Newsdesk Archive

Moscow: A Siberian resident miraculously escaped serious injury or even death when a fragment of a Russian communication satellite crashed through the roof of his house.A Meridian satellite that was launched Friday from the Plesetsk space centre in northern Russia on board a Soyuz-2 carrier rocket crashed near the Siberian city of Tobolsk minutes after lift-off. Eight satellite fragments were found in an area some 100 km from the city of Novosibirsk.A titanium ball of about five kg fell on to the roof of a house in Ordyn district. The house owner, Andrei Krivorukov, had gone out to the yard to fetch firewood minutes before the crash.

An unfortunate consequence of many industrial and manufacturing practices, from textile factories to metalworking operations, is the release of heavy metals in waterways. Those metals can remain for decades, even centuries, in low but still dangerous concentrations.Ridding water of trace metals "is really hard to do," said Joseph Calo, professor emeritus of engineering who maintains an active laboratory at Brown. He noted the cost, inefficiency, and time needed for such efforts. "It's like trying to put the genie back in the bottle."

WASHINGTON: Scientists claim to have uncovered a critical genetic mutation in some patients with myelodysplastic syndromes - a group of blood cancers that can progress to a fatal form of leukaemia. A team at Washington University School of Medicine has also found evidence that patients with the mutation are more likely to develop acute leukaemia.

SYDNEY: A new digital map configured by British and Australian scientists has revealed astonishing new geological facts about Antarctica, not known till now.BEDMAP2 is a detailed digital map of the bedrock of Antarctica and is a close-up of the continent minus ice. It has been configured out of more than 27 million pieces of data acquired by airplanes, satellites, ships and dog-drawn sleds.

The Great Barrier Reef, like most other coral reefs around the world's oceans, is under threat from a number of sources, from the steadily acidifying waters of the sea to the impact of commercial fishing. But a new effort to collect samples from the reef has established the first frozen repository of Great Barrier Reef corals that could one day be used to restore coral populations.Coral reefs are dynamic ecosystems made up of coral polyps, the hard skeletons they live in, the symbiotic algae that feed them and the myriad fish and other plants and animals that support and are supported by the corals.

Scientists may have found the smallest black hole yet by listening to its X-ray "heartbeat."The black hole, if it truly exists, would weigh less than three times the mass of the sun, putting it near the theoretical minimum mass required for a black hole to be stable.The researchers can't directly observe the black hole, but they measured a rise and fall in X-ray light coming from a binary star system in our Milky Way galaxy that they think signals the presence of a black hole.Until now, this X-ray pattern, which is similar to a heartbeat registered on an electrocardiogram, has been seen in only one other black hole system.

In the search for life beyond Earth, few places beckon as strongly as Europa, an ocean-bearing, ice-covered moon circling Jupiter.But how to pull off the mission, given today's tight science budgets and competing missions, such as a sample return from Mars?A team of scientists may have the answer: Send a pair of landers directly to Europa and design the mission to last just seven days.

Suggestions that we can dump large amounts of alkaline chemicals into the oceans to prevent their acidification seems dead in the water. A study shows it would cost trillions of dollars.As humans spew more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is taken up by the oceans, turning them increasingly acidic and threatening ecosystems around the globe.

Till now, we've had to rely on guesswork based on our officemates' forehead bulges, receding chins, and subliterate grunts to gauge how much Neanderthal is in their ancestry. No more! 23andMe, the popular personal genomics company that analyzes your DNA based on a saliva sample, has added a test for Neanderthal percentage into their analytic suite.The test compares the contemporary human genome to the Neanderthal genome to calculate what percentage of your own DNA comes from that branch of the family.

A very British problem of a leaky church roof could be about to give the world the chance to glimpse the legendary Ark of the Covenant.That's because the claimed home of the iconic relic - a small chapel in Ethiopia - has sprung a leak and so the Ark could now be on the move.The Ark - which The Bible says holds God's Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai - is said to have been kept in Aksum, in the Chapel of the Tablet, adjacent to St Mary of Zion Church, since the 1960s.According to the Old Testament, it was first kept in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem for centuries until a Babylonian invasion in the 6th century BC.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Franco-Swiss border has made its first clear observation of a new particle since opening in 2009.It is called Chi_b (3P) and will help scientists understand better the forces that hold matter together.The as-yet unpublished discovery is reported on the Arxiv pre-print server.The LHC is exploring some of the fundamental questions in "big physics" by colliding proton particles together in a huge underground facility.

Even the mighty can lose heart. New calculations suggest that Jupiter's rocky core is dissolving like an antacid tablet plopped in water.The work could help explain why its core appears smaller and its atmosphere richer in heavy elements than predicted.Giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have begun their lives as solid bodies of rock and ice. When they grew to about 10 times the mass of Earth, their gravity pulled in gas from their birth nebula, giving them thick atmospheres made mainly of hydrogen.

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.

