Newsdesk Archive

Almost half of the world's seabirds have populations that are thought to be in decline, according to a new review.The study, published in Bird Conservation International, found that 28% of species are considered to be in the highest categories of risk.Conservationists are particularly concerned by the albatross family.Threats to the birds include commercial fishing and damage to breeding colonies caused by rats and other invasive species.

An ancient white horse acquired an unexpected rider earlier this week courtesy of bookmakers Paddy Power.Yesterday morning (Thursday 8 March) visitors to the 3,000-year-old Uffington White Horse were in for a shock, when they saw the horse was now complete with a jockey.

British archaeologists have unearthed a slave burial ground containing an estimated 5,000 bodies on a remote South Atlantic island.The corpses were found on tiny St Helena, 1,000 miles off the coast of south-west Africa.Those who died were slaves taken from slave traders by the Royal Navy in the 1800s.Many of the captives died after being kept on British ships in appalling conditions or in refugee camps when they reached the island.The dig, held in advance of the construction of a new airport on the island, revealed the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade.

On the hottest day of the New York City summer in 2011, a white roof covering was measured at 42 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the traditional black roof it was being compared to, according to a study including NASA scientists that details the first scientific results from the city's unprecedented effort to brighten rooftops and reduce its "urban heat island" effect.

A Hong Kong-based dentist by day and inventor by night, Ng Tz--chuen, will be part of a team studying the secrets still hidden in the narrow passageways of the Pyramids of Giza, according to Reuters.Ng is part of a team, along with former Egyptian Antiquities Minister, Zahi Hawass, seeking to solve the mystery surrounding the stone doors that block what is believed is the tomb of Pharaoh Cheops - the ancient Egyptian ruler after whom the largest pyramid is named.A self-described daydreamer, Ng, 59, thought up and created tiny grips, not unlike those he uses to pull teeth, to fit on to a mini robot that will enter the tomb behind the doors.

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have put out a new video to address false claims about the "Mayan apocalypse," a non-event that some people believe will bring the world to an end on Dec. 21.In the video, which was posted online Wednesday (Mar. 7), Don Yeomans, head of the Near-Earth Objects Program Office at NASA/JPL, explains away many of the most frequently cited doomsday scenarios.

In what could be the world's first climate-induced migration of modern times, Anote Tong, the Kiribati president, said he was in talks with Fiji's military government to buy up to 5,000 acres of freehold land on which his countrymen could be housed.Some of Kiribati's 32 pancake-flat coral atolls, which straddle the equator over 1,350,000 square miles of ocean, are already disappearing beneath the waves.Most of its 113,000 people are crammed on to Tarawa, the administrative centre, a chain of islets which curve in a horseshoe shape around a lagoon."This is the last resort, there's no way out of this one," Mr Tong said.

Dwight Schrute would be jealous: A new study suggests that women can detect snakes faster during the premenstrual phase of their menstrual cycles.The quirky character on the sitcom "The Office" has plenty of theories about both snakes and menstruation, including a color-coded chart for the cycles of his female co-workers, but even he didn't see this one coming. Study researchers say the idea makes sense, as fluctuating hormones can influence the amygdala, a brain region responsible for fear and anxiety.During the luteal phase, or premenstrual portion, of the menstrual cycle, women are quicker at detecting photos of snakes, a threatening stimulus, than they are during the early and late follicular phase of the cycle, when the ovaries prepare to release an egg.

University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy without using fossil fuels and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Reporting in the journal Nanoscale, the team said nanowires, which are made from abundant natural materials like silicon and zinc oxide, also offer a cheap way to deliver hydrogen fuel on a mass scale."This is a clean way to generate clean fuel," said Deli Wang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Director James Cameron has said that he is close to diving 11km (seven miles) down to the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.He has just successfully completed a test-dive 8km (five miles) down off the coast of Papua New Guinea.He now hopes to reach the world's deepest point in his one-man submersible in the coming weeks.Only two people have been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, back in 1960.

The Spanish village of Rasquera has leased a plot of land to grow cannabis in an effort to clear its 1.3 million euros debt.The funding for planting the controversial herb will come from a Barcelona cannabis users' association over the next two years.However, Spanish authorities are still looking into the legality of the initiative.

MIT physicists have managed to build a light-emitting diode that has an electrical efficiency of more than 100 percent. You may ask, "Wouldn't that mean it breaks the first law of thermodynamics?" The answer, happily, is no.The LED produces 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, giving it an efficiency of 230 percent. That means it operates above "unity efficiency" -- putting it into a category normally occupied by perpetual motion machines.However, while MIT's diode puts out more than twice as much energy in photons as it's fed in electrons, it doesn't violate the conservation of energy because it appears to draw in heat energy from its surroundings instead. When it gets more than 100 percent electrically-efficient, it begins to cool down, stealing energy from its environment to convert into more photons.

IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago - though not everyone is convinced they weren't just good swimmers.Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive "Mousterian" stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren't islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow.

After analyzing the material, the researchers established that the contents of the vessel consisted of a mixture of substances of lipids and resins."The natural resins were the pine resin, exudated from Pinaceae, and the mastic resin, from Anacardiaceae trees. The lipid was a vegetable oil, most likely moringa oil, which was used by the Egyptians and Greeks to produce ointments and perfumes," Ribechini said.

