Newsdesk Archive

CNN's Piers Morgan talks to a panel of experts about new audio tapes that give details about the day JFK died.

Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of a male figure perfectly inscribed in a circle and square, known as the "Vitruvian Man," illustrates what he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe. Beloved for its beauty and symbolic power, it is one of the most famous images in the world. However, new research suggests that the work, which dates to 1490, may be a copy of an earlier drawing by Leonardo's friend.

A newly discovered letter from a freed former slave to his onetime master is creating a buzz. Letters of Note explains that in August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee wrote to his former slave Jourdan Anderson, requesting that Jourdan return to work on his farm.In the time since escaping from slavery, Anderson had become emancipated, moved to Ohio where he found paid work and was now supporting his family. The letter turned up in the August 22 edition of the New York Daily Tribune.

Neuroscientists have made huge breakthroughs in our understanding of the inner workings of the mind, particularly how various regions of the brain are linked to specific cognitive processes. This is powerful knowledge... and it could be headed to the battlefield.That's the finding of a new report by the UK's Royal Society, that warns these advances in neuroscience could lead to the creation of new weapons that attack enemy forces by disabling parts of their minds. Gases or even electronic devices could be specifically targeted to take down vital regions of the brain.

Clara Lazen is the discoverer of tetranitratoxycarbon, a molecule constructed of, obviously, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. It's got some interesting possible properties, ranging from use as an explosive to energy storage. Lazen is listed as the co-author of a recent paper on the molecule. But that's not what's so interesting and inspiring about this story. What's so unusual here is that Clara Lazen is a ten-year-old fifth-grader in Kansas City, MO.

Back in July an ocean exploration team led by Swedish researchers found what some suggested may be a flying saucer on the sea floor. There were even skid marks behind the large object that suggested it may have moved across, or crashed on, the sea floor.While experts speculated that the object was just a glitch in the team's sonar, new reports surfaced this week that the team uncovered a second, similar object nearby. But, as the report hopped from one website to the next, one thing was missing: an image of the second object.

Archaeologists discovered a series of deposits in the interior of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico. The team of researchers announced their findings after exploring the 65-metre high pyramid from 2008 to 2011.Using the 116 metre long tunnel excavated in the 1930s by archaeologist Eduardo Noguera, the Pyramid of the Sun Project, directed by Alejandro Sarabia, stratigraphically excavated 59 trenches and created 3 short tunnels in order to reach the natural rock level and verify the presence of burials and offerings.

Scientists on an expedition to sample a deep-sea trench got a surprise when their traps brought back seven giant crustaceans glimpsed only a handful of times in human history.The "supergiant" amphipods are more than 20 times larger than their typical crustacean relatives, which are generally less than a half-inch (1 centimeter) long, and thrive in lakes and oceans around the world. They are sometimes called the "insects of the sea.""We pulled up the trap, and lying among the fish were these absolutely massive amphipods, and there was no inkling whatsoever that these things should be there," said Alan Jamieson, a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and leader of the expedition that turned up the fantastical creatures in November 2011.

New research reveals how the arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages. Led by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford, the study is published today (1 February 2012) in Nature Geoscience.The team set out to identify the effects that the first land plants had on the climate during the Ordovician Period, which ended 444 million years ago. During this period the climate gradually cooled, leading to a series of 'ice ages'. This global cooling was caused by a dramatic reduction in atmospheric carbon, which this research now suggests was triggered by the arrival of plants.

A painstakingly detailed investigation shows that mass extinctions need not be sudden events. The deadliest mass extinction of all took a long time to kill 90 percent of Earth's marine life, and it killed in stages, according to a newly published report.Thomas J. Algeo, professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, worked with 13 co-authors to produce a high-resolution look at the geology of a Permian-Triassic boundary section on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. Their analysis, published Feb. 3 in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, provides strong evidence that Earth's biggest mass extinction phased in over hundreds of thousands of years.

Over the next few hundred million years, the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea will disappear, and Asia will crash into the Americas forming a supercontinent that will stretch across much of the Northern Hemisphere. That's the conclusion of a new analysis of the movements of these giant landmasses.Unlike in today's world, where a variety of tectonic plates move across Earth's surface carrying the bits of crust that we recognize as continents, ancient Earth was home to supercontinents, which combined most if not all major landmasses into one. Previous studies suggest that supercontinents last about 100 million years or so before they break apart, setting the pieces adrift to start another cycle.

Welcome to the extreme sport of space-diving.After some minor speed bumps, Daredevil adventurer Felix Baumgartner's plans to plunge 23 miles from the edge of space back to Earth -- a Red Bull-sponsored stunt that would be the world's highest freefall -- is finally coming to fruition, the team announced Monday, Feb. 6.After successful rounds of vacuum chamber tests in Texas, the team is now moving to Roswell, N.M., for the mission's final phase of preparations, said Art Thompson, a team technical director who helped develop the B-2 Stealth bomber.

New Delhi, India - The seed is the first link in the food chain - and seed sovereignty is the foundation of food sovereignty. If farmers do not have their own seeds or access to open pollinated varieties that they can save, improve and exchange, they have no seed sovereignty - and consequently no food sovereignty.The deepening agrarian and food crisis has its roots in changes in the seed supply system, and the erosion of seed diversity and seed sovereignty.Seed sovereignty includes the farmer's rights to save, breed and exchange seeds, to have access to diverse open source seeds which can be saved - and which are not patented, genetically modified, owned or controlled by emerging seed giants. It is based on reclaiming seeds and biodiversity as commons and public good.

