Newsdesk Archive
At least one non-avian dinosaur, Microraptor gui, feasted on birds, according to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The evidence is strong. Paleontologists found a fossil of the small, bird-like dinosaur with remains of a bird in its gut. It appears that the dinosaur grabbed the bird and swallowed it whole. The bird must have been the dinosaur's last meal, given how fossils for the two animals were preserved together over millions of years.
How low can you go?For water, the answer is -55 degrees Fahrenheit (-48 degrees C; 225 Kelvin). University of Utah researchers found that is the lowest temperature liquid water can reach before it becomes ice.Back in grade school, we all learned that water under normal atmospheric pressure freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 C), but that rule only holds for water with tiny impurities."If you have liquid water and you want to form ice, then you have to first form a small nucleus or seed of ice from the liquid. The liquid has to give birth to ice," said chemist and co-author of the study Valeria Molinero in a press release.
When exposed to certain levels of PCBs, turtles suffer from stunted growth and weak bones, found a new study.With low bone-density, turtles have a tougher time diving, swimming and chewing their food. And the same is probably true for fish and other wild animals that are exposed to the ubiquitous environmental pollutant.It's too soon to know what the results mean for people, and our level of exposure is probably much lower than what some turtles experience. But there is reason to believe that the shelled creatures might be sentinels for human health.
Archaeologists led by the University of Birmingham with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection have discovered evidence of two huge pits positioned on celestial alignment at Stonehenge.Shedding new light on the significant association of the monument with the sun, these pits may have contained tall stones, wooden posts or even fires to mark its rising and setting and could have defined a processional route used by agriculturalists to celebrate the passage of the sun across the sky at the summer solstice.Positioned within the Cursus pathway, the pits are on alignment towards midsummer sunrise and sunset when viewed from the Heel Stone, the enigmatic stone standing just outside the entrance to Stonehenge. For the first time, this discovery may directly link the rituals and celestial phenomena at Stonehenge to activities within the Cursus.
Heritage Daily has been informed of the start of a programme of essential conservation works to the Mound of the Hostages on the Hill of Tara in County Meath, IrelandThe Mound of the Hostages, Duma na nGiall, is one of the most prominent monuments among the concentration of prehistoric sites on the Hill of Tara. The megalithic passage tomb also called Duma na nGiall is the oldest monument on the Hill of Tara dating back to between 2500 B.C. and 3000 B.C.The passage, 4m in length and 1m wide, was subdivided by sillstones into three compartments each containing cremated remains. A wonderfully decorated stone can be viewed from the entrance gate.
Neanderthals may have been victims of love, or at least of interspecies breeding with modern humans, according to a new study.As the heavy-browed species ventured farther and farther to cope with climate change, they increasingly mated with our own species, giving rise to mixed-species humans, researchers suggest.Over generations of genetic mixing, the Neanderthal genome would have dissolved, absorbed into the Homo sapiens population, which was much larger.
Even as pollution levels in the Ganges River continue to rise, recent legal rulings may offer up a new defense of the sacred waterway.Last month, the Allahabad High Court, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, ordered the closure of more than 100 tanneries that pour tons of toxic chromium into the Ganges each year in the industrial city of Kanpur.The ruling was the latest in a series of decisions by the court that have stopped giant construction projects in the Ganges floodplain and mandated the construction of new waste treatment plants in cities along its banks."It's the great achievement of my life, if it succeeds," says public interest attorney Arun K. Gupta, who took part in the litigation.
In a secluded stretch of desert about 300 kilometres south of Cairo, hundreds of bodies lie buried in the sand. Wrapped in linen and rolled up in stiff mats made of sticks, they are little more than bones. But their ornate plaited hair styles and simple personal possessions help to reveal details about the individuals in each grave. The bodies date from around 3,300 years ago, when the Pharaoh Akhenaten renounced Egypt's traditional polytheistic religion and moved his capital to remote Amarna, to worship just one god: the Sun disc Aten.
A new report suggests that up to one fifth of global energy could be provided by biomass (plants) without damaging food production.The report reviews more than 90 global studies. It has been produced by the Technology and Policy Assessment function of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), which addresses key controversies in the energy field, and aims to provide authoritative and accessible reports that set very high standards for rigour and transparency.
To avoid the reach of U.S. copyright laws, numerous online pirates have set up shop in countries less willing or able to enforce intellectual property rights. Policymakers agree that these "rogue" sites pose a real problem for U.S. artists and rights holders who aren't getting paid for the rampant distribution of their music, movies and other creative works. The question is how to help them. Lawmakers keep offering proposals, but they don't seem to be getting any closer to the right answer.The latest, HR 3261, comes from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and a dozen co-sponsors. Dubbed the Stop Online Piracy Act, it's designed to isolate foreign websites that commit or "facilitate" willful copyright infringements by cutting off their funding and shrinking their U.S. audience. In that sense, it's similar to its counterpart in the Senate, S 968, the PROTECT IP Act, which the Judiciary Committee has approved.Both bills go to risky extremes, however, in their efforts to stop these sites from attracting an audience.
The Protect IP Act (PIPA) - the US Senate's version of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House - is gaining steam.SOPA is still likely to pass - and we expect its supporters to try and move it soon - but, right now, we also need to watch the Senate because Majority Leader Harry Reid is thinking about moving PIPA as soon as next week.But just as SOPA would not achieve its stated goal of stopping piracy online, nor would this. Just like SOPA, this bill will create new cybersecurity risks and jeopardize the basic structure of the internet as we know it.And as a non-profit committed to keeping the web open and accessible to all, Mozilla wants to ensure that this legislation does not pass in its current form.By working with other organizations fighting to protect the internet as we know it, and by reaching out to people like you, we're helping organize a massive day of constituent calls to the Senate next Tuesday, asking them not to pass PIPA in its current form.We need as much support as we can get - will you say you'll be a part of it? Pledge to call next Tuesday using the form on the right, and we'll send you a reminder along with information on how to call on Tuesday morning (if you're opted-in to receive email from us).**If you are not a resident of or voter in the US, please pass this page along to anyone you know in the States, to help get the word out.**.