An ancient galaxy that formed just after the birth of the universe has been photographed by telescopes on Earth and in space, and is the brightest galaxy ever seen at such remote distances, astronomers say. The blob-shaped galaxy, called GN-108036, is about 12.9 billion light-years away and appears as it existed just 750 million years after the universe began. The universe, for comparison, is about 13.7 billion years old.But the sheer distance to the galaxy isn't the only thing to intrigue scientists. The galaxy is also creating stars at a furious pace, making it a rare cosmic find. NASA officials described the galaxy as shining from the "dawn of time," with star formation inside it occurring at a "shockingly high rate."A photo of the rare galaxy released by NASA shows the object as a red blob surrounded by other bright galaxies.

Dec. 23, 2011 -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is getting into a festive mood this Christmas after imaging a beautiful nebula called Barnard 3, or IRAS Ring G159.6-18.5. Nicknamed the "Wreath Nebula" by mission scientists, Bernard 3 does have some familiarity with the green and red wreath hanging peacefully on your neighbor's door. But looks can be deceiving.From 1,000 light years away, this nebula looks peaceful and serene, but it is actually the site of savage stellar winds blasting from the central bright star called HD 278942. These blizzard-esque winds have shaped the warm dust into a wreath-like ring, while the luminous star is likely the only energy source causing the ring to glow in infrared wavelengths (green).

Pigeons may be ubiquitous, but they're also brainy, according to a new study that found these birds are on par with primates when it comes to numerical competence.The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, discovered that pigeons can discriminate against different amounts of number-like objects, order pairs, and learn abstract mathematical rules. Aside from humans, only rhesus monkeys have exhibited equivalent skills.Could pigeons then be the Einsteins of the bird world?

A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction. This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer.According to Big Bang cosmology, the universe originated in an explosion from an invisibly tiny point. This theory is strongly supported by observation of the cosmic microwave background and the relative abundance of elements. However, a situation in which the whole universe is a tiny point exceeds the reach of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and for that reason it has not been possible to clarify how the universe actually originated.

Remove birds from poetry, Aldous Huxley once said, and we would have to cast aside half of the English canon.Now, the impact of birdsong on our creativity and on our sense of wellbeing is to be explored in a three-year research project at the University of Surrey, supported by the National Trust and Surrey Wildlife Trust.The study will examine the psychological impact of being exposed to birdsong, including whether it helps us relax, can assist our ability to complete tasks and even think creatively.

A mysterious bony growth found in elephants' feet is actually a sixth "toe", scientists report.For more than 300 years, the structure has puzzled researchers, but this study suggests that it helps to support elephants' colossal weight.Fossils reveal that this "pre-digit" evolved about 40 million years ago, at a point when early elephants became larger and more land-based.

In order to reduce energy costs and protect Rwanda's forests, the country's 14 prison have introduced biogas burners, so they are now 75% powered by the inmates' own waste. The burners need one thing - a regular, reliable supply of waste - and jails are perfect.

Organisers of next year's London Olympics could perhaps take heart from the positive pronouncement by Rollo Maughfling, the arch druid of the standing stones in Wiltshire, after this morning's ceremony.He said that the sun rising over the horizon at the end of the religious service, bathing more than 1,000 people who attended in pale light, meant good things for the next 12 months.The mild temperatures and sunshine at the pre-historic site were a marked contrast to last year's solstice, when the giant stones were surrounded by a thick blanket of snow and the winter morning mist obscured the actual sunrise.

Large Hadron Collider scientists including a group from the UK believe they have detected their first new subatomic particle.Known as Chi (the Greek X symbol) b (3P), it is a "boson" like the fabled Higgs particle believed to underpin mass.Chib(3P) provides a new way of combining two other elementary particles, the "beauty" quark and its antiquark, so that they bind together.

The heaviest interplanetary spacecraft ever launched is about to become one of the most dangerous man-made objects to fall from space when it crashes to the ground early in the new year.The Russian Phobos-Ground probe was destined to land on a moon of Mars but problems soon after launch in November meant that it was stuck in an unstable, low-Earth orbit.Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said yesterday that the lorry-sized probe weighing 13.2 tonnes and laden with 11 tonnes of toxic rocket fuel and 10kg of radioactive cobalt-57 will fall to Earth between 6 and 19 January.

The plan by the 'Save the Unicorn at Uffington' has more than 1,000 members and is being lead by Bronze Age enthusiasts.They claim the 3,000-year-old horse made from crushed white chalk in Uffington, Oxfordshire, was originally meant to be a depiction of the mythical horned beast.The amateur historians have now received financial backing from 'well-wishers' including a £50,000 anonymous donation towards adding a 75-foot long horn to the horse.

Witnessed by hundreds of pro-democracy protestors in the Russian capital's Bolotnaya Square on Saturday, the unidentified craft drew confused stares.Clearly not a helicopter, the silent UFO pulsated coloured lights and had five extended tendrils or pylons emanating from the body of the vehicle.Onlookers, protesting against election results, climbed trees to grab a closer look at the mysterious craft which seemed to be observing the 25,000 people who had made their way down to Bolotnaya Square to protest.

Scientists say rare fossils found in Tasmania's south-east prove that an ancient species of prehistoric animal did exist throughout Australia.The dicynodont was an early ancestor of modern-day mammals and lived about 250 million years ago.Roughly the size of a cow, the plant-eating animal had two tusks and a horny beak.

