Newsdesk Archive

An unborn baby's whole genetic code has been mapped in the womb using DNA taken from its parents.The technique could in future make it possible swiftly to scan for some 3,500 genetic disorders before birth, without physically disturbing either foetus or mother.Most pre-natal genetic screening currently involves tapping fluid from the foetal sac, or taking placental samples. This is done by either inserting a probe through the mother's abdomen or the neck of her womb.

CBS News VideoResearchers say, for the first time, they've mapped the genetic code of a fetus. Dr. Eric Eric Schadt, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, speaks about how the medical breakthrough can be used to diagnose genetic disorders, and the ethical debates it could spur.

More than 50,000 people in 2011 were arrested in New York City for possessing small amounts of marijuana -- the majority of whom were black and Latino -- at a considerable judicial and financial cost. New York City spends about $75 million every year on arresting people for recreational marijuana possession.But what many people don't know is that the state decriminalized this offense more than 30 years ago, making private possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana a violation punishable by a $100 fine. Possession of the same amount in public view remains a criminal misdemeanor.Despite this change in law, arrests for small quantities of marijuana over the last decade have skyrocketed, with more than 400,000 people arrested and unceremoniously run through the criminal justice system. Marijuana possession is now the No. 1 arrest category in New York.Why is this happening?.

The moon is known for its ability to impact on our tides, but it has been causing another effect over the last few years - disrupting experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.The gravitational effect of the moon may be generally weak on our surface, but with the collider stretching out in a ring with a 16mile (27km) circumference, the effects are enough to be felt.The scientific research facility on the Swiss-French border is picking apart neutrons and electrons while hunting for the elusive Higgs Boson particle, and technician Pauline Gagnon, working on the collider, blogged her surprise when she realised the cause for less 'particle collisions' were happening on her shift.She wrote: 'The shift crew (about ten people plus dozens of experts on call) must keep the detector running smoothly, tackling every problem, big or small, as fast as possible.

As a rising global population and increasing standard of living drive demand for freshwater, many researchers are developing new techniques to desalinate salt water. Among them is a team of scientists from The Netherlands, who have shown how to transform brackish (moderately salty) water into potable freshwater using just a pair of wires and a small voltage that can be generated by a small solar cell. The simple technique has the potential to be more energy-efficient than other techniques because of the minimal amount of mixing between the treated and untreated water.

ESA's Mars Express has provided images of a remarkable crater on Mars that may show evidence that the planet underwent significant periodic fluctuations in its climate due to changes in its rotation axis.On 19 June 2011, Mars Express pointed its high-resolution stereo camera at the Arabia Terra region of Mars, imaging the Danielson and Kalocsa craters. Danielson crater is named after the late George E Danielson, who was instrumental in the development of many spacecraft cameras flown to Mars. Seen to the right (north) in the image, it is the larger crater, roughly 60 km across.

Mystery in Israel's skies: Hundreds of Israelis nationwide flooded police hotlines Thursday evening with reports about seeing an unidentified flying object in the nation's skies.A prominent Israeli astronomer said the object flew above Lebanese territory and is not a meteor. The UFO was also clearly visible in Palestinian territories. A similar sighting in Norway three years ago turned out to be a failed missile test.The object was initially spotted in northern Israel, but was later reported being seen as far south as Gedera. The IDF Northern Command said it was unaware of any IDF operations in the area. Officials were also checking whether the Air Force was related to the sighting.

Japan must restart two nuclear reactors to protect the country's economy and livelihoods, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has said in a televised broadcast.Measures to ensure the safety of two reactors at western Japan's Ohi nuclear plant have been undertaken, he said.

Psychoactive medications in water affect the gene expression profiles of fathead minnows in a way that mimics the gene expression patterns associated with autism spectrum disorder in genetically susceptible humans, according to research published June 6 in the open access journal PLoS ONE. These results suggest a potential environmental trigger for autism spectrum disorder in this vulnerable population, the authors write.The researchers, led by Michael A. Thomas of Idaho State University, exposed the fish to three psychoactive pharmaceuticals -- fluoxetine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSR1; venlafaxine, a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, and carbamazepine, used to control seizures -- at concentrations comparable to the highest estimated environmental levels.

The faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in quantity and furiously burned cosmic fuel.

Scientists on Friday said that an experiment which challenged Einstein's theory on the speed of light had been flawed and that sub-atomic particles -- like everything else -- are indeed bound by the universe's speed limit.Researchers working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) caused a storm last year when they published experimental results showing that neutrinos could out-pace light by some six kilometres (3.7 miles) per second.

The nations of the world need to work together to develop a warning and communication system that could mitigate the worst effects of a catastrophic asteroid strike, a new report stresses.Such a system would issue international warnings about possible impending strikes and educate the public about the threats posed by near-Earth objects. It also would call government leaders' and the public's attention to the scientific value and potential economic importance of asteroids.

The mud-coloured Omo River which snakes through green gorges, feeding lush vegetation and providing vital water to one of Ethiopia's most remote regions, will also power a contentious dam project.The government says the Gibe III dam will boost development, give access to power for many Ethiopians -- about half of the population -- currently living without it, and generate revenue from the export of electricity to the region.