After 20 years of drilling, a team of Russian researchers is close to breaching the prehistoric Lake Vostok, which has been trapped deep beneath Antarctica for the last 14 million years.Vostok is the largest in a sub-glacial web of more than 200 lakes that are hidden 4 kilometers beneath the ice. Some of the lakes formed when the continent was much warmer and still connected to Australia.The lakes are rich in oxygen (making them oligotrophic), with levels of the element some 50 times higher than what would be found in your typical freshwater lake. The high gas concentration is thought to be because of the enormous weight and pressure of the continental ice cap.

Clues to how life evolved, not only on this planet but also possibly on alien worlds, might be found in underwater caves in the Bahamas, researchers say.The caves in question are called "blue holes," so-named because from the air, their entrances appear circular in shape, with different shades of blue water in and around them. There are estimated to be more than 1,000 such caves in the Bahamas, the greatest concentration of blue holes in the world."It's really incredible to be swimming down a passage that no one has ever been in before, to experience that thrill of discovery," said researcher Tom Iliffe, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University at Galveston. "At the bottom of a cave, there's no telling what might be around the next corner.

A cargo ship spilled acid into China's longest river last week, contaminating tap supplies and sparking a run on bottled water in eastern China, the government and state media said.It is the nation's second water pollution scare in a month, after factories in the southern region of Guangxi contaminated water supplies for millions with toxic cadmium and other waste in January.The ship, reportedly South Korean, was docked in Zhenjiang city on the Yangtze river last Thursday when it leaked phenol -- an acid used in detergents -- into the water because of a faulty valve, local authorities reported.

One of the world's smallest primates, the Philippine tarsier, communicates in a range of ultrasound inaudible to predator and prey alike, according to a study published on Wednesday.No bigger than a man's hand, Tarsius syrichta can hear and emit sounds at a frequency that effectively gives it a private channel for issuing warnings or ferreting out crickets for a nighttime snack, the study found.Only a handful of mammals are known to be able to send and receive vocal signals in the ultrasound range, above 20 kilohertz (kHz), including some whales, domestic cats and a few of the many species of bats.

I was recently interviewed by the interesting and innovative British rock band Turbowolf and we had a great discussion about ancient mysteries, what we can learn from ancient wisdom, the strange times we live in today, and the urgent the need for a new state of human consciousness in the world. The interview breaks down into four short episodes the first of which is now posted on my Youtube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/GrahamHancockDotCom-GrahamPlease also see the GrahamHancock.com Video Page for other videos of Graham.

It seems the general public just can't make up its mind about the existence of man-made climate change. Rather than steadily increasing or decreasing over the last decade, the U.S. public's concern over our warming planet has jumped up and down, according to Gallup polls. But what exactly is driving this seesawing of opinions on climate change?The level of public concern about this global issue is mostly influenced by the mobilization efforts of political leaders and advocacy groups, new research shows.

Researchers found the steady drone of motors along busy commercial shipping lanes not only alters whale behaviour but can also affect the giant sea mammals physically.Using the reduction in marine traffic after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York to conduct a unique experiment, scientists proved that shipping noise levels fell by half as transport was shut down in response to the terror attacks.The American team from the New England Aquarium, in Boston, say only a catastrophe of the magnitude as Twin Towers attacks in 2001 could have caused maritime traffic to suddenly drop off.

I love science. The joy of discovery in pure research combines with applied science to leave me fantasizing about future technology. Add in the occasional WTF moment and the comedy inherent in poorly prepared presentations, and you have the perfect occupation. Unfortunately, science sometimes attracts people who pull the wings off a cockroach, pin it on its back, and stick electrodes inside it to use it as a mini-electricity generator.Now, I hate cockroaches as much as anyone, and there is a certain satisfaction in extracting revenge for all those restless nights in rooms that, shall we say, rustled, but... Surely there was a good reason for this?

Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission was felled by space radiation, a new report concludes.The ambitious mission was supposed to bring a soil sample of the Martian moon Phobos back to Earth. But it got stuck in Earth orbit and eventually plunged into the ocean on 15 January.The head of a commission that investigated the incident suggested in January that the probe's operations might have been accidentally disrupted by a US radar beam from the Marshall Islands. But that provoked sceptical reactions from some Russian scientists, who said it was an "exotic" idea.

Family histories don't come much more bizarre. Three-quarters of the fish in the sea can trace their origins back to a freshwater ancestor. The finding highlights how important rivers and lakes are as a source of new species, just as that supply is under threat from disappearing freshwater habitats.Fish first evolved in the sea. The oceans have been teeming with them for almost half a billion years, so there is no reason to doubt that the fish living there today did all their evolving in salt water - until you take a closer look at their family tree.

