Newsdesk Archive

Two metal detector enthusiasts from Jersey uncovered what could be Europe's largest hoard of Iron Age coins - after a painstaking search spanning 30 years.Reg Mead and Richard Miles began their hunt after a woman told them her father had found coins in a field some years before.But the woman could only give the pair a rough location for the discovery.And to complicate things further, the field's owner would only allow them to look for a short time each year after the crop was harvested.

Archaeologists in Greece's second-largest city have uncovered a 70-metre section of an ancient road built by the Romans that was city's main travel artery nearly 2,000 years ago.The marble-paved road was unearthed during excavations for Thessaloniki's new underground system, which is due to be completed in four years.The road in the northern port city will be raised to be put on permanent display when the metro opens in 2016.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory doesn't have anywhere near the name recognition of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. But for the time being, it can lay claim to its own impressive achievement: it's just been recognized by Guinness World Records for achieving the "Highest Manmade Temperature." Go, RHIC!The honor comes courtesy of the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) collaboration, designed to study the formation and characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to have existed for ten-millionths of a second after the universe's birth.

Launched in August of last year, NASA's Juno probe is on a Kamikaze mission to go prospecting for water on Jupiter.Juno is nearly 300 million miles from Earth -- that's so far that a radio signal takes over 25 minutes to reach the probe. The spacecraft will loop back toward Earth and in October 2013 to get an added boost in speed by robbing some orbital momentum from our planet.It slingshots into Jupiter orbit in 2016. Juno will set a new record as the farthest solar-power probe ever launched. (There was a shortage of nuclear fuel, as used on all previous NASA outer solar system spacecraft.)

Glass jewelry believed to have been made by Roman craftsmen has been found in an ancient tomb near Kyoto, researchers said, in a sign the empire's influence may have reached the edge of Asia.Tests have revealed that three glass beads discovered in the fifth-century Utsukushi burial mound in Nagaoka, Kyoto Prefecture, were probably made sometime between the first and fourth centuries A.D., according to the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties.The government-backed institute has recently finished analyzing components of the 5-mm glass beads, which have tiny fragments of gilt attached.

The mysterious unmanned mini-space shuttle on a classified mission has finally returned to earth.It landed early Saturday morning at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California after weather conditions kept pushing back landing attempts the last few days.The Air Force's X-37B, is an unmanned reusable spacecraft built by Boeing that has spent more than a year on a classified mission in space.

Population estimates for the Amazon basin just before Europeans arrived range from 2 to 10 million people. The newly reported reconstruction of Amazonian prehistory by Smithsonian scientist Dolores R. Piperno and colleagues suggests that large areas of western Amazonia were sparsely inhabited. This clashes with the belief that most of Amazonia, including forests far removed from major rivers, was heavily occupied and modified. The team's research is published in the June 15 issue of Science.

Data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft indicate that the venerable deep-space explorer has encountered a region in space where the intensity of charged particles from beyond our solar system has markedly increased. Voyager scientists looking at this rapid rise draw closer to an inevitable but historic conclusion - that humanity's first emissary to interstellar space is on the edge of our solar system.

You don't have to be big to hunt black holes. NASA's telescope NuSTAR, which was due to take off from an island in the South Pacific on 13 June, is small enough to fit beneath the belly of an aircraft, even including its launch rocket. Once in orbit, it will unfold to the length of a school bus.The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array will be the first telescope to bring high-energy X-rays into focus, letting astronomers map and study the extreme physics around black holes and the explosions of massive stars. Its images of these objects will be 10 times crisper and 100 times more sensitive than those of previous telescopes.

Archaeologists claim to have unearthed the remnants of a large prehistoric building, which they say could be older than Egypt's pyramids.Experts said they were mystified by the "unique" find on the site of a housing development in Monmouth.Monmouth Archaeology, which found the wooden foundations, said they dated to at least the Bronze Age, but could be early Neolithic, about 6,500 years old.It said the pyramids were built about 4,500 years ago.

New tests show that crude Spanish cave paintings of a red sphere and handprints are the oldest in the world, so ancient they may not have been by modern man.Some scientists say they might have even been made by the much-maligned Neanderthals, but others disagree.Testing the coating of paintings in 11 Spanish caves, researchers found that one is at least 40,800 years old, which is at least 15,000 years older than previously thought. That makes them older than the more famous French cave paintings by thousands of years.

GARDAI are hunting vandals who attacked a 5,500-year-old standing stone at the Hill of Tara in Co Meath with a hammer.Damage has been caused in 11 places on all four faces of the Lia Fail Standing Stone -- also know as the 'Stone of Destiny' -- which is mentioned in ancient texts about the High Kings of Ireland.

A manned Chinese submersible broke through the 7,000-metre mark for a new national record on Sunday, state media said, as the rising Asian nation showed off its technological might.The "Jiaolong" craft dived 7,015 metres (23,015 feet) in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean on its fourth dive since arriving in the area earlier this month, the official Xinhua news agency said.The dive came on the same day as China was attempting its first manual space docking, a complex manoeuvre that will bring the country a step closer to building a space station.

