Newsdesk Archive

Lake Turkana, Kenya (CNN) -- Richard Leakey has spent a lifetime exploring Kenya's Turkana Basin searching for the origins of man.Each layer of sediment, says the paleoanthropologist and founder of the Turkana Basin Institute, helps to tell the narrative of human evolution."You get the whole story of life represented going back from the present right back to the beginnings of an ape that has two legs as opposed to four," Leakey said."So the whole story of humanity you can actually trace to the Turkana Basin.

A 3D printer is being used to create "bone-like" material which researchers claim can be used to repair injuries.The engineers say the substance can be added to damaged natural bone where it acts as a scaffold for new cells to grow.It ultimately dissolves with "no apparent ill-effects", the team adds.The researchers say doctors should be able to use the process to custom-order replacement bone tissue in a few years time.

A series of new archaeological discoveries in the Sultanate of Oman, nestled in the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, reveals the timing and identity of one of the first modern human groups to migrate out of Africa, according to a research article published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

A Supreme Council of Antiquities mission has discovered a Coptic city dating back to the fourth century. The city is located in the Ain al-Sabil area of the New Valley Governorate.In the middle of the city, a basilica church was found, surrounded by buildings that Council Secretary General Mostafa Amin said were service units for the priests.

An archaeological research team from North Carolina State University, the University of Washington and University of Florida has found one of the most diverse collections of prehistoric non-native animal remains in the Caribbean, on the tiny island of Carriacou. The find contributes to our understanding of culture in the region before the arrival of Columbus, and suggests Carriacou may have been more important than previously thought.The researchers found evidence of five species that were introduced to Carriacou from South America between 1,000 and 1,400 years ago. Only one of these species, the opossum, can still be found on the island. The other species were pig-like peccaries, armadillos, guinea pigs and small rodents called agoutis.

After 35 years of noninvasive research, art experts have turned to rather drastic methods to solve a longstanding Leonardo da Vinci mystery.Putting aside the state-of-the-art technologies employed in the past decades, the researchers have simply drilled a hole into a frescoed wall that they believe hides a long-lost da Vinci masterpiece known as the "Battle of Anghiari.""We are finally in the condition to put to an end a great research. In the next two-three months, one of art history's greatest mysteries will be solved once and for all," Matteo Renzi, the mayor of Florence, said.

When NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, the mission was to study the outer planets of the solar system. Now the probes are so far away, they are able to make measurements of our galaxy from an outsider's perspective.For the first time, scientists have been able to measure a type of radiation streaming out from the Milky Way that in other galaxies has been linked to the birthplaces of young, hot stars.

A cosmic directory that lists the planets and moons most likely to harbour alien life was launched by astronomers on Monday.Scientists created the online catalogue to make sense of the ever-rising number of distant worlds that researchers have spotted with modern telescopes.They believe the database will help astronomers, and others with an interest, to compare faraway worlds and keep tabs on the most habitable ones as researchers discover them.

Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought.Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of violent quasars, the almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies that dominated the early years of the universe.One of these newly surveyed monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped swirl of stars known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in a sprawling cloud of thousands of galaxies about 336 million light-years away in the Coma constellation.

Archeological research of pagan graves in the valley Þegjandadalur in Suour-Pingeyjasysla county in northeast Iceland support the theory that ritual human sacrifice was practiced during paganism in Iceland.An L-shaped turf wall was discovered in Pegjandadalur, which is believed to have been constructed before Icelanders converted to Christianity in 1000 AD, Morgunblaoio reports.In a large hole in the wall fractions of a human skull were found, a jawbone of a cat and various other animal bones, including a sheep jawbone and a several cattle bones.

A Chinese company digging an unexploited copper mine in Afghanistan has unearthed ancient statues of Buddha in a sprawling 2,600-year-old Buddhist monastery.Archaeologists are rushing to salvage what they can from a major 7th century B.C. religious site along the famed Silk Road connecting Asia and the Middle East.The ruins, including the monastery and domed shrines known as 'stupas,' will likely be largely destroyed once work at the mine begins.The ruins were discovered as labourers excavated the site on behalf of the Chinese government-backed China Metallurgical Group Corp, which wants to develop the world's second largest copper mine, lying beneath the ruins.

If you were fond of whiling away the hours browsing hoary tomes in the college stacks - or are otherwise a hopeless history buff - be forewarned: catnip alert ahead.The British Library has put about three centuries worth of articles dating back to 1700 online for public browsing. The British Newspaper Archive comprises about 4 million stories published by local and regional newspapers in the U.K. This is the first fruit of a digitization project that's expected to last another decade. When complete, the library will have put online approximately 650 million articles on 40 million web pages.

HANDHELD gadgets could one day diagnose infections at the push of a button by using the supersensitive touchscreens in today's smartphones.Many believe that in the future collecting samples of saliva, urine or blood could be performed using a cheap, USB-stick-sized throwaway device called a lab-on-a-chip. The user would inject a droplet of the fluid in the chip, and micropumps inside it would send the fluid to internal vessels containing reagents that extract target disease biomarker molecules. The whole device would then be sent to a lab for analysis.

Investigators have found that in 2007 the German Intelligence Service (BND) destroyed files of 250 BND employees who had been in the Nazi SS or Gestapo.The BND confirmed the loss, calling it "regrettable and annoying".Four independent historians are investigating the BND's old links with the Nazis. They say some of the missing papers concern suspected war criminals.