The scattered islands of the vast Pacific Ocean were settled by seafarers who set out from the eastern coasts and islands of Asia and traveled thousands of kilometers by boat. Meanwhile pre-Columbian South America was populated by people who crossed a now-vanished land bridge far to the north. Did these two groups ever meet in the New World? There's a good chance of that, according to a new study, which finds evidence that Easter Islanders may have reached South America and mixed with the Native Americans already there.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express has returned compelling evidence that the red planet once hosted an enormous ocean in its northern plains. The probe's radar detected sediments reminiscent of an ocean floor, within areas that have been suspected to be shorelines.Jérémie Mouginot from the Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG), the University of California in Irvine, and colleagues analysed more than two years of data from Mars Express' Marsis (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) radar.The radar can penetrate deep into the planet's ground, and reveal the first 60 to 80 metres of the planet's subsurface. At these depths, the team found that the northern plains are covered in low-density material.

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.

A federal judge for the first time in U.S. history heard arguments Monday in a case that could determine whether animals enjoy the same constitutional protection against slavery as human beings.U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller called the hearing in San Diego after Sea World asked the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that names five orcas as plaintiffs in the case.PETA claims the captured killer whales are treated like slaves for being forced to live in tanks and perform daily at its parks in San Diego and Orlando, Fla..

It's been a busy fortnight. First the publication of two major peer-reviewed research papers about magic mushrooms that attracted worldwide publicity. Then off to Prague for an international drugs policy symposium. And just last week, news of a large grant for our next collaborative study with Imperial College. But I'm getting ahead of myself.I established the Beckley Foundation some 14 years ago as a think tank on drugs policy. It was apparent even then that the "war on drugs" had failed. A 1997 report by the United Nations Drugs Control Programme put the value of the global trade in illicit drugs at around $400bn. Recent UN figures show that global production of opium (used mostly to make heroin) rose by almost 80% between 1998 and 2009. The market in illicit drugs is the third largest market in the world, after food and oil.

VANCOUVER SUNThe recovery of a mysterious wooden pole at the bottom of Lake Huron is fuelling excitement among U.S. and Canadian researchers that they have found more evidence of a "lost world" of North American caribou hunters from nearly 10,000 years ago.The scientists believe these prehistoric people - who would have been among the earliest inhabitants of the continent - had a "kill site" along a ridge along the present-day U.S.-Canada border that was eventually submerged by rising waters when the glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age.

The North Star, a celestial beacon to navigators for centuries, may be slowly shrinking, according to a new analysis of more than 160 years of observations. The data suggest that the familiar fixture in the northern sky is shedding an Earth's mass worth of gas each year. Some researchers caution, however, that the conclusion depends on certain assumptions about exactly where the star is in its several-billion-year life cycle.

A recent eruption from the sun was so strong it was felt by NASA's Mars-bound Curiosity rover en route to the Red Planet.The solar tempest occurred on Sunday (Jan. 22), contributing to the largest radiation storm since 2003. The solar particles released were so abundant they were enough to be registered by Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD), an instrument designed to measure the radiation levels on Mars.

A mysterious, centuries-long cool spell, dubbed the Little Ice Age, appears to have been caused by a series of volcanic eruptions and sustained by sea ice, a new study indicates.The research, which looked at chemical clues preserved in Arctic vegetation as well as other data, also pinpointed the start of the Little Ice Age to the end of the 13th century.

For the first five years of life, human cognition slowly comes to fruition, receiving and storing information and experience from the environment and enabling humans to advance beyond the capabilities of their primate cousins, according to a study published online in Genome Research. An international team of researchers have identified extended synaptic development in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain that sheds new light on the evolution of human cognition and suggests another reason why the human family diverged from other primates 4-6 million years ago.

Archaeological finds are nothing new at Chaa Creek, but a new discovery this week (21 January 2012) is definitely something out of the ordinary - an ancient Maya household was accidentally unearthed in the middle of town near the eco resort's downtown offices in San Ignacio, Belize.Larry Waight, Chaa Creek's marketing administrator said that with over 70 sites recorded within the eco resort's 365 acre nature reserve, having archaeologists working alongside resort staff is nothing new, but to have office workers rubbing shoulders with researchers wielding shovels and trowels while sifting through mounds of dirt is a first.

Twenty years ago free-range eggs were rarely bought but for the first time this year they will outsell those from caged birds, according to industry estimates.Of the 9 billion eggs laid in the UK in 2012, 49 per cent will come from free-range hens allowed to roam outdoors, compared with 48 per cent from hens cooped up in cages. A further 3 per cent come from "barn" hens that wander around indoor sheds, according to the British Egg Industry Council.Animal welfare groups say there has been a quiet revolution in shopping habits since 1995, when 86 per cent of British eggs came from battery cages.

Researchers working around Japan's disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant say bird populations there have begun to dwindle, in what may be a chilling harbinger of the impact of radioactive fallout on local life.In the first major study of the impact of the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years, the researchers, from Japan, the US and Denmark, said their analysis of 14 species of bird common to Fukushima and Chernobyl, the Ukrainian city which suffered a similar nuclear meltdown, showed the effect on abundance is worse in the Japanese disaster zone.

Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory.

