Newsdesk Archive

Drunvalo Melchizedek, author of The Flower of Life and The Serpent of Light, has just released a new video, available in 14 parts on Youtube. The Maya of Eternal Time claims to reveal new information about prophecies held by the indigenous Maya of today. Broadcasting from a futuristic-looking set, Melchizedek says he received permission from Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez, the leader of the Mayan council of elders, to disseminate this material. According to this program, somewhere between now and 2015, magnetic pole shift will be followed by a physical one in which we will go blind for thirty hours before all of humanity attains a higher state of consciousness.In my book Beyond 2012 (US, UK, CA), I sought to separate fact from rumor in regard to the end of the Long Count Calendar of the Classical Maya. Watching Melchizidek's production, I found a number of factual anomalies and points to question. These are enumerated below, and below that, I offer my review of The Serpent of Light, which was similarly riddled with inaccuracies and seeming exaggerations.See Geoff Stay's previous article for GrahamHancock.com http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/StrayG1.php

Millennia before modern-day Americans made fun of their politicians or cracked crude jokes over a cold one, people in ancient Mesopotamia were doing much the same thing.The evidence of sex, politics and beer-drinking comes from a newly translated tablet, dating back more than 3,500 years, which reveals a series of riddles.The text is fragmentary in parts and appears to have been written by an inexperienced hand, possibly a student. The researchers aren't sure where the tablet originates, though they suspect its scribe lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, near the Persian Gulf.

Coral reefs around the world are suffering badly from overfishing and various forms of pollution. Yet many experts argue that the greatest threat to them is the acidification of the oceans from the dissolving of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.The effect of acidification, according to J.E.N. Veron, an Australian coral scientist, will be "nothing less than catastrophic.... What were once thriving coral gardens that supported the greatest biodiversity of the marine realm will become red-black bacterial slime, and they will stay that way."

Sixteen-foot-long pythons aren't just frightening movie concepts, they are a real-life threat in the Everglades where they are annihilating the park's mammal populations to unrecoverable numbers, researchers now say.The pythons entered the park from households that kept the snakes as pets, and may also have been set loose by hurricanes in the '90s, researchers say. Rangers started noticing the python's presence in 2000, when two snakes were removed from national lands. The number of pythons has skyrocketed, with more than 300 pythons being removed from the Everglades every year since 2007. Researchers don't know their true numbers but estimate at least tens of thousands of the giant snakes inhabit the National Everglades Park.

When George Washington died in December 14, 1799, the nation mourned the loss of the war hero who led the United States to independence.But architect William Thornton believed America's first president was too important to leave the country so soon. He concocted a mad scheme to reanimate Washington's body and bring him back from the dead.The tale of zombie George Washington, revealed by the science fiction blog io9, is reminiscent of the best selling book 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,' which recast the 16th president as a combat-hardened vampire slayer. Except Washington's story is true.

The Little Ice Age was caused by the cooling effect of massive volcanic eruptions, and sustained by changes in Arctic ice cover, scientists conclude.An international research team studied ancient plants from Iceland and Canada, and sediments carried by glaciers.They say a series of eruptions just before 1300 lowered Arctic temperatures enough for ice sheets to expand.Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they say this would have kept the Earth cool for centuries.

hirty-thousand-year-old bison bones discovered in permafrost at a Canadian goldmine are helping scientists unravel the mystery about how animals adapt to rapid environmental change.The bones play a key role in a world-first study, led by University of Adelaide researchers, which analyses special genetic modifications that turn genes on and off, without altering the DNA sequence itself. These 'epigenetic' changes can occur rapidly between generations - without requiring the time for standard evolutionary processes.

The heads of 13 of the world's biggest drug companies, brought together by Bill Gates, have agreed to donate more medicines and, in a rare spirit of co-operation, to work together to find new ones in an attempt to end many neglected tropical diseases that kill and maim some of the poorest people on the planet.The 10 diseases targeted affect 1.4 billion people. They include lymphatic filariasis, river blindness, schistosomiasis and Chagas disease. Often the treatments that exist are ineffective, and sometimes even fatal.

A new robotic Russian space freighter launched into orbit Wednesday (Jan. 25) hauling tons of food and equipment for the crew of the International Space Station.The unmanned cargo ship Progress 46 soared spaceward atop a Soyuz rocket from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Liftoff occurred at 6:06 p.m. EST (2306 GMT), though it was early Thursday at the launch site, marking Russia's first space mission of the year.

The United States and Russia will jointly inspect foreign facilities in Antarctica to make sure environmental and other responsibilities under the 1959 Antarctica Treaty are being met, the State Department said Saturday.A US-Russian team will travel to Antarctica January 23-28 to check foreign stations, installations and equipment, it said.

Nearly 12,000 people will die of head and neck cancer in the United States this year and worldwide cases will exceed half a million.A study published this week in the journal Carcinogenesis shows that in both cell lines and mouse models, grape seed extract (GSE) kills head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cells, while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

Man-made air pollution from North America causes Europe to lose 1.2 million tonnes of wheat a year, a new study has found.The research, led by the University of Leeds and co-authored by the University of York, shows for the first time the extent of the Northern Hemisphere's intercontinental crop losses caused by ozone - a chemical partly produced by fossil fuels.The study also suggests that increasing levels of air pollution from one continent may partly offset efforts to cut carbon emissions in another.The findings have important implications for international strategies to tackle global food shortages, as well as global climate and human health strategies.

