Newsdesk Archive

If we can engineer a soldier who can resist torture, would it still be wrong to torture this person with the usual methods? Starvation and sleep deprivation won't affect a super-soldier who doesn't need to sleep or eat. Beatings and electric shocks won't break someone who can't feel pain or fear like we do. This isn't a comic-book story, but plausible scenarios based on actual military projects today.In the next generation, our warfighters may be able to eat grass,communicate telepathically,resist stress, climb walls like a lizard, and much more. Impossible? We only need to look at nature for proofs of concept. For instance, dolphins don't sleep (or they'd drown); Alaskan sled-dogs can run for days without rest or food; bats navigate with echolocation; and goats will eat pretty much anything. Find out how they work, and maybe we can replicate that in humans.

When Hollywood imagines the future, from Logan's Run to Avatar, it tends to picture living spaces as sterile and characterless, without any cultural clues to the person who lives there. No record library, no DVDs, no Hemingway on bookshelves ... often no bookshelves.And here we are, catching up to that vision of the future. Sales of physical books dropped 30 percent last year, while e-book sales more than doubled. Sales of DVDs fell during that same period, while online streaming rose. And in 2011, for the first time, digital music downloads overtook sales of CDs. It's as if we're deciding en masse that when it comes to the arts and entertainment, we can do without the actual object that is the object of our affection. Who needs real-world clutter in an age when everything streams?In short: "Welcome," as Morpheus put it in The Matrix, "to the desert of the real.

Tyrannosaurus rex had the most powerful bite of any creature that has ever walked the Earth, say scientists.Previous estimates of the prehistoric predator's bite suggested it was much more modest - comparable to modern predators such as alligators.This measurement, based on a laser scan of a T. rex skull, showed that its bite was equivalent to three tonnes - about the weight of an elephant.The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.

ANSA MedISTANBUL, FEBRUARY 10 - Numerous archaeological excavations are underway at a huge site in Anatolia which will uncover an ancient and rich yet forgotten kingdom known as Tuwana from the darkness of history, which will be featured in an open-air museum. The news was reported by Lorenzo d'Alfonso, an Italian archaeologist leading the joint mission by the University of Pavia and NYU, who provided details on the excavation campaign in a press conference in Istanbul this month, during which the details of the Italian archaeological missions in Turkey were explained.

Scientists sequencing the genome of the 5,000-year-old "Iceman" corpse found 20 years ago in the Tyrolean Alps, have discovered that he had brown eyes, was lactose-intolerant, prone to heart disease and had Lyme disease. The boffins also found that he may be related to some modern-day Northern Mediterraneans.The results of their tests are published in the journal Nature Communications and unveil some of the characteristics of the ancient mountain roamer, the world's oldest glacier mummy.

Pre-Columbian star war stories have emerged from 23 stone carvings unearthed near the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan, the ancient Aztec center that became Mexico City after the Spanish invasion in 1521.Providing unique iconographic evidence for Aztec myths, the bas-relief sculptures lay embedded in a strip of floor in front of the Templo Mayor complex, Tenochtitlan's holiest shrine.Far from being purely decorative, the artistic carvings show symbols of death and crude representations in line with the Aztecs' bloody rituals.

Last week, the president of Guatemala joined former and current presidents of Colombia and Mexico in expressing interest in considering the regional legalization of the drug trade. The U.S. State Department immediately expressed its disfavor, but the question is out in the open now. The issue of whether to legalize drugs -- and thus reject the U.S. model of "war" against drugs -- threatens to consume the next Summit of the Americas, an April meeting of Western Hemisphere Heads of State in Colombia.It is easy to see why. The drug war has been a disaster for the Latin American countries fighting it, especially Mexico, and Central Americans' suspicion that legalization could be less painful and costly is reasonable. Whether or not legalization would in fact be a good thing for Central America, the situation is desperate enough that they must at least consider their options.

A British couple are on their way home after they were arrested at an Egyptian airport on suspicion of trying to smuggle antiquities out of the country before experts realised they were imitations bought at a local bazaar.Officials at Luxor International Airport stopped Michael Newey, 65, and his wife Angela, 62, with 19 mementoes including Pharonic statues, a Greco-Roman bronze coin and a 16th century Bible.During an examination of the items by the Ministry of Antiquities, Mrs Newey was said to have smashed three of them and the police were called.

A Greek bronze helmet, covered with gold leaf and decorated with snakes, lions and a peacock's tail (or palmette), has been discovered in the waters of Haifa Bay in Israel. But how this helmet ended up at the bottom of the bay is a mystery.The helmet dates back around 2,600 years and likely belonged to a wealthy Greek mercenary who took part in a series of wars, immortalized in the Bible, which ravaged the region at that time. Archaeologists believe that he likely fought for an Egyptian pharaoh named Necho II.

Without leap years, Earth would experience "calendar climate change" and the seasons would completely swap every 750 years, a QUT scientist says.Astronomy expert Dr Stephen Hughes said leap years kept the calendar in sync, otherwise the middle of summer would become the middle of winter - as once happened in ancient Egypt."The year, defined as when the sun arrives back at the same place in the sky on its apparent circuit around the Earth, is not exactly 365 days long," Dr Hughes said. "Rather, it's 365 days, 5 hours and 48 minutes. In other words, the calendar is out of sync by about one day out every four years. "So, every four years an extra day puts the Earth calendar in sync."