Astronomers have used radio interferometry to obtain a radio astronomical photograph of a cosmic explosion, the youngest supernova SN2011dh, just 14 days after a star exploded in the Galàxia del Remolí (M51) galaxy last June. The international astronomer team coordinated telescopes around Europe to achieve this feat.Galàxia El Remolí in the constellation of Llebrers is at around 23 million light years from the Earth. The death of a star in the form of a supernova explosion in this galaxy is considered to be one of the most violent phenomenon that has ever occurred in the universe. Though, the explosion by itself is beautiful.
If you think interplanetary space is a dangerous place now, with asteroids screaming by at close range and comets crashing into planets with the force of multiple H-bombs, be grateful you weren't here 4 billion years ago or so. Back then, our solar system was still getting itself organized. Planets caromed around like so many billiard balls, their gravity whipping smaller objects both outward into deep space and in toward the sun. One consequence of the latter: the Late Heavy Bombardment, which pummeled the inner planets with a barrage of asteroid strikes that gave the moon a goodly fraction of the craters we see today. (Earth got slammed too, but erosion, submersion in the oceans and plate tectonics have cleaned up most of the scarring.
Anyone willing to travel to remote places for the sake of science has to accept some health problems, be it frostbite in Antarctica or bone loss in space. To make matters worse, these people also have to accept self-diagnosing and self-treating these health problems, not to mention others that may arise in the course of their missions. Now the European Space Agency wants to make these types of tests somewhat simpler for the astronauts who may need to perform them, by developing a space-worthy lab on a chip.
A new, compact gasification contraption can dramatically compress the things our armed forces leave behind, turning trash into ash. Marines at Camp Smith, Hawaii, are testing the new unit to verify whether it could be used at forward operating bases to cut down on landfill. The Micro Auto Gasification System, or MAGS, can bake 100 pounds of garbage and compress it into 5 pounds of ash, while creating more energy than it consumes.It could someday handle the daily waste needs of 1,000 Marines at a forward operating base, according to the Office of Naval Research.
In two new books, the University of Oregon's Madonna Moss challenges conventional thinking about the region's early inhabitants, pointing to cultures built around fishing, fish processing and fish resource management.(EUGENE, Ore.) - Native people of the Pacific Northwest were fishermen and food producers, as well as stewards of their environment who timed their fishing practices to promote the production of salmon and the other fish that they relied on. They were not simply hunter-gatherers, says University of Oregon archaeologist Madonna L. Moss.
MELBOURNE: Scientists claim to have discovered two huge sunken islands in the Indian Ocean, which once formed part of the last link between India and Australia.A team from Sydney University , Macquarie University and the University of Tasmania say the two islands, about the size of Tasmania, were once part of the supercontinent Gondwana and are more than 1.5 kilometres underwater.They say the islands, discovered west of Australia, were once above water. The discovery was made while the scientists were mapping the seafloor of the Perth Abyssal Plain.
Researchers say new tests have confirmed earlier indications that neutrinos can travel faster than light, but not everyone is convinced.The claim runs so counter to a century's worth of physics that most observers won't be content until the findings from the OPERA experiment are repeated under a variety of conditions, by different teams of researchers. If the results hold up, that would require a reinterpretation of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which effectively sets the velocity of light in a vacuum as a cosmic speed limit.The latest round of tests was conducted to address some of the criticisms that cropped up in the wake of the OPERA team's initial announcement about faster-than-light neutrinos in September.
The oldest known whale to ply the Antarctic has been found, scientists say.A 24-inch-long (60-centimeter-long) jawbone was recently discovered amid a rich deposit of fossils on the Antarctic Peninsula (map).The creature, which may have reached lengths of up to 20 feet (6 meters), had a mouthful of teeth and likely feasted on giant penguins, sharks, and big bony fish, whose remains were also discovered with the jawbone.The early whale swam polar waters during the Eocene period, some 49 million years ago. Its age suggests fully aquatic whales evolved from their mammalian ancestors more rapidly than previously thought, said researcher Thomas Mörs, paleozoologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
Call it a two-for-one special in renewable energy. A new concept for marine solar cells could harness energy from both the sun and the waves at the same time."They work on many different levels. They can be scaled up to as big a project as you want it to be," said British designer, Phil Pauley.The idea came to him during a brief brainstorming session, he said. Usually his eponymous firm, located near London, develops interactive 3D models and visualizations for clients that include Deutsche Bank, Hamptons International, and Eurostar.
Long before the dinosaurs, a bleak environment of widespread fires and oxygen-poor coastal seawater killed off some 90 percent of all Earth's living species. The whole process took less than 200,000 years, according to a new study of the planet's most catastrophic mass-extinction event.The end-Permian extinction probably isn't as well known as the Cretaceous extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. But the end-Permian collapse nearly spelled the end of life on Earth.Now scientists have painted a picture of just how fast the "Great Dying" unfolded 252 million years ago.
ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.
Collaborations between Johns Hopkins and National Taiwan University researchers have successfully manipulated the life span of common, single-celled yeast organisms by figuring out how to remove and restore protein functions related to yeast aging.A chemical variation of a "fuel-gauge" enzyme that senses energy in yeast acts like a life span clock: It is present in young organisms and progressively diminished as yeast cells age.
An astronomer has captured the first amateur pictures of another solar system from a tiny telescope in his back yard. Rolf Olsen, a New Zealand based astrophotographer, has published the first non-professional pictures of the disk of debris and dust swirling around Beta Pictoris, a very young solar system.Incredibly, the 12 million-year-old system, some 60 million light years away from our own, was captured with only a 25cm telescope.The material that forms the proto-planetary disc around Beta Pictoris has been photographed by large observatories often before, but it was not thought possible for amateurs to take a picture of the system, because of the glare from the star itself.
