Newsdesk Archive
A Bolivian judge has rejected calls to resign after he admitted "reading" coca leaves to help him make decisions.Judge Gualberto Cusi - who is from the indigenous Aymara community - said he used the traditional divination technique to help guide his judgement.But he said he did not let it dictate sentencing.Coca leaf is a vital element of indigenous culture in Bolivia, and is frequently defended by President Evo Morales.
As a former prosecutor and member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), I've been heartened by the recent and sudden global awakening to the failure of the war on drugs.Several sitting Latin American presidents, members of the U.S. Congress and even televangelist Pat Robertson have all said recently that it's time to seriously consider options like legalization.So you can imagine that I was cautiously optimistic that alternatives to prohibition would at least be discussed at the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) meeting held in Vienna last week, which I and several other LEAP members attended.But it wasn't in the cards.
Asteroids: they're big, scary and can kill millions. Nuclear weapons: they're big, scary and can kill millions. Wouldn't it make sense to unite the two? Seems like a perfect match.We've gone full circle more than once in the discussion about asteroid collision mitigation plans in recent years. The once sci-fi space rock disposal solution is becoming more sci-fact every time the ugly subject of errant space rocks is discussed. It's a "given" that if an incoming asteroid were to be spotted last-minute, we'd obviously need to launch our entire nuclear deterrent into space.
"A woman isn't complete without her own TARDIS." Truer words have never been spoken, at least if you're a bona fide GeekGrrl who thrills to the latest episode of "Doctor Who." They were uttered by a German teacher who goes by SillySparrowness on YouTube, and she really did build her own TARDIS (and her own chicken coop, apparently, but all the Internet cares about is the TARDIS).Technically, it's not a working time machine, but it is an impressive full-sized model of a TARDIS. It can be assembled in about 10 minutes, too, making for quick relocation from room to room.
A wooden statue of a king, a private offering chapel, a monumental building and remains of over 80 animal mummies found by a University of Toronto-led team in Abydos, Egypt reveal intriguing information about ritual activity associated with the great gods.Professor Mary-Ann Pouls Wegner of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations presented her team's findings at a recent meeting of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities.
PUNE: Researchers from the city-based Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute recently unearthed four megalithic burials at Hirapur in Chandrapur district, which, the researchers say, were used for more than just burying the dead.Material evidences unearthed at the excavation sites testify that these burials or 'megaliths', dating between the 3rd and the 2nd century BC, were also worshipped by the local rural communities, and guarded with Laterite protection walls. Archaeologists said this is perhaps the first time that a megalithic structure has been found to have been worshipped. Archaeologists said the megaliths might have been erected and protected during the Asmaka Janapada or in the Satavahana periods.
A Hong Kong dentist is wielding forceps to help reach for answers inside the last surviving example of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramid of Giza.Pulling teeth by day and devising inventions by night, Ng Tze-chuen, 59, said he organized a team working with Egypt's former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass to unlock the mystery surrounding the doors blocking two narrow shafts in the pyramid, which is the tomb of the Pharaoh Cheops, also known as Khufu."The Chinese have more experience with chopsticks. And a dentist has more experience in gripping with forceps," said Ng.
The complex world of human genetics research speaks a language unfamiliar to most of us, but it has opened up a new window on our understanding of the dynamics of ancient populations; and few areas of research have been more tantalizing than that surrounding the questions of how modern humans are related to the Neandertals, an ancient species of human whose morphology or physical characteristics disappeared from the human fossil record roughly 30,000 years ago. The most recent studies have provided evidence about when the Neandertal (Homo neandertalensis) and modern human populations (Homo sapiens) first diverged from a common ancestral population. They have also suggested that Neandertals and ancient modern humans interbred, and that some distinct modern populations have more Neandertal ancestry than others.
Mankind's ancestors may have started walking on two legs simply because it allowed them to carry more food away in their hands, boosting their chance of survival, scientists believe.Anthropologists studying chimpanzees found that the great apes, who usually walk on all fours, walk upright and free their hands for carrying when they need to monopolise hard-to-find resources by swiping more at a single attempt in the face of fierce competition.
Hydraulic fracturing or fracking has the potential to generate enormous profits for drilling firms because it releases shale gas, a cheaper alternative to importing expensive fossil fuels from abroad.But it is bitterly opposed by environmental groups which claim the method could contaminate groundwater, pollute the atmosphere and trigger earthquakes.Fracking, which involves injecting water, sand and chemicals into shale beds at high pressure, is already under way in Lancashire and oil firms are examining sites in Sussex, Surrey and Kent.
Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.
Peter Gandy, co-author with Timothy Freke of the popular and controversial book 'The Jesus Mysteries'(US, UK, CA) which examined and called into question the existence of a historical Jesus, is the first Community Interview by the GHMB. Questions for him were collected on the messageboard, and have now been answered.Stay tuned for upcoming announcements on the next GHMB community interview.
Mysterious explosions. Unexplained shaking. Something's going on in Clintonville, Wisconsin, but nobody seems to know what it is.The sounds -- variously described as rattling pipes, clanging metal, thunder or firecrackers -- have continued on and off since early Sunday night in just one part of the small town of 4,600, located about 180 miles northeast of Madison.Accompanying the sounds are vibrations that have shaken homes and household objects in the northeast corner of town, city manager Lisa Kuss said.