Some of the earliest humans to inhabit America came from Europe according to a new book. Across Atlantic Ice puts forward a compelling case for people from northern Spain travelling to America by boat, following the edge of a sea ice shelf that connected Europe and America during the last Ice Age, 14,000 to 25,000 years ago.Across Atlantic Ice is the result of more than a decade's research by leading archaeologists Professor Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter (UK) and Dr Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution (USA). Through archaeological evidence, they turn the long-held theory of the origins of New World populations on its head.For more than 400 years, it has been claimed that people first entered America from Asia, via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. We now know that some people did arrive via this route nearly 15,000 years ago, probably by both land and sea.

The last Incan emperor's tomb has remained a mystery for centuries but an expert now believes she may have pinpointed the historic site.The Inca empire spanned more than 1,000 miles of South America in the 1400s and early 1500s, taking in parts of modern-day Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia. Atahualpa was the last of the dynasty and was taken captive during the Spanish conquest in what is now Cajamarca, Peru. He had just defeated his brother in a violent civil war when the conquistadors arrived in the Andes, quickly capturing him and holding him for ransom.Atahualpa offered to fill a large room with gold and silver in return for his life being spared and the Spanish agreed but they went on to execute him anyway. Puppet Inca rulers were installed following his death in 1533 but the empire began to fall apart.

Prepare to be confronted with something scarier (and cuter) than Jurassic Park's raptors. In the mid to late Jurassic, the world was full of furry, flying vampire pterosaurs who fed on dino blood.The Jeholopterus was a small pterosaur who was found in Northeastern China. Though originally identified as an insect-eater, an odd mystery about the animal eventually led one researcher to suggest the creature was actually feeding on the blood of nearby sauropods. Let's take a look at the discovery of Jeholopterus, and what spurred great debate over whether it was a blood-sucker.

Ambling through the parched and scarred landscape of eastern Washington state is the 60-mile-long Grand Coulee, the largest of the stair-step canyons that give the region called the Channeled Scablands its character. Looking out over this majestic scenery, a visitor feels compelled to throw open both arms, take a deep breath, and say, "Wow! How did this get here?"That turns out to be a deceptively simple question. It's the same one that J Harlen Bretz, a geologist from the University of Chicago, asked in 1922. And it's the question that led him to propose one of the boldest ideas in all of 20th-century geology.

It's like a cosmic version of Russian nesting dolls. Tiny dust grains collected from the surface of the asteroid Itokawa harbour even smaller particles and craters of their own - the scars of high-speed collisions with nanometre-sized impactors.In 2010, Japan's Hayabusa probe delivered more than 1500 rocky particles from Itokawa to Earth. Studies of some of the grains last year suggested that the 500-metre-long asteroid probably began its life as a much larger rock, measuring at least 20 kilometres across. Indeed, Itokawa has a very low density, suggesting it is a rocky rubble pile that probably coalesced after its parent body was smashed in an impact.

Have you ever wondered why you always find fragments of blue and white pottery wherever you dig in urban Britain?Was there a mass smashing of China in protest against the Boxer uprising? Or did some 19th century quack suggest that broken crockery was an infallible deterrent to slugs?We may find out a little more courtesy of Greater Manchester's biggest-ever archaeological project which is roping-in more than 9000 people to dig for history.

An extinct penguin that lived in New Zealand 27 million years ago may have been the tallest ever.At 1.3 metres in height, Kairuku grebneffi would have looked down on today's 1-metre-tall emperor penguin. It has a rival for the tallest penguin crown, though, as a few fossil bones of a penguin that may have been slightly taller were found in Peru in 2007.The new find is so complete that "we could put the whole animal back together", says Daniel Ksepka of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Consequently its height is known more accurately than the ancient Peruvian penguin.

British researchers believe that the worms, which live in ponds and lakes, could live forever after examining their ability to repeatedly regenerate.Experts from Nottingham University managed to create a colony of more than 20,000 flatworms from one original by chopping it into pieces and observing each section grow into a new complete worm.They believe that it could help scientists develop new methods to allow humans to stay younger for longer.

Among the many applications of flexible thermoelectric materials is a wristwatch powered by the temperature difference between the human body and the surrounding environment. But if you wanted this watch made of low-cost carbon nanotube (CNT)/polymer materials, you would currently need a piece of fabric with an area of about 500 cm2, which is about 50 times greater than the area of a typical wristwatch.

The first detailed maps of the Earth's forests at the time of the dinosaurs have been drawn up. The patterns of vegetation, together with information about the rate of tree growth, support the idea that the Earth was stifling hot 100 million years ago.High temperatures and possibly more atmospheric carbon dioxide caused forests to extend much closer to the poles and grow almost twice as fast as they do today.

Some of the earliest evidence of prehistoric architecture has been discovered in the Jordanian desert, providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago.The ancient hut structures in eastern Jordan were discovered by a team of archaeologists including academics from The University of Nottingham. The finding suggests that the area was once intensively occupied and that the origins of architecture in the region date back 20 millennia, well before the emergence of agriculture.

In one of the most unusual UFO videos ever posted, a "cloud" falls from the sky and the cameraman is able to put his hand right through it as it gets caught against a nearby fence.It's not clear where the video was filmed, but the witnesses are speaking Arabic and dressed in garb common to the region. The action picks up as the fluffy, unknown substance floats to the ground looking remarkably like a real cloud falling from a clear blue sky. Of course that's impossible.After filming the UFO for a few moments from a car, one of the occupants jumps out and walks over to the cloudy object as it gets caught up against a fence. That's when it gets really weird.

For more than 500 years, the Maya kings ruled the New World's richest and most advanced civilization. But then, around 800 C.E., the Maya empire began to collapse and its kings soon disappeared; by 1000 C.E., most of its great cities and temples lay in ruins. What happened? In recent years, scientists have increasingly blamed a series of droughts for the calamity, but the evidence has been ambiguous. A new study concludes that drought did indeed play an important role, but the actual decrease in rainfall was relatively modest.

