Newsdesk Archive
On Feb. 18, 1930, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the ninth planet, Pluto. As we celebrate the 82nd anniversary of its discovery, we are also reminded about the controversy that still surrounds this little world's planetary status.In light of the discovery of Eris in 2005, the following year the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to define what a "planet" actually is. Unfortunately for Pluto, it became a rounding error and joined Eris in the "dwarf planet" club.Though many saw this as a demotion, in actuality it was an indication about how exciting and rich our solar system is. Discoveries of minor objects in the Kuiper Belt (a region of space outside the orbit of Neptune) and beyond are increasing, and as our technology improves, more discoveries are inevitable.
New evidence has emerged to support the controversial claim that Hitler had a son with a French teenager, the French magazine LePoint reported on Friday.The man, Jean-Marie Loret, claimed to be the Fuhrer's son in 1981, when he published an autobiography called "Your Father's Name Was Hitler." He died four years later aged 67, not being able to prove his family line.But Loret's Paris lawyer, François Gibault, told the French magazine that a number of photographs and documents can now support the claim.He also revealed how Loret got to know about his parentage.
Biologists at the University of Sussex have been analysing how effectively different species of flowers attract foraging insects.Preliminary results have revealed there is a 100-fold difference in the lure that some popular garden plants have for honey bees and bumblebees.The best plants are the Mexican giant hyssop, which was particularly good for bumblebees, while borage was best for honeybees and lilac sage was second best.
With its miles and miles of dense swamp forest, Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo has long been a wildlife haven. It's home to an unusual primate population: so-called "naïve" chimpanzees, who have so little exposure to humans that they investigate the conservationists who study them, instead of running away.These curious chimps got a recent boost when Congo formally expanded Nouabalé-Ndoki to protect them. Known as the Goualougo Triangle, the 100-plus square-mile forest and its unique great ape population was first reported in 1989 by WCS conservationists.
The researchers trained a colony of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to use cues provided by a different species, the honeybee (Apis mellifera), as well as cues provided by fellow bumblebees to locate food resources on artificial flowers.The results, published online in the journal PLoS-ONE, show that the bumblebees are able to learn the information from the honeybees just as efficiently as when the information came from their own species.
Working at the Drug Policy Alliance for the last twelve years I have read and heard countless stories of people having their lives ruined because of our country's cruel war on drugs. Last weekend, the nationally syndicated show This American Life highlighted a story that is so insane, you don't know whether to laugh or puke.Last year in three high schools in Florida, several undercover police officers posed as students. The undercover cops went to classes, became Facebook friends and flirted with the other students. One 18-year-old honor student named Justin fell in love with an attractive 25-year-old undercover cop after spending weeks sharing stories about their lives, texting and flirting with each other.
The time of the day could be an important factor in the risk of getting an infection, according to researchers in the US.They showed how a protein in the immune system was affected by changes in the chemistry of the body through the day.The findings, published in the journal Immunity, showed the time of an infection changed its severity.An expert said drugs were likely to take advantage of the body clock in the near future.
The technology is a "turbo-powered" version of photosynthesis, the natural process by which plants creates energy from sunlight, but uses electricity to spark the reaction.Rather than producing carbohydrates, the end product is fuel which could be used in petrol engines to power cars and even aeroplanes, researchers said.The Glasgow University scientists running the project expect to have fine-tuned the method within two years, and to have built a working model within five.
A wealth of new discoveries, from animal mummies linked to the jackal god and human remains to an enigmatic statue, are revealing the secrets of an ancient holy place in Egypt once known as the "Terrace of the Great God."The mysterious wooden statue may be a representation of Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who ruled the land 3,500 years ago, the researchers say. She was typically portrayed as a man in statues, but this one, giving a nod to femininity, had a petite waist.
A "unique" medieval coin from the reign of William the Conqueror has been discovered in a field near Gloucester.The hammered silver coin was found by metal detectorist Maureen Jones just north of the city in November.Experts from the Portable Antiquities Scheme said the find "filled in the hole" in the dates the Gloucester mint was known to have been operating.The coin, which dates from 1077-1080, features the name of the moneyer Silacwine and where it was minted.
The men were part of a larger group of 34 who were buried alive when an Allied shell exploded above the tunnel in 1918 causing it to cave in.Thirteen bodies were recovered from the underground shelter but the remaining men had to be left under a mountain of mud as it was too dangerous to retrieve them.Nearly a century later French archaeologists stumbled upon the mass grave on the former Western Front during excavation work for a road building project.
The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol said Friday morning that it had turned in more than enough valid petition signatures to get their initiative on the ballot later this year.The activists said they had submitted 12,000 additional signatures, on top of the 163,000 submitted earlier this year. The additional signatures were required after the Secretary of State said that a random sampling of entries found less than 50 percent were valid.
Back when he was running for president in 2008, Barack Obama insisted that medical marijuana was an issue best left to state and local governments. "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue," he vowed, promising an end to the Bush administration's high-profile raids on providers of medical pot, which is legal in 16 states and the District of Columbia.But over the past year, the Obama administration has quietly unleashed a multiagency crackdown on medical cannabis that goes far beyond anything undertaken by George W. Bush. The feds are busting growers who operate in full compliance with state laws, vowing to seize the property of anyone who dares to even rent to legal pot dispensaries, and threatening to imprison state employees responsible for regulating medical marijuana. With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush's record for medical-marijuana busts. "There's no question that Obama's the worst president on medical marijuana," says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. "He's gone from first to worst."
