Newsdesk Archive

We have met our match at the genteel pastime of jigsaw puzzles. It seems an algorithm can now whiz through 10,000 pieces in 24 hours. The speedy solver could also help piece together shredded documents or archaeological artefacts.Andrew Gallagher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, wrote the algorithm while working at photography firm Kodak. By mimicking the way a human solves jigsaws, it beat last year's record of 3300 pieces. The algorithm can even solve multiple puzzles at the same time, where the pieces have been mixed up together.

One of the easiest and often most effective means of controlling the spread of malaria is to control the mosquitos that carry it to humans. Unfortunately, that has proven to be just as much of an evolutionary arms race as targeting malaria itself; mosquitos evolve resistance to pesticides almost as quickly as malaria has evolved resistance to drugs.Recent efforts have focused on forms of control that don't impose a huge fitness burden on the mosquito population. This general approach has been tested in the wild on the mosquitos that carry Dengue fever, which scientists infected with bacteria that block the spread of the virus. Now, researchers are reporting that they've developed genetically modified mosquitos that turn mosquitos into a dead-end for the malarial parasite. Their method: have the mosquitos express antibodies against the parasite whenever it feeds on blood.

Last year, when the Large Hadron Collider shut down at the end of August, its detectors had recorded enough data to provide a suggestive bump in the data, hinting that the Higgs boson might be lurking somewhere around 125GeV. At the time, CERN's director indicated that the facility would do what it could to make sure it had a definitive answer on the question by the end of this year's run. And, over the winter, the people running the collider picked parameters that should get us there: a slight bump in energy and a high number of proton bunches circulating at once.

Two beams of protons circulate around the 27km circumference of the Large Hadron Collider tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border. Those protons moving clockwise collide, head on, with those moving anticlockwise and the collisions take place in the middle of cavernous detectors. The scientists working on two of these detectors have made it their immediate priority to find the much vaunted Higgs particle and, towards the end of last year, the first, tentative, evidence of the particle's existence was made public. Next month, at an international conference in Australia, we can expect to hear the latest news on the hunt. The burning question is whether, with more data, the experimental evidence will strengthen or weaken. So what is the evidence and why do we need to keep waiting on tenterhooks?.

It is an area of science that has the power to control the human mind with the flick of a light switch.Scientists have developed a way of using pulses of light to turn the brain cells that control our everyday actions and thoughts on or off at will. It provides a way of controlling the brain that has never been possible before.The researchers have already conducted tests in monkeys, our closest relatives, using light to send them to sleep. They now hope to develop the techniques further for use in humans.

Google on Saturday unveiled a cultural map of Brazil' Surui indigenous people, a digital tool that will help the Amazonian tribe share their vast knowledge of the forest and fight illegal logging.The map, the result of a five-year partnership between Surui chief Almir and the US technology giant, was released online for the first time at a business forum held on the sidelines of the UN Rio+20 conference on sustainable development here.

China has launched its latest manned space mission - whose crew includes its first female astronaut, Liu Yang.The Shenzhou-9 capsule rode to orbit atop a Long March rocket from the Jiuquan spaceport on the edge of the Gobi desert.Ms Liu and her two male colleagues are heading to the Tiangong space lab.They will spend over a week living and working on the 335km-high vessel, testing new systems and conducting a number of scientific experiments.

Norwegian archaeologists have solved one of the great puzzles of the Roman Empire: Why was the vibrant city of Palmyra located in the middle of the Syrian Desert?In ancient Roman times A.D., Palmyra was the most important point along the trade route linking the east and west, reaching a population of 100 000 inhabitants. But its history has always been shrouded in mystery: What was a city that size doing in the middle of the desert? How could so many people live in such an inhospitable place nearly 2 000 years ago? Where did their food come from? And why would such an important trade route pass directly through the desert?Norwegian researchers collaborated with Syrian colleagues for four years to find answers.

Sceptics expected that a deep-water dive would debunk the slew of extra-terrestrial theories surrounding an unidentified object sitting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.But the Swedish expedition team that took the plunge surfaced with more questions than answers - and certainly no solution to its origins.The divers found that the object, which some have likened to the Millennium Falcon because of its unusual round outline, was raised about 10 to 13ft above the seabed and curved in at the sides, giving it a mushroom shape.They added that the object has 'rounded sides and rugged edges''First we thought this was only stone, but this is something else,' diver Peter Lindberg said in a press release.At the center of the object, which has a 60-meter diameter, has an 'egg shaped hole leading into it from the top'.

Stalactites grow from cave ceilings not as dull cones but often sporting elegant corrugations. Two researchers from the Polytechnic University of Turin have now explained these mysterious, wavy patterns using standard fluid mechanics.The new theory, detailed in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows that the horizontal ripples form because spatially periodic patterns arise in the rate of mineral deposits from the water flowing down the stalactite.Starting from this model, climate scientists might in the future use stalactite surface structure to reconstruct variations in precipitation patterns over tens of thousands of years.

Campaigners looking to clear the name of Britain's last convicted witch may apply for a judicial review.Spiritualist Helen Duncan was convicted in 1944 under the Witchcraft Act for fear she would reveal military secrets during World War II.Miss Duncan, from Callander near Stirling, was arrested in Portsmouth alongside three members of her audience as she conducted a seance.In 2008, the Scottish Parliament rejected a petition to pardon her.

