Newsdesk Archive

A Chinese inventor has come up with an incredible new design for a car that will work on tarmac, sand, ice... and even water.The all-terrain vehicle, which has a top speed of 62mph and works like a hovercraft, can move seamlessly between different surfaces.Designer Yuhan Zhang, 21, created the spectacular car - called the Volkswagen Aqua - for a competition sponsored by the German car manufacturer.

ONE of the biggest drawbacks with owning an electric vehicle (EV) is range anxiety - a driver's nagging fear that the battery charge will not get them to their destination. Now IBM claims to have solved a fundamental problem that may lead to the creation of a battery with an 800-kilometre (500-mile) range - letting EVs potentially compete with most petrol engines for the first time.Standard electric vehicles use lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are bulky and rarely provide 160 kilometres (100 miles) of driving before they run down.

A sticky end awaits worms that stray too close to a scrawny-looking plant unique to Brazil. Philcoxia minensis is the first carnivorous plant discovered to trap and devour prey in the soil with the help of sticky leaves prodded below the surface.Earlier investigations had shown that P. minensis's tiny subterranean leaves, each just 1.5 millimetres wide, were covered with grains of sand and the corpses of nematode worms.Now, Rafael Silva Oliveira of the State University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil and his colleagues say they have proof that the plants qualify as carnivores by digesting the nematodes.

Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to proteins in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood.The type of RNA in question is called microRNA, due to its small size. MicroRNAs have been studied extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been linked to human diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. The Chinese research provides the first example of ingested plant microRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function.Should the research survive scientific scrutiny, it could prove a game changer in many fields. It would mean that we're eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but information as well.

ANTARCTICA has yielded its first sauropod fossil. The long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs are already known to have plodded across the six other continents.The 70 to 80-million-year-old fossil is too incomplete to be given an exact name, but it is distinctive enough to identify as belonging to a branch of sauropods called titanosaurs.

Well, this is a bad way to start the year.Over the past 48 hours, news has broken in India of the existence of at least 12 patients infected with tuberculosis that has become resistant to all the drugs used against the disease. Physicians in Mumbai are calling the strain TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant. In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know.

In a sign of pessimism about humanity's future, scientists today set the hands of the infamous "Doomsday Clock" forward one minute from two years ago."It is now five minutes to midnight," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) director Kennette Benedict announced today (Jan. 10) at a press conference in Washington, D.C.That represents a symbolic step closer to doomsday, a change from the clock's previous mark of six minutes to midnight, set in January 2010.

The world's deepest known volcanic vents are also the hottest, a UK-led expedition has indicated.The seafloor vents are located 5km below the surface of the Caribbean, in the Cayman Trough.The researchers say the structures are shooting jets of mineral-rich water more than a kilometre into the ocean above.The vents' features suggest the water is warmer than 450C - hot enough to melt lead.

Tell me about this new file-sharing religion, Kopimism.We were founded about 15 months ago and we believe that information is holy and that the act of copying is holy.Why make a religion out of file-sharing? Why not just be an ordinary club without defining yourselves as being a religious community?Because we see ourselves as a religious group, a church seems like a good way of organising ourselves.Was it hard to become an official religion?We have had this faith for several years and one day we thought, why not try and get it registered? It was quite difficult. The authorities were quite dogmatic with their formalities. It took us three tries and more than a year to get recognised.

"the more freely information flows; the stronger that society becomes" President Obama http://tiny.cc/rh5b1By allowing free conversation it is so easy to drop a link.It would be ridiculous for an ISP to block the entire whitehouse.gov domain on court order because a single user posted a link. It is difficult for any web administrator to know which links to copyrighted material are done with permission. This will kill the free flow of information and conversation on the internet.SOPA is too blunt. Please veto.

Human emissions of carbon dioxide will defer the next Ice Age, say scientists.The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear.Researchers used data on the Earth's orbit and other things to find the historical warm interglacial period that looks most like the current one.In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not.

Barack Obama has taken a big step towards preserving one of the world's natural wonders, banning uranium mining on 1m acres of land around the Grand Canyon.The move, announced by the interior secretary, Ken Salazar, at a film screening in Washington, bans new mining claims around the canyon for the next 20 years. The area is rich in uranium deposits.

Researchers have released the biggest images yet detailing dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up three-quarters of the Universe's mass.Each image, a billion light-years across, shows vast dark matter clumps and voids scattered through the cosmos.The team from the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope inferred the dark matter's existence by the way it bends light.The images were presented at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, US.

Scientists are reporting discovery of an improved way to remove carbon dioxide -- the major greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming -- from smokestacks and other sources, including the atmosphere. Their report on the process, which achieves some of the highest carbon dioxide removal capacity ever reported for real-world conditions where the air contains moisture, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.Alain Goeppert, G. K. Surya Prakash, chemistry Nobel Laureate George A. Olah and colleagues explain that controlling emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. They point out that existing methods for removing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and other sources, including the atmosphere, are energy intensive, don't work well and have other drawbacks. In an effort to overcome such obstacles, the group turned to solid materials based on polyethylenimine, a readily available and inexpensive polymeric material.

A military prosecutor tried to commit suicide following a news conference on the investigation into a plane crash that killed the Polish president in 2010.Military prosecutor Mikolaj Przybyl shot himself after cutting short a news conference in which he had defended a military investigation into leaks related to a plane crash that killed Poland's president two years ago.He has reportedly survived the incident and a military spokesperson has said that Mikolaj Przbyl's life was not in danger.