Did a UFO really crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947? What was that mysterious triangle of lights that hundreds of people spotted over Phoenix, Ariz., last fall? Are alleged alien abductees telling the truth? For a new series on the National Geographic Channel called "Chasing UFOs," a team of investigators visited UFO hotspots around the world and interviewed witnesses in an attempt to address some of history's most famous purported evidence that aliens have visited Earth.We caught up with Ben McGee, a geoscientist and the lead field researcher on the UFO-chasing team, as well as its only skeptic, to get a taste of what he and his team discovered.

A lawsuit filed Friday by the Legal Aid Society charges that the New York Police Department is routinely ignoring a September directive reminding officers that they may not make arrests on misdemeanor marijuana charges if they have directed suspects to bring into open view the drug.The organization is seeking a court injunction to compel the the department to stop these arrests, arguing that in such cases state law mandates a desk-appearance ticket for a violation that carries a $100 fine.The filing takes aim at one aspect of the department's stop-and-frisk policy, and comes after a failed bid by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to decriminalize the public possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Archaeologists have found a stunning array of 1,200-year-old Maya paintings in a room that appears to have been a workshop for calendar scribes and priests, with numerical markings on the wall that denote intervals of time well beyond the controversial cycle that runs out this December.For years, prophets of doom have been saying that we're in for an apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012, because that marks the end of the Maya "Long Count" calendar, which was based on a cycle of 13 intervals known as "baktuns," each lasting 144,000 days. But the researchers behind the latest find, detailed in the journal Science and an upcoming issue of National Geographic, say the writing on the wall runs counter to that bogus belief.

The sardonic proverb "nothing is certain but death and taxes," can now be recast for the cosmos.Last week's announcement of the inevitable collision of the Andromeda galaxy with the Milky Way is one of only two apocalyptic astronomical predictions that we can be absolutely certain of. The other is the death of our sun. Purely deterministic processes drive both.The eventual galaxy smashup is the result of the inexorable pull of gravity between two heavyweight "island universes" each weighing over 1 trillion times the mass of our sun.

Sperm whales, it is not widely known, have the largest heads in the animal kingdom. (At around six meters, (20 feet) long, a sperm whale's head constitutes roughly one-third of its entire length from tip to tail.) Sperm whales are also the deepest divers in the mammalian world, able to descend in excess of 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) in search of giant squid, subjecting themselves to pressures that would crush a human.And, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, sperm whales also produce extraordinarily valuable poop.Not all sperm whales produce this poop. And at least some - and perhaps most or even all - of those that do, die in the process. But the result is, to humans, little short of golden.

Imagine a world without man-made climate change, energy crunches or reliance on foreign oil. It may sound like a dream world, but University of Tennessee, Knoxville, engineers have made a giant step toward making this scenario a reality.UT researchers have successfully developed a key technology in developing an experimental reactor that can demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy for the power grid. Nuclear fusion promises to supply more energy than the nuclear fission used today but with far fewer risks.

Scientists do not fully understand how nature uses proteins to develop new materials and minerals, but learning more about the natural processes could lead to bioengineering methods such as the biological synthesis of solid-state materials for electronics applications. Now researchers in the US have designed a synthetic biological platform to facilitate the study of these processes and genetically engineer new materials.The scientists, led by Professor Emeritus Daniel E. Morse of the University of California, Santa Barbara, created synthetic cells containing a polystyrene micro-bead as a nucleus. They then created DNA segments containing genes from two related silicateins along with random mutations and attached a piece of this DNA to each plastic bead. They soaked each bead in a mixture of bacterial proteins required by the synthetic cells to manufacture silicateins, and surrounded the beads with oil to act as the cell membrane.

You may not expect much from a garden snail. Some clever hacking can turn it into a living battery, though. Evgeny Katz and his team from Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have successfully implanted a biofuel cell in a snail for the first time, allowing it to generate electricity for the remaining months of its life.

Ancient standing stones, seafarers and community center studies have won scholars awards from the journal, Antiquity.The awards recognize the journal's most striking recent reports of scholarship on the ancient world.Most striking visually is the photo award made to Chris Ceaser for a sunrise view of the Castlerigg Stone Circle in northwestern England, a Stone Age ceremonial center perhaps 3,300 years old.Another prize winner was a report on what looks like the earliest recorded Stone Age temple, or at least a feasting hall, dating to 11,600 years, found at a site in southern Jordan. It was reported by a team led by Stephen Mithen of the United Kingdom's University of Reading.

South African paleontologist Phillip Tobias, an internationally respected scientist associated with some of the world's most famous hominid fossil finds, died Thursday aged 86.Tobias, also an anti-apartheid activist, was renowned for his "dedication to a better understanding of the origin, behaviour and survival of humanity," said the University of Witwatersrand, where he was professor emeritus.