Scientists believe they have made a remarkable discovery of fossils said to be more than 450 million years old in a disused Powys quarry.They think they are of a kind never before discovered.The well-preserved organisms from the Ordovician period, which began about 495m years ago, lived in what is now the town of Llandrindod Wells, which was partially under water.Scientists believe they shed new light on how ocean communities have evolved.

The Romans founded London as a centre of trade and business in about AD 50 - or so archaeologists have long believed.But new evidence suggests the capital has a more chilling history, built as a military base by slaves who were then slaughtered. Hundreds of skulls discovered along the course of the "lost" river Walbrook suggest London may have been built by forced labour.Dominic Perring, director of the Centre for Applied Archaeology at University College London, says the skulls could be those of Queen Boudica's rebel Iceni tribesmen who were brought to London to build a new military base.

An archaeological team made up of archaeologists from the School of Archaeology and Museology under Peking University and Shaanxi Archaeological Research Institute has unearthed more than 10,000 tortoise shells at the Zhougong Temple site in Shaanxi province.These tortoise shells date back to the Western Zhou dynasty and were engraved with nearly 2,600 recognizable characters. A tortoise shell unearthed in late November presents a scene of two people practicing divination simultaneously for the first time.

In time for the celebration of the Year of the Maya in 2012, the Global Heritage Fund (GHF), a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation and development of archaeological sites in developing countries, has officially unveiled the long-awaited Archaeological Development Plan for the Mirador Cultural and Natural System. This system is an area in Guatemala that contains some of the world's largest pyramids, including La Danta, the world's largest pyramid by volume, and the large Pre-Classic Maya complex that is touted today by many archaeologists as the birthplace, or cradle, of Maya civilization in Mesoamerica.

Modern humans possess brain structures larger than their Neanderthal counterparts, suggesting we are distinguished from them by different mental capacities, scientists find.We are currently the only extant human lineage, but Neanderthals, our closest-known evolutionary relatives, still walked the Earth as recently as maybe 24,000 years ago. Neanderthals were close enough to the modern human lineage to interbreed, calling into question how different they really were from us and whether they comprise a different species.

A team of archeologists has begun working on examining the site of the ancient city of Isos in southern Turkey by making use of ground-based sensors to visualize the underground features of the city's structures, the district governor has said.Iskender Yonden, the district governor of Erzin, Hatay province, announced on Monday that a team of four archeologists got to work at the reported site of the ancient city of Isos, which has been underground for some 500 years in the southern province of Hatay, as part of the work of unearthing the ancient city.

Evidence of a previously unknown Viking king has been discovered in a hoard of silver found by a metal detectorist, stashed in a lead box in a field in Lancashire.The 201 pieces of silver including beautiful arm rings, worn by Viking warriors, were found on the outskirts of Silverdale, a village near the coast in north Lancashire, by Darren Webster, using the metal detector his wife gave him as a Christmas present. It adds up to more than 1kg of silver, probably stashed for safe keeping around AD900 at a time of wars and power struggles among the Vikings of northern England, and never recovered.

Chinese archaeologists recently found a palace dating back to about 3,600 years ago at the Erlitou Bronze Age site in Henan province.It is the best-preserved palace ever found at the site and may be the prototype for places of worship during the Shang dynasty.In the Erlitou site's palace area, archaeologists found the rammed-earth foundation of the palace, which has at least three courtyards and covers a total area of more than 2,100 square meters.

Under the cold clear waters of Lake Huron, University of Michigan researchers have found a five-and-a-half foot-long, pole-shaped piece of wood that is 8,900 years old. The wood, which is tapered and beveled on one side in a way that looks deliberate, may provide important clues to a mysterious period in North American prehistory."This was the stage when humans gradually shifted from hunting large mammals like mastodon and caribou to fishing, gathering and agriculture," said anthropologist John O'Shea. "But because most of the places in this area that prehistoric people lived are now under water, we don't have good evidence of this important shift itself- just clues from before and after the change.

State regulators no longer require developers along South Carolina's coast to do routine archaeological surveys, and some say the state will lose an unknown amount of its history as a result.The change -- which took effect during the past year -- stemmed from discussions between the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control's Office of Coastal Resource Management and the State Historic Preservation Office.

Budget uncertainties have led NASA to change its policy on funding the development of commercial spaceships, shifting to a process that provides more flexibility but also more risk for the space agency.More than $365 million has already been devoted to NASA's commercial crew development program, or CCDev. Congress has approved another $406 million to be paid to would-be spaceship builders, with the aim of having U.S.-made, crew-capable successors to the space shuttle fleet flying to the International Space Station by 2017.

HOHHOT - Scientists said on Sunday that they have finished sequencing the genome of a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. Zhou Huanmin, project leader and head of the biological research lab at the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, said that this is the first individual genome sequencing of a Mongolian.The blood donor was a man identified only as one of Genghis Khan's 34th-generation offspring from the Sunit Tribe, which is based in the Xilin Gol League in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.Zhou said the research team will continue to sequence the genomes of another 199 ethnic Mongolians and build a database consisting of the Mongolian genetic code.