Nearly one-third of CO2 emissions due to human activities enters the world's oceans. By reacting with seawater, CO2 increases the water's acidity, which may significantly reduce the calcification rate of such marine organisms as corals and mollusks. The extent to which human activities have raised the surface level of acidity, however, has been difficult to detect on regional scales because it varies naturally from one season and one year to the next, and between regions, and direct observations go back only 30 years.

The first wild black squirrel was spotted in 1912 outside Letchworth in Hertfordshire after being introduced to the area by a Victorian aristocrat.The darker animals are the same species as the invasive greys and have slowly been increasing as they interbreed with the larger resident population.At the moment it is estimated there could be as many as 25,000 in the east of England.Meanwhile native red squirrel populations have crashed in the last 100 years because of the greys spreading disease and taking over habitat.

Czech archaeologists have found a long lost temple from the Meroe period near the town of Vad Bon Naga in Sudan, Pavel Onderka, from Prague's Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures, told journalists yesterday.The large temple compound is situated 130 km northwards of Khartoum. European travellers saw the remains of the temple in the early 19th century but then the temple disappeared in the desert, said Onderka who leads the Czech archaeology expedition.

Compelling new evidence from the US government's top bee expert that modern pesticides may be a major cause of collapsing bee populations led to calls yesterday for the chemicals to be banned.A study published in the current issue of the German science journal Naturwissenschaften, reveals how bees given minute doses of the widely used pesticide imidacloprid became more vulnerable to infections from a deadly parasite, nosema.

A recently discovered mysterious "winged" structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels.Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room.

Stories of Bronze Age Scandinavian invaders killing men and enslaving women may have to be rewritten thanks to discovery of a series of virtual "time capsuals" in the Outer Hebrides.Archaeologists have published the results of over 20 years of work in South Uist uncovering ancient settlements preserved under sand dunes dating from the Bronze Age to the modern era.The team said the research challenges the existing belief that the Norse period marked a cataclysmic change in the Hebridean way of life.

A bicycle pump-like device that harnesses wave power to generate electricity could be coming to the United Kingdom's coast within the next few years. The surprisingly simple system gets around a huge hurdle facing wave power: corrosion.The "Searaser" device works a little like an air pump for a bike, only it's much larger and pushes water around. Searaser contains a piston between two buoys, a larger one that floats on the ocean surface, and a smaller one suspended underwater that's weighted to the seafloor. When ocean waves pass by, the motion causes the piston to pump seawater through a pipe toward the shore.

Microscopic plastic debris from washing clothes is accumulating in the marine environment and could be entering the food chain, a study has warned.Researchers traced the "microplastic" back to synthetic clothes, which released up to 1,900 tiny fibres per garment every time they were washed.Earlier research showed plastic smaller than 1mm were being eaten by animals and getting into the food chain.The findings appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Plundering, pillaging and plenty of sea food -- what wasn't to like about the life of a Viking?How it sometimes ended, suggests an archeological study in the current Oxford Journal of Archeology. In the study led by Mark Pollard of the United Kingdom's University of Oxford, archeologists thought they had uncovered the victims of England's St. Brice's Day Massacre in 1002 A.D.The 1002 massacre was "a most just extermination" in the words of King Aethelred the Unready, of Danes cluttering up the English countryside that took place at St. Frideswide's Church, now Christ Church Cathedral, in Oxford. Scandinavian Viking raiders had harried the English coast in the Middle Ages, expeditions that lasted two centuries, creating long-lasting friction between Danes and Saxons.

Because our galaxy is teeming with planets it should be home to countless extraterrestrial civilizations. That is unless, through some perverse twist in nature, intelligent life is an evolutionary dead-end.But let's be optimistic and assume that some fraction of far-flung worlds rise to the status of a hosting a super-civilization.This was described in 1964 by Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev who hypothesized that a so-called Type III civilization would control the entire energy output of a galaxy. (We don't even reach Type I status because we have failed to harness nuclear fusion or build a constellation of solar power satellites.).

Last week we asked readers for their predictions of life in 100 years time. Inspired by ten 100-year predictions made by American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins in 1900, many of you wrote in with your vision of the world in 2112.Many of the "strange, almost impossible" predictions made by Watkins came true. Here is what futurologists Ian Pearson (IP) and Patrick Tucker (PT) think of your ideas.1. Oceans will be extensively farmed and not just for fish.

An intense solar flare unleashed the biggest radiation storm in years today (Jan. 23), but astronauts aboard the International Space Station are not in any danger, NASA officials say.The sun eruption triggered the most powerful radiation storm since 2005 in a wave of charged particles that is expected to hit our planet Tuesday (Jan. 24) at around 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT), according to experts at the Space Weather Prediction Center, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Construction workers laying new pipes and cables on Burns Avenue in San Ignacio in western Belize have stumbled upon a cache of Maya artifacts dating back more than 2 thousand years. The pottery and human bones were unearthed during work that is part of a $2.7 million dollar beautification project in the small town. The workers were using an excavator to open trenches on the street on Saturday when they made the find. The area is home to the nearby Cahal Pech Maya Site.