The Greenland ice sheet is likely to be more vulnerable to global warming than previously thought. The temperature threshold for melting the ice sheet completely is in the range of 0.8 to 3.2 degrees Celsius global warming, with a best estimate of 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels, shows a new study by scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Today, already 0.8 degrees global warming has been observed. Substantial melting of land ice could contribute to long-term sea-level rise of several meters and therefore it potentially affects the lives of many millions of people.
LONDON: Scientists have identified a gene that could hold the key to extending life by up to two decades . The gene is found in all mammals and is known to protect against age-related cell damage.The scientists manipulated the gene, SIRT6, in laboratory mice and found it extended their lifespan by up to 15%, the Daily Express reported. They hope the discovery will lead to the creation of a pill to help older people stay fitter, healthier and live longer - a breakthrough akin to finding "the fountain of youth".
Art researchers and scientists said on Monday that a high-tech project using tiny video probes has uncovered evidence that a fresco by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci lost for five centuries may still exist behind a wall of Florence's city hall."Together with art historians and scientists combining historical evidence and technology, this research team has unlocked a mystery that has been with us for more than 500 years," said Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the U.S. National Geographic Society, which sponsored the research.
This extraordinary visual essay, told with no human commentary at all, explores the impact of deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources in Indonesia from the point of view of a dying orangutan called Green.Stunning images of the natural world and its biodiversity are counter-pointed with scenes of their destruction and the resulting cruelty to animals.The film takes viewers on an emotional journey, following Green's final days and revealing the devastating impact of logging, land-clearing and palm oil plantations.NOTE: This film contains upsetting scenes including cruelty to animals.
Mice hitched a ride with Vikings to mount their own invasions in the 10th century, research has shown.A genetic study shows that Viking longboats carried the weeny Norse warriors to colonies in Iceland and Greenland.Scientists compared modern mouse DNA with ancient samples from mouse bones found at archaeological sites.
Catch yourself daydreaming while washing the dishes again? If this happens often you probably have a pretty capable working memory, new research suggests.This mind wandering, it seems, actually gives your working memory a workout. Working memory is the mental work space that allows the brain to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously. The more working memory a person has, the more daydreaming they can do without forgetting the task at hand.
Black bears have a surprising capacity to heal as they hibernate, say researchers in the US.Medical researchers and zoologists worked together to find that the bears' wounds healed with almost no scarring, and were infection-free.The scientists hope, eventually, to find out exactly how the bears' bodies heal while their body temperature, heart rate and metabolism are reduced.This could aid studies of human wound-healing.
Is this truly the video that UFO skeptics have been dreading? Actually, a compilation of 17-month-old video clips from a Chilean military air show is stirring up predictable responses from both sides of the UFO debate, but no dread.For those who are inclined to believe that some unidentified flying objects exhibit characteristics beyond what our technology seems capable of, the El Bosque case could represent the latest, greatest evidence for flying saucers."This is a very, very unusual case, and I'm hoping that this case will help move forward the recognition that there really is something here that's worthy of further study. ... It has the possibility of being a breakthrough case," said investigative journalist Leslie Kean, the author of the book "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.
It sounds like the bizzare script of a Hollywood B-movie.In a parallel universe the Nazis have won the war, Adolf Hitler moves to LA where he mingles with the stars of the silver screen while running his evil empire from a luxurious ranch deep in the LA hills.But during the 1930s, American sympathisers were so confident this exact scenario was actually going happen they spent millions building a deluxe compound ready for their fuhrer's imminent arrival.Equipped with a diesel power plant, 375,000 gallon concrete water tank , giant meat locker, 22 bedrooms and even a bomb shelter, the heavily guarded estate was home to a community of Hollywood fascists who hoped to ride out the war there.
A giant cloud of gas and dust 770 light-years away contains the first clear case of a clump of potentially star-forming gas on the verge of creating dense cores without the influence of nearby stars.Using radio and infrared telescopes, astronomers have obtained a first tantalizing look at a crucial early stage in star formation. The new observations promise to help scientists understand the early stages of a sequence of events through which a giant cloud of gas and dust collapses into dense cores that, in turn, form new stars.The scientists studied a giant cloud about 770 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus.
Ancient humans have changed the landscape around their settlements in such ways that even today archaeologists can distinguish between "lived in" spots and those never occupied by humans.Now, two scientists have figured out a more efficient way of locating these sites, via their footprints, from space.The scientists relied on two distinct features of ancient settlements in the Near East: soils altered by human activity and little hills that formed over time as residents successively built on top of older structures. By examining satellite images for these two features, they have found evidence of about 9,500 possible human settlements across an area of 8,880 square miles (23,000 square kilometers) in northern Mesopotamia, located in the northeast of modern Syria.