In the race against world governments and the wealthiest companies to commercialize a nuclear fusion reactor, a small, innovative Canadian firm is hoping to bottle and sell the sun's energy.In a laboratory in this Pacific Coast city, General Fusion physicists and engineers in bright red smocks are busy assembling an experimental reactor.

Brazil said Monday that the pace of deforestation in its Amazon region fell to its lowest level since authorities began monitoring the world's largest tropical rainforest.The head of the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), Gilberto Camara, said deforestation dropped to 6,238 square kilometers (2,408 square miles), between August 2010 and July this year, down 11 percent compared with the same period in 2009-2010."It's the lowest deforestation rate measured since INPE began its monitoring in 1988," Camara told a press conference.

An elusive bumblebee, which was last seen in 1956, was recently found living in the White Mountains of south-central New Mexico, scientists announced Monday (Dec. 5).Known as "Cockerell's bumblebee," the bee was first described in 1913 using six specimens collected along the Rio Ruidoso, a river located in the Sierra Blanca and Sacramento Mountains, N.M. Over the years, one more sample was found in Ruidoso, and 16 specimens were collected near the town of Cloudcroft, N.M.The last Cockerell's bumblebee sample was collected in 1956. No other specimens had been recorded until Aug. 31, when a team of scientists from the University of California, Riverside, found three more samples of the bee species in weeds along a highway north of Cloudcroft.

Vesta appears in a splendid rainbow-colored palette in new images obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. The colors, assigned by scientists to show different rock or mineral types, reveal Vesta to be a world of many varied, well-separated layers and ingredients. Vesta is unique among asteroids visited by spacecraft to date in having such wide variation, supporting the notion that it is transitional between the terrestrial planets -- like Earth, Mercury, Mars and Venus -- and its asteroid siblings.In images from Dawn's framing camera, the colors reveal differences in the rock composition associated with material ejected by impacts and geologic processes, such as slumping, that have modified the asteroid's surface.

NASA's famous Voyager 1 space probe, sailing outwards into the interstellar void far beyond the orbit of Pluto, has entered a new and never-before-seen region of space thought to be the very edge of the "bubble" maintained around the solar system by the power of the Sun."We shouldn't have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like," enthuses Ed Stone, Voyager project boffin.The probe has been encountering strange, previously unseen phenomena in recent times as it comes to the true edge of the solar system, where the "wind" of particles blowing out from the Sun is no longer steady - and sometimes is overcome by the cosmic winds of the wider galaxy, actually gusting back on the outward-bound probecraft.

The sun doesn't always shine and the breeze doesn't always blow and therein lie perhaps the biggest hurdles to making wind and solar power usable on a grand scale. If only there were an efficient, durable, high-power, rechargeable battery we could use to store large quantities of excess power generated on windy or sunny days until we needed it. And as long as we're fantasizing, let's imagine the battery is cheap to build, too.Now Stanford researchers have developed part of that dream battery, a new electrode that employs crystalline nanoparticles of a copper compound.In laboratory tests, the electrode survived 40,000 cycles of charging and discharging, after which it could still be charged to more than 80 percent of its original charge capacity. For comparison, the average lithium ion battery can handle about 400 charge/discharge cycles before it deteriorates too much to be of practical use.

Widespread anger and frustration at the way police engage with communities was a significant cause of the summer riots in every major city where disorder took place, the biggest study into their cause has found.Hundreds of interviews with people who took part in the disturbances which spread across England in August revealed deep-seated and sometimes visceral antipathy towards police.In a unique collaboration, the Guardian and London School of Economics (LSE) interviewed 270 people who rioted in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester and Salford.

Disclosure Petition II - Rockefeller InitiativeDirect Petition Link: http://wh.gov/jz0Info Page: www.disclosurepetition.infoMedia Coverage/Videos: www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/Twitter Page: https://twitter.com/#!/stevebassettFacebook Page: www.facebook.com/events/325470837470238/

The Sicevo Gorge is a rugged, picturesque river canyon cut into the Kunivica plateau in southeastern Serbia. Containing a nature park, it draws visitors for its beautiful landscape, the result of the occurrence and interaction of geological, geomorphological and hydrological phenomena. But it also contains a series of caves, at least one of which has yielded evidence of human presence during the shifting glacial times of the Ice Age of present-day Europe. The Gorge was placed on the map of popular attention when, in 2008, anthropologists uncovered a partial human mandible (lower jaw), complete with three teeth, while excavating in a small cave."We were looking for Neanderthals," said Dr. Mirjana Roksandic, a participating paleoanthropologist with the University of Winnepeg and a leading research team member. "But this is much better."

LONDON: Scientists claim to have discovered a potentially habitable planet which has an environment much similar to that of Earth and may contain water and even life.The exoplanet, called Gliese 581g, is located around 123 trillion miles away from Earth and orbits a star at a distance that places it squarely in the habitable or the Goldilocks zone, the scientists said.The research, published in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, suggests that the planet could contain liquid water on its surface, meaning it tops the league of planets and moons rated as being most like Earth, they said.

The bioluminescence of fireflies and "Red Tide" are arguably two of nature's most beautiful phenomena, leaving us spellbound in a open field or on the shore with our mouths agape. But have you ever considered lighting your home with this kind of light?Dutch electronics company Phillips has. In fact, they've created Bio-light, a greener lighting system that's part of their Microbial Home (MH) system. It isn't powered by electricity or sunlight, but by glowing bioluminescent bacteria that thrive on waste generated in the average home.The bioluminescent bacteria is housed in hand-blown glass cells, clustered together to form a lamp that could easily be displayed in a modern art museum. Each cell is connected to the lamp's reservoir base by thin silicon tubes that pipe methane gas from composted bathroom solids and vegetable scraps via a kitchen dodad that digests bio-waste.