They trek for days through crocodile-infested swamps and up rain-lashed mountain jungles, but the members of the Malaya Historical Group are not seeking treasure or ancient artefacts. Instead, they're after rusty wreckage.Over the past decade, the six amateur Malaysian military historians have helped locate the confirmed or suspected crash sites of 30 World War II aircraft -- helping bring closure for the families of more than 40 missing British and American air crews.
Some of the thousands of endangered languages destined to soon become extinct because so few people are speaking them are being preserved in the form of digital "talking dictionaries", designed to conserve the sound of the disappearing words and their meanings.Linguists are using Facebook and other kinds of digital technology to preserve the more than half of the world's 7,000 languages that could disappear completely by 2100. It is the first time that some of the languages have ever been recorded, said David Harrison, a National Geographic fellow.
Armed robbers have stolen dozens of artefacts from a Greek museum dedicated to the history of the early Olympics.Two masked men smashed display cabinets and took more than 60 objects after overpowering a guard at the museum in Olympia, officials said.The town's mayor said the items, mostly bronze and clay statuettes, were of "incalculable" value.Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos has tendered his resignation, but it has so far not been accepted.
It may not be the long-awaited news about a Higgs boson discovery, but an "interesting" announcement will soon come from scientists analyzing data from the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab, near Batavia, Ill.Wait a minute, isn't the Tevatron in semi-retirement? Yes and no.Although its house-sized particle detectors have seen their last high-energy collisions, huge quantities of Tevatron data have yet to be analyzed.According to Rob Roser, lead researcher of the Tevatron's CDF experiment, there's something hiding in the data that could support recent findings to come from the Tevatron's European successor, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). What's more, the announcement will be made public next month.
Edinburgh - Modern technology reveals the secrets kept for thousands of years by Egyptian mummies in a major exhibition at Scotland's National Museum.Scientists used advanced scanning techniques on the mummified corpses of a young woman and a girl child laid over her feet to reveal jewellery in the binding and also have plans to tap their DNA to discover whether the two are related.
Support for Acta in Europe is waning as both Bulgaria and the Netherlands refuse to ratify the international anti-piracy agreement.Bulgaria will not ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement over fears it will curb freedom to download movies and music for free and encourage internet surveillance, economy minister Traicho Traikov said on Tuesday.More than 4,000 people marched in the capital Sofia last Saturday calling on parliament not to ratify the act. Similar rallies drew thousands of protesters across eastern Europe, as well as in Germany, France and Ireland.
Learning about the academic and military origins of the Internet as a way to keep communicating, even after a nuclear event, thrilled me as a teenager back in the '90s. And yet the Egyptian government shut the Internet down last year.Techno-geek activists around the world want to prevent that from happening again.Flipping the Internet switch in Egypt only took several phone calls and about half an hour to do. In the current issue of Scientific American, writer Julian Dibbell takes a closer look at activists in Vienna, Washington, D.C., and New York who are creating a shadow Internet.
Ancient giant eruptions in the Pacific Northwest may actually have been caused by the tearing of a titanic slab of rock and not the supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park, scientists now suggest.Supervolcanoes are capable of eruptions dwarfing anything ever recorded by humanity. There are roughly a dozen supervolcanoes on Earth today, one of which sits beneath Yellowstone National Park.
You know the picture. Everybody does. It's Leonardo da Vinci's iconic man in a circle and the square, the figure known as Vitruvian Man--or, as Tim Howard, a producer at Radiolab once aptly put it to me, "the naked guy doing jumping jacks."But if everybody knows the picture, almost nobody knows anything about its story. When I began looking into it, a couple of years ago, I discovered, to my great surprise, that nobody had even ever written a book on the picture.
In a rough-and-tumble wonderland of plunging canyons and towering buttes, some of the still-raw bluffs are lined with soaring, six-sided stone columns so orderly and trim, they could almost pass as relics of a colossal temple. The secret of how these columns, packed in edge to edge, formed en masse from a sea of molten rock is encrypted in details as tiny as the cracks running across their faces. To add to this mystery's allure, decoding it might do more than reveal the life story of some local lava: it might help explain the history of Mars.
The Neolithic builders of Stonehenge were inspired by "auditory illusions" when they drew up blueprints for the ancient monument, a researcher claims.The radical proposal follows a series of experiments by US scientist Steven Waller, who claims the positions of the standing stones match patterns in sound waves created by a pair of musical instruments.Waller, an independent researcher in California, said the layout of the stones corresponded to the regular spacing of loud and quiet sounds created by acoustic interference when two instruments played the same note continuously.
Late one night in the summer of 1977, a large radio telescope outside Delaware, Ohio intercepted a radio signal that seemed for a brief time like it might change the course of human history. The telescope was searching the sky on behalf of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the signal, though it lasted only seventy-two seconds, fit the profile of a message beamed from another world. Despite its potential import, several days went by before Jerry Ehman, a project scientist for SETI, noticed the data. He was flipping through the computer printouts generated by the telescope when he noticed a string of letters within a long sequence of low numbers---ones, twos, threes and fours. The low numbers represent background noise, the low hum of an ordinary signal. As the telescope swept across the sky, it momentarily landed on something quite extraordinary, causing the signal to surge and the computer to shift from numbers to letters and then keep climbing all the way up to "U," which represented a signal thirty times higher than the background noise level. Seeing the consecutive letters, the mark of something strange or even alien, Ehman circled them in red ink and wrote "Wow!" thus christening the most famous and tantalizing signal of SETI's short history: The "Wow!" signal.