Stars with disks of debris around them might be good targets to search for Earth-like planets, researchers say.Debris disks consist of fields of planetesimals and dust encircling stars. A few hundred stars have been found that show signs of a debris disk, said astrophysicist Sean Raymond at the Observatory of Bordeaux in France. .

Our high-tech world seems to have weathered a solar storm that was still showing signs of life late Thursday.While some experts think the threat from the solar storm passed by earlier in the day, space weather forecasters said it's still too early to relax because the storm's effects could continue through Friday morning.Around midnight EST Thursday, the storm reached what forecasters called a "moderate level.".

The Little Ice Age, a centuries-long spell of cold summers in Europe and elsewhere, began suddenly late in the 13th century, a new study finds. A string of volcanic explosions may have set off this change in climate by belching particles that reflected sunlight and allowed Arctic sea ice to reach epic proportions, researchers report online January 31 in Geophysical Research Letters.

Quantum physics deals with the realm of the very small, and most of us never expect to see the weird world it describes. But could we? Recently, scientist Geraldo Barbosa of Northwestern University designed an experiment to answer that question.The quantum effect Barbosa is hoping to see is called quantum entanglement, in which two or more particles can become "entangled" so that even after they are separated in space, when an action is performed on one particle, the other particle responds immediately.

Airlines and energy suppliers are on alert as the largest solar storm in five years heads toward Earth, threatening to disrupt flights and power lines.The eruption on the surface of the sun, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has led to a "massive amount of solar particles heading towards Earth", which are due to hit the planet between 6am and 10am on Thursday morning, a Met Office spokesman said. But he added that the phenomenon was likely to go unnoticed by most.

IBM researchers have built a prototype optical chip that can transfer a terabit of data per second, using an innovative design requiring 48 tiny holes drilled into a standard CMOS chip, facilitating the movement of light. Much faster and more power-efficient than today's optics, the so-called "Holey Optochip" technology could enhance the power of supercomputers.Optical chips, which move data with light instead of electrons, are commonly used for interconnects in today's supercomputers and can be found in IBM systems such as Power 775 and Blue Gene. Optical technology is favored over electrical for transmitting high-bandwidth data over longer distances, which is why it's used for telecommunications networks, said IBM Optical Links Group manager Clint Schow.As speed and efficiency improve, optical technology has become more viable in smaller settings.

A NASA Mars satellite has captured an image of a massive dust devil twisting its way across the Red Planet's surface.The towering dust plume casts a snake-like shadow across the smooth plains of the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars.Scientists who have examined the image, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Feb. 16, estimate the twirling cloud of dust is more than a half mile high, with a plume that's about 30 yards wide.

The results of recent research suggests that ancient, or prehistoric, builders of the monumental structures found in such diverse places as Ireland, Malta, southern Turkey and Peru all have a peculiarly common characteristic -- they may have been specially designed to conduct and manipulate sound to produce certain sensory effects.

It turns out that prehistoric human hunters of the Ice Age had significant help from the weather when it came to driving the big mammals, like mammoths and mastodons, to their extinction.So reports the authors of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

An eccentric Hong Kong dentist will use his skills and tools, many of which he has invented, to explore ancient Egyptian wall cavities and fill in the gaps around the mysteries of the pharaohs.Ng Tze-chuen, a 59-year-old dentist, is teaming up with Egypt's former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass in a bid to delve deep into the last surviving wonder of the ancient world - the Great Pyramid of Giza.Tze-chuen has created a tiny robot, the size of an insect, with dental forcep-inspired grips on the top. This little device will travel between the cracks on two mysterious doors blocking the entrance to two narrow shafts believed to lead to Pharaoh Cheops's tomb.

Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.

Camels with long, crocodile-like snouts once lived near what is now the Panama Canal, suggests a new study.The camels lived 20 million years ago and are now considered to be among the oldest known animals from Panama."They were probably browsers in the forests of the ancient tropics. We can say that because the crowns are really short," lead author Aldo Rincon, a University of Florida geology doctoral student, said in a press release.Rincon and his team are working with the Panama Canal Authority and scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to make the most of a five-year window of excavations during Panama Canal expansions that began in 2009.

A new paper in PLoS one posits an awesome historical hypothesis: that Neanderthals wore eagle talons as a kind of jewelry. Here's the evidence. The researchers found precise marks at the top of an eagle talon that were consistent with cutting the claw out of its natural sheath. Then, they looked at talons at three other known Neanderthal sites and found similar marks, but *only* on the eagle talons. Given the multiple sites and the fact that they were occupied at different times over a 65,000-year period, the researchers say "it seems reasonable to argue that Neanderthals in France and Italy regularly used terminal phalanges of birds of prey." But to what end? Well, we can't be sure, but perhaps as jewelry or ornamentation.

On 6 August at precisely 13 seconds after 6.30 in the morning London time, Nasa scientists should receive a message from Mars telling them whether their $2.5 billion (£1.67bn) gamble on three nylon lines has paid off.This will be the moment when, for the first time, tethers will be used to gently lower a six-wheeled robotic rover the size of a Mini Cooper down to the surface of another planet from a spacecraft hovering precariously overhead.