Royal cemetery in Meidum developed continuously at least until the late New Kingdom period, the end of the second millennium BC, determined Dr. Teodozja Rzeuska, archaeologist at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Culture PAS. Until now, Egyptologists believed that the dead had been buried there only in times of the builders of the pyramids, in the third millennium BC.Archaeological site Meidum represents the southern border of the most famous necropolis of the ancient world - the Memphite necropolis, which includes the largest pyramids built for the pharaohs Khufu and Khafre."Scientists associate Meidum with a finely crafted mastaba (tomb of the mighty - editor. PAP) relief depicting geese, with one of the oldest mummies found in Nefer mastaba, and with sculptures depicting the family of Pharaoh Snefru (IV Dynasty, 27th century BC). The necropolis is considered one of the most recognisable in Egypt, but paradoxically it is also one of the least known and most mysterious "- said Dr. Teodozja Rzeuska.
An eminent UK engineer is suggesting building cloud-whitening towers in the Faroe Islands as a "technical fix" for warming across the Arctic.Scientists told UK MPs this week that the possibility of a major methane release triggered by melting Arctic ice constitutes a "planetary emergency".The Arctic could be sea-ice free each September within a few years.Wave energy pioneer Stephen Salter has shown that pumping seawater sprays into the atmosphere could cool the planet.The Edinburgh University academic has previously suggested whitening clouds using specially-built ships.
Ancient blades made of volcanic rock that were discovered at what may be the world's oldest temple suggest that the site in Turkey was the hub of a pilgrimage that attracted a cosmopolitan group of people some 11,000 years ago.The researchers matched up about 130 of the blades, which would have been used as tools, with their source volcanoes, finding people would have come from far and wide to congregate at the ancient temple site, Göbekli Tepe, in southern Turkey. The blades are made of obsidian, a volcanic glass rich with silica, which forms when lava cools quickly.The research was presented in February at the 7th International Conference on the Chipped and Ground Stone Industries of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in Barcelona, Spain.
The planet is warming, deserts are growing and populations of people are increasing. So how do you feed everyone without turning Earth into one giant factory farm? Throw a little goo into the mix. That's what industrial design students Ruud van Reijmersdal, Tom Slijkhuis, Joppe Spaans and Jeroen Rood of the Industrial Design Technical University of Eindhoven in The Netherlands.
A year ago this Sunday, a dreadful and terrifying natural disaster was sweeping a trail of death and destruction along the north-eastern coast of Japan. The Tohoku earthquake and ensuing tsunami claimed an estimated 20,000 lives, washing away entire towns and wreaking havoc with the nation's infrastructure. An oil refinery was set ablaze leading to the death of six workers and a reservoir also failed, killing a further four people. The nuclear reactors at Fukushima experienced a partial meltdown causing the release of radiation, but killing no one.
WASHINGTON: The GOCE Exploitation for Moho Modelling and Applications project - or GEMMA - has generated the first global high-resolution map of the boundary between Earth's crust and mantle based on data from ESA's GOCE satellite.This boundary between the crust and underlying mantle is known as the Mohorovicic discontinuity, or Moho.Understanding it will offer new clues into the dynamics of Earth's interior.
Patients might one day be able to grow their own organs to replace diseased or damaged body parts - offering a potential solution to the global donor shortage crisis - one of the world's leading transplant surgeons said on Friday.
An exhibition entitled "The wreck of Antikythera - The ship, the treasures, the Mechanism", will open at the Archaeological Museum in Athens on April 5 and will run for a year.This is the first time that all the findings from the Antikythera wreck, dated between 60-50 BC, will be displayed together, while some of the items have never been displayed before.Sometime before Easter 1900, Elias Stadiatis, a Greek sponge diver, discovered the wreck of an ancient cargo ship off Antikythera Island at a depth of 42 m (138 ft). Sponge divers retrieved several statues and other artifacts from the site.
At the press site at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), one figure stood out among the crowd gathered to watch the final launch of the space shuttle Discovery last year. Arriving on a broad-wheeled, chariot-like buggy called a "centaur base," the gold-helmeted robot was hard to miss. Robonaut 2 (called R2 for short) was aboard Discovery, about to become the first humanoid robot in space. Its cart-riding sibling was at KSC to promote the program as R2 blasted off toward the International Space Station. Hovering around R2's twin on launch day was a team of young engineers clearly excited to see 15 years of work reach fruition.
How would the sky look through infrared eyes? The scientists behind NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission have served up that kind of view with an all-sky map of infrared wavelengths, centered on the glowing Milky Way.The map was unveiled this week to mark the completion of WISE's infrared sky atlas, more than two years after the $320 million mission was launched. The telescope collected more than 2.7 million images in four infrared wavelengths and sent down more than 15 trillion bytes of data. The WISE spacecraft was shut down a year ago, after surveying the entire sky one and a half times, but scientists needed still more time to analyze and organize the data.
An orbiting NASA probe has taken new and ultra-detailed pictures of an electric rover vehicle owned by a multimillionaire games developer and space tourist, left abandoned on the Moon after it broke down.The probe in question is our old friend the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has of late lowered its flight path so as to pass still closer to the Moon's surface.The electric rover is of course Lunokhod 2, which landed in the Le Monnier crater on the eastern wall of the Mare Serenitatis basin back in 1973. It was sent and operated by the Soviet space programme but it is nowadays owned by Richard Garriott (sometimes aka "Lord British") - the brain behind Ultima among other things - who purchased it at auction in the 1990s.