The invention of the toilet accomplished many good things, but it did rob us of the chance at immortality - through our poop. Ancient humans have revealed some of their greatest secrets through paleofeces, the study of the waste they left behind.In studying ancient humanity, there's no more powerful resource than preserved DNA... theoretically. While DNA has evolved to be the molecule of life, it's not built nearly as well to stick around after its organism is dead and gone. There are a few ways to preserve DNA for up to as much as a million years without complete degradation, but these mostly involve being frozen in ice or permafrost. Since most of humanity historically has stayed away from extremely cold climates, that naturally limits our sources of usable ancient human DNA.
One of the world's tiniest lizards has been discovered by keen-eyed researchers in Madagascar.The miniature chameleon, Brookesia micra, reaches a maximum length of just 29mm.German scientists also found a further three new species in the north of the island.The lizards were limited to very small ranges and scientists are concerned they could be at risk from habitat disturbance.
The prospect of cloaking devices has become more realistic in recent years as scientists have developed means of making objects invisible to certain wavelengths in limited circumstances.Now researchers from Manchester University say a similar approach could be used to defend structures against earthquakes and other natural disasters.In the same way that cloaking devices make objects appear invisible by deflecting light around them, the team claimed that pressurised rubber could be used to "hide" structures from shock waves produced by earthquakes, sending them around the structure rather than through it.
Former American President Dwight D. Eisenhower had three secret meetings with aliens, a former US government consultant has claimed.The 34th President of the United States met the extra terrestrials at a remote air base in New Mexico in 1954, according to lecturer and author Timothy Good.Eisenhower and other FBI officials are said to have organised the showdown with the space creatures by sending out 'telepathic messages'.The two parties finally met up on three separate occasions at the Holloman Air Force base and there were 'many witnesses.
LIKE giant spacecraft that have just touched down, they give the countryside an otherworldly look.Elevated land-based islands are what one architect is proposing for the Tōhoku region of north-east Japan, the area that was devastated by last March's magnitude 9 earthquake and the mega-tsunamis it triggered.Keiichiro Sako of Sako Architects in Tokyo has created a blueprint in which groups of these islands form entire towns. They are designed to protect people living in low-lying areas from future tsunamis.
Work on an 8,000-year-old Stone Age settlement under the surface of the Solent in Hampshire is throwing up evidence of clear parallels of the modern "high street", archaeologists say.After 30 years of excavating the area around Bouldnor Cliff, a boatyard was uncovered last summer, which teams have been working on ever since.Since The Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology spotted a swamped prehistoric forest in the 1980s, the Stone Age village was found by chance at the end of the last century.
When the binary star system Eta Carinae experienced a spectacular outburst in 1837 -- dubbed the "Great Eruption" -- there were no cameras or other sophisticated scientific instruments around to record the event for posterity.But now, 170 years later, remnants of light from the Great Eruption are finally reaching Earth, providing new insight into how massive stars behave when they are on the brink of exploding.Astrophysicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, announced the detection of this "light echo" in a Feb. 16 letter to the journal Nature.
The idea of a river dying is not a common one. If we were to categorise how people feel about rivers, in so far as they do so at all, we might suppose that feelings generally focus on power and permanence. T S Eliot, contemplating the Mississippi pounding past St Louis where he grew up, thought of it as "a strong brown God". Oscar Hammerstein portrayed it as eternal: "Ol' Man River, he jes' keeps rolling along".Few poems or folk songs, then, about rivers as vulnerable, as likely to wilt and die and disappear. But they can do, in somewhere like southern England, where the landscape, and hence the watercourses that bisect it, are on a much smaller scale; and a particularly vulnerable set of rivers in England are the most beautiful ones of all, the chalk streams.
More than half a century of sending objects into space has left the Earth surrounded by junk. Bits of long-dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other debris orbit the planet at almost 18,000 mph, each chunk a potential hazard to working satellites or astronauts.The Swiss have a plan, however. Scientists at the Swiss space centre at EPFL, the federal institute for technology in Lausanne, want to send a "janitor satellite" into orbit, to sweep up debris and permanently remove it from orbit.The SFr10m (£7m) satellite, called CleanSpace One, could launch within five years, according to EPFL.
Early Monday morning was very disturbing to many upstate South Carolina residents who witnessed an unidentified object streaking through the sky, exploding and apparently crashing, reports Open Minds TV.Upstate residents near Greenville reported a very bright light accompanied by an explosion shortly before 2 a.m., while others felt tremors from the nearby crash of the object.According to Fox affiliate, Fox Carolina -- whose own security cameras caught the streaking object on video -- many callers reported seeing the sky event all across the region.