The new approach to landing a rover on the planet, to be attempted in August, will involve winching it slowly to the surface using nylon ropes attached to a spacecraft overhead.Once the probe, named Curiosity, has safely reached the ground the 25ft-long cords will be cut and the parent ship will use rockets to fire itself well away from the probe for a crash landing.The new tactic is an attempt to overcome the challenging nature of landing on another planet with several previous missions, including Britain's Beagle 2 in 2003, having failed in either their approach or landing.

Capturing wanted fugitives and transporting them across borders has been much in the news in the post-9/11 era - the time of extraordinary rendition, instant communications and intercontinental flights.But March 2012 marks the 350th anniversary of just such an incident, in the Dutch city of Delft - then, as now, a pleasant place with canalside houses and windmills, immortalised in the paintings of Vermeer.

"We're seeing the first glimpses of the development of prosthetic devices," says Dr Jacky Finch, who has analysed this Egyptian prosthetic toe. It dates to between 950-710BC and was found on a female mummy in a tomb near Luxor. There are earlier references to prostheses - Indian texts from 1,400BC talk about an iron leg, but this is the "earliest tangible piece of archaeological evidence".

The bone of a large flying reptile has been found in the gut of a Velociraptor, sparking fresh discussion among palaeontologists.Velociraptors have previously been described as "hyper predators".However, scientists suggest this pterosaur was too large to be the Velociraptor's intended prey but could have been scavenged.

Volunteers given the beta-blocker, used to treat chest pains and lower heart rates, scored lower on a standard psychological test of "implicit" racist attitudes.They appeared to be less racially prejudiced at a subconscious level than another group treated with a "dummy" placebo pill.Scientists believe the discovery can be explained by the fact that racism is fundamentally founded on fear.Propranolol acts both on nerve circuits that govern automatic functions such as heart rate, and the part of the brain involved in fear and emotional responses. The drug is also used to treat anxiety and panic.

Scientists have discovered a strange and rare hybrid site in the deep sea where two extreme seafloor environments exist side by side, and are home to a parade of weird hybrid creatures seemingly adapted to the hardships posed by both intense environments.Researchers discovered hydrothermal vents and cold methane seeps in a swath of the the deep sea off Costa Rica in 2010, and found a host of unknown species living there.Scientists made the discovery during a dive in the manned submersible Alvin to an area known as the Jaco Scar, where an underwater mountain is moving under a tectonic plate.

Historical archives are an invaluable resource for those who study the past, or for those of us who are merely curious about those earlier eras. This is even more true for archives of scientific papers, including seminal works in astronomy, because all science builds on the discoveries that came before.Maintaining those archives can be costly, however. That's why it's good news to hear that the Ransom Center at the University of Texas -- home to the archival collection of the Herschel family papers -- has received a $10,000 grant from the Friends of the Center for History of Physics to catalog and rehouse the papers of astronomer John F.W. Herschel. The grant will also make it possible to create an online inventory of the full collection.

Organic cultivation methods not only benefit biodiversity; they also appear to have a positive effect on the ecosystem service pollination. In a study of strawberry plants in Skåne, the proportion of fully pollinated flowers was significantly higher on organic farms. This is shown in new research from Lund University in Sweden.

In Uttar Pradesh, one of India's poorest states, a pair of US-born entrepreneurs is creating a new model for energy delivery to villages far from the grid. The founders of Mera Gao Power build and operate solar-powered micro grids to provide low-cost lighting and mobile phone charging to village houses, giving many rural people access to both light and power for the first time in their lives.For many villagers in off-grid areas in India, their only source of light after dark comes through kerosene powered lanterns, which can cause serious health issues, both from the fumes released while burning, and the chance that children may accidentally drink the kerosene. So when Nikhil Jaisinghani and Brian Shaad give them the opportunity to have LED lighting to replace the dirty kerosene lights, plus a way to charge their mobile phones, they also give them a way to change their lives.

In the 21st century, it can feel as if the future has already arrived. But we're only getting started.It's fashionable to be pessimistic about our prospects, yet our species may very well endure for at least 100,000 years.So what's in store for us? We now have the perspective to identify the forces and trends that have shaped humanity and the Earth to date. With this knowledge, we can make intelligent predictions about what is to come. Indeed, many groups are now attempting to extend humanity's horizons far beyond the next century, from the Long Now Foundation to those who say our presence is forging a new geological era.New Scientist tours the coming epoch, from the language we will speak to what our descendants will make of our trash.

Greater Tokyo, home to 35 million tightly packed people, has seen a threefold increase in tectonic activity since the magnitude 9.0 undersea quake that unleashed a killer tsunami last March.Every day, an average of nearly 1.5 quakes are recorded in and around the city, one of the most populated places on earth.But Tokyoites are so used to being shaken in their beds or at their desks that the majority pass almost without comment.The city is, without doubt, one of the most earthquake-proofed places in the world. Even the monster quake of March 11 last year that struck just 370 kilometres (230 miles) away caused little structural damage.

