Newsdesk Archive

Earth's biggest mass extinction rolled over the planet like hell on wheels.For the first time, paleontologists have pinned down exactly when and how fast the granddaddy of all mass extinctions took place, and their findings leave the finger of blame pointing squarely at a colossal and long-lived injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Sound familiar?That ancient carbon dioxide came not from cars and factories, of course, but from massive volcanic eruptions, brush fires, and possibly even the combustion of coal seams ignited by hot lava.The greenhouse gas increase, in turn, raised global temperatures and turned the oceans acidic and oxygen-deprived, among other trying consequences. Needless to say, life did not fare well. An oft-quoted estimate suggests that 90 percent of all marine life went extinct.

Two skeletons dating back nearly two million years appear to have a coating of skin on their bones in a world-first that would offer scientists a unique insight into the lifestyles - and DNA - of our ancestors.They are two of the most complete skeletons of early human relatives ever found and were donated to the Natural History Museum in London today by the University of the Witwatersrand and the Government of the Republic of South Africa.The 1.9-million-year-old fossils from Malapa Cave in South Africa have the scientific name Australopithecus sediba and have been studied by Professor Lee Berger of the Institute for Human Evolution at Wits University.

The US House of Representatives dealt a blow to childhood obesity warriors on Thursday (Friday NZT) by passing a bill that abandons proposals that threatened to end the reign of pizza and French fries on federally funded school lunch menus.The scuttled changes, which would have stripped pizza's status as a vegetable and limited how often French fries could be served, stemmed from a 2010 child nutrition law calling on schools to improve the nutritional quality of lunches served to almost 32 million US school children.The action is a win for the makers of frozen French fries and pizza and comes just weeks after the deep-pocketed food, beverage and restaurant industries successfully weakened government proposals for voluntary food marketing guidelines to children.

The team behind the finding in September that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and found the same result.If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.Critics of the first report had said that the long bunches of neutrinos used could introduce an error into the test.The new work, posted to the Arxiv repository, used much shorter bunches.

A bronze 'buckle' believed to be 1,400 years old had been unearthed in Alaska for the first time - and archeologists are mystified about how it got there.The artifact was found in sediment as they dug on a site where a 1,000-year-old Inupiat home was built.The two inch by one inch object - which seems to have been molded - appears to have been part of a harness.How it got to Alaska is a mystery - although it is thought it may have been brought by Eskimos from East Asia around 1,400 years ago and passed down through the generations.'The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years,' research assistant John Hoffecker said.

A strong majority of Americans believe marijuana should be legal for medical purposes, but just over half say that pot use for recreation should be illegal, according to a new poll Friday.Seventy-seven percent say doctors should be allowed to prescribe small amounts of marijuana for patients suffering from serious illnesses, the CBS New poll found. But with the concept of medical marijuana comes a dose of skepticism - just 31 percent believe the pot purchased under medical marijuana programs is actually being used to alleviate suffering.A slight majority, 51 percent, of those surveyed believe marijuana for recreational use should be illegal, while 40 percent think pot should be legal, the survey showed.CBS News first asked the question in 1979, when 69 percent thought that marijuana should be illegal, compared to only 27 percent who thought it should be legal.Meanwhile, among young Americans under the age of 30, 52 percent favor legalizing pot.

According a recent CBS News poll conducted at the end of October, a slim majority of 51 percent continues to think that marijuana use should be illegal. But support for specifically allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana for serious medical conditions - or legalized "medical" marijuana - is far stronger: 77 percent Americans think it should be allowed.Still, even though most Americans support this, just three in 10 believe that the marijuana currently being bought in this country under state-authorized medical marijuana programs is being used in the way it has been authorized: for alleviating suffering from serious medical conditions.Legalizing MarijuanaA recent CBS News Poll conducted nationwide finds 40 percent of Americans think the use of marijuana should be legal, while 51 percent think it should not. The percentage that favors legalizing marijuana use has been steady for the past two years, but it is larger than it was when CBS News first asked the question back in 1979.

A Colorado School of Mines chemical engineering student remains in a Japanese jail after a friend of his says he mailed the student three cookies and four pieces of candy infused with marijuana.Tim Wilson was registered as a medical marijuana patient with the State of Colorado when the marijuana edibles were sent, although federal and state laws prohibit the mailing of such items. He was given a medical marijuana card for pain in his back.Tim Wilson was also volunteering with the country's ongoing earthquake relief efforts.