Ghana coach Goran Stevanovic has revealed deep divisions within the squad, saying some players used witchcraft against their own team-mates.The Serbian made his claim in a leaked report on the Black Stars' failure at the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations, where they were beaten by eventual winners Zambia in the semi-finals."We all need to help in changing some players' mentality about using 'black power' to destroy themselves, and also make sure we instil discipline and respect for each other," the coach said.

Newly published results from an international team of researchers show that most of an earlier population of Neanderthals in Europe had already died off around 50,000 years ago.Previously, the established view was of a stable Neanderthal population in Europe from nearly 250,000 to 30,000 years ago and then they disappeared from the archaeological record after modern humans arrived, however this new research suggests the accepted paradigm must be revised.

"There could be billions of Earthlike planets in the Universe but a great majority of them may have a totally different internal and atmospheric structure. Building planets in chemically non-solar environments (which are very common in the Universe) may lead to the formation of strange worlds, very different from the Earth! The amount of radioactive and some refractory elements (especially Si) may have drastic implications for planetary processes such as plate tectonics and volcanic activity," says Garik Israelian, one of the team members of a new study. Israelian is an astrophysicist who led the team which found the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of black holes.

A mysterious phenomenon detected by space probes has finally been explained, thanks to a massive computer simulation that was able to precisely align with details of spacecraft observations. The finding could not only solve an astrophysical puzzle, but might also lead to a better ability to predict high-energy electron streams in space that could damage satellites.

Humans are frequently blamed for deforestation and the destruction of environments, yet there are also examples of peoples and cultures around the world that have learned to manage and conserve the precious resources around them. The Yanesha of the upper Peruvian Amazon and the Tibetans of the Himalayas are two groups of indigenous peoples carrying on traditional ways of life, even in the face of rapid environmental changes. Over the last 40 years, Dr. Jan Salick, senior curator and ethnobotanist with the William L. Brown Center of the Missouri Botanical Garden has worked with these two cultures. She explains how their traditional knowledge and practices hold the key to conserving, managing and even creating new biodiversity in a paper released in the new text, "Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, and Sustainability," published by Cambridge University Press.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Sarah Parcak calls herself a space archaeologist. Her Twitter handle is even @indyfromspace.And indeed, the UAB professor is a mixture of sci-fi technology and an old-fashioned, Indiana Jones-style archaeologist. She wears khakis and a cool hat, but she also uses satellite images shot from 400 miles up to pinpoint ancient archaeological sites.And this week she'll take a coveted spot on the main stage of the prestigious TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., which brings together top thought leaders in technology, entertainment, design and other fields. She'll have three minutes on Tuesday to explain what makes her research special.

The Antiquities Seizures Unit (ASU) arrested a British couple trying to smuggle 19 artifacts dated to different archaeological eras at Cairo International Airport on Sunday.Hassan Rasmi head of the ASU said that these objects include five clay and green faience ancient Egyptian Ushabti (funerary figurines) each nine centimeters tall, clay pots with human-shaped heads, Late Period lamps decorated with winged amulets and the goddess Isis, Ostraca (inscribed stone reliefs), Graeco-Roman bronze coins and Coptic manuscripts, and a Bible.In collaboration with the customs police, the objects were confiscated and transferred to the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square where it would be subjected to archaeological examination and restoration.

Hades wasn't the happiest place, the Department of Motor Vehicles of the ancient Greek afterlife.There, in a gloomy underworld, departed heroes such as Achilles gathered mostly to grouse about their boredom, and await the verdict of the judges of the dead."I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead," said Achilles, the greatest of Greek heroes, commenting on the scenery, according to the ancient poem, The Odyssey.

Hailed since ancient times for its medicinal properties, we still have a lot to learn about the effects of rosemary. Now researchers writing in Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology, published by SAGE, have shown for the first time that blood levels of a rosemary oil component correlate with improved cognitive performance.

Did it feel like time flew in November 2009? It turns out the days were actually going a wee bit faster for part of that month, according to a team of NASA and European scientists.Earth spun about 0.1 millisecond faster for a two-week stretch, said study co-author Steven Marcus, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.The planet's speedier spin appears to have been due to a slowdown in an ocean current that whips around Antarctica.

Jianhui manipulates objects with his hands and gets a drink as a reward. Unknown to him, not far away a robot hand mirrors his fingers' moves as it receives instructions from the chips implanted in his brain.Zheng Xiaoxiang of the Brain-Computer Interface Research Team at Zhejiang University in Zijingang, China, and colleagues announced earlier this week that they had succeeded in capturing and deciphering the signals from the monkey's brain and interpreting them into the real-time robotic finger movements.The two sensors implanted in Jianhui's brain monitor just 200 neurons in his motor cortex, Zheng says. However, this was enough to accurately interpret the monkey's movements and control the robotic hand.

On the cusp of trial over the catastrophic 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, phalanxes of lawyers, executives and public officials have spent the waning days in settlement talks. Holed up in small groups inside law offices, war rooms and hotel suites in New Orleans and Washington, they are trying to put a number on what BP and its partners in the doomed Macondo well project should pay to make up for the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.No matter what, the case is all but guaranteed to set records as the most expensive environmental disaster in history, far surpassing the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989. Exxon ultimately settled with the U.S. government for $1 billion, which would be about $1.8 billion today.