In a recent study led by Uppsala University, researchers compared the DNA of identical (monozygotic) twins of different age. They have shown that structural modifications of the DNA, where large or small DNA segments change direction, are duplicated or completely lost, are more common in older people. The results may in part explain why the immune system is impaired with age. During a person's life, continuous alterations in the cells' DNA occur.The alterations can be changes to the individual building blocks of the DNA but more common are rearrangements where large DNA segments change place or direction, or are duplicated or completely lost. In the present study the scientists examined normal blood cells from identical (monozygotic) twins in different age groups and looked for large or smaller DNA rearrangements.

he sky isn't falling. Aliens are not launching an attack.A flying fireball shooting across the sky about 8 p.m. Wednesday was reported from as far north as Oklahoma City to as far south as Houston, according to officials with the Federal Aviation Administration.Given the scores of people who saw it across such a wide span of miles, the bolide was likely a meteoroid or piece of space junk and not a UFO, astronomers said Thursday.

Contact lenses that help enhance normal vision with megapixel 3D panoramic images are being designed by scientists using military funding.For those who do not want to rely on contact lenses, future versions could involve lenses directly implanted within the eye, researchers added.Over the decades, the video displays that everyone from fighter pilots to the general public use have grown increasingly complex. One possibility for advanced displays is a virtual reality (VR) system that replaces our view of the real world with computer-generated vistas. Another idea consists of augmented reality (AR) displays that overlay computer-generated images over real-world environments. However, these often require bulky apparatus such as oversized helmets.

A century's worth of astronomical photographic plates have revealed a slew of new variable stars, many of which alter on timescales and in ways never before seen.The discoveries come from a new analysis of the 500,000 plates made by the Harvard College Observatory from the 1880s through the 1980s, covering the whole sky. The trove of old-school data has offered astronomers an unprecedented look at how stars change over long timescales.

Archaeologists are investigating the truth behind the story that Ice Age Neanderthals in Jersey would push mammoths off cliffs in St Brelade for food.About 30 years ago, evidence suggested early residents of what is today the island of Jersey chased the giant mammals off the cliffs at La Cotte above Ouaisne.Dr Geoff Smith, an analyst for Jersey Archive, said: "It was in the 70s and 80s that the hypothesis was put forward that Neanderthals were grouping together to drive herds of woolly mammoth and woolly rhinos off the cliffs and butchering them.

Skin cells have been converted directly into cells which develop into the main components of the brain, by researchers studying mice in California.The experiment, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, skipped the middle "stem cell" stage in the process.The researchers said they were "thrilled" at the potential medical uses.Far more tests are needed before the technique could be used on human skin.

HAT CREEK, CALIFORNIA: ET might be phoning, but do we care enough to take the call?Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, and on the stubborn strength of their own dreams, a band of astronomers recently restarted one of the iconic quests of modern science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - SETI, for short - which had been interrupted last year by a lack of financing.

How did some dinosaurs reach such soaring heights -- up to 100 feet high in some cases? Efficient lungs and respiration, along with egg laying, might have given dinos a growth edge when compared to other animals, suggests new research.The study also negates a popular theory that animals tended to become bigger over the course of their evolution.While some dinosaurs grew ever larger over subsequent generations, not all did.

Blue whales are the largest animal to have ever lived on Earth and -- for now -- are continuing to get bigger, say researchers.The findings come out of a study by evolutionary biologist Alistair Evans, of Monash University in Melbourne, and colleagues."The biggest animal ever is potentially still getting bigger," says Evans, whose study is reported this week in Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences.When the dinosaurs and their marine cousins went extinct 65 million years ago, mammals took the opportunity to take advantage of the space these creatures had previously occupied, says Evans.

Graham: "A friend of mine created this incredible documentary about the scandal of British nuclear tests in Australia, which I have now uploaded on my YouTube channel." The description follows:Sacrificial Lambs on the High Alter of ScienceAustralian servicemen and nomadic Aboriginals reveal the devastating effects of atomic weapons testing carried out in Australia by the British during the 1950s. For the first time, members of the Royal Australian Army, Air Force and Navy describe former top secret aspects of those tests. With the use of rare archival film and photographs, as well as eye witness accounts, Australian Atomic Confessions chronicles the hidden history and exposes previously hidden Governemnet cover-ups. The consequences of nuclear testing imposed on the Australian people and land are not just skeletons of the past. Sydneys' new nuclear reactor continues to pose a threat to the environment and civilians, and the problem of removing and disposing of the old nuclear reactor remains an unanswered question. Prominent Aboriginal Elders also warn that an imminent catastrophe may occur in Central Australia as a result of two uranium mines. Australian Atomic Confessions is a chilling expose of nuclear testing and its damaging legacy, one that continues to this day.To buy this dvd with extra extended interviews, music and Dreamtime stories, or to make a donation to the filmmakers, please go to http://www.australianatomicconfessions.com/

A University of Rhode Island biologist who released lizards on tiny uninhabited islands in the Bahamas has shed light on the interaction between evolutionary processes that are seldom observed.Jason Kolbe, a URI assistant professor of biological sciences, and colleagues from Duke University, Harvard University and the University of California at Davis, found that the lizards' genetic and morphological traits were determined by both natural selection and a phenomenon called founder effects, which occur when species colonize new territory.Their research was published recently in the journal Science.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- A growing number of states are seeking shiny new currencies made of silver and gold.Worried that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. dollar are on the brink of collapse, lawmakers from 13 states, including Minnesota, Tennessee, Iowa, South Carolina and Georgia, are seeking approval from their state governments to either issue their own alternative currency or explore it as an option. Just three years ago, only three states had similar proposals in place.