Researchers concluded that cravings for the dessert were similar to those experienced by drug addicts.They found that the brain was left wanting more while eating ice cream in the same way as a person who regularly uses cocaine.Their study, published online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, appears to add weight to previous studies that people can be left feeling "addicted" to some foods.Dr Kyle Burger, from the Oregon Research Institute, in Eugene, about 110 miles south of Portland, said overeating "high-fat" or "high-sugar" foods appeared to change how the brain responded and in turn downgraded the mental "reward".

The fringes of Antarctica are being invaded by alien plants and tiny animals, scientists have found.Researchers scoured the clothes and boots of tourists and scientists visiting the continent, and found that most were carrying plant seeds.Alien plants already grow on the fast-warming Antarctic Peninsula.Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team says the plants are likely to spread as the climate warms.

An active region on the sun that unleashed a powerful solar flare Sunday (March 4) does not appear to be quieting down, and may have more surprises in store over the coming week, scientists say.An X1.1-class solar flare erupted from the sun at 11:13 p.m. EST on March 4 (0413 GMT March 5). X-class flares are the most powerful type of solar storm, with M-class eruptions considered to be mid-range, and C-class flares being the weakest.Sunday's solar tempest sent a fast-moving cloud of plasma, called a coronal mass ejection (CME) hurtling into space. The CME is not expected to hit Earth but could trigger minor geomagnetic storms, according to experts at the Space Weather Prediction Center, which is operated by the National Weather Service.

New evidence supports the idea that a huge space rock collided with our planet about 13,000 years ago and broke up in Earth's atmosphere, a new study suggests.This impact would have been powerful enough to melt the ground, and could have killed off many large mammals and humans. It may even have set off a period of unusual cold called the Younger Dryas that began at that time, researchers say.The idea that Earth experienced an asteroid or comet impact at the start of the Younger Dryas has been controversial, in part because there is no smoking-gun impact crater left behind as with other known events in our planet's past. But researchers say it's common for space rocks to disintegrate in the heat of a planet's atmosphere before they can reach the ground.

Monkeys called wild drills, already an overhunted species, may see a dramatic population decline if their forest home dries out and vegetation becomes sparser amid warming temperatures, researchers report.Closely related to baboons and mandrills, endangered wild drills (Mandrillus leucophaeus) are found in the African equatorial rainforest. Researchers studied DNA from 54 drill samples, most of which were poop collected in the Cross-Sanaga-Bioko Coastal forests that stretch across portions of Nigeria, Bioko Island (equatorial Guinea) and Cameroon.

The preserved heart of Dublin's patron saint has been stolen from the city's Christ Church Cathedral, officials say.The thief would have needed metal cutters to prise open the iron bars protecting the wooden heart-shaped box holding St Laurence O'Toole's heart.Police believe it happened some time between Friday night and about 12.30 GMT on Saturday."They specifically targeted this, they wanted the heart of St Laurence O'Toole," a church spokeswoman said.

Some Scandinavian trees survived the last Ice Age, challenging a widely held notion that they were killed off by the huge ice sheet that covered the region.Modern trees in Scandinavia were thought to descend from species that migrated north when the ice melted 9,000 years ago.But research suggests some conifers survived on mountain peaks that protruded from the enormous ice sheet, on islands and in coastal areas.The work appears in Science journal.

In what may be the biggest daily tornado outbreak on record for March, an entire month's worth of twisters struck in a single day.The nation's Storm Prediction Center received 81 reports of tornadoes on Friday, March 2, according to data filtered to remove duplicate reports of tornadoes. For the entire month of March, the 10-year average number of tornadoes is 87, according to the Weather Channel's severe weather expert Greg Forbes.

Police forces say they have received a number of calls reporting what is believed to have been a meteor.A "huge fireball" was reported travelling from northern Scotland to southern England at about 21:40 GMT, amid fears a plane had crashed.Police received reports of a "bright light" and "orange glow", but aircraft-related incidents were ruled out.The Met Office tweeted: "Hi All, for anyone seeing something in the night sky, we believe it was a meteorite."

A Japanese researcher has used thousands of strands of spider silk to spin a set of violin strings.The strings are said to have a "soft and profound timbre" relative to traditional gut or steel strings.That may arise from the way the strings are twisted, resulting in a "packing structure" that leaves practically no space between any of the strands.The strings will be described in a forthcoming edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

DID some of the first American settlers come from Europe rather than across the Bering land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, as most people believe?The controversial theory is advanced in the book Across Atlantic Ice, launched last week in the US. Co-authors Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, UK, and Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC claim that glaciers and ice floes spanned much of the north Atlantic Ocean during the last ice age. This bridge lasted at least 2000 years.

"This is an absolutely important find for the history of Ecuador's archeology and for the (Andean) region," said Patrimony Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa, speaking of the ruins found by Ecuadoran historian Tamara Estupinan.The Inca empire, in the 1400s and early 1500s, spanned much of South America's Andean region, over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers), from modern-day Bolivia and Peru to Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia. It included dozens of ethnic groups with different languages, cities, temples, farming terraces and fortresses.Atahualpa was the last of his dynasty. During the Spanish conquest he was taken captive in what is now Cajamarca, Peru.

Fossils dating back 505 million years preserve the relics of tiny, slithering animals which are the oldest life forms ever discovered with primitive spinal cords.As the precursor of vertebrates the species is also believed to be the direct ancestor of all members of the chordate family, which includes fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals.The finding means the 5cm long creatures, known as Pikaia gracilens, were the forerunners of animals as diverse as snakes, swans and humans, scientists said.