Researchers at the University of Colorado have made a breakthrough that may one day help doctors detect disease earlier and with more accuracy.Based on the hypothosesis of Dr. Tenio Popmintchev, researchers have created a laser beam by adding 5,000 photons together. Previously, two photons were typically used to create laser beams. This is the first time so many photons have been successfully added together.The result is a more efficient and easier to set up X-ray, according to Dr. Margaret Murnane.

There are benefits in the melting of the Arctic, but the risks are much greaterNOW that summer is here, the Arctic is crowded with life. Phytoplankton are blooming in its chilly seas. Fish, birds and whales are gorging on them. Millions of migratory geese are in their northern breeding grounds. And the area is teeming with scientists, performing a new Arctic ritual.

A Greek flag waves by the statue of the goddess Athina, in Athens, Friday, June 22, 2012. In Greek mythology, King Sisyphus pushed a boulder up a hill, over and over, forever, in a futile exercise that a few commentators have compared to international efforts to revive Greece's dire finances. Homer's Odyssey, whose protagonist endures years of peril on his way home after the Trojan War, is seen as another metaphor for the ordeal of a nation in its fifth year of recession.

A painless hypodermic needle the size of a mosquito's bloodsucking mouthparts is under development by medical technologists.Japanese microengineers have created a minute needle just a milimetre long and with a diameter of 0.1mm that uses the same mechanism as the insect's unique jaws to pierce human skin.With seven moving parts, female mosquito mouthparts, known as the proboscis, are highly specialised and touch the nerves of the skin at fewer points than the smooth surface on man-made needles.

The Swiss-made Solar Impulse landed in Ouarzazate at 26 minutes after midnight (2326 GMT) after having taken off from Rabat at dawn on Thursday."Once again, the flight was magnificent," Borschberg said shortly before landing.Earlier, during the flight, pilot Andre Borschberg told AFP by satellite telephone from his cockpit said he was optimistic about the chances of success.

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.There are growing signs they were mistaken.Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.

A new status code to reflect internet censorship could be named after Ray Bradbury's most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451Ray Bradbury's fiction looks set to enter the structure of the internet, after a software developer has proposed a new HTTP status code inspired by Fahrenheit 451.Tim Bray, a fan of Bradbury's writing, is recommending to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which governs such choices, that when access to a website is denied for legal reasons the user is given the status code 451.

Global warming may cause more extinctions than predicted if scientists fail to account for interactions among species in their models, Yale and UConn researchers argue in Science."Currently, most models predicting the effects of climate change treat species separately and focus only on climatic and environmental drivers," said Phoebe Zarnetske, the study's primary author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. "But we know that species don't exist in a vacuum. They interact with each other in ways that deeply affect their viability.

Recent ongoing research suggests that the Welsh are genetically distinct from the rest of mainland Britain. Professor Peter Donnelly, of Oxford University, showed that many individuals in Wales carry DNA which could be traced back to the last Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago.The project surveyed over 2,000 people in rural areas across Britain who could trace their origins back at least three generations in the same location.

In the dead of Martian winter, the snowflakes that blanket the planet's poles are no bigger than red blood cells, according to a new study of the icy particles.The results suggest that, rather than resembling a blizzard, Mars snow would probably look like fog as it fell.Previous data from NASA's Phoenix mission revealed snow falling near the red planet's north pole as the seasons turned from summer to fall. At the time the air was relatively warm, so those ice crystals were most likely made from water, scientists say.

Detail of an Old Master oil painting, a close-up of a copper-rich mineral, or the vivid colours of a paua shell? The image is in fact the surface of an alien world: an enhanced-colour image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera.Each colour represents a different type of rock, the mix of minerals churned up by a meteor striking the surface close to the Nili Fossae region. Known as ejecta, these rocks surround an impact crater and give scientists a chance to examine the planet's ancient bedrock.

If you drive a car, you'll be blue when you read this: red cars attract more bird droppings than any other color.The game-changing evidence comes from a new study from Great Britain, which recorded the number of "emissions" made on cars by the birds in five British cities.More than 1100 cars were analyzed over a two-day period and at the end, 18 percent of the pooped-on cars were red and 14 percent were blue, followed by black (11 percent), white (7 percent), grey or silver (3 percent) and green cars, which only got one percent of the bird bombs, according to Independent Online.

A Florida fossil dealer who prepared the skeleton of a tyrannosaur and attempted to sell it at auction, questions assertions that the fossils were taken illegally from Mongolia, and says the dispute over its ownership has brought financial ruin on his family."Imagine watching your house burn down with everything you have in it and knowing you have no insurance," Eric Prokopi, a commercial fossil dealer based in Gainesville, Fla., writes in a lengthy statement issued to reporters today (June 22).The lost sale of the dinosaur has been devastating, he writes.

Four "aquanauts" returned to dry land today (June 22), after spending 12 days living on the ocean floor off the Florida coast as part of a NASA-led mock mission to an asteroid.The undersea explorers wrapped up the 16th expedition of the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations Program, or NEEMO 16 this morning, emerging from the water at 9:11 a.m. EDT (1311 GMT), NASA officials confirmed.