With the successful launch of the Mars Science Laboratory on Saturday, NASA can breathe easy -- for a few months anyway.Another cliff-hanger moment will come on Aug. 6, 2012, when the 1,980-pound rover is lowered to the surface of Mars by a rocket-powered sky crane making its debut flight."We call it the 'six-minutes of terror,'" said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "It is pretty scary, but my confidence level is really high."

Schools of fish, flocks of birds -- even bicyclists in the Tour de France -- all use the principles of swarm behavior and drafting to conserve energy while moving in the same direction.Australian industrial designer, Charles Rattray, believes these concepts are the future of transportation. That's why he's designed Autonomo, a biomimicry inspired autonomous vehicle he hopes will revolutionize the auto industry by the year 2030.

Neurosurgeons may one day get help in operating rooms from a robot with movements 10 times steadier than the human hand to perform delicate brain surgeries, the EU said Monday.The European Commission touted the EU-funded ROBOCAST project as a breakthrough in robotic neurosurgery that could in future help treat tumors, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease and Tourette syndrome.

When a doctor wants to carry out a test, she will probably prick you with a needle, fill up several test tubes of your blood, label, package and send them to some centralised hospital laboratory. Technicians will then take the contents, perform the various biochemical analyses needed, write up the results and send back the documentation in a few weeks, perhaps longer if there's a backlog.The process is slow and labour-intensive. What if you could reduce the whole business to a few minutes? What if, for the majority of ailments or questions, the doctor only needed a drop of your blood and could test you for viruses or cancers while you wait in her surgery? With a lab-on-a-chip, that is already possible.

A team of scientists have used the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite to confirm major reductions in the levels of a key air pollutant generated by coal power plants in the eastern United States. The pollutant, sulfur dioxide, contributes to the formation of acid rain and can cause serious health problems.The scientists, led by an Environment Canada researcher, have shown that sulfur dioxide levels in the vicinity of major coal power plants have fallen by nearly half since 2005. The new findings, the first satellite observations of this type, confirm ground-based measurements of declining sulfur dioxide levels and demonstrate that scientists can potentially measure levels of harmful emissions throughout the world, even in places where ground monitoring is not extensive or does not exist. About two-thirds of sulfur dioxide pollution in American air comes from coal power plants. Geophysical Research Letters published details of the new research this month.

Just eight months ago, a one-acre plot at the Denver Green School was an unused athletic field, but now that land has come to life with food-bearing vegetation."We have harvested over 3,000 pounds of produce from this ground. Lots of salad greens and root vegetables, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers," said Megan Caley, the programs and outreach coordinator for Sprout City Farms.Each week during harvest season, the farm produces 150 pounds of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables that end up in the school's cafeteria.

In an exclusive report, NBCLA has discovered critical documents and never-before-seen photos that not only shed new light on the 74-year-old disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart, but also perhaps deepen the mystery surrounding her fate.The items (photos, embedded below) were shown to NBCLA about two weeks ago inside an airport hangar in Upland, Calif. They include more than a dozen original photos of Earhart, including the negatives; a pair of woman's goggles and a leather cap; plus, what could be considered the Holy Grail for historians: Earhart's "airworthiness certificate" for the plane that she disappeared with in 1937.The certificate has specific details about Earhart's plane and her flight plan for the historic around-the-world flight in 1937. And until now, it was always assumed to have been with her when she vanished.

Check out this video of an octopus literally crawling out of the water and dragging itself across dry land in pursuit of a meal. A family with a camera was lucky enough to be on the scene and captured the whole thing on videoIf you're curious to learn more about the sea creature's possible motivation, there has been some great research on the understanding of octopus intelligence recently, including this surprisingly moving article in Orion magazine, chronicling a researchers bond with a giant Pacific octopus named Athena.As it turns out, walking on land in the octopus kingdom is not as unique as you might think.

ONE thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own.

When I was a boy, my father used to take me by the hand to visit the ruins of the ancient metropolis on the outskirts of our town. We would always stop by to visit the huge winged bulls that guarded the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh.I was scared of the winged bulls, but at the same time, they excited me. Through them and the site, I learned the stories of the civilization that lived along the Tigris River in what was now Northern Iraq.Many decades later, I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3-D laser scanning system and cloud of points software. The systems we developed were extremely fast and could rapidly collect millions of points with very high accuracy and very high resolution.

It is looking increasingly grim for Russia's Mars mission Phobos-Grunt, which has been stuck circling the Earth since its launch in early November.Apart from some brief radio contact with the wayward probe just over a week ago, there has been total silence from the spacecraft.The European Space Agency announced on Friday that it was now ceasing any further attempts to get a signal.Russian engineers though are expected to keep trying to the last.

Images of prisoners' brains show important differences between those who are diagnosed as psychopaths and those who aren't, according to a new study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers. This study found reduced connectivity between an area of prefrontal cortex (PFC, red) and the amygdala (blue). The white matter pathway connecting the two structures (the uncinate fasciculus) is shown in green.The results could help explain the callous and impulsive antisocial behavior exhibited by some psychopaths.

Thirty years ago, if you were walking along the coast of the Netherlands and picked a two-spot ladybug off the leaf of a European lime tree, chances were that the bug would be red with black spots. If you were farther inland, you'd have had a good chance of finding a bug that was black with red spots. In the past 3 decades, however, researchers have been finding more red bugs inland. The reason, they believe, is that a warming climate and fewer sunny days might be driving a shift in ladybug color.