The joint venture has been awarded the project on a turnkey basis and the final contract signature is expected within a matter of days.The museum will be located on the Cairo-Alexandria highway overlooking the Grand Pyramids. It is 65% funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Client for the scheme is the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), which is responsible for the conservation, protection and regulation of all antiquities and archaeological excavations in Egypt.A joint venture between Hill International and EHAF Consulting Engineers will provide project management services during the design and construction of the project.

BLAIRSVILLE, GA (December 21, 2011) -- Around the year 800 AD the flourishing Maya civilization of Central America suddenly began a rapid collapse. A series of catastrophic volcanic eruptions were followed by two long periods of extreme drought conditions and unending wars between city states.Cities and agricultural villages in the fertile, abundantly watered, Maya Highlands were the first to be abandoned. Here, for 16 centuries, Itza Maya farmers produced an abundance of food on mountainside terraces. Their agricultural surpluses made possible the rise of great cities in the Maya Lowlands and Yucatan Peninsula. When the combination of volcanic eruptions, wars and drought erased the abundance of food, famines struck the densely populated Maya Lowlands.

Heavy rainfall can trigger earthquakes in what one scientist calls "disaster triggering disaster."Shimon Wdowinski, of the University of Miami in Florida, first noticed a connection between storms and earthquakes last year.The devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti in early 2010 came only 18 months after Haiti had been deluged by several hurricanes and tropical storms.And another large earthquake, a magnitude 6.4 temblor that rocked Taiwan in 2009, occurred only seven months after the area had been hit by Typhoon Morakot, which dropped 9.5 feet (2.9 meters) of rain in five days. Hurricanes are called typhoons in parts of Asia.

Titanosaurs were sauropods - four-legged herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails. Their remains have been found around the world but this is the first evidence they may have roamed Antarctica.The new specimen was discovered on James Ross Island by an Argentinian-led team. They identified it as belonging to a lithostrotian titanosaur from the Late Cretaceous period of around 70 million years ago. The land mass was then rich in plant life.The find consists of section of vertebrae almost 20cm long believed to have come from the middle third of the dinosaur's tail.

Seize the day.Only 52 weeks and a day are left before Dec. 21, 2012, when some believe the Maya predicted the end of the world.Unlike enthusiasts of other doomsday theories who suggest putting together survival kits, southeastern Mexico, the heart of Maya territory, plans a yearlong celebration.Mexico's tourism agency expects to draw 52 million visitors by next year only to the regions of Chiapas, Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Campeche. All of Mexico usually lures about 22 million foreigners in a year.

A new article is now up on the forum, titled: 'Evidence of Vitrified Stonework in the Inca Vestiges of Peru', written by Jan Peter de Jong & Christopher Jordan.Vitrified stones are simply stones that have been melted to a point where they form a glass or glaze. There is much debate in archaeological circles over the ancient examples under study for two reasons. Firstly, few cases are known to have been tested and even if they have, there are many questions over how they were made.

The discovery follows confirmation earlier this month of a super-Earth sized planet, called Kepler-22b, that circles the right distance from its parent star for liquid water to exist on its surface. Water is believed to be a key ingredient for life."Kepler-22b has the right temperature, but it is too big. (The planets) we're announcing today are just the right size, but too hot," astronomer David Charbonneau with Harvard University, told reporters during a conference call.

The fossils were found by a couple strolling on a beach on the Tasman Peninsula.The plant-eating animals, about the size of a cow, lived about 250 million years ago and became extinct about 20 million years ago.Complete specimens of the dicynodont have been found in India and South Africa. The discovery of the two skull pieces found in Tasmania has enabled scientists to confirm that the creature lived in Australia. The only other evidence was a fossil found in Queensland in 1983.

Under extreme pressures and temperatures, one of the main materials of the Earth's interior has exhibited a never-before-seen transition.Iron oxide was subjected to conditions similar to those at the depth where the Earth's innermost two layers meet.At 1,650C and 690,000 times sea-level pressure, the metal changed the degree to which it conducted electricity.But, as the team outlined in Physical Review Letters, the metal's structure was surprisingly unchanged.

Three thousand years ago Britons in East Anglia were skilled boat builders and sailors, enjoyed fishing, and the occasional bowl of nettle stew - and used a method of eel trapping still used today. They even used wooden cutlery.This incredible, detailed picture of life three millennia ago is thanks to a haul of Bronze Age boats, spears, swords and clothing have been unearthed at one of the most significant Bronze Age sites ever found in Britain, on the River Nene, at Must Farm quarry, Whittlesey.

French archaeologists have discovered an extremely rare example of a neolithic "earth mother" figurine on the banks of the river Somme.The 6,000-year-old statuette is 8in high, with imposing buttocks and hips but stubby arms and a cone-like head. Similar figures have been found before in Europe but rarely so far north and seldom in such a complete and well-preserved condition.The "lady of Villers-Carbonnel", as she has been named, can make two claims to be an "earth mother". She was fired from local earth or clay and closely resembles figurines with similar, stylised female bodies found around the Mediterranean.