More than a quarter of Americans believe in Bigfoot, a recent poll found. They claim this legendary bipedal ape, a "long lost relative" of humans, evades detection in remote woodland areas. Although it may seem strange to think a 7-foot-tall land mammal could go unnoticed for so long, the notion is actually widespread.Along with that sizeable minority of Americans, an Angus Reid Public Opinion poll found that 21 percent of Canadians also believe in an undiscovered hairy humanoid, which they prefer to call Sasquatch. In Russia, belief in a similar creature, called the Yeti, is so common that local branches of the Russian government have funded Yeti expeditions, and the country has even considered founding an entire institute devoted to the study of Yetis.

Centuries of speculation have attributed countless functions to the famous Wiltshire landmark, describing it variously as a prehistoric observatory, a place of healing and a temple for ritual sacrifice.But a new study by researchers from five British universities suggests Stonehenge may in fact have been built as a sign of peace between people from the east and west of the country after a period of conflict.The stones, which come from different locations as far afield as southern England and west Wales, may have been used to represent the ancestors of some of Britain's earliest farming communities, researchers suggest.

From Mozart to the Beatles, music evolves as listeners get used to sounds they initially find strange or even shocking. As trailblazing music becomes mainstream, artists strike out in new directions. But in a new study, a computer program shows how listeners drive music to evolve in a certain way. Although the resulting strains are hardly Don Giovanni, the finding shows how users' tastes exert their own kind of natural selection, nudging tunes to evolve out of noise.

A new report on Britain's environment found that levels of sulphur in our atmosphere have dropped 90 per cent compared with their peak level in the 1950s, thanks to measures to control emissions from coal-fired power stations in the 1980s.Now a similar political drive is needed to tackle the problem of nitrogen emissions from cars, power stations and farms and prevent the pollution from killing off wild flowers, experts said.Having too much nitrogen in the atmosphere over-fertilises the Earth and allows grasses and weeds such as nettles to flourish, causing the disappearance of wild flowering plantsl.

Food waste is a growing problem in many parts of the world, but discarded fruit peel, in the case of pomegranates, could be put to good use in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology.The pomegranate, Punica granatum, is native in northern India and has been cultivated and naturalized over the whole Mediterranean region since ancient times. The fruit extract is a rich source of highly potent antioxidants.

There's a new weapon in the war on meat: a tiny tick, whose bite might be spreading meat allergies up the East Coast.A bite from the lone star tick, so-called for the white spot on its back, looks innocent enough. But University of Virginia researchers say saliva that sneaks into the tiny wound may trigger an allergic reaction to meat -- agonizing enough to convert lifelong carnivores into wary vegetarians.

Carbon stored in Arctic tundra could be released into the atmosphere by new trees growing in the warmer region, exacerbating climate change, scientists have revealed.The Arctic is getting greener as plant growth increases in response to a warmer climate. This greater plant growth means more carbon is stored in the increasing biomass, so it was previously thought the greening would result in more carbon dioxide being taken up from the atmosphere, thus helping to reduce the rate of global warming.

Wombats might have a reputation as comical, clumsy creatures - but you would not be laughing if you came across an oversized, 2.8-tonne version.Australian scientists unveiled the biggest-ever graveyard of an ancient rhino-sized mega-wombat called diprotodon, with the site potentially holding valuable clues on the species' extinction.The remote fossil deposit in outback Queensland state is thought to contain up to 50 diprotodon skeletons including a huge specimen named Kenny, whose jawbone alone is 70 centimetres (28 inches) long.

A 70 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar, unearthed in the Gobi Desert, is to be seized by the US Department of Homeland Security.A New York court has issued a warrant forcing an auction house to return the fossil to modern-day Mongolia, where it was discovered about seven years ago.The dinosaur was sold at auction in New York last month by Heritage Auctions, for more than $1m (£600,000).But the court says it was illegally imported to the US via the UK in 2010.

Europe has given the final go-ahead to a space mission to investigate the "dark universe".The Euclid telescope will look deep into the cosmos for clues to the nature of dark matter and dark energy.These phenomena dominate the Universe, and yet scientists concede they know virtually nothing about them.European Space Agency (Esa) member states made their decision at a meeting in Paris. Euclid should be ready for launch in 2020.

A Dutch entrepreneur is on a mission to send a bold gang of explorers - aka reality show contestants - to Mars.It's either one of the biggest hoaxes in history conjured up by a group of richly deluded young fantasists or a brave attempt to challenge the boundaries of space travel and beat Nasa and co at their own game.The Mars One online statement explains that by using the $6bn (4.7bn euros; £3.8bn) generated through the biggest-ever television spectacle, the team will have enough knowledge and resources to set up a permanent colony on Mars.

More than 7,000 years ago, prehistoric people in the African Sahara were making dairy products, such as butter, yogurt and cheese.The discovery, based on the identification of dairy fats on ancient pottery shards found in Libya, is the first to provide a definitive date for early dairy farming in Africa. Adding to findings from Europe and the Middle East, the study points to milk products as a main reason why people in many places may have chosen to give up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favor of a more settled existence.

