex subway system, getting on and off at their regular stops. The human commuters around them are so accustomed to it that they rarely seem to notice.

Two Tulane University archaeologists have accomplished what might seem impossible: They found something timely at a 1,500-year-old Maya ruin. It happened in mid-April, when Jocelyne Ponce and Marcello Canuto were examining hieroglyphics that had been carved into limestone staircase risers at a temple deep in the Guatemalan jungle.At the end of what Canuto described as "a long, elaborate text" about a Maya king, they found what turned out to be a clear reference to Dec. 21, 2012, the date that has made some people quake in fear because they believe that is the date the world will end.Canuto, director of Tulane's Middle American Research Institute, is not one of those people.

You'd have to go to the moon or Mars to find a bigger impact crater than the one discovered in Greenland.An asteroid 30 kilometres across smashed into Greenland three billion years ago, creating a crater that was once 25 kilometres deep and 600 kilometres wide. That dwarfs the oldest known impact crater on Earth, the Vredefort crater in South Africa, both in age and size. The Vredefort is about two billion years old and about 300 kilometres across.The new find is centred to the east of what is now the town of Maniitsoq on Greenland's western coastline. What remains of the original crater is only about 100 kilometres wide.

Scientists hunting the Higgs subatomic particle will unveil results next week that could confirm, confound or complicate our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.Seldom has something so small and ephemeral excited such interest. The theoretical particle explains how suns and planets formed after the Big Bang - but so far it has not been proven to exist.

If you can explain, before the end of July, why hot water freezes faster than cold, you could bag £1,000. That's what the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is offering for "the most creative explanation" of this phenomenon, known as the Mpemba effect. They say that submissions should be "eye-catching, arresting and scientifically sound", and may use any media, including film.

The best semiconductors are grown, not made. At least, this might one day be the case. Proteins that can build silica nanostructures on our behalf have been "evolved" in the lab. The structures could find a use in the semiconductor industry.Luke Bawazer, now at the University of Leeds, UK, and his colleagues wondered whether proteins that evolved to help build animal skeletons could be used to grow new electronics components.

Want healthy knees? Then you better floss your teeth.Yes, you read that right. Scientists have found traces of gum bacteria in the knees of people with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Rheumatology, adds more evidence of the link between poor oral health and poor health in general.Researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland essentially traced the passage of bacteria in the mouth to the fluid surrounded the kneecap, called synovial fluid. By analyzing the DNA of the bacteria, the researchers could determine that the progeny of the gum bacteria entered into the bloodstream and settled in the synovial fluid, which was in a weakened state as a result of arthritis.

Although it is known that women who smoke during pregnancy put themselves and their unborn babies at risk for several health problems, new research published online in The FASEB Journal reveals that children can inherit damaged DNA if their fathers smoked around the time they were conceived, increasing their risk of developing diseases, such as cancer.The study, conducted by Professor Diana Anderson from the University of Bradford's Division of Medical Sciences, found a strong association between DNA changes in the sperm of fathers who smoke and DNA changes in their newborn babies.

Evolution-wise, bottlenose dolphins have left their mammalian brothers in the dust, and new research is showing what genes they changed to do it. These genes include those involved in brain and metabolism.These changes could be why dolphins are known to be exceptionally smart, able to use tools, recognize themselves and even communicate with each other and with trainers.

JERUSALEM, June 26 (UPI) -- In an effort to preserve Palestinian heritage, ancient Arab language manuscripts from five Jerusalem libraries will soon be available online, officials said.The project was sponsored and initiated by the European Union and will showcase collections of thousands of ancient Arab language documents, manuscripts and books from five Arab libraries in Jerusalem's Old City, The Jerusalem Post said Tuesday.

Despite its good ecologic status, there were no permanent settlements in the south Swedish inland 9,000 years ago. Yet the area was visited by people who wanted to express their individuality and creativity and thereby gain status. This is found in a new doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg.

The search for life on Mars trundles on and, beside a few tantalizing hints, we still don't know if the Red Planet could ever have played host to the most basic of life forms.Why are we having such a hard time? Well, potential abodes for tiny Martians are (or were) likely deep underground, so we need to be smart and look for secondary indications of microbial alien life. And what better way to find aliens than to sniff them out, literally?This wonderfully elegant suggestion comes the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where a group of geologists had an epiphany.

Dinosaurs may not have been the slow, sunbathing reptiles researchers used to think. In fact, they may have been warm-blooded, new research suggests.The researchers studied the "growth lines" on animal bones, which are similar to the growth rings in tree trunks. During slow-growing times like during the winter, they are darker and narrower, while in fast-growing times the bones have lighter, wider bands.

If there's something you'd like to say to aliens, now's your chance. The Wow! signal, a mysterious radio transmission detected in 1977 that may or may not have come from extraterrestrials, is finally getting a response from humanity. Anyone can contribute his or her two cents -- or 140 characters, to be exact -- to the cosmic reply via Twitter.All tweets composed between 8 p.m. EDT Friday (June 29) and 3 a.m. EDT Saturday (June 30) tagged with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs will be rolled into a single message, according to the National Geographic Channel, which is timing the Twitter event to coincide with the premiere of the channel's new series, "Chasing UFOs."

Perhaps someday you'll need to go to the store because you ran out of cathode paint. A team of researchers has just announced a new paint-on battery design. The technique could change the way batteries are produced and eliminate restrictions on the surfaces used for energy storage.The paint-on battery, like all lithium ion batteries, consists of five layers: a positive current collector, a cathode that attracts positively charged ions, an ion-conducting separator, an anode to attract negative ions, and a negative current collector. For each layer, the challenge was to find a way to mix the electrically conductive material with various polymers to create a paint that could be sprayed onto surfaces.