Gay men are able to lead healthier, less stress-filled lives when states offer legal protections to same-sex couples, according to a new study examining the effects of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The study, "Effect of Same-Sex Marriage Laws on Health Care Use and Expenditures in Sexual Minority Men: A Quasi-Natural Experiment," is online in the American Journal of Public Health.

This Sunday, millions of Americans will sit down in front of their television or computer, crack open a few beers, and watch the Super Bowl. But if those viewers live in a housing project for the homeless, that booze could get them booted back out to the street. Many homeless housing projects have strict abstinence policies, and require residents to be completely sober. Permitting alcohol, many community organizers reason, would enable addictions and promote a downward spiral into continued drinking and declining health.Now, a study suggests that requiring alcohol abstinence from residents of homeless projects might be misguided. In at least one project where residents were allowed to drink, alcohol consumption decreased, as did alcohol-related health problems, researchers reported on January 19 in the American Journal of Public Health.

In a few weeks, a group of British researchers will enter the labyrinthine store of London's Natural History Museum and remove several dark-coloured pieces of primate skull and jawbone from a small metal cabinet. After a brief inspection, the team will wrap the items in protective foam and transport them to a number of laboratories across England. There the bones and teeth, which have rested in the museum for most of the last century, will be put through a sequence of highly sensitive tests using infra-red scanners, lasers and powerful spectroscopes to reveal each relic's precise chemical make-up.

Watch This Week in Discovery News to catch up on the biggest story of the week and see what people were talking about on social media. This week we've got a blue theme.The FBI wants to monitor postings on social networks, strange blue balls show up in a UK man's yard after a storm and fire is made using only a carved piece of ice.

It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake's untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal Nature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a "book for burning" and that Sheldrake was to be "condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy."See Rupert's latest book, The Science Delusion: CA - UK - US

If everyone in the UK went vegetarian or vegan it would have the same environmental benefit as talking half of all cars off the road, according to new research. Scientists have calculated the impact of 61 foods, with fresh meat and cheese topping the carbon footprint league.They estimate that the combined greenhouse gas emissions from the foods we eat in the UK are the equivalent of 167 million tons of carbon dioxide, and switching to vegetarian diets could cut this by between 22 and 26 per cent.

The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence.A dramatic loss of sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas above northern Russia could explain why a chill Arctic wind has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week.

Everybody is African in origin. Barring a smattering of genes from Neanderthals and other archaic Asian forms, all our ancestors lived in the continent of Africa until 150,000 years ago. Some time after that, say the genes, one group of Africans somehow became so good at exploiting their environment that they (we!) expanded across all of Africa and began to spill out of the continent into Asia and Europe, invading new ecological niches and driving their competitors extinct.

Data from Scripps, NOAA sharpen resolution of seafloor maps, correct "discovery" of AtlantisInternet information giant Google updated ocean data in its Google Earth application this week, reflecting new bathymetry data assembled by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, NOAA researchers and many other ocean mapping groups from around the world.The newest version of Google Earth includes more accurate imagery in several key areas of ocean using data collected by research cruises over the past three years. "The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype map that had high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived ship data," said David Sandwell, a Scripps geophysicist.

Berlin (CNN) -- A civil court in Munich has blocked a British publisher's plans to print excerpts of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in Germany later this month.The court ruled Wednesday that British publisher Peter McGee's plans to disseminate portions of the anti-Semitic manifesto in Germany were not protected by long-standing citation rights.Initially slated to hit the shelves in the Zeitungszeugen magazine in Germany on January 26, it would have been the first time that any parts of the book had been reprinted in a newspaper or magazine in that country since the end of World War II.

Scientists' list of verified planets is now more than two dozen planets longer, thanks to NASA's Kepler space telescope team.The Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems with 26 verified planets in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, NASA said Thursday.This nearly triples the number of verified multiple-planet stars that the Kepler mission has discovered, now standing at 17. And it nearly doubles the number of verified planets it has discovered, which now is 61.

The prehistoric lake dwellings of the alpine region, including Switzerland, provide a unique glimpse of life in the earliest agricultural settlements from 5,000 to 500 BC.Stretching across six European countries, they were added to the Unesco World Heritage List in June 2011. There are 111 sites in all, with 56 of them in Switzerland.

The discovery of a 3,300-year-old tool has led researchers to the rediscovery of a "lost" 20th-century manuscript and a "geochemically extraordinary" bit of earth.Discovered on Emirau Island in the Bismark Archipelago (a group of islands off the coast of New Guinea), the 2-inch (5-centimeters) stone tool was probably used to carve, or gouge, wood. It seems to have fallen from a stilted house, landing in a tangle of coral reef that was eventually covered over by shifting sands.

Near-Earth orbit is packed with satellites, essential to communication and navigation back on Earth. But many of those satellites are aging, so what happens when they break down, or need refueling?Simply ditching the satellites would be wasteful -- it costs many millions of dollars to build and launch a satellite -- and then there's the fact that it's getting pretty crowded up there.The obvious solution is to send astronauts up to make the necessary repairs, thereby extending the lifetime of an ailing satellite, but this is expensive and risky (especially for the astronauts). In the case of more distant satellites, it might not even be feasible. So NASA is funding research on developing remotely operated robotic systems that might be up to the challenge.