Humanity can keep its space-junk problem under control by removing about five big pieces of orbital debris every year from the huge cloud surrounding Earth, experts say.Such an active remediation effort, combined with more passive measures like draining fuel from defunct satellites, would likely keep space-junk levels relatively constant for the next 200 years or so. And there's more good news: We probably have a decade or two to figure out how to do it, researchers say.

IBM researchers have created a subatomic snapshot of the electric charge within a molecule, an advance that could have applications in ever-smaller transistors or in solar power.Scientists from IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology today that describes a technique for measuring how electrons move when forming molecular bonds. This method allows them to create images of how the electric charge is distributed within molecules, giving science a better picture of chemistry at the molecular level, said Fabian Mohn, who coauthored the paper.Having a picture of the electric charge distribution could be useful tool for research on making tiny transistors the size of a molecule or developing solar cells from inexpensive organic materials, he said.

WASHINGTON: The collapse of the Mayan civilization was likely due to a relatively mild drought, much like the drier conditions expected in the coming years due to climate change, scientists said Thursday.Scholars have long believed that a major drought caused severe dry conditions that killed off the ancient culture known for its mastery of language, math and astronomy.But researchers from the Yucatan Center for Scientific Research in Mexico and the University of Southampton in Britain said their analysis shows the drought only caused reductions of 25 to 40 per cent less annual rain.

A newly discovered planet 4,000 light-years away is just too dense.Dubbed CoRoT-20b, the planet is thought to be a gas giant about four-fifths the size of Jupiter and orbits close to a sunlike star. Despite the new planet's relatively diminutive size, this world has four times Jupiter's mass, making CoRoT-20b one of the densest known planets, a new study says.That poses a problem for astronomers: If CoRoT-20b is structured like a traditional gas giant, with a solid core surrounded by a gassy atmosphere, the planet's core would have to make up 50 to 77 percent of the world's total mass. By contrast, Jupiter's core is thought to represent just 15 percent of that planet's mass.

Children with autism spectrum disorders who also have serious behavioral problems responded better to medication combined with training for their parents than to treatment with medication alone, Yale researchers and their colleagues report in the February issue of Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry."Serious behavioral problems interfere with everyday living for children and their families," said senior author on the study Lawrence Scahill, professor at Yale University School of Nursing and the Child Study Center. "Decreasing these serious behavioral problems results in children who are more able to manage everyday living."

A group of Mexican scientists is working on a vaccine that could reduce addiction to one of the world's most notorious narcotics: heroin.Researchers at the country's National Institute of Psychiatry say they have successfully tested the vaccine on mice and are preparing to test it on humans.The vaccine, which has been patented in the US, makes the body resistant to the effects of heroin, so users would no longer get a rush of pleasure when they smoked or injected it.

A small, twin-propeller plane flies over the Amazon rainforest in eastern Peru. The scale of the vegetation is extraordinary. The tree canopy stretches as far as the eye can see -- an endless array of broccoli florets bounded only by haze and horizon. Greg Asner, 43, has seen the rainforest from this vantage point many times before, but he still stares out of the window in rapt fascination.This patch of forest in the Tambopata National Reserve is rich with life, even by the Amazon's standards. A 50-hectare patch of forest -- the size of as many rugby pitches -- contains more plant species than the whole of North America. "We might as well be exploring Mars," says Asner. "These are areas where no human has ever been. There's no access.

On the front porch of an old Coast Guard station on Appledore Island, seven miles off the southern coast of Maine, Thomas Seeley and I sat next to 6,000 quietly buzzing bees. Seeley wore a giant pair of silver headphones over a beige baseball cap, a wild fringe of hair blowing out the back; next to him was a video camera mounted on a tripod. In his right hand, Seeley held a branch with a lapel microphone taped to the end. He was recording the honeybee swarm huddling inches away on a board nailed to the top of a post.Seeley, a biologist from Cornell University, had cut a notch out of the center of the board and inserted a tiny screened box called a queen cage. It housed a single honeybee queen, along with a few attendants. Her royal scent acted like a magnet on the swarm.

Incredulity reigned among British archaeologists yesterday after Senator Frank Moss, chairman of the US Senate Space Committee, told a gathering of American mapmakers that a speck on a photograph of Mount Ararat taken from 450 miles up by a satellite might be the remains of Noah's Ark. "If it's not the Loch Ness Monster, it's the Ark," said one expert, and a (non-archaeological) colleague asked: "Are there two sets of animal tracks leading from it?".

It was first available when Britain was under threat from Napoleon but it has now been re-published for free at the Project Gutenberg online digital library.The book includes gems suchs as 'ace of spades' for a widow, 'all-a-mort' to be struck dumb, and 'angling for farthings', which means to beg out of a prison window with a cap or box.The dictionary has already become an online hit. A selection of words can be found here.

An ancient global warming event shrunk the earliest horses down to the size of scrawny housecats, according to new research that could have implications for what mammals might look like in a future warming world.During what's known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, about 56 million years ago, a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans boosted average global temperatures by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 degrees Celsius) over 175,000 years. Mammals responded to this climate change by shrinking, with about one-third of species getting smaller.

Stone Age cave paintings evoke reverent silence in most people. But David Lubman, Miriam Kolar, and Steve Waller prefer to shout and clap instead.They are among a growing number of researchers probing the acoustic properties of ancient sites. Their research, presented this week in Vancouver, British Columbia at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, shows that ancient peoples created sophisticated sonic illusions in ceremonial spaces ranging from Mayan temples to Stonehenge.