Until now, Earth was the only planet known to have vast reservoirs of water in its interior. Scientists analyzed the water content of two Martian meteorites originating from inside the Red Planet. They found that the amount of water in places of the Martian mantle is vastly larger than previous estimates and is similar to that of Earth's. The results not only affect what we know about the geologic history of Mars, but also have implications for how water got to the Martian surface. The data raise the possibility that Mars could have sustained life.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has returned data that indicate ice may make up as much as 22 percent of the surface material in a crater located on the moon's south pole.The team of NASA and university scientists using laser light from LRO's laser altimeter examined the floor of Shackleton crater. They found the crater's floor is brighter than those of other nearby craters, which is consistent with the presence of small amounts of ice. This information will help researchers understand crater formation and study other uncharted areas of the moon. The findings are published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.

Soil on the moon can hover over the surface, and the temperature six feet (two meters) deep can be more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit (167 degrees Celsius) colder than the topsoil.Now researchers in Australia think they've solved the puzzle of moon soil's odd behavior: nanosize particles of lunar glass.Small bubbles of glass form on the moon when micrometeorites hit the lunar surface.Since the moon has no atmosphere to slow the projectiles, each one, no matter how tiny, "wreaks havoc," said Paul Warren, a research geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn't involved in the new study.

Eating less meat, particularly beef, recycling more waste and devoting more farmland to crops which can generate biofuels are essential if the world is to combat climate change, experts warned.Failure to make our farms more efficient would leave us unable to feed the growing world population and potentially lead to an ecological disaster with ever more dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, they said.Drawing up models of how changes in our diet could impact on farming by 2050, the Exeter University team found that a "high-meat, low-efficiency" situation would increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 55 parts in a million.

Dr. Higgs, I presume?A team of physicists gathered in a room at CERN on Friday to begin crunching new data from the Large Hadron Collider this year. And they will be at it all week.What they are seeing nobody knows.

Early this morning at 2:07am EDT the Chinese crew of Shenzhou-9, China's 3-person orbital spacecraft, achieved China's first-ever space dock with their Tiangong-1 space station. In doing so, China became the third country to carry astronauts (or taikonauts) to an orbital space station, and at least a billion people celebrated. The flight also brought with it China's first woman into space.

Archaeologists have unearthed at least five mammoths at a site in Serbia. The discovery last week at Kostolac coal mine, east of the Serbian capital of Belgrade, is the first of its kind in the region and could offer important insights into how the ice age affected the area now known as the Balkans. Miomir Korac, of Serbia's Archaeology Institute, said: "There are millions of mammoth fragments in the world, but they are rarely so accessible for exploration."

A 3,300-year-old treasure trove of gold found in northern Germany has stumped German archeologists. One theory suggests that traders transported it thousands of miles from a mine in Central Asia, but other experts are skeptical.Archeologists in Germany have an unlikely new hero: former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They have nothing but praise for the cigar-smoking veteran Social Democratic politician.

Paul the Octopus got all his predictions right during the 2010 World Cup. But can his feat be matched? Several animal oracles are doing their best to run the slate during this year's European Football Championship tournament. And so far, three of them have a perfect record. All hail the otters!When Paul the Octopus ran the slate of football prophesy during the 2010 World Cup, fans around the globe were astonished. How, everyone wondered, was it possible that a simple cephalopod living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany could see the football future? Paul managed eight correct predictions in a row -- surely an unprecedented feat?.

The theory of time running out was devised by researchers from two Spanish universities trying to explain why the universe appeared to be spreading continuously and accelerating.Observations of supernovae, or exploding stars, found the movement of light indicated they were moving faster than those nearer to the centre of the universe.But the scientists claimed the accepted theory of an opposite force to gravity, known as dark energy, was wrong, and said the reality was that the growth of the universe was slowing.

Turtles killed as they were having sex and then fossilised in position have been described by scientists.The remains of the 47-million-year old animals were unearthed in the famous Messel Pit near Darmstadt, Germany.They were found as male-female pairs. In two cases, the males even had their tails tucked under their partners' as would be expected from the coital position.Details are carried in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Sika deer "eavesdrop" on monkey chatter in order to find food, say scientists.A team from Kyoto University, Japan, tested how macaque monkey calls affected the feeding behaviour of the deer that live on Yakushima Island.Previous research has focussed on species "listening to" one another to avoid danger.But when scientists played macaque calls from hidden speakers, the deer gathered nearby, indicating that they associate the sounds with benefits.

The historic stone monument has been commonly associated with the annual celebration of summer but a researcher has suggested the winter festival was more important.Mike Parker Pearson, professor of archaeology at Sheffield University, suggested the midwinter solstice was historically when people would kill their animals and was more significant than the midsummer solstice.He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "In a way, we can look at the midwinter solstice as being a kind of neolithic Christmas.

