Newsdesk Archive

What we currently call breast cancer should be thought of as 10 completely separate diseases, according to an international study which has been described as a "landmark".The categories could improve treatment by tailoring drugs for a patient's exact type of breast cancer and help predict survival more accurately.The study in Nature analysed breast cancers from 2,000 women.

Something as simple as going for a brisk stroll could play an important role in fighting depression, according to researchers in Scotland.Vigorous exercise has already been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression, but the effect of less strenuous activities was unclear.A study in the journal Mental Health and Physical Activity showed walking had a "large effect" on depression.One in 10 people may have depression at some point in their lives.

Look closely at these solar panels. They aren't the flat panels commonly seen on rooftops, but arrays of tubular components.These tubes, developed by Naked Energy, in Guildford, England, are a kind of hybrid solar-energy contraption that make more efficient use of the sun's energy to produce both electricity and hot water.They're hybrid because they do two jobs. Most solar panels either making electricity or heat water, not both. The former is done by a photovoltaic silicon solar panel, familiar in small devices such as calculators and big rooftop installations. Solar hot water heaters are basically arrays of black plastic pipes that get heated up during the day.

New Jersey granted its first permit Monday for a Montclair facility to immediately begin growing medical marijuana, a significant step in the program first legalized more than two years ago.If Greenleaf Compassion Center also secures a permit for its storefront disciplinary, medicinal marijuana could be available to state residents with chronic diseases by midsummer, said Donna Leusner, spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Senior Services, the agency implementing the program.

The first cargo resupply mission to the space station to be carried out by a commercial operator is likely to be on 30 April, the US space agency says.The flight of the unmanned Dragon freighter is supposed to be just a demonstration, but its success would mark a new era in spaceflight.Nasa is keen to hand off routine space transportation to the private sector - for both cargo and crew.The upcoming mission will be performed by the SpaceX company of California.

Geologists in Russia's volatile Chechnya region have discovered what they believe to be fossilized dinosaur eggs laid by one of the huge extinct reptiles that roamed the Earth more than 60 million years ago."We've found about 40 eggs so far, the exact number has not been established," said Said-Emin Dzhabrailov, a geologist at the Chechen State University."There could be many more laying under the ground."The find was uncovered when a construction crew was blasting through a hillside to build a road near the region's border with former Soviet Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains.

New Orleans, LA - "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either."Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.Cowan's findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP's oil and dispersants.

Weighing in at four tons, the mother animal was 2,500 times heavier than its newly hatched dinosaur baby. By way of comparison, a mother elephant, which is just as heavy, only weighs 22 times as much as its new-born calf. In other words, neonates are already big in large mammal species.After all, larger eggs require a thicker shell and as the embryo also needs to be supplied with oxygen through this shell, eventually neither the shell nor the egg can grow any more. Consequently, newly hatched dinosaur babies cannot be larger in the same way as in larger species of mammal.

Mesolithic artefacts from a lost settlement are coming to light after 6 millennia after currents scoured sand from the seabed just of the coast of Denmark in Horsens Fjord.Science Nordic reports on a chance return to a stretch of coast where Peter Alstrup, now an archaeology PhD student at Aarhus Universit, had spent his childhood.Alstrup dived on the site (which had been known since the 70s) and noticed how the overlying sediments had been lost and there lying on the seabed he discovered beautifully carved pieces of wood.

On April 16, an M-class flare erupted on the limb of the sun, triggering a coronal mass ejection (CME). The CME -- a magnetized bubble of superheated plasma -- wasn't thrown in the direction of Earth, but toward Mars and Venus, both of which may experience a glancing blow according to Spaceweather.com.Additional analysis by NASA's Space Weather Laboratory at Goddard Space Flight Center has shown that the CME will likely wash over the Mars Science Laboratory (currently en route to the Red Planet), the STEREO-B spacecraft and the Spitzer space telescope.

A team of academics have revealed the "sonic experience" that early visitors to Stonehenge would have heard.Scholars from the Universities of Salford, Huddersfield and Bristol used an American replica of the monument to investigate its audio history.Salford's Dr Bruno Fazenda said they had found the site reacted to sound "in a way that would have been noticeable to the Neolithic man".He said the research would allow a "more holistic" view of its past.

Dramatic warming at the end of the last ice age produced an intense rise in sea level and a massive ice sheet collapse in the Antarctic.The sea level rise is known as Melt-Water Pulse 1A, and new research indicates it increased sea level by about 45 feet (14 meters) sometime between 14,650 and 14,310 years ago, during the same time as a period of rapid climate change known as the Bølling warming.

Shipwreck disaster experts are calling for a deep-sea expedition to a lost U.S. nuclear attack sub, the USS Scorpion, in an effort to verify a new theory on what caused the Cold War vessel to sink.The Scorpion was lost May 22, 1968, killing 99 men, about 400 miles south of the Azores Islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The sub has been inspected by undersea recovery teams, including a visit in 1985 by oceanographer Robert Ballard before his team's discovery of the Titanic shipwreck.