A neural condition that tangles the senses so that people hear colors and taste words could yield important clues to understanding how the brain is organized, according to a new review study. This sensory merger, called synesthesia, was first scientifically documented in 1812 but was widely misunderstood for much of its history, with many experts thinking the condition was a form of mild insanity."It's not just that the number two is blue, but two is also a male number that wears a hat and is in love with the number seven," said study co-author David Brang, of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)."We're not sure if these personifications are [also a symptom of] synesthesia, but we think this is what derailed a lot of scientists from being interested in it. ... They thought these people were making it all up."
Mexico's archaeology institute downplays theories that the ancient Mayas predicted some sort of apocalypse would occur in 2012, but on Thursday it acknowledged that a second reference to the date exists on a carved fragment found at a southern Mexico ruin site.Most experts had cited only one surviving reference to the date in Mayan glyphs, a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.But the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement that there is in fact another apparent reference to the date at the nearby Comalcalco ruin. The inscription is on the carved or molded face of a brick. Comalcalco is unusual among Mayan temples in that it was constructed of bricksk.
With the coming to power of a right-wing government, the Netherlands is less and less cool about cannabis. Dutch police and local governments in the southern Netherlands plan to work with the European Space Agency to find illegal marijuana plots hidden in fields of corn and asparagus by using satellite data.The experiment will begin early in 2012, using images taken from orbit to identity cannabis plants, according to Max Timp, a spokesman for the municipality of Venlo, which is leading the misguided project, reports Rudy Ruitenberg at Bloomberg.
Earlier this year, archaeologists from the Archaeological Superintendence of Emilia-Romagna in Italy uncovered a pyramid of human remains in a crypt beneath the church of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle in the small and chilly Apennine mountain town of Roccapelago.Natural mummiesBodies of adults, children and infants, many of them partly mummified were found in a patchwork of skin, tendons, hair, clothes, socks, caps, bags, and shrouds.
Taiwan NewsTaipei, Nov. 13 (CNA) Taiwanese and Spanish researchers have been cooperating on an excavation project to find an "embryo city" built by the Spaniards in Taiwan nearly 400 years ago. The excavation, co-funded by Taiwan's National Science Council (NSC) and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), began in early October at Heping Island in the northeastern city of Keelung, where construction of a city named San Salvador began in 1626 during Spain's 1626-1642 occupation of northern Taiwan.
Men in prehistoric Europe scarred, pierced and tattooed their penises, likely for ritualistic and social group reasons, according to a new study.Analysis of phallic decorations in Paleolithic art, described in the December issue of The Journal of Urology, may also show evidence of the world's first known surgery performed on a male genital organ. The alteration, or surgery, might have just been for ornamental purposes, or a piercing, the researchers suggest.Lead author Javier Angulo, chair of the Department of Urology at Hospital Universitario de Getafe in Spain, explains that, like today, tattooing and manipulation of body parts have always functioned as a way for people to express themselves.
Recent excavations conducted by the University of Tübingen at Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany have produced new evidence for the earliest painting tradition in Central Europe about 15,000 years ago.This period is referred to as the Magdalenian and is named after the site of La Madeleine in France.Three of the new paintings show double rows of red dots on limestone cobbles, while one painted fragment may originate from the wall of the cave.
YOU may think humanity's first words are lost in the noise of ancient history, but an unlikely experiment using plastic tubes and puffs of air is helping to recreate the first sounds uttered by our distant ancestors.Many animals communicate with sounds, but it is the variety of our language that sets us apart. Over millions of years, changes to our vocal organs have allowed us to produce a rich mix of sounds. One such change was the loss of the air sac - a balloon-like organ that helps primates to produce booming noises.
A heavy equipment operator unearthed what appears to be a nearly complete plesiosaur while digging in Canada's oil sands, Syncrude announced Thursday.The fossil was discovered on November 14 and is now being examined by Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology scientists who aim to have it removed by the end of the week, the company said in a statement."This is a very rare find," said the museum's Don Brinkman. "It's a long necked plesiosaur, which is a marine reptile with a very long neck, small head and short body.
Israeli archaeologists have uncovered ancient coins near the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City which challenge the assumption that all of the walls of the Second Temple were built by King Herod.The coins, which date back to around 15 AD, were found inside a Jewish ritual bath located at the foot of the western wall of the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, archaeologists said on Wednesday.Until now, archaeologists and scholars have largely accepted that the Roman king was responsible for construction of both the Temple and its walls in a project completed by the time of his death in around 4 BC.
I highly recommend this exhibition in London next week by my friend, visionary artist Android Jones: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=144481625651376. It opens on 28 Nov and there will be a spectacular dance/art performance on 1 Dec: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVWZxbtF-mY. I met Android at the Reality Sandwich retreat in Boulder Utah in September, got to know him well and developed a deep appreciation of what he is doing. His art is amazing and speaks to the emergent consciousness of our times in an utterly unique way. -Graham
A vehicle the size of a small 4x4,is about to embark on a one-way 350m-mile trip costing $2.5bn to explore one of the solar system's most intriguing destinations.On Saturday, Nasa is dueto launch its Curiosity rover on what is the most ambitious mission yet to the red planet.After years of delays and cost overruns, the US space agency believes the Mars Science Laboratory will provide vital scientific information and unprecedented knowledge of the planet's hostile terrain.
The US space agency (Nasa) has released the sharpest ever elevation map of the Moon.It will enable scientists to accurately portray the shape of the entire Moon at a higher resolution than ever before.The map was produced using data sent back by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft, which was launched in June 2009.It reveals troughs and bumps over nearly the entire Moon with a pixel scale close to 100m (328 ft).
A Chinese spacecraft has returned to Earth after completing the nation's first docking manoeuvres in orbit.The Shenzhou 8 capsule landed in the Gobi desert late on Thursday (Beijing time), the final moments of its descent having being slowed by parachute.While in orbit, the unmanned Shenzhou mission had rendezvoused with China's mini spacelab, Tiangong-1.