In the 1930s there was an advertisement for an oil company that went: "Stonehenge Wilts, but Shell goes on forever." In 2012, with oil supplies falling and the remnants of the iconic slabs indomitable on the windswept plains of Wiltshire, the truth is surely otherwise."The stones themselves still stand, enduring in a society which is not," argues Christopher Chippindale, of the University of Cambridge's museum of archaeology and anthropology, who is also author of the book Stonehenge Complete. Today the World Heritage's foremost lintelled sarsen structure is not just enduring but thriving, spawning more academic research, wild theorising, bouncy art, and pagan robe sales than ever.

Uruguay has unveiled a plan to allow state-controlled sales of marijuana to fight a rise in drug-related crime.Under the bill, only the government would be allowed to sell marijuana to adults registered on a database.Defence Minister Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro said this was part of a plan to remove profits from drug dealers and divert users from harder drugs.He said that the recent increase in murder rates was a clear symptom of a rise in drug trafficking crimes.

Rama Budihal is creating digital history on wheels. "In India, we don't care about history, because we have too much of it," says Budihal, a Bangalore-based engineer and inventor. "I want to build recognition of the wealth of treasures we have here."His first stop: digitally preserving the roughly five million ancient manuscripts across the country, using a bus kitted out with a scanner, GPS and navigation, and systems that connect a network of historians and scholars in Delhi and Bangalore. Since 2007, the team has scanned more than a million scripts. The data is annotated and stored in the National Manuscripts Data Centre.

The world's political and environmental leaders gather in Rio de Janeiro tomorrow to assess the state of the planet's health 20 years after the first such gathering in 1992. But if science is any guide, Earth still needs some help.Several new climate studies reveal various aspects of the same foreboding problem: the atmosphere continues to warm, glaciers continue melting and seas keep rising.

On Friday (June 22) the movie "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" confronts our worst nightmare: death.But it's worse than that; it's not only you. All of your friends, family and pets are going the way of the dinosaur.This morbid scenario doesn't sound very funny -- death, after all, is as funny as taxes, both of which are the only two certainties in life (and both are deeply unfunny) -- so why is the comedic genius Steve Carell starring alongside Academy Award nominee Keira Knightly in what is being billed as a "doomsday comedy"?.

With so many exciting celestial bodies in our solar system and beyond, it's easy to take the moon for granted. Sure, NASA crashed a probe into the lunar surface for science recently, but no human being has set foot on the moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972.Now Ian Crawford of Birkbeck College in London and his colleagues have co-authored a paper making the case for a return manned mission to the moon, to augment the many remote-sensing spacecraft sent into lunar orbit over the last ten years.

Everyone seems to ponder the lyrics of Train's song "Drops of Jupiter," so perhaps it's about time a songwriter includes the "Snowflakes of Mars" in their next ballad. MIT scientists might even be able to add prose to the lyrics by describing their study into the very alien snow that falls from Red Planet skies.After collecting the vast quantities of data gathered by orbiting Mars spacecraft, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team has uncovered some rather interesting facts about Martian snow.But before you start dreaming about snowball fights and reindeer grazing on the slopes of Olympus Mons, think again -- this snow is like nothing we can ever experience on Earth.

An old NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars is a step closer to recovering from the malfunction of a small but vital part that keeps it pointed at the Red Planet, NASA officials say.NASA engineers are testing a spare reaction wheel aboard the 11-year-old Mars Odyssey spacecraft in the hope of restoring the aging probe to active duty after more than a week of down time. The move comes after the spacecraft slipped into a protective "safe mode" when another reaction wheel seized up last week.

A bizarre illness affecting nearly 20 students at a Western New York Junior-Senior High school now has an official diagnosis: mass hysteria.The students, almost all of them girls, and mostly friends, began experiencing involuntary jerks and tics. Sometimes their limbs, neck or face would suddenly spasm; other times they would twitch, grunt, or shout. It was strange and troubling behavior, made all the more scary because it had no clear cause.

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.

Scientists already knew that neonicotinoid pesticides, which affect insects' nervous systems, can alter bee behaviour, putting these vital pollinators, already threatened by habitat loss and disease, further at risk.This new piece of research shows that bumblebees with diets contaminated with levels of neonicotinoid pesticide typically found in the environment produce up to a third fewer offspring.

Research is urgently needed to evaluate the risks and benefits of nano-pesticides to human and environmental health. Melanie Kah and Thilo Hofmann from the Department of Environmental Geosciences of the University of Vienna recently performed an extensive analysis of this emerging field of research. The results were published June 6th in the internationally recognized journal Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology. The study presents the current scientific state of art on nano-pesticides and identifies direction priorities for future research.

Julian Assange is in 'good spirits' and has received a 'generous and welcoming' reception from the Ecuadorean embassy where he is seeking asylum, a friend said today.The WikiLeaks founder is currently holed up at the embassy in talks with his lawyers in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations.However Scotland Yard said Assange had breached his bail conditions by entering the embassy and he faces being re-arrested.

On a clear night in the Northern Hemisphere, look up at the sky and, over a period of hours, you'll notice the stars rising in the east and setting in the west ... all except one, Polaris, the Pole Star.It has the unique responsibility of marking, to within a few fractions of a degree, the north celestial pole. This grand title is the point in the sky toward which the Earth's axis of rotation is directed.