Bright, vivid, playful are words used to describe the paintings created by five-year old Australian artist Aelita Andre.Already an art prodigy, her bold masterful style has already garnered her worldwide attention, solo art exhibitions and the distinction of being the youngest professional painter in the world.Last year, during her art exhibition at New York's Agora Gallery, every one of her paintings sold within seven days. Now, Andre is back for seconds.

An 18-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has discovered melt-glass material in a thin layer of sedimentary rock in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Syria. According to the researchers, the material -- which dates back nearly 13,000 years -- was formed at temperatures of 1,700 to 2,200 degrees Celsius (3,100 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit), and is the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.

For the second day in a row, an active region on the sun has erupted with a coronal mass ejection (CME), blasting a beautifully dynamic magnetic bubble of energetic plasma in the direction of Earth. It is powering through interplanetary space at a breakneck speed of 1,360 kilometers per second (that's over 3 million miles per hour!)A NASA spacecraft -- one of two solar satellites called the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) that are orbiting the sun in opposite directions -- watched the CME expand and get launched into interplanetary space from a perfect vantage point.

What do fireflies, nanorods and Christmas lights have in common? Someday, consumers may be able to purchase multicolor strings of light that don't need electricity or batteries to glow. Scientists in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences found a new way to harness the natural light produced by fireflies (called bioluminescence) using nanoscience. Their breakthrough produces a system that is 20 to 30 times more efficient than those produced during previous experiments.

To mark the upcoming Olympic Games in London, a crew of astronauts due to launch to the space station this summer is planning an orbital sporting event for the occasion.NASA astronaut Sunita (Suni) Williams, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency spaceflyer Akihiko Hoshide and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko are due to launch July 14 to the International Space Station.

The largest lottery jackpot in history inspired Americans to spend $1.5 billion for a slim chance at riches this year. Transportation experts are wagering that this fervor for small gambles can be put to use solving a big urban problem: traffic congestion.Two experimental transportation projects under way this year in Singapore and Silicon Valley aim to improve commutes through gaming.Thousands of commuters so far have decided it's worth the effort to change their routines for a shot at $50 or $100.

There are more than 100 hypotheses for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Asteroid impact is the most famous, and the effects of volcanic eruptions, sea level change and climate fluctuations remain debated, but other fantastic and weird ideas have been tossed around. Many of the discarded notions, proposed before we knew an extraterrestrial bolide struck the Yucatán Peninsula, cited pathologies as the deciding factor. Cataracts, slipped discs, epidemics, glandular problems and even a loss of sex drive have all been proposed as the reason non-avian dinosaurs perished about 66 million years ago. In fact, pioneering paleopathologist Roy Moodie suggested that a startling number of accidents and injuries could have killed Triceratops and kin.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft may be getting its first taste of interstellar waters beyond our sun's familiar shores and, like the pioneers that first took to the oceans to explore seas unknown, the 34-year-old robotic spacecraft is about to make history as the first man-made object to venture beyond the known horizon.This historic announcement was made on Thursday by the team keeping a careful eye on Voyager 1's particle detectors who noticed an uptick in interstellar cosmic ray counts in recent years. That can mean only one thing: the mission is beginning to leave the outermost regions of the heliosphere -- the farthest extent of the sun's influence.

Adrian Owen has found a way to use brain scans to communicate with people previously written off as unreachable. Now, he is fighting to take his methods to the clinic.Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.Incredibly, he provided answers.

Bulgaria's claim to have unearthed six bones belonging to John the Baptist has received a boost from scientists who have concluded after dating them and analyzing their genetic code that they could indeed be relics of the man who baptized Jesus.The remains, which include a molar and a piece of cranium, were found in July 2010 in a marble sarcophagus in the ruins of a medieval church on the island of Sveti Ivan, or Saint John, off Bulgaria's Black Sea coast near the resort of Sozopol.

When I last interviewed James Lovelock in 2010, I provided here online fuller quotes of his key points than the print edition of the interview would allow. As it proved popular with readers last time round, I have taken the time again to transcribe his responses...Lovelock on "fracking":Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it: the amount of CO2 produced by burning gas in a good turbine gives you 60% efficiency. In a coal-fired power station, it is 30% per unit of fuel. So you get a two-to-one gain there straight away.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Friday he would back a proposal that would decriminalize possessing small amounts of marijuana, the latest major U.S. political figure to support diminished penalties for the drug's use.Under the proposed ordinance, to be voted on by the city council later this month, police officers in the nation's third-largest city would be able to issue a written violation for possession of 15 grams or less.

The government has published plans to force internet service providers to retain data on all online communications made by UK citizens, including those on popular social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.The Communications Data Bill, laid before parliament on Thursday, will see content service providers being forced "to retain and store communications records" beyond those they retain for their own business reasons, the Home Office said in a statement on Thursday.The data includes the time and duration of a communication, the number or email address of the originator and recipient, and the location of the device from which the communication was made. The bill will also cover geolocation data, which can pinpoint exactly where individuals were when they made their communications.