An experiment to repeat a test of the speed of subatomic particles known as neutrinos has found that they do not travel faster than light.Results announced in September suggested that neutrinos can exceed light speed, but were met with scepticism as that would upend Einstein's theory of relativity.A test run by a different group at the same laboratory has now clocked them travelling at precisely light speed.
Could the common brown garden snail you see slinking along the sidewalk actually be a military spy? Not yet, but such a possibility isn't far off in the making: Scientists are working on building "cyborg snails" that will be able to gather and transmit environmental and military intelligence back to humans on a base.But the catch has been powering the data collection and transmission without encumbering the little buggers with battery packs. New research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society points to a solution: Evgeny Katz and his team at Clarkson University have implanted snails with biofuel cells that can extract electricity from glucose and oxygen in the snails' blood, Richard Van Noorden reports in Nature.
The dead are often described as sleeping, but archaeologists in Cambridgeshire have uncovered a bed on which the body of a young Anglo-Saxon woman has lain for more than 1,300 years, a regal gold and garnet cross on her breast.Three more graves, of two younger women and an older person whose sex has not yet been identified, were found nearby.Forensic work on the first woman's bones suggests she was about 16, with no obvious explanation for her early death. Although she was almost certainly a Christian, buried with the beautiful cross stitched into place on her gown, she was buried according to ancient pagan tradition with some treasured possessions including an iron knife and a chatelaine, a chain hanging from her belt, and some glass beads which were probably originally in a purse that has rotted away.
Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett has sent a letter to the top federal prosecutor in Colorado, asking federal authorities to drop their crackdown on medical-marijuana dispensaries that are abiding by state law.In the letter, dated Tuesday, Garnett writes that Colorado has created a system for regulating medical-marijuana businesses that is working and that it is not worth the federal government's time to target dispensaries abiding by state law.
LONDON - A new anaesthetic gel made from a plant found deep in the Peruvian rainforest could replace the dentist's needle and bring relief to patients with a phobia of jabs, researchers claim.Indigenous tribes uncovered the remarkable painkilling properties of the Acmella oleracea plant centuries if not millennia ago and it was used by Incas to treat toothache, ulcers, abscesses and to clean their teeth.
Since the days of Queen Victoria the Highlands of Scotland have represented the last unspoilt wilderness in the United Kingdom.But the mountains and lochs will be ruined for tourists and future generations if plans to build almost 1,400 turbines go ahead, according to campaigners backed by US billionaire Donald Trump.The windswept mountains and glens are some of the best places in Europe to build wind turbines, despite also being highly sensitive areas for wildlife like golden eagles, red deer and pine martens.
America's weather is stuck on extreme.Nearly 11 feet of snow has fallen on Anchorage, Alaska, this winter. That's almost a record, and it's forcing the city to haul away at least 250,000 tons of snow. Yet not much snow has dropped on the Lower 48 this year.The first three months of 2012 have seen twice the normal number of tornadoes. And 36 states set daily high temperature records Thursday. So far this month, the U.S. has set 1,757 daily high temperature records. That's similar to the number during last summer's heat wave, said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The first clone, a female kid called "Noori," meaning "light" in Arabic, on March 9 could spark breeding programmes across the region and mass production of the high-priced wool, Dr Riaz Ahmad Shah, a veterinarian in the animal biotechnology center of Sher-i-Kashmir University, said.Cashmere wool, particularly made into shawls, is a major source of income for Kashmir, generating about $80 million a year for the Indian-controlled portion of the disputed mountain state. A shawl can cost $200 in Kashmir and much more when sold abroad - a boon given the average salary of $800 a year for Kashmir's 10.2 million people.
Can a new currency help a debt-stricken community get back on its feet? A Hamburg-based theater group is hoping to do just that in the German city of Oberhausen. Locals will be able to earn "coals" through voluntary work and exchange them for goods and services.All around Europe, governments are cutting back on spending in reaction to the euro crisis. But in one small city in Germany, locals are bucking the trend. Fed up with austerity, they are planning to spend more, not less, money -- and they are making it themselves.
Neurobehavioral disorders are increasingly prevalent in children, however their etiology is not well understood. An association between prenatal cellular telephone use and hyperactivity in children has been postulated, yet the direct effects of radiofrequency radiation exposure on neurodevelopment remain unknown. Here we used a mouse model to demonstrate that in-utero radiofrequency exposure from cellular telephones does affect adult behavior.
University of Chicago physicists have experimentally demonstrated for the first time that atoms chilled to temperatures near absolute zero may behave like seemingly unrelated natural systems of vastly different scales, offering potential insights into links between the atomic realm and deep questions of cosmology.This ultracold state, called "quantum criticality," hints at similarities between such diverse phenomena as the gravitational dynamics of black holes or the exotic conditions that prevailed at the birth of the universe, said Cheng Chin, associate professor in physics at UChicago. The results could even point to ways of simulating cosmological phenomena of the early universe by studying systems of atoms in states of quantum criticality.
The National Academies in the United States, made up of the four organizations: the National Academies of Science and Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, has issued an interim report in the National Academies Press, advocating that additional research be put into studying alternative technologies for imploding fuel used in fusion reactions.