A team of researchers in Australia has shown that the evolution of flowers in that country was driven by the preferences of bees, rather than the other way around. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team describes how they gathered over a hundred samples of different flowers and then compared them against the types of colors that bees best identify and then compared those results with research findings regarding bees and flowers in North America.

LONDON, June 6 (Reuters) - Drug-resistant strains of gonorrhoea have spread to countries across the world, the United Nations health agency said on Wednesday, and millions of patients may run out of treatment options unless doctors catch and treat cases earlier.Scientists reported last year finding a "superbug" strain of gonorrhoea in Japan in 2008 that was resistant to all recommended antibiotics and warned then that it could transform a once easily treatable infections into a global health threat.

Campaigns to combat archaeological tomb raiders have notched up some big successes, notably a deal under which the J Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles agreed to hand back 40 precious artefacts after it was shown they had been looted from digs in Italy.Activists, however, call that a drop in the ocean in a business valued at as much as $10bn (£6.5bn) a year, and claim hard-pressed lawyers and police forces are struggling against unscrupulous dealers.

A South African cave has revealed 14 new fossils for palaeoanthropological analysis which are discussed by Pickering et al (2012) published in the Journal of Human Evolution.In the Gauteng Province of South Africa lies a cave called Swartkrans, which is one of the most important caves in the famous Cradle of Humankind. This cave has provided an extensive amount of fossils which have been attributed Paranthropus robustus. The genus Paranthropus is composed of three separate species i.e. Paranthropus aethiopicus, Paranthropus robustus and Paranthropus boisei.

A LOT of ink has been spilled on the supposed death of the printed word. Ebooks are outselling paper books. Newspapers are dying. "Phone books are already dead," said James Reid-Cunningham of the Boston Athenaeum library at a conference called Unbound: Speculations on the Future of the Book, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May. "The days of the codex as the primary carrier of information are almost over."This has inspired a lot of hand-wringing from publishers, librarians, archivists - and me, a writer and lifelong bibliophile who grew up surrounded by paper books. I've been blogging since high school, I'm addicted to my smartphone and, in theory, I should be on board with the digital revolution - but when people mourn the loss of paper books, I sympathise.Are printed books really going the way of the dodo? And what would we lose if they did?.

A Brazilian father claims his two-year-old son, who had been pronounced dead, sat up during his funeral and asked for water.Kelvin Santos stopped breathing while being treated for pneumonia at the Aberlardo Santos Hospital in Belem, northern Brazil on June 1, OPOVO reports.He was declared dead at 7.40pm on Friday and his body was handed over to his family who held a wake throughout the night with Kelvin's body displayed in an open casket.

Widespread retreat of glaciers has been observed along the southeastern margin of Greenland. This retreat has been associated with increased air and ocean temperatures. However, most observations are from the satellite era; presatellite observations of Greenlandic glaciers are rare. Here we present a unique record that documents the frontal positions for 132 southeast Greenlandic glaciers from rediscovered historical aerial imagery beginning in the early 1930s. We combine the historical aerial images with both early and modern satellite imagery to extract frontal variations of marine- and land-terminating outlet glaciers, as well as local glaciers and ice caps, over the past 80 years.

In the ruins of a Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan, archaeologists have uncovered a stone statue that seems to depict the prince Siddhartha before he founded Buddhism.The stone statue, or stele, was discovered at the Mes Aynak site in a ruined monastery in 2010, but it wasn't until now that it was analyzed and described. Gérard Fussman, a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, details his study in "The Early Iconography of Avalokitesvara" (Collège de France, 2012).

With forests and fish stocks declining, water demand rising and lack of action on climate change, humanity's path is anything but sustainable, the UN warns.The Global Environmental Outlook says significant progress is seen on only four out of 90 environmental goals.Meanwhile, a team of scientists warns that life on Earth may be on the way to an irreversible "tipping point".

This week, Giza Inspectorate operated 18 water pump machines to pump out subterranean water that has accumulated under the Sphinx.The machines are distributed over the Giza plateau according to a map showing the areas where the subterranean water has accumulated.Mohamed Ibrahim Minister of State for Antiquities said that the machines will pump out 1100 cubic metres of water every hour, based on studies carried out previously by reputed Egyptian and American experts in subterranean water and ground mechanic and equilibrium factors.

Yes, that's a Tyrannosaurus rex head poking out of the Conservatory of Flowers roof. No, there aren't hallucinogens in the Golden Gate park fog. The beast is part of "Plantosaurus Rex," a new exhibition of ancient plants that runs through Oct. 21."I was a huge dinosaur nerd as a kid," admitted Director of Operations and Exhibitions Lau Hodges, who put the display together and wrote its explanatory booklet. "It was a dream come true, a chance to show a lot of plants we don't often display." She wanted to tell a story of adaptation, how plants responded to the planet's changing geography and climate and how they co-evolved with animals. She wanted to engage young visitors, combining lifelike (and sometimes life size) dinosaur sculptures by Sonoma County artist Bridget Keimel with modern relatives of ancient plants. The show is tied together by Saxon Holt's gorgeous, evocative photomurals.