A giant Galapagos tortoise believed extinct for 150 years probably still exists, say scientists.Chelonoidis elephantopus lived on the island of Floreana, and was heavily hunted, especially by whalers who visited the Galapagos to re-stock.A Yale University team found hybrid tortoises on another island, Isabela, that appear to have C. elephantopus as one of their parents.Some hybrids are only 15 years old, so their parents are likely to be alive.

You may have heard of soldier ants - whose primary function is to guard their nest from intruders.Now, scientists have discovered a new soldier, in the usually much less confrontational world of bees.A University of Sussex team found that, in colonies of Jatai bees (Tetragonisca angustula), some insects are born soldiers.The study, reported in the journal PNAS, is the first known example of a soldier bee.

Two hundred Paleolithic tombs have been discovered in the western al-Mahwit region of Yemen, reports say.The tombs contain embalmed mummies and other funerary relics, according to the state-run Saba news agency.They were carved into the rock and have one or more chambers depending on how many bodies they held, Mohammad Ahmad Qassim, head of antiquities for Al-Mahwit province, told Saba.

Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell and a few of his fellow Apollo astronauts were in Washington, D.C. on Monday, where they met with NASA to address "misunderstandings" over the ownership of the mementos they kept from their missions.Their meeting at NASA Headquarters with Administrator Charles Bolden, a former shuttle astronaut himself, came after the space agency questioned the $388,375 sale of one of Lovell's Apollo 13-flown checklists last December.

Rock-art has been discovered and recorded in forty sites in northeastern Guanajuato, Mexico, as part of an ongoing project carried out by researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).The majority of the images were created by hunter-gatherers who occupied the area during the 1-5 centuries AD, but religious iconography and inscriptions were also discovered dating to the colonial era, as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Colorado River is one of the most used and contested waterways on Earth. It provides water for 30 million people, and has many dams and diversions along its 1,450 miles (2,333 kilometers).Because it is so heavily tapped for agriculture, industry, and municipal uses along its course, the Colorado River rarely reaches its delta in the Gulf of California. About one-tenth of the river's former flow now makes it to Mexico, but most of that is used for farming and cities south of the border.

A £500,000-rescue has been launched to save the battered remains of a canteen and theatre covered with nostalgic scenes by homesick German prisoners.They form part of Harperley prisoner of war camp in Durham, the only camp to have scheduled monument status which puts it on a par with Stonehenge.

With the energy crisis looming, today's Caturday video smile focuses on hamster power. You know, those small fuzzy rodents that adults get for their kids as pets. But hamsters are more than pets, they are research subjects and research collaborators, testing nanotechnology designed to capture mechanical "bioenergy" produced by living things as they .. well, live.There are several species of hamsters that are kept as pets. The golden hamster, Mesocricetus auratus, is probably the most popular of the hamster species that are kept as pets. They are the largest of the pet hamsters and also, according to my experience, the most temperamental. However, the dwarf hamsters, Phodopus species, which are amongst the smallest mammals on earth, are becoming increasingly popular pets.

Until recently, astronomers searching for signals from intelligent aliens have had to scan the heavens blindly. But now that's starting to change, as scientists are targeting newly discovered exoplanets beyond the solar system for their search.Since the first alien planet was discovered in 1996, astronomers have found more than 700 worlds around other stars.A leading player in this search is NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which has discovered 2,326 exoplanet candidates since its launch in March 2009. Follow-up observations from the ground over the coming years hope to confirm most of these as the genuine article.

Thomas Hills is an associate professor of psychology at Warwick University. Along with Ralph Hertwig from Basel University he recently published a paper entitled "Why Aren't We Smarter Already: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Cognitive Enhancement".Why did you embark on this project?I study the evolution of cognition. There is a growing interest in drug-enhancements for cognitive abilities, such as Ritalin and modafinil. Drugs like these are being used in many different places, like the military and education. So the question is, if these abilities are so great, why don't people already them? Typically, in evolutionary theory, if you want to ask why a fish doesn't swim faster, or why a bird can't see farther, the answer is there are trade-offs. The natural question is: what are the trade-offs for cognition and intelligence?.

Oxytocin, the "love hormone" that builds mother-baby bonds and may help us feel more connected toward one another, can also make surly monkeys treat each other a little more kindly.Administering the hormone nasally through a kid-sized nebulizer, like a gas mask, a Duke University research team has shown that it can make rhesus macaques pay more attention to each other and make choices that give another monkey a squirt of fruit juice, even when they don't get one themselves.

Not everything is weird at the nanoscale. Wires so small you'd expect them to obey the strange laws of quantum mechanics have instead displayed the same electrical properties as ordinary electrical interconnects.The finding bodes well for conventional computers, because these tiny, conductive wires could make chips smaller. It could be bad news, though, for the super-fast quantum computers that are hoped to come next.So far, conventional computers have followed Moore's law: the density of transistors that a conventional integrated-circuit chip can hold doubles approximately every two years, yielding ever-better performance out of ever-smaller devices.

Ants can be programmed to become "supersoldiers", according to an international team of researchers.All ant colonies are made up of insects of different "castes", including soldiers and workers. This team worked out how to "trick" developing ant larvae to turn into a rare and unusual supersoldier caste.The breakthrough, the researchers say, reveals that hidden traits could be unlocked in many species.The findings are published in Science.