Humankind has made great conceptual and technological advances since we first walked the Earth. Thanks to our ability to build on others' ideas, we've progressed from the abacus to the computer, from the wheel to the modern-day car, and from simple observations about the world to our current knowledge of the laws of nature and the Universe. This ability to accumulate knowledge and improve on it, referred to as "cumulative culture," is unique to humans.

Female bonobos "advertise" their homosexual activity to important audiences, say scientists.Researchers studying communication among the apes found that females made the most noise during sex if the "alpha female" was nearby.Low-ranking females that were invited to have sex with high-ranking females would also call to tell other group members about the bond.Experts suggest females communicate the encounters to boost their status.

Rhinos survived the Ice Age and saber-toothed tigers, but humans may be the greatest threat the horned herbivores have ever faced.Demand for rhinoceros' horns as folk medicine and ornaments in Asia fuels the illegal slaughter of rhinos. Recently in South Africa, four Kruger National Park workers, including a ranger, were arrested on charges of rhino poaching, reported the AP.Last year was the worst on record rhinos in South Africa. A record 448 rhinos were killed in 2011. This year, 80 rhinos have already been killed, reported the AP.To save the rhinos, wildlife managers have gone so far as to use a chemical which makes the beast's horns toxic to anyone who ingests them.

A spike in the poaching of elephants and rhinos has become so alarming that experts are debating a controversial plan to permit the legalized trade of ivory.Renewed interest in the idea comes in the aftermath of a massacre of nearly 450 elephants in Northern Cameroon -- killed primarily for their valuable tusks.Global economic and political turmoil has helped to make ivory a coveted and pricey commodity. Poaching is only escalating because of that in many African countries.

Nowadays the name "Challenger" is most associated with the doomed space shuttle, but it wasn't always so. The shuttle was named after a 19th century naval vessel, which, from 1872 to 1876, carried out one of the first expeditions to explore the deep oceans.While touring the Philippines, the Challenger's crew dredged up a sponge and found that its cavities were filled by a bizarre, branching worm, which was later dubbed Syllis ramosa.For over a century, S. ramosa remained unique. But no longer. A second species has been found off the coast of Australia, and there could be many more out there.

POLICE watched seven people sell drugs in Marshall Courts and Seven Oaks, two districts in south-eastern Newport News, in Virginia. They built strong cases against them. They shared that information with prosecutors. But then the police did something unusual: they sent the seven letters inviting them to police headquarters for a talk, promising that if they came they would not be arrested. Three came, and when they did they met not only police and prosecutors, but also family members, people from their communities, pastors from local churches and representatives from social-service agencies. Their neighbours and relatives told them that dealing drugs was hurting their families and communities. The police showed them the information they had gathered, and they offered the seven a choice: deal again, and we will prosecute you. Stop, and these people will help you turn your lives around.

Red lipstick once shimmered on the lips of the Medici Venus,‭ ‬according to chemical analysis on the‭ ‬2,000-year-old marble statue representing the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite.The investigation, carried out at the University of Modena and Reggio and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where the statue has been on display since 1677, indicates that the life-sized naked and sensual Venus originally had red lips and hair laminated with gold.These features were meant to represent the Venus "in a very realistic way," ‬ Fabrizio Paolucci,‭ head of the Uffizi's classical antiquities department, said.To strenghten the effect, the naked statue also wore precious earrings, as newly discovered earlobe holes suggest.

A team led by Simcha Jacobovic, a Canadian documentary director, used a robot to photograph a number of limestone burial caskets, found below a block of flats, which may provide an unprecedented glimpse into Christianity's earliest days.But the potential significance of the discovery is almost certain to be overshadowed by controversy, with Mr Jacobovic using it as new evidence to bolster his widely disputed claims to have identified the bones of Christ and his family at a nearby burial site.The caskets, known as ossuaries, were inscribed with what some independent experts said could plausibly be the earliest Christian iconography ever documented.

When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and then moved down the West Coast.But the mastodon relic found near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting that the blade was just as ancient.Whoever fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here.

A Nasa spacecraft has detected oxygen around one of Saturn's icy moons, Dione.The discovery supports a theory that suggests all of the moons near Saturn and Jupiter might have oxygen around them.Researchers say that their finding increases the likelihood of finding the ingredients for life on one of the moons orbiting gas giants.The study has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Probing the largely unexplored question of what characteristics make a leader among schooling fish, researchers have discovered that by mimicking nature, a robotic fish can transform into a leader of live ones.Through a series of experiments, researchers from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) aimed to increase understanding of collective animal behavior, including learning how robots might someday steer fish away from environmental disasters. Nature is a growing source of inspiration for engineers, and the researchers were intrigued to find that their biomimetic robotic fish could not only infiltrate and be accepted by the swimmers, but actually assume a leadership role.

A website has been launched that aims to get the public involved in the search for extraterrestrial life.Announced at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Los Angeles, the site will stream radio frequencies that are transmitted from the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Allen Telescope Array.Participants will be asked to search for signs of unusual activity.