Frankincense - a traditional staple of the Christmas story - faces an uncertain future, according to researchers. Ecologists have warned that the production of the fragrant resin could decline by half over the next 15 years. The festive fragrance is produced by tapping the gum of trees in the Boswellia genus.The findings, based on a study carried out in Ethiopia, have been published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. It is used extensively in religious rituals and in the perfume industry. It has also been investigated for its medicinal properties."There are several reasons why [the tree species Boswellia papyifera] it is under threat," explained co-author Frans Bongers, an ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Maybe Frank should have sang "Fly Me to the Moons."Scientists studying satellites orbiting the planet have come to an astounding conclusion: Earth has multiple moons at any given time, the MIT Technology Review reported.Mikael Granvik, along with colleagues at the University of Hawaii, first discovered a mysterious body orbiting the Earth in 2006. The object -- or RH120 as it was known -- turned out to be a tiny asteroid just a few meters across. Moreover, it was a natural satellite just like our moon.

The worst drought in Texas' history has led to the largest-ever one-year decline in the leading cattle-state's cow herd, raising the likelihood of increased beef prices as the number of animals decline and demand remains strong.Since Jan. 1, the number of cows in Texas has dropped by about 600,000, a 12 percent decline from the roughly 5 million cows the state had at the beginning of the year, said David Anderson, who monitors beef markets for the Texas AgriLife Extension Service. That's likely the largest drop in the number of cows any state has ever seen, though Texas had a larger percentage decline from 1934 to 1935, when ranchers were reeling from the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, Anderson said.

On the bright yellow tundra outside this oil town near the Arctic Circle, a pitch-black pool of crude stretches toward the horizon. The source: a decommissioned well whose rusty screws ooze with oil, viscous like jam.This is the face of Russia's oil country, a sprawling, inhospitable zone that experts say represents the world's worst ecological oil catastrophe.

A new study co-authored by University of Florida researchers on the endangered Ozark Hellbender giant salamander is the first to detail its skin microbes, the bacteria and fungi that defend against pathogens.Published today in the online journal PLoS One, the study details changes in the salamander's declining health and habitat, and could provide a baseline for how changing ecosystems are affecting the rapid decline of amphibians worldwide."Scientists and biologists view amphibians as kind of a 'canary in the coal mine' and their health is often used as a barometer for overall ecosystem health.

The Nile crocodile is a species that was identified by ancient Egyptians. Genetic analysis done by a group of geneticists using samples taken from species throughout the animal's range and including DNA from mummified crocodile remains indicates that more than one species is known by this name.

A 2,000-year-old Iron Age fire guard has been accepted into Wales' national museum in lieu of inheritance tax.The Capel Garmon Firedog, once one of a pair on the hearth of a chieftain's roundhouse, is regarded as one of the finest surviving prehistoric iron artefacts in Europe.Previously on loan to the National Museum it will now be part of Wales' collections of Early Celtic Art.

A trove of newly translated texts from the ancient Middle East are revealing accounts of war, the building of pyramidlike structures called ziggurats and even the people's use of beer tabs at local taverns.The 107 cuneiform texts, most of them previously unpublished, are from the collection of Martin Schoyen, a businessman from Norway who has a collection of antiquities.The texts date from the dawn of written history, about 5,000 years ago, to a time about 2,400 years ago when the Achaemenid Empire (based in Persia) ruled much of the Middle East.

Move over, Mars: Evidence is mounting that water exists even on the hot, barren planet closest to the sun, Mercury.Based on new data from a NASA probe, astronomers say they're close to proving that mysterious "bright" spots at Mercury's poles are patches of water ice.Ice on Mercury might seem strange. After all, the planet's surface can get hot enough to melt lead on the side facing the sun.But Mercury doesn't tilt very far on its axis, raising the prospect that the bottoms of some polar craters might be in permanent shadow.

In what is turning out to be one of the best months ever for black-hole fanbois, a team of Dutch, Italian, and US space boffins has detected the "heartbeat" of what appears to be teensiest, weensiest black hole ever discovered."Just as the heart rate of a mouse is faster than an elephant's, the heartbeat signals from these black holes scale according to their masses," said University of Amsterdam's Diego Altamirano, referring to the newly discovered IGR J17091-3624 and a similar object, GRS 1915+105.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 44,000 year old Neanderthal building that was constructed using the bones from mammoths.The circular building, which was up to 26 feet across at its widest point, is believed to be earliest example of domestic dwelling built from bone.Neanderthals, which died out around 30,000 years ago, were initially thought to have been relatively primitive nomads that lived in natural caves for shelter.

NASA has lost or misplaced more than 500 of the moon rocks its Apollo astronauts collected and brought back to Earth, according to a new agency report.In an audit released Thursday (Dec. 8), NASA's Office of Inspector General states that the agency "lacks sufficient controls over its loans of moon rocks and other astromaterials, which increases the risk that these unique resources may be lost."