BEIJING, China has set up a laboratory to conduct research on medicines for astronauts during space missions, the science and technology ministry said.The laboratory, housed in the China Astronaut Centre here, was opened on Tuesday. The construction began in 2009, Xinhua reported.

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.Further, NASA doesn't need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News."The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope -- watch the bacteria move," Miller said.

On April 12, 1961, the world met Yuri Gagarin, a former Soviet Air Force pilot who shot from obscurity to international fame after making one full orbit around the Earth in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.But the mission records the Soviet Union submitted to international authorities to secure Gagarin's place as the first man in space present a very different mission. Specifically, his landing was deliberately falsified. During the year, lies about the Vostok landing system called into question whether or not Vostok 1 deserved its place as history's first spaceflight at all.

Engineers are battling to save the European Space Agency's (Esa) flagship Earth observation mission - Envisat.Controllers say the eight-tonne spacecraft appears to be in a stable condition, but they are not receiving any data at all from it.Contact was lost with Envisat at the weekend shortly after it downloaded pictures of Spain's Canary Islands.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but the moon is exclusively a child of Earth, according to a new "paternity test" carried out on Apollo lunar rock samples.Historically, astronomers have long pondered where the moon came from. Analysis of the moon rocks brought back to Earth during the Apollo manned missions led to a radical hypothesis that was finally embraced in the mid-1980s.The leading theory has been that a Mars-sized protoplanet barreled into Earth 4.4 billion years ago and the two bodies merged -- like a kid kneading yellow and blue Play-Doh together to make a green ball. The moon condensed quickly from the spillover ejecta. This same scenario has been applied to the birth of Pluto's moon Charon.

Duck-billed dinosaurs that lived within Arctic latitudes approximately 70 million years ago likely endured long, dark polar winters instead of migrating to more southern latitudes, a recent study by researchers from the University of Cape Town, Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas and Temple University has found.

It sounds like the ultimate science fiction storyline: what if the dinosaurs weren't wiped-out by an asteroid impact 65 million years ago? Perhaps they'd still be alive today, in an advanced evolutionary state, developing their space program and their own asteroid impact mitigation strategies. Sadly for us, this would have probably meant that mammals wouldn't have gotten a foothold and the fledgling human race would have become glorified dino-chum.

SAN SALVADOR -- No one was murdered in El Salvador on Saturday, officials said, in what was the first homicide-free day in nearly three years for the Central American country plagued by violent drug gangs."After years when the number of murders reached alarming levels of up to 18 per day, we saw not one homicide in the country," President Mauricio Funes said in a statement released on Sunday.The murder-free day was the first recorded since leftist Funes took office in June 2009. At the beginning of his term, the country had an average of 12 murders a day, but that tally climbed closer to 18 per day in early 2012.

YAKIMA -- When George Rohrbacher talks about marijuana prohibition, his biggest concern isn't the merits of the drug, but a statistic he likes to call "the butcher's bill."The numbers add up to about 26 million during the past 40 years. They don't represent the costs of enforcement, but the number of people who have been arrested for using pot."Even today, in the year 2012, we will arrest another 850,000 Americans for pot," said Rohrbacher, a former state lawmaker, before a crowd of about 150 people at the Capitol Theatre on Wednesday night. "This is a national disgrace with a local solution.

Israeli scientists have uncovered messages transmitted underground - not by enemy agents, but by garden pea plants.The Ben-Gurion University team discovered that plants can transmit distress signals to each other through their roots. An injured plant "communicates" to a healthy one, which in turn relays the signal to neighboring plants, possibly enhancing the other plants' ability to deal with stress in the future, according to the study, recently published in the periodical PLoS (Public Library of Science One ).

Scientists from Bristol University found evidence of public anger in the days before widespread violence and looting on the streets by studying millions of tweets.After examining the mood of the messages of 140 characters or less, they found an increase in anger and fear levels in the summer of 2011.The study, presented at an international workshop in Lyons, France, also found a drop in levels of anger before the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton, indicating the event had a calming effect.

When they are ready to snuggle up at the tops of trees, great apes make themselves cozy "nests" in which to rest for the night. New studies of these one-night nests reveal their incredible complexity."They are almost as complex as a man-made shelter you might make," study researcher A. Roland Ennos of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. "They know how the wood is going to break, and they have a feel for how strong they have to make it [the nest]. That shows the apes have intelligence and have a feel for the physics of their environment.

The GHMB community interview with former head of the MoD UFO research project, Nick Pope, is now done.Also see the interview page for upcoming grahamhancock.com community interviewees.

So-called non-Newtonian fluids are the stars of high school science demonstrations. In one example, an ooey-gooey batter made from corn starch and water oozes like a liquid when moved slowly. But punch it, or run across a giant puddle of it, and it becomes stiff like a solid. Pour it on top of a speaker cone, and the vibrations cause the fluid to stiffen and form strange tendril-like shapes. Now, a group of college students has figured out a new use for the strange stuff: filler for potholes.

