Newsdesk Archive

For almost all of humanity's existence, the idea of exploring the galaxy was just a far-off dream.But in the 50 years since we began conquering the pull of gravity and escaped our atmosphere, we have been able to dismiss get beyond the dreaming and discuss the practical ways we can settle on other worlds.As we take our baby-steps into the wider world, one suggestion is that we, in a sense, return to the Stone Ages - and use caves as our initial dwelling places.The idea was given even more credence in 2007 when NASA captured images of 'skylights' on Mars - showing that caves do exist on the red planet, giving us four walls, a roof, and potentially even a fairly air-tight environment to set up a new home.

Urban researchers in Berlin are exploring an eerie phenomenon -- the modern ghost town. From a deserted Cypriot holiday resort to a brand new Chinese city devoid of inhabitants, they are asking why people abandon their communities and exploring the stories that make these empty places so compelling.The Japanese island of Hashima was once among the most densely populated areas in the world. But with the decline of the coal industry, the island was deserted in the 1970s. Now history enthusiasts like to explore it in hopes of discovering remnants of the mining town it once was. The desolate ruins of the settlement also inspire filmmakers to replicate the haunting setting in their movies.

JISH, Israel -- Two villages in the Holy Land's tiny Christian community are teaching Aramaic in an ambitious effort to revive the language that Jesus spoke, centuries after it all but disappeared from the Middle East.The new focus on the region's dominant language 2,000 years ago comes with a little help from modern technology: an Aramaic-speaking television channel from Sweden, of all places, where a vibrant immigrant community has kept the ancient tongue alive.

The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as 'attack', 'Al Qaeda', 'terrorism' and 'dirty bomb' alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like 'pork', 'cloud', 'team' and 'Mexico'.Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats.

Street lighting is changing insect ecosystems in towns and cities, a study has found.Groups of invertebrates living near artificial lights include more predators and scavengers, say researchers.The effect could be impacting the survival rates of different species, with long-term consequences for birds and mammals that rely on them for food.Scientists conducted the study in the market town of Helston, west Cornwall.

Out of the skulls of babes. Modern birds have skulls that look remarkably like those of juvenile dinosaurs, offering an unusual explanation for how birds came to have relatively large brains.As dinosaurs evolved into birds, something arrested their development. The juvenile heads they kept may be responsible for their relatively high intelligence, and their incredible evolutionary success.Birds are living dinosaurs, having evolved from feathered dinosaurs similar to the Velociraptor. They were the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction that took place 65 million years ago.

A subsea turbine which uses tidal power to generate electricity has successfully completed initial tests off Orkney.The turbine was lowered into position during winter storms and Scottish Power Renewables said it was performing well.The 100ft-high 1MW (megawatt) Hammerfest Strom HS1000 device is already powering homes and businesses on the island of Eday.There are plans to create a 10MW tidal power array in the Sound of Islay.

Two studies led by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and National Geographic's Genographic Project reveal new information about the migration patterns of the first humans to settle the Americas. The studies identify the historical relationships among various groups of Native American and First Nations peoples and present the first clear evidence of the genetic impact of the groups' cultural practices.

Imagine reading an entire book, but then realizing that your glasses did not allow you to distinguish "g" from "q." What details did you miss? Geneticists faced a similar problem with the recent discovery of a "sixth nucleotide" in the DNA alphabet.Two modifications of cytosine, one of the four bases that make up DNA, look almost the same but mean different things. But scientists lacked a way of reading DNA, letter by letter, and detecting precisely where these modifications are found in particular tissues or cell types.

Babylon's Hanging Gardens were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but heritage appears to be no match for Iraq's booming oil industry in a dispute over a new pipeline.As Baghdad is working to get UNESCO to list Babylon as a World Heritage Site, archaeologists and oil ministry officials are in a battle over a pipeline that one side insists threatens the site and could cause irreparable damage to the ruins.

Let's be upfront about this: We still don't have hard-nosed evidence for any life that's not of this Earth. That fact hasn't changed since the time of Aristotle.But unlike that gifted Greek, a lot of folks today think proof of alien biology could grace the next news cycle. After all, astronomers have recently uncovered thousands of new planets; space agencies have relentlessly hurled hardware at dozens of solar system targets; and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists continue to build new equipment for tuning in ET's radio chatter.

Last week researchers from Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology announced that they are seeking genetic materials (such as hair, skin, and blood samples) claimed to be of unknown animals such as Bigfoot. The goal of the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project is to catalogue and identify new species, including those long believed to be mythical.Despite the publicity that the new project is garnering, this is far from the first time that alleged Bigfoot samples have been subjected to scientific testing.

ATHENS - Judges narrowly acquitted Socrates, the philosopher whose teachings earned him a death sentence in ancient Athens, in a retrial Friday billed as a lesson for modern times of revolution and crisis.Socrates spoke himself at his trial in the fourth century BC, but this time in his absence, a panel of 10 U.S. and European judges heard pleas by top Greek and foreign lawyers at the event at the Onassis Foundation in Athens.Judges then voted on whether he was guilty on the ancient charges of evil-doing, impiety and corrupting the young.

A forensic approach that links changes deep below a volcano to signals at the surface is described by scientists from the University of Bristol in a paper published today in Science. The research could ultimately help to predict future volcanic eruptions with greater accuracy.Using forensic-style chemical analysis, Dr Kate Saunders and colleagues directly linked seismic observations of the deadly 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption to crystal growth within the magma chamber, the large underground pool of liquid rock beneath the volcano.