If they exist at all, most unglazed clay objects from ancient times are now rubble, mere fragments of their former glory.This terracotta head, at around 2000 years old, is a rare exception. Excavated from a village in Nigeria, this is one of the best-preserved examples of its kind ever discovered. It is a product of the Nok culture that flourished from about 1000 BC to AD 500, when it mysteriously died out, and provides examples of the earliest figurative art in sub-Saharan Africa.

Millions of animals were‭ ‬ritually slaughtered in ancient Egypt to foster a huge mummification industry that even drove some species extinct.As an exhibition‭ ‬at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. shows,‭ ‬almost no animals escaped the carnage.‭Although ‬pets died of natural causes before their mummification,‭ and sacred beasts were pampered by adoring priests, most‬ animals in ancient Egypt had miserable, short lives.Many ‬were simply bred to become votive mummies -- offered to the gods in the same way that people light up candles in churches today.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is an intriguing, alien world that's covered in a thick atmosphere with abundant methane. With an average surface temperature of a brisk -297 degrees Fahrenheit (about 90 kelvins) and a diameter just less than half of Earth's, Titan boasts methane clouds and fog, as well as rainstorms and plentiful lakes of liquid methane. It's the only place in the solar system, other than Earth, that has large bodies of liquid on its surface. The origins of Titan's methane clouds and fog, as well as rainstorms and plentiful lakes of liquid methane have been a puzzle to scientists.

Think of farming, and the rolling fields of the countryside spring to mind. But across Britain's towns and cities, veggie growers, cheese-makers and honey producers are becoming established. Not since the Second World War, when people were urged to Dig for Victory, has urban farming been so popular.Across the country, more than 2,000 new spaces for growing food have been created over the past three years. And this is just the start of the upsurge of inner-city farming. Already, eco-designers have been invited to look round the Olympic site in east London to see if there is potential for a farm after the Games.

A UCSF study suggests patients with chronic pain may experience greater relief if their doctors add cannabinoids -- the main ingredient in cannabis or medical marijuana -- to an opiates-only treatment. The findings, from a small-scale study, also suggest that a combined therapy could result in reduced opiate dosages.More than 76 million Americans suffer from chronic pain -- more people than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined, according to the National Centers for Health Statistics.

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.

Recent earthquakes in Ohio and Oklahoma have been directly linked to deep wells used to dispose of liquid wastes for hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" of natural gas, according to geological experts.And they expect more earthquakes to come as the industry continues to expand across the eastern United States.A boom in gas production using hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" of natural gas has played a role in decreasing US dependence on foreign oil and coal and helped cut energy prices, but evidence is mounting that the process may come at a price.

Celebrations abounded in France today to mark the 600th birthday of Joan of Arc, the fifteenth-century peasant girl who led the French army to victory against the English, was burned at the stake for heresy and witchcraft, and five centuries later was declared a saint.Looking for a patriotic boost in the presidential election campaign, French President Nicolas Sarkozy delivered a 19 minute praise of the medieval heroine as he visited her native village of Domremy-La-Pucelle.Although it might prove effective from a political perspective, Sarkozy's commemoration was likely made on the wrong day."January 6 was almost certainly not the day of Joan's birth," Nancy Goldstone, the author of the forthcoming book The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc, told Discovery News.

Heritage, we may have a problem.That's more or less what NASA told Heritage Auctions of Dallas, Texas, recently, in response to their record-setting, $388,375 sale of astronaut James Lovell's Apollo 13 flown checklist."NASA has made a claim against astronaut Jim Lovell, claiming that he does not have title to the checklist," Greg Rohan, Heritage's president, told collectSpace.com in an e-mail.But the space agency interprets its inquiry differently.

In an effort to detect the radio emissions from a hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence, it helps to know where to look. Space, after all, is a very big place and the chances of accidentally stumbling across an alien television signal is very low.So, using data from the Kepler space telescope, astronomers are becoming more focused on "listening" for radio signals coming from stars known (or at least thought) to have planets orbiting them. And it seems the first "candidate" signals have been detected!But before you start popping the "we've discovered ET!" champagne corks, this first signal is most likely terrestrial in origin.

The world's most famous living scientist turns 70 today. Professor Stephen Hawking has defied medical expectations, since being diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and given only a few years to live, to become one of the most accomplished physicists in the fields of black holes and the study of the early universe.Hawking's fame has also brought his ideas to a vast audience outside academia. His first book, A Brief History of Time, has reportedly sold more than 10m copies worldwide and the physicist has made guest appearances on The Simpsons and Star Trek.

A BLAST of radiation from a passing star cluster could turn out to be the cause of a mass extinction on ancient Earth.In 2003, a team led by Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas in Lawrence suggested that a gamma-ray burst within a few thousand light years of Earth triggered a mass extinction 440 million years ago. But proof has been elusive. Because these bursts occur when a single star explodes or two stellar corpses merge, there is little left to identify the culprit.

Libya boasts a rich cultural heritage; Palaeolithic rock paintings, Greek and Roman ruins and ancient desert oases. These historic treasures, including six UNESCO World Heritage sites, have suffered years of neglect and most recently the perils of conflict.During the conflict in Libya there were allegations that pro-Qadhafi troops and missiles were being hidden in the ancient city of Leptis Magna and that Qadhafi was using it as an archaeological shield. With such explosive storage, the risk of damage was great, but the sites of Leptis Magna and Sabratha have survived the conflict unscathed. That is excellent news for the cultural heritage of Libya and the tourism industry that the nation hopes to resurrect.