Philosophers have debated the nature of time long before Einstein and modern physics. But in the 106 years since Einstein, the prevailing view in physics has been that time serves as the fourth dimension of space, an arena represented mathematically as 4D Minkowski spacetime. However, some scientists, including Amrit Sorli and Davide Fiscaletti, founders of the Space Life Institute in Slovenia, argue that time exists completely independent from space. In a new study, Sorli and Fiscaletti have shown that two phenomena of special relativity - time dilation and length contraction - can be better described within the framework of a 3D space with time as the quantity used to measure change (i.e., photon motion) in this space.

A new study by Clinical Epigenetics, a peer-reviewed journal that focuses largely on diseases, has found that the rise in autism in the United States could be linked to the industrial food system, specifically the prevalence of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the American diet. The study, published yesterday online, explores how mineral deficiencies could impact how the human body rids itself of common toxic chemicals like mercury and pesticides. The report comes just after a different report, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, documented a startling rise in autism in the United States.

Mild mannered though they seem, plants are extremely competitive, especially when it comes to getting their fair share of sunlight. Whether a forest or a farm, where plants grow a battle wages for the sun's rays.A plant's primary weapon in this fight is the ability to grow towards the light, getting just the amount it needs and shadowing its competition. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have determined precisely how leaves tell stems to grow when a plant is caught in a shady place.

Some glaciers on Asia's Karakoram mountains are defying the global trend and getting thicker, say researchers.A French team used satellite data to show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range, to the west of the Himalayan region, are putting on mass.The reason is unclear, as glaciers in other parts of the Himalayas are losing mass - which also is the global trend.The region's glaciers are poorly studied, yet provide a vital water source for more than a billion people.

THEY look dark, but mysterious expanses on Mars are mainly made of glass forged in past volcanoes.The dark regions make up more than 10 million square kilometres of the Martian northern lowlands, but their composition wasn't clear. Past spectral measurements indicated that they are unlike dark regions found elsewhere on the Red Planet, which consist mainly of basalt.Briony Horgan and Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe analysed near-infrared spectra of the regions, gathered by the Mars Express orbiter. They found absorption bands characteristic of the iron in volcanic glass, a shiny substance similar to obsidian that forms when magma cools too fast for its minerals to crystallise.

For the first time, astronomers have snapped photos of auroras lighting up Uranus's icy atmosphere.Two fleeting, Earth-size auroral storms were imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope as they flared up on the dayside of the gas giant in November 2011."The last time we had any definite signals of auroral activity on Uranus was when NASA's Voyager 2 probe swung by in 1986," said study leader Laurent Lamy, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon, France."But this is the first time we can actually see these emissions light up with an Earth-based telescope.

NEW YORK--For a year, an ancient Cambodian statue of a warrior has been at the center of a legal battle in New York in which U.S. authorities back Cambodia's claim that the artwork was looted.The standoff between Sotheby's auctioneers, who intended to sell the 1,000-year-old statue, and the U.S. government hardened on April 4 when a federal prosecutor in New York demanded its surrender.

Raymond Moody has spent nearly 40 years looking forward, trying to understand what happens when people die. That pursuit led to the publication of "Life After Life" in 1975, a seminal collection that actually coined the term "near-death experience."But in his new memoir, "Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife," the 67-year-old Moody instead looks back, reflecting on his fascination with death, the effect of his life's work, and trying to figure out what it's all meant.

The chances of finding life on Mars could be improved by looking in craters made by asteroids, according to a study.Scientists at the University of Edinburgh said organisms had been discovered thriving deep underneath a site in the US where an asteroid crashed 35 million years ago.They believe such craters provide refuge for microbes.The findings suggest that crater sites on other planets may be "hiding life".

The simple act of walking continues to take strange detours among ancient human ancestors.To wit, 1.5 million-year-old footprints excavated in Africa, initially thought to reflect a thoroughly modern walking style, were instead made by individuals that walked differently than people today do, researchers reported April 13 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. And findings presented April 12 at the meeting revealed the surprisingly apelike qualities of foot fossils from a 2 million-year-old species that some researchers regard as the root of the Homo genus.

Two deep-frozen settlements, Qeqertasussuk and Qajaa, were among the traces that some of the very first immigrants to western Greenland, 4,500 years ago, left behind at Disko Bay.Unlike settlements elsewhere in the world, where only stone objects have survived thousands of years hidden in the soil, the deep-frozen remains in the Disko Bay area have also preserved perishable materials such as wood and bones, hair, feathers and skins.

New York City is looking to replace its public pay phones with Internet-connected touch-screen tablets.The city will start a pilot program next month where it will install 32-inch "smart screens" with broadband Internet connections in 250 old phone booths throughout the city.The hope is that eventually the city will replace its 12,800 outdoor pay phones with these new tablet-booths, according to a story by the New York Post. The franchise for the public pay phones in the city is expiring in October 2014.