A man in Dorset has been left mystified after tiny blue spheres fell from the sky into his garden.Steve Hornsby from Bournemouth said the 3cm diameter balls came raining down late on Thursday afternoon during a hail storm.He found about a dozen of the balls in his garden. He said: "[They're] difficult to pick up, I had to get a spoon and flick them into a jam jar."The Met Office said the jelly-like substance was "not meteorological".Mr Hornsby, a former aircraft engineer, said: "The sky went a really dark yellow colour.

They can be mean and nasty, and they can mess up our planet big time. They are near-Earth objects, dubbed NEOs, celestial flotsam such as asteroids or comets that can, and have, scored direct hits on our humble home planet.A new international consortium has been launched to address the impact threat to Earth, but, more pointedly, to organize, prepare and implement mitigation measures.Called NEOShield, the European Commission is providing a significant amount of euros to support the initiative. The undertaking consists of research institutes, universities and industrial partners in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Spain, as well as in the U.S. and Russia.

The largest solar particle event since 2005 hit the Earth, Mars and the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft travelling in-between, allowing the onboard Radiation Assessment Detector to measure the radiation a human astronaut could be exposed to en route to the Red Planet.On Sunday, a huge coronal mass ejection erupted from the surface of the sun, spewing a cloud of charged particles in our direction, causing a strong "S3" solar storm. A NASA Goddard Space Weather Lab animation of the CME illustrates how the disturbance impacts Earth, Mars and several spacecraft. Solar storms can affect the Earth's aurorae, satellites, air travel and GPS systems; no harmful effects to the Mars Science Laboratory have been detected from this solar event.

Two Canadian teenagers have sent a Lego man into the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere using a home-stitched parachute and equipment found on Craigslist.Two weeks ago, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, attached the plastic figurine replete with maple leaf flag to a helium balloon, which they sent 80,000 feet into the air.The pair managed to capture the entire journey into the blackness of space, including the descent, which lasted 97 minutes, using four cameras, at an entire cost of just £254.

Scientists from the National Research Council in the U.S. are urging insurers to invest more money in studying nanotechnology. The technology has advanced significantly in the past decade and now holds major promise in medical applications and consumer products. Council scientists say that the potential health hazards of the technology are not yet fully understood and that an additional $24 million a year is required to fill in the knowledge shortfall. Without an intimate understand of the risks associated with nanotechnology, consumers could face unforeseen dangers that will have a major impact on the insurance industry.Scientists are suggesting that the Environmental Protection Agency establish a new organization whose sole purpose is to study and calculate the risks associated with nanotechnology.

(CNN) -- Deep down on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Swedish treasure hunters think they have made the find of a lifetime. The problem is, they're not exactly sure what it is they've uncovered.Out searching for shipwrecks at a secret location between Sweden and Finland, the deep-sea salvage company Ocean Explorer captured an incredible image more than 80 meters below the water's surface. At first glance, team leader and commercial diver Peter Lindberg joked that his crew had just discovered an unidentified flying object, or UFO."I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have a seen a few objects on the bottom, but nothing like this," said Lindberg.

Millennia before modern-day Americans made fun of their politicians or cracked crude jokes over a cold one, people in ancient Mesopotamia were doing much the same thing.The evidence of sex, politics and beer-drinking comes from a newly translated tablet, dating back more than 3,500 years, which reveals a series of riddles.The text is fragmentary in parts and appears to have been written by an inexperienced hand, possibly a student. The researchers aren't sure where the tablet originates, though they suspect its scribe lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, near the Persian Gulf.

Cold, electrically charged particles have long been suspected to exist tens of thousands of miles above the Earth's surface, and now scientists have detected such ions there for the first time. And they are significantly more abundant at those heights than previously imagined.Cold is, of course, a relative term. Although these low-energy ions are 1,000 times cooler than what researchers might consider hot plasma, these particles still have an energy that would correspond to about 1 million degrees Fahrenheit (500,000 degrees Celsius). But because the density of the "cold" ions in space is so low, satellites and spacecraft can orbit through them without getting destroyed.

Under the hot sun at Tel es-Safi in southern Israel -- the Philistine city of Gath -- archeologists have been puzzling over life in the Iron Age city and how it was plundered and destroyed by some invading force hundreds of years before the common era."It was like a mini-Pompei, a frozen record in a moment of time," says Prof. Steve Weiner, director of the Kimmel Center for Archeological Science at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.Kimmel's unique onsite laboratory helps archeologists piece together the events of the destruction.

Seafaring before the Neolithic - circa 7th millennium BCE - is a controversial issue in the Mediterranean. However, evidence from different parts of the Aegean is gradually changing this, revealing the importance of early coastal and island environments. The site of Ouriakos on the island of Lemnos (Greece) tentatively dates to the end of the Pleistocene and possibly the beginning of the Holocene, circa 12,000 BP.