Huancavelica, Dec. 29 (ANDINA). The president of the Cave Art Peruvian Association, Gori Echevarria reported on Thursday the finding of cave paintings depicting humans, animals and geometric figures (circa 8-12,000 years old) in the province of Churcampa, located in the country's central Huancavelica region.Echevarria said six cave paintings were identified in a 20-meter stone wall in the last days which depict humans in hunting positions.

A closed meeting with the army engineering section and the Arab Contractor Company a delegation with the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) led by Mohamed Shiha head of the Projects Department is to be held tomorrow to discuss all possible procedures to restore Egypt Scientific Institute (ESI). Report submitted by the MSA inspection mission would be also discussed in order to draw a restoration plan.

Newfound tombs in Central America are yielding thousand-year-old gold, gems, and even hints of murder by pufferfish. But the real treasure is the excavation's clues to the unnamed civilization of the so-called golden chiefs of Panama, archaeologists say."It's really a very spectacular find. ... probably the most significant" for this culture since the 1930s, when the nearby Sitio Conte site, also in central Panama, yielded a wealth of gold artifacts, anthropologist John Hoopes said.Until now, Sitio Conte provided the only major evidence of the golden-chiefs culture, which can be traced from about A.D. 250 to the 16th century, when Spanish conquerors arrived on the scene.

The results of a study conducted by researchers show that the Belgrade fortress is not only threatened by the effects of coal burning, as was assumed until now, but also by flower beds! The deterioration of the fortress walls could be partially caused by the large quantities of potassium present in fertilizers used by gardeners and could be responsible for the formation of black crusts on the ramparts.To preserve this heritage, the researchers recommend avoiding excessive use of fertilizers. Their conclusions are due to be published in the first quarter of 2012 in the Journal of Cultural Heritage and could prove to be of value to other historical sites across the world.

For nearly 40 years, farmer Eiichi Fukuda has put his faith in the land, trusting the annual yield of the fertile brown soil to help feed his family and the rest of his nation.But these days, the veteran grower has watched the good earth turn dangerous. Nearly 10 months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was struck by an earthquake-triggered tsunami, releasing radioactive cesium into the atmosphere, many nearby farmers are now at odds with their own land.Fukuda's eldest son, Hideaki, refuses to drive the tractor without a glass compartment to protect him from blowing dust. Family members now scrub their boots and work clothes immediately after leaving the field as a precaution against any radioactive residue.And, most telling, they no longer eat the food they grow.

Armed commandos are to be deployed in the jungles of southern India to deter poachers from capturing and killing endangered tigers.The 54-strong Special Tiger Protection Force will patrol the two main tiger reserves of Bandipur and Nagarhole national parks on the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu state border, the Karnataka government in Bangalore said on Wednesday.The squad, which includes forest rangers, has undergone a three-month course in jungle survival techniques as well as weapons training.

I was hoping to keep out of the story about the "Roman brothel token" found by a metal detectorist near Putney Bridge and now on display at the Museum of London. But I think someone had better give a different version from the torrent of lurid stuff now pouring out about the sex-life of Roman London.The object in question is a small bronze "coin" -- with a scene of sex on one side and a the Roman numeral XIIII on the other. Assuming that it is genuine (and there are quite a few fakes of these circulating and this one was not actually found in an archaeological context), then it is what Romantokenarchaeologists term a "spintria". This is a Latin word for male prostitute... but it is an entirely modern practice to apply it to these little objects; we haven't got the foggiest clue what the Romans called them... or (despite what you read) what they used them for. Quite a few have been found across the Roman world.

A new University of Florida study shows genomes of a recently formed plant species to be highly unstable, a phenomenon that may have far-reaching evolutionary consequences.Published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the first to document chromosomal variation in natural populations of a recently formed plant species following whole genome doubling, or polyploidy. Because many agricultural crops are young polyploids, the data may be used to develop plants with higher fertility and yields. Polyploid crops include wheat, corn, coffee, apples, broccoli and some rice species.

Around Christmas, something unusual was seen in Malaysia, and it wasn't Santa Claus. Residents of the Kampung district of Melaka were alarmed over reports of the orang minyak (Malay for "oily man"), a bizarre monster said to abduct young women by night throughout Malaysia. The creature has been occasionally sighted for decades, but never captured.According to a report in Malaysiannewspaper The Star, there were multiple sightings over the Christmas holidays. One eyewitness saw it "crawling up the stairs of the house, just like Spider-man. When it reached the top it suddenly jumped onto the roof. I don't think a human could do that. It then just disappeared... We can laugh and joke about it, but this is serious. All the families here have young girls."

For those in the UK I will be appearing live on BBC 1's "The Big Question" between 10am and 11am Sunday morning, 8 January. I'm on the show to discuss 2012 and the question "Is it time to repent?". Other matters discussed, in which I won't be participating, are Mrs Thatcher's Britain and the right to assisted suicide. My segment will be the last of the three.-GrahamUpdate- The show has aired and is available on BBC iPlayer here.

Our world is fascinated by prophecies of doom. Every day the media carry reports of predictions that the next year, decade, century or millennium will bring untold disasters. From a reading of current news headlines, this is difficult to argue against.And now, we are bombarded by predictions of a disaster associated with what many say is the end of the Maya calendar. But did the Maya actually predict that the world as we know it will be destroyed by some unknown cataclysm on Dec. 21, 2012?.