New findings from an international team of researchers show that most Neanderthals in Europe died off around 50,000 years ago. The previously held view of a Europe populated by a stable Neanderthal population for hundreds of thousands of years up until modern humans arrived must therefore be revised.This new perspective on the Neanderthals comes from a study of ancient DNA published February 25 in Molecular Biology and Evolution.The results indicate that most Neanderthals in Europe died off as early as 50,000 years ago. After that, a small group of Neanderthals recolonised central and western Europe, where they survived for another 10,000 years before modern humans entered the picture.

He was old, but not ancient, the man next to us at the delicatessen. It was 1973. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I had ordered dinner and this old guy, sitting by himself, seemed lonely, so we got talking and he told us how he had grown up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and that when he was a boy, his next-door neighbor was a famous man, a really famous man.We asked, "Who was it?" And he said, "Have you ever heard of the mad monk, Rasputin?"I knew of Rasputin. He'd lived, I'd thought, in a Russian palace with the Romanov czar, Nicholas II, and had magically healed the czar's son from a supposedly incurable disease, then gained great sway over the Romanov family, and then, in a ghastly scene, was shot, clubbed and poisoned to death by a group of noblemen just before the start of the Russian Revolution. In my mind, all this happened in a different age. The pictures I'd seen showed him with a 19th century beard, dressed in robes.

A book by a former mistress of President John F Kennedy has revealed new details of their relationship.Extracts in the US media of Once Upon A Secret by Mimi Alford recount the affair she had with the president whilst an intern at the White House.She also relates Mr Kennedy's thoughts on the Cuban missile crisis and the death of his baby son.

The recent delay of the next manned launch to the International Space Station due to a damaged Russian space capsule highlights NASA's critical need for commercially built vehicles, space policy experts say.The Russian Soyuz spacecraft was originally scheduled to launch to the orbiting outpost on March 29, but the capsule was damaged in a botched pressure test and is unusable for the upcoming flight. Instead, Russia is preparing the next spaceship on the line, which means the liftoff will occur no earlier than May 15, NASA's space station program manager Mike Suffredini announced Thursday (Feb. 2).

Thomas Edison came up with a way to play back recorded sound in 1878. But 20 years before the inventor patented the phonograph, French scientist Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was fiddling around in his laboratory trying to come up with a way to record sound. His invention, the phonautogram, enabled him to create a visual representation of his voice.Scott de Martinville wasn't able to listen back to his recordings, though. The science of acoustics was in its infancy. He could only see lines etched in soot. His achievements were long-forgotten until a group of historians, audio engineers and scientists searched for his work. The First Sounds Collaborative found it in the archives of the French Academy of Sciences in 2008.

Powered by acid and capable of moving at blistering speeds in excess of 640 kilometres per hour, scientists in California have created a novel and quite lethal-sounding torpedo. But this one has rather more of a humanitarian agenda.Like something out of the Fantastic Voyage, the torpedo is just 10 microns in length and designed to travel within the human body with the aim of delivering drugs, says Joseph Wang at the University of California, San Diego.

Scientists say NASA is about to propose major cuts in its exploration of other planets, especially Mars. But even before the cuts are unveiled, lawmakers are vowing to fight "tooth and nail" to preserve missions to the Red Planet.With limited money for science and an over-budget new space telescope, the space agency essentially had to make a choice in where it wanted to explore: the neighboring planet or the far-off cosmos.Based on the advance word about NASA's budget for the coming year, Mars lost out.

Gene therapy has markedly improved vision in both eyes in three women who were born virtually blind. The patients can now avoid obstacles even in dim light, read large print and recognize people's faces. The operation, researchers predict, should work even better in children and adolescents blinded by the same condition.

Deep in the Yucatan's primordial forests, a sprawling Maya city lies protected by jaguars, monkeys and miles of flatout wilderness.The sun has set since we entered the jungle, leaving us in total blackness except for the beam of light from José's head lamp, which bobs over vines and trees. As we ascend a rise, I notice square stones emerging from the black ground around us, stacked into low, uneven walls."What's this?" I ask José, our teenage guide, who we rustled up from the nearest village. "A Maya structure," he says, without breaking stride."Does it have a name?" I ask. "No," he says. It doesn't.

Research published today (22nd February) provides, for the first time, a clear answer to the debate as to whether Triceratops and other extinct creatures took on a more mammal-like or more reptile like posture.Dr. Shin-ichi Fujiwara from the University of Tokyo and Professor John Hutchinson from the Royal Veterinary College have developed a new, advanced method that provides insight into the kinds of forelimb postures animals might use, derived from simple measurements on bones.

A stick figure man with a giant phallus dubbed "the little horny man" by its discoverers is the oldest rock carving found yet in the Americas, researchers say.These findings might shed new light on when the New World was first settled, scientists added.The time frame during which humans first reached the Americas remains hotly debated. One key to settling this controversy would involve uncovering early examples of human artifacts, such as art.

In three stars far, far away, one of the rarest elements known to man has been spotted, improving our understanding about how heavy elements are created, bolstering evidence that a rare type of supernova may have been responsible for their creation.Tellurium -- a brittle and toxic semiconducting metal -- has for the first time been discovered in the atmospheres of three stars that are nearly 12 billion years old. The stars, all a few thousand light-years from Earth, live inside the Milky Way.With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers from MIT and other institutions were able to "see" tellurium by the light it absorbs.

In the dark abyss of the world's deepest known cave lurks a newly found species of primitive eyeless insect, one that researchers are calling the deepest land animal ever found.The creature, now known as Plutomurus ortobalaganensis, is one of four newly discovered species of wingless insects called springtails, which commonly live in total darkness in caves, where they feed on fungi and decomposing organic matter.