The world is entering an era where injuries as common as a child's scratched knee could kill, where patients entering hospital gamble with their lives and where routine operations such as a hip replacement become too dangerous to carry out, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned.There is a global crisis in antibiotics caused by rapidly evolving resistance among microbes responsible for common infections that threaten to turn them into untreatable diseases, said Margaret Chan, director general of the WHO.
Sirenians, or seacows, are a group of marine mammals that include manatees and dugongs; today, only one species of seacow is found in each world region. Smithsonian scientists have discovered that this was not always the case. According to the fossil record of these marine mammals, which dates back 50 million years ago, it was more common to find three, or possibly more, different species of seacows living together at one time. This suggests that the environment and food sources for ancient seacows were also different than today. The team's findings are published in the journal PLoS ONE.
A giant asteroid collision with the moon that created the solar system's largest known impact crater may have spawned the surprisingly strong magnetic anomalies seen on the moon, a new study suggests.The Apollo missions to the moon revealed that portions of the lunar crust are strongly magnetized. The origin of these magnetic anomalies has proven enigmatic, with potential explanations including a much stronger, longer-lasting magnetic field on the moon than before predicted.Most lunar magnetic anomalies had not been linked with any known geologic structures, which is part of what made it difficult to determine what might have created them.
It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Not so, perhaps, when it comes to ancient Hindu temples.This week, officials in eastern India announced their plan to build a replica of Cambodia's spellbinding 12th-century temple, Angkor Wat, on the banks of the Ganges in the state of Bihar.A religious group, the Mahavir Mandir Trust, said that when it is completed, the £13 million (NZ$25m) project will not only be a major attraction in its own right, but will be the tallest Hindu temple in the world.
Earlier evidence out of UCLA suggested that meditating for years thickens the brain (in a good way) and strengthens the connections between brain cells. Now a further report by UCLA researchers suggests yet another benefit.Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues, have found that long-term meditators have larger amounts of gyrification ("folding" of the cortex, which may allow the brain to process information faster) than people who do not meditate. Further, a direct correlation was found between the amount of gyrification and the number of meditation years, possibly providing further proof of the brain's neuroplasticity, or ability to adapt to environmental changes.The article appears in the online edition of the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
(CNN) -- The moment 18-year-old Army Pvt. Tim Josephs arrived at Edgewood Arsenal in 1968, he knew there was something different about the place."It just did not look like a military base, more like a hospital," recalled Josephs, a Pittsburgh native. Josephs had volunteered for a two-month assignment at Edgewood, in Maryland, lured by three-day weekends closer to home."It was like a plum assignment," Josephs said. "The idea was they would test new Army field jackets, clothing, weapons and things of that nature, but no mention of drugs or chemicals
Two years ago, when NASA's Cassini Solstice spacecraft flew past the moon Dione, it noticed something familiar. Oxygen is present in Saturn's third-largest moon's exosphere (its extended, tenuous atmosphere), and according to research published this week, Cassini's hi-tech "nose" had sniffed it.Obviously, the first thing that springs to mind when discussing oxygen is that it's a pretty important component for life on Earth. But Dione, a barren and icy world, possesses few attributes that would make it suitable for life as we know it.Although it is known to be composed of significant quantities of water ice, there is no indication -- unlike sister Saturn moon Enceladus -- that there is any sub-surface aquifer of liquid water. Liquid water is key to the evolution of life.
Global warming gases cannot explain why Earth was not frozen billions of years ago when the sun was cooler, researchers say.In the Archean Eon about 2.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, before the first advanced life appeared on the planet, the sun was only about 70 percent as bright as it is today. This means the amount of heat felt on Earth was much less, and Earth's surface should have been frozen.
SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -- Researchers have pieced together what's believed to be the first comprehensive map of the entire 3-by-5-mile Titanic debris field and hope it will provide new clues about what exactly happened the night 100 years ago when the superliner hit an iceberg, plunged to the bottom of the North Atlantic and became a legend.Marks on the muddy ocean bottom suggest, for instance, that the stern rotated like a helicopter blade as the ship sank, rather than plunging straight down, researchers told The Associated Press this week.
A new study in Science suggests that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates. Some honey bees, too, are more likely than others to seek adventure. The brains of these novelty-seeking bees exhibit distinct patterns of gene activity in molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans, researchers report.
Brain scans of Nasa astronauts who have returned to Earth after more than a month in space have revealed potentially serious abnormalities that could jeopardise the future of long-term space missions.Doctors examined 27 astronauts who had flown long-duration missions with the US space agency and found a pattern of deformities in their eyeballs, optic nerves and pituitary glands that remains unexplained.The problems are similar to those caused by intracranial hypertension, a rare medical condition that occurs when pressure inside the skull rises and presses on the brain and the backs of the eyes.
Creating some of life's building blocks in space may be a bit like making a sandwich -- you can make them cold or hot, according to new NASA research. This evidence that there is more than one way to make crucial components of life increases the likelihood that life emerged elsewhere in the Universe, according to the research team, and gives support to the theory that a "kit" of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by impacts from meteorites and comets assisted the origin of life.