Nature's game of intimidation and imitation comes full circle in the waters of Indonesia, where scientists have recorded for the first time an association between the black-marble jawfish (Stalix cf. histrio) and the mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus).Undescribed by scientists until 1998, the talented mimic octopus is known to impersonate toxic flatfish, lionfish, and even sea snakes by creatively configuring its limbs, adopting characteristic undulating movements, and displaying bold brown-and-white color patterns. Thanks to these brazen habits, it can swim in the open with relatively little fear of predators.The jawfish, on the other hand, is a small and timid fish. It spends most of its adult life close to a sand burrow, where it will quickly retreat upon sighting a predator.

Cloaking devices are one of the inventions of science fiction that have made a few tentative steps towards the real world in recent years. Now, researchers have moved the concept into the fourth dimension, creating a setup that hides a specific point in time from being perceived by observers. But if you want to make an event disappear, you have to act fast: right now, we can only hide a few picoseconds worth of time.The cloaking devices we've made all work based on a similar principle: light that enters the device is bent in such a way that when it exits, its location and direction make it appear that the device itself, and anything within it, were not present. In other words, while within the device, light travels as if it were present. It's just that, once it exits the other side, there's no evidence that anything unusual has taken place. The same general idea governs the action of a temporal cloaking device.

WHEN you throw out your Christmas wrapping paper this year, don't tell Narayanan Menon and Anne Dominique Cambou. You'll be throwing away examples of their painstaking research.That's because they study the physics of crumpled balls of paper, which contain deeper mysteries than you might expect. Take a sheet of A4, scrunch it up and throw it at a colleague. You'll notice that even though paper is flimsy, it becomes sturdier in the form of a ball.

Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world's first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.

Scientists have been trying for a while now to recreate the process of photosynthesis, using sunlight and water to spark chemical reactions. Now a team from Penn State University has done one better, producing an engineered biological system that can produce a hydrogen biofuel twice as fast as nature.The system uses a molecular wire to facilitate fast movement of electrons between light-capturing enzymes, which are used to split water into molecular oxygen and hydrogen. It could someday serve as a fast and reliable way to derive hydrogen for use in fuel cells.

The world's first monkeys to be created from the embryos of several individuals have been born at a US research centre.Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre produced the animals, known as chimeras, by sticking together between three and six rhesus monkey embryos in the early stages of their development.Three animals were born at the laboratory, a singleton and twins, and were said to be healthy, with no apparent birth defects following the controversial technique.

A century after the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank to the floor of the Atlantic, more than 5,000 artifacts plucked from the wreckage will be sold at auction, but bidders beware: The collection has been appraised at $189 million and must be sold in one chunk.That means if you have your eye on only the delicate diamond bracelet, or the 17-ton slab of hull from the doomed passenger ship, you're out of luck, auctioneer Arlan Ettinger of Guernsey's Auction House in Manhattan said Thursday as he announced plans for the sale. It will be held April 11 to coincide with the Titanic's maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City.

A team of researchers led by the University of Colorado Boulder recently discovered the first prehistoric bronze artifact made from a cast ever found in Alaska, a small, buckle-like object found in an ancient Eskimo dwelling and which likely originated in East Asia.The artifact consists of two parts -- a rectangular bar, connected to an apparently broken circular ring, said CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker, who is leading the excavation project. The object, about 2 inches by 1 inch and less than 1 inch thick, was found in August by a team excavating a roughly 1,000-year-old house that had been dug into the side of a beach ridge by early Inupiat Eskimos at Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula, which lies within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.

Scientists have uncovered a lot about the Earth's greatest extinction event that took place 250 million years ago when rapid climate change wiped out nearly all marine species and a majority of those on land. Now, they have discovered a new culprit likely involved in the annihilation: an influx of mercury into the eco-system.

Alcohol consumption can lead to those dreaded hangovers and even alcohol dependence. However, a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience has found a natural ingredient in the Asian tree Hovenia dulcis that seems to produce anti-alcohol effects.Led by Jing Liang from the University of California, researchers began looking at different herbs that have natural anti-alcohol properties. They found descriptions of anti-alcohol properties of the Asian tree Hovenia dulcis that dated back to 659. These descriptions listed it as a prime hangover remedy.

Sabertooth cats and other super-toothy predators apparently possessed mighty arms that they used to help them kill.The beefy arms would have served to pin down prey and protect the ferocious-looking teeth of the feline predators, which were actually fragile enough to fracture, scientists find.The finding also may hold for other knife-fanged prehistoric carnivores ; long before sabertooth cats evolved, a number of now-extinct toothy hunters once roamed the Earth. These included the nimravids, or false sabertooth cats, which lived from 7 million to 42 million years ago alongside a sister group to cats known as barbourofelids, which lived from 5 million to 20 million years ago.

ARE the souls of the departed becoming fidgety in the great beyond? "I certainly get more ghostly photos sent to me now compared with 10 years ago," says Caroline Watt of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Phil Hayes, an investigator at Paranormal Research UK, agrees. Last year, he reported record numbers of spooky images reaching his inbox. So what's going on?A century ago, spirit photography was all the rage, tantalising the public imagination with what purported to be hard evidence of wispy apparitions. However, its resurgence may have less to do with the paranormal than with the increasing use of social media and cameraphones.

A Nobel prizewinning crystal has just got alien status. It now seems that the only known sample of a naturally occurring quasicrystal fell from space, changing our understanding of the conditions needed for these curious structures to form.Quasicrystals are orderly, like conventional crystals, but have a more complex form of symmetry. Patterns echoing this symmetry have been used in art for centuries but materials with this kind of order on the atomic scale were not discovered until the 1980s.