A distant planet barely bigger than Earth has been discovered in our galaxy, but it might have been missed if not for the combined efforts of several observatories both on and around our home planet.U.S. space agency astronomers say the hard-to-detect data gathered during multiple readings by the Kepler space telescope and two ground observatories revealed tiny clues they needed to make the improbable discovery of a so-called super-Earth planet that otherwise would have gone undetected.

The interpretation of the hieroglyphs by Sven Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia was presented for the first time Wednesday at the archaeological site of Palenque in southern Mexico.His comments came less than a week after Mexico's archaeology institute acknowledged there was a second reference to the 2012 date in Mayan inscriptions, touching of another round of talk about whether it predicts the end of the world.Gronemeyer has been studying the stone tablet found years ago at the archeological site of Tortuguero in Mexico's Gulf coast state of Tabasco.

The moon Enceladus, one of the jewels of the Saturn system, sparkles peculiarly bright in new images obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The images of the moon, the first ever taken of Enceladus with Cassini's synthetic aperture radar, reveal new details of some of the grooves in the moon's south polar region and unexpected textures in the ice. These images, obtained on Nov. 6, 2011, are the highest-resolution images of this region obtained so far.The area on Enceladus observed by Cassini's radar instrument does not include the famous "tiger stripes," fissures that eject great plumes of ice particles and water vapor, but covers regions just a few hundred miles away from the stripes.

For many, the story of Pompeii defines what happens when a volcano erupts: It destroys everything in its path and kills everyone who cannot escape.But nearly a millennium ago, a very different scenario played out just north of the modern-day city of Flagstaff in the Arizona desert. Here, the local Sinagua peoples survived the eruption of the powerful Sunset Crater volcano and adapted to a changed landscape to forge a more complex society and higher standard of living."They were much better evolved to deal with the volcano than we are," said archaeologist Mark Elson of Desert Archaeology, a Tucson firm that helps preserve ancient sites. By studying how the Sinagua adapted, Elson thinks we could learn better ways to cope with such massive catastrophes as Hurricane Katrina and the Great Plains floods.

A frozen afternoon in the Dutch city of Maastricht and the winter market on the banks of the river Meuse fills the air with festive aromas of spiced wine, waffles and grilled sausages. It's exactly the kind of attraction that you would expect tourists to flock to. But the stalls are eerily quiet.In this cobblestoned corner of the Netherlands most international visitors are after a different sort of scent and you don't have to walk far to find it.

A huge alien planet turns super-slow somersaults as it hurtles through space, dragging its four sibling planets along for the topsy-turvy ride, a new study suggests.The giant exoplanet, known as 55 Cancri d, gets tugged by a faraway companion star as it orbits its own parent star. As a result, the planet performs a flip over the course of millions of years, and the other four planets in the system follow suit, researchers said."It kind of shepherds along the other planets," study lead author Nathan Kaib, of Queen's University in Canada, told SPACE.com.

On Saturday, the 27th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster in India that killed 20,000 people will be commemorated by World No Pesticides Use Day. This year, it is also the start of a three-day public trial of pesticide companies by the Permanent People's Tribunal (PPT), an international opinion tribunal that has raised awareness of cases from Eritrea to Guatemala.It will convene in Bangalore, India, to hear cases brought against the big six pesticide companies; Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont, which control 74% of the global pesticide market. The PTT will invite the companies to defend an allegation of violating human rights. The World Bank estimates that more than 350,000 people each year die of unintentional pesticide poisoning - close to 1,000 people a day. Pesticide Action Network (PAN) International, which is spearheading the PPT, says that up to 41 million people suffer from adverse effects of pesticide exposure.

The composition of the Earth's core remains a mystery. Scientists know that the liquid outer core consists mainly of iron, but it is believed that small amounts of some other elements are present as well. Oxygen is the most abundant element in the planet, so it is not unreasonable to expect oxygen might be one of the dominant "light elements" in the core. However, new research from a team including Carnegie's Yingwei Fei shows that oxygen does not have a major presence in the outer core. This has major implications for our understanding of the period when the Earth formed through the accretion of dust and clumps of matter. Their work is published Nov. 24 in Nature.

University of Oregon chemists have developed a boron-nitrogen-based liquid-phase storage material for hydrogen that works safely at room temperature and is both air- and moisture-stable -- an accomplishment that offers a possible route through current storage and transportation obstacles.Reporting in a paper placed online ahead of publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team of four UO scientists describes the development of a cyclic amine borane-based platform called BN-methylcyclopentane. In addition to its temperature and stability properties, it also features hydrogen desorption, without any phase change, that is clean, fast and controllable. It uses readily available iron chloride as a catalyst for desorption, and allows for recycling of spent fuel into a charged state.

Death has not always been a part of life; for perhaps the first billion years in which life existed on Earth, death was an aberration, a function of adverse environmental conditions -- a pool of water being too hot, or too cold -- rather than an inevitability. Death as a way of life is, it appears, a consequence of the development of sex.But how did sex begin? And why? In the words of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, the answer was a by-product of cannibalism. Writing in Scientific American in 1994, she argued that:Sex began when unfavorable seasonal changes in the environment caused our protoctist predecessors to engage in attempts at cannibalism that were only partially successful. The result was a monster bearing the cells and genes of at least two individuals (as does the fertilized egg today) ... Those microbial ancestors that fused survived, whereas those that evaded sexual liaisons died.