Did you see the debate? A debate with a host of celebrities: Russell Brand, Sir Richard Branson; world leaders, and eminent opinion formers. Oh, and Peter Hitchens was in attendance. A debate of such magnitude would surely not creep under the radar? Especially given the gravitas of the contested subject?Under the heading of 'The War on Drugs Has Failed' - and hosted by Intelligence Squared, the debate is a must watch for anyone remotely interested in societal issues. Luckily, the full video will be available to view soon [edit- see below]. The drugs debate has never been given such a platform, and it just goes to show how ripe the discussion now is.
The seas are creeping higher as the planet warms, but scientists have not yet reached a consensus about how high they may go. Projections for the year 2100 range from inches to several feet, or more. The sub-tropical islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas contain important sites where researchers have gone looking for answers. By pinpointing where shorelines stood on cliffs and reefs there during an extremely warm period 400,000 years ago, they hope to narrow the range of global sea-level projections for the future.
NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft orbiting the moon officially have begun their science collection phase. During the next 84 days, scientists will obtain a high-resolution map of the lunar gravitational field to learn about the moon's internal structure and composition in unprecedented detail. The data also will provide a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed and evolved.
Will humans be around in the deep future? Given the track record of most mammals, we've got a pretty good shot at surviving for at least the next 100,000 years and possibly even a million years or more. Of course, that's not to say we won't face any challenges. We can expect threats we've encountered before, like colossal volcanic eruptions and pandemic bugs, as well as new ones like out-of-control technology.
With this story, keep in mind that we really do tell it like it is -- even when it is hard to believe.There is a law enforcement agency in Arizona that actually welcomes claims of the paranormal -- ghosts, witchcraft, UFOs and even Bigfoot.CBS 5 News obtained dozens of photos and case files from strange scenes and sightings in northeastern Arizona.
I just finished reading The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, in which Steven Pinker argues that violence in all forms has diminished over the past few centuries. That's good for people, of course, but it got me thinking about the environment. How does war affect the planet?Research on this issue is pretty thin. The human and financial costs of armed conflict are so vast that few people have stopped to consider what war does to rivers, trees, and elephants. In recent years, academics have been much more interested in how environmental degradation contributes to war than in how wars degrade the environment. In addition, no two wars affect the planet in the same way. The environmental devastation from a nuclear war, for example, would be difficult to estimate in advance.
Alexandria, the brilliant Greek city state known as "The Bride of the Mediterranean", wore its distinctly Egyptian flavour with pride, and it was more pharaonic than previously supposed. Salvaged sphinxes, statues, papyrus columns and blocks of stone inscribed with the names of pharaohs attest to this. The sea bed in the Great (Eastern) harbour is carpeted with such works -- some usurped from earlier structures and transported to adorn the Ptolemaic city.
Latin America Leads The Way; UN Remains Closed To ChangeThe 55th annual session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) started on Monday in Vienna, Austria, with a focus on strengthening the drug program of the United Nations. Government representatives from more than 100 countries will discuss international cooperation in combating drugs, and the enforcement of the current prohibition model. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime will invite delegates to celebrate 100 years of "successful" drug control. Are these people disconnected from reality?
Russian and South Korean scientists have signed a deal on joint research intended to recreate a woolly mammoth, an animal which last walked the earth some 10,000 years ago.The deal was signed by Vasily Vasiliev, vice rector of North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic, and controversial cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, on Tuesday.Hwang was a national hero until some of his research into creating human stem cells was found in 2006 to have been faked. But his work in creating Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog, in 2005, has been verified by experts.
An engineer by training and now an expert in art diagnostics, Maurizio Seracini may have just hit pay dirt: After more than 30 years of searching for a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting, he has evidence the mural has been hiding out on the very wall where it was painted in 1503.Seracini and his colleagues reported today (March 12) they have chemical evidence the painting may be located behind a more recent mural.Da Vinci painted the mural "The Battle of Anghiari," which commemorates the 1440 victory of the battle on the plain of Anghiari between Milan and the Italian League led by the Republic of Florence, in the Palazzo Vecchio's Hall of the 500 (the town hall in Florence).
A group of plant scientists is warning federal regulators that action is needed to mitigate a growing problem with biotech corn that is losing its resistance to plant-damaging pests.The stakes are high - corn production is critical for food, animal feed and ethanol production, and farmers have increasingly been relying on corn that has been genetically modified to be toxic to corn rootworm pests.
A team of archeologists from Toronto University has discovered a cache of animal mummies that reveal rituals carried out by ancient Egyptians for their god Osiris.The team discovered the remains of three hall temples from the reign of King Seti I. One of them was filled with 83 mummified dogs, cats, sheep and goats over 2000-years-old.Early ancient Egyptians buried their kings at the northern side of the Upper Egyptian town of Abydos because it was considered holy land. The god of the afterlife, Osiris, was buried there after being killed by his son Set, the god of the underworld.
The remains of what may be a previously unknown human species have been identified in southern China. The bones, which represent at least five individuals, have been dated to between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago. But scientists are calling them simply the Red Deer Cave people, after one of the sites where they were unearthed.The team has told the PLoS One journal that far more detailed analysis of the fossils is required before they can be ascribed to a new human lineage."We're trying to be very careful at this stage about definitely classifying them," said study co-leader Darren Curnoe from the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Cleveland Museum of Natural HistoryCut marks found on Ice Age bones indicate that humans in Ohio hunted or scavenged animal meat earlier than previously known. Dr. Brian Redmond, curator of archaeology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was lead author on research published in the Feb. 22, 2012 online issue of the journal World Archaeology.