A toothy Mayan skull, made of limestone and in the shape of a monkey head, is set to go on display at a Maya exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto Canada.But unlike the famous crystal skulls, which are widely regarded as fake, this one is believed to be real.The skull is roughly life-size and small enough that you can hold it in your hands. It has eight inlaid white teeth made of shell in two groups of four, with a black tooth made of iron pyrite in the middle. The mouth of the skull is wide open, and the eyes may have originally had shells in them.
A Jewish group in Jerusalem is using 21st-century technology to map every tombstone in the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, a sprawling, politically sensitive necropolis of 150,000 graves stretching back three millennia.The goal is to photograph every grave, map it digitally, record every name, and make the information available online. That is supposed to allow visitors to find their way in the cemetery, long a bewildering jumble of crumbling gravestones and rubble surrounded by Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. Beset for many years by neglect, it is among the oldest cemeteries in continuous use in the world.
Bullets dating back to the English Civil War have been found in a field in Berkshire by archaeologists.The bullets, dating back to 1643, were discovered during Thames Water's exploration work before pipes were replaced in Essex Street, Newbury.The seven bullets were found buried in a field adjacent to the road.Archaeologist Mike Hall said it proved there would have been "fierce fighting" there, during the Battle of Newbury.
In a secluded stretch of desert about 300 kilometers south of Cairo, hundreds of bodies lie buried in the sand. Wrapped in linen and rolled up in stiff mats made of sticks, they are little more than bones. But their ornate plaited hair styles and simple personal possessions help to reveal details about the individuals in each grave. The bodies date from around 3,300 years ago, when the Pharaoh Akhenaten renounced Egypt's traditional polytheistic religion and moved his capital to remote Amarna, to worship just one god: the Sun disc Aten.
Global temperatures could be less sensitive to changing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels than previously thought, a study suggests.The researchers said people should still expect to see "drastic changes" in climate worldwide, but that the risk was a little less imminent.The results are published in Science.Previous climate models have tended to used meteorological measurements from the past 150 years to estimate the climate's sensitivity to rising CO2.
The elusive culprits that are killing countless coral reefs around the world can now be nabbed with technology normally used to diagnose human diseases, marine researchers say.Coral researchers and reef managers will be able to identify coral infections using a new method that allows them to classify specific diseases based on the presence of microbes.This could lead to more effective action to reduce the impact of disease on the world's imperilled coral reefs.
The biggest volcanic eruptions of the past half eon had seemed a likely culprit in the greatest mass extinction Earth has seen. Now the closest look yet at events 252 million years ago is linking those eruptions even more closely not only to the biotic cataclysm in the sea but also to the mass extinction on land.An international group of scientists led by paleontologist Shu-zhong Shen of Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China intensively sampled the fossil record, they report today in Science. They examined nine rock outcrops across South China, not just the couple of sites most closely sampled in the past. Each sampling site spanned the mass extinction 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period. The sites included records from the sea, where fully 90% of species disappeared, as well as from the land.
A species of frog that was thought to have been made extinct during the notorious drainage of the Hula marshlands in Israel, has appeared again after more than 50 years of hiding.The Palestinian or Hula painted frog (Discoglossus nigriventer) originally went missing when the Jewish National Fund drained the marshlands around the Hula Valley in the 1950s. The swamp was a breeding ground for malaria, and the disease was killing off the population.
An ancient argument may have resulted in someone cracking the head of an ancient early human called the Maba Man. A healed lesion on this 200,000-year-old skull may have come from violent trauma, though not bad enough to have killed him."People are social mammals, we do these kinds of things to each other," study researcher Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience, referring to interpersonal aggression. "It's another case of long-term survival of a pretty serious injury.
A series of crude graffiti drawn on the walls of a London flat are the "Lascaux of Punk," according to a controversial claim made by two British archaeologists who compared the rude markings to Paleolithic cave art.Found behind cupboards in the upper room of a two-story 19th-century house at 6 Denmark Street in London, the intact graffiti was drawn by the Sex Pistols' lead singer, John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten). The Sex Pistols ushered in the era of punk in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. According to John Schofield, of the department of archaeology at the University of York, and independent researcher Paul Graves-Brown, the Pistols' "cave art" is worthy of being reviewed in the same way archaeologists examine prehistoric art. While Lydon drew the pictures, other members of the band wrote some text on the walls.
Crew on the International Space Station will no longer have to hide from a possible collision with some space debris, after NASA flight controllers decided it posed no threat to the station.The ISS 'nauts had been told to take shelter in their Soyuz spacecraft in case the debris from the Fengyun 1C, a Chinese satellite, hit the station.Usually if there's a danger of something hitting the ISS, the crew manoeuvre it out of the way, but this time they were too busy sorting out the return journey of the Expedition 29 astronauts to do that.
After days of frustrating silence, contact with the probe was made on Tuesday at 2025 GMT at a European Space Agency ground station in Perth, Western Australia, the Paris-based ESA said."ESA teams are working closely with engineers in Russia to determine how best to maintain communication with the spacecraft," it said.A spokesman at European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP: "We sent an instruction to (the probe) to switch on its transmitter and the probe sent us telemetric data.
Ever get up to retrieve something from another room only to completely forget what you needed after crossing the doorway?You're not alone, and scientists think forgetful trips between rooms result from how our brains interpret spatial information.Researchers already know that walking from one space to another makes people more likely to forget tasks when compared to others who don't make such a transition. Called "location-updating effect," the phenomenon also causes people transitioning between rooms (even virtual ones) to take more time while attempting to recall items from memory.
SANTIAGO, Chile -- More than 2 million years ago, scores of whales congregating off the Pacific Coast of South America mysteriously met their end.Maybe they became disoriented and beached themselves. Maybe they were trapped in a lagoon by a landslide or a storm. Maybe they died there over a period of a few millennia. But somehow, they ended up right next to one another, many just meters (yards) apart, entombed as the shallow sea floor was driven upward by geological forces and transformed into the driest place on the planet.