Quito, Ecuador, is not considered a global leader by most measures. But there is one way in which Quito is at the forefront of metropolises worldwide: in planning for climate change. For more than a decade, officials in Ecuador's mountainous capital have been studying the effects of global warming on nearby melting glaciers, developing ways of dealing with potential water shortages and even organizing conferences on climate change for leaders of other Latin American cities.In so doing, Quito officials represent a global trend: The cities that are most active in preparing for climate change are not necessarily the biggest or wealthiest. Instead, they are often places buffeted by natural disasters and increasing changes in temperature or rainfall. In places where the climate seems to be a growing threat to human lives, resources and urban infrastructure, local officials have been working with scientists, conducting assessments and examining which new measures may best prepare them for the future.

On high-level nuclear waste, the world's governments are registering low levels of activity. The US pulled the plug on its planned Yucca mountain repository in Nevada last year. The UK has been inviting local communities to "volunteer" to host a storage facility since 2008. Meanwhile France and Germany shunt waste between each other, hoping something will turn up.

Quantum information has leapt through the air about 100 kilometers or more in two new experiments, farther and with greater fidelity than ever before. The research brings truly long-distance quantum communication networks, in which satellites could beam encrypted information around the globe, closer to reality.

The vastness of space and the puzzling nature of the cosmic objects that occupy it provides no shortage of material for astronomers to ponder.To round up some of the most enduring mysteries in the field of astronomy, the journal Science enlisted help from science writers and members of the Board of Reviewing Editors to choose eight puzzling questions being asked by leading astronomers today.

"HERE and now", "Back in the 1950s", "Going forward"... Western languages are full of spatial metaphors for time, and whether you are, say, British, French or German, you no doubt think of the past as behind you and the future as stretching out ahead. Time is a straight line that runs through your body.Once thought to be universal, this "embodied cognition of time" is in fact strictly cultural. Over the past decade, encounters with various remote tribal societies have revealed a rich diversity of the ways in which humans relate to time (see "Attitudes across the latitudes"). The latest, coming from the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea, is perhaps the most remarkable. Time for the Yupno flows uphill and is not even linear.

More than 100 "vampire" corpses have been dug out from graves across Bulgaria during historic excavations, according to the country's archaeologists.Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the National History Museum in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, said on Tuesday that Bulgarian archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Middle Ages pierced through the chest with iron rods to keep them from turning into the undead.Dimitrov said that the two "vampire" remains were found last weekend near the Black Sea town of Sozopol.

A gigantic oyster fossil that was accidentally trawled up by fishermen is to be MRI-scanned to see if it contains an enormous pearl.The prehistoric mollusc is more than 100million years old and is ten times bigger than a regular oyster shell.It was hauled up in the Solent and found in the nets of the trawler boat when it returned to port.After layers of mud were washed off, it was clear the item was a huge fossilised shell that measured seven inches wide and three inches thick.

It's difficult to imagine a more successful mission than NASA's Kepler telescope, which was sent to space with the goal of spotting planets orbiting distant stars. It has been phenomenally efficient at finding them. In the process, the probe has revolutionized what we know about our galaxy's population of planets. It's easy to think of Kepler itself as a key milepost in humanity's understanding of our Universe. But for at least some of the scientists who work on exoplanets, Kepler is only the first step in a plan that will take decades, and will culminate when we begin searching all the stars in our neighborhood for signs of life.

Researchers from the University of Bonn have just shown how a single atom can be split into its two halves, pulled apart and put back together again. While the word "atom" literally means "indivisible," the laws of quantum mechanics allow dividing atoms - similarly to light rays - and reuniting them. The researchers want to build quantum mechanics bridges by letting the atom touch adjacent atoms while it is being pulled apart so that it works like a bridge span between two pillars. The results have just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Gouldian finches have different personalities depending on the colour of their heads, researchers have found.Scientists from Liverpool John Moores University and The Royal Veterinary College investigated the "highly sociable" Australian birds.The team set the finches a series of behavioural tests to understand the purpose of their bright appearance.They found that red-headed finches were more aggressive, while black-headed birds were bolder and took more risks.

You may not have noticed when you woke up today, but the Internet universe expanded overnight by the trillions.Today at midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, the new Internet protocol system IPv6 was born, bringing "more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion" extra Internet protocol addresses into the world, according to the Internet Society, the nonprofit, Internet policy organization that is behind the system's launch and also controls the .org domain.Every Internet-connected device has an IP address, a series of numbers that allows your computer or smartphone to connect to the Web. Since the early days of the Internet, most devices have logged online with addresses from the IPv4 system.

Skywatchers have the opportunity to witness history today (June 5), as the planet Venus rambles across the face of the sun in a rare event that will not be visible again for 105 years.Astronomers call this orbital encounter the "transit of Venus," when the planet passes between Earth and the sun, appearing as a tiny black blemish as it travels across the solar disk.

A once-in-lifetime celestial event will take place Tuesday (June 5) when Venus will cross the sun for the last time this century, and astronomers around the world are in position to catch the show. And now you can be, too.You don't have to go to the ends of the Earth to catch the transit of Venus. NASA and many research universities, organizations and amateur astronomy groups are offering their own webcasts of the Venus transit and we here at SPACE.com have assembled many of them below for your convenience.SPACE.com's complete transit of Venus coverage is here.