By a number of measures, spider silk is one of the toughest materials around. It's also light weight and (obviously) biocompatible. Unfortunately, it's also extremely hard to produce in any sort of usable quantity. Now, researchers have figured out a way that might help us make a lot more of something almost as good: they've engineered some DNA that encodes a hybrid of silkworm and spider proteins, and gotten silkworms to produce it.

LANGUAGE classes of the future might come with a physical workout. People learn a new language more easily when words are accompanied by movement.Manuela Macedonia and Thomas Knösche at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, enrolled 20 volunteers on a six-day course to learn "Vimmi", an artificial language designed to make study results easier to interpret. Half of the material was taught using spoken and written instructions and exercises, while the other half was taught with body movements to accompany each word, which the students were asked to act out.

An Ecuadorean appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling that Chevron Corp should pay $18 billion in damages to plaintiffs who accused the U.S. oil giant of polluting the Amazon jungle and damaging their health.A judge ordered Chevron to pay $8.6 billion in environmental damages last February, but the amount was more than doubled to about $18 billion because Chevron failed to make a public apology as required by the original ruling.

Nigerian villagers say oil washing up on the coast comes from a Royal Dutch Shell loading accident last month that caused the biggest spill in Africa's top producer in more than 13 years.Shell denies that any of the oil is from its 200,000 barrel per day Bonga facility, 120 km offshore and accounting for 10 percent of monthly oil flows, which was shut down by the spill on Dec. 20.Shell says five ships were used to disperse and contain the spill and that this kept any oil from washing ashore.But local villagers, as well as environmental and rights groups, dispute this account, saying the oil is still at large, coating parts of the coast, killing fish and sparking protests.

The technique, known as ''diamagnetic levitation'', allows water and organic based materials to become weightless.Floating freely inside a plastic tube, the flies were observed closely to spot any changes in their behaviour.The scientists confirmed effects previously seen in similar experiments in Earth orbit. The flies walked more quickly and more frequently while floating in zero gravity than they did on the ground.

FLIPPER for dinner? It's more common than you might think. Though eating sea mammals is frowned upon in much of the world, the consumption of animals such as whales, dolphins and manatees is on the rise in poor nations. Declines in coastal fish catches have led people to look for other sources of meat."This is essentially a bushmeat problem," says Martin Robards of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Alaska. Robards worked with Randall Reeves of the Okapi Wildlife Associates in Quebec, Canada, to compile the first comprehensive report of the types and numbers of marine mammals consumed each year. Their review of some 900 sources found that large-scale whaling has decreased in the last four decades, but that doesn't mean marine mammals are out of danger.

They may be getting older, but they haven't outgrown their drug problems. German health workers are reporting a spike in the number of elderly addicts as a generation of baby boomers reaches retirement age. But the healthcare system isn't prepared to handle them.The man remained completely calm as the police broke down the door of his apartment in the western German city of Dortmund. But when you're pushing 70, it takes a lot to get upset. Then again, it might have had something to do with the drugs.

Middle-aged adults whose memories have grown hazy can't blame occasional pot smoking or other light illicit drug use for their forgetfulness, according to a British study, although experts warn heavy, prolonged use could harm mental functions.The study, carried in the American Journal of Epidemiology, tested the mental function and memory of nearly 9,000 Britons at age 50 and found that those who had used illegal drugs as recently as in their 40s did just as well, or slightly better, on the tests than peers who had never used drugs.

Built nearly three decades ago but never used, the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (pictured) in the Philippines is now being promoted by its parent company, the National Power Corporation, as a new ecotourism site. Visitors can tour the plant and stay the night at an adjacent beach, which is home to a turtle sanctuary."This will be the only tourist-friendly nuclear power plant in this part of the world," National Power spokesman Dennis Gana told the AFP news service. Europe, in particular, is home to several others.

EARTH'S magnetic field is an invaluable navigational tool for humans and other animals, but the way it gradually changes with time is liable to confuse migrants. Evolution, it seems, is one step ahead of the problem: turtle hatchlings don't all respond to a given magnetic field in the same way, suggesting some will arrive at the correct destination even if the field shifts.The motion of Earth's fluid outer core, which contains iron and nickel, helps to generate a planet-wide magnetic field. Some animals can detect this field, which reveals the direction of magnetic north, and use it to navigate.

High-speed video footage of leaping lizards supports a 40-year-old hypothesis1 about how theropod dinosaurs, such as the velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame, used their tails to stay stable while bounding around. The finding could be used to inform the design of more agile search-and-rescue robots.Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, filmed red-headed agama lizards (Agama agama) running down a track and vaulting off an obstacle to reach a shelter on a high platform. When the obstacle's surface was made slippery, the lizards skidded and jumped at the wrong angle. But by lifting their tails up or down, the lizards could adjust the tilt of their bodies, and thus land successfully.

The file-sharing religion known as 'Kopimism' has been officially recognised as a religion by Swedish authorities, making file-sharing itself a "holy act" for its followers.Known as "Kopimists", these believers treat CTRL+C and CTRL+V as holy symbols, and call the sharing of information online "kopyacting".Lead by 19-year-old philosophy student Isak Gerson, the religious group needed to apply three times officially before they were given the thumbs up.But despite the recognition, this does not mean file-sharing is legal in Sweden - just that the religion of Kopimism is now official.