Of all the human ancestors represented in the fossil record, Neandertals are the best known. A significant proportion of what scientists have learned about the Neandertals is based on a set of remains that the Croatian paleontologist Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger recovered between 1899 and 1905 from a rock shelter in the town of Krapina, some 60 kilometers north of Zagreb. The Krapina sample dates to between 120,000 and 130,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, and includes multiple representatives of nearly every bone and tooth of the body.
Joel Achenbach has a wonderful feature in Sunday's Washington Post Civil War supplement on the conflict's part in industrial history, especially on Abraham Lincoln's role as "technologist-in-chief":The telegraph came along in 1844, and information suddenly no longer moved at the speed of a horse. Since earlier in the century, the ancient sources of power -- wind, water, human and animal muscle -- had been to a great extent supplanted by the miracle of steam. Lincoln saw these changes and approved. He was a technophile, curious about contraptions, a student of machines. He became a promoter of railroads and an eager user of the telegraph.
The two brightest planets in the sky, Venus and Jupiter, will likely draw attention to the western sky as darkness falls next week.Planetariums, observatories and perhaps even weather forecast offices might get a number of inquiries about what those "two bright lights in the sky" are.This weekend, Venus shines to Jupiter's lower right, moving up on it day by day. On Monday evening (March 12) they'll appear to line up side-by-side, and on Tuesday evening (March 13), they will be separated by just 3 degrees (about the width of two fingers held out at arm's length), with Venus standing just above and to Jupiter's right.
There were once seven words you couldn't say on television, as the late comedy icon George Carlin famously lampooned 40 years ago.Now it appears there are more than 500 words you shouldn't say on Twitter or Facebook unless you want to be flagged by the Department of Homeland Security. There is a surveillance program the agency quietly began in February 2011 to monitor social media, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Anthropologists in Mexico say the remains of 167 bodies found in a cave in the southern state of Chiapas were part of an ancient burial ground.The National Anthropology Institute said tests showed the remains dated back to the eighth century.Scientists hope pottery found in the cave will help them determine the community those buried belonged to.It was first feared the bodies could belong to victims of the decades-long civil war in neighbouring Guatemala.
Printing three dimensional objects with very fine details using two-photon lithography can now be achieved orders of magnitude faster than similar devices in a breakthrough by Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) researchers.The 3D printing process uses a liquid resin, which is hardened at precisely the correct spots by a focused laser beam. The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors and leaves behind a hardened line of solid polymer a few hundred nanometers wide.This fine resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand.
A centuries-old copy of the Bible that contains early teachings of Jesus Christ has been in the Turkish state's possession for the past 12 years, daily Bugün reported today.The Vatican reportedly placed an official request to examine the scripture, which was written on pages made of animal hide in the Aramaic language using the Syriac alphabet.The book was seized by the police from a smuggling gang in 2000 in Turkey's Mediterranean region and since placed in Ankara's Justice Hall. There, it waited for eight years before being transferred to the Ethnography Museum with a police escort, the report said.
By daybreak, much of this town has already been at work for hours.Fishermen have long since cast off aboard boats named for their sweethearts and chugged out to sea before sunrise.Clad in yellow and orange rubber suits, these seafarers drag giant nets across the ocean floor during 12-hour work days, hauling back the fish they will later bring to market.
Engineering professor Donald Sadoway on Thursday used an old-school chalk board at the prestigious TED gathering to write the formula for a liquid battery that could one day cut the need for new power plants."The way things stand, electricity demand must be in constant balance with supply," Sadoway told the tech-savvy audience in southern California.Inexpensive batteries made from liquid metal could store electricity from solar panels, wind farms, or existing generation facilities and save it for when it is most needed.
A year after whole neighbourhoods full of people were killed by the Japanese tsunami, rumours of ghosts swirl in Ishinomaki as the city struggles to come to terms with the awful tragedy.One reconstruction project appears stalled because of fears the undead spirits of those who perished last March will bring bad luck.
Planet hunters are right on the verge of finding a world beyond the sun where life could plausibly exist -- a planet more or less the size of Earth, with balmy temperatures and enough water to sustain biological activity. At this point, it's a numbers game -- exoplanets are being discovering by the net full already, so figure a year or two at the outside before a just right world is found.
Researchers in the US have built a prototype device which they say can generate electricity from waste water.The team at Pennsylvania State University says the technology would simultaneously treat the water.They suggest the process could be adopted in developing countries, providing clean water and power for homes.Details are published in the journal Science.
FOR legislative acts of national intellectual suicide, the "Law for the restoration of the professional civil service", passed by the Nazis shortly after their accession to power in Germany in 1933, stands without comparison. German science, then the envy of the world, was decapitated as those of non-Aryan descent or suspect political views were forced from the nation's universities. Many sought refuge in friendlier - though not always friendly - countries such as the UK and US.
Diplomats, business leaders, and scientific experts are gathering in southern France this week for an international conference billed as a "platform for solutions" to the global water crisis, but denounced by critics for lacking legitimacy and promoting the interests of large transnational corporations.Organisers say more than 20,000 delegates from 180 countries will attend the six-day World Water Forum (WWF) in Marseille. French president Nicolas Sarkozy is expected to attend, along with European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, King Mohammed VI of Morocco, and the CEOs of Nestlé and Coca-Cola.