The few plants that live in Antarctica today are hardy hangers-on, growing just a few weeks out of the year and surviving poor soil, lack of rain and very little sunlight. But long ago, some parts of Antarctica were almost lush.New research finds that between about 15 million and 20 million years ago, plant life thrived on the coasts of the southernmost continent. Ancient pollen samples suggest that the landscape was a bit like today's Chilean Andes: grassy tundra dotted with small trees.

There has been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the internet in last six months, according to a report from Google.Since the search engine last published its bi-annual transparency report, it said it had seen a troubling increase in requests to remove political content. Many of these requests came from western democracies not typically associated with censorship.

Texas Democrats came together at their state convention earlier this month and agreed to adopt a plank to their party platform calling for the decriminalization of marijuana.From the party's website:This decriminalization of marijuana does not mean we endorse the use of marijuana but it is only a call to wiser use of law enforcement and public health policy. Prohibition of marijuana abdicates the control of marijuana production and distribution to drug cartels and street gangs. Such prohibition promotes disrespect for the law and reinforces ethnic and generational divides between the public and law enforcement.

The Vatican's number 2 accused the media on Monday of trying "to imitate Dan Brown" in their coverage of the VatiLeaks scandal and said the Roman Catholic Church's latest travails were part of the Devil's attempt to destabilize it.The interview with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who ranks second only to Pope Benedict in the Vatican's hierarchy, was the latest attempt at damage control by senior Vatican officials since the leaks scandal began in January.

Predator plants may cut back on flies if they can access key nutrients elsewhere, according to research.Scientists studying carnivorous sundew plants in Swedish bogs found that nitrogen deposition from rain reduced how many insects the plants trapped.Pollution from transport and industry causes nitrogen-rich rain, meaning more reaches the ground in some areas."If there's plenty of nitrogen available to their roots, they don't eat as much" says Dr Jonathan Millett.

Small, shifting human populations existed in the Amazon before the arrival of Europeans, with little long-term effect on the forest.That's the result of research led by Crystal McMichael and Mark Bush of the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT). The finding overturns the idea the Amazon was a cultural parkland in pre-Columbian times with large human populations that transformed vast tracts of the landscape.

NASA's Earth-observing fleet of satellites provides a worldwide and unbiased view with standardized scientific data -- information crucial for tracking the health of the world's forests.Countries like Brazil are using data from NASA satellites to track and measure their forests in advance of a United Nations effort to reduce climate change by providing "carbon credits" for protected land.The concept is known as REDD+, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. It includes monitoring forest degradation and efforts in conservation and sustainable management.

The universe has no shortage of bizarre materials. Superfluids are liquids that can flow straight up walls, Bose-Einstein condensates are gasses that will vibrate eternally, and neutron stars are essentially city-sized subatomic particles.Physicists have now developed a mathematical theory that describes how collective quantum mechanical weirdness leads to the strange properties of these materials. While previous work has focused on each individual system, the new theory unites the behavior for many materials, including magnets, superfluids, and neutron star matter.

What does a robot feel when it touches something? Little or nothing until now. But with the right sensors, actuators and software, robots can be given the sense of feel -- or at least the ability to identify different materials by touch.Researchers at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering published a study June 18 in Frontiers in Neurorobotics showing that a specially designed robot can outperform humans in identifying a wide range of natural materials according to their textures, paving the way for advancements in prostheses, personal assistive robots and consumer product testing.

In an attempt to replicate the early experiences of infants, researchers in England have created a robot that can learn simple words in minutes just by having a conversation with a human.The work, published this week in the journal PLoS One, offers insight into how babies transition from babbling to speaking their first words.The three-foot-tall robot, named DeeChee, was built to produce any syllable in the English language. But it knew no words at the outset of the study, speaking only babble phrases like "een rain rain mahdl kross."

An active sunspot is amping up the sun's activity, and has already unleashed two strong solar flares that triggered weekend geomagnetic storms on Earth, NASA officials say.The M-class solar flares set off two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that erupted from the sun on last Wednesday and Thursday (June 13 and June 14).The first flare peaked Wednesday at 9:17 a.m. EDT (1317 GMT), and lasted for three hours, NASA scientists said. The resulting CME was hurled into space directly toward Earth, but was not expected to carry serious effects for the planet because it was traveling at a relatively slow speed.

Seeing is believing, except when you don't believe what you see.This is according to veteran radio astronomer Gerrit Verschuur, of the University of Memphis, who has an outrageously unorthodox theory that if true, would turn modern cosmology upside down.He proposes that at least some of the fine structure seen in the all-sky plot of the universe's cosmic microwave background is really the imprint of our local interstellar neighborhood. It has nothing to do with how the universe looked 380,000 years after the Big Bang, but how nearby clouds of cold hydrogen looked a few hundred years ago.

Access to Britain's published scientific research should be open and free of charge to all, an influential academic panel recommends to the Government today.The present, centuries-old system, whereby would-be readers or users of the research have to subscribe to the scientific journals where it appears, should be ended, according to the panel chaired by Dame Janet Finch, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester.