On Wednesday (Feb. 15), the red planet Mars swings to aphelion -- its farthest point from the sun in its approximate two-year orbit. This chart helps to illustrate Mars, the fourth planet outward from the sun, at aphelion.In their order going outward, the four inner rocky planets planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The four outer gas giant planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- lie well outside chart.You can see Mars this evening -- or any evening in the coming months -- for yourself. The best time to see Mars in this two-year period is almost here, with Earth due to pass between Mars and the sun on March 3, 2012.
We may never know the full tale of this ghoulish looking object but she is set to be reunited with her merman in an exhibition next month.Researchers at Lincoln University have been working to establish the origins of the Buxton Mermaid, a fake mummified mermaid, thought to date back to the mid-19th century.Anita Hollinshead, 43, a conservation and restoration Masters student studying with the university, came across the object while working at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery and decided to dig deeper into the history of the object.
We can forget about fixing the planet's ecosystems and climate until we have fixed government systems, a panel of leading international environmental scientists declared in London on Friday. The solution, they said, may not lie with governments at all."We are disillusioned. The current political system is broken," said Bob Watson, the UK government's chief environmental science advisor, who chaired the meeting.
Diseases -- often transmitted by humans -- are decimating great ape populations, to the point that some are now calling for vaccinating gorillas and chimpanzees.Over the last two decades, the Zaire strain of Ebola has killed roughly one-third of the world's gorilla population and only a slightly smaller proportion of the world's chimpanzees, according to a new study in the journal PLoS ONE.That means that infectious disease is now a major threat to the survival of African great apes, along with poaching and habitat loss.
Following one of Earth's five greatest mass extinctions, tiny marine organisms called graptoloids did not begin to rapidly develop new physical traits until about 2 million years after competing species became extinct.This discovery, based on new research, challenges the widely held assumption that a period of explosive evolution quickly follows for survivors of mass extinctions.
Nasa is about to propose "irrational" major cuts to its exploration of other planets, especially Mars, scientists claim.Budget constraints mean Nasa executives have had to decide whether to invest in space exploration in the neighbouring planet or the far-off cosmos.
Research revealed one in five parents has scrapped old classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Rapunzel in favour of more modern books.One third of parents said their children have been left in tears after hearing the gruesome details of Little Red Riding Hood.And nearly half of mothers and fathers refuse to read Rumplestiltskin to their kids as the themes of the story are kidnapping and execution.Similarly, Goldilocks and the Three Bears was also a tale likely to be left on the book shelf as parents felt it condones stealing.
The space rock, which weighs 200lb and is 1.6ft long, had been outside a house at Wilsford cum Lake, near Amesbury, Wilts, since at least the early 1900s.Experts who previously examined the rock assumed that it had been brought to England, having landed elsewhere several thousand years ago.But researchers now believe it may have landed in Britain 30,000 years ago. It is four times bigger than any other meteorite found in this country.
In a study of the molecular underpinnings of plants' pest resistance, Rice University biologists have shown that plants both anticipate daytime raids by hungry insects and make sophisticated preparations to fend them off."When you walk past plants, they don't look like they're doing anything," said Janet Braam, an investigator on the new study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's intriguing to see all of this activity down at the genetic level. It's like watching a besieged fortress go on full alert.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will increase the energies of the bunches of subatomic particles called protons that it smashes together.The boost should improve the collider's chances of discovering "new physics" and definitively confirming or denying the existence of Higgs boson particle.The proton beams' energies will be increased by 14%, for a total collision energy of 8 trillion electron volts.The announced increase will break the LHC's own high-energy record.
A French court on Monday declared U.S. biotech giant Monsanto(MON.N) guilty of chemical poisoning of a French farmer, a judgment that could lend weight to other health claims against pesticides.In the first such case heard in court in France, grain grower Paul Francois says he suffered neurological problems including memory loss, headaches and stammering after inhaling Monsanto's (MON.N) Lasso weedkiller in 2004.
Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts.Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. One decade after this unprecedented experiment, drug abuse is down by half.
Where did Valentine's Day come from? (Think naked Romans, paganism, and whips.) What does it cost? And why do we fall for it, year after year?More than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine's Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying.The lovers' holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Published by The Disinformation Company, Ltd, New York, 2006. Buy this book: US, UK, CASupernatural is the 12th book of Graham Hancock (British, b. 1950) and according to the back jacket, five of his previous books, including Fingerprints of the Gods and Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, were bestsellers. Supernatural, however, is very controversial and may not have met with similar success. It is 710 pages in length and includes six parts: The Visions, The Caves, The Beings, The Codes, The Religions, and The Mysteries, as well as three Appendices, extensive Notes and References, and the Index. The book includes many valuable illustrations and photographs of newly discovered cave art from Upper Paleolithic Europe and southern Africa (10,000 to 40,000 years ago), as well as some beautiful and intriguing color reproductions of paintings by the Peruvian shaman Pablo Amaringo that depict his Ayahuasca visions. Strangely, several of these paintings include aliens and UFOs.
bernama.comWAYANAD (Kerala), Feb 14 (Bernama) -- Brahmi script, ancient letters believed to be used during the Indus valley civilisation, have been found in a rock cave in Wayanad district in south Indian state Kerala.The Edakkal caves, situated about 4,000 feet above sea level on the Ambukuthi hillock, were found to have been engraved with the script, believed to have been used between fifth century BC to sixth century AD, Press Trust of India (PTI) reported.