It took some 10 million years for Earth to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time, latest research has revealed.Life was nearly wiped out 250 million years ago, with only 10 per cent of plants and animals surviving. It is currently much debated how life recovered from this cataclysm, whether quickly or slowly.Recent evidence for a rapid bounce-back is evaluated in a new review article by Dr Zhong-Qiang Chen, from the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, and Professor Michael Benton from the University of Bristol. They find that recovery from the crisis lasted some 10 million years, as explained today in Nature Geoscience.

More than 17,000 people have signed an online petition urging US President Barack Obama to require all scientific journal articles resulting from US taxpayer-funded research to be made freely available online. The signatures, obtained within a week of the petition's launch after an active social media campaign, put it over two-thirds of the way towards the threshold that will require an official response from the White House.

It has long been debated how cats went from running in the wild to becoming our domesticated furry friends.Researchers may have solved the mystery after analysing the genetic makeup of Egyptian cat mummies.The results of the study of DNA from the remains of ritually slaughtered animals found in tombs suggest that we have the people of Ancient Egypt to thank for our moggies and ginger toms.Scientists at the University of California Davis published the study which points at the Egyptians as being the first cat breeders, The Sunday Times reports.

New evidence from meteorites suggests that the basic building blocks of life are present on Mars.The study found that carbon present in 10 meteorites, spanning more than four billion years of Martian history, came from the planet and was not the result of contamination on Earth.Details of the work have been published in the journal Science.But the research also shows the Martian carbon did not come from life forms.A team of scientists based at the Carnegie Institution for Science, based in Washington DC, found "reduced carbon" in the meteorites and says it was created by volcanic activity on Marss.

The Ministry of State for Antiquities started a project to reduce the water table accumulated under the Sphinx at Giza plateau...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.

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."It is the first time in many years that such a well-preserved tomb has been unearthed, " said Muhammad Ibrahim.The tomb dates from ancient Egypt's First Intermediate period (2181-2055 BC) and is an unusual find, as very little archaeological evidence survives from this period.

Computerworld - Sotheby's will put some Apple history on the block next month, including one of only six working Apple-1 personal computers. The auction house has estimated the motherboard will sell for up to $180,000.Also up for sale: A memo written by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his time at video game maker Atari.The Apple-1 -- which consisted of a circuit board hand-built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak -- first went on sale in July 1976 for $666.66. About 200 units were produced. According to the Sotheby's catalog listing (download PDF), there are about 50 surviving Apple-1 computers, but just six known to be in working condition.

'Tractor beams' of light that pull objects towards them are no longer science fiction. Haifeng Wang at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and co-workers have now demonstrated how a tractor beam can in fact be realized on a small scale.Tractor beams are a well-known concept in science fiction. These rays of light are often shown pulling objects towards an observer, seemingly violating the laws of physics, and of course, such beams have yet to be realised in the real world. Haifeng Wang at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and co-workers have now demonstrated how a tractor beam can in fact be realized on a small scale.

Jeff Larson has seen just about everything wash up on the shores of Santa Cruz: bottles, toys, shotgun shells, busted surfboards and fishing floats that looked like they had bobbed across the Pacific.When surging water driven by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan tore apart his city's harbor, he was there to scoop up the splintered docks and broken boats that were heaved onto the sand.

China and India are some of the world's top polluters, with countless cars, factories, and households belching more than 2 million metric tons of carbon soot and other dark pollutants into the air every year. These pollutants aren't just bad news for the countries themselves. A new study reveals that they can affect climate thousands of kilometers away, warming the United States by up to 0.4°C by 2024, while cooling other countries.

A bill introduced in New Jersey that would impose fines rather than jail time for marijuana possession offers a more reasonable approach to the war on drugs.Under the measure, a first-time offender arrested with 15 grams of marijuana or less would face a $150 fine. The fine for subsequent offenses could increase to up to $500, along with referral to a state drug-education program. The bill won unanimous approval with bipartisan support Monday from the Assembly Judiciary Committee. A Senate version was introduced last week.Unfortunately, legislative approval may not be enough. A spokesman for Gov. Christie has said it is unlikely that the former federal prosecutor would sign it.

The evolutionary origin of turtles is one of the last unanswered questions in vertebrate evolution. Paleontological and morphological studies place turtles as either evolving from the ancestor of all reptiles or as evolving from the ancestor of snakes, lizards, and tuataras. Conflictingly, genetic studies place turtles as evolving from the ancestor of crocodilians and birds.Having recently looked at more than a thousand of the least-changed regions in the genomes of turtles and their closest relatives, a team of Boston University researchers has confirmed that turtles are most closely related to crocodilians and birds rather than to lizards, snakes, and tuataras.

When military historian Dan Snow and a team of archaeologists unearthed a Second World War Spitfire from an Inishowen bog in County Donegal, it kicked off a remarkable, and often surprising, documentary journey.We would film six Browning machine guns emerging from the muck that day, followed by a fully inflated tail wheel and the preserved leather flying helmet thrown off 70 years earlier by American pilot Bud Wolfe.Despite everything that came out of the ground, what seemed most striking was how far the fighter plane was from, what I presumed, was the heart of the battle, in Europe.