Scientists have outlined which moons and planets are most likely to harbour extra-terrestrial life.Among the most habitable alien worlds were Saturn's moon Titan and the exoplanet Gliese 581g - thought to reside some 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.The international team devised two rating systems to assess the probability of hosting alien life.They have published their results in the journal Astrobiology.
A bizarre underwater "icicle of death" has been filmed by a BBC crew.With timelapse cameras, specialists recorded salt water being excluded from the sea ice and sinking.The temperature of this sinking brine, which was well below 0C, caused the water to freeze in an icy sheath around it.Where the so-called "brinicle" met the sea bed, a web of ice formed that froze everything it touched, including sea urchins and starfish.The unusual phenomenon was filmed for the first time by cameramen Hugh Miller and Doug Anderson for the BBC One series Frozen Planet.
A strong earthquake struck Thursday morning near the Japan nuclear power plant hit by a powerful tsunami earlier this year. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude-5.9 quake struck shortly before 4:30 a.m. local time. It hit 62 miles (101 kilometers) east of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The quake struck at a depth of 23 miles (37 kilometers).The quake struck 151 miles (244 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo.
Carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders composed of one-atom-thick carbon lattices, have gained fame as one of the strongest materials known to science. Now a group of researchers from the University of Michigan is taking advantage of another one of carbon nanotubes' unique properties, the low refractive index of low-density aligned nanotubes, to demonstrate a new application: making 3-D objects appear as nothing more than a flat, black sheet.The refractive index of a material is a measure of how much that material slows down light, and carbon nanotube "forests" have a low index of refraction very close to that of air. Since the two materials affect the passage of light in similar ways, there is little reflection and scattering of light as it passes from air into a layer of nanotubes.
A Stone Age hand axe which was found on a building site could help prove part of Gloucestershire was once "almost on the seaside", experts have said.Archaeologists uncovered the finely-worked stone tool, which may be about 100,000 years old, on a housing development in Moreton-in-Marsh. They said they believed it may have been used by cavemen on the shores of a lake that spanned across the Midlands.The axe is thought to have been used primarily for butchering large animals. The tool was found by Cotswold Archaeology earlier this month on the building site at The Fire Service College. A similar axe was found nearby a few years ago, which experts said made the latest find "hugely significant".
On Monday the long-awaited trial of three surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge opened in Phnom Penh. This week the tribunal hears opening arguments by the prosecution and by the defense. The three accused are charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.The hearings opened Monday with judges reading out the names of the three accused senior Khmer Rouge leaders and the charges they face.The list of alleged crimes is long and includes murder, extermination, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, persecution and willful killing, among others.
A new generation of contact lenses that project images in front of the eyes is a step closer after successful animal trials, say scientists.The technology could allow wearers to read floating texts and emails or augment their sight with computer-generated images, Terminator-syle.Seattle's Washington University which is working on the device says early tests show it is safe and feasible.But there are still wrinkles to iron out, like finding a good power source.
With hundreds of turtles and dugongs dying due to a lack food off Queensland, some Indigenous leaders are supporting a temporary suspension on traditional hunting.The leaders are meeting in Cairns in far north Queensland today to work on a new conservation strategy for communities across Cape York.The two-day meeting comes as the Federal Opposition calls for a judicial inquiry into dugong and turtle poaching.
But now it has emerged that manufacturers could be allowed to make virtually identical statements after scientists accepted that water does in fact help with hydration.Although food standards experts insisted that water is not proven to actively prevent the body from becoming dehydrated, they conceded that it does help regulate body temperature and maintain the body's physical and mental functions.
Three crew members from the International Space Station returned to Earth on Tuesday morning after six months orbiting the planet. The members of Expedition 29, squashed into a Soyuz spacecraft, landed in central Kazakhstan.It was the first return to Earth of astronauts since Nasa retired its space shuttle in July. With that gone, the Russians are the only people able to transport people and goods to and from the ISS, which is a joint endeavour of 16 countries and cost $100bn (£64bn) to build.
The idea that subatomic particles can travel faster than the speed of light in contravention of the currently accepted laws of physics has been dealt a serious blow by researchers who share the lab of the team that made the original finding.In September, physicists working on an experiment called Opera at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy announced that neutrinos sent there from Cern near Geneva seemed to complete the 450 mile (720km) journey faster than a beam of light.
Leonardo da Vinci was not just a great painter. He was also a brilliant geologist, as today's latest instalment of our interactive series on his drawings reveals. Rocks pile and gather and disintegrate in mountains, caves, strata and screes in his paintings. The two versions of his picture The Virgin of the Rocks in the National Gallery's exhibition of his art glory in two different imaginary caverns, each with its own rich earthscape of stone perforated and sculpted by wind and water. But Leonardo did not only look at stone from a painter's point of view. It was not a background feature in his eyes. It was a scientific problem.
When humans turned from hunting and gathering to farming some 10,000 years ago, they set our species on the road to civilization. Agricultural surpluses led to division of labor, the rise of cities, and technological innovation. But civilization has had both its blessings and its curses. One downside of farming, a new study demonstrates, was a shortening of the human jaw that has left precious little room for our teeth and sends many of us to an orthodontist's chair.
Enigmatic and exotic, sprites are large electrical discharges that flash high in the upper atmosphere -- usually above powerful lightning storms. Often bright red in color with streaming tendrils of blue and purple stretching down beneath, they hadn't even been photographed in color until 1995!Sprites are one of the most elusive phenomena occurring in Earth's atmosphere -- and researchers at Tel Aviv University now suggest they may also be found on other worlds as well.Although sprites are fairly common on Earth they have not been well documented because of their location high in the mesosphere, well above the range of weather balloons. They only last a few tens of milliseconds and are basically high-altitude offshoots of lightning events closer to the ground. Lighting is not only found in large quantity on Earth but also on other planets in our solar system.