A mysterious cylindrical object is sitting 300 feet at the bottom of the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland, and nobody knows what it is -- yet.Deep sea divers using remote-controlled cameras are heading to the site on Friday. They'll try to determine the exact identity of the object, which side-scan sonar first revealed in June 2011."My guess is that they won't find anything. They may just find a large roundish rock," well-known skeptic Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, told The Huffington Post.

Wading into the debate over stop-and-frisk police tactics, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo plans to ask legislators on Monday for a change in New York State law that would drastically reduce the number of people who could be arrested for marijuana possession as a result of police stops.The governor will call for the decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana in public view, administration officials said. Advocates of such a change say the offense has ensnared tens of thousands of young black and Latino men who are stopped by the New York City police for other reasons but after being instructed to empty their pockets, find themselves charged with a crime.

INSIDE SCIENCEOur universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself.Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory, which suggests that the universe began as a seemingly impossible "singularity," an infinitely small point containing an infinitely high concentration of matter, expanding in size to what we observe today. The theory of inflation, a super-fast expansion of space proposed in recent decades, fills in many important details, such as why slight lumps in the concentration of matter in the early universe coalesced into large celestial bodies such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

Scientists at the University of Eastern Finland say they hope to have an allergy vaccine on the market in five to seven years.For everything, from pollen to cat hair.The antibody immunoglobulin E (IgE) works as the sneezy gatekeeper for allergies: it causes your white blood cells to release histamine, which in turn causes all of your favorite allergic responses, from a watery eyes to hay fever.

Yet again young amateur astronomers are helping scientists with real science.That's the beauty of astronomy; the sky is a big place, plenty of room for everyone. Nowhere is this truer than in the search for asteroids and, in particular, the more deadly near-Earth asteroids (NEAs).So, a partnership with the UK's Faulkes Telescope Project hopes to boost the European Space Agency's space hazards research while at the same time giving students the chance to discover potentially hazardous space rocks.

A small cosmetic jar offers more circumstantial evidence that the legendary aviator, Amelia Earhart, died on an uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati.Found broken in five pieces, the ointment pot was collected on Nikumaroro Island by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 75 years ago.

A moderate solar flare on May 17 lit up ground stations all over the world with an unexpected and puzzling pulse of high-energy particles. It should not have happened, and scientists are now trying to figure out why it did.Major solar flares, flashes of light at various wavelengths often associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are known to disrupt communications and can even trip power grids on Earth. But the May 17 flare was an M-class event, moderate and relatively common and not expected to create disturbances on the surface of Earth. Yet either the flare or the CME generated a ground-level enhancement (GLE), a blast of high-energy particles that lit up ground stations called neutron monitors on Earth for the first time in nearly six years.

Around 100,000 years ago, the human race was on the brink of extinction. Confined to Africa, our population had fallen to less than 10,000. Yet within a few tens of thousands of years, we began spreading around the world.New genetic evidence suggests that one factor contributing to the population bottleneck was a massive epidemic of bacterial disease. The bacteria were exploiting two immune system genes, turning them against us. So the solution was simple: get rid of the traitorous genes.

Giant insects ruled the prehistoric skies during periods when Earth's atmosphere was rich in oxygen. Then came the birds. After the evolution of birds about 150 million years ago, insects got smaller despite rising oxygen levels, according to a new study by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz.Insects reached their biggest sizes about 300 million years ago during the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods. This was the reign of the predatory griffinflies, giant dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 28 inches (70 centimeters). The leading theory attributes their large size to high oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere (over 30 percent, compared to 21 percent today), which allowed giant insects to get enough oxygen through the tiny breathing tubes that insects use instead of lungs.

Cutting-edge advances in materials are opening up vast new opportunities in engineering, science and design. From self-healing concrete to edible packaging, here are seven remarkable materials and how they could affect our world.Materials science continues to develop new substances with remarkable attributes, as well as inventive new combinations of traits. Sophisticated new materials are already playing a major role in engineering, medicine, science, design and manufacturing, as well as in everyday life.Here we highlight some new and inventive materials that are bringing science fiction closer to reality.

Working with populations of yeast growing in test tubes, researchers at MIT published the first experimental validation of the theory that populations suffering a decline in environmental conditions appear stable until they reach a tipping point where the population plummets, making recovery nearly impossible.In the early 1990s, overfishing led to the collapse of one of the most bountiful cod fisheries in the world, off the coast of Newfoundland. Twenty years later, the cod population still has not recovered, dramatically affecting the economic life of the region.

A rough estimate based on geologic records indicates there's a 1-in-10,000 chance of a "supereruption" at Yellowstone during our lifetimes. However, given the erratic nature of volcanoes, that number doesn't mean much. The bulging pocket of magma swishing around beneath Old Faithful might never blow its lid again. Or, it might put on a surprise fireworks show next Independence Day. Scientists just don't know.But if or when it blows, what will actually happen? Will it be the end of us all, or just a big knock to the tourism industry in Wyoming? .

In cities, the presence of algae, lichens, and mosses is not considered desirable and they are often removed from roofs and walls. It is, however, totally unfair to consider these cryptogamic covers, as the flat growths are referred to in scientific terms, just a nuisance. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry have discovered that these mostly inconspicuous looking growths take up huge amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrogen and fix it at Earth's surface.