The mystery surrounding the tomb of the last Inca emperor - and its reputed treasure - might be closer to being solved.If Ecuadorean historian Tamara Estupinan is right, Emperor Atahualpa's mummified body was kept in the lush, hilly lowlands, a six-hour drive south-west of Ecuador's capital city, Quito.While it is still too early to confirm Ms Estupinan's theory, this discovery could shed light on a tumultuous historical period that marked the beginning of the Spanish colonial era in the Americas.

In 1980, people began to take notice when workers from a commercial logging company began dredging up pottery fragments and bones in an area near the little village of Pancasila on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia. Other locals began finding coins, brassware and charred timber in the same region, all buried beneath a thick layer of volcanic deposits. The finds were not far from the foot of the Tambora volcano, a volcano that, in April of 1815, produced the largest eruption in recorded history. In fact, so intense was the eruption, it's atmospheric effects influenced weather patterns across faraway Europe and North America. And in one evening alone, it destroyed at least one entire village kingdom near its feet.

There are 25 pools at Cara Blanca, and we have only just begun plumbing their depths. In 2010, divers explored eight pools and, in addition to gauging their size and depth, extracted 10-foot-long sediment cores using four-inch-diameter PVC pipe from two pools: Pool 2 (16 feet deep) and Pool 6 (60-feet deep). The history of changing climate and landscape is slowly emerging from the cores via pollen and soil analyses. Radiocarbon dating shows that the Pool 6 core covers a period before and after the Classic period (around A.D. 550-850), the time when the Maya population was at its peak and kings were at their most powerful.

Scary needles and looking away when getting a shot may be a thing of the past. New technology is being developed that allow needle-free injection of drugs.Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Ian Hunter, the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor of Mechanical Engineering, have developed a jet-injection system that injects the drug through the skin. Instead of using a hypodermic needle, the device uses a high-pressure system that can penetrate the skin and deliver the drug into the bloodstream. Not only will the device save some patients the pain of needles, but can also reduce needle-related injuries and also help patients who need to self-inject medication.

Researchers have trapped a rainbow - slowing light to a near-stop - in an array of 25,000 "invisibility cloaks", each smaller than a hair's breadth.A report in the New Journal of Physics shows how the quest for an invisibility cloak is leading to cleverer ways to use and manipulate light.The trick could aid the analysis of complex samples or even communications.In recent years, a number of research efforts has demonstrated a wide range of cloaking techniques.

By peering at crystals encased within volcanic rock, scientists could get a better idea of when eruptions will occur, researchers say.More than 500 million people live close to volcanoes that could erupt with little or no clear warning, causing widespread devastation and even global effects on climate, as in the case of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Although scientists keep an eye on many of the world's volcanoes for ground movements, gas emissions and other signs of unrest, volcanologists still face challenges directly linking surface activity with volcanic plumbing changes deep underground.To learn more about volcanic activity in an effort to help predict it, researchers investigated the magma from within volcanoes. Crystals often grow within magma chambers, large crevices of searing hot fluid rock beneath volcanoes.

On June 5, astronomers will witness an astronomical event that has been observed in the modern era only six times previously, a passage or transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. The next time such an event will occur is 2117, so researchers are gearing up to devote as many resources as possible to view the transit from both Earth and space. Among other things, scientists hope observations of the transit will inform efforts to detect extrasolar planets -- those around distant stars -- a feat that is achieved in part by observing the dimming of a star as a planet passes between it and the Earth.

Warming in Great Britain appears to have given a little brown and orange butterfly an edge. The brown argus butterfly has spread about 49 miles (79 kilometers) northward on the island over 20 years, observations indicate.Although it's well known that climate change can prompt plants and animals to shift the ranges in which they live, the brown argus (Aricia agestis) has widened its living quarters with unusual speed, according to an analysis of decades of data collected by British volunteers.The butterfly's secret? A new host plant to feed its larvae.

The International Space Station's crew reached out today with a robotic arm to grab SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule and brought it in for the orbital outpost's first-ever hookup with a commercial spaceship.It marks the station's first linkup with a U.S.-made spacecraft since last year's retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet, and potentially opens the way for dozens of commercial cargo shipments. If the long-range plan unfolds as NASA hopes, U.S. astronauts could be shuttled back and forth on the Dragon or similar spacecraft within just a few years.

Despite what the movies tell us, any aliens that visit Earth probably won't want to enslave or vaporize us, veteran E.T. hunter Jill Tarter says.Hostile aliens abound at the multiplex these days, terrorizing our planet in films such as "Battleship" and "Men in Black 3." But science fiction is probably far from reality in its depiction of Earth-contacting extraterrestrials, said Tarter, who announced Monday that she's retiring after spending 35 years scanning the heavens for signals from intelligent life beyond Earth.

Researchers have identified what they say are the oldest-known musical instruments in the world. The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, come from a cave in southern Germany which contains early evidence for the occupation of Europe by modern humans -Homo sapiens. Scientists used carbon dating to show that the flutes were between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. The findings are described in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Argentine experts have discovered the near-complete remains of a new species of Jurassic-era dinosaur that stood on its rear legs and had tiny arms, according to a leading paleontologist. The find belongs to the Abelisaurus family, "the most common carnivorous species in the southern hemisphere during the Cretaceous Period," some 70 to 100 million years ago, paleontologist Diego Pol told AFP on Thursday. "However the fossils that we found are some 170 million years old," from the earlier Jurassic Period, Pol said.