Red dots, hand stencils and animal figures represent the oldest examples yet found of cave art in Europe.The symbols on the walls at 11 Spanish locations, including the World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo and Tito Bustillo have long been recognised for their antiquity.But researchers have now used refined dating techniques to get a more accurate determination of their ages.One motif - a large red dot - is said to be more than 40,000 years old.

An original Apple 1 computer motherboard sold this morning at Sotheby's for $374,500. The auction house originally estimated the item would sell for $120,000 to $180,000.Filed under "Fine Books and Manuscripts," the motherboard is operational and is marked "Apple Computer 1" and dated 1976. "It is thought that fewer than 50 Apple 1 Computers survive, with only [six] known to be in working condition," Sotheby's reports in catalog notes.The iconic piece of technology history features a MOS Technologies 6502 microprocessor and 8 kilobytes of RAM. The original Apple 1 computers retailed for $666.66 in 1979 and did not include a monitor, keyboard, case or power supply. Only about 200 Apple 1 computers were produced.

A Chinese-born Swedish investor with Japanese support has agreed to buy bankrupt automaker Saab Automobile and plans to bring it back to life as a maker of electric cars, with an initial focus on the Chinese market.Saab, which has been making cars since 1947, crashed into bankruptcy at the end of 2011, less than two years after former owner General Motors (GM) sold it to Dutch group Spyker.

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.

A paper published this week in Science provides the most nuanced view to date of the small, shifting human populations in much of the Amazon before the arrival of Europeans. The research, which includes the first landscape-scale sampling of central and western Amazonia, finds that early inhabitants were concentrated near rivers and lakes but actually had little long-term impact on the outlying forests, as if they merely tiptoed around the land far from natural sources of water. In doing so, the new study overturns the currently popular idea that the Amazon was a cultural parkland in pre-Columbian times.

A renowned scientist says he has spotted evidence that a universe existed before the Big Bang.Professor Roger Penrose from Oxford University says concentric circles discovered in the background microwaves of the universe provides evidence of events that took place before the universe came into being.The cosmic microwave offers us a ghostly look at the the universe just 300,000 years after the Big Ban' - a microscopic amount of time compared to the universe's estimated age of 13.7billion years.The research by Penrose, who was awarded the 1988 Wolf Prize along with Stephen Hawkings for adding to our cosmic knowledge, adds evidence to the theory that the universe has expanded ('the Big Bang') and contracted ('the Big Crunch') many times.

Many of the issues the Environment Movement has faced over the last 50 years have been difficult, but none has been as formidable as the two challenges confronting it over the next half century, confronting the earth: population growth and climate change.These two colossal problems, it is clear now, cannot be "solved"; they can only be coped with, and the coping will have to be by governments. The task of the Green Movement will be to keep the pressure on governments, and companies, and individuals, to do what is necessary, however difficult that is.

The asteroid, which is 10 times the size of an Olympic swimming pool, is one of 9,000 "near-Earth objects" recorded by Nasa.It will not be visible to the naked eye but stargazers can watch a live broadcast and catch a glimpse of it passing by Earth online.Named LZ1, the asteroid is 500m (1,650ft) wide and is likely to get only within 14 times the moon's distance from Earth.It was identified days ago by Scottish-Australian astronomer Rob McNaught at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Australian National University.

The surface of Mars is pocked by more than 635,000 impact craters at least 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) wide, a new study reports.The new Martian crater atlas is the largest single database ever compiled of impacts on a planet or moon in our solar system, researchers said. It highlights the violent history of Mars and could also help scientists address a number of questions about the Red Planet.

When a South African botanist Lyall Watson claimed in 1973 that plants had emotions that could be recorded on a lie detector test, he was dismissed by many in the scientific community.However, new research, published in the journal Trends in Plant Science, has revealed that plants not only respond to sound, but they also communicate to each other by making "clicking" sounds.Using powerful loudspeakers, researchers at The University of Western Australia were able to hear clicking sounds coming from the roots of corn saplings.

Plenty of pet owners are comforted by a pair of puppy-dog eyes or a swipe of the tongue when their dog catches them crying. Now, new research suggests that dogs really do respond uniquely to tears. But whether pets have empathy for human pain is less clear.In a study published online May 30 in the journal Animal Cognition, University of London researchers found that dogs were more likely to approach a crying person than someone who was humming or talking, and that they normally responded to weeping with submissive behaviors. The results are what you might expect if dogs understand our pain, the researchers wrote, but it's not proof that they do.

Meditation is often thought to help open up the mind, and new findings suggest it can steer people away from the mental traps that drag out problem solving.Meditative techniques could help not only help negotiators and managers find novel solutions to challenges, but perhaps also help people who are depressed or suffer other mental disorders who can't see ways out of the problems that bedevil them, researchers said.

As much as 10 percent of the 500,000 ancient books in Central China's Henan provincial library were found seriously damaged because of a lack of maintenance.More than 100,000 of the library's ancient books needed restoration and 50,000 of those were seriously damaged, Du Tao, director of the executive office of the Henan provincial library, told China Daily on Wednesday.