Amateur researchers in the United States continue to eagerly search for the mysterious creature known as Bigfoot, staking out California's redwood forests at night in their hunt for the elusive beast. Despite many claimed sightings, the existence of Sasquatch has never been proven. Yet that hasn't stopped the obsessed from pursuing his giant footprints.The plaintive howl echoes through the forest sounding like a muffled "whoop, whoop, whoop." Brandon Kiel pauses to listen in the dark, holding his breath for a moment before drawing air into his lungs.Once again, Kiel cups his hands in front of his mouth and imitates the call: "whoop, whoop, whoop." The sound echoes back through the night, but all else is silence. Bigfoot isn't answering.
But wildlife experts say they have been inundated with reports of unseasonal bird life as Britain experiences a balmy November.The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said that the unusual weather conditions was having a widespread impact on wildlife around the country.Britain has enjoyed an usually mild and dry autumn. Rainfall levels for November are less than half of what they should be for this time of year while temperatures have been around 3.5C higher than the long term monthly average.
Australian scientists have thrown new light on the mechanism behind the mass death of corals worldwide as Earth's climate warms.Coral bleaching, one of the most devastating events affecting coral reefs around the planet, is triggered by rising water temperatures. It occurs when the corals and their symbiotic algae become heat-stressed, and the algae which feed the corals either die or are expelled by the coral.There have been seven major bleaching events globally in the past 30 years, the most recent being in 2010 across the Indian Ocean and Coral Triangle. Australia's Great Barrier Reef has suffered eight events since 1980, the worst being in 2002 when 55% of the total reef area was affected. The frequency of these events appears to be increasing.
From above the Amazon rainforest may look like an endless, uniform sea of greenery, but it turns out there are sharp lines through it separating very different ecosystems with distinct inhabitants. And these lines are drawn by the region's geology.An innovative study published in Journal of Biogeography and led by Mark Higgins of Duke University is the first to combine large-scale data from satellites with painstaking work on the ground, sampling the plant types found in particular areas.
RATS are four times the pest we thought they were.Ken Aplin at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC looked at the genes of black rats (Rattus rattus) from 32 countries to work out their evolutionary history. He found that the rats fell into six distinct groups that diverged from one another about a million years ago, before modern humans evolved.Four of these groups include rats that now live off humans, by eating our rubbish, for example. That means they became pests on at least four separate occasions, Aplin says.
THE earliest stars may have been less than half as large as previously thought. The new size limit could resolve one of astronomy's oldest mysteries: why some elements are more abundant than theory predicts.In the first hundreds of millions of years after the big bang, the earliest stars formed from atomic hydrogen, helium and tiny amounts of other light elements. Initial calculations showed that these stars would have grown to between 100 and 200 times the mass of our sun.Now a team led by Takashi Hosokawa at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has used computer simulations to show the gas clouds from which the stars formed would have been much hotter than thought.
Humans have been enjoying water heated by the Earth for millenia. Bath, England, for example, got its name from the hot springs savored by relaxing Romans.Nowadays, geothermal power plants also take advantage of water heated by the Earth's interior to boil water into steam. The steam then turns a turbine to make energy. Geothermal is cheap to operate, less expensive to build than nuclear and produces significantly less pollution than fossil fuels.However, the need for accessible underground heat limited the technology to places like California, the Philippines, El Salvador and Iceland. But new technologies and maps of the Earth's crust are making geothermal a renewable energy competitor to fossil fuels, even in places like coal-rich West Virginia.
Astronomers estimate that our galaxy is teeming with around 50 billion exoplanets, but the number of alien worlds confirmed to exist has just passed the 700 mark.One database keeping track of the growing number of exoplanet discoveries is the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia (exoplanet.eu) administered by astrobiologist Jean Schneider of the Paris-Meudon Observatory. On Friday news of this milestone was announced via the awesome (and free) the Exoplanet iPhone app:There are now more than 700 confirmed exoplanets in the database. The latest addition is the planet HD 100655 b.Wait a minute. What was all that news in 2010 about NASA's Kepler Space Telescope spotting over 1,200 candidate exoplanets? Why is this particular database reporting only 700 discoveries?The key word here is "candidate.
For years journalists have warned of imminent banana extinction. "Get bananas while you still can," wrote New Scientist over five years ago. "The world's most popular fruit ... is in deep trouble," it went on to say, adding that the banana would probably be out of supermarkets by 2013, and would soon exist only in backyard gardens and other places the Panama Race IV, a pathogen taking out plantations in Southeast Asia, couldn't reach.
As a fetus grows, it's constantly getting messages from its mother. It's not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this includes signals about the mother's mental state. If the mother is depressed, that affects how the baby develops after it's born.In recent decades, researchers have found that the environment a fetus is growing up in -- the mother's womb -- is very important. Some effects are obvious. Smoking and drinking, for example, can be devastating. But others are subtler; studies have found that people who were born during the Dutch famine of 1944, most of whom had starving mothers, were likely to have health problems like obesity and diabetes later.
In the vast eco-system that is Facebook, you're closer to your fellow social networkers than you might think. In a new study, Facebook researchers tested the "six degrees of separation" theory and found that four degrees, and in some cases three, might be more accurate.Facebook teamed up with the Università degli Studi di Milano to take the "six degrees" concept, first proposed in 1929 and tested in the 1960s, into the digital age."Using state-of-the-art algorithms developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, we were able to approximate the number of hops between all pairs of individuals on Facebook," the Facebook data team wrote in a blog post.