A new dolphin speaker device could one day help us talk with these remarkably intelligent life forms, scientists say. Dolphins live in a world of sound far beyond our own. They can distinguish very small differences in the frequency or pitch of sound waves, and can hear and generate low-frequency sounds below 20 kilohertz that lie within human capabilities, as well as high-frequency sounds of up to more than 150 kilohertz, well beyond the range of our hearing. In addition, dolphins not only can produce tones just as humans do, but they can also communicate at a variety of frequencies simultaneously. With whistles, burst-pulse sounds and clicks, dolphins use sound not only to communicate and to scan their surroundings and prey in the dark sea (called echolocation).

At a time when black magic was relatively common, two curses involving snakes were cast, one targeting a senator and the other an animal doctor, says a Spanish researcher who has just deciphered the 1,600-year-old curses.Both curses feature a depiction of a deity, possibly the Greek goddess Hekate, with serpents coming out of her hair, possibly meant to strike at the victims. Both curses contain Greek invocations similar to examples known to call upon Hekate.

Western Europe has the worldwide highest risk of radioactive contamination caused by major reactor accidents.Catastrophic nuclear accidents such as the core meltdowns in Chernobyl and Fukushima are more likely to happen than previously assumed. Based on the operating hours of all civil nuclear reactors and the number of nuclear meltdowns that have occurred, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have calculated that such events may occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors) -- some 200 times more often than estimated in the past.

Solar power gathered in space could be set to provide the renewable energy of the future thanks to innovative research being carried out by engineers at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.Researchers at the University have already tested equipment in space that would provide a platform for solar panels to collect the energy and allow it to be transferred back to earth through microwaves or lasers.This unique development would provide a reliable source of power and could allow valuable energy to be sent to remote areas in the world, providing power to disaster areas or outlying areas that are difficult to reach by traditional means.

Although there is an urban legend that the world will end this year based on a misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar, some researchers think a 40-year-old computer program that predicts a collapse of socioeconomic order and massive drop in human population in this century may be on target.Remember how Wile E. Coyote, in his obsessive pursuit of the Road Runner, would fall off a cliff? The hapless predator ran straight out off the edge, stopped in midair as only an animated character could, looked beneath him in an eye-popping moment of truth, and plummeted straight down into a puff of dust. Splat! Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of such a possible course for human civilization in the 21st century. In Limits to Growth, a bitterly disputed 1972 book that explicated these findings, researchers argued that the global industrial system has so much inertia that it cannot readily correct course in response to signals of planetary stress.

The presence of street lights substantially changes the ecology of ground-dwelling invertebrates and insects, research suggests.Scientists trapped nearly 1,200 of the animals in areas under and between street lights in Helston in Cornwall.They report in Biology Letters that invertebrate predators and scavengers were more common near the lights, even during the day.That suggests street lights influence ecology more than previously thought.

One of the first creatures to step on land could not have walked on four legs, 3D computer models show.Textbook pictures of the 360-million-year-old animal moving like a salamander are incorrect, say scientists.Instead, it would have hauled itself from the water using its front limbs as crutches, research in Nature suggests.The move from living in water to life on land - a pivotal moment in evolution - must have been a gradual one.

Archaeologists are to exhume and analyse human bones found under a prehistoric monument only recently identified as a burial site cap.The Trefael Stone in Pembrokeshire was thought to be just one of many linked to nearby Bronze Age locations.But it has now been reclassified after a survey established it as the capstone of a Stone Age ritual burial chamber.The survey revealed the location, near Nevern, has been used for ritual burials for at least 5,500 years.

Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that a small dose of a commonly used crop pesticide turns honey bees into "picky eaters" and affects their ability to recruit their nestmates to otherwise good sources of food.The results of their experiments, detailed in this week's issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, have implications for what pesticides should be applied to bee-pollinated crops and shed light on one of the main culprits suspected to be behind the recent declines in honey bee colonies.

Déjà vu - that strange feeling of having experienced something before - is more likely to occur when a scene's spatial layout resembles one in memory, according to groundbreaking new research by a Colorado State University psychology professor.The research, led by Anne Cleary, associate professor of psychology, appears this month in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Consciousness and Cognition. The study is the first ever to use virtual reality technology to model déjà vu in the laboratory.

Chemical warfare is nothing new. As early as 428 BC the Spartans were burning wood soaked in resin and sulfur for use against their enemies. And the First World War is often remembered for its horrific deaths due to mustard gas. But the mid-20th century ushered in a new futuristic chemical weapon: LSD.Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline (peyote), and psilocybin (psychedelic mushrooms) were all seen as possible contenders for non-lethal weapons of the future; sprayed on an unsuspecting army or civilian population and making them vulnerable to invasion.

(AP) LAS VEGAS - It's been a long, strange trip for what appears to be several tiny chips of lunar rock that found their way into a casino mogul's hands after being collected by the first men on the moon.If they're real, they were plucked from the lunar surface by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, given by then-President Richard Nixon to former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia, pilfered by a Costa Rican mercenary soldier-turned Contra rebel, traded to a Baptist missionary for unknown items, then sold to a flamboyant Las Vegas casino mogul who squirreled them away in in a safety deposit box.

Google today pledged to warn users whose computers or home routers appear to be infected with the DNSChanger malware. The roughly half a million devices still infected with DNSChanger will receive warnings atop their search results that provide steps for removing the malicious software from their machines.What's the big deal? Computers still infected with DNSChanger after July 9 will no longer be able to connect to the Internet, so those affected need to act fast.The problem dates back to November 2011, when the FBI seized and shut down about 100 servers that were infecting millions of computers with the DNSChanger Trojan. Infected machines had their Domain Name System settings altered so websites would redirect to servers controlled by the criminals. The scammers reportedly earned millions in affiliate and referral fees by diverting users through those sites.