Ice may have spread much further across the UK than previously thought - even sculpting the rocky landscape of Dartmoor during the last Ice Age.A study of the National Park area of Dartmoor, in south west England, shows for the first time that an ice cap and valley glaciers were present in its centre and that the naturally castellated stone outcrops, known as tors, were survivors.The new research by the Universities of Durham and Exeter, and Stockton Riverside College, is published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.Researchers, who carried out detailed observations on the ground and using aerial photography, say the evidence includes glacial features such as elongated rounded mounds and hummocky landforms.

A team of Japanese astronomers using telescopes on Hawaii say they have seen the oldest galaxy yet discovered.The team calculates that the galaxy is 12.91bn light years away, and their research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. The scientists with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used the Subaru and Keck telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea.A light year is the distance that light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (9.66 trillion kilometres). Seeing distant galaxies is in effect looking back in time.

BEIJING: More than 100 pages of Tibetan scripture on traditional medicine and religion dating back to the 13th century have been found at a monastery in Lhasa.The document, whose content covers traditional Tibetan medicine and religion, was found at the monastery in Nyemo county on the outskirts of Lhasa last week, Tashi Gyatso, an official with Tibetan capital's cultural bureau said.

The practice of "Fang Sheng", or compassionate release, has been a Buddhist tradition in China for thousands of years, stemming from the teaching that it is possible to improve your karmic balance by doing good deeds to animals.In the past few years, however, as more and more Chinese have sought solace in spirituality, it has become a major industry and many of Beijing's pet markets, with their cramped cages full of animals, depend on it for a large part of their business.Each weekend, hundreds of groups now journey out from Beijing to release animals into the countryside.

Behold the bonobo, our ape cousin that's kinder and gentler than the chimp or, well, us. Now scientists have mapped the primate's DNA, and some researchers say that may eventually reveal secrets about how the darker side of our nature evolved.Scientists have found that we are as close genetically to the peace-loving but little-known bonobo as we are to the more violent and better understood chimpanzee. It's as if they are siblings and we are cousins, related to them both equally, sharing some traits with just bonobos and other characteristics with just chimps.

Several times in the past 10 years scientists have had to rewrite the textbooks on Neanderthals, the latest species of human to go extinct. Once the archetype for primitive, uncivilised behaviour, the species, illuminated through fossil excavations and lately analysis of their genome, has emerged as being not too dissimilar from our own.Contrary to their dim-witted image Neanderthals have been found to have used tools, to have worn jewellery, and, lastly, to have interbred with our Homo sapiens ancestors to such an extent that 4% of every modern European's genome is traceable to Neanderthal origins.Now comes what could be the final nail in the coffin of the "unintelligent Neanderthals" myth: they might have been the first human species to paint in caves.

Researchers who studied more than two million people over 40 years found a rise in deaths from heart attacks, strokes, falls and suicides.William Shakespeare died on his birthday on April 23 1616. The actress Ingrid Bergman also died on her birthday, in August 1982.On average, people over the age of 60 were 14 per cent more likely to die on their birthdays.Heart attacks rose 18.6 per cent on birthdays and were higher for men and women while strokes were up 21.5 per cent - mostly in women.

Last month, nearly 1m signatures were delivered to county registrars throughout California calling for a referendum on the labeling of genetically engineered foods. If the measure, "The Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act", which will be on the ballot in November, passes, California will become the first state in the nation to require that GM foods be labeled as such on the package.

A phenomenon first observed by an ancient Greek philosopher 2,300 years ago has become the basis for a new device designed to harvest the enormous amounts of energy wasted as heat each year to produce electricity. The first-of-its-kind "pyroelectric nanogenerator" is the topic of a report in ACS' journal Nano Letters.

CT scans of fossilized primate skulls or skull fragments from both the Old and New Worlds may shed light on how these extinct animals moved, especially for those species without any known remains, according to an international team of researchers. The researchers looked at the bony labyrinth in fossil remains and compared them to CT scans previously obtained from living primate species. The bony labyrinth of the inner ear is made up of the cochlea -- the major organ of hearing -- the vestibule and the three semicircular canals which sense head motion and provide input to synchronize movement with visual stimuli.

Kids today may not be running around the neighborhood without fear like Beaver Cleaver, but the country is in the midst of low levels of crime not seen in decades, according to a report released this week by the FBI.Violent crime, which has been falling for five years, decreased 4 percent in 2011, according to the Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report. Murders are at the lowest point in 40 years. Violent crime, according to the FBI, includes murder, rape, robbery and assault.

Woolly mammoths were apparently driven to extinction by a multitude of culprits, with climate change, human hunters and shifting habitats all playing a part in the long decline of these giants, researchers say.Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) wandered the planet for about 250,000 years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America covered in hair up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) long and possessing curved tusks up to 16 feet (4.9 meters) long. Nearly all of these giants vanished from Siberia by about 10,000 years ago, although dwarf mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 3,700 years ago.

The late Paul the Octopus achieved worldwide fame in 2010 when he correctly predicted the result of all eight of Germany's World Cup tournament matches, in addition to the final. This year, an entire menagerie is trying to repeat his success, including Yvonne the cow.Germany has long been the mother lode of animal stories. There was Knut the baby polar bear, Bruno the marauding brown bear, Petra the swan who fell in love with a pedal boat, Heidi the cross-eyed opossum and Dietmar the stork who broke his leg.