If you want to save an ancient archaeological site from impending destruction, here is one way to do it: Buy it.That is exactly what happened in 2011 as the monumental remains of a Classic period Maya kingdom located in northwestern Belize faced destruction from bulldozing. Action from expanding development pressures began to inch closer to three Maya archaeological sites in northwestern Belize, sites that have not yet been badly damaged by bulldozing. One of the sites, known as Grey Fox (named after a type of fox that is indigenous to the area), is located on the edge of a 500 sq. km., low-lying un-impacted forest area known as the Bajo Alcranes. The site contains two large public plazas, each about 100 x 100 meters in size, dominated by a large eastern pyramid and large royal elite residences and viewing galleries, and, adjacent to the plazas, a probable ballcourt.

Chances are you own a smart phone or some kind of electronic device with capabilities that would stun even an Apple engineer from ten years ago. We've come to expect that technology advances at a mind-boggling pace, but just how far has rocket technology advanced in say, the past three decades?Not much.The rockets that sent men to the moon were powered by chemical combustion, which in its most powerful form ignites hydrogen with oxygen. The space shuttle main engine, essentially the state of the art for rocket propulsion, uses the same chemicals.

Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth might itself threaten the food supply of billions of people.

More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on Earth's surface began forming multi-cellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals.Just how that happened is a question that has eluded evolutionary biologists.Now scientists have replicated that key step in the laboratory using common Brewer's yeast, a single-celled organism.The yeast "evolved" into multi-cellular clusters that work together cooperatively, reproduce and adapt to their environment--in essence, they became precursors to life on Earth as it is today.

Computational modeling that examines evidence of how hominin groups evolved culturally and biologically in response to climate change during the last Ice Age also bears new insights into the extinction of Neanderthals. Details of the complex modeling experiments conducted at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado Denver were published in the December issue of the journal Human Ecology.

The Department of Natural Resources is investigating vandalism at an Indian mound in Manchester State Forest southwest of Sumter.The Sumter Item reported Thursday that officials discovered that someone dug into a mound behind a fenced-in portion of the forest.State Forestry Commission spokesman Scott Hawkins says the mounds are behind locked gates and not viewable on forest maps in order to protect them. He says they have turned the investigation over to the Natural Resources Department.

CyArk and partners have launched the Hopi Petroglyph Sites Digital Preservation Project website, a portal featuring sacred Hopi sites documented through state-of-the-art 3D capture technology. The resulting information collected has been used to create online interactive and educational multimedia freely available to the public.Vandalism and deteriorationThe 3D models and virtual tours captured at Tutuveni and Dawa Park in Arizona provide the basis for this rich interactive web portal, but they also represent a permanent and highly-accurate 3D digital archive of the sites and the petroglyphs contained within. With the increasing vandalism and deterioration occurring at these sacred Hopi Sites, it is more important than ever to document what exists and educate the public about its importance, not only for members of the Hopi tribe, but for all of us who stand to learn a great deal about the diverse history of the Native American people.

The biggest trees in the world, known as the true ecological kings of the jungle, are dying off rapidly as roads, farms and settlements fragment forests and they come under prolonged attack from severe droughts and new pests and diseases.Long-term studies in Amazonia, Africa and central America show that while these botanical behemoths may have adapted successfully to centuries of storms, pests and short-term climatic extremes, they are counterintuitively more vulnerable than other trees to today's threats.

More than 10,000 people have taken to Poland's streets to protest the signing of an international treaty activists say amounts to internet censorship.Prime Minister Donald Tusk says his government will on Thursday sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.The treaty, known as Acta, aims to establish international standards to enforce intellectual property rights.But critics say it could curb freedom of expression, and government websites have been hacked in protest.

Aeroplanes can fly because their wings cause the air pressure underneath to be greater than that above, lifting them into the air.But engineers have for years been frustrated by a theory which wrongly explains what causes the change in pressure to occur.The myth is commonly found in school textbooks and aeroplane flight manuals, and is so widely believed that even Einstein was rumoured to subscribe to it.

LONDON: The effects of hallucinogenic drugs as they pass through the brain have been mapped for the first time, providing insight into the drug's effects on consciousness and mood.Psychedelic drugs such as 'magic mushrooms' contain the active compound psilocybin, which causes hallucinations and existential experiences, but until now the causes behind this effect have been unknown.

Chemists have taken an important step in making artificial life forms from scratch. Using a novel chemical reaction, they have created self-assembling cell membranes, the structural envelopes that contain and support the reactions required for life.Neal Devaraj, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and Itay Budin, a graduate student at Harvard University, report their success in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Researchers have "cloaked" a three-dimensional object, making it invisible from all angles, for the first time.However, the demonstration works only for waves in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.It uses a shell of what are known as plasmonic materials; they present a "photo negative" of the object being cloaked, effectively cancelling it out.

It sounds more like folklore than science, but meteorologists have discovered that lightning in Africa could be a warning of cloudy skies in Britain.Thunderstorms over central and east Africa were found to create an electrical charge in the sky above Scotland, 8,000 miles away.The researchers believe this "fair weather electric field", carried around the globe in the upper atmosphere, could influence the weather by triggering cloud formation. The finding has been hailed as a real-life example of the "butterfly effect", in which a seemingly minor event has a big impact elsewhere.

A small asteroid the size of a city bus zoomed between Earth and the moon's orbit Friday (Jan. 25) just days after its discovery, but it never posed a threat to our planet, NASA says.The asteroid 2012 BX34 passed within 36,750 miles (59,044 kilometers) of Earth when it made its closest approach at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT). The space rock is about 37 feet (11 meters) wide and would have broke apart in Earth's atmosphere long before it reached the ground, if it had reached the planet at all, NASA scientists said.