Elephant seals are in it deep due to climate change ... deep in the ocean, that is. Elephant seals from Marion Island in the southwest Indian Ocean are swimming farther beneath the surface as their prey also moves into cooler, deeper waters."This prey is moving down to greater depths, presumably due to the increasing water temperatures, and this is forcing the seals to follow them," explained Horst Bornemann from the Alfred Wegener Institute, in a press release.
IT SOMETIMES feels as though some months go by faster than others, but November 2009 really did. Events in the Southern Ocean conspired to make the Earth spin ever-so-slightly faster, shortening half of the days in the month by 0.1 milliseconds each.Different factors affect how fast the Earth spins. For instance, if the winds that whip around the planet slow down, the Earth spins faster to conserve angular momentum.
Katharina Henot suffered her fiery fate in Cologne in 1627 after being found guilty of practicing black magic. Arrested, and tortured to such an extent that the right-handed woman had to scrawl her last letter of defence with her left hand, she was eventually paraded through the city in an open cart before being tied to a stake and burnt.Now the panel on the city council whose predecessors found her guilty of witchcraft hundreds of years ago will review the evidence. It is suspected that Henot, head of the city's post office, fell foul of a deadly game of political intrigue orchestrated by her rivals and detractors.
When archaeologist Neil Brodie arrived for a dig at an ancient Roman cemetery site in Jordan, it was obvious that someone had got there before him."It was a desert environment and there were just all these big holes in the ground," said Brodie. "They must have been looking for metal and jewellery. All the human bones were just scattered around. The landscape was full of big holes and bones. It looked like a WW1 battlefield."What was particularly disconcerting for Brodie was that the site was opposite the local police station.
A British excavation has struck archaeological gold with a discovery that may solve the mystery of where the Queen of Sheba of biblical legend derived her fabled treasures.Almost 3,000 years ago, the ruler of Sheba, which spanned modern-day Ethiopia and Yemen, arrived in Jerusalem with vast quantities of gold to give to King Solomon. Now an enormous ancient goldmine, together with the ruins of a temple and the site of a battlefield, have been discovered in her former territory.
In the first comprehensive satellite study of its kind, a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team used NASA data to calculate how much Earth's melting land ice is adding to global sea level rise.Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), the researchers measured ice loss in all of Earth's land ice between 2003 and 2010, with particular emphasis on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. is taking steps to prevent a possible self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.Readings from a thermometer at the bottom of the No. 2 reactor's pressure vessel rose from 50.8 degrees at 5 a.m. on Feb. 1 to 73.3 degrees at 7 a.m. on Feb. 6.Melted fuel is believed to have accumulated at the bottom of the reactor, but high radiation levels have prevented workers from checking the exact situation within the reactor.
A Stanford University research team has designed a high-efficiency charging system that uses magnetic fields to wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils placed several feet apart. The long-term goal of the research is to develop an all-electric highway that wirelessly charges cars and trucks as they cruise down the road.
Hundreds of species never before seen in a Peruvian national park have been found during an inventory of the Amazonian forests there, according to a conservation group.The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced today the discovery of 365 species previously undocumented in Bahuaja Sonene National Park in southeastern Peru. More than a dozen researchers inventoried the park's plant life, insects, birds, mammals and reptiles. The species found are known to exist elsewhere, but have never been seen inside Bahuaja Sonene.
A Google Earth map that raised rumors of the lost city of Atlantis has gotten a much-needed update, ridding the seafloor of a gridlike pattern that some vigilant users suspected were sunken streets from the mythological underwater city.In fact, Google Ocean, an extension of map program Google Earth, was merely displaying a data artifact from the sonar method that oceanographers use to map the seafloor. This week, Google updated the application with new seafloor data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other groups.
As an ice age crept upon them thousands of years ago, Neanderthals and modern human ancestors expanded their territory ranges across Asia and Europe to adapt to the changing environment.In the process, they encountered each other.Although many anthropologists believe that modern humans ancestors "wiped out" Neanderthals, it's more likely that Neanderthals were integrated into the human gene pool thousands of years ago during the Upper Pleistocene era as cultural and climatic forces brought the two groups together, said Arizona State University Professor C. Michael Barton of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity and School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
As we discover more and more planets around other stars, the Fermi Paradox is becoming, well, more paradoxical.The Fermi Paradox simply asks the question "where are they?" Our Milky Way galaxy is so big and so old -- and we are estimated to be accompanied by at least 100 billion planets -- that aliens should have visited us by now.Instead, when we peruse the heavens, we are faced with the Great Silence, which is one of the biggest challenges to modern astronomy.There have been numerous solutions to the Fermi paradox, but none of them are satisfactory.
When we think about the engineering required for an interstellar probe, it's easy to get absorbed in the obvious -- and admittedly very exciting -- challenges involving the propulsion system.However, we also need to keep in mind that unless we can get scientific data from the probe back to Earth then there is very little point in getting the probe to another star at all. The data are the product that we have paid for; all the other engineering can be seen as the means to that end.
The Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany has yielded yet another startling archeological discovery -- the oldest evidence of human painting ever found in Central Europe. The meaning of the stones painted with red and brown dots, however, remains unclear.They may only be a series and red and brown spots, but they still constitute one of the most important works of art ever made in Central Europe. The spots were discovered on stones in a cave in southern Germany, and are the oldest known signs of painting ever found in the region.