Excalibur Almaz, a British space company based on the Isle of Man, has announced plans to make the first trip to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission of 1972.The company has acquired a fleet of former Soviet shuttles and space stations and is planning the mission in three years time.The flight, which would last four months and fly past the moon at a distance of 1000km, is open to anyone who can finance it including government-sponsored researchers, space agency scientists or even billionaires with money to burn.

Grasshoppers who die frightened leave their mark in the Earth in a way that more mellow ones do not, US and Israeli researchers have discovered."Indeed this sounds a little bit weird," says lead author Dr Dror Hawlena in an audio interview posted on the journal Science's website.Hawlena, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, along with colleagues at Yale University devised a test to measure the legacy of grasshoppers who were scared by spiders.

Pumping all manner of fluids into deep rock formations has triggered earthquakes strong enough to cause a bit of damage while seriously rattling the local populace, a committee of the National Research Council (NRC) concluded in a report released today.Fracking for natural gas and oil, formally known as hydraulic fracturing, has been responsible for only one or two triggering episodes, the committee found. But hundreds of felt quakes in 13 states have been produced by the deep injection of wastewater from fracking and other industrial activities, as well as the creation of geothermal energy sites, the enhanced recovery of oil and gas, and even the simple extraction of oil and gas. And capturing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from power plants and pumping it into the ground "may have potential for inducing larger seismic events," the committee found, because much larger volumes would be involved.

Seeing is believing, except when you don't believe what you see.This is according to veteran radio astronomer Gerrit Verschuur, of the University of Memphis, who has an outrageously unorthodox theory that if true, would turn modern cosmology upside down.He proposes that at least some of the fine structure seen in the all-sky plot of the universe's cosmic microwave background is really the imprint of our local interstellar neighborhood. It has nothing to do with how the universe looked 380,000 years after the Big Bang, but how nearby clouds of cold hydrogen looked a few hundred years ago.

Every month between November 2011 and March 2012, Japanese officials conducted auctions in an attempt to sell whale meat from the country's "scientific" whaling program in the North Pacific. The total amount of whale meat on the block: 1211.9 tons. Total amount sold: 303.1 tons. Total amount remaining: 908.8 tons.Writing on the website of Japan's Dolphin and Whale Action Network, journalist Junko Sakuma not only revealed the figures but also provided a breakdown showing that while tail meat (which is considered the prime cut) from minke whales sold out, similar meat from Bryde's whales could barely sell at all, even when the asking price was dropped by half. As for sei whale meat: well, don't even ask about sei whale meat.

A new computer model developed in Switzerland shows that the pH of the ocean waters off the west coast of the US will fall over the next four decades faster than previously thought. The region studied is on the eastern boundary of an upwelling zone, and is important for commercial fishing and for its diversity in marine life.An upwelling zone is one in which waters from the deep ocean well up to replace water displaced by summer surface winds, which push water away from the coast. The upwelled deep water tends to contain high concentrations of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) from the respiration of microbes on the ocean floor, and this adds to the dissolved atmospheric CO2, which is rising, producing a region of marked decreases in pH.

A new university-led study with NASA participation finds ancient Antarctica was much warmer and wetter than previously suspected. The climate was suitable to support substantial vegetation -- including stunted trees -- along the edges of the frozen continent.The team of scientists involved in the study, published online June 17 in Nature Geoscience, was led by Sarah J. Feakins of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and included researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Carbon stored in Arctic tundra could be released into the atmosphere by new trees growing in the warmer region, exacerbating climate change, scientists have revealed.The Arctic is getting greener as plant growth increases in response to a warmer climate. This greater plant growth means more carbon is stored in the increasing biomass, so it was previously thought the greening would result in more carbon dioxide being taken up from the atmosphere, thus helping to reduce the rate of global warming.

In a paper recently published in European Physical Journal C, researchers hypothesised the existence of mirror particles to explain the anomalous loss of neutrons observed experimentally. The existence of such mirror matter had been suggested in various scientific contexts some time ago, including the search for suitable dark matter candidates.

Recent years have brought unprecedented melting to Arctic sea ice, the white cap that covers the far north. Now, months before the sea ice reaches its annual minimum extent, this summer looks likely to follow suit, bringing unusually ice-free waters.Satellite observations analyzed by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center show the extent of the sea ice hovering below the baseline, the average between 1979 and 2000, for most of the spring and dipping particularly low in June.

Contact between the people of the Western Hemisphere and Polynesia has been a subject of debate since long before Thor Heyerdahl sailed the Kon-Tiki from South America to the Tuamota Islands in the Pacific. Recently a humble microorganism may have added some evidence to the possibility of trans-Pacific contacts.A particular strain of yeast was identified in three far flung corners of the globe: eastern Australia, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands. The yeast, a variety of Saccharomycopsis fodiens, was not found anywhere else, though microbiologists isolated thousands of different yeast strains growing on sap beetles, the microbes' preferred habitat.