Students and enthusiasts attending a recording for BBC Radio 4 have probably seen a new state of matter only recently discovered, an expert says.The state of matter is a plasma like those in conventional nuclear fusion tests, but at higher densities.And far from needing expensive apparatus, the conditions can be achieved in a simple glass tube containing a routine liquid.The professor behind the demonstration says it can be achieved for a mere £10.

NASA has launched its next Mars rover, kicking off a long-awaited mission to investigate whether the Red Planet could ever have hosted microbial life.The car-size Curiosity rover blasted off atop its Atlas 5 rocket at 10:02 a.m. ET Saturday, streaking into a cloudy sky above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here. The huge robot's next stop is Mars, though the 354-million-mile (570-million-kilometer) journey will take eight and a half months.Joy Crisp a deputy project scientist for the rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., called the liftoff "spectacular.""This feels great," she said as she watched the rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral.

(ReutersVideo) Dec. 2 - A team of scientists has demonstrated that a coordinated group of pre-programmed, autonomous robots can do the job of building workers, constructing a six meter high tower without any human intervention. Architects say this new technology paves the way for new methods of engineering buildings of the future. Georgina Cooper reports.

Animals may sense chemical changes in groundwater that occur when an earthquake is about to strike.This, scientists say, could be the cause of bizarre earthquake-associated animal behaviour.Researchers began to investigate these chemical effects after seeing a colony of toads abandon its pond in L'Aquila, Italy, in 2009 - days before a quake.They suggest that animal behaviour could be incorporated into earthquake forecasting.

At a special meeting at the Cern laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, scientists from the two main experiments targeting the Higgs boson will disclose their latest findings.While researchers from the ATLAS and CMS teams regularly present batches of their most recent data, there is particular excitement surrounding the seminar on December 13.Although scientists are unlikely to announce conclusive evidence of whether or not the particle exists, their data could be strong enough to make a confident guess one way or the other.

A study of human bones from the ruins of Harappa has revealed signs of lethal interpersonal violence and challenged current thinking that the ancient Indus civilisation was an exceptionally peaceful realm for its inhabitants.An American bioarchaeologist has said that her analysis of skeletal remains from Harappa kept at the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, suggests that women, children and individuals with visible infectious diseases were at a high risk of facing violence.

There are no cows on Mars.Of that, planetary scientists are certain, which leaves them puzzling over what could be producing methane gas detected in the thin Martian air. Methane molecules are easily blown apart by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so any methane around must have been released recently.Could the gas be burbling from something alive? Cows, after all, burp methane on Earth. Other creatures, including a class of micro-organisms that live without oxygen, also produce methane.The National Aeronautics and Space Administration could get some answers soon. On the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida is a spacecraft, the Mars Science Laboratory, that is scheduled to lift off on Saturday and reach Mars next August. It will deliver an S.U.V.-size rover named Curiosity that carries an instrument that can detect methane in the air, and if it does, it will unleash new excitement about the prospect of life on Mars.

Mars was known as the "fire star" to ancient Chinese astronomers, and scientists are still burning with questions regarding the Red Planet.Even after dozens of spacecraft have been sent to Mars, much remains unknown about that world. Here are some of the biggest unsolved mysteries we have about Mars as NASA prepares to launch its latest Martian probe, the huge Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, on Nov. 25.

Three top Khmer Rouge leaders went on trial for genocide at a UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia Monday accused of "brutality that defies belief" during a reign of terror that left up to two million dead.More than three decades after the "Killing Fields" era, hundreds of Cambodians packed into a Phnom Penh courtroom to hear the opening statements, seen as a key moment in the still-traumatised nation's quest for justice.

Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" encouraged amateur "symbologists" everywhere to scan their favorite paintings for secret codes -- but the practice has been going on for centuries.From the inscrutable prehistoric cave drawings inside the Chauvet Caves in Southern France to the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, artists have kept the intentions and significance of their work close to their chests.Famously opaque paintings include Bronzino's 1545 work "An Allegory with Venus and Cupid," which contains allegorical figures even scholars aren't able to decipher.

Last Thursday, November 17, four unmanned Wave Gliders left the coast of San Francisco and began a 300-day journey across the Pacific Ocean. The vehicles, which are self-propelled and remotely piloted, will travel together to Hawaii and then two will head to Japan and the other two to Australia. The trips will cover about 37,000 miles (60,000 km), setting a Guinness World Record for the longest distance ever traveled by an unmanned ocean vehicle.

New discoveries by an international team of archaeologists and geologists in the Dhofar Mountains of southern Oman are shedding new light on when and how archaic modern humans first migrated out of their African homeland to occupy Eurasia.Led by Dr. Jeffrey Rose of the University of Birmingham, the team found over 100 new sites that featured "Nubian Middle Stone Age (MSA)" tools, an ancient industry known to have existed in the Nile Valley of Egypt, but never outside of Africa. According to these researchers, this provides further evidence that early humans migrated across the Red Sea region on their journey out of Africa. Says Rose, "After a decade of searching in southern Arabia for some clue that might help us understand early human expansion, at long last we've found the smoking gun of their exit from Africa. What makes this so exciting is that the answer is a scenario almost never considered.

Written in "alien" characters, illustrated with sketches, and dating back hundreds of years, the Voynich Manuscript has puzzled cryptographers, historians and bibliophiles for centuries.And now the mystery has finally come to an end, according to a businessman from Finland named Viekko Latvala, a self described "prophet of god," who says he has decoded the book and unlocked the secrets of the world's most mysterious manuscript.Latvala's business associate, Ari Ketola told FoxNews.com the meaning of the crazy characters he described as "sonic waves and vocal syllables."