The results are in from China's most recent national heritage census - the first in more than 20 years - and they're not good.According to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH), around 44,000 of China's 766,722 registered heritage sites have completely disappeared, while approximately a quarter of those remaining are either 'poorly preserved' or 'in a state of disrepair.' No sites were specifically mentioned in the census, but the study included ancient ruins, temples and other cultural relics.
A University of Glasgow study claims to have discovered how plants initiate the process of protecting themselves from the harmful rays of the sun.Plants rarely show signs of damage due to their ability to make their own chemical sunscreen in their leaves.Researchers say a protein called UVR8 detects the presence of UV-B light and starts the protection process.
A mysterious deep humming sound coming from all directions at once has inspired a UFO report in Primrose Hill.The green open space has been a site of pilgrimage for Druids throughout the centuries, but at least one person thought otherworldly forces were at work at the nature spot this week.An eyewitness, who recorded his name only as Andy G, made a report to the UK UFO Sightings website at 6am last Friday.
The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy may be constantly snacking on asteroids. A new study finds that asteroids at least 12 miles wide falling into the black hole would account for the regular bright x-ray flares seen through telescopes.Though nothing, including light, can escape a black hole, most are ringed by a disk of gas and dust. As it falls in, this material heats up to incredible temperatures, generating energy.
Efforts to legalize marijuana for recreational use are gaining momentum in Washington state and Colorado, despite fierce opposition from the federal government and a decades-long cultural battle over America's most commonly used illicit drug.Officials in Washington state on Friday said an initiative to legalize pot has enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November. In Colorado, officials are likely this week to make a similar determination about an initiative there.
With a weight that rivals a baby elephant, a meteorite that fell from space some 30,000 years ago is likely Britain's largest space rock. And after much sleuthing, researchers think they know where it came from and how it survived so long without weathering away.The giant rock, spanning about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) across and weighing 205 pounds (93 kilograms), was likely discovered by an archaeologist about 200 years ago at a burial site created by the Druids (an ancient Celtic priesthood) near Stonehenge, according to said Colin Pillinger, a professor of planetary sciences at the Open University.
One of NASA's workhorse space observatories, the RHESSI satellite, is celebrating its tenth year in space on a prolific sun-monitoring mission that has recorded more than 40,000 X-ray solar flares from our nearest star.RHESSI, or the Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, hit its 10-year orbital milestone on Sunday (Feb. 5), NASA officials said. The observatory has been tracking solar flares to help astronomers better understand how the sun ejects huge amounts of particles and energy so efficiently.
Please see this video for an overview of what ACTA is, and how it will affect you:Please visit http://killacta.org/ to contact your representatives and share your opposition to ACTA.See here for more ways to act against ACTA: http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/How_to_act_against_ACTA
Thousands of people have taken part in co-ordinated protests across Europe in opposition to a controversial anti-piracy agreement.Significant marches were held in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta).Around 200 protesters gathered in central London outside the offices of several major rights holders.Demonstrators argued that Acta will limit freedom of speech online
You only need to look at the numbers to know that social media is here to stay. Two hundred million new users joined Facebook in the last year alone growing the massive social networking site to 800 million active users. Career networking site LinkedIn reported 131 million users last year, Twitter touched 100 million, and there are many other sizable and niche nuanced social media players.So what next for social media and how do companies and brands engage more strategically amid the plethora of established and emerging platforms?
Chemicals giant Solvay hailed Monday the successful entry into service in Flanders of what it said was the largest fuel cell of its type in the world.A super-battery that produces enough electricity to power nearly 1,400 homes, the Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell has been producing clean electricity at a "steady rate" for weeks at a SolVin plant part-owned by Germany's BASF in Antwerp, northern Dutch-speaking Belgium.
The end of the world as we know it could come in any number of ways, depending on who you ask. Some people believe global cataclysm will occur when Earth's magnetic poles reverse. When north goes south, they say, the continents will lurch in one direction or the other, triggering massive earthquakes, rapid climate change and species extinctions.The geologic record shows that hundreds of pole reversals have occurred throughout Earth's history; they happen when patches of iron atoms in Earth's liquid outer core become reverse-aligned, like tiny magnets oriented in the opposite direction from those around them. When the reversed patches grow to the point that they dominate the rest of the core, Earth's overall magnetic field flips. The last reversal happened 780,000 years ago during the Stone Age, and indeed there's evidence to suggest the planet may be in the early stages of a pole reversal right now.
Humans may have played a significant part in the sudden disappearance of rainforests from Central Africa, according to a study published online in Science1. The work contradicts the prevailing view that the expansion of farming practices on the continent was made possible by the increased incidence of long, severe dry spells that destroyed vast tracts of rainforest.Geochemist Germain Bayon and his colleagues at the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea in Plouzané examined the weathering of sediment samples drawn from the mouth of the Congo River. Because deforestation would intensify weathering, the clay samples provide, in effect, a continuous record of the climate for the past 40,000 years.
A federal judge in San Diego yesterday dismissed a case in which the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sought to free five orcas "enslaved" at SeaWorld theme parks by using the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude. The case is one of the boldest attempts yet to establish legal rights for animals, and the first to attempt to do so on constitutional grounds. But some groups that support legal rights for animals say PETA's case may end up hurting the cause.