Catching a whiff of someone's body odour is enough to tell you whether they are young, middle aged or elderly without having seen them, researchers found.Elderly people's smell was the most distinctive but contrary but was also judged by volunteers to be less intense and unpleasant than that of younger people.

A small black dot will grace the face of the sun as it rises (over Europe) on Wednesday, when Venus makes a rare and historic journey across the burning disc of our parent star.Few people alive today will have another chance to witness the transit of Venus, as the laws of orbital mechanics do not bring the planets into position again until December 2117.In previous centuries, nations dispatched astronomers to their farthest territories to record the transit in progress. In doing so, they embarked on the first global scientific collaboration in history and answered the pressing question of the size of the solar system.

Rats with a spinal cord injury that left their hind legs completely paralyzed learned to walk again on their own after an intensive training course that included electrical stimulation of the brain and the spine, scientists reported on Thursday.Researchers have known for some time that stimulation and training can improve muscle control somewhat after such injuries in animals. And last year, an international team of scientists reported the case of a 23-year-old paraplegic who regained the ability to stand for a few minutes at a time after a similar program.

TAMPA, Fla. -- First came Miami: the case of a naked man eating most of another man's face. Then Texas: a mother accused of killing her newborn, eating part of his brain and biting off three of his toes. Then Maryland, a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain.Violence, we're used to. Cannibalism and people who should fall down but don't? That feels like something else entirely.

"Do you want to play wiv mummy? Wocka-wocka-woo?" said the gorilla. Well, not quite, but older gorillas have been found to use a modified system of gestures when communicating with infants. Much like "motherese", the baby talk human parents use when talking to their children, the gorillas' special gestures may help the infants to develop their own communication skills.

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director of CERN where the LHC is based, said he was confident that by the end of the year it will be possible to say whether the Higgs Boson, the particle which is responsible for giving mass to the universe, exists.The theoretical particle, nicknamed the God Particle due to its central role it has in explaining modern physics, has never been detected and scientists have been working for decades to prove its existence.Scientists hope that high energy collisions of particles in the 17 mile underground tunnel at CERN will finally allow them to create the conditions to allow them to spot the elusive Higgs Boson.

Tundra is by definition a cold, treeless landscape. But scientists have found that in a part of the Eurasian Arctic, willow and alder shrubs, once stunted by harsh weather, have been growing upward to the height of trees in recent decades.The reason for the change: the warming Arctic climate, they say.Roughly 30 years ago, trees were nearly unknown there. Now, 10 percent to 15 percent of the land in the southern part of the northwestern Eurasian tundra, which stretches between Finland and western Siberia, is covered by new tree-size shrubs, which stand higher than 6.6 feet (2 meters), new research indicates.

Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found.The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between ad 774 and ad 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the ad 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped by 1.2% over the course of no longer than a year, about 20 times more than the normal rate of variation. Their study is published online in Nature today.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) today officially approved new names for elements 114 and 116, the latest heavy elements to be added to the periodic table.Scientists of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)-Dubna collaboration proposed the names as Flerovium for element 114, with the symbol Fl, and Livermorium for element 116, with the symbol Lv, late last year.

A stone's throw from Iraq's Shiite holy city of Najaf's airport, the remains of the celebrated ancient Christian city of Hira lie neglected and mouldering, because funds for excavation have dried up.Three sites, discovered five years ago, are unexplored and unkempt, and officials fear the uncompleted excavation could lead to their eventual demise.The sites, which contain mud walls and jars that are exposed to the elements, lie fewer than 100 metres (yards) from an active runway, are not fenced off and have no security except their proximity to the restricted airport area.

Last week I wrote about how ultra-advanced aliens would be virtually indistinguishable from gods. Today I want to take the opposite tack and argue for our cosmic loneliness and our role as space explorers. This is inspired by the phenomenal docking of the SpaceX Dragon module with the International Space Station last week and its expected return tomorrow, when it's supposed to land in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.Adam already wrote about the remarkable SpaceX mission and what it means for the space race. I want to take this topic up and see what it means for our future now that the mission is coming to an end.

Panaji: Scientists of the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) have found an Indo-Arabic stone anchor off the Kutch coast in Gujarat that offers significant clues to the Indo-Arabic and Indo-Persian trade of the first and second century BC. It was found at a depth of more than 50 metres.The find has been published in the May issue of the scientific journal Current Science.

Exotic subatomic particles called excitons have been trapped and cooled to the point they formed a giant wave of matter, physicists report.Excitons exist in materials called semiconductors, which have a certain range of electrical conductivity that makes them essential for modern electronics. When light is shined on a semiconductor, it can kick out an electron from an atom, creating a bound state between the "hole" that's left and the detached electron, called an exciton.

The government of Mongolia and the auction house that conditionally sold a tyrannosaur skeleton are collaborating on an investigation into whether or not the fossils were taken illegally from that country.Heritage Auctions and the consignors of the skeleton have voluntarily given information regarding the origin and chain of custody of the three-quarters- complete specimen to the attorney representing President Elbegdorj Tsakhia, who maintains that the fossils belong to Mongolia. Meanwhile, a team of Mongolian officials and paleontologists is planning to visit the specimen, which Heritage Auctions has housed in New York City, to conduct an investigation next week.