Physicists are closer than ever to hunting down the elusive Higgs boson particle, the missing piece of the governing theory of the universe's tiniest building blocks.Scientists at the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, announced today (Dec. 13) that they'd narrowed down the list of possible hiding spots for the Higgs, (also called the God particle) and even see some indications that they're hot on its trail.

Nasa is developing a harpoon capable of taking samples from comets.The space agency has already built a prototype capable of launching test harpoon tips across a distance of a mile (1.6km).The engineers believe it would be safer to collect comet material using the equipment rather than trying to land on the celestial bodies.Nasa said that the samples could reveal the origins of the planets and how life was created on Earth.

Starving orangutans in Borneo may be teaching us new lessons about human evolution.Nathaniel Dominy, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College, has been studying the dietary habits of these apes: what food they eat and how they digest it. "We are interested in how orangutans cope with food-limited environments because it may give us a glimpse into what early human ancestors were facing," Dominy explains. He and his colleagues report on a study of orangutans under dietary stress in Borneo in the December 14 online issue of Biology Letters, a journal of The Royal Society.

Triceratops, with its three large horns and great ruffled headdress, seems distinctive enough, but at one time paleontologists had named more than a dozen different species of the rhinoceros-like dinosaur.These have been condensed into three recognized species in the Triceratops genus, but some researchers believe that number should be lower still: They suggest there is just one Triceratops, of whom the size and shape of its skull and head ornaments changed as it matured.

At the most recent Republican presidential candidate debate Mitt Romney pooh-poohed Newt Gingrich's proposal that we should mine the moon's resources as part of space commercialization.Our only natural satellite has been considered an ideal place to dig up the isotope helium 3, which is rare on Earth, but embedded in the lunar regolith by the solar wind. Helium 3 could be used as fuel for nuclear fusion reactors of the far future -- Gingrich therefore sees the moon as an untapped resource.

With 2012 around the corner, doomsday alarmists will no doubt be looking for signs of the end of the world.According to the 2012 doomsday hype, the Maya predicted that the world will come to an end on Dec. 21, 2012 based on the premise that that particular date is when their Long Count calendar, which runs about 5,125 years, ends. How this incarnation of the end of days manifests itself is the subject of debate among doomsayers.

New research from Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies has revealed how dinosaurs like Velociraptor and Deinonychus used their famous killer claws, leading to a new hypothesis on the evolution of flight in birds.In a paper published Dec. 14 in PLoS ONE, MSU researchers Denver W. Fowler, Elizabeth A. Freedman, John B. Scannella and Robert E. Kambic (now at Brown University in Rhode Island), describe how comparing modern birds of prey helped develop a new behavior model for sickle-clawed carnivorous dinosaurs like Velociraptor.

A father in Louisiana bludgeoned and beheaded his disabled 7-year-old son last August because he no longer wanted to care for the boy.For most people, such a heinous act is unconscionable.But it may be that a person can become callous enough to commit human atrocities because of a failure in the part of the brain that's critical for social interaction. A new study by researchers at Duke University and Princeton University suggests this function may disengage when people encounter others they consider disgusting, thus "dehumanizing" their victims by failing to acknowledge they have thoughts and feelings.

A trio of Japanese physicists have applied a reformulation of string theory, called IIB, whereby matrices are used to describe the properties of the physical universe, on a supercomputer, to effectively show that the universe spontaneously ballooned in three directions, leaving the other six dimensions tightly wrapped, as string theory has predicted all along. Their work, as described in a paper pre-published on the arXiv server and soon to appear in Physical Review Letters, in effect, describes the birth of the universe.

Russia's space agency (Roscosmos) says its unsuccessful Mars probe will fall back to Earth next month.The unmanned Phobos-Grunt spacecraft became stranded in orbit in November.The agency says it expects the toxic fuel on board to burn up on re-entry, but 20-30 fragments of the spacecraft will survive to the surface.Current Roscosmos estimates for the timing of the fall are between 6 and 19 January, but this window will be narrowed nearer the event.

UPDATE! Comet Lovejoy has survived its fiery Dec. 15 plunge through the sun's atmosphere. Read the full story here.The sungrazing comet C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy), set to skim the surface of the sun late Thursday (Dec. 15), was discovered two weeks ago by amateur observer Terry Lovejoy.Lovejoy, 45, works in the information technology field by day in Thornlands, Australia. But by night he is a comet hunter. SPACE.com spoke to Lovejoy about his discovery, his comet-hunting inspiration, and his plans for the future.

A newfound comet defied long odds Thursday, surviving a suicidal dive through the sun's hellishly hot atmosphere, according to NASA scientists.Comet Lovejoy plunged through the sun's corona at about 7 p.m. ET, coming within 87,000 miles of our star's surface. Temperatures in the corona can reach 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, so most researchers expected the icy wanderer to be completely destroyed.But Lovejoy proved to be made of tough stuff. A video taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, or SDO, showed the icy object emerging from behind the sun and zipping back off into space.

Hemophilia, a disease whose victims can suffer serious internal bleeding and may bleed to death from injuries, has a long and eventful history. Caused by defective blood clotting factors, the disease has been with us since at least the second century, when a rabbi gave mothers whose first two sons had bled to death from circumcision wounds permission to leave the third sons uncircumcised. It also famously afflicted several members of European royal families. But a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine brings us a bit closer to a new kind of historic event: a cure.