The texts of the Nag Hammadi codices have commonly been treated as mere witnesses to Gnostic texts in Greek mainly from the second and third centuries. A new research project will now challenge this approach by interpreting the Coptic texts of these codices within the context of their probable production and use in fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian monasticism.Shrouded in mystery, the Nag Hammadi codices have, since their discovery by Bedouins in the vicinity of the Upper Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi in 1945, evoked great interest in the scientific community and general public alike.
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, has completed the genome sequence of a Denisovan, a representative of an Asian group of extinct humans related to Neanderthals.In 2010, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues presented a draft version of the genome from a small fragment of a human finger bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. The DNA sequences showed that this individual came from a previously unknown group of extinct humans that have become known as Denisovans. Together with their sister group the Neanderthals, Denisovans are the closest extinct relatives of currently living humans.
Research by the University of Otago in Christchurch and Wellington has shown that breastfeeding of infants has a clear protective effect against children developing asthma or wheezing up to six years of age.There has long been debate over this issue in the scientific literature, but this latest study of 1105 infants in Christchurch and Wellington over six years demonstrates that exclusive, or indeed any breastfeeding, has a protective effect on the development of asthma in young children.
US President Barack Obama's budget proposal to be submitted next week for 2013 will cut NASA's budget by 20 percent and eliminate a major partnership with Europe on Mars exploration, scientists said Thursday.The White House is proposing a $1.2 billion budget for the US space agency, down from $1.5 billion this year, according to Louis Friedman, a former NASA official and co-founder of the Planetary Society who was briefed on the matter.
The world's oldest works of art have been found in a cave on Spain's Costa del Sol, scientists believe.Six paintings of seals are at least 42,000 years old and are the only known artistic images created by Neanderthal man, experts claim.Professor Jose Luis Sanchidrian, from the University of Cordoba, described the discovery as 'an academic bombshell', as all previous art work has been attributed to Homo sapiens.The paintings were found in the Nerja Caves, 35 miles east of Malaga in the southern region of Andalusia.Spanish scientists sent organic residue found next to the paintings to Miami, where they were dated at being between 43,500 and 42,300 years old.
A team of geologists from the U.S., Mexico and China are using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) laser altimetry to study how an earthquake can change a landscape. In particular, the geologists want to know more about the magnitude 7.2 quake that struck April 4, 2010, near Mexicali in northern Mexico. Airborne LiDAR equipment, which bounces a stream of laser pulses off the ground, can measure surface features to within a few centimeters. The researchers were able to make a detailed scan of the affected area over about 360 square kilometers in less than three days, they report in the February 10 issue of the journal Science.In the above image, blue shows where ground surface moved down whereas red indicates upward movement compared with the previous survey.
Destructive plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients have been rapidly cleared by researchers testing a cancer drug on mice. The US study, published in the journal Science, reported the plaques were broken down at "unprecedented" speed. Tests also showed an improvement in some brain function.Specialists said the results were promising, but warned that successful drugs in mice often failed to work in people.The exact cause of Alzheimer's remains unknown, but one of the leading theories involves the formation of clumps of a protein called beta-amyloid. These damage and kill brain cells, eventually resulting in memory problems and the inability to think clearly. Clearing protein plaques is a major focus of Alzheimer's research and drugs are already being tested in human clinical trials.
You don't have to be big to challenge Einstein. A pocked ball just 36 centimetres wide is the latest space probe tasked with measuring general relativity, one of the cornerstones of modern physics.The Laser Relativity Satellite, or LARES, is a tungsten sphere with reflectors mounted in 92 holes punched into its surface. It is due to launch from Kourou, French Guiana, on a new European Space Agency rocket called Vega, designed to cheaply launch payloads of less than 2500 kilograms. The launch window opens on 13 February.LARES's orbit will be tracked by bouncing ground-based lasers off the reflectors. General relativity states that gravity arises from the curvature of space and time. If this is true, Earth should drag space-time around with it as it spins, slightly perturbing the orbits of satellites.
Today MoMA PS1 announced the winner of their 13th annual Young Architects Program (YAP), in which an up-and-coming design company is picked to transform the museum's courtyard during the summer. This year's winner is HWKN (Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner); their installation is called Wendy and will double as a sort of air filter to cancel out motor vehicle pollution. If you're a fan of PS1's popular Saturday dance parties, here's a look at where you'll be partying this summer.PS1 describes Wendy as "an experiment that tests how far the boundaries of architecture can expand to create ecological and social effect. Wendy is composed of nylon fabric treated with a ground breaking titania nanoparticle spray to neutralize airborne pollutants.
A woolly mammoth has reportedly been seen and videotaped in Siberia, offering irrefutable proof that the giant hairy prehistoric elephants -- believed to have gone extinct thousands of years ago -- still exist.That is, of course, if this new video shows an actual mammoth crossing a Siberian river. According to The Sun, a government engineer, conducting a survey for a potential new road last summer, saw the beast in question in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia.
Commercial spaceship companies are due to get some additional breathing space, thanks to legislation that was approved by the House on Friday and seems certain to become law.The provision takes up just a few words in the reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration, but the impact of those words could be incredibly significant: Basically, they extend the current regulatory environment for reusable space vehicles for an additional three years, to October 2015. If the provision hadn't been worked out, things could have become much more difficult for space tourism companies.