GH: Since 2003 I've been working regularly with Ayahuasca, the sacred vine of the Amazon, and more recently I was introduced by the David Lynch Foundation to transcendental meditation. I have found both of these disciplines to be of great value in my life and explain why in an interview with Sonia Doubell uploaded to my Youtube channel here:http://www.youtube.com/GrahamHancockDotCom
Visitors to the village of Acy-Romance north of the modern day French city of Rheims, will see no sign of the Gallic village that was once there. However, very unusually, this village has been fully excavated.A succession of digs over fifteen years, plot by plot, has revealed the full details of the little Gallic settlement that stood here some 2200 years ago, in the heart of the territory of the Remi tribe.
The head of an Iron Age man who died almost 2,000 years ago has been scanned in a Manchester hospital to shed light on how he died.Worsley Man is thought to have lived in about 100 AD when Romans occupied much of Britain.Since its discovery in a Salford peat bog in 1958, the head has been kept at Manchester Museum on Oxford Road.The scans at the Manchester Children's Hospital have now revealed more details about his violent death.
Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski of the University of Alberta, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona demonstrate a plausible mechanism for encoding synaptic memory in microtubules, major components of the structural cytoskeleton within neurons.
A team of scientists from the University of Virginia and University of North Carolina in the US have discovered a previously unidentified type of small circular DNA molecule occurring outside the chromosomes in mouse and human cells. The circular DNA is 200-400 base pairs in length and consists of non-repeating sequences. The new type of extra-chromosomal circular DNA (eccDNA) has been dubbed microDNA. Unlike other forms of eccDNA, in microDNA the sequences of base pairs are non-repetitive and are usually found associated with particular genes. This suggests they may be produced by micro-deletions of small sections of the chromosomal DNA.
A NEW campaign to overturn the federal government's intervention in the Northern Territory claims Aboriginal communities are at "breaking point" and people have been made to feel like criminals in their own lands.In a powerful video aimed at YouTube and social media, Dhalulu Ganambarr-Stubbs, a Yolngu scholar and artist from Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land, says that in 2012 the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory are suffering.But she says that after five years of federal intervention, begun by the Howard Government and continued by the Rudd and Gillard Governments, the policy has failed, with indigenous imprisonment up 41 per cent, lower school attendance, inadequate housing, a 38 per cent rise in the number of children removed from their homes by social services and a doubling of cases of self-harm and suicide.
It was just another day on the beach for holidaymakers off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, when a pod of about 30 dolphins swam ashore on Monday. Beachgoers quickly came to the rescue, rushing into the sea and dragging the dolphins by their fins and tails into deeper water.The whole episode was captured by Gerd Traue in a video (above), which has racked up over a million views online.
Japan's Antarctic whaling fleet has killed less than a third of the animals it planned to because of sabotage by activists, Tokyo said Friday as it announced the end of the season's hunt.Japan's Fisheries Agency said the fleet was on its way home from the Antarctic "on schedule", but admitted that at 267 the catch was way down on expectations.Whalers killed 266 minke whales and one fin whale, the agency said, well below the approximately 900 they had been aiming for when they left Japan in December.
Archaeologists are mounting a campaign against two new cable TV shows that they say encourage and glamorize looting of American archaeological sites.On 20 March, Spike TV will premiere a new show called American Digger, while a show called Diggers on the National Geographic Channel made its debut 28 February. Both shows "promote and glorify the looting and destruction of archaeological sites," Society for American Archaeology (SAA) President William F. Limp wrote in a message posted earlier this week to the SAA listserv.
The dispute over whether NASA's early astronauts have title to the space-flown artifacts they kept as souvenirs from their missions may soon be resolved by Congress.A bill introduced by the chairman and ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives' Science, Space, and Technology Committee would confirm full ownership rights to the artifacts saved, donated, or sold by astronauts who were part of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.
Visit the caves of Pech Merle, Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac in southern France and you will witness some of the most breathtaking art our planet has to offer. Images of bisons, lions and other creatures loom from the cavern walls. Herds of horses and the occasional rhino, not to mention the odd mammoth and giant bull, parade across the rocks. Many animals are depicted in vivid colours, with a sense of perspective and anatomical detail that suggest these artists had acquired considerable skill.
An explosion caused by a fire left one soldier wounded and two missing Saturday at a Brazilian naval base in Antarctica, and forced dozens of researchers to evacuate, the military said.The Brazilian Navy said the fire broke out in a room housing energy generators of the Comandante Ferraz Antarctic Base, a research station located in Admiralty Bay, King George Island, near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The world's oldest works of art have been found in a cave on Spain's Costa del Sol, scientists believe.Six paintings of seals are at least 42,000 years old and are the only known artistic images created by Neanderthal man, experts claim.Professor Jose Luis Sanchidrian, from the University of Cordoba, described the discovery as 'an academic bombshell', as all previous art work has been attributed to Homo sapiens.The paintings were found in the Nerja Caves, 35 miles east of Malaga in the southern region of Andalusia.