KINGSTON, Jamaica - Archaeologists said Tuesday that they'll ask the United Nations' cultural agency to bestow world heritage status on Port Royal, the mostly submerged remains of a historic Jamaican port known as the "wickedest city on Earth" more than three centuries ago.Receiving the designation from UNESCO would place Port Royal in the company of global marvels such as Cambodia's Angkor temple complex and India's Taj Mahal.The sunken 17th century city was once a bustling place where buccaneers including Henry Morgan docked in search of rum, women and boat repairs.

LONDON, May 31 (Reuters) - Scientists have unravelled exactly how opium poppies produce a non-addictive compound that can both suppress coughs and kill tumour cells, paving the way for improved production of the medicine.Opium poppies, the source of illicit heroin, are also important for producing medical painkillers such as morphine and codeine, along with noscapine, which has been used for decades as a cough suppressant.

A new drug for advanced prostate cancer patients has proved so effective that researchers stopped the clinical trial early to give all patients a chance to receive the life-extending medication, according to a UCSF-led study released Saturday.The hormone treatment, Johnson & Johnson's Zytiga, when added to a standard steroid therapy doubled the time it takes for the disease to progress in patients treated with the standard therapy alone, said the lead researcher, Dr. Charles Ryan, associate professor of clinical medicine at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Super-eruptions from massive volcanoes with the power to destroy humanity could take much less time to form than scientists previously thought, it was reported yesterday.Supervolcanoes are a huge but little understood natural disaster waiting to happen.Only a handful of such volcanoes exist in the world, but should one erupt the effect would be devastating.

The American SpaceX company's Dragon cargo capsule has splashed down in the ocean off the California coast.The return to Earth completes a historic first mission to the International Space Station (ISS) by a privately operated vehicle.Impact with the water was confirmed at 08:42 Pacific Daylight Time (15:42 GMT; 16:42 BST).Fast boats positioned in the splashdown zone were despatched to recover the unmanned capsule.Dragon came down right on top of its targeted location about 900km (560 miles) from the Baja Peninsula.

From the 2nd to the 5th of June, Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Diamond Jubilee, marking 60 years of reign, a landmark anniversary that is cause for celebration in the United Kingdom. We would also be amiss if we didn't note that the Astrologer Royal was doubtless consulted when selecting the spectacularly auspicious end date of the festivities, the same day that Venus, "the Queen of Heaven," begins to transit the face of the sun, which last occurred in 2004 and won't occur again for another 113 years.The celebratory ceremony of the jubilee is as old as civilization itself, a tradition that stretches back through medieval Christianity to ancient Israel and ultimately to Sumer and First Dynasty Egypt, whereupon it is lost to recorded history.

On Tuesday, June 5, skywatchers in North America will have their last chance to see Venus pass in front of the sun for over a century. Because of the International Date Line, this event will occur on Wednesday June 6 in Asia, Australia, Africa, and Europe.This event, called a transit of Venus, is one of the rarest sights in astronomy. Transits of Venus occur in pairs 8 years apart, each pair separated from the next by over a century. The last pair occurred in 1881 and 1889, and the next pair will occur in 2117 and 2125. This week's transit is paired with a transit which occurred on June 8, 2004.

After months of delay, NASA's newest space telescope is just two weeks away from launching on an ambitious mission to seek out the universe's black holes and investigate their mysterious origins.The space agency's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is slated to launch June 13 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The X-ray space telescope will ride into orbit on a Pegasus XL rocket from Orbital Sciences, which is designed to launch in midair from a rocket-carrying aircraft. The mission has been awaiting launch since March, when NASA delayed its liftoff pending a review of the rocket.

More than ten thousands of bone fragments were recovered from the Lingjing site, Henan Province during 2005 and 2006. By taking statistical analyses of the skeletal elements of the two predominant species in this assemblage, aurochs (Bos primigenius) and horse (Equus caballus), scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, found that hominids at this site have already practiced sophisticated hunting techniques and subsistence strategies and may be quite familiar with the ecological and anatomical characteristics and nutritional values of the large-sized prey animals and can accordingly take different processing and handling strategies at the hunting site, as reported in the journal of Science China Earth Sciences.

Cairo, 28 May (AKI) - Archaeologists have discovered an 4,000-year-old tomb in Upper Egypt containing a sarcophagus inscribed with ancient funeral texts as well as ritual objects, Egypt's archaeological treasures minister said Monday.

A recently released biography on President Barack Obama details a young Obama's high school days smoking marijuana. The president had previously admitted to using the drug in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams of My Father."Obama's history of drug use is a past behavior that is certainly still frowned upon, but he is by no means the only president to have a drug history. Find out which other presidents had a history of use, going all the way back to the nation's Founding Fathers.

For many whales and dolphins, the world is shaped by sound; they hunt and navigate by listening for echoes.Navigating in this way requires super-sensitive hearing. And scientists have now found that, for some whales, this sense is adjustable.Researchers in Hawaii measured the hearing of a female false killer whale, and found that she could fine-tune her most crucial sense.The whale would "turn down" her hearing when she anticipated a loud noise.