A night-flowering orchid, the first of its kind known to science, has been described by a team of botanists. Experts say the "remarkable" species is the only orchid known to consistently flower at night, but why it has adopted this behaviour remains a mystery.The plant was discovered by a Dutch researcher during an expedition to New Britain, an island near Papua New Guinea. The findings appear in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society."It was so unexpected because there are so many species of orchids and not one was known [to flower] at night only," said co-author Andre Schuiteman, senior researcher and an orchid expert at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
When searching for alien planets that could host extraterrestrial life, scientists should broaden their minds beyond "Earth-like planets," researchers say.To date, more than 700 alien planets have been discovered beyond our solar system, and scientists are eager to know if any of them harbor life. In a new study, astrobiologists propose two new planetary rating systems that could make it easier to denote potentially habitable worlds.One of the new scales, called the Earth Similarity Index (ESI), would take the traditional tack and categorize a planet's likeness to our own. This makes sense, the researchers say, because Earth is still the only known planet to host life, so other worlds that resemble Earth are good bets in the search for extraterrestrials.
An experiment showing it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light, and so confound a fundamental principle of theoretical physics, has passed its first serious test of validity.Scientists have excluded one of the sources of error that could have led them to make a mistake when they announced in September that a beam of sub-atomic particles had travelled a fraction of a second faster than light.They repeated the first experiment, in which they had fired pulses of neutrons from the Cern underground laboratory near Geneva through solid rock to subterranean particle detectors at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy about 750km (466 miles) away.
Douglas Tompkins, the US environmentalist and co-founder of the North Face outdoor clothing brand, has been nothing if not persistent in pursuit of his dream of creating a vast nature reserve in the province of Corrientes, in Argentina's sub-tropical far north.Just three years ago Mr Tompkins had to put up with the country's land minister, Luis Delía, calling him a "gringo imperialist" and promising to expropriate the huge land holdings that the government claimed were a threat to national sovereignty. Mr Delía even posed for photographers with pliers in hand as he cut through the wire fencing protecting one of Mr Tompkins' properties.
The Antarctic fur seals' remarkable homing instinct, which is thought to be the most accurate of any sea mammal, allows the creatures to return to within a single body length of the spot where they were born to give birth to their own pups.Nearly four million of the sea mammals breed in huge colonies on the virtually featureless beaches of South Georgia every year. After being born, the seals spend five years out at sea feeding before returning to the island to breed.Using radio tags placed on 335 seals shortly after they were born, researchers at the British Antarctic Survey have discovered that each seal returns to exactly the same location on the beach once they start breeding year after year.
For many football fans who watched the New Orleans Saints rout the Indianapolis Colts on Oct. 23, the most unusual thing about the game was the lopsided final score of 62-7.But for UFO aficionados and paranormal experts who tuned in, they may have seen something in the sky that was even more out-of-the-ordinary than the tossing of more touchdowns vs. incompletions.As NBC's cameras returned from a commercial break and focused on the historic, triple-steepled St. Louis Cathedral in the city nicknamed the Big Easy, a couple of lit objects seemed to streak across the darkening sky -- and they've yet to be definitively identified.
Researchers found that large populations of lemmings are turning the Arctic green as the herbivores graze on plants and fertilise the soils.But for all it appears the the retreat of Arctic the tundra is encouraging global warming it may actually cool down the climate as plants can grow bigger and store more carbon.The team from the University of Texas at El Paso found when lemmings are excluded from the Arctic environment in enclosures in Alaska there is an increase in certain plant types called lichens and bryophytes.
TVNZA Peruvian archaeologist has discovered the remains of 44 infants and young children sacrificed to appease ancient deities in the 14th century at a site in the Andes near the Bolivian border.The remains were found near a stone funeral tower - known locally as chullpas - in the Sillustani archaeological site, located some 1300 kilometres south-east of the capital Lima, near Lake Titicaca, which Peru shares with Bolivia."These are children and babies of both sexes, with ages going from newborns to the age of three," archaeologist Eduardo Arisaca told local regional media.
Researchers say they have found new evidence of prolonged drought in parts of the West, suggesting megadroughts are not the rarity Westerners would like them to be.Analyzing corings taken from ancient living and dead bristlecone pines in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, University of Arizona scientists found signs of extreme drought in the 2nd century that matches or exceeds the better-known droughts of the medieval period.
A sharp incision in his right eye may have contributed to the rapid demise of Ötzi the Iceman, the famous mummy who died in the Italian Alps more than 5,000 years ago.Twenty years after two hikers stumbled upon the Iceman in a melting glacier, new analyses have revealed that a deep cut likely led to heavy bleeding in the man's eye. In the cold, high-altitude conditions where he was found, that kind of injury would have been tough to recover from.
Permanent Peoples' Tribunal accuses biotech giants Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta, DuPont and BASF of promoting dangerous pesticides including endosulfan, paraquat and neonicotinoidsThe world's major agrochemical companies, Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta, DuPont and BASF, will face a public tribunal in early December accused of systematic human rights violations.They are accused of violating more than 20 instruments of international human rights law through promoting reliance on the sale and use of dangerous and unsafe pesticides including endosulfan, paraquat and neonicotinoids.
Alternative energy is all the rage as we try to reduce dependency on foreign oil and lower our monthy bills without reading by candlelight. At the head of the pack are three different technology: wind turbines, solar panels that capture energy from sunlight and solar collectors that convert the heat from the sun into electricity. A London company combined all three into a power plant you'd want to have in your yard: an artificial tree.The company, Solar Botanic, has created a fully artificial tree capable of generating enough electricity for a house and reduce the home owner's dependence on the public power grid. The "trees" take advantage of the wind, light and heat they're exposed to while outside. Solar Botanic's website refers to these three technologies as piezovoltaic, photovoltaic and thermovoltaic, respectively.