A 300-million-year-old forest has been found preserved by volcanic ash, just as the Roman town of Pompeii was.The remarkable discovery was made near a coal mine at the city of Wuda in China, by a University of Pennsylvania scientist and Chinese researchers.The study site is unique as it gives a snapshot of a moment in time. Because volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest over the course of only a few days, the plants were preserved as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew.

There are places where open flames are particularly frowned upon. A textile mill or a stationery store, for instance. And then there are places where the mere mention of a flame, fire, spark, smoke or ember elicits pandemonium. The San Francisco Antiquarian Book, Print and Paper Fair, held earlier this month, would be such a place. In a building stretching one square block sat some of the rarest texts, maps and manuscripts in the world, precariously flammable, and indubitably expensive.

Some people reach for the stars, but the stars themselves seem to be reaching for the planets. Although Earth and its planetary neighbors were born with the sun, a new study says billions of stars in our galaxy likely grabbed planets from the depths of space. The finding may explain the puzzling presence of worlds located far from their suns and even suggests that our solar system could harbor a planet that lurks unseen well beyond Pluto.

A bright, cloudless day. A remote village in the heart of a vast Amazon wilderness. The head of his tribe moved to tears -- tears of joy, pride and gratitude.It was February 4th, 2012, and Romero Ríos Ushinahua, leader of his people and one of the last members of the Maijuna tribe was witnessing a ceremony to declare the nearly 1-million acre Maijuna Reserve.I was privileged to be on hand that day, and to see history in the making.

Plans were drawn up to harvest the microscopic creatures to sustain the country if food supplies were cut off during Second World War.Secret letters between academics that proposed harvesting tons of protein-rich plankton from Scottish sea lochs have just been discovered.They claimed the waters were "soup-like" in richness with nutritional material and that some types of plankton were quite "tasty."They made diagrams of nets, explored areas where it could work and even carried out trials from 1941-43 to see if it was possible. They proposed taking the tons plankton to drying plants before it would be sorted, mixed and turned into food.

The world of science was upended last year when an experiment appeared to show one of Einstein's fundamental theories was wrong - but now the lab behind it says the result could have been caused by a loose cable.Physicists at the CERN research institute near Geneva appeared to contradict Albert Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity last year when they reported that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster than light.

Astronomers have claimed the existence of a new class of planet: a "water-world" with a thick, steamy atmosphere.The exoplanet GJ 1214b, just 40 light-years away, is a so-called "Super Earth" - bigger than our planet, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter.Observations using the Hubble telescope now seem to confirm that a large fraction of its mass is water.The planet's high temperatures suggest exotic materials might exist there.

Insects cover our planet. Filed into 750,000 different species, at any given time there are one million trillion bugs buzzing around the globe.About 14,000 of those species are blood-feeders, meaning they drink their meals by puncturing the skin of vertebrates, including humans. Besides being a nuisance, blood-feeding insects, such as certain strains of mosquitoes, are infected with parasitic organisms that are no threat to the bugs themselves, but if transferred to humans, become toxic, or worse, lethal.

Determining social relationships between populations in the past can be difficult. Trade can be inferred from evidence such as pottery with foreign designs, or non-local foods. Warfare can be determined from the presence of mass graves or cemeteries of adult males displaying trauma, or weaponry showing signs of frequent use. However, trauma is not always a sign of conflict with external populations. It can also reflect the normal struggles of daily life or even interpersonal violence within the community.

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year's end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish "international control over the Internet" through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet's flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

The interest generated by our Wall Street Journal op-ed of Jan. 27, "No Need to Panic about Global Warming," is gratifying but so extensive that we will limit our response to the letter to the editor the Journal published on Feb. 1, 2012 by Kevin Trenberth and 37 other signatories, and to the Feb. 6 letter by Robert Byer, President of the American Physical Society.We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by eliminating fossil fuels, the recipient of medical care (all of us) is being asked to submit to what amounts to an economic heart transplant. According to most patient bills of rights, the patient has a strong say in the treatment decision. Natural questions from the patient are whether a heart transplant is really needed, and how successful the diagnostic team has been in the past. In this respect, an important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions.

An extraordinary council of marine mammals was clicking late into last night to consider the future of cetacean species after human scientists proposed a declaration of rights for some of the world's smartest animals......Well, if they're that clever, they would be, right? A group of biologists and philosophers said at a conference in Vancouver this week that dolphins and whales were so smart they deserved to be treated as "non-human persons". But why stop there? Nature is overrun with over-achievers who threaten the supremacy "human persons" earned mainly by killing things and inventing calculators. Let's take a moment to marvel at their staggering feats and brilliant brainpower.

Earth's clouds got a little lower -- about one percent on average -- during the first decade of this century, finds a new NASA-funded university study based on NASA satellite data. The results have potential implications for future global climate.Scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand analyzed the first 10 years of global cloud-top height measurements (from March 2000 to February 2010) from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft. The study, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, revealed an overall trend of decreasing cloud height. Global average cloud height declined by around one percent over the decade, or by around 100 to 130 feet (30 to 40 meters). Most of the reduction was due to fewer clouds occurring at very high altitudes.

Researchers have unearthed a forest in northern China preserved under a layer of ash deposited 300 million years ago.Preservation of the forest, just west of the Inner Mongolian district of Wuda, has been likened to that of the Italian city of Pompeii.The researchers were able to "reconstruct" nearly 1,000 sq m of the forest's trees and plant distributions.This rare insight into how the region once looked is described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Climate scientists have been examining the past environments and archaeological remains of Norse Greenland, Iceland and North Atlantic Islands for several years. They have been particularly interested in the end period of the settlements in the early part of the Little Ice Age (1300-1870 CE) and have been able to analyse how well the Norse responded to changes in economy, trade, politics and technology, against a backdrop of changing climate.