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- In the current issue of Science, researchers at Michigan State University demonstrate how a new virus evolves, which sheds light on how easy it can be for diseases to gain dangerous mutations.The scientists showed for the first time how the virus called "Lambda" evolved to find a new way to attack host cells, an innovation that took four mutations to accomplish. This virus infects bacteria, in particular the common E. coli bacterium. Lambda isn't dangerous to humans, but this research demonstrated how viruses evolve complex and potentially deadly new traits, said Justin Meyer, MSU graduate student, who co-authored the paper with Richard Lenski, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

The raven-size creature long thought of as the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, may have been adorned with black feathers, researchers have found.The structures that held the black pigment may have strengthened wing feathers, perhaps helping Archaeopteryx fly, scientists added.Archaeopteryxlived about 150 million years ago in what is now Bavaria in Germany. First unearthed 150 years ago, the fossil of this carnivore, with its blend of avian and reptilian features, seemed an iconic evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.

Eight years after landing on Mars for what was planned as a three-month mission, NASA's enduring Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is working on what essentially became a new mission five months ago.Opportunity reached a multi-year driving destination, Endeavour Crater, in August 2011. At Endeavour's rim, it has gained access to geological deposits from an earlier period of Martian history than anything it examined during its first seven years. It also has begun an investigation of the planet's deep interior that takes advantage of staying in one place for the Martian winter.

Rice University physicists have gone to extremes to prove that Isaac Newton's classical laws of motion can apply in the atomic world: They've built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom of potassium.In a new paper published this week in Physical Review Letters, Rice's team and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology showed they could cause an electron in an atom to orbit the nucleus in precisely the same way that Jupiter's Trojan asteroids orbit the sun.

In a broad appeal to U.S. voters, President Obama said Tuesday that he will open more than 75% of potential offshore oil and gas resources to exploration and, at the same time, produce enough clean energy on public land to power 3 million homes.During his election-year State of the Union address, Obama said the nation is rapidly boosting its oil production but, with just 2% of the world's oil reserves, it needs to look at other energy sources. He said he will "take every possible action to safely develop" natural gas while requiring companies that drill on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use.

The first secure quantum computer has been made by combining entanglement, a bizarre property of tiny particles, with the power of apparent randomness.The technique is similar to quantum cryptography, which guarantees the secrecy of a message sent from one place to another, but in this instance guarantees the privacy of data-processing. It could enable code-breakers, governments or private individuals to harness the power of a quantum server remotely without having to worry that the owner can snoop on their data or calculations.

Already under construction, these two projects are saving humans from having to work in two of the most inhospitable environments on the planet: the Sahara Desert, and the South Pole in Antarctica.BUILDING IN THE SAHARAThe Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing, Engineering and Automation in Stuttgart, Germany, is developing a robot to construct a 2,270-square-mile solar farm in the Sahara. The 100-ton Industrial Parallel Kinematics device (IPAnema) is similar to the Skycam that hovers above the field at NFL games: 2,000 feet of polyethylene cable strung between four mobile towers suspend the end effector, a box with jaws built for grasping solar reflectors. IPAnema will be ready for work in 2015.

It was mentioned in the novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God in scenes spanning from the reign of Augustus through the reign of Claudius, and it was mentioned in the movie, Gladiator, in the scene where Maximus is informed that he had a loyal army encamped there and awaiting his orders. Historically, it is documented as the Roman harbor city of Ostia, the vital town of maritime commerce near the sea at the mouth of the Tiber River. Today it is a large archaeological site that now lies about 3 km from the sea, a distance created through time by silting and a drop in sea level. It is known for its well-preserved and impressive ancient buildings, mosaics and frescoes (see photo images below). Now, archaeologists are investigating a find here that has never been explored, using a new model of archaeological excavation.

The ancient remains of four prehistoric bears have been uncovered by archaeologists diving in underwater caves in Mexico.Scientists think the extinct species lived in the caves in the ice age before they became filled with water.Human remains were also found.

Food is getting elbowed out of the discussion on climate change, which could spell disaster for the 1 billion people who will be added to the world's population in the next 15 years. That's the word today from scientists wondering why food and sustainability get such short shrift when it comes to thinking about how humans will adapt to climate change.In the past year, we've seen drought in Texas, floods in Australia and massive drought and wildfires in Russia, all of which have had a big impact on global food supply and prices. Those are good examples of the extreme weather events and changes in weather patterns that scientists expect to see with climate change.

Over many generations, people living in the high-altitude regions of the Andes or on the Tibetan Plateau have adapted to life in low-oxygen conditions. Living with such a distinct and powerful selective pressure has made these populations a textbook example of evolution in action, but exactly how their genes convey a survival advantage remains an open question. Now, a University of Pennsylvania team has made new inroads to answering this question with the first genome-wide study of high-altitude adaptations within the third major population to possess them: the Amhara people of the Ethiopian Highlands.

NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet.The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week.It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US.It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions.