Menachem Youlus said he lied when he claimed he had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls in Europe and Israel for six years.Youlus, the owner of the Jewish Bookstore in Maryland, entered the plea to mail and wire fraud charges in US District Court in Manhattan. A plea deal with prosecutors called for him to serve up to five years and three months in prison.

Sometimes the puppets control the puppeteer. It seems volcanic outbursts on Jupiter's moon Io control brilliant auroras on its parent planet.Auroras are shimmering curtains of light caused when charged particles slam into a planet's magnetic field. Earth's northern and southern lights are active only when the sun releases a big blob of charged plasma, as it did on 24 January.Jupiter has a permanent ring of auroral light surrounding each of its poles (see photo). Most of the charged particles responsible for the light have long been thought to originate from tiny, hyperactive Io, which burps out about a tonne of sulphur per second in its persistent, violent volcanic activity. However, the sun was thought to cause any variations in the rings via changes in the pressure of the solar wind.

Germany this week returned an ancient pre-Islamic sculpture looted during Afghanistan's civil war, giving hope to Kabul's cultural mavens that the rest of its stolen treasures will also make their way home.Eight figures, one missing a torso and others without noses, make up the 30-cm high (12 inches) limestone antiquity from the second century AD, a reminder of Afghanistan's rich classical past as a confluence of cultures on the crossroads of Asia.

A 6,500-year-old Sumerian gold jar, the head of a Sumerian battle axe and a stone from an Assyrian palace were among 45 relics returned to Iraq by Germany on Monday.The items were among thousands stolen from Iraq's museums and archeological sites in the mayhem that followed the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003.The tiny gold jar, dating to 4,500 BC, the bronze axe head, clay tablets bearing cuneiform script, a metal amulet and other artifacts were seized by German police at public auctions and turned over to Iraqi officials in a ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The eruption of some of the largest volcanoes on the planet could be predicted several decades before the event, according to researchers.Analysis of rock crystals from the Greek island of Santorini suggests eruptions are preceded by a fast build-up of magma underground, which might be detected using modern instrumentation.Such volcanoes can produce enough ash and gas to temporarily change the global climate.The research is in the journal Nature.

Primitive moss-like plants could have triggered the cooling of the Earth some 470 million years ago, say researchers.A study published in Nature Geoscience may help explain why temperatures gradually began to fall, culminating in a series of "mini ice ages".Until now it had been thought that the process of global cooling began 100 million years later, when larger plants and trees emerged.

The ACTA agreement will breach users' rights and change the course of internet evolution, argued a branch union of Bulgarian ISPs Wednesday."ACTA aims at obliterating anonymity and entirely transform the structure of the global network," said the Bulgarian Union of Independent Internet Providers.In addition, Bulgarian ISPs argue that the agreement will breach privacy of users and will go as far as reverse the presumption of innocence.Last Thursday, Bulgaria became one of 21 EU member states who joined countries such as the USA, Japan, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Switzerland as signatories to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Spain has won a major victory in its long court battle with a Florida-based deep-sea salvage company over rights to an estimated $500 million in silver and gold coins, officials said Wednesday.The treasure was recovered in 2007 from a 19th century sunken ship off the Spanish coast.The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Tuesday turned aside another motion from the U.S.-based company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, and Spanish officials said they now expect the coins -- nearly 600,000 of them -- to arrive in Spain soon.

A Maine seafarer said he found the wreck of a World War II merchant ship off the Massachusetts coast, sunk while ferrying a load of the precious metal platinum valued today at nearly $3 billion, an unprecedented find that left some doubting the cargo.Greg Brooks of Sub Sea Research in Gorham, Maine, said on Thursday he discovered the submerged ship in 2008 some 50 miles off the Massachusetts coast and, using a remotely run submersible vessel, identified it last summer as British freighter Port Nicholson.

Groundhog Day 2012 hoopla is tickling the nation. Maybe it's a sign of too much technology in our lives or of boredom with the upcoming election, but Americans really seem to be getting a kick out of the quaint and quirky tradition of letting a groundhog predict the weather.How else to explain why thousands of people showed up on this cold and dark winter's morning at Gobblers Knob -- seriously, it's called Gobblers Knob -- in Punxsutawney, Pa., to see whether Punxsutawney Phil would catch a glimpse of his shadow? And why "Groundhog Day" stories are setting the Web on fire, with no less than six of the Top 10 most frequently searched terms on Google relating in some way shape or form to prognosticating groundhogs?But, come on, people, it can't all be butterflies and rainbows and groundhogs. We have to ask: Can groundhogs really predict what Mother Nature has in store?

The origins of rice cultivation can be traced to the valleys of China's Yangtze River, with some estimates putting it at over 7,000 years ago. In that time, rice has become an integral part of Chinese life and culture. It dictates the lives of millions of farmers in the Chinese countryside, feeds over a billion Chinese citizens each year and is synonymous with Chinese cuisine and culture. And Yunnan, in southwestern China is where much of this rice originates from.

Astronomers have created the world's largest virtual optical telescope linking four telescopes in Chile, so that they operate as a single device.The telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal observatory form a virtual mirror of 130 metres in diameter.A previous attempt to link the telescopes last March failed.Thursday's link-up was the system's scientific verification - the final step before scientific work starts.