A drug that bolsters the body's cannabis-like chemicals can ease anxiety in mice, according to a new study that suggests the same brain chemistry influences how people cope with stress.The body releases chemicals called endocannabinoids, so named because they act on the brain in almost the same way as cannabis, or marijuana, does. Much like marijuana, endocannabinoids promote relaxation. The new research finds that by halting the enzyme that breaks down an endocannabinoid called andamide, scientists can quickly train mice to get over traumatic experiences.

A mysterious but crucial step that coca plants use to build cocaine has been discovered, according to a group of biochemists.Despite the drug's infamy, cocaine is chemically similar to a host of anesthetics and stimulants used legally every day. Understanding how cocaine is made in the coca plant might therefore lead to new anesthetic drugs without the addictive qualities, the study authors say."Plants can't run away, so they have to be the planet's best chemists to survive," said study co-author John D'Auria, a biochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany."They make chemicals other organisms simply cannot make, including cocaine.

NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCILResearchers from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton are setting off on a mission to drill the deep seabed of the north Atlantic for secrets about the climate during the planet's last lengthy spell of extreme warmth, which happened around 30 million years ago.

Freiburg Research Team Develops Method for Sustainable Use of CO2It is beyond dispute that carbon dioxide (CO2) has an effect on global warming as a greenhouse gas, but we still pump tons and tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day. A research team at the Freiburg Materials Research Center (FMF) led by the chemist Prof. Dr. Ingo Krossing has now developed a new system for producing methanol that uses CO2 and hydrogen. Methanol can, for example, be used as an environmentally friendly alternative for gasoline. The goal of the scientists is to harness the power of CO2 on a large scale and integrate it into the utilization cycle as a sustainable form of energy production.

A large eruption in the volcanically active region of Central America could release enough ozone-depleting gases to significantly thin the ozone layer for several years, researchers announced today (June 12).Such a volcanic eruption could double or triple the current levels of the chemical elements bromine and chlorine in the stratosphere, the upper atmosphere layer where ozone gas protects us from ultraviolet radiation, the researchers calculated, based on the levels of these chemicals released from 14 volcanoes in Nicaragua over the past 70,000 years. The researchers presented their work at a scientific conference in Iceland.

A group of high school students may have come close to Bigfoot during a class project in the Idaho wilderness.A dark, mysterious creature was caught on tape for a few seconds near Mink Creek before it retreated into the treeline."It just didn't look human-like. I don't know what that is, it's not a bear, it's not a moose or anything. It was big and bulky and black," said the student who captured the video. He spoke to ABC News' Idaho affiliate but did not want want to be identified on camera.

Dozens of previously dismissed radio signals were actually credible transmissions from Amelia Earhart, according to a new study of the alleged post-loss signals from Earhart's plane.The transmissions started riding the air waves just hours after Earhart sent her last inflight message.The study, presented on Friday at a three day conference by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), sheds new light on what may have happened to the legendary aviator 75 years ago. The researchers plan to start a high-tech underwater search for pieces of her aircraft next July.

Large-scale increases in upper-ocean temperatures are evident in observational records1. Several studies have used well-established detection and attribution methods to demonstrate that the observed basin-scale temperature changes are consistent with model responses to anthropogenic forcing and inconsistent with model-based estimates of natural variability.

While the official target of NASA's space exploration program remains exploring Earth approaching asteroids, the case for a return to the moon has been made from a variety of quarters.The most recent attempt to make a case for the moon is in a paper, entitled Back to the Moon: The Scientific Rationale for Resuming Lunar Surface Exploration soon to be published in the journal Planetary and Space Science, as reported in the Atlantic.

Ornate stucco reliefs have crumbled from the Trevi fountain, Rome's baroque masterpiece, making it the latest in a series of Italian monuments to suffer damage and reigniting a row over Italy's commitment to protect its heritage.As hundreds of tourists lobbed pennies into the fountain's pool on Monday, workmen were erecting scaffolding around a section of the facade where fragments of a gargoyle's head and foliage crashed to the ground on Saturday night.

Manoel Jose Leite, a small-scale organic farmer, is set to pioneer low-carbon agriculture in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, which for decades has been destroyed by expanding agribusiness.Finding the right balance between agriculture and environmental protection will be one of the major challenges on the agenda of the UN conference on sustainable development, which opens in Rio on Wednesday.The issue is particularly pressing for leading grain exporter Brazil, 40 percent of whose huge territory is covered by the Amazon rainforest.

Signs of autism have been found in fish swimming in water contaminated with psychoactive medications.Scientists identified patterns of gene activity in the fathead minnows that mimicked those seen in susceptible humans with the developmental disorder.The findings suggest a potential environmental trigger for autism in genetically vulnerable people, the study authors said.

An unexpected contamination problem has cropped up for NASA's next Mars rover, but scientists are confident the huge robot will still be able to complete its mission after it lands on the Red Planet in August.NASA scientists discussed the contamination concern and a new Mars landing plan for the car-size Curiosity rover in a teleconference with reporters today (June 11). The contamination issue, they said, concerns the rover's drill.