Humanity's unquenchable thirst for fresh water is driving up sea levels even faster than melting glaciers, according to new research. The massive impact of the global population's growing need for water on rising sea levels is revealed in a comprehensive assessment of all the ways in which people use water.Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world and then channelled into fields and pipes to keep communities fed and watered. The water then flows into the oceans, but far more quickly than the ancient aquifers are replenished by rains. The global tide would be rising even more quickly but for the fact that man-made reservoirs have, until now, held back the flow by storing huge amounts of water on land.

BLOOMBERGThe World War II generation may have passed down to their grandchildren the effects of chemical exposure in the 1940s, possibly explaining current rates of obesity, autism and mental illness, according to one researcher.David Crews, professor of psychology and zoology at the University of Texas at Austin, theorized that the rise in these diseases may be linked to environmental effects passed on through generations. His research showed that descendants of rats exposed to a crop fungicide were less sociable, more obese and more anxious than offspring of the unexposed.

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 trade of the first and second century B.C. It was found at a depth of more than 50 metres.The find has been published in the May issue of scientific journal Current Science.

A paralysed man has regained limited use of his hand after pioneering surgery to bypass damage to his spinal cord.His injury meant his brain could not "talk" to his hand, meaning all control was lost.Surgeons at the Washington University School of Medicine re-wired his nerves to build a new route between hand and brain.He can now feed himself and can just about write.

When President Obama announced NASA's budget for FY 2013, Mars was hit hard.Exploration of the Red Planet lost 21 percent of its 2012 funding, dropping from $1,510 million to $1,192 million. But that doesn't change the fact that there's a fantastic launch opportunity in 2018.Under its new diminished Mars program, the mission will certainly be different from the planned ExoMars mission. How different? Well, have your say. NASA is taking suggestions from the Everyman about what its 2018 mission should look like.

A field trial for a novel UK geoengineering experiment has been cancelled amid questions about a pre-existing patent application for some of the technology involved.The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project is a collaboration among several UK universities and Cambridge-based Marshall Aerospace to investigate the possibility of spraying particles into the stratosphere to mitigate global warming. Such particles could mimic the cooling produced by large volcanic eruptions, by reflecting sunlight before it reaches the Earth's surface.

The author of a new book about the Zodiac Killer, who struck Northern California four decades ago, claims there was a massive law enforcement coverup that prevented the killer from being caught."The Zodiac Killer Cover Up" is a new book written by a former California Highway Patrol officer, Lyndon Lafferty.Lafferty claims the killer is now a 91-year-old man living in Solano County. The book uses aliases and does not identify the alleged killer by name. Lafferty claims he and other lawmen investigated the suspect in the early 1970s but were stymied by "power brokers" in Solano County. Lafferty claims the killer was motivated by jealousy because his wife was having an affair.

Austrian scientists are looking to break the record for the longest journey made by a fully autonomous sailboat, all while collecting data on a Baltic Sea porpoise.Scientists from the Austrian Society of Innovative Computer Sciences hope their craft, named the ASV Roboat, will cover 150 nautical miles (172 miles) and work for 100 hours without human intervention once it is put into the water July 9. The current record is 78.9 nautical miles (91 miles), set in March by a robot sailboat made by the French engineering institute ENSTA Brest.

Min, the ancient Egyptian god of phallus and fertility, might have brought some worldy advantages to his male worshippers, but offered little protection when it came to spiritual life.Researchers at the Mummy Project-Fatebenefratelli hospital in Milan, Italy, established that one of Min's priests at Akhmim, Ankhpakhered, was not resting peacefully in his finely painted sarcophagus."We discovered that the sarcophagus does not contain the mummy of the priest, but the remains of another man dating between 400 and 100 BC," Egyptologist Sabina Malgora said.

Hope springs eternal for die-hard Star Trek fans that scientists will one day build an actual, working antimatter propulsion engine similar to the one that powers the fictional starship Enterprise.A new paper by a pair of enterprising (get it?) physicists should fan the flames of that fantasy even further.Ronan Keane (Western Reserve Academy) and Wei-Ming Zhang (Kent State University) report that the latest results from their computer simulations indicate that at least one key component of realizing a working antimatter propulsion engine -- highly efficient magnetic nozzles -- should be far more efficient than previously thought. And such nozzles are feasible using today's technologies.

The study of the "Demon star", Algol, made by a research group of the University of Helsinki, Finland, has received both scientific and public attention. The period of the brightness variation of this eclipsing binary star has been connected to good prognoses three millennia ago. This result has raised a lot of discussion and the news has spread widely in the Internet.The Egyptian papyrus Cairo 86637 calendar is probably the oldest preserved historical document of bare eye observations of a variable star. Each day of one Egyptian year was divided into three parts in this calendar. A good or a bad prognosis was assigned for these parts of a day.

Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that the weight of the world rests on her shoulders.She is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists.As such, she has become a star attraction for campaigners eager to preserve her dying tongue.Madhav Prasad Pokharel, a professor of linguistics at Nepal's Tribhuwan University, has spent a decade researching the vanishing Kusunda trib.

In the Star Wars movies, moisture farmers on dry planets like Tattoine use droids to help with the repetitive, back-breaking labor, but that's in a galaxy far, far away. There's no doubt that robots are cool, but are robots on farms far off in our future?Actually, the future is already here, with highly advanced milking machines on some dairy farms and a fully automated robot planting tractor set to hit the market this fall.