Climate change sceptics have acquired a new explanation for why glaciers are retreating: it's not global warming, it's theft.Police in Chile have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing five tonnes of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region to sell as designer ice cubes in bars and restaurants.Local media reported that last Friday police intercepted a refrigerated truck with an estimated £3,900 worth of illicit ice allegedly bound for whiskies, rums and cocktails in the capital Santiago.

Scientists in Cape Cod are trying to determine what is causing dolphins to swim dangerously close to shore, with more than 100 becoming stranded in the last three weeks.Members of Congress are due to be briefed on Friday about the strandings, the worst such event in more than a decade. Volunteers are maintaining coastal vigils and trying to get the animals back to sea."What is different about this particular event is that instead of having one discrete event, it is this string of ongoing strandings that started on 12 January and is just continuing," said Katie Moore, who manages marine mammal rescue operations for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "It's day after day after day.

The idea that slight shifts in Earth's axis might have been enough to trigger the ice ages is a century old.But a Harvard earth sciences Professor Peter Huybers has finally proved it, using computer models to test competing ideas - and finding that earth's tilting axis is the only one that works.The finding could have profound implications for our understanding of our planet's climate - and could, its author says, be crucial to 'predicting long-term changes in future climate.'Two 'cycles' in the way Earth's axis spins have an effect on the cycle - one lasting 10,000 years and one lasting roughly 40,000 years.

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Bird enthusiasts are reporting rising numbers of snowy owls from the Arctic winging into the lower 48 states this winter in a mass southern migration that a leading owl researcher called "unbelievable."Thousands of the snow-white birds, which stand 2 feet tall with 5-foot wingspans, have been spotted from coast to coast, feeding in farmlands in Idaho, roosting on rooftops in Montana, gliding over golf courses in Missouri and soaring over shorelines in Massachusetts.

Titan's surface is a Bizarro World version of Earth: lakes full of liquid methane, mountains made of water-ice, and rippling dunes made of solid benzene. Now a specially-designed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) could help scientists unlock the secrets of the enigmatic Saturnian moon without breaking the budget.The idea gets a boost from the physics of flying, says a team led by Jason Barnes of the University of Idaho in a new study in Experimental Astronomy.Titan has less gravity than Earth, so a UAV would weigh just 1/7 as much there as it does on our planet. And its atmosphere has 4 times the density of Earth's, which would also help keep a winged vehicle aloft..

A major United Nations report has called for a sustainable "evergreen revolution", warning that time is running out to ensure there is enough food, water and fuel to meet the needs of the world's rapidly growing population.In a grim warning about the earth's increasing demand for resources, a panel led by the presidents of Finland and South Africa found demand will grow exponentially as the global population rises from 7 billion people to an expected 9 billion by 2040.Within the next 20 years the world's population will need 50 per cent more food and vast new reserves of energy and water, according to UN estimates.

Koko the gorilla is world-famous for her ability to communicate with humans using phrases in American Sign Language, and for her gentle play with pet cats. Now, a new study on Koko's play with wind instruments shows that she skillfully controls how she breathes.That's a knockout conclusion because scientists have thought that humans alone, out of all the primates, can gain skillful, voluntary control over the act of breathing.Think of blowing out candles on a birthday cake, or powerfully pushing air through a trumpet to play music. It's usually argued that skilled breathing like this originated only in the primate lineage at the point when specialized anatomy made speech possible.

In a piece in Nature magazine, Dr David Bowman, an ecologist at the University of Tasmania, proposed bringing in large "grass-eating machines" such as elephants and rhinoceroses to limit the damage from the continent's rampant bushfires."It's out of control," he said. "Last year we had a fire in the outback in Central Australia the size of Tasmania." But critics said the elephants could be as difficult to control as the African grass they are supposed to contain.

A spoonful of sugar might make the medicine go down. But it also makes blood pressure and cholesterol go up, along with your risk for liver failure, obesity, heart disease and diabetes.Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact, so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

A new look at an alien planet that orbits extremely close to its parent star suggests that the rocky world might not be a scorching hot wasteland, as was thought. In fact, the planet may actually be stranger and wetter than astronomers ever imagined.The exotic planet 55 Cancri e is a relatively close alien planet, just 40 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cancer (The Crab).

The first use of embryonic stem cells in humans eased a degenerative form of blindness in two volunteers and showed no signs of any adverse effects, according to a study published by The Lancet on Monday.Publication in the peer-reviewed journal marks an important step for embryonic stem cells, which were hailed as a miracle cure after they were discovered in 1998 but then ran into technical and political hurdles.

The coming year is going to be a big one in all kinds of areas, from space to supercomputing, research done both above and below the ocean, examinations into our distant past and into our future. And salmon. Expect to hear lots about salmon.

There are plenty of drumlins in County Down - but have you heard of the Mound of Down?If not, that is probably because it has been hidden from public view by trees and gorse for decades.But work is now under way to expose this fortification which could be about 1,000 years old.Tim Campbell, director of the St Patrick Centre in Downpatrick, said it was one of the largest megalithic hill forts in western Europe.