Dozens of the square stones used by Romans 2,000 years ago to pave roads are ending up in passengers hand luggage.Security staff screening bags at the Italian capital's main airports at Fiumicino and Ciampino have reported a surge in findings as x-ray scanners pick up the objects when luggage is screened and they in turn call police.On Sunday, police in Rome put on display a vast collection of the cobblestones and artefacts that they have seized from passenger luggage in the first six months of this year.

Brazil will offer inmates in its crowded federal penitentiary system a new way to shorten their sentences: a reduction of four days for every book they read.Inmates in four federal prisons holding some of Brazil's most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year, the government announced.

When someone claims they're good at rock-paper-scissors, they're usually just trying to psyche you out so they can predict your next move. But this robot, created by the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory in Japan, doesn't need to psyche you out, because it knows it will beat you every single time.How can it do it? One thing it certainly doesn't do is any kind of high-level analysis of the game. It doesn't put your last sequence of moves through a complex semantic analysis and try to predict the move. It doesn't use anti-random tactics like "five scissors in a row" to throw you off. All it needs is a high-speed camera and quick reflexes.

The United States and the United Kingdom are teaming up to fight against a growing threat from space: sun storms.An international space weather agreement between the two countries will expand collaboration to protect against the potentially damaging effects of solar radiation, which is due to increase as the sun ramps up activity toward a maximum in 2013.The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the United Kingdom Government Office for Science announced today (June 26) that the nations will share space weather resources and scientific expertise to guard valuable power and electronic infrastructure from solar outbursts.

The genomes of Ethiopian people hold echoes of the meeting between a legendary king and queen.About 3000 years ago, the Queen of Sheba purportedly travelled from what is now Ethiopia to meet King Solomon in Israel. Ethiopian folklore even tells of a child between the pair. But that's just a story, right?Perhaps not entirely.

C. p. pyrenaica, the Pyrenean Ibex, became extinct in 2000 before its biological and phytogenetic characteristics could be explored in depth.In 1984 and 1994 during routine explorations a speleological group found the bone remains of two male and one female Ibex in the karstic caves and wells that acted like traps in Larra and Millaris, Spain. Both locations lie at 2,390 and 2,500 m height, respectively.Dr Ricardo García-González, a researcher at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology has been put in charge of analyzing the skulls and comparing their craniometric characteristics with both fossil and modern day neighboring mountain goat populations.

Lonesome George, the giant tortoise who became the face of the Galapagos Islands conservation effort, was found dead in his corral Sunday morning, according to a statement by the Galapagos National Park Service. He was believed to be more than 100 years old and weighed 200 pounds.He is the last known Pinta Island giant tortoise, and his death likely marks the complete extinction of his subspecies.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced that a supercomputer called Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was ranked the world's most powerful computing system.Clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), Sequoia earned the No. 1 ranking on the industry standard Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers released Monday, June 18, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC12) in Hamburg, Germany. Sequoia was built for NNSA by IBM.

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have used genome sequencing technology to control an outbreak of the superbug MRSA in a study that could point to faster and more efficient treatment of a range of diseases.The work adds to a burgeoning body of research into better techniques for diagnosing disease more quickly and at an earlier stage to allow more effective treatment and reduce healthcare costs.

THE Herero people know just what to do when a horse is too wild or unpredictable: they lash a donkey to it, which forces the horse to slow down and helps to tame it. Unruly animals have been dealt with this way for generations by the inhabitants of the small village of Erindiroukambe, which lies in the heart of the Kalahari desert in eastern Namibia.But times are changing and, as young men leave to work or study in cities like Windhoek, 400 kilometres away, it becomes much harder to hang on to this kind of local knowledge. Kasper Rodil, at Aalborg University in Denmark, and his colleagues want to see if tablet computers can help bridge the gap. "The human race would lose some colour if we lost this kind of knowledge," says Rodil.

INSTALLING huge mirrors in space would help reverse global warming, but they would come at a price: less rain for the Americas and northern Eurasia.Previous studies have shown that geoengineering cannot restore both temperature and rain to previous levels, but they could not specify what a geoengineered climate would look like.Hauke Schmidt of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and his colleagues played out the same simple scenario in four different climate models. In each one, he quadrupled carbon dioxide levels from pre-industrial levels. Then, to mimic the effect of space-borne mirrors, he reduced the amount of incoming sunlight to precisely compensate for the extra trapped heat.

A newly identified googly-eyed artifact may have been used by the ancient Egyptians to magically protect children and pregnant mothers from evil forces.Made of faience, a delicate material that contains silica, the pale-green talisman of sorts dates to sometime in the first millennium B.C. It shows the dwarf god Bes with his tongue sticking out, eyes googly, wearing a crown of feathers. A hole at the top of the face was likely used to suspend it like a bell, while a second hole, used to hold the bell clapper, was apparently drilled into it in antiquity.

The face of a flounder, sole, halibut or other flatfish looks like a hodgepodge of mismatched puzzle pieces forced together, with eyes that don't seem to match one another nor the orientation of the animal's mouth.This is because, as these fish mature, one eye migrates over the top of the fish's head, coming to rest above the other eye, so both are on the same side of the head. A new fossil discovery has shed light on how this strange trait came about.Matt Friedman, a paleobiologist at University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, found a sort of flatfish missing link in a drawer of unidentified fish fossils in the Natural History Museum of Vienna, Austria.

A wine plague spread by lice destroyed vines in France in the 19th century but a small area in the Pyrenees, which contains plants up to 200 years old, was spared and is being classified as a national heritage monument.Like other national treasures such as the Palace of Versailles and Notre Dame cathedral, the vines in the Ardour valley will be protected.They contain the ancient DNA of local grape varieties. Some grapes are still being used with grapes from younger generation vines to make Saint-Mont wine.