Israeli archaeologists have uncovered what they suggest may be the Byzantine quarry site referred to in the miracle story by Procopius of Caesarea.The recent discovery of a Jerusalem quarry by archaeologists have led some archaeologists to suggest that it may be the site of the miracle described by historian Procopius of Caesarea in his work,The Buildings of Justinian, where God provided a miraculous supply of stone for the construction of the Nea Ekklesia of the Theotokos Church.

A UK-Swiss team will use DNA testing to investigate the origins of remains claimed to be from yeti and bigfoot.The project will examine hair, bone and other material from a collection amassed by a Swiss biologist - and will invite submissions from elsewhere.Many cultures relate legends of hairy, humanoid creatures that lurk in the wilds, rarely seen.But material claimed to be from such creatures have never been subjected to modern scientific techniques.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - (AP) -- A first-of-its-kind commercial supply ship rocketed toward the International Space Station following a successful liftoff early Tuesday, opening a new era of dollar-driven spaceflight.The SpaceX company made history as its Falcon 9 rocket rose from its seaside launch pad and pierced the pre-dawn sky, aiming for a rendezvous in a few days with the space station. The unmanned rocket carried into orbit a capsule named Dragon that is packed with 1,000 pounds of space station provisions.It is the first time a private company has launched a vessel to the space station. Before, that was something only major governments had done.

LONDON: Setting out on beach holidays in the winter seems to be a thousands of years old choice, as cavemen had even moved to warmer regions surrounding the Mediterranean Sea while the Ice Age reached its peak, a study has found.New DNA analysis has shown how humans sheltered from the Ice Age in Southern France and East Asia, where they remained until the cold snap lifted, 20,000 years ago.

Imagine you had a building material that was energy-efficient, non-toxic and resistant to mold, insects and fire. The material may even have a higher R-value, or thermal resistance, than concrete, a claim that is still being investigated. The only problem? The base of the Hempcrete creation is hemp, which comes from the cannabis sativa plant -- the same one that produces marijuana, which is a federally banned substance. Because of this, industrial hemp production is illegal in the United States.

It sounds like a scene from Hollywood blockbuster Inception, but it could be possible to control your dreams in the future thanks to a special 'sleeping mask'.The Remee is the invention of Americans Duncan Frazier, 30, and Steve McGuigan, 30, who claim the mask works by making the brain aware it is asleep, allowing the person to control what then happens in their lucid dreams.

Today marks the 508th anniversary of the death of Christopher Columbus.Everybody knows the story of Columbus, right? He was an Italian explorer from Genoa who set sail in 1492 to enrich the Spanish monarchs with gold and spices from the orient. Not quite.For too long, scholars have ignored Columbus's grand passion: the quest to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims.During Columbus's lifetime, Jews became the target of fanatical religious persecution. On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled from Spain. The edict especially targeted the 800,000 Jews who had never converted, and gave them four months to pack up and get out.

The cross-breeding of dogs has made it difficult to trace the genetic roots of today's pets, according to a new study.Scientists from Durham and Aberdeen analysed data from the genetic make-up of modern dogs while assessing the archaeological record of dog remains.They found that modern breeds genetically have little in common with their ancient ancestors.

In the shallow waters of Gijon harbour, in northern Spain, a large, yellow fish cuts through the waves.But this swimmer stands apart from the marine life that usually inhabits this port: there's no flesh and blood here, just carbon fibre and metal.This is robo-fish - scientists' latest weapon in the war against pollution.This sea-faring machine works autonomously to hunt down contamination in the water, feeding this information back to the shore.Here in Spain, several are undergoing their first trials to see if they make the grade as future marine police.

It sounds like a bad sci-fi film: A group of scientists build an robot intelligent robot, give it the ability to build its own tools, and arm it with a gun.Thankfully, while the first part is true, the gun on this occasion is just a glue gun.Still, the reality of a tool-building robot is a scary enough thought, with the team from the science and technology university ETH Zurich building a robot which can built its own tools to carry out its missions.In the video below, the un-named robot uses the glue gun to build itself a cup, which it then glues on to itself to transport water from one dish to another.

Researchers in the US have demonstrated a means to use short sections of DNA as rewritable data "bits" in living cells.The technique uses two proteins adapted from viruses to "flip" the DNA bits.Though it is at an early stage, the advance could help pave the way for computing and memory storage within biological systems.A team reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say the tiny information storehouses may also be used to study cancer and aging.

More than a year after a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a massive nuclear disaster, experts are warning that Japan isn't out of the woods yet and the worst nuclear storm the world has ever seen could be just one earthquake away from reality.The troubled Reactor 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is at the centre of this potential catastrophe.Reactor 4 -- and to a lesser extent Reactor 3 -- still hold large quantities of cooling waters surrounding spent nuclear fuel, all bound by a fragile concrete pool located 30 metres above the ground, and exposed to the elements.A magnitude 7 or 7.5 earthquake would likely fracture that pool, and disaster would ensue, says Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with Fairewinds Energy Education who has visited the site.