As if it wasn't enough with imbeciles claiming that the Earth will be consumed by a supernova or a hungry black hole in 2012, now we are getting photos of Mayan pyramids firing energy beams into the sky. Great. Just great.One of the researchers who operates NASA Mars missions' cameras thinks "it really is an awesome image!". He also has an explanation about why this happened. One that doesn't involve the end of the world.

The oldest and thickest Arctic ice seems to be vanishing faster than the younger, thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean's floating ice cap, a new NASA study finds.Typically the thicker, older ice survives through the summer melt season (hence, it's called multi-year ice), while the younger ice that forms over the winter melts as quickly as it formed. That's what makes this new finding worrisome; if the ice that usually sticks around is rapidly disappearing, the Arctic sea ice is more vulnerable to further disappearance during the summer, said study researcher Joey Comiso, senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The demise of older, thicker sea ice in the Arctic could have repercussions far beyond the steady decline in habitat essential for ringed seals, walruses and polar bears. A new NASA-led study has found that it could set in train a chemical process that results in more toxic mercury being deposited in the northern polar region.Writing in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and colleagues note that as thick, multiyear ice declines it is replaced by newer, seasonal and perennial ice, which is saltier than its more weathered kin. This is significant, notes a press release from the American Geophysical Union, which publishes the journal, because of the interaction between the salt in sea ice, frigid temperatures and sunlight.

Researchers believe that new "thinking caps", could help provide super-human strength, highly enhanced concentration or thought-controlled weaponry.A British ethics group is investigating the ethical dilemmas posed by inventions that interfere with the brain's inner workings.The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCB) has launched a consultation on the risks posed by such new technologies, the global market for which it says is worth $8bn (£5bn) and "growing fast.

"The Lorax," which premieres in movie theaters this weekend, is an adaptation of Dr. Seuss' classic tale of the ecologically conscious Lorax, the greedy Once-ler who devastated the environment by cutting all the Truffula trees and a young boy who is provided a seed of hope to save a devastated world.As was the case when "The Lorax" was first released in 1971, the environmental morality tale at the center of the film adaptation has been attacked by critics who say the story conveys an anti-industry message. Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, who would have been 108 years old as of March 2, 2012, never shied from embedding his political views within the pages of his books.

ATHENS - Lack of funding in crisis-hit Greece has stymied archaeological research and leads experts to rebury valuable discoveries to better protect them, a Greek daily reported on Friday."Mother Earth is the best protector of our antiquities," Michalis Tiverios, a professor of archaeology at Thessaloniki's Aristotelio University, told Ta Nea daily on the sidelines of an annual archaeological congress in the city.Tiverios recently persuaded the culture ministry to rebury a previously-unknown Early Christian basilica, found two years ago during work on Thessaloniki's new underground railway.

The third and final field season of the Jarash Hinterland Survey (JHS) took place in October 2010, apparently the hottest October in Jordan for a century.Jarash is one of the best preserved Roman provincial cities and spreads over some 85 hectares with a planned layout encircled by city walls. Its famous colonnaded streets and piazza, theatres, temples, churches, baths and hippodrome are visited by many thousands of tourists each year.

Modern Nordic cuisine has put the Danish capital at the top of the culinary world, but the chef behind its first "caveman fast food" restaurant, Paleo, takes inspiration from the Stone Age to create primal gastronomy.There will be hot dogs and pizzas on the menu, but no buns or dough. Paleo will serve meat, fish, berries and vegetables, but no starch, refined sugars or dairy products are allowed.

The University of Pennsylvania General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, which has attracted millions of viewers of its videos online, today released its latest demonstration of robot power.The video shows a group of small quadcopter performing the theme song to James Bond movies. Introduced at the TED conference, the movie shows about ten of the flying robots emerge from boxes on the floor and start playing different instruments.Robots dip up and down in the air to press the keys of a synthesizer to play the melody, while others tap a cymbal and bass drum. Still others fly over a series of wires to create Bond-esque sounds effects. In the end, a couple even strum a chord on an electric guitar.

A quartzite colossus of 18th Dynasty King Amenhotep III is to be raised on Luxor's west bank on Saturday.The colossus was unearthed in 2004 by an Egyptian-European archaeological mission led by Horig Sourouzian during routine excavation work. It was 100 meters behind the gigantic colossi of Memnon which represent the same king at the main entrance of its temple. The colossus was half buried under Nile alluvia in seven pieces.In 2011 the restoration work was completed and Antiquities Minister Mohamed Ibrahim is to witness the raising of the colossi at its original location. Sourouzian said it is the first time that such a monumental sculpture will raised by combining Pharaonic methods and modern air-cushion techniques.

What if bacteria could talk to each other? What if they had a sense of touch? A new study by researchers at UC Santa Barbara suggests both, and theorizes that such cells may, in fact, need to communicate in order to perform certain functions.The findings appeared recently in the journal Genes & Development.Christopher Hayes, UCSB associate professor of molecular, cellular, and development biology, teamed with graduate students Elie Diner, Christina Beck, and Julia Webb to study uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC), which causes urinary tract infections in humans. They discovered a sibling-like link between cell systems that have largely been thought of as rivals.