Some years ago, Werner Herzog was on an internal flight somewhere in Colorado and the plane's landing gear wouldn't come down. They would have to make an emergency landing. The runway was covered in foam and flanked by scores of fire engines. "We were ordered to crouch down with our faces on our knees and hold our legs," says Herzog, "and I refused to do it." The stewardess was very upset, the co-pilot came out from the cabin and ordered him to do as he was told. "I said, 'If we perish I want to see what's coming at me, and if we survive, I want to see it as well.Note: See Herzog's latest film 'Into The Abyss' on Amazon- CA, UK, US

Nearly twice as many emperor penguins inhabit Antarctica as was thought.UK, US and Australian scientists used satellite technology to trace and count the iconic birds, finding them to number almost 600,000.Their census technique relies in the first instance on locating individual colonies, which is done by looking for big brown patches of guano (penguin poo) on the white ice.High resolution imagery is then used to work out the number of birds present.

n July 1976, the Viking 1 probe touched down on Mars and failed to find traces of life - but now, three decades later, scientists think the experiment was flawed.VIking 1 did find evidence of extraterrestrial microbes in soil samples from the Red Planet.Mathematical analysis of the samples concluded that salts in the soil on Mars 'threw off' initial estimates - and that the soil samples show strong evidence of microbial life.The new analysis looked for 'complexity' in the samples - an indication of life. To the surprise of the scientists, they found it.

The video which was posted on YouTube by crazybreakingnews on April 7 2012, has already been viewed nearly four million times.The white spherical object which is filmed outside the window of a passenger plane appears to be moving at a similar speed to the plane.As the passenger tries to zoom in for a closer look the mysterious object, flies out of shot.

Farming without fire in tropical regions, like indigenous populations did in Pre-Columbian times, may be the key to both feeding people and managing land more sustainably.For hundreds of years before Columbus arrived in Central America, indigenous people converted vast swaths of tropical savannas into agricultural fields with raised beds for growing crops -- all without the use of slash-and-burn or other fire-intensive techniques, which are common today and a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

Awakening from anesthesia is often associated with an initial phase of delirious struggle before the full restoration of awareness and orientation to one's surroundings. Scientists now know why this may occur: primitive consciousness emerges first. Using brain imaging techniques in healthy volunteers, a team of scientists led by Adjunct Professor Harry Scheinin, M.D. from the University of Turku, Turku, Finland in collaboration with investigators from the University of California, Irvine, USA, have now imaged the process of returning consciousness after general anesthesia. The emergence of consciousness was found to be associated with activations of deep, primitive brain structures rather than the evolutionary younger neocortex. These results may represent an important step forward in the scientific explanation of human consciousness.

Physicists on the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) have announced the first results from their collaboration, revealing the most precise measurements ever made of the large-scale structure of the universe between five to seven billion years ago. They achieved this by observing the primordial sound waves that propagated through the cosmic medium a mere 30,000 years after the Big Bang.And so far, the data supports the theory that our universe as flat, comprised of roughly a quarter cold dark matter, and four percent ordinary matter, with the rest made up of a mysterious force dubbed "dark energy.

A judicial figure at the Public Funds Prosecution Office has denied reports circulated in different media outlets that former first lady Suzanne Mubarak was questioned in relation to charges filed against the former minister of state for antiquities, Zahi Hawass.Hawass is facing charges involving the squandering of public funds and the theft of Egyptian antiquities during his decades-long career as an archaeologist and later as secretary-general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and as minister of state for the recently-created Ministry for Antiquities.

The problem of menacing space junk has spurred all sorts of ideas to deal with it, from garbage scows and huge nets to laser blasts and debris-snagging Nerf balls.Now scientists are considering a huff-and-puff approach to remove debris from orbit by firing focused pulses of atmospheric gases into the path of targeted space trash.

Considered one of the best potential sources for extraterrestrial life in the solar system, Jupiter's moon Europa may host life in the ocean deep beneath the moon's icy crust.Some organisms could even travel to Europa's surface through cracks and instabilities in the crust, some researchers speculate. But radiation from Jupiter's magnetosphere constantly bombards the moon and could annihilate life at shallow depths, making it difficult to detect with an orbiter or lander.

For 50 years the environmental movement has unsuccessfully argued that we should save the planet for moral reasons, that there were more important things than money. Ironically, it now seems it will be money -- through the economic impact of climate change and resource constraint -- that will motivate the sweeping changes necessary to avert catastrophe.The reason is we have now reached a moment where four words -- the earth is full -- will define our times. This is not a philosophical statement; this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology. There are many science-based analyses of this, but they all draw the same conclusion -- that we're living beyond our means.

When we modern folks visit a beautiful natural site, the experience may evoke a sense of peace, a feeling of awe ... or just the need to snap a million photos. For our ancient forbears, though, these places were so much more.Throughout history, civilizations all over the globe have attached spiritual or religious importance to natural spots that played key roles in their respective cultures. From the mythological homes of powerhouse gods like Zeus and Shiva to the serene spot where the mortal Buddha achieved enlightenment, these are the places of legend.

Manmade mounds shaped like orcas, condors and even a duck may be the oldest evidence of animal mounds outside of North America, according to a former University of Missouri anthropologist.Writing in the magazine Antiquity, Robert Benfer, a professor emeritus, describes a series of mounds, some more than 1,300 feet (400 meters) across, in coastal valleys in Peru. Archaeological evidence at the sites pegs some at more than 4,000 years old."It's going to shake everybody's views," Benfer told LiveScience. "The previous oldest animal figures were at Nazca and they're 2,000 years old.