Last week a federal appeals board sent Cate Jenkins back to work at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), marking another victory in the rabble-rousing chemist's colourful career. The agency had fired the 65-year-old scientist in December 2010, alleging that she threatened a supervisor, but the US Merit Systems Protection Board ruled that the EPA failed to inform Jenkins of all of the charges against her.Jenkins maintains that she was fired in retaliation for her work exposing pollution dangers at the World Trade Center site in New York after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. In parallel with her formal work at the EPA, Jenkins has alleged, among other things, that EPA used a falsified health standard that remains in place today to downplay the dangers of corrosive dust at the site. In the months and years following the attacks, Jenkins reported her findings to the EPA Inspector General, Congress and the FBI. Although she has now been cleared to return to work, the whistle-blower case continues in a separate process at the US Department of Labor. The EPA could also choose to dismiss her again, this time following the proper procedures.

Scientists have discovered fossilized bones near Utah's iconic Arches National Park representing a new species of raptor dinosaur that was about the size of a coyote, the state's top paleontologist announced on Friday.The raptor was among several discovered at or near Doelling's Bowl Bone Bed, about 230 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, which has yielded several new species in the last two decades and is thought to be the base of Utah's Cretaceous record. Fossils found at the bone bed are estimated at between 120 and 130 million years old.

ANY teenage boy will confirm that older boys make it impossible to get the girls. Young male orang-utans with the same problem have a unique and unexpected solution: they don't grow up until they are strong enough to challenge the dominant males.Male orang-utans can reproduce from around age 15, but in order to attract a mate they also have to develop secondary sexual characteristics - the equivalent of men growing chest hair. These include conspicuous cheek flanges. Yet Sumatran orang-utans often delay acquiring flanges, sometimes for over 10 years. No other primates do this, not even Bornean orang-utans.

Humans are not the only primates going ape over iPads, so are, um, apes. Several zoos in the US have started to introduce their orang-utans to computers as part of their mental stimulus programmes, and it turns out the animals are big fans of the hi-tech tablet. Staff at Miami's Jungle Island turned to the iPad on the suggestion of dolphin researcher Jack Kassewitz. The main app used is Tap To Talk, which displays pictures of various objects such as a mango or a bucket, one of which the trainer then names, and the orang-utan then presses the corresponding button.The software was originally designed for children with autism. "There's not really an end goal," says Ashley Serrate, of Jungle Island. "We just want to enrich the lives of orang-utans and keep making sure they have fun.

Climate change, with its associated melting ice caps and shrinking glaciers, is the usual suspect when it comes to explaining rising sea levels. But a recent study now shows that human water use has a major impact on sea-level change that has been overlooked.During the latter half of the twentieth century, global sea level rose by about 1.8 millimetres per year, according to data from tide gauges. The combined contribution from heating of the oceans, which makes the water expand, along with melting of ice caps and glaciers, is estimated to be 1.1 millimetres per year, which leaves some 0.7 millimetres per year unaccounted for. This gap has been considered an important missing piece of the puzzle in estimates for past and current sea-level changes and for projections of future rises.

A Bronze Age version of Facebook has emerged from granite rocks in Russia and northern Sweden, revealing a thousands-of-years-old timeline filled with an archaic version of the Facebook "like."Using computer modeling, Mark Sapwell, a Ph.D. archaeology student at Cambridge University, analyzed some 3,500 rock art images from Nämforsen in Northern Sweden and Zalavruga in Western Russia."Although this rock art has been documented from the early 1900s, the modeling has allowed a unique look at the interesting way these images have been arranged and accumulated over time," Sapwell told Discovery News.

It may not be intuitive, but a coating of reflective metal can actually make something less visible, engineers at Stanford and UPenn have shown. They have created an invisible, light-detecting device that can "see without being seen."At the heart of the device are silicon nanowires covered by a thin cap of gold. By adjusting the ratio of metal to silicon -- a technique the engineers refer to as tuning the geometries -- they capitalize on favorable nanoscale physics in which the reflected light from the two materials cancel each other to make the device invisible.

After a day off recovering from jet lag, which I somehow end up spending whizzing up and down the hills of San Francisco on a Segway, I head off down Highway 101 to Mountain View to record the first interview in my Little Atoms road trip. I'm meeting Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Seti Institute and presenter of their excellent Big Picture Science radio show and podcast.Seth is the public face of Seti, he's the SETI GUY. At least that's what it says on his car registration plate. Seti is an abbreviation of Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence, and that's what Seth does. He's a full-time alien hunter.

A Russian-made Soyuz craft carrying three astronauts has docked with the International Space Station, putting the crew in place for the imminent arrival of the first ever privately owned cargo ship to the orbiting lab.The Soyuz eased into position this morning Moscow time over the Mongolian-Kazakh border after a two-day trip that began with the launch from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan.

Brenton Gurney, 38, from Sydney, suffered a series of headaches but an MRI scan found nothing wrong, so he convinced his brother Craig to have a scan.Craig's MRI revealed a brain tumour in the base of his skull. It has been removed in a 10-hour operation and he has safely recovered."Ultimately Brenton saved my life," Craig told The Sydney Morning Herald.Brenton said: "We've always been really, really close."During the gruelling operation, Brenton said, the family often looked over to him in the waiting room as to detect his brother's progress.

In October, 2004, Scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, conducted a survey around the margin of the reservoir that will later be submerged upon completing a new section of the dam, and found 367 lithic artifacts with handaxes and picks from 43 open-air sites, distributed upon different terraces along the Hanshui River and its tributary Danjiang River.The finding of handaxes and picks offers new materials to discuss the diffusion and cultural communication of early hominids, researchers reported in the latest issue of Acta Anthropologica Sinica 2012 (2).