Engravings, the earliest form of art in the American continent.Undeniably, the civilizations of Pre-Columbian America are more famous for their monuments and works of art, than for the great events of their history. It is due, on one hand, to the limitations of our knowledge in that last field, and on the other hand, of course, to the extraordinary Pre-Columbian artistic flourishing, whose creations expressed ideas and even complex messages, without being devoid, however, of aesthetic considerations..

The social unrest, economic gloom and austerity in Europe today mirrors one of the greatest crises in British history, says the historian Michael Wood.At home in Britain there are worrying signs in every town - cuts in public services have led to closures of public baths and libraries, the failure of road maintenance, breakdowns in the food supply and civic order.While political commentators and church leaders talk about a "general decline in morality" and "public apathy", the rich retreat to their mansions and country estates and hoard their cash.It all sounds eerily familiar doesn't it? But this is not Angela Merkel's eurozone - it is Roman Britannia towards the year 400, the period of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Geologists at the University of Maryland have published research that could help prove or disprove Gaia theory -- the notion that the Earth is one single self-regulating system.The concept dates from the 70s (see: Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, US, UK, CA) and was initially formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. It proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings comprise a single system that maintains the conditions for life on Earth. It was initially met with skepticism from the scientific community, and remains somewhat controversial, but is now an important area of research in Earth systems science and biogeochemistry.If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, then a number of signals should be observable in the Earth's natural cycles and systems. One of those is that a sulphur compound made by organisms in the ocean should be stable enough in water to allow its transfer into the air, so it can then be returned to land.

Bipolar disorder is a serious and debilitating condition where individuals experience severe swings in mood between mania and depression. The episodes of low or elevated mood can last days or months, and the risk of suicide is high.Antidepressants are commonly prescribed to treat or prevent the depressive episodes, but they are not universally effective. Many patients still continue to experience periods of depression even while being treated, and many patients must try several different types of antidepressants before finding one that works for them. In addition, it may take several weeks of treatment before a patient begins to feel relief from the drug's effects.

In the course of routine excavation work at the tomb of the first Middle Kingdom governor of the Hare Nome or province, the nomarch Ahanakht I at the Deir Al-Barsha site in Minya, Belgian archaeologists from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven stumbled on what is believed to be an important burial going back to the beginning of the Middle Kingdom.

Babylon was probably founded in the 23rd century BC. It was sacked countless times and rebuilt almost as many. It was taken by Cyrus II of Persia in 539BC and by Alexander the Great two centuries later. It slipped into oblivion in the early Christian era before being rediscovered in the 19th century by Claudius Rich. At the end of the 20th century it was spoiled by Saddam Hussein and in the early 21st century damaged by the US army. Now it's bracing for an oil pipeline.

Researchers from Harvard University, The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have found evidence that the evolution of birds is the result of a drastic change in how dinosaurs developed. Scientists have long understood that modern birds descended from dinosaurs. Rather than take years to reach sexual maturity, as many dinosaurs did, birds sped up the clock -- some species take as little as 12 weeks to mature -- allowing them to retain the physical characteristics of baby dinosaurs.The results of the study appeared May 27 in an online edition of the journal Nature.

The world is on the brink of a "golden age" for natural gas, with demand for the low-carbon fossil fuel slated to rise by 50 percent -- as much as demand for coal, oil, nuclear power combined -- over the next two and a half decades, according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.Should those trends manifest, however, the world will have little chance of halting global warming at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, the limit most scientists say is necessary if runaway climate change is to be avoided.

Pacific bluefin tuna have carried radiation across the ocean from Japan to California. The radioactivity is well below levels that would cause concern for human health, but the results show that fallout from the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last year provides an unusual opportunity to track the animals, air and water of the Pacific Ocean.Bluefin tuna (Thunnus orientalis) spawn in Japanese waters before swimming to the Californian coast. Researchers who tested 15 fish caught after the disaster in March 2011 found that all contained traces of caesium-134, a water-soluble radioisotope spewed into the ocean by the meltdown. Fish that travelled to California before 2011 did not carry the isotope. The results were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A set of 80-year-old photographs discovered in a basement archive reveals the remarkable sensitivity of Greenland's glaciers to climate change, according to a new study that one scientist called "glaciological research with a splash of Indiana Jones."The research, published online May 27 in the journal Nature Geoscience, reveals a pattern of stop-and-go melting along Greenland's southeastern coast. Aerial photographs dating back to 1931 show a period of glacier retreat between 1933 and 1943, followed by a cool period of advancing ice until 1972. More recently, most of those gains have been lost as temperatures creep upward.

Ancient Egyptians may have chronicled the flickering of a star known as "the Demon," perhaps the earliest known record of a variable star, astronomers suggest.The ancient Egyptians wrote calendars that marked lucky and unlucky days. These predictions were based on astronomical and mythological events thought of as influential for everyday life. The best preserved of these calendars is the Cairo Calendar, a papyrus document dating between 1163 and 1271 B.C. The entry for each day is prefaced by three hieroglyphics that indicate either good or bad luck, with the characters often derived from events of mythology.

The classification system that makes drugs such as cannabis and MDMA (ecstasy) illegal has prevented scientists from properly researching their possible therapeutic uses for conditions such as schizophrenia and depression, according to the government's former chief adviser on drugs.Professor David Nutt said the UK's laws on misuse of drugs needed to be rewritten to more accurately reflect their relative harms and called for a regulated approach to making drugs such as MDMA and cannabis available for medical and research purposes.