A new exhibit at the Oriental Institute Museum asks visitors to think twice about the images they see of ancient worlds. A painting or a model may look authoritative, but before you accept it as truth, ask yourself what assumptions the artist or archaeologist is making to complete the image, what gaps might he or she be filling in?And then, bigger picture, consider how much of what we think we know about earlier times might be based on images that blend the factual and the fanciful.

Not since footage emerged of a giant, ape-like figure in the California woods in the late 1960s has there been so much interest in proving the existence of Bigfoot. So how do you go about finding a creature most people believe to be a myth?It could be a human footprint. Let's not rule that out.Kentucky Bigfoot investigators pride themselves on their scientific rigour.They compile detailed reports, take copious notes, and rely on high-tech recording equipment to set their traps and document their work.

Several mass deaths of dolphins have occurred over the past few years and while experts are worried about the die-off they say we are not witnessing a global population crash.But what is behind the recent mass strandings and deaths is complicated and, inevitably, involves humans.For example, the bottlenose dolphin die-off in Gulf of Mexico started in early 2010, even before BP's massive oil spill in April 2010. Disease was linked to some of the hundreds of Gulf dolphin deaths, but not all of them. The ultimate cause remains mysterious.

Australia's greatest ancient Aboriginal rock art detailing kangaroos, turtles and humans on boulders in the remote Pilbara area will be studied under a US$1.1 million deal announced Monday.Tens of thousands of the indigenous works, which are scattered over the mineral-laden region, will be researched and catalogued under a six-year agreement between the University of Western Australia and miner Rio Tinto.Although one of the world's richest collections of Aboriginal art, the carvings which lie on the National Heritage-listed Dampier Archipelago, about 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) north of Perth, have never been fully documented.

The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) said on Thursday they intended to digitize 1.5 million pages of ancient texts and make them freely available online.The libraries said the digitized collections will centre on three subject areas: Greek manuscripts, 15th-century printed books and Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books.The areas have been chosen for the strength of the collections in both libraries and their importance for scholarship in their respective fields.

Painting roofs white and using light-coloured materials to surface roads and pavements would not only make cities cooler in summer, it would save the same amount of carbon as taking all the cars in the world off the roads for 50 years, a study has found.One of the simplest, yet most effective, ways of engineering the urban environment to cope with global warming is to increase the reflectivity of the cityscape so that more of the incoming sunlight is directed back into space, scientists said.

Henry Dryer sits slumped over the tray attached to his wheelchair. He doesn't speak, and rarely moves, until a nursing home worker puts his headphones on.Then Dryer's feet start to shuffle, his folded arms rock back and forth, and he sings out loud in perfect sync with his favorite songs."I feel a band of love, dreams," said Dryer, 92, who has dementia. "It gives me the feeling of love, romance!Henry is one of seven patients profiled in the documentary "Alive Inside," a heartwarming look at the power of music to help those in nursing homes.

In findings that will be toasted by pub quiz aficionados, researchers found drinkers got more test questions right and were quicker in delivering the right answers.It is thought alcohol hinders analytical thinking and allows 'creative' thoughts that might otherwise by stifled to take root, allowing test subjects to come up with more imaginative solutions.Psychologists at the University of Illinois set 40 healthy young men a series of brain teasers. They involved being given three words, such as coin, quick and spoon, and coming up with a fourth word that links the three - in this case, silver.

Artemis Innovation Management Solutions has been given some seed money by NASA to look deeper into a project the company first proposed last summer; namely, building a satellite that could collect energy from the sun and beam it back down to Earth to add to the electrical grid. Building such a satellite has been bantered about for several decades by various groups and scientists, but until now, no one had come up with a design that would work given all the constraints of the time. But now, an idea proposed by longtime NASA engineer John Mankins, now with Artemis, has clearly created enough interest within NASA that some money to investigate the idea is being offered.

The sun isn't an only child. When it was born 4.6 million years ago, it came to life alongside a whole brood of siblings.Now a simulation by astrophysicist Matthew Bate from the University of Exeter in the UK shows what the star birth might have looked like by realistically replicating the thermodynamics involved. The video starts with a turbulent cloud of hydrogen and helium gas that eventually forms a dense core when enough energy is lost. Stars and brown dwarfs begin to form in this region, shown as white dots in the clip. The siblings interact with each other, causing many to be ejected from the cloud, just as the sun was expelled before giving rise to our solar system.

BEIJING: The magnetic phenomenon that causes auroras on Earth has now been discovered around Venus, a planet without a magnetic field.Scientists from China, the US and Austria have jointly found this phenomenon called "magnetic reconnection" in the near-Venus magnetotail.

Diamonds are forever -- or, at least, the effects of this diamond on quantum computing may be. A team that includes scientists from USC has built a quantum computer in a diamond, the first of its kind to include protection against "decoherence" -- noise that prevents the computer from functioning properly.The demonstration shows the viability of solid-state quantum computers, which -- unlike earlier gas- and liquid-state systems -- may represent the future of quantum computing because they can be easily scaled up in size. Current quantum computers are typically very small and -- though impressive -- cannot yet compete with the speed of larger, traditional computers.