A pair of diamond crystals, large enough to be seen by the naked eye, have been linked together by quantum entanglement. The diamonds are entangled such that manipulating one affects the other, even though they are physically separated. In this case, the crystals were 3 millimeters wide and 15 centimeters apart. (One of the diamond wafers is pictured below.) Indeed, Einstein called this phenomenon "spooky action at a distance," and scientists still don't understand how it's possible. The University of Oxford physicists published their work today in the journal Science. From Nature:A vibration in the crystals could not be meaningfully assigned to one or other of them: both crystals were simultaneously vibrating and not vibrating.

The mainstream media often like to portray the scientific community as regularly riven by blazing rows. Scientists, understandably, complain: after all, if you go to any mainstream academic conference, you won't find any hint of controversy about the MMR jab or the reality of climate change, let alone argy-bargy over the basic facts of evolution.But in the past few weeks, I have witnessed a bare-knuckle brouhaha that would make an uninformed outsider gasp at how bloody a battle over a seemingly arcane issue can be.

A single hormone co-ordinates how a plant grows in response to the environment, researchers have found.Plant molecular biologist Dr Phil Brewer, of the University of Queensland, and colleagues, report their findings about a chemical called strigolactone, this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."It's a very key hormone," says Brewer.

In December leaders from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to agree on cutting back greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The most effective step to implement that goal would be a massive shift away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy sources. If leaders can have confidence that such a transformation is possible, they might commit to an historic agreement. We think they can.

The senior Vatican scientist, Brother Guy Consolmagno, said that he would be delighted if we encountered intelligent aliens and would be happy to baptise them.His pronouncement opens up the possibility of space missionaries heading out to the stars to convert aliens to Christianity.Speaking on the eve of addressing the British Science Festival, Dr Consolmangno said he had no problem with science and religion co-existing together.

Tucked away behind metal construction fences lie some of the visible remains of an ancient temple. Most of the ancient temple foundations are now hidden, overlaid by urban sprawl, and what fraction can still be seen is eclipsed and sandwiched in by buildings. The unsuspecting pedestrian may never even notice it. It is shrouded in part by overhanging vegetation. It lies almost forgotten now within its modern context as the steady march of change and development has passed it by.

The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration, some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.

Washington: The root of the mysterious range of Antarctic mountains completely hidden under the continent's massive ice sheet may be over 200 million years old, dating back to the dinosaur age, scientists have claimed.Researchers, on a project to understand the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains in east Antarctica better, said the mountains rise up to 10,000 feet above the planet's surface, but are covered by up to 15,750 feet of ice.

LONDON: Researchers claim to have discovered strong evidence that suggests the Yeti or Abominable Snowman, an ape-like cryptid also said to live in the Himalayas, does not only exist, but also builds nests by twisting tree branches in a remote area of Russia.Experts at an international Yeti conference held recently in Russia claimed to have found strangely twisted trees in a remote part of the country , suggesting a creature building nests like the orangutans and gorillas.

Among the many hurdles to be cleared before human embryonic stem cells can achieve their therapeutic potential is determining whether or not transplanted cells can functionally integrate into target organs or tissues.Writing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of Wisconsin scientists reports that neurons, forged in the lab from blank slate human embryonic stem cells and implanted into the brains of mice, can successfully fuse with the brain's wiring and both send and receive signals.

Americans take time to appreciate and devour abundant food on Thanksgiving. But for nearly one billion people, November 24 will be a day of hunger just like every other day.Thanksgiving 2050 doesn't have to be like that for the estimated 9 billion people who will be sharing the same global plate by then. Or will it?Like the dismal ghost of Christmas future showing Scrooge what awaits if he doesn't change, a study led by David Tilman of the University of Minnesota presented two possible food futures for the planet in 2050, depending on how well people use cropland.

The beautifully preserved leather trappings of an ancient Egyptian chariot have been rediscovered in a storeroom of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Researchers say that the find, which includes intact harnesses, gauntlets and a bow case, is unique, and will help them to reconstruct how such chariots were made and used.The ancient Egyptians used chariots--typically with one or two riders and pulled by two horses--for hunting and warfare as well as in processions. They are frequently shown in ancient Egyptian art, and several examples of the wooden frames survive, including six dismantled chariots found in King Tutankhamun's tomb, dating to around 3,300 years ago.

Piano practicing fine tunes the brain circuitries that temporally bind signals from our senses.Over the years pianists develop a particularly acute sense of the temporal correlation between the movements of the piano keys and the sound of the notes played. However, they are no better than non-musicians at assessing the synchronicity of lip movements and speech. This was discovered by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in a comparative study on the simultaneous brain processing of stimuli from different senses by musicians and non-musicians. The researchers also used functional magnetic resonance imaging in their study to map the areas of the brain active during this process. According to their findings, in pianists, the perception of asynchronous music and hand movements triggers increased error signals in a circuit involving the cerebellum, premotor and associative areas of the brain, which is refined by piano practicing. The study shows that our sensorimotor experience influences the way in which the brain temporally links signals from different senses during perception.

Guppies in the wild have evolved over at least half-a-million years -- long enough for the males' coloration to have changed dramatically. Yet a characteristic orange patch on male guppies has remained remarkably stable, though it could have become redder or more yellow. Why has it stayed the same hue of orange over such a long period of time?Because that's the color female guppies prefer."Sometimes populations have to evolve just to stay the same," said Greg Grether, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-author of a study published Nov. 23 in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, a major journal for research in evolutionary biology.