Scientists have doubled the power output of a "bacteria battery" by selecting microbes from a UK river estuary, including one normally found in space.The development takes microbial power technology a stage nearer its goal of providing a portable, independent and renewable source of power for use with low-energy devices and in parts of the world without electricity.A multi-disciplinary team from Newcastle university focussed on the river Wear estuary to collect and test different bacteria for their power-generation potential. The microbial power process is well-established in sewage treatment and water cleansing, but remains well short of providing a significant supply of electricity.

A seven-million-year-old trail of fossilised footprints in the Arabian desert was left by a herd of ancient elephants, according to scientists.Researchers say the "trackways" reveal that animals that left them had a rich and complex social structure.Just like modern elephant society, this consisted of family herds and of solitary male animals.The study is published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Unlike Earth, our Moon has no active volcanoes, and the traces of its past volcanic activity date from billions of years ago. This is surprising because recent Moonquake data suggest that there is plenty of liquid magma deep within the Moon and part of the rocks residing there are thought to be molten. Scientists have now identified a likely reason for this peaceful surface life: the hot, molten rock in the Moon's deep interior could be so dense that it is simply too heavy to rise to the surface like a bubble in water. For their experiments, the scientists produced microscopic copies of moon rock collected by the Apollo missions and melted them at the extremely high pressures and temperatures found inside the Moon. They then measured their densities with powerful X-ray beams.

"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material -- it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," according to Ralph Lorenz of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "We are carbon-based life, and understanding how far along the chain of complexity towards life that chemistry can go in an environment like Titan will be important in understanding the origins of life throughout the universe.""When we designed the original tour for the Cassini spacecraft, we really did not know what we would find, especially at Enceladus and Titan," said Dennis Matson, the JPL Cassini project scientist.

Fifty years ago this week the idea of mutually assured nuclear destruction was outlined in a major speech. But how did this frightening concept of the Cold War fade from people's psyches?Today the notion of all-out nuclear war is rarely discussed. There are concerns about Iran and North Korea's nuclear programmes and fears that terrorists might get hold of a nuclear bomb.But the fear of a war in which the aim is to wipe out the entire population of an enemy has startlingly diminished.

The tree had been on fire for over a week before anyone noticed. The Senator, one of the oldest Cypress trees in the world, was killed when a smoldering ignition from an errant lightning strike slowly transformed it into a towering chimney and fuel source in one. Or maybe it didn't happen like that at all. Perhaps it was an errant cigarette, or a sinister match strategically placed in its hollow berth. The mystery endures, but the fact remains: on January 16, 2012 The Senator collapsed and died, engulfed in flames. It was 3,500 years old.

Dolphins deserve to be treated as non-human "persons" whose rights to life and liberty should be respected, scientists meeting in Canada have been told.A small group of experts in philosophy, conservation and dolphin behaviour were canvassing support for a "Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans".They believe dolphins - and their whale cousins - are sufficiently intelligent and self-aware to justify the same ethical considerations given to humans.

Motorists of The Silver State, don't be alarmed if you soon glance over at the car next to you and see a passenger waving from a driverless car as you zoom across Interstate 15.Nevada lays claim (mining pun intended) to some fairly brazen "firsts," morally suspect as they may be: The first U.S. state to legalize casino-style gambling; the first state to sanction the use of the gas chamber for executions; and, to top it off, the first (and only) state to legalize prostitution in the modern era.Depending how you feel about sharing the road with driverless vehicles, Nevada's newest "first" sounds just as reckless as the aforementioned.

A mounted human head strikes a brain-teasing pose-just one of eight forgotten but stunningly preserved 19th-century Italian mummies whose secrets of preservation have only recently been unraveled.Working in the town of Salò, anatomist Giovan Battista Rini (1795-1856) "petrified" the corpses and body parts by bathing them in a cocktail of mercury and other heavy metals, according to new chemical analyses and CT scans, to be described in a future issue of the journal Clinical Anatomy.

Eastern Europe's tradition of political revolt has met the digital age. This time it's not communists or food shortages fueling fury, but an international copyright treaty that opponents say threatens freedom on the Internet.A grassroots protest movement erupted last month in Poland and spread quickly across the former Eastern Bloc and beyond. The growing opposition against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has raised questions about the fate of the treaty, which is important to the governments of the United States and other industrialized economies.

When John Glenn was preparing for launch on the first U.S orbital spaceflight, he realized that his capsule would be passing over some parts of the world that might be inhabited by aborigines -- native tribes cut off from civilization and unaware that humans were flying in space."I was thinking that if I had to make an emergency re-entry and came down in one of those areas, well ... The people on the ground might hear a sonic boom, look up, and here comes a little black dot. It sets down, the hatch blows off the side and out steps this thing in a silver suit," Glenn told reporters during a press conference marking the 50th anniversary of his flight.

Aggressive infections in hospitals are an increasing health problem worldwide. The development of bacterial resistance is alarming. Now a young Danish scientist has found a natural substance in a Chilean rainforest plant that effectively supports the effect of traditional treatment with antibiotics.

Dirty snow melts faster than clean snow. Nowhere is this clearer than on the glaciers of the Himalayas, where scientists have recorded accelerated melting, coinciding with a greying of the glaciers.Asia's industrial revolution is pumping out lots of smoke. Much of that smoke is billowing over the Himalayas, depositing dirty black soot on pristine white glaciers. Jing Ming, of the China National Climate Center in Beijing, and colleagues, have been using satellite data going back to 2000 to measure how dirty the glaciers have become.