On paper, it looks like a blindingly obvious idea: take a version of a wind turbine and plant it on the seabed so that its blades spin in the flow of the tides and so generate electricity.Unlike wind, the tides are totally predictable for decades ahead.The turbines, well below the waves, are also out of sight and probably out of mind. And the tidal currents are of course utterly carbon-free.

Generally speaking, there's a collective sigh of relief when any large hulk of space rock flies past Earth -- except, perhaps, for the smaller asteroids that scatter precious meteorites over California's 'Gold Country'. But when one of the estimated 4,700 potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) glides by, we really should count our lucky stars -- those things could kill you.PHAs are asteroids larger than 100-meters (330-feet) wide that drift close enough to Earth's orbit to be considered a threat. They come within eight million kilometers (five million miles), or around 20-times the Earth-moon distance, of our planet and should they be on a collision course with Earth, they could survive the atmospheric burn and wipe out a city (or worse). They are an extra-special subset of a larger family of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), space rocks that give astronomers a reason for paus.

Anthropologists working in southern France have determined that a 1.5 metric ton block of engraved limestone constitutes the earliest evidence of wall art. Their research, reported in the most recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the piece to be approximately 37,000 years old and offers rich evidence of the role art played in the daily lives of Early Aurignacian humans.The research team, composed of more than a dozen scientists from American and European universities and research institutions, has been excavating at the site of the discovery -- Abri Castanet -- for the past 15 years. Abri Castanet and its sister site Abri Blanchard have long been recognized as being among the oldest sites in Eurasia bearing artifacts of human symbolism. Hundreds of personal ornaments have been discovered, including pierced animal teeth, pierced shells, ivory and soapstone beads, engravings, and paintings on limestone slabs.

A new study by scientists from Denmark and Germany has found live bacteria trapped in red clay deposited on the ocean floor some 86 million years ago. The bacteria use miniscule amounts of oxygen and move only extremely slowly.Researchers led by Hans Røy from the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University in Denmark, extracted samples from columns of sediment up to around 30 meters beneath the sea floor in the region of rotating currents north of Hawaii known as the North Pacific Gyre. The sediment columns, built up by deposition of clay, dead algae and crustaceans, and dust, can be as much as several kilometres thick, with the most ancient sediment at the bottom of the columns.

Like humans who might use a different slang term for "that's cool" or have distinct fashion sense, adjacent chimpanzee groups also show cultural differences, in this case, in their nut-cracking techniques, researchers have found."In humans, cultural differences are an essential part of what distinguishes neighboring groups that live in very similar environments," study researcher Lydia Luncz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany said in a statement."For the first time, a very similar situation has been found in wild chimpanzees living in the Tai National Park, Cote d'Ivoire, demonstrating that they share with us the ability for fine-scale cultural differentiation."

For algae to power our cars and planes, production needs to be low carbon and cost effective, which means working with natural processes, not against them, say scientists.Algae could become an important source of sustainable biofuel, as production doesn't compete with food crops for land. But we may need to change the way we grow algae from closed systems to open ponds if it is to be low-carbon and cost-effective.

NASA's Kepler space telescope finds planets beyond the solar system by looking for dips in starlight caused by planets parading past their parent stars, relative to Kepler's point of view.But there's another method by which scientists can find sibling Kepler worlds beyond the telescope's eye.David Nesvorný, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and colleagues parsed through Kepler data on a sunlike star designated "Kepler Object of Interest 872," or KOI-872, and found something interesting -- the planet's transit was late.

A broken-down cargo ship was drifting towards the fringes of Australia's Great Barrier Reef Saturday, with fears of major damage if it were to run aground at the World Heritage-listed site.Authorities were rushing to the assistance of the Hong Kong-flagged bulk carrier, the ID Integrity, which broke down north of Cairns.The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said the ship had suffered an "an engine breakdown en route from Shanghai" and was adrift on what is the world's biggest coral reef.

Within the hidden inland and interior regions of South-Central California, millions of years of wind scouring and water erosion have sculpted distinctive yellow-and-tan sandstone outcrops into bizarre and beguiling forms worthy of a Daliesque timescape. The endless forces of weather and climate have created a menagerie of rocky pinnacles, honeycombed sandstone cavities, and sinuous rockshelters. In desert scrub and patchy oak woodlands, misshapen cave mouths appear to grin awkwardly in shifting shadow and light as the sun wheels overhead, season after season.Note: See Graham's related book on the mysteries of cave art: 'Supernatural' - CA, UK, US. Kindle

Scientists have identified thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for many millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere.The methane has been trapped by ice, but is able to escape as the ice melts.Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this ancient gas could have a significant impact on climate change.Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2 and levels are rising after a few years of stability.

It's history's most famous unsolved crime spree. In 1888, a serial killer who came to be known as Jack the Ripper gruesomely murdered five prostitutes in London's Whitechapel district. More than 100 men, from Lewis Carroll to Queen Victoria's grandson, have since been labeled suspects, and the guesswork has spawned an entire field of study, known as "Ripperology." Now, a new book turns the speculation on its head, by arguing that Jack the Ripper was actually a woman.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have snapped a stunning new photo of a heavily eroded impact crater in Algeria.The image shows Ouarkziz Crater, a 2.2-mile-wide (3.5-kilometer) hole in the ground in northwestern Algeria, near the border with Morocco. It was formed by an asteroid impact less than 70 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era, which is also known as the "Age of Dinosaurs.".