Durham Crematorium wants to install turbines in two of its burners, which would use the heat generated during the cremation process to provide the same amount of electricity as would power 1,500 televisions.A third burner is to be used to provide heating for the site's chapel and its offices.The scheme would be the first of its kind in the UK but industry experts say that it could be followed by other similar projects.Many crematoria are currently replacing their furnaces, to meet government targets on preventing mercury emissions from escaping into the atmosphere.

Humans are practically unique as a species in having grandparents who are involved in the lives of their grandchildren.Research from Basel University and Edith Cowan University in Western Australia has highlighted how crucial the role of the grandparent can be in early life.Dr David Coall, from Edith Cowan University said: "Evolutionary perspectives on the post-reproductive years have highlighted grandparenthood as an unusual feature of the human lifespan that is only shared with one or two other species, such as some whale species."Grandparents in industrialised societies invest a significant amount of time and money in their grandchildren.

Our soft food diet may be causing our jaws to grow too short and small relative to the size of our teeth, meaning our mouths are too crowded.Comparisons of skulls from 11 different human populations spread across the globe show that those with hunter-gatherer lifestyles grew longer and narrower jaws.Those with a more modern lifestyle who did not have to chew so much would have put less pressure on the jaw, explaining why theirs were shorter and wider, researchers said.

Will the future of space exploration evolve into a hybrid of human and robotic expeditions, one which may change the face of humanity in space?The species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to is Homo sapiens. During a time of dramatic climate change 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens (modern humans) evolved in Africa. Is the human species entering another evolutionary inflection point?.

Imagine being able to access the Internet through the contact lenses on your eyeballs. Blink, and you'd be online. Meet someone, and you'd have the ability to immediately search their identity. And if your friend happens to be speaking a different language, an instantaneous translation could appear directly in front of you.That might sound farfetched, but it's something that might very well exist in 30 years or less, says theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.

Worms have survived their first space mission in liquid form.The result, published in a Royal Society journal, means worm colonies can be established on space stations without the need for researchers to tend to them.The animals are helping scientists understand the effects of weightlessness and high radiation levels experienced in space.Lessons learned could one day assist humans to explore the Solar System.

Ravens use their beaks and wings much like humans rely on our hands to make gestures, such as for pointing to an object, scientists now find.This is the first time researchers have seen gestures used in this way in the wild by animals other than primates.From the age of 9 to 12 months, human infants often use gestures to direct the attention of adults to objects, or to hold up items so that others can take them. These gestures, produced before children speak their first words, are seen as milestones in the development of human speech.

When it comes to money, creative people are more likely to cheat to get it than the less-imaginative crowd, a new study suggests.The reason? Creative types may be more skilled at coming up with reasons for their less-than-ethical actions, according to the researchers.In the new study, scientists measured the intelligence and creativity of 97 students from local universities in the southeastern United States by asking them to complete a series of recognized psychological tests. The participants then took part in five experiments to determine whether creative people are more likely to cheat under circumstances where they can justify their dishonest behavior.

Education, jobs, religion and even the cultural effects of bilingualism were as topical in the ancient world as they are today.All of these topics and more are featured in translations of ancient papyrus in the University of Cincinnati-based journal, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, due out Dec. 2.The annually produced journal, edited since 2006 by Peter van Minnen, UC associate professor and head of classics, features the most prestigious global research on papyri, a field of study known as papyrology. (Papyrology is formally known as the study of texts on papyrus and other materials, mainly from ancient Egypt and mainly from the period of Greek and Roman rule.)

New research shows the Southern Ocean is storing more heat than any other ocean in the world.The study, carried out by Tasmania's Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem centre, has found that carbon dioxide levels in the Southern Ocean will be corrosive to some shellfish by 2030 if current trends continue.Scientists say deep moving currents around Antarctica are the reason why the Southern Ocean is warming faster than other oceans.

Police across the US have been criticised for their actions in clashes with Occupy Wall Street protesters. The man who led the police response to the Battle in Seattle protests at the 1999 WTO meeting blames the post-9/11 militarisation of American policing."Law enforcement across the country is pursuing the same tactics that failed so miserably in Seattle," Norm Stamper tells BBC World Service's Witness programme."There's a lack of patience, there's a lack of imagination and there are clear over-reactions to the challenges the police perceive. It is all so disheartening."

A "soft" robot inspired by squid and starfish can crawl, undulate, and squeeze under obstacles.Built by a team at Harvard University, this robot has several advantages over those with treads, wheels and rigid parts - which have a limited repertoire of movements and may have trouble navigating difficult terrain.The sea creature-inspired creation was manufactured with soft materials and its motion is driven by compressed air.Details appear in the journal PNAS.

Ancient rock deposits, laid down between two massive ice ages, reveal the oldest known fossils for two types of single-celled creatures: Tube-shelled foraminifera and hairy, vase-shape ciliates.Both closely resemble microbes living today. But the climate they lived in may have been quite different. The fossils appear in limestone deposited on the ocean floor between 635 million and 715 million years ago. This period was marked by two "Snowball Earth" events, when ice may have covered the entire planet.

People who believe there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about global warming tend to be less certain that global warming is happening and less supportive of climate policy, researchers at George Mason, San Diego State, and Yale Universities report in a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.A recent survey of climate scientists conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois found near unanimous agreement among climate scientists that human-caused global warming is happening..