A team of archaeologists from INRAP have recently completed an excavation at the foot of the ramparts of Mont-Saint-Michel, uncovering the remains of the Tower of Denis, a fortification tower built sometime around 1479 and destroyed in 1732.Curated and financed by the Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Basse-Normandy, this intervention is part of a project to reconstruct the maritime aspect of Mont-Saint-Michel and to restore its fortifications.

The textbooks will tell you that the Mayan people thrived in Central America from about 250 to 900 A.D., building magnificent temples in Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and southern Mexico.But could they possibly have left stone ruins in the mountains of North Georgia? Richard Thornton thinks so. He says he's an architect by training, but has been researching the history of native people in and around Georgia for years. On Examiner.com, he wrote about an 1,100-year-old archeological site near Georgia's highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, that he said "is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540.

Scientists doing their first exploring of deep-sea vents in the Antarctic have uncovered a world unlike anything found around other hydrothermal vents, one populated by new species of anemones, predatory sea stars, and piles of hairy-chested yeti crabs.It was "almost like a sight from another planet," said expedition leader Alex Rogers, a professor of zoology at Oxford University.Even in the eye-popping world of deep-sea vents, the Antarctic discoveries stand out, with the unfamiliar species of crabs found crowded in piles around the warm waters emanating from the seafloor. Many of the animals found at the vents have never been found at hydrothermal vents in other oceans, Rogers said. "To see these animals in such huge densities was just amazing," Rogers told LiveScience.

In the race for bigger offshore wind turbines, what's under the water can be just as much trouble as what's above.Turbine makers are building giant machines that must withstand powerful storms in the inhospitable waters of the North Sea -- but they will also need to spend money on sturdy foundations, specialized installations and ships that can nail the turbines to the ocean floor at depths of 115 feet.

Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk has lost his bid to regain his U.S. citizenship, the Associated Press reports.The 91-year-old retired autoworker from suburban Cleveland was convicted of war crimes by a German court and sentenced to five years in prison. He is free pending appeal.Demjanjuk, who was born in Ukraine and served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland, argued his citizenship should be reinstated because "a newly discovered document suggested that an incriminating document against him was a Soviet fraud," AP writes.

PASADENA, Calif. -- The second of NASA's two Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft has successfully completed its planned main engine burn and is now in lunar orbit. Working together, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will study the moon as never before."NASA greets the new year with a new mission of exploration," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "The twin GRAIL spacecraft will vastly expand our knowledge of our moon and the evolution of our own planet. We begin this year reminding people around the world that NASA does big, bold things in order to reach for new heights and reveal the unknown.

Here, Prof Clive Finlayson looks back at the year's developments in human evolution research and asks whether recent discoveries rule out a well known idea about our ancestors.Hobbits on Flores, Denisovans in Siberia, Neanderthals across Eurasia and our very own ancestors.Given this array of human diversity in the Late Pleistocene, we might well be forgiven for thinking that Ernst Mayr's contention that "in spite of much geographical variation, never more than one species of man existed on Earth at any one time" had finally been put to bed.

THE discovery of a Stone Age temple on Orkney looks set to rewrite the archeological records of ancient Britain with evidence emerging it was built centuries before Stonehenge.Archeologists have so far found undisturbed artefacts including wall decorations, pigments and paint pots, which are already increasing their understanding of the Neolithic people.

Companies making genetically modified animals face a regulatory morass in this country. It's not always clear which federal agency has responsibility for regulating a particular animal, and even when one agency does take the lead, the approval process can drag on for years.The companies say this uncertainty means their technologies may die without ever being given a chance.Take the case of the British company Oxitec. It has developed a genetically modified mosquito that the company says can be used to combat a disease called dengue.

Last May we mentioned the X Prize Foundation and their collaboration with Qualcomm for the Tricoder X PRIZE, a $10 million award for the development of a mobile medical diagnostic tool a la Star Trek. To follow up on that, a tech startup, Scanadu, has entered that competition with their Medical Tricorder. Developed to measure blood pressure, pulmonary function and temperature, it is geared toward parents of young children to help make decisions on whether a symptom is serious enough to visit an emergency room, or what other measures could be taken.

A rare type of traditional music known in Khmer as preun has been rediscovered in Cambodia in the depths of rural Samrong district in Oddor Meanchey province.Cambodian cultural researcher, Young Yorn, 30, came across a folk group that performs the musical style while in the northwest of the Kingdom. He says the ancient music was different from other traditional Cambodian music that he has studied.Young Yorn says it is uncertain when the musical form began. What is known is that the khen, an instrument made from long bamboo pipes, can be seen on a carving on Bayon temple.

Characterised by chronic respiratory illness and fever, brucellosis is acquired by eating infected meat or unpasteurized dairy products or by coming into contact with animals carrying the brucella bacteria.David Foran, director of Michigan State University's (MSU) Forensic Science Program, and Todd Fenton, Michigan associate professor of anthropology, confrimed the existence of brucellosis.

I've got a lot of peeves. One of my peeves is the phrase, "bird brain", which presumably means "stupid." However, having spent most of my waking life in the company of birds and a suite of other animal species (including non-human primates), I've learned that birds are much smarter than other animals. In fact, they're smarter than a rather large number of humans whom I happen to know or know about (but I am merciful; I won't name names).