Generally, solar flares are bad news for stuff orbiting the Earth. The impact of intense solar radiation on sensitive electronics can render the most sophisticated space technologies useless. Also, heating and expansion of the Earth's upper atmosphere by peaking solar activity can increase drag on satellites, slowing them down, causing them to drop from orbit.How could this negative situation be turned into a positive? What's bad for operational satellites has the wonderful side effect of helping mankind with an increasingly pressing problem: the specter of space junk.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them.The information comes from a document released on 19 January looking for companies who might want to build a monitoring system for the FBI. It spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by 10 February.

NASA has released a breath-taking high-definition image of our fair planet from space. The 64-megapixel image was captured by the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. According to NASA, the image is a a composite that uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012.This isn't the first time NASA has released a high-resolution image of the Earth as seen from space. The first (and arguably most famous) was taken by Apollo 17 and is known as the Blue Marble photo. NASA has released several photos along the same vein since then, including Blue Marble 2002, which many will recognize as the oh-so-familiar iPhone lock image.

The gigantic asteroid Vesta may be packed with ancient ice. Though generally believed to be quite dry, roughly half of the giant asteroid is expected to be so cold and to receive so little sunlight that water ice could have survived there. The presence or absence of water ice on Vesta would provide clues about the tiny world's formation and evolution.NASA says data from its Dawn mission to the asteroid Vesta suggests the rocky body is cold and dark enough to have retained ice for billions of years.Modeling of Vesta's average global temperatures and illumination by the sun shows that, under present conditions, Vesta's polar regions are cold enough to sustain water ice for long periods, the space agency said in a release Wednesday.

Jumping spiders, which hunt by pouncing on their prey, gauge distances to their unsuspecting meals in a way that appears to be unique in the animal kingdom, a new study finds.The superability boils down to seeing green, the researchers found.There are several different visual systems that organisms use to accurately and reliably judge distance and depth. Humans, for example, have binocular stereovision. Because our eyes are spaced apart, they receive visual information from different angles, which our brains use to automatically triangulate distances.

Working 11 hours a day may not only make you more tired -- it could also make you more depressed.A study of civil servants in England found that working excessive hours was linked with more cases of major depressive episodes. The 2,123 men and women observed in the study, published this week in the online journal PLoS One, were followed for an average 5.8 years and assessed for depression.Working 11 or more hours a day was associated with a 2.3- to 2.5-fold increased risk of having a major depressive episode compared with those who worked a standard seven- to eight-hour day. That association held true after researchers adjusted for social and demographic factors, smoking, alcohol use and job strain.

Oxford, United Kingdom - It has sometimes been claimed that, like human rights and democracy, the protection of Egypt's cultural heritage cannot be left to the Egyptians. Corruption, poverty and ignorance, Egypt's critics maintain, pose a serious threat to the preservation of artefacts of "global importance".Egypt's own Antiquities Council, of course, claims otherwise. Attempting to demonstrate its commitment to safeguarding "national heritage", erstwhile director Zahi Hawass waged a mildly successful international campaign to repatriate what "rightly belongs" to Egypt. In one case, a mummy returned from Atlanta, Georgia, was given a farcical state-funeral, serenaded by singing schoolchildren and marching military bagpipers.Hawass, obsessed with ancient showpieces like the bust of Nefertiti and the Rosetta Stone, has long overlooked the theft of Egypt's non-ancient heritage.

Last year broke records for extreme weather in the United States, with 14 events each causing at least a billion dollars in damage, US authorities said on Thursday.Also, 2011 marked 35 years in a row that global temperatures have been warmer than average, according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

When sites like Wikipedia and Reddit banded together for a major blackout January 18th, the impact was felt all the way to Washington D.C. The blackout had lawmakers running from the controversial anti-piracy legislation, SOPA and PIPA, which critics said threatened freedom of speech online.Unfortunately for free-speech advocates, these pieces of legislation are not the only laws which threaten an open internet.

Chinese authorities are seeking permission to explore Sri Lanka's coastline for possible Chinese ship wrecks from the ancient Silk Route era, an official said Wednesday.Sri Lanka, an Indian Ocean island, was a key trading post along the ancient Silk Route which saw silk, spices and handicrafts travel by road and sea between Asia and Europe.

The only works of art depicting the horrors of Auschwitz in occupied Poland - made by an inmate and hidden in a bottle - have gone on display for the first time at the camp's museum.Children can be seen being torn from the arms of their mothers and a guard smoking a cigarette outside a gas chamber as bodies are loaded into a lorry are among the artworks on show.They were made in secret - their discovery at the time would have meant instant execution for the artist - and hidden in a bottle that was then stashed into the eaves of one of the huts.

Russia is talking to NASA and the European Space Agency about building manned research colonies on the moon, according to Russian news reports.Russia's Federal Space Agency, known as Roscosmos, is also consulting with NASA and ESA about the possibility of placing manned space stations in lunar orbit, Russian news agency Ria Novosti reported Thursday.A growing body of research supports the supposition that humanity can live for extended periods of time on or around the moon, Russian space agency chief Vladimir Popovkin said.

Some of the most intriguing areas on the moon are the hardest to see.These spots, called permanently shadowed regions, are always dark and never reflect sunlight, so telescopes and satellites have no way to image them in regular light. Now, researchers have used a more devious method to view these areas and found that they may be relatively abundant in water ice.The permanently shadowed regions are located on the moon's poles and are usually deep in craters where sunlight can't reach. To view these areas, scientists used light that's reflected off hydrogen atoms floating throughout the universe that spreads in all directions, even hitting areas in shade. This light, called lyman alpha emission, shines in a particular, narrow wavelength band.