Ancestors of the earliest Native Americans may indeed be traced to Asia, according to a recent genetic study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia. The researchers, led by Theodore Schurr, an associate professor in Penn's Department of Anthropology, in collaboration with Ludmila Osipova of the Institute, suggest that an ancient people living in a mountainous region in southern Siberia may have been the genetic source for those who migrated westward, possibly crossing the Bering Land Bridge to become the earliest Native Americans.

Questions surrounding when and where early modern humans first migrated from Africa to populate the rest of the world have long been a focus of debate and study among scientists, where genetic research has played a key role. Now, recent genetic research study results have been released by an international team of scientists. The research, published January 26 by Cell Press in the American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that modern humans settled first in Arabia more than 60,000 years ago on their way out through the Horn of Africa.

One might argue that the stone age technology among people living in Russia during the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages was relatively unimpressive. But the fishing equipment of a certain group living near present-day Moscow more than 7,500 years ago would be something to shout about, according to archaeologists.An international team of archeologists, led by Ignacio Clemente, a researcher with the Spanish National Research Council, has discovered and documented an assemblage of fish seines and traps in the Dubna Basin near Moscow that are dated to be more than 7,500 years old. They say that the equipment, among the oldest found in Europe, displays a surprisingly advanced technical complexity. The finds illuminate the role of fishing among European settlements of the early Holocene (about 10,000 years ago), particularly where people did not practice agriculture until just before the advent of the Iron Age.

Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on gathering electrical signals directly from patients' brains.Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds of words that patients were thinking of.

A giant prehistoric crocodile once bore a shield on its head, an ornament never before seen on these reptiles that may have been used to intimidate enemies and attract mates, researchers say."'Shieldcroc' is the earliest ancestor of our modern crocodiles to be found in Africa," said researcher Casey Holliday, a vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia. "Along with other discoveries, we are finding that crocodile ancestors are far more diverse than scientists previously realized.

The first plants to take root on dry land may have cooled the Earth enough to bring on a series of ice ages, scientists claim.As plants spread across the continents, they extracted minerals from the rocks they clung to and drew down levels of atmospheric carbon, causing temperatures to drop markedly, the researchers say.The scenario explains puzzling glaciations that saw ice sheets advance in the Ordovician period between 488m and 444m years ago. At the time, Earth's continents were clustered over the south pole and stretched as far north as the equator.

According to the findings of an inter-departmental commission, the failure of the interplanetary probe Phobos-Grunt was caused by a combination of several factors, including the impact of cosmic rays. The head of the Russian Space Agency Roskosmos, Vladimir Popovkin said that the developers should have taken into account the impact of cosmic rays, and that some staff members had been held to account.Contrary to expectations by mass media, the programmers involved in the project Phobos-Grunt have not been blamed for the failure. The mission failed due to a malfunction of the onboard computer system which was a result of the impact of heavily charged space particles, Vladimir Popovkin said.

The wispy clouds of a distant nebula bursting with newborn stars take on an eerie face-like shape sculpted by stellar winds in a new photo snapped by a telescope in Chile.The hotbed of star birth, called NGC 3324, is full of hot young stars, whose ultraviolet radiation is making the gas clouds glow. The stellar wind and radiation from the newborn stars has also punched out a cavity in the surrounding gas and dust. The edge of the wall of gas and dust at the right in the photo resembles the profile of a human face, with a ridge in the center that looks like a nose.

In the future, a swarm of flying robots may do the work now done by human search teams. A robotics research team at the University of Pennsylvania has designed a system to coordinate a number of small quadcopters, a step toward coordinating multiple robots for tasks such as surveillance or searching areas after a disaster.The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) lab at UPenn yesterday posted a video on You Tube with nano quadcopters showing remarkable agility and the ability to perform as a team.The quadcopters are able to flip over and maintain flight. More amazing (unnerving?) is their operation in formation. Based on commands, 16 quadcopters change direction, land, navigate past obstacles, and even fly in a figure-eight formation.

Washington, DC -- The country's leading medical marijuana advocacy group, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), filed an appeal brief today in the D.C. Circuit to compel the federal government to reclassify marijuana for medical use. In July 2011, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) denied a petition filed in 2002 by the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis (CRC), which was denied only after the coalition sued the government for unreasonable delay. The ASA brief filed today is an appeal of the CRC rescheduling denial.

There's no quick fix for severe depression.Although antidepressants like Prozac have been around since the 1970s, they usually take weeks to make a difference. And for up to 40 percent of patients, they simply don't work.As a result, there are limited options when patients show up in an emergency room with suicidal depression.The doctors and nurses at Ben Taub General Hospital in Houston say they see this problem every day.

The abiding public image of the current conflict in Afghanistan is the repatriation parades for fallen soldiers through the village of Royal Wootton Bassett in the country of Wiltshire. However further to the south of the county a project has been developed to deal with the hidden casualties of the conflict.It is perhaps not widely appreciated that the founding fathers of much of modern archaeology were senior figures within the British army including Lt-General Pitt Rivers, Brigadier Mortimer Wheeler, Col TE Lawrence, and O.G.S Crawford to name but a few. Meanwhile, many of those who grew the discipline in the post-War world of university expansion and Rescue Archaeology learnt many of their skills in uniform. With the inherent skills of the infantryman; an appreciation of landscape, topography and deposits in the ground as their lives depend upon it, it is less of a leap of faith to think that archaeology might be a discipline perfect for soldiers.