Traveling to another star may sound like science fiction -- something the USS Enterprise can do at the flick of the warp drive switch after Jean Luc Picard's "Engage" command -- but science fact has an annoying habit of reminding us that space is vast and the speed of light is very limited.But for a group of interstellar enthusiasts headed by an ex-NASA astronaut, the light-years between the stars isn't insurmountable; it's merely a problem we need to embrace and work toward finding a solution. What's more, they have the backing of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to begin work.

White Americans' heads are getting bigger. That's according to research by forensic anthropologists at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.Lee Jantz, coordinator of UT's Forensic Anthropology Center (FAC); Richard Jantz, professor emeritus and former director of the FAC; and Joanne Devlin, adjunct assistant professor, examined 1,500 skulls dating back to the mid-1800s through the mid-1980s. They noticed U.S. skulls have become larger, taller and narrower as seen from the front and faces have become significantly narrower and higher.

One day, when our children live on the Newt Gingrich Lunar subdivision, they will know just how watery the moon truly is.As far as we in the West have been concerned, the first proof that there might be water up there came in 1994, when the Clementine mission returned results suggesting that there must at least be watery ice beneath the moon's surface.However, a Columbia University astrophysicist, Arlin Crotts, has declared that the Russians had secured evidence of moon water as far back as 1976. This evidence was simply ignored by the high-fallutin' West.

One-quarter of the world's entire mountain gorilla population is under threat from sustained fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Just over 800 gorillas remain in the world, with 210 living in the Virunga National Park, a Unesco World Heritage site. A rebel army calling itself M23 entered the gorillas' habitat in the early hours of 8 May, and set up an operating base at Runyoni, a strategic peak in the Rutshuru territory, close to the border of Uganda. For more than two weeks, the rebels have been under siege as FARDC, the Congolese national army, fires rockets, mortars and anti-aircraft guns towards Virunga, Africa's oldest national park.

Two Roman-era shipwrecks have been found in deep water off a western Greek island, challenging the idea that ancient shipmasters stuck to coastal routes.The merchant ships were sunk nearly a mile deep between Corfu and Italy - proving that ancient traders didn't 'hug the shore'.Greece's culture ministry said the two third-century wrecks were discovered earlier this month during a survey of an area where a Greek-Italian gas pipeline is to be sunk.They lay between 0.7-0.9 miles deep in the sea between Corfu and Italy.

It was used to help Apollo astronauts navigate in space, and has since been applied to problems as diverse as economics and weather forecasting, but Harvard scientists are now using a powerful statistical tool to not only track sea level rise over time, but to determine where the water causing the rise is coming from.

Our universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself.Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory, which suggests that the universe began as a seemingly impossible "singularity," an infinitely small point containing an infinitely high concentration of matter, expanding in size to what we observe today. The theory of inflation, a super-fast expansion of space proposed in recent decades, fills in many important details, such as why slight lumps in the concentration of matter in the early universe coalesced into large celestial bodies such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

Author Robert Ardrey's* popularization of the theory that modern humans are in part a product of their violent primate ancestral past may have some merit, with a twist, according to Dr. Christopher Boehm, Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. In a review published in the May 18, 2012 issue of the journal Science, he suggests that, though the common ancestor to modern-day chimpanzees, bonobos and humans may have used conflict to solve problems and achieve objectives, it was not until the later human hunter-gatherers that the more organized, full-scale features of aggression and conflict that define actual warfare developed.

Archaeological excavations have provided the first substantiation that a farmland estate in Sicily boasts a history which reaches back over a thousand years. Numerous finds demonstrate the continuous use of the land complex as a nexus of settlement and economic and religious life between the 5th and 16th century. The findings are the result of two projects of the Austrian Science Fund FWF which comprise the first in-depth archaeological exploration of Sicily's Byzantine period. The projects' findings are now accessible to the public in the Krahuletz Museum in Eggenburg, Austria.

When the Tissint meteorite crashed to Earth in Morocco last year, international drama ensued. The charred pieces of splintered rock were particularly coveted because they came from Mars, and local tribesmen, meteorite collectors, and scientists jockeyed for position. One of the first scientists to get his hands on Tissint was Andrew Steele, a Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and while he cryptically previewed his findings at the Conference on Life Detection in Extraterrestrial Samples earlier this year, some of his results were published online last week in Science.

A mummified child in Korea whose organs were relatively well preserved has produced the oldest full viral genome description. A liver biopsy of the mummy revealed a unique hepatitis B virus (HBV) known as a genotype C2 sequence, which is said to be common in Southeast Asia.The first discovery of hepatitis in a Korean mummy came in 2007. The new work provided more detailed analysis.The research, announced today, was detailed in the May 21 edition of the scientific journal Hepatology.

A convoy of self-driving cars has taken to a public motorway in Spain in normal traffic, a world first, according to Swedish car maker Volvo.A professional driver took the lead of the convoy in a truck, and was followed by four self-driven Volvo vehicles: a second truck and three cars, Volvo said in a statement.Vehicles in the road train were equipped with safety systems including cameras, radar and laser sensors, enabling them to monitor the lead vehicle and other vehicles on the road, Volvo said.