KATHMANDU, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- What could well be compared to Shangri-La as envisioned by British author James Hilton in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon, recent findings of human history dating back to over 3,000 years in the caves of Upper Mustang in western Nepal have unraveled a significant portion, if not the whole of that virgin unknown.

Spain's pre-historic burial chambers have survived invasion, war, a long dictatorship and a property bubble which paved over vast tracts of the country.But the economic crisis which ended the building boom that buried some of the country's greatest archaeological treasures under shopping malls and new housing may also be bad news for those hoping to provide lasting safeguards for Spain's remaining tholos dolmens or passage tombs.

Cambridge University has put online 4,000 pages of scientific and mathematical manuscripts authored by Sir Isaac Newton.The first installment of the Cambridge Newton papers is now available for public perusal at the university's new digital library website. The trove features many of Newton's most important work from the 1660s, including his college notebooks while an undergraduate at Trinity College as well as his Waste Book, in which he developed his most important work on calculus.

A remote-controlled robot may stop satellites in space from running on empty.As part of a NASA project, researchers at John Hopkins University have modified a robotics console normally used in surgery so it could be used to operate a filling station in space. By refueling aging satellites, their owners can get more useful life out of their expensive hardware. If it works, satellites can be repaired or refueled without having to send out human repair crews.

Muscat: At least 5,000 year old burial sites have been discovered by archaeologists during the two-year-long Sohar Heritage Project, according to a press release from the Ministry of Heritage and Culture on Sunday.The ministry-run project, which has carried out major survey within Sohar town and surrounding areas, is mainly funded by the industrial sector in the this port town.

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Japan offered a "heartfelt apology" for the systematic mistreatment of Canadian prisoners during World War Two, helping to heal ties between the two nations, Ottawa said on Thursday.Thousands of Allied prisoners were forced by the Japanese Imperial Army to work as slave laborers during the war. Many were tortured or starved and died in captivity.

One day after the anniversary of the first successful flight of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon capsule, NASA announces that SpaceX has been granted permission to rendezvous its Dragon capsule with the International Space Station. A successful rendezvous will make SpaceX the first commercial company in history to berth with the ISS.

The efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased, according to new research on the mechanisms of solar energy conversion led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin.Zhu and his team have discovered that it's possible to double the number of electrons harvested from one photon of sunlight using an organic plastic semiconductor material.

PERHAPS THIS IS a ridiculous question, but: Does Santa Claus really exist? Some would say that the question is silly because of course Santa Claus is a myth. Others would say the question is ridiculous because of course he is real! How can we doubt it?Over the years, many children and adults have reported sightings of the real Santa Claus - not department store Santas or bell-ringing Salvation Army charity collectors, but the real thing. They even claim seeing the sleigh and reindeer in some cases. Are these illusions seen through the eyes of Christmas excitement and expectation? Or are these cases of genuine Christmas magic?.

A Russian Soyuz rocket has launched from French Guiana - only the second such vehicle to fly out of the territory's new Sinnamary spaceport.The Soyuz put six satellites in orbit, including France's new Pleiades-1 high-resolution imaging spacecraft.This satellite is designed to take pictures that resolve features on the ground as small as 50cm across.The capability will put it on a par with the leading US commercial systems operated by GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.

Imagine jeans, sweats or socks that clean and de-odorize themselves when hung on a clothesline in the sun or draped on a balcony railing. Scientists are reporting development of a new cotton fabric that does clean itself of stains and bacteria when exposed to ordinary sunlight. Their report appears in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.Mingce Long and Deyong Wu say their fabric uses a coating made from a compound of titanium dioxide, the white material used in everything from white paint to foods to sunscreen lotions. Titanium dioxide breaks down dirt and kills microbes when exposed to some types of light. It already has found uses in self-cleaning windows, kitchen and bathroom tiles, odor-free socks and other products.

Will the mystery over the Great Pyramid's secret doors be solved in 2012?I dare say yes. After almost two decades of failed attempts, chances are now strong that researchers will reveal next year what lies behind the secret doors at the heart of Egypt's most magnificent pyramid.New revelations on the enduring mystery were already expected this year, following a robot exploration of the 4,500-year-old pharaonic mausoleum.But unrest in Egypt froze the project at its most promising stage, after it produced the first ever images behind one of the Great Pyramid's mysterious doors.

LONDON: From writing a letter to reading a map, a survey has revealed the top 50 tasks which have been wiped out by technology.On top of the list is checking film shows timings on the internet; trips to the travel agent are also increasingly a thing of the past, again thanks to the web, the survey of 3,000 adults found.Other activities that are becoming redundant include recording TV programmes on VHS, dialling directory enquiries and using a public telephone box.