By generating strips of meat from stem cells researchers believe they can create a product that is identical to a real burger.The process of culturing the artificial meat in the lab is so laborious that the finished product, expected to arrive in eight months' time, will cost about £220,000 (EUR250,000).But researchers expect that after producing their first patty they will be able to scale up the process to create affordable artificial meat products.Mass-producing beef, pork, chicken and lamb in the lab could satisfy the growing global demand for meat - forecast to double within the next 40 years - and dramatically reduce the harm that farming does to the environment.

Unlike Earth, the Moon has no active volcanoes despite the fact that recent moonquake data suggest that there is a lot of magma under its surface.A team of Dutch earth scientists -- lead by Mirjam van Kan Parker and Wim van Westrenen from VU University Amsterdam -- have now identified the likely reason for the lack of volcanic activity: the hot, molten rock contained within the Moon's interior could be so dense that it is too heavy to rise to the surface. The team came to this conclusion by producing microscopic copies of Moon rock collected by the Apollo missions and melting them at extremely high pressures and temperatures, similar to those found inside the Moon. They then measured their densities with powerful X-rays generated at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF).

The US space agency Nasa recently announced that half of the moon rocks brought back to Earth from two Apollo space missions have gone missing. They were given as gifts to the nations of the world. So what happened to them?Towards the end of the Apollo 17 mission on 13 December 1972, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt - the last men to have set foot on the moon - picked up a rock.Cernan announced: "We'd like to share a piece of this rock with so many of the countries throughout the world."His wish was fulfilled.

A total of 23 pre-Columbian stone plaques dating back over 550 years were discovered by archaeologists in front of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan in Mexico City, with carvings illustrating Aztec myths including the birth of the god of war Huitzilopochtli.The sculpted images are carved on slabs of tezontle (a volcanic rock) and feature depictions of serpents, captives and warriors. They also feature other figures relating to the mythological origins of Aztec civilization.

What does music look like? Benjamin Samuel Koren, who runs computational geometry company 1:One, wanted to understand the architecture of Bach's Goldberg Variations."If you listen to the music, it's difficult to get a feel for the intricate structure of the piece," says the 30-year-old. "So the idea was to make it visual." Koren mapped 75,730 notes of the 40-minute piece as discrete Midi "events", then assigned each note a colour. Although the colours are subjective, they are relative to one another, analogous to the notes between musical intervals."I had no idea what would come out," says Koren. "But you can see three axes emerging in the piece -- blue, yellow, blue, corresponding to the Variations' fundamental harmony. The play on words may seem trivial, but it does have a golden centre."

Sir Isaac Newton reshaped the course of science and our view of our place in the world. But he was a renaissance man - and not only because of when he lived.Besides mathematics and physics, Newton's interests spread into alchemy and theology, and now a collection of around 7,500 of his original manuscripts, mainly on theology, have been digitised and launched online by the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. The handwritten papers show his feverish dedication to this work, which includes investigations in Hebrew and Greek as he tried to unlock the secrets of ancient texts.

Some of the world's most endangered marine life could be saved from extinction by establishing mobile nature reserves that would protect vulnerable species as they moved around the oceans, scientists say.The initiative could provide safe havens for endangered loggerhead and leatherback turtles, albatrosses, sharks and other travelling species, and sea life that is abandoning its historic territories in response to climate change.

Poachers have slaughtered at least 200 elephants in the past five weeks in a patch of Africa where they are more endangered than anywhere else on Earth, wildlife activists say.The International Fund for Animal Welfare warned that the money made from selling elephant tusks was fuelling misery throughout the continent.

It's 2060, and you're planning to visit your grandkids in California. You know they love animals, so you're thinking of taking them to a zoo Let's see what your search results pull up:Welcome to the San Francisco All-Robotic Zoo!The most advanced robotic animals in the world, straight from Silicon Valley | New tiger model just in | Totally humane - no real animals in cagesDodo Chick Exhibit Now Open at the San Diego ZooCome visit our brand-new dodo chicks! Touch here to enter the naming contest.

Past Author of the Month, Jason Gregory, has created a wonderful presentation called 'The Sacred Sound of Creation'. It has been embedded in his AOM article for GrahamHancock.com readers to see."One World Within Productions presents Jason Gregory's experiential journey known as "The Sacred Sound of Creation." Combined with the artistry of US filmmaker and musician Justin Jezewski, "The Sacred Sound of Creation" is an expression of consciousness through knowledge, music and visualization, which explores the fundamental principles of reality."

We have a new article now posted on the articles page about cyclical time and predetermintion.Part 1: Cyclic Time on the Financial MarketsIt is often said that history repeats itself. Why is it then, that we 'know' this, but, do not 'act upon it' ? In fact, what really happens is, that we recognise cyclic time only after certain events have taken place and we compare those events to something that has happened in the past. We do not know the reasons for these cycles, and frankly, we tend not to bother with understanding them.

An ancient royal garden has come back into bloom in a way, as scientists have reconstructed what it would've looked like some 2,500 years ago in the kingdom of the biblical Judah.Their reconstruction, which relied on analyses of excavated pollen, reveals a paradise of exotic plants.The luxurious garden had been discovered at Ramat Rahel, an archaeological site located high above the modern city of Jerusalem, about midway between the Old City of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. This site was inhabited since the last century of the Kingdom of Judah (seventh century B.C.) until the early Muslim reign in Palestine (10th century), a period that saw many wars and exchanges of power, with the garden evolving under each civilization.