Located in the arid coastal plain south of Lima, Peru, these incredible lines are only visible in their entirety from a tower, airplane or from space. Created on a gigantic scale, they consist of hundreds of simple lines, geometric shapes, and zoomorphic figures representing entities such as human figures, hummingbirds, spiders, sharks, orcas, llamas, jaguar, lizards, fish, and a monkey. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, the geoglyphs or "lines" of Nasca and the pampas of Jumana are well-known to the world, and are today an important tourist destination. These Nasca Lines, as they are popularly called, date from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. and cover an area consisting of foothills and desert for more than 450 square kilometers. Attributed to three different stages of development corresponding to the Chavín, Paracas, and Nasca cultures respectively, they were made by removing the overlying dark sand and iron oxide gravel to expose a lighter ground underneath. Although numerous theories abound concerning their origin and meaning, many scholars suggest that they had ritual astronomical functions.
Have no illusions about the true nature of the so-called "War on Drugs" and the actions of the DEA. The War on Drugs has always been about protecting the profits of the drug companies which have a long and well-documented history of copying street drugs, repackaging them as "medications" and selling them to children as FDA-approved drugsToday, yet another example emerges as the DEA moves to legalize THC in Big Pharma's pills while simultaneously making it illegal for anyone else to grow, sell or possess THC. The DEA, you see, is working to change the classification of THC from a schedule I substance (like street heroin) to a schedule III drug (pharmaceuticals). So if Big Pharma grows its own marijuana plants, extracts the THC and puts it into a "pot pill," those pills will be perfectly legal. They're already FDA approved, actually, when made with the synthetic version of THC.But if a guy grows the very same chemical in his backyard, then extracts THC from those plants -- even for his own personal use -- suddenly he's guilty of committing a federal crime and will likely be subjected to an armed raid by DEA agents.
Citizens of Switzerland will soon be allowed to grow up to four marijuana plants each at home, according to government officials. Four people sharing a house can grow up to 16 plants, but only if each person tends to their own crop.The further relaxation of the Alpine nation's already liberal cannabis laws has been agreed upon by four regions in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, reports Ian Sparks at the Daily Mail."We have agreed these new rules to prevent drugs tourism between regions where the rules are different, and to stop them buying it on the streets," said a spokesman for the Neuchatel region of Switzerland.
The scheme, if approved by the Danish parliament at the start of next year, could make the city the first to fully legalise, rather than simply tolerate, marijuana consumption.The drug is already sold openly on the streets of Christiania, a self-proclaimed 'free town' in the city centre, despite the closure of the neighbourhood's Amsterdam-style coffee shops in 2004.But marijuana has never been officially decriminalised and those caught in possession of even small amounts face fines of up to £450."We are thinking of perhaps 30 to 40 public sales houses, where the people aren't interested in selling you more, they're interested in you," said Mikkel Warming, the Mayor in charge of Social Affairs at Copenhagen City Council. "Who is it better for youngsters to buy marijuana from? A drug pusher, who wants them to use more, who wants them to buy hard drugs, or a civil servant?"
A mummified elongated skull found in Peru could finally prove the existence of aliens.The strangely shaped head - almost as big as its 50cm (20in) body - has baffled anthropologists.It was one of two sets of remains found in the city of Andahuaylillas in the southern province of Quispicanchi.The skeletal sets were discovered by Renato Davila Riquelme, who works for the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco in south-eastern Peru.He said that that the eye cavities are far larger than normally seen in humans.There is a soft spot in the skull - called an open fontanelle - which is a characteristic of children in their first year of life, yet the skull also has two large molars, only found in much older humans.
Named after the Soviet geophysicist who detected them in 1958 during the first International Polar Year exploration, the Gamburtsev mountains are 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) long, with jagged peaks up to 2,700 meters (8,900 feet) high intersected by deep troughs and valleys.How this chain came into being is one of the many mysteries of the great white continent.The Gamburtsevs are located at high elevation and on a continent that geologically is ancient and long free of the tectonic upheaval that throws up mountains.
Using data obtained from the archaeological record, a team of researchers at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado, Denver, conducted experiments using complex computer modeling to analyze evidence of how human hunter-gatherers responded culturally and biologically to the dramatic changes that took place during the last Ice Age. The results showed, among other things, that the Neanderthals, thought by many scientists to have become extinct at least in part because of their inadaptability and inability to compete with the expanding presence of modern humans, may have actually been victims of their own success.
It's well known that Earth's most severe mass extinction occurred about 250 million years ago. What's not well known is the specific time when the extinctions occurred. A team of researchers from North America and China have published a paper in Science this week which explicitly provides the date and rate of extinction."This is the first paper to provide rates of such massive extinction," says Dr. Charles Henderson, professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary and co-author of the paper: Calibrating the end-Permian mass extinction. "Our information narrows down the possibilities of what triggered the massive extinction and any potential kill mechanism must coincide with this time.
Pictures of the Peruvian mummy found in Cusco, Peru that's believed to be "non-human."
Artist and composer Ben Grosser, who is working on an MFA in New Media at the University of Illinois, has developed a robot that's able to hear the world around it and use those sounds to create a painting.The Interactive Robotic Painting Machine has a microphone that captures surrounding sound and a genetic algorithm designed to transform those sounds into computer code ultimately drives the robot's paintbrush in three dimensions, controlling how much paint to put on the brush and how much pressure to apply to canvass.The sounds can come from people in the room or, when people aren't around, can come from the machine itself. In a related project called HeadSwap, the robotic painter collaborated with violinist Benjamin Sung, who played music composed by Zack Browning. At the same time that Sung was watching the machine paint and using what he saw to inform his music, the machine was listening to Sung play and using that to inform its art.
Of the approximately 1,500 exoplanets found so far, only a few are in the so-called habitable zone around their parent star. It's also called the "Goldilocks zone," a coveted sweet-spot where the amount of radiation coming from a star is "just right" for liquid water to exist on the surface of a rocky planet.For example, Earth is within the present habitable zone around our sun, which is a comparatively narrow swath 18 million miles across.Enthusiasm about finding other worlds nestled inside other stars' habitable zones is so strong that in 2008 a radio message was beamed to a planet known to exist in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, located 20 light-years away.The signal contains 501 greetings that were selected through a competition on a social networking site.