Ten years ago on March 1, the European Space Agency launched an 8-ton satellite called Envisat that would deliver back to Earth some of the most beautiful images of our planet taken from space.Since then, Envisat has orbited Earth more than 50,000 times and has lived twice as long as planned.The satellite has more than seven instruments on board that can use radar to see through clouds, capture ocean color and land cover, monitor the ozone layer and atmospheric pollutants, measure thermal-infrared radiation, and register surface topography.

Physicists have taken a step forward in their efforts to understand why the Universe is dominated by matter, and not its shadowy opposite antimatter.A US experiment has confirmed previous findings that hinted at phenomena outside our understanding of physics.The results show that certain matter particles decay differently from their antimatter counterparts.Such differences could potentially help explain why there is so much more matter in the cosmos than antimatter.The findings from scientists working on the CDF experiment have been presented at a particle physics meeting in La Thuile, Italy.

Swiss researchers of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich confirm earlier findings that the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin Cry1Ab produced for pesticidal purposes by genetically modified (GM) Bt maize increases mortality in the young ladybird larvae (Adalia bipunctata L., two-spotted ladybird) in laboratory tests. These ladybird larvae are typical 'non-target' environmental goods which are not supposed to be harmed by the GM maize.

The 460 foot ball of rock named 2011 AG5 is potentially on course to hit this planet on February 5, 2040.The United Nations Action Team on near-Earth object has begun discussions about how to divert the asteroid, amid fears that the likelihood of a collision could increase over the next few years.While the object has the potential to wipe out millions of lives if it landed on a city, it is far smaller than the nine mile wide asteroid which is believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Forty years ago, the first bionic human featured in the hit US TV science-fiction series The Six Million Dollar Man. Today, he has become science fact. New technologies that "intervene" in the brain, building superhuman capabilities and enabling users to operate weapons or wheelchairs with the power of thought alone, are on the market or under development.Electrodes implanted deep in patient's brains have been shown to stabilise the shaky movements of Parkinson's disease and "creativity caps" that deliver magnetic pulses to the head are in use to boost memory and mathematical ability.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy says it's "very weird" that Canada is taking a tougher line on marijuana when governments across the globe are reconsidering the war on drugs.In an open letter Wednesday to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Brazil-based commission calls on Canada to stop pursuing the "destructive, expensive and ineffective" prohibition of pot.Louise Arbour, a former Supreme Court of Canada judge, former Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso, former Swiss president Ruth Dreifuss and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson are among the signatories to the letter that warns Canada is repeating "the same grave mistakes as other countries.

Bottlenose dolphins swap signature whistles with each other when they meet in the open sea, a new study reports, suggesting that these marine mammals engage in something akin to a human conversation.Earlier research found that signature whistles are unique for each dolphin, with the marine mammals essentially naming themselves and communicating other basic information.A signature dolphin whistle in human speak, might be comparable to, "Hi, I'm George, a large, three-year-old dolphin in good health who means you no harm."

Prehistoric Eurasian nomads are commonly perceived as horse riding bandits who utilized their mobility and military skill to antagonize ancient civilizations such as the Chinese, Persians, and Greeks. Although some historical accounts may support this view, a new article by Dr. Michael Frachetti (Washington University, St. Louis) illustrates a considerably different image of prehistoric pastoralist societies and their impact on world civilizations more than 5000 years ago.

LONDON: Dinosaurs may have roamed among pine trees in the Arctic covered with weird monkey puzzle forests some 100 million years ago, a new study has claimed.Drawing up the first realistic picture of the fauna in the age of the dinosaurs, researchers from the Royal Holloway University of London claimed that about 100 million years ago, the polar-regions had a climate similar to Britain today.

Giza plateau was crowded on Monday as journalists, TV anchors, photographers and antiquities officials flocked to the northern side of King Khufu's Great Pyramid to witness Japanese scientists and archaeologists taking samples from different parts of Khufu's second solar boat, which is still buried in sand after 4,500 years. The boat's wooden beams are to be subjected to laboratory analysis to determine the types of fungi, insects and viruses that are affecting the boat, as well as the amount of deterioration that has taken place, so that an appropriate method can be selected to restore it and place it on display beside King Khufu's first boat, which is on display in a museum especially constructed for it on the plateau.

One of the earliest forests in the world was home to towering palmlike trees and woody plants that crept along the ground like vines, a new fossil find reveals.The forest, which stood in what is now Gilboa, N.Y., was first unearthed in a quarry in the 1920s. But now, a new construction project has revealed for the first time the forest floor as it stood 380 million years ago in the Devonian period."For the first time, we actually have a map of about 1,200 square meters (12,900 square feet) of a Devonian forest," said study researcher Chris Berry, a scientist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. "We know which plants were growing where in this forest, and how they were interacting."

A newly discovered document, written by one of Europe's most famous philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, reveals a plan that, if successful, could have turned the tide of one of England's bloodiest wars.In the words of Hobbes, the plan would prevent the "ruine of the English nation." The document was written during the height of the English civil war, a series of conflicts between 1642 and 1651 that saw King Charles I (and later his son Charles II), pitted against his country's parliament.

The vessel, carrying copper and tin ingots used to make weapons and jewellery, sank off the coast near Salcombe in Devon and is thought to date from 900BC.But it was only last year that the South West Maritime Archaeological Group, a team of amateur archaeologists, brought its cargo to the surface.The discovery was not announced until this month's International Shipwreck Conference, in Plymouth, Devon.