Why does our universe look the way it does? In particular, why do we only experience three spatial dimensions in our universe, when superstring theory, for instance, claims that there are ten dimensions -- nine spatial dimensions and a tenth dimension of time?Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged from the original nine dimensions of space. They describe their new supercomputer calculations simulating the birth of our universe in a forthcoming paper in Physical Review Letters.Before we delve into the mind-bending specifics, it's helpful to have a bit of background.

Organic chemists at the University of York have made a significant advance towards establishing the origin of the carbohydrates (sugars) that form the building blocks of life.A team led by Dr Paul Clarke in the Department of Chemistry at York have re-created a process which could have occurred in the prebiotic world.

A gang of heavily insulated scientists has wrapped up its Antarctic expedition, with its members thawing out from the experience, but pleased to have bagged more than 300 space rocks.They are participants in the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program, or ANSMET for short. Since 1976, ANSMET researchers have been recovering thousands of meteorite specimens from the East Antarctic ice sheet. ANSMET is funded by the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation.

Until recently, archeologists have thought of Neanderthals, an early relative of humans, as thick, slow thinking and likely uncreative. Now, new evidence dispels part of that image. Archeologists digging in the Netherlands have unearthed flint and bone fragments from 200,000 years ago that have remnants of red ochre on them, indicating that Neanderthals were using the material much earlier than was previously thought. The research team has published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Amazon Basin, traditionally considered a bulwark against global warming, may be becoming a net contributor of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a result of deforestation, researchers said on Wednesday.In an overview published in the journal Nature, scientists led by Eric Davidson of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts say the Amazon is "in transition" as a result of human activity.Over 50 years, the population has risen from six million to 25 million, triggering massive land clearance for logging and agriculture, they said.

Paleontologists have found the skull of a weird but deadly mammal-like monster that terrorized Brazil long before dinosaurs ruled the earth.The specimen is from the Permian period, more than 260 million years ago. The complete skull measures about 13 inches (35 centimeters) in length and was discovered in 2008 during a scientific excavation on a farm in the pampas region of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. The skull came from a creature that was part of a class of long-extinct vertebrates called dinocephalian therapsids, which predated the dinosaurs and were distantly related to mammals.

Astronomers have spotted a "dwarf" galaxy some 10 billion light-years away which may be made mostly of the mysterious material called dark matter.The dwarf was found using a technique called gravitational lensing. It is only the second dark dwarf ever seen, and it is by far the most distant.The fact that so few dwarf galaxies are seen in our own cosmic neighbourhood has remained a conundrum in astronomy.The study in Nature could explain it: they may be overwhelmingly dark matter.

LONDON: Astronomers who are searching for extraterrestrial lives have said that they would not conceal any information if aliens got in touch and will let us know through Twitter.Researchers from Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence scan the universe for signals coming from the world's largest radio telescopes, hunting for any unusual signs.And while conspiracy theorists argue there would be a government cover-up or global upheaval Seth Shostak, the Seti Institute's principal astronomer, told the BBC that both groups are unnecessarily panicking.

A drug derived from magic mushrooms could help people with depression by enabling them to relive positive and happy moments of their lives, according to scientists including the former government drug adviser, Professor David Nutt.Two studies, for which scientists struggled to find funding because of public suspicion and political sensitivity around psychedelic drugs, have shed light on how magic mushrooms affect the brain.Nutt, from Imperial College London, was sacked as a government drug adviser after claiming tobacco and alcohol were more dangerous than cannabis and psychedelic drugs such as ecstasy and LSD.

Friends socially sharing drugs and those using cannabis for medicinal purposes could escape jail under new guidelines for judges.Drug runners and small-time dealers caught with heroin, cocaine or thousands of pounds worth of cannabis could also avoid prison.Instead, low-level operatives caught with 6kg of cannabis, 20 ecstasy tablets, or five grams of heroin or cocaine are likely to receive a community sentence.The guidelines, which come into force on February 27, are expected to be met with mixed reaction.

UK scientists have detected a huge dome of fresh water that is developing in the western Arctic Ocean.The bulge is some 8,000 cubic km in size and has risen by about 15cm since 2002.The team thinks it may be the result of strong winds whipping up a great clockwise current in the northern polar region called the Beaufort Gyre.This would force the water together, raising sea surface height, the group tells the journal Nature Geoscience.

An international team of scientists has demonstrated the first soap that responds to magnets.This means the soap and the materials that it dissolves can be removed easily by applying a magnetic field.Experts say that with further development, it could find applications in cleaning up oil spills and waste water.Details of the new soap, which contains iron atoms, are reported in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie.

An intense solar flare unleashed the biggest radiation storm in years today (Jan. 23), but astronauts aboard the International Space Station are not in any danger, NASA officials say.The sun eruption triggered the most powerful radiation storm since 2005 in a wave of charged particles that is expected to hit our planet Tuesday (Jan. 24) at around 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT), according to experts at the Space Weather Prediction Center, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).NASA scientists also routinely monitor space weather conditions in order to protect astronauts and hardware in orbit from harmful radiation, and today's solar storm is no exception, agency officials said.