A group of Chinese and Australian scientists have developed a handheld, battery-powered plasma-producing device that can rid skin of bacteria in an instant.The device could be used in ambulance emergency calls, natural disaster sites, military combat operations and many other instances where treatment is required in remote locations.

A vast urn-burial site has been found at Mandapam village, near Aarpakkam intersection, about 14 km from Kancheepuram.The importance of the site, archaeologists say, is that it belongs to a period earlier than the Megalithic Age or Iron Age in Tamil Nadu.They estimate that the site is datable to 1,800 BCE to 1,500 BCE, that is, 3,800 to 3,500 years before the present.The site, however, has been ravaged by quarrying for blue-metal. Earth-movers have sliced the big urns and smashed into pieces ritual pottery, bowls and terracotta plates inside the urns.

It's possibly the greatest "What if ..." in the world. What if the Shroud of Turin really is the burial cloth Jesus was wrapped in . . . and the faint imprint on it, the image of a man who has been tortured and crucified, really is Christ himself?The last time the Shroud was on view, for six weeks in 2010, more than two million people saw it, even though in 1988, after a carbon dating test, it was declared a medieval fake - dating from between 1260 and 1390.The story was supposed to be over. But tell that to the throngs who waited hours for the chance to spend seconds before it in reverent silence.

A mysterious birdlike dinosaur was about to lay her eggs when she perished some 70 million years ago in what is now Patagonia, researchers have found.The scenario is based on the discovery of two dinosaur eggs lying near the partial skeletal remains of an alvarezsaurid dinosaur, which was a type of small maniraptoran, a group of theropod dinosaurs believed to be the line that eventually led to modern-day birds. Alvarezsaurids are bizarre among dinosaurs, scientists have said, due to their short, massive forelimbs tipped with a single digit sporting a gigantic claw. The dinosaurs also show highly birdlike skeletons, even though they were flightless.

WASHINGTON: The early days of our solar system might look quite different than previously thought, claim physicists. In its research, a team at the US department of energy's Argonne National Laboratory used sensitive instruments to find a different half-life for samarium, one of the isotopes used to chart the evolution of the solar system.

LONDON: A new invention, being funded by billionaire Bill Gates, aims to turn used toilet water into drinking water, a British nanotechnology expert says.According to Manchester University's Sarah Haigh, the invention could make waste water from toilets safe to drink, the Daily Mail reported.

Forty years after its initial publication, a study called The Limits to Growth is looking depressingly prescient. Commissioned by an international think tank called the Club of Rome, the 1972 report found that if civilization continued on its path toward increasing consumption, the global economy would collapse by 2030. Population losses would ensue, and things would generally fall apart.

When you buy a house, you end up feeling like you will be paying it off until the world ends.Well, how about one of these luxurious condos, which come with all the mod-cons, as well as a pool, a movie theater and a library - oh, and a guarantee that it will survive Doomsday if and when that fateful day comes.For these luxury flats, deep below the Kansas prairie in the shaft of an abandoned missile silo, are meant to withstand everything from economic collapse and solar flares to terrorist attacks and pandemics.Naturally, there will be no one around to phone if the guarantee fails - but at that point, the insurance will probably be the least of your worries.

A new, detailed record of past climate change provides compelling evidence that the last ice age was ended by a rise in temperature driven by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.The finding is based on a very broad range of data, including even the shells of ancient tiny ocean animals.A paper describing the research appears in this week's edition of Nature.The team behind the study says its work further strengthens ideas about global warming.

The wreck of the Titanic is to come under the protection of the United Nations cultural agency Unesco.The agency says more than 700 divers have visited the site, 4,000m under water off the coast of Canada.The ship will fall under the 2001 Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage once it passes the 100th anniversary of its sinking on 15 April.

The second-largest mass extinction in Earth's history coincided with a short but intense ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea levels dropped. Although it has long been agreed that the so-called Late Ordovician mass extinction -- which occurred about 450 million years ago -- was related to climate change, exactly how the climate change produced the extinction has not been known. Now, a team led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a framework for weighing the factors that might have led to mass extinction and has used that framework to determine that the majority of extinctions were caused by habitat loss due to falling sea levels and cooling of the tropical oceans.

Two wooden coffin lids, painted with Egyptian symbols, were recently seized by the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Carbon dating of the lids has revealed that they are truly ancient: one is between 2,800 and 3,000 years old, dating from the Iron Age, the other between 3,600 and 3,400 years old, from the late Bronze Age.

Is there an afterlife? In the past century, with the rise of scientific materialism, the idea that we have souls that survive our physical death has become a subject of ridicule in academia. And yet during that time, evidence has mounted that human consciousness may be far more than just the accidental by-product of a flesh-and-blood brain, and may in fact be an intrinsic part of the cosmos. Additionally, scientists around the world have collected numerous accounts from people near death which suggest that, at the time of our passing, we undergo a transition to another, better place.Author Greg Taylor, known for his popular website The Daily Grail, is hoping to raise greater public awareness of the case for an afterlife, by writing a book which will discuss the evidence thoroughly, in order that people can come to their own conclusions, rather than relying on blind faith (both religious and atheistic).Taylor is already well into the writing of his book, but is currently conducting a crowd-funding campaign to help cover additional research expenses, in seeking to make it as comprehensive a resource as possible.

Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance.The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also -- and in practice this is likely more important -- challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.Please noteL Merrill also has an indigogo crowdfunding page here: http://www.indiegogo.com/calyx

A long-standing mystery about how dying stars spew out the material of future planets is now solved, scientists say.While stars like our Sun are known to eject much of their mass in their final years, it has remained unclear just how the dust is blown away.Scientists reporting in Nature describe an astronomical study of extraordinary resolution to tackle the mystery.They found dust grains of nearly a millionth of a metre across, big enough to be pushed out by dying stars' light.

How pigeons are able to detect magnetic fields to navigate their way home remains a mystery, say researchers.Biologist Dr Jeremy Shaw, from the University of Western Australia, and colleagues, report their findings today in the journal Nature."At this stage it's still that needle-in-a-haystack problem," says Shaw.Behavioural studies show that pigeons are able to detect magnetic fields.

While the largest contributor to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is the power industry, the second largest is the more often overlooked cement industry, which accounts for 5-6% of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions. For every 10 kg of cement produced, the cement industry releases a full 9 kg of CO2. Since the world consumes about 3 trillion kg of cement annually, this sector has one of the highest potentials for CO2 emission reductions. But while processes are being explored to sequester the CO2 from cement production, so far no process can completely eliminate it.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study suggests people who had certain kinds of dental X-rays in the past may be at an increased risk for meningioma, the most commonly diagnosed brain tumor in the U.S.The findings cannot prove that radiation from the imaging caused the tumors, and the results are based on people who were likely exposed to higher levels of radiation during dental X-rays than most are today.

Vermont, U.S.A. wants to regulate labeling of foods which contain GMO products, but Monsanto has threatened to sue the entire state if they do so. Includes an informative video on the tactics of Monsanto.Digital Journal recently reported on the "Label it Yourself" campaign, launched by critics of Monsanto's genetically modified food. The activists say that foods should be labeled to warn buyers of the possible health-damaging qualities of this food.Now lawmakers in the state of Vermont are planning to regulate food labeling, so that consumers will know which products are made from the genetically modified crops.

ImMucin, a vaccine that targets a molecule present in 90 percent of all cancers, has been tested on humans for the first time, according to researchers who found that all the blood cancer patients tested in the trial had greater immunity to the disease after receiving the drug.Results have yet to be formally published, but if the findings are confirmed in future trials then the vaccine could be on the market in six years.The clinical trial was conducted at the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem and consisted of ten patients with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that affects plasma cells in bone marrow, have now received the vaccine.

It turns out that the milk of human kindness is evoked by something besides mom's good example. Research by psychologists at the University at Buffalo and the University of California, Irvine, has found that at least part of the reason some people are kind and generous is that their genes nudge them toward it.Michel Poulin, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at UB, is the principal author of the study "The Neurogenics of Niceness," published in this month in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

An Argentine-Swedish research team has reported a 70-million-year-old pocket of fossilized bones and unique eggs of an enigmatic birdlike dinosaur in Patagonia."What makes the discovery unique are the two eggs preserved near articulated bones of its hind limb. This is the first time the eggs are found in a close proximity to skeletal remains of an alvarezsaurid dinosaur," says Dr. Martin Kundrát, dinosaur expert from the group of Professor Per Erik Ahlberg at Uppsala University.

A group of Peruvian archaeologists found a 1,500-year-old altar for human sacrifices on the top of a hill in the northern region of La Libertad, the daily El Comercio reported Tuesday.The structure is located 3,250 feet high on Campana Hill and was cut by the Moche culture into a rock at the site with three steps leading to a small platform."Many archaeologists identified in the Moche ceramic sculptures ... an ancient rite of sacrifice," said the head of the archaeological team, Regulo Franco. "Now, with this find, we're sure that what appeared on the ceramics was Campana Hill.

The ruins of the site rest atop a sandstone hill, hugging the far northern coast of the current State of Israel near the border with Lebanon. One can see later-period standing structures that provide the backdrop for what is now a national park and beach resort. But below the surface, and beneath the ocean waves, lie the remains of an ancient harbor town that reach back in history to as long ago as Chalcolithic times (4500 - 3200 BC). After decades, a team of archaeologists will return to the site to investigate evidence of a settlement that played a chief role in the ancient commerce of the area and the civilizations that crossed and controlled its strategic location.

Are they marks left by a biting crocodile or an early human using a stone tool?That's a question that deserves more careful consideration than it may have garnered in the past, according to Jackson Njau, an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington Department of Geological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. An expert at reading bones, he is also former principal curator of the National Natural History Museum in Arusha, Tanzania and co-director of field research at paleontological sites in eastern Africa's Olduvai Gorge, one of the most famous regions bearing on human evolution and the fossil record.