Parasitic flies that turn honeybees into night-flying zombies could provide another clue to cracking the mystery of colony collapse disorder.Since 2007, thousands of hives in the US have been decimated as bees inexplicably go missing overnight. The best explanation so far is that multiple stresses, perhaps parasitic mites, viruses or pesticides, combine to tip the bees over the edge.John Hafernik of San Francisco State University in California and colleagues discovered that hosting Apocephalus borealis, a parasitic fly found throughout North America, makes bees fly around in a disoriented way at night, when they normally roost in the hive, before killing them.

The ancient Mayan people, whose empire extended across much of Central America from late-antiquity to the 1500s, maintained a complex system of calendars -- which, oddly enough, ended with this year, 2012. This anomaly in Mayan timekeeping has caused many today to wonder whether the great calendar-makers foresaw an apocalypse in our era. The truth is more complex. Here are today's top 10 myths about 2012.1. OK, it's past 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2012. Why didn't anything happen?Actually the great endpoint of the Mayan Long Count calendar is winter solstice 2012, which falls on Dec. 21 of this year. Keeping counting.For good insights into 2012 prophecies, see the John Major Jenkins and the Geoff Stray interviews over on the Video Page.

Examples of a crystal previously thought to be impossible in nature may have come from space, a study shows.Quasicrystals have an unusual structure - in between those of crystals and glasses. Until two years ago, quasicrystals had only been created in the lab - then geologists found them in rocks from Russia's Koryak mountains. In PNAS journal, a team says the chemistry of the Russian crystals suggests they arrived in meteorites.Quasicrystals were first described in the 1980s by Israeli researcher Daniel Schechtman, who was awarded last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.

The next time you visit the Louvre, a Nintendo 3DS console could guide you through the halls of the world-renowned museum.According to the AFP, the Louvre on Thursday announced that it is partnering with Nintendo to replace traditional audio guides with Nintendo's glassesless 3D handheld. In March, the museum will gradually begin to replace the antiquated devices that are only used by 4 percent of the famous Paris museum's 8.5 million annual visitors.The Louvre will start with 5,000 3DS's, which will offer maps that will pinpoint your exact location inside the museum; an array of themed itineraries, including some that are kid-friendly; and hundreds of commentaries recorded in seven different languages that will tell you all about the works you see.

Even as the latest in NASA spacecraft technology has just entered orbit around the moon, the agency has created digital maps out of images taken decades ago by spacecraft on some of the earliest missions to Earth's closest celestial body.Through the Apollo Zone project out of the NASA Ames Research Center, scientists have created maps out of static images taken from the Apollo Metric Camera aboard the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 spacecraft, which flew to the moon in the early 1970s as part of the larger Apollo mission.The "Digital Image Mosaic (DIM) and Digital Terrain Model (DTM) maps cover about 18% of the lunar surface at a resolution of 98 feet (30 meters) per pixel," according to NASA.

US researchers have created silkworms that are genetically modified to spin much stronger silk.Writing in the PNAS journal, scientists from the University of Wyoming say that their eventual aim is to produce silk from worms that has the toughness of spider silk. In weight-for-weight terms, spider silk is stronger than steel.Comic book hero Spider-Man generated spider silk to snare bad guys and swing among the city's skyscrapers. Researchers have been trying to reproduce such silk for decades.

As the Colosseum 'crumbles' and awaits a £22 million restoration, a Japanese tycoon has stepped forward to spruce up another of Rome's ancient treasures: a massive stone pyramid built as a mausoleum for a Roman dignitary.The marble pyramid, which dates from 12BC and adds an incongruous touch of ancient Egypt to the Italian capital, is grimy from traffic fumes and festooned with weeds and bushes growing from the cracks between its enormous stone blocks.The project will include efforts to determine whether, as legend has it, there are secret chambers built into the pyramid. "A few years ago ultrasonic testing found anomalies within the structure," Maria Grazia Filetici, a Rome cultural official, told La Repubblica newspaper. "We want to investigate them further with probes."

What do you do when Hollywood and the government team up to enforce censorship on the internet with the likes of SOPA and Protect-IP? Launch another government-free internet, of course.During the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin back in August -- an annual hacker conference sponsored by the German Chaos Computer Club -- a team of German hackers revealed plans to launch their own communication satellites into space in order to create a separate, "uncensorable" network called the Hackerspace Global Grid (HGG)."The first goal is an uncensorable Internet in space. Let's take the Internet out of the control of terrestrial entities," said activist Nick Farr.

From the moment he set out from his base camp on Oct. 20, 1911, Roald Amundsen had a head start on Robert Falcon Scott, his rival in the race for the South Pole. Scott did not begin his journey south until 11 days later, and even before the two parties got underway, the Briton was already 60 miles behind because of the relative location of their respective camps.But as 1911 drew to a close, Scott and Amundsen were finally on the same latitude. This was not, however, a consequence of Scott making up the enormous gap between himself and his rival, but a sign that the two men were traveling in different directions. Amundsen was returning north after successfully attaining the South Pole on December 14; Scott and his companions were still laboring south, hoping against hope that, for all their struggles, they might be the first to reach the destination.

Santa delivered a record-breaking summer day to the South Pole this year.The temperature at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole research station hit 9.9°F (-12.3°C) on Dec. 25, beating the old record of 7.5°F (-13.6°C) set on Dec. 27, 1978, reported the Weather Underground.The low on Dec. 25 was 0°F (-17.8°C), which sounds comfy considering the lowest recorded temperature at the South Pole was -117.0°F (-82.8°C) set on June 23, 1982.