The finding in South Africa showed several clutches of fossilised eggs, many containing embryos.Tiny footprints of the newborn dinosaurs also showed they stayed in the nest long enough to grow to double their size.The nests, found in Golden Gate Highlands National Park, is 100 million years older than previously found nests and belonged to Massospondylus, a 20-foot ancestor of long-necked "sauropod" dinosaurs that lived 190 million years ago.At least 10 nests were found at different rock levels, with up to 34 eggs in each, suggesting the dinosaurs returned to the same spot to lay their eggs.

A potent solar flare has unleashed the biggest radiation storm since 2005 and could disrupt some satellite communications in the polar regions, US space weather monitors said Monday.The event started late Sunday with a moderate-sized solar flare that erupted right near the center of the Sun, said Doug Biesecker, a physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Space Weather Prediction Center."The flare itself was nothing spectacular, but it sent off a very fast coronal mass ejection traveling four million miles per hour (6.4 million kilometers per hour)," he told AFP.

If you think a Chihuahua doesn't have much in common with a Rottweiler, you might be on to something.An ancient dog skull, preserved in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia for 33,000 years, presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with equally ancient dog remains from a cave in Belgium, indicates that domestication of dogs may have occurred repeatedly in different geographic locations rather than with a single domestication event.In other words, man's best friends may have originated from more than one ancient ancestor, contrary to what some DNA evidence previously has indicated.

The chance of a big earthquake hitting the Japanese capital in the next few years is much greater than official predictions suggest, researchers say.The team, from the University of Tokyo, said there was a 75% probability that a magnitude seven quake would strike the region in the next four years.The government says the chances of such an event are 70% in the next 30 years.The warning comes less than a year after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan's north-eastern coast.

A federal judge has ruled that a Colorado woman can be compelled to decrypt her encrypted laptop so that the police can inspect it for incriminating evidence. The woman, Ramona Fricosu, is a defendant in a mortgage scam case. She had argued that the Fifth Amednment's privilege against self-incrimination protected her from having to disclose the password to her hard drive, which was encrypted using PGP Desktop.In previous cases, judges have drawn a distinction between forcing a defendant to reveal her password and forcing her to decrypt encrypted data without disclosing the password. The courts have held that the former forces the defendant to reveal the contents of her mind, which raises Fifth Amendment issues.

Ancient Egyptians paid special attention to the organs of their dead, embalming them so they would continue to function in the afterlife. Now it seems they did the same for sacrificed ibis birds, and even packed their stomachs with food so they wouldn't go hungry.Ibis mummies are found in their millions at shrines in Egypt, where they were sacrificed to Thoth, the god of writing and wisdom. Andrew Wade at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and his colleagues used a CT scanner to look inside two mummified adult ibises and one hatchling.

A recently discovered mysterious "winged" structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels.Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room."Generally speaking, [during] the Roman Empire people built within a fixed repertoire of architectural forms," said William Bowden, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who reported the find in the most recent edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

I have always found the field of archaeology fascinating and exciting. From my first exposure through the Indiana Jones franchise (in my experience, Indy is the reason most of us American anthropologists and archaeologists got into the field) to my college career where I majored in anthropology, I have always kept track of the exciting finds in the archaeological world. A somewhat recent find, Gobekli Tepe, an 11,000 year old megalithic archaeological site found in Turkey, is without question an incredible find and addition to the human story. The stones are ornately carved with reliefs of animals and birds, some not indigenous to the region. Researching this site can help to unlock secrets of the daily life of a culture without metal tools or pottery.

LOS ANGELES (KTLA) - What will Los Angeles look like in the future?For artist Chris Burden, who has watched the city evolve since 1960, it's a fast-paced Metropolis, a city where cars could one day be digitally controlled, driving at blinding speeds without the danger of crashing.One thousand cars on 18 freeways, traveling at speeds equal to 240 miles per hour, circulate on Burden's large-scale kinetic sculpture, which will be on view at the L.A. County Museum of Art. Burden says the balconies at the exhibit offer a unique perspective for visitors.

You might someday be much, much smarter than you are now. That's the hope of neuroscientists focused on understanding the basis of intelligence. They have discovered that the brains of people with high IQs tend to be highly integrated, with neural paths connecting distant brain regions, while less intelligent people's brains build simpler, shorter routes. But no one knows why some brains construct much longer-range connections than others.

LONDON (Reuters) - A new molecule has been detected in the earth's atmosphere which could help produce a cooling effect, scientists said, but it remains to be seen whether it can play a major role in tackling global warming.The molecule can convert pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide, into compounds which can lead to cloud formation, helping to shield the earth from the sun, the researchers said.

The United States will work with other nations to develop an international code of conduct for outer space, but only if the code does not hinder U.S. national security efforts, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Tuesday (Jan. 17).Space junk and "irresponsible actors" threaten the long-term sustainability of the space environment, Clinton said in a statement released Tuesday. Such threats can be reduced and managed if the U.S. and other nations establish rules for everyone to follow, she added."A code of conduct will help maintain the long-term sustainability, safety, stability and security of space by establishing guidelines for the responsible use of space," Clinton said.