Emperor Qinshihuang's terracotta army appears even mightier after Chinese archeologists unearthed more than 100 additional soldiers, though the warriors fell prey to arson and looting by the military leader who overthrew the First Emperor's dynasty, the new find suggests."We have found large quantities of red clay and charcoal along with holes for robbing in the major pit," Shen Maosheng, who is leading one of the teams, told Shanghai Daily. "Rebel leader Xiang [Yu] was the person with the power, time and motive to destroy the terracotta warriors.

A huge portion of New Zealand's South Island has been designated as the world's largest International Dark Sky Reserve, making it one of the best places for stargazing on the globe."The new reserve is coming in at a 'Gold' level status," said the International Dark-Sky Association's executive director Bob Parks in a statement. "That means the skies there are almost totally free from light pollution. To put it simply, it is one of the best stargazing sites on Earth.

Erich von Daniken, the Swiss author best known for his controversial work linking extraterrestrial influences to early human culture with books such as 'Chariots of the Gods?' Daniken is one of the main figures responsible for popularizing the "paleo-contact" and ancient astronaut hypotheses.His community interview for GrahamHancock.com is now live.See the interviews page for more GHMB community interviews.

The Museum of the Confederacy is appealing for the public's help in identifying the subjects of eight photographs picked up on the battlefields of the Civil War. The Associated Press reports that the images are being publicized in the hope that a descendant might recognize a facial resemblance or make a connection to the sites where they were found:Museum officials can only speculate on the children and adults, including soldiers, shown in the photographs. But whether they were sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, or siblings the prospect of identifying each grows dimmer with the passage of time.Typically they were found by another soldier and handed down through generations. Ultimately an attic would be cleared or a trunk would be emptied and the photo would be given to the museum. Some have been in the museum's possession for 60 years or more.

An old meatpacking plant on Chicago's South Side is being transformed into an eco farm, which its founders says will produce food sustainably, while creating zero waste.American entrepreneur John Edel is the founder of "The Plant," a vertical-farm initiative that he hopes will show people the ease of adapting to green food production in urban living environments.A vertical farm is an urban agriculture concept whereby food is grown in and on top of buildings in city areas. In order for this process to work, urban farmers use a variety of techniques, including hydroponics -- cultivating plants in water -- and aquaponics, which uses by-products from fish farming to assist hydroponic growth.

A solar-powered plane has landed in Morocco after flying from Spain, completing the second leg of its pioneering journey.Pilot Bertrand Piccard landed the Solar Impulse in Rabat - 19 hours after taking off from Madrid.The plane - the size of a jumbo jet - was powered by 12,000 solar cells turning four electrical motors.The 2,500km-trip (1,550 miles), begun in Switzerland in May, is described as a rehearsal for a world tour in 2014.

The oceans have warmed in the past 50 years, but not by natural events alone.New research by a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and international collaborators shows that the observed ocean warming over the last 50 years is consistent with climate models only if the models include the impacts of observed increases in greenhouse gas during the 20th century.Though the new research is not the first study to identify a human influence on observed ocean warming, it is the first to provide an in-depth examination of how observational and modeling uncertainties impact the conclusion that humans are primarily responsible.

The most active volcanic body in the Solar System is not playing ball with scientists, as mysteries emerge surrounding the internal heating of the moon Io.A study on Jupiter's moon has yielded a map of hot spots which show the range of heat being emitted by the highly active volcanic body. The volcanic eruptions on Io are immense, and dwarf the volcanic activity seen on Earth.The volcanic activity of Io gives it its yellow surface colour which is frozen sulphur.

On the afternoon of June 3, 1965, Ed White stood up on his seat and stuck his head out of Gemini 4's open hatch into space. He was in orbit with commander Jim McDivitt, and both were men waiting for a "go" from Houston to begin America's first spacewalk.White knew he would be facing some difficulties on the spacewalk, properly called "extravehicular activity," or EVA. He'd already mounted a video camera on the spacecraft's body just above the hatch, and it was more work than he'd anticipated.

xinhuanetSHIJIAZHUANG, June 2 (Xinhua) -- Archaeologists have discovered six kilns that date back to the Sui Dynasty (581-618) and Tang Dynasty (618-907) in the city of Xingtai in north China's Hebei province.Excavation work has revealed the tops of three of the kilns, which were discovered in Neiqiu county, according to Wang Huimin, an archaeologist from the Cultural Relics Institute of Hebei.

The remains of a newly discovered suburb of the ancient city of Cahokia are right in the path of a new interstate freeway in East St. Louis. Visitors paddling up from the Mississippi 900 years ago would have seen tall wooden temples atop earthen pyramids, and rows and rows of thatched-roof huts.Across the Mississippi River from St. Louis' famous Gateway Arch is a part of Illinois that's a post-industrial wasteland.

The hunt for other intelligent civilisations has a new technique in its arsenal, but its first use has turned up no signs of alien broadcasts.Australian astronomers used "very long baseline interferometry" to examine Gliese 581, a star known to host planets in its "habitable zone".The hunt for aliens is fundamentally a vast numbers game, so the team's result should come as no surprise.Their report, posted online, will be published in the Astronomical Journal.