It seems that the energy mix of the future will have to differ from the current suggestions of some visionaries. This is because the jet streams that sweep the upper atmosphere with high winds would yield about 200 times less energy than previously estimated, according to calculations by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. The high winds were thought to be a rich potential source of renewable energy. However, their speed is due to the near absence of friction and not to strong propulsion, which would be necessary for high-output wind turbines. Using climate simulations, the researchers also discovered that the climate system could be subjected to massive change if large amounts of energy were taken from the jet streams.

Machines may be capable of impressive feats, but can they ever be truly intelligent? In this animation produced by The Open University, we follow a famous thought experiment proposed by philosopher John Searle that challenges the notion of strong AI - that a machine can ever successfully perform an intellectual task as well as a human.

Many pixels have been devoted to exotic materials that could one day make "invisibility cloaks" a reality, thrilling science fiction fans who dream of, say, their own Tardis equipped with a "chameleon circuit." (Time travel, alas, is a thornier issue).The latest research on this comes from the University of Michigan, where engineering professor L. Jay Guo has developed a "perfect black" type of cloth that can render a 3D object "invisible." Guo's work is described in a new paper in Applied Physics Letters.It's basically a black carpet made out of carbon nanotubes (CNT), capable of absorbing 99.9 percent of the light that hits it. "It's not cloaking, as the object can still cast a shadow," Guo cautioned. "But if you put an object on a black background, then with this coating, it could really become invisible.

Members of the Samburu people in Kenya have been abused, beaten and raped by police after the land they lived on for two decades was sold to two US-based wildlife charities, a rights group and community leader have alleged.The dispute centres on Eland Downs in Laikipia, a lush area near Mount Kenya. At least three people are said to have died during the row, including a child who was eaten by a lion after the Samburu were violently evicted in November last year.

Japan's whaling fleet has left its home port for another turbulent season in the Southern Ocean, this year courtesy of extra money from the nation's earthquake recovery fund.Three vessels have set sail from the port of Ishinomaki, in western Japan, with a mission to catch 900 whales over the next three months.The Japanese fleet will have beefed-up security this year after its last season was cut short by the Sea Shepherd anti-whaling group.

The secret gates at the heart of the Great Pyramid may be opened for the first time in 2012, a British robot company believes - solving a mystery that has puzzled archaeologists since 1872.Scoutek UK had already begun exploring behind the gates earlier this year - and produced the first-ever images from behind the gates using a 'micro snake' robot. But the exploration was halted by the recent unrest in Egypt.Expedition leader Shaun Whitehead said, 'I'm very confident we can resume work in 2012.

The spectacular explosion of a star in a distant galaxy (left, above) has given astronomers a rare glimpse of how supernovae blast the basic ingredients for life into the cosmos.Scientists captured images of the colossal detonation in the Pinwheel galaxy (right, above) 21m light years away within hours of the burst of light from the explosion reaching Earth.

Engineers have brought the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to a "cold shutdown condition", nine months after the earthquake and tsunami, Japan has confirmed.Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda made the announcement at a nuclear task-force meeting.Declaring a cold shutdown condition is seen as a key milestone in efforts to bring the plant under control.

A field trial of LED light fittings in social housing says the new technology can deliver huge energy savings, reduce costs and makes residents feel safer.The study, carried out by the Energy Saving Trust (EST), measured the performance of more than 4,2500 LED light fittings installed at 35 sites.The EST said it carried out the trial because an increasing number of LED lights were now commercially available.It is predicted the technology could dominate the lighting market by 2015.

A team of scientists from Oregon State University has collected microbes from ice within a lava tube in the Cascade Mountains and found that they thrive in cold, Mars-like conditions. The microbes were collected from a lava tube near Newberry Crater in Oregon's Cascades Mountains, at an elevation of about 5,000 feet. They were within the ice on rocks some 100 feet inside the lava tube, in a low-oxygen, near-freezing environment. Scientists have said that the subsurface of Mars could have similar conditions and harbor bacteria.

European nuclear research scientists say they are close to discovering the elusive Higgs boson, the "God particle" that confers mass on matter and is thought to be one of the building blocks to the universe. But they are still some way from confirming the existence of a sub-atomic particle that is one of the cornerstones of modern physics.Despite excited reports yesterday morning on the BBC that the particle has been "glimpsed", the Cern laboratory in Geneva yesterday merely confirmed that measurements by its £5bn Large Hadron Collider have come closer than previous searches to detecting the sub-atomic particle whose existence was first hypothesised in the 1960s.

WASHINGTON -- It seems as if violence is everywhere, but it's really on the run.Yes, thousands of people have died in bloody unrest from Africa to Pakistan, while terrorists plot bombings and kidnappings. Wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan. In peaceful Norway, a man massacred 69 youths in July. In Mexico, headless bodies turn up, victims of drug cartels. This month eight people died in a shooting in a California hair salon. Yet, historically, we've never had it this peaceful.That's the thesis of three new books, including one by prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of mayhem.

Residents of Coventry have been left mystified after hundreds of apples fell from the sky over their homes.People in the Keresley area of the city said the fruit came raining down at about 19:00 GMT on Monday, hitting passing vehicles.Parish councillor Sandra Camwell said the apple storm lasted a few minutes and was the second occurrence of its kind in a fortnight.