The first Homo sapiens appeared on the planet some 200,000 years ago. But even though they looked fully human, they didn't act fully human until they began creating symbolic art, some 100,000 years later. Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall discusses those human origins in his book Masters of the Planet.IRA FLATOW, HOST:This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're broadcasting from the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. That's the one with the big, blue whale hanging from the ceiling. And besides the oceans, one of the main themes of the museum is human origins. Where did we all come from? And it may not be what you think.CA, UK, US

Once you see it, you can't shake it; there is indeed an elephant on Mars! Well, it's actually a Martian lava flow in the shape of an elephant's head, but it is also a fantastic opportunity to discuss some Mars geology and why the human brain seems so easily tricked into seeing large mammals in alien landscapes.First, a little Mars geology.As photographed by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), this geological feature was spotted in Elysium Planitia, a Martian plain that exhibits some of the youngest lava flows on the Red Planet's surface.Mars is largely geologically inactive, so active volcanoes and flowing lava are a thing of the past. But the 'young' lava flows that cover Elysium Planitia may have been emplaced within the last 100 million years -- potentially as recent as the last 10 million years. This may not sound recent, but when chronicling billions of years of Mars geological history, a hundred million years is no time at all.

In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward."The standard hypothesis has been that the source of carbon was in the ocean, in the form of frozen methane gas in ocean-floor sediments," DeConto says. "We are instead ascribing the carbon source to the continents, in polar latitudes where permafrost can store massive amounts of carbon that can be released as CO2 when the permafrost thaws.

Fossil fuel derived carbon dioxide has a serious impact on global climate but also a disturbing effect on the oceans, know as the other CO2 problem. When CO2 dissolves in seawater it forms carbonic acid and results in a drop in pH, the oceans acidify. A wealth of short-term experiments has shown that calcifying organisms, such as corals, clams and snails, but also micron size phytoplankton are affected by ocean acidification. The potential for organisms to cope with acidified oceanic conditions via evolutionary adaptations has so far been unresolved.

The first human egg cells that have been grown entirely in the laboratory from stem cells could be fertilised later this year in a development that will revolutionise fertility treatment and might even lead to a reversal of the menopause in older women.Scientists are about to request a licence from the UK fertility watchdog to fertilise the eggs as part of a series of tests to generate an unlimited supply of human eggs, a breakthrough that could help infertile women to have babies as well as making women as fertile in later life as men.

In a spring ritual as old as life itself, Steve Ellis' bees return to their hives day after day loaded with pollen from the dandelions and flowering trees that are in full bloom across central Minnesota.But for too many of them, a day of foraging ends in convulsions and death."You wouldn't think people could get attached to insects," said Ellis, a commercial honey producer from Barrett, Minn. "But it's hard for us to see our bees getting injured like that."

On the night of Feb. 6, 1975, Marine Reserve Squadron Capt. Larry Jividen was piloting a T-39D Sabreliner (see image above) combat trainer and utility aircraft with five Naval officer pilots on board for a special training flight. He didn't know the evening would evolve into a game of "tag" with an unidentified flying object.Jividen hasn't spoken about that experience from nearly 40 years ago -- until now.The nine-year Marine Corps officer -- and later commercial airline pilot -- had taken off at twilight for a two-hour roundtrip that began and ended at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla.

The universe is filled with high-energy radiation, much of which is made of gamma rays belched out by strange pulsing stars and the remnants of supernova explosions. But a new study of some of most extreme objects has turned up a mystery: nearly one-third of all gamma-ray emitting objects seen to date defy identification.The objects were spotted by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which scans the entire sky over the course of three hours, mapping the powerful spectrum. When stacked together, the surveys create an extremely precise view of the gamma-ray universe.

So, did Jesus really exist? With his new book, 'Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth', (CA, UK, US), Bart Ehrman, historian and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, wanted to provide solid historical evidence for the existence of Jesus."I wanted to approach this question as an historian to see whether that's right or not," Ehrman tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.The answer is straightforward and widely accepted among scholars of all faiths, but Ehrman says there is a large contingent of people claiming that Jesus never did exist. These people are also known as mythicists.Note: See our community interview with Peter Gandy, co-author of 'The Jesus Mysteries' for more on this subject.

American researchers have shown that prospective magnetic fusion power systems would pose a much lower risk of being used for the production of weapon-usable materials than nuclear fission reactors and their associated fuel cycle.The researchers, from Princeton University, found that if nuclear fusion power plants are designed to accommodate appropriate safeguards, there is little risk of fissile materials being produced for weapons, either secretly or overtly.

Eneless Beyadi appears through a forest of maize clutching an armful of vegetables and flashing a broad smile.Beyadi cultivates about half a hectare of plots in the village of Nankhunda, high on the Zomba plateau in southern Malawi. She gets up at 4 a.m. every day to tend her gardens, as she lovingly calls them, before heading off to teach at a school. In the afternoon, she returns to the gardens, which help to feed her family of six. As testimony to her efforts, the maize (corn) on Beyadi's land stands tall even in the lashing rain, whereas the stunted, yellowed stalks on a neighbour's plot bow low.