Two atheists - John Gray and Alain de Botton - and two agnostics - Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I - meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. "To say something along the lines of 'I'm an atheist; I think religions are not all bad' has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?"

In the middle of the night on February 13th, something disturbed the animal population of rural Portal, Georgia. Cows started mooing anxiously and local dogs howled at the sky. The cause of the commotion was a rock from space."At 1:43 AM Eastern, I witnessed an amazing fireball," reports Portal resident Henry Strickland. "It was very large and lit up half the sky as it fragmented. The event set dogs barking and upset cattle, which began to make excited sounds. I regret I didn't have a camera; it lasted nearly 6 seconds."Strickland witnessed one of the unusual "Fireballs of February.

Five thousand years ago, so the legend goes, two pipers played in a field while a circle of merry maidens danced around them. Then they all turned to stone, leaving Stonehenge to mystify us for millennia. Other theories about the stone circle's purpose include an alien observatory, a burial site and an acoustic stadium.Here at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver, Canada, archaeoacoustician Steven Waller - an independent researcher based in La Mesa, California - threw yet another idea into the mix. The stone circle, he says, may have been inspired by an auditory illusion that occurs when two identical instruments, such as pipes, play the same note at the same time. A person walking in a circle around the pipers hears the note's volume decrease at certain points where the two sound waves collide and cancel one another out. At these spots, it sounds as though a giant pillar is blocking the sound.

Archaeologists on Monday began restoration on a 4,500-year-old wooden boat found next to the pyramids, one of Egypt's main tourist attractions.The boat is one of two that were buried next to the Pharaoh Khufu, spokesmen for a joint Egyptian-Japanese team of archeologists said. The boats are believed to have been intended to carry pharaohs into the afterlife.

He laid the foundations of classical physics and is considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time.But Sir Isaac Newton was also deeply interested in the occult and applied a scientific approach to the study of scripture and Jewish mysticism.Now Israel's national library, which contains a vast trove of Newton's esoteric writings, has digitised his occult collection and posted it online.Among the yellowed texts is Newton's famous prediction of the apocalypse in 2060.The quintessential scientist, Newton revolutionised the approach to physics, maths and astronomy in the 17th and 18th century.

Cuttlefish could have more in common with humans than you think: they may see the world in a similar way. Biologist Sarah Zylinski, from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues found that when they see a partially obscured shape, they fill in the missing information much like humans do. Apart from insects, it's the first time this behaviour has been demonstrated in an invertebrate.

State legislatures have convened or are convening all around the country, and once again this year, marijuana decriminalization or legalization are hot topics at the statehouse. Legalization bills are pending in three states (as well as on the ballot as initiatives in Washington and almost certainly Colorado), decriminalization bills are alive in nine states, and bills that would improve existing decriminalization laws have been filed in two states.And this is still early in the legislative season. Bills can still be introduced in many states, and bills that have already been introduced can advance or be killed. By around the beginning of May, a clearer picture should emerge, but 2012 is already looking to be even more active than last year when it comes to decriminalization and legalization bills. There's a reason for that, said leading reformers.

It doesn't take more than a moment of thought to recognise that the rulings on which drugs are legal or illegal are governed by no particular logic.No theory from medicine or philosophy or psychology demands alcohol, tobacco and caffeine must be legal while marijuana, cocaine, and heroin must be prohibited.We cannot rely on distinctions about relative harm. Many experts have pointed out that marijuana is on balance less dangerous than alcohol. But this legal discord isn't unusual. One British police chief controversially stated a few years ago that ecstasy is safer than aspirin.

Giant Jurassic fleas measuring more than two centimetres (about an inch) may have fed on feathered dinosaurs, say scientists.Fossils of several of the blood-sucking insects were unearthed at two sites in China.The largest females were 20.6 millimetres (0.81in) long, while males grew to 14.7 millimetres (0.58in).Besides being much larger than modern fleas, they lacked their characteristic jumping hind legs.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, their congentially blind engineer, Jordy LaForge, is able to see thanks to a visor worn across his eyes.Now, thanks to an Israeli team, real-life technology has taken one more step to catching up with science fiction.They have shown that an amazing device can use sound to hack into the visual cortex of blind people to let them 'see'.The Sensory Substitution Device, invented over 20 years ago by Dutch researcher Dr Peter Meijer, uses an algorithm to translate the position and appearance of an object into distinct tones.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Yitshak Ehrenberg has witnessed a transformation in Germany's Jewish community during his 15 years as an Orthodox rabbi in Berlin and he is determined to harness a new generation to ensure the religion thrives here."After the war, most of the community were refugees, survivors, broken souls who had lost their family and sometimes even their faith," the 62-year-old told Reuters from a luxurious living room filled with modern art and family photographs.

Jean-Marie Loret, who died in 1985 aged 67, never met his father, but went on to fight Nazi forces during the Second World War.His extraordinary story has now been backed up by a range of compelling evidence, both in France and in Germany, which is published in the latest edition of Paris's Le Point magazine.Hitler is said to have had an affair with Mr Loret's mother, Charlotte Lobjoie, 16, as he took a break from the trenches in June 1917.