In the ongoing hunt for Martian life, there's one place astronauts haven't yet explored deeply: caves. But to delve into Martian caves calls for some heavy-duty gear, and where do you test Martian caving gear on Earth? The Austrian Alps.

SpaceX's scorched Dragon cargo capsule is on a ship making its way back to Los Angeles after Thursday's historic descent from orbit.The California-based company reported that the 14.4-foot-high (4.4-meter-high) spacecraft and its more than 1,300 pounds (620 kilograms) of cargo were in good shape, despite its plunge from the International Space Station. On the way down, the Dragon weathered re-entry temperatures in excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius). At a height of 40,000 feet, the Dragon started deploying its parachutes and drifted into the Pacific, about 560 miles west of Baja California. A recovery team got to the craft, towed it to the ship and used a crane to hoist it aboard, as planned.

The fact that Timothy Brown is a reasonably healthy 46-year-old is no small thing. Only a few years ago, he had AIDS."I feel good," Brown told ABC News. "I haven't had any major illnesses, just occasional colds like normal people."Brown is the only person in the world to be cured of AIDS, the result of a transplant of blood stem cells he received to treat leukemia.

Few people are aware that there have been numerous, carefully-controlled scientific experiments with telepathy, psychokinesis, remote viewing, and other types of psychic phenomena, which have consistently produced compelling, statistically-significant results that conventional science is at a loss to explain.Even most scientists, are currently unaware of the vast abundance of compelling scientific evidence for psychic phenomena, which has resulted from over a century of parapsychological research.

Thousands of people in Israel, Turkey and Jordan got the shock of their lives yesterday, as they watched a spinning 'UFO' performing cartwheels in the sky.Police in these countries - as well as in Cyprus and Lebanon - were flooded with phonecalls by panicked residents, as the white, gleaming light danced high up in the atmosphere.Theories abounded over what this could be - a failing missile test, a satellite breaking up in our atmosphere, or a visit from an alien spacecraft.

Singapore's latest development will finally blossom later this month, with an imposing canopy of artificial trees up to 50 meters high towering over a vast urban oasis.The colossal solar-powered supertrees are found in the Bay South garden, which opens to the public on June 29. It is part of a 250-acre landscaping project -- Gardens by the Bay -- that is an initiative from Singapore's National Parks Board that will see the cultivation of flora and fauna from foreign lands.The man-made mechanical forest consists of 18 supertrees that act as vertical gardens, generating solar power, acting as air venting ducts for nearby conservatories, and collecting rainwater. To generate electricity, 11 of the supertrees are fitted with solar photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into energy, which provides lighting and aids water technology within the conservatories below.

Within the exotic world of macroscopic quantum effects, where fluids flow uphill, wires conduct without electrical resistance and magnets levitate, there is an even stranger family of "unconventional" phenomena. These effects often defy explanation by current theoretical physics, but hold enormous promise for the development of such futuristic technologies as room-temperature superconductors, ultrasensitive microscopes and quantum computation.

Until recently, it was generally considered that Islam, the youngest of the great world religions, was born "not amidst the mystery which cradles the origin of other religions, but rather in the full light of history," as Ernest Renan, the French scholar of Middle East civilizations, put it in 1883. Most textbooks and popular biographies still take Renan's line: Islam originated among the tribal Arabs of the Hijaz (the coastal region of western Arabia that includes both Mecca and Medina) who heeded the divine messages of Muhammad.

The Great Wall of China has been officially declared even longer than previously thought, state-run media report.The wall measures 21,196.18km (13,170.6956 miles) long based on the latest state survey results, state-run news agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday.A preliminary study released in 2009 estimated the wall to be 8,850km long.The world's largest man-made structure was built to protect China's northern border.

The language of life is about to expand its vocabulary. An international team of researchers discovered that the body's copying machine for DNA works in the same way for manmade, artificial building blocks of DNA as it does for the natural kind.If scientists find artificial DNA building blocks work well and are safe to use, the extra building materials could create DNA that codes for new molecules that the body can't make now. The artificial DNA could also form the basis of a partly synthetic organism.

Research team's results mark the successful completion of the first light detection and ranging survey of Honduras' Mosquitia region, one of the world's least-explored virgin rainforestsA field team from the University of Houston and the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) has mapped a remote region of Honduras that may contain the legendary lost city of Ciudad Blanca.

MEDITATION increases our ability to tap into the hidden recesses of our brain that are usually outside the reach of our conscious awareness.That's according to Madelijn Strick of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues, who tested whether meditation has an effect on our ability to pick up subliminal messages.

THEY can "smell" chemicals and respond to light, but can plants hear sounds? It seems chilli seeds can sense neighbouring plants even if those neighbours are sealed in a box, suggesting plants have a hitherto-unrecognised sense.Plants are known to have many of the senses we do: they can sense changes in light level, "smell" chemicals in the air and "taste" them in the soil (New Scientist, 26 September 1998, p 24). They even have a sense of touch that detects buffeting from strong winds.