ELECTRIC cars are clean, green and rather cool these days - even if they can't compete with conventional vehicles in terms of battery life and driving range. These disadvantages could disappear, however, with a system for wirelessly charging cars as they speed down the highway.To do this, Shanhui Fan and colleagues at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University in California, suggest using magnetic coils embedded in the roadway to create a weak field that resonates with a coil on the car to transfer power. This kind of power transfer works on a similar principle to an opera singer shattering a glass by singing precisely the right note. In 2007, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated that magnetic resonance could be used to transfer power wirelessly between two stationary objects 2 metres apart.

A 27-year-old woman has lost her place the London 2012 Paralympic Games in what appear to be the most unusual of circumstances: Monique van der Vorst, formerly paralysed from the waist down, has regained her ability to walk. Perhaps surprisingly, though, neuroscientists say her experience is not unprecedented.van der Vorst was a handcyclist with national and international titles to her name. She has now traded her handbike for a bicycle - and has just been given one of 11 spots on the Dutch women's professional cycling team, Rabobank, according to IoL News.

Sir David Attenborough has warned that there will be "open water at the North Pole in summer within the next few decades" if the current rate of global warming is allowed to continue.In his bleakest comments yet on the fate of our warming planet, the veteran naturalist, who visited the pole for the first time last year, said that the consequences of melting sea ice would be dire for wildlife and humanity alike.Writing in the Radio Times on the eve of the United Nations Climate Conference in South Africa, Sir David said the implications of Arctic meltwater disrupting the flow of ocean currents which maintain global climate were "hard to overstate".

And you thought flaming Chevy Volts and exploding iPods were bad. Imagine if malicious individuals worldwide could send commands to your printer, forcing it to steal your personal information and then self-destruct in taking out your home/office in a fiery blaze. That's exactly what might be possible with a newly discovered set of security exploits.The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations is on guard after receiving a debriefing from Columbia University that printers from Hewlett Packard, Comp. (HPQ) -- the world's top printer manufacturer -- and possibly other printer makers' designs are vulnerable to a newly discovered class of security flaws which can be exploited for anything from malicious mischief to participating in serious system intrusions.

The conventional method of creating nanoporous materials involves removing minor quantities of material and leaving voids in its place. One disadvantage in this method is the void must continuous throughout the material and must form a network for the proper removal of the materials from inside also. This has kept the production of nanoporous material limited till now. When produced effectively it will have potential applications from water purification to optical communications.The new research by the Cambridge university scientists, published in the Nature Materials journal (27 November issue) speaks of a new method called Collective Osmotic Shock to produce the nanoporous materials more effectively. The osmotic forces will aid in forming a nanoporous material by deforming the matrix formation and creating the voids in between.

(Reuters Health) - The digital age has left men's nether parts in a squeeze, if you believe the latest science on semen, laptops and wireless connections.In a report in the venerable medical journal Fertility and Sterility, Argentinian scientists describe how they got semen samples from 29 healthy men, placed a few drops under a laptop connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and then hit download. Four hours later, the semen was, eh, well-done.A quarter of the sperm were no longer swimming around, for instance, compared to just 14 percent from semen samples stored at the same temperature away from the computer. And nine percent of the sperm showed DNA damage, three-fold more than the comparison samples.

A new photograph-analyzing tool quantifies changes made by digital airbrushers in the fashion and lifestyle industry, where image alteration has become the psychologically destructive norm."Publishers have legitimate reasons to alter photographs to create fantasy and sell products, but they've gone a little too far," said image forensics specialist Hany Farid of Dartmouth University. "You can't ignore the body of literature showing negative consequences to being inundated with these images."In a Nov. 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, Farid and doctoral student Eric Kee debut a computational model developed by analyzing 468 sets of original and retouched photographs. From these, Farid and Kee distilled a formal mathematical description of alterations made to models' shapes and features.

A dry autumn has led to low water levels in Germany's Rhine River. But the newly exposed banks haven't just revealed rocks and junk. Passersby in recent days have also found two bombs and a few barrels of smoke-screen chemicals left over from World War II.For more than 200 years, the myth of the Lorelei rock, named after a mythical mermaid who lured fisherman to their deaths by singing the most beautiful song ever heard and causing them to crash into the rocks, put fear into the hearts of captains of boats plying the Rhine River. Historically low water levels this November are presenting a new threat: World War II bombs.

The "Climategate" dispute over global warming science was reignited yesterday when thousands more hacked emails from climate researchers, some of them potentially damaging, were released online on the eve of a vital UN climate conference.The private messages between senior scientists in Britain and America, hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA), were released five days before delegates from nearly 200 countries meet in Durban, South Africa, in an effort to agree a new international global warming treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol, which runs out next year.

Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History acknowledged the reference had been found in a 1,300-year-old inscription made on a carved brick fragment at a ruin at Comalcalco in the south of the country.Most experts have previously cited only one surviving Mayan reference to the date, on a stone tablet from a nearby site at Tortuguero.Speculation that the ancient Mayans foretold a cataclysmic event was fuelled by publicity surrounding "2012," a Hollywood disaster movie released in 2009, but the idea has been dismissed by most archaeologists and astronomers.

One dental researcher thinks he's found a way to permanently stave off the cavity-causing bacteria that lead to expensive and costly trips to the dentist.Wenyuan Shi of the University of California, Los Angeles, has led efforts to develop a mouthwash with technology that kills Streptococcus mutans, the bacteria responsible for cavities.First, Shi and colleagues had to understand how these bacteria interact in biofilms, or the sticky colonies of microorganisms that build up as plaque on the teeth. Bacteria often latch on to the surfaces of teeth, breaking down food debris and nutrients into acids that can eat away at enamel and form caries (another word for cavities). These harmful plaque build-ups can lead to gum disease and even tooth loss.