The Russian web was ablaze with bizarre theories today at an extraordinary explosion seen by thousands of commuters in St Petersburg.It must have seemed like the end of the world was nigh when motorists driving along this busy motorway saw a huge flash light up the night sky on the horizon.So far, conspiracy theories of martians and bomb-testing have emerged to explain the astonishing sight. However, the reality was far less exciting.The flash was the result of an explosion at an electrical power plant in St Petersburg, in what was described as a 'technical malfunction' by officials. No one was hurt in the incident.
Why zebras evolved their characteristic black-and-white stripes has been the subject of decades of debate among scientists.Now researchers from Hungary and Sweden claim to have solved the mystery.The stripes, they say, came about to keep away blood-sucking flies.They report in the Journal of Experimental Biology that this pattern of narrow stripes makes zebras "unattractive" to the flies.They key to this effect is in how the striped patterns reflect light.
GOVERNMENT spooks want cyborg insects to snoop on their enemies. Biologists want to tap into the nervous systems of insects to understand how they fly. A probe that can be implanted into moths to control their flight could help satisfy both parties. One day, it could even help rehabilitate people who have had strokes.The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been running a programme to develop machine-insect interfaces for years but electrodes implanted to stimulate the brains or wing muscles of insects were not precise enough. Now Joel Voldman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have designed a unique, flexible neural probe that can be attached directly to an insect's ventral nerve cord (VNC), which, along with the brain, makes up the central nervous system in insects.
After a decade of effort, Russian researchers in Antarctica have successfully drilled through more than two miles of solid ice to reach a massive lake that has been sealed off from light and air for millions of years.If Lake Vostok, a freshwater body roughly the size of Lake Ontario that has been locked beneath the ice for between 15 million and 34 million years, is found to harbor living organisms, the discovery would fuel hopes of discovering life on other worlds, such as Jupiter's moon, Europa, or Saturn's moon, Enceladus, both of which are thought to have liquid oceans below their icy crusts.
Russian scientists in Antarctica have drilled through nearly four kilometres of ice to reach a vast freshwater lake that has lain untouched for at least 14 million years.Sealed deep under the ice sheet, Lake Vostok is one of the world's last unexplored frontiers, and scientists suspect it may reveal new life forms.It is the deepest and most isolated of Antarctica's sub-glacial lakes, supersaturated with oxygen, resembling no other known environment on Earth.
The rivers and glaciers that descend from the steep slopes of the Himalaya mountain range help to provide water for the 1.4 billion people that live in its shadow. Any interruption in this flow could have severe implications in a region blighted by political tension and poverty.A paper published in the science journal Nature this week which revealed that there has been no appreciable loss of ice from the region's glaciers over the past decade has been met with relief and surprise. The findings have also been greeted with delight by climate sceptics who have long viewed claims made about the melting of Himalayan glaciers as unfounded and alarmist.
Himalayan glaciers are not melting as much as previously thought! Take that, Warmists!This is some pretty damning stuff. Over the last 10 years, we learn, the amount of melting in the Himalayas has been "negligible". We are told that sea level rises caused by melting ice from ice caps and glaciers outside Greenland and Antarctica are less than half what was thought.And what's more amazing, of course, is that this breakthrough was discovered by careful investigative work by climate-sceptic bloggers and journalists, fighting through the veil of secrecy which climate scientists have thrown over anything which casts doubt on the "settled science" "consensus" of the AGW alarmists' vested-interest fantasies.
With a weight that rivals a baby elephant, a meteorite that fell from space some 30,000 years ago is likely Britain's largest space rock. And after much sleuthing, researchers think they know where it came from and how it survived so long without weathering away.The giant rock, spanning about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) across and weighing 205 pounds (93 kilograms), was likely discovered by an archaeologist about 200 years ago at a burial site created by the Druids (an ancient Celtic priesthood) near Stonehenge, according to said Colin Pillinger, a professor of planetary sciences at the Open University.
Look! Down on the ground. See that small speck at the lower left corner on this picture of Mars? It's alien technology -- ours!NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) snapped this image of Bonneville Crater, near where Spirit, one of NASA's two roving geology stations, landed in January 2004. The scene was captured by the MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.After six years of studies, Spirit succumbed to the harsh Martian climate, but sister rover Opportunity, located on the opposite side of the planet, is still at work. It will be joined by a new rover in August called Curiosity that will assess the planet's suitability for life.
What on Earth is going on with the world's glaciers? Reports today suggest that the Himalayan glaciers have not lost any mass in the last decade. But while that comes as a real surprise, the global pattern remains basically the same. Overall, the world's ice is melting away and causing sea levels to rise.John Wahr of the University of Colorado at Boulder and colleagues used data from the twin GRACE satellites to measure the total amount of water lost from the world's glaciers and ice sheets - excluding Greenland and Antarctica - between 2003 and 2010.
In September 1941, Hu Chengzhi placed several skulls into two wooden crates. Around him, China was at war with Japan, so he was sending the skulls to the US for safekeeping. They never arrived. Hu was among the last people to see one of the most important palaeontological finds in history.These lost skulls belonged to Homo erectus pekinensis, known as Peking Man. More than half a century later, evolutionary biologists would still love to get their hands on these fossils: not only would they help answer questions about early cannibalism among our ancestors, they could even shed light on the origins of spoken language.