UP, UP and away. Parts of the planet have seen levels of carbon dioxide rise above 400 parts per million for the first time. Although it's largely symbolic, the milestone is a stark reminder of humanity's powerful influence on the atmosphere."During the month of April, the mean was over 400 ppm for the first time, throughout the Arctic," says Pieter Tans of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. CO2 levels reach an annual peak around April as the gas is released by respiration, and then fall over the summer as plants suck it up. As a result, the 2012 average will be a little lower, at about 393 ppm.

A Brooklyn court has ordered the family of a Holocaust survivor to return a 3,200-year-old artifact to a German museum.The Assyrian artifact is a golden tablet about the size of a passport photo that was looted from the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin during World War II, according to court papers.The tablet was discovered in 1913 by a group of German archeologists in Iraq, court papers read. It was placed in the Berlin museum in 1926, but when an inventory was conducted in 1939, the tablet was missing.

Another look at a nearly 80-year-old pottery collection at the Arizona State Museum is yielding new information about migrants who abandoned the Four Corners region.Approximately eight centuries ago, people living along the Colorado Plateau in what is now the Four Corners area faced a crisis. Environmental changes that devastated their agricultural practices and likely aggravated social unrest forced significant numbers of these people to move away.

Wooden fish traps said to be some 9,000 years old have been found in the Baltic Sea off Sweden, possibly the oldest such traps in existence.Marine archaeologists from Stockholm's Sodertorn University found finger-thick hazel rods grouped on the sea bed.They are thought to be the remains of stationary basket traps.

Archaeologists in the eastern Mediterranean region have been unearthing spherical jugs, used by the ancients for storing and trading oil, wine, and other valuable commodities. Because we're used to the metric system, which defines units of volume based on the cube, modern archaeologists believed that the merchants of antiquity could only approximately assess the capacity of these round jugs, says Prof. Itzhak Benenson of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geography.

Two side-by-side meteor craters on Mars have revealed that the Red Planet has undergone serious climate change in its history.One crater in particular reveals dark traces of sediment thought to have been cemented together by water from an ancient groundwater reservoir, before being carved away by howling Martian wind.The find, by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, has lent weight to the idea that Mars was once very different to the dead orb we see now.The ancient 'climate change' that turned Mars from a wet planet - possibly capable of supporting life - to the dusty, wind-scoured orb that we see today was probably caused by changes in the axis of the planet's rotation.

Large-scale engineering projects aimed at fighting global warming could radically reduce rainfall in Europe and North America, a team of scientists from four European countries have warned.Geoengineering projects are controversial, even though they are largely theoretical at this point. They range from mimicking the effects of large volcanic eruptions by releasing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, to deploying giant mirrors in space to deflect the sun's rays.

Fat can be a good thing, especially that belly fat you want to get rid of. According to a new study, belly fat may play an important role in regulating the immune system.The fatty membrane that hangs from the stomach, called omentum, is found in all animals but was previously thought to be kind of useless in humans. The membrane lines organs found in the abdomen and acts as a storehouse for fat. While too much belly fat may be unsightly for some, there is an important reason why we have belly fat in the first place.

Jurassic Park fans of all ages are in for a bit of a shock: experts from Manchester University have found that dinosaurs, usually portrayed as enormous, earth-shaking monsters, might have been much lighter than previously thought.But this is merely the latest in a long history of palaeontologists admitting that there is a speculative element to their field. Dinosaurs have fascinated us since the first tantalising fragments of their bones emerged from the quarries of southern England in the early 1800s, but the scientists working on these remains were faced with a perplexing, difficult task: how to reconstruct the appearance and behaviour of animals that had been dead for hundreds of millions of years, with no obvious living equivalents.

A swirling spiral of light seen in the skies over Israel, Syria and other Middle East countries on Thursday night has been linked to a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile test.Hundreds of Israelis jammed police hotlines with reports of the unidentified flying object, according to Ynetnews. Sighting reports came from Lebanon and even Armenia and Turkey. Versions of the video, captioned in Arabic, began appearing on YouTube.Some of the reports that popped up on Twitter suggested that the lights in the sky were seen as a good omen for Syria's revolution. Others worried that it was a bad omen for Syria, potentially signaling the use of chemical weapons.

Imagine a world with no HIV, no malaria, no tuberculosis, no flu and so on down to the absence of the common cold. With scientists chasing after cure-all anti-virus treatments and a universal flu vaccine in labs around the world, the eradication of infectious diseases certainly appears to be medical research's ultimate (if remote) goal. But what if we actually got there?As the Princeton mathematical epidemiologist Nim Arinaminpathy put it, "If we had a magic pill that got rid of all infectious diseases, period, would we really use it?" He isn't sure. In all likelihood, purging humanity of infectious disease would not be a universally positive eventuality, but it wouldn't trigger the immediate downfall of Homo sapiens, either.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of an Elizabethan theatre where some of William Shakespeare's plays were first performed.The remains of the Curtain Theatre, which opened in 1577, were found behind a pub in Shoreditch, east London, as part of regeneration works.The venue was immortalised as "this wooden O" in the prologue to Henry V.It is hoped the site could be opened to the public, with plays staged there in the future.Archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) stumbled across parts of the playhouse's yard and gallery walls after development began on the site last October.