In Chile's dry, hot, desert-like Atacama Region, a group of Smithsonian researchers are digging up whales.The fossil site, near the port city of Caldera in northern Chile, was discovered in late 2010 by a construction company expanding the Pan-American Highway. In a road cut, the workers discovered complete skeletons of baleen whales, says paleobiologist Nick Pyenson, the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The company agreed to grant the site a brief reprieve, allowing Pyenson to coordinate a short-term excavation of the fossils.

An international team of researchers funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will travel next month to one of Antarctica's most active, remote and harsh spots to determine how changes in the waters circulating under an active ice sheet are causing a glacier to accelerate and drain into the sea.The science expedition will be the most extensive ever deployed to Pine Island Glacier. It is the area of the ice-covered continent that concerns scientists most because of its potential to cause a rapid rise in sea level. Satellite measurements have shown this area is losing ice and surrounding glaciers are thinning, raising the possibility the ice could flow rapidly out to sea.

For hundreds, if not thousands of years, researchers of one kind or another have dug into the earth in search of clues to help explain our past. In so doing they have found evidence of ancient peoples that roamed around in an environment that we can only vaguely imagine. Such evidence is generally composed of remnants of dwellings, clothing, tools and most especially bones. Traditionally, such relics have been found either by accident or by serious-minded teams of professional scientists scanning likely terrain and having at it with small axes and shovels.

Bigfoot fanatics claim that a "nest" of trees found in the Kemerovo region is evidence that the creature was roaming the region and building homes in the same way that orang-utans or gorillas would.Bigfoot experts from Russia, Canada, the US and Sweden recently met at a conference in Moscow before mounting an expedition to Siberia, where stories of the "Wildman" abound, the Sun reports.John Bindernagel, a biologist who took part in the expedition, told the paper: "We didn't feel like the trees we saw in Siberia had been done by a man or another mammal.

A catastrophic prehistoric landslide left behind a giant lake along what is now a river in California, researchers have discovered. The landslide also apparently left its mark on the river's trout, in the form of a genetic similarity, the researchers added.Scientists investigated Northern California's Eel River to study large, slow-moving landslides. The river stretches about 200 miles (320 kilometers) in length and carries extraordinarily large amounts of sediment down its course, the most of any river not fed by a glacier in the contiguous United States.

One might think that the archaeological treasures of ancient Egypt have been pretty much picked over by now. Of all the civilizations that have graced the pages of archaeological romance, ancient Egypt stands arguably on top. For thousands of years, tomb robbers have looted it, and since the 18th century, archaeologists have systematically pored over the remains. Thus it could be said that this field has already seen its heyday.But for Professor Donald Redford and Dr. Susan Redford of Pennsylvania State University, like other scholars in their field, it offers a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new finds and surprises that continue to excite the imagination of would-be Egyptologists and archaeologists.

Why there is stuff in the universe -- more properly, why there is an imbalance between matter and antimatter -- is one of the long-standing mysteries of cosmology. A team of researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just concluded a 10-year-long study of the fate of neutrons in an attempt to resolve the question, the most sensitive such measurement ever made. The universe, they concede, has managed to keep its secret for the time being, but they've succeeded in significantly narrowing the number of possible answers.

The search for the elusive particle, which is thought to give mass to the building blocks of the universe, has become a byword for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), based at the vast Cern laboratory in Switzerland.But Cern has invested so much in ensuring that the Higgs boson project captivates the imagination of the world that it may be hard to justify keeping the LHC open if the particle is actually found, Prof Peter Higgs claimed.Accusing the laboratory of overhyping a project which has its roots in his own research half a century ago, Sir Peter said it could struggle to interest funding bodies in other valuable research to which the enormous particle collider is vital.

Human domestication of soybeans is thought to have first occurred in central China some 3,000 years ago, but archaeologists now suggest that cultures in even earlier times and in other locations adopted the legume (Glycine max).Comparisons of 949 charred soybean samples from 22 sites in northern China, Japan and South Korea -- found in ancient households including hearths, flooring and dumping pits -- with 180 modern charred and unburned samples were detailed in the Nov. 4 edition of the online journal PLoS ONE, a publication of the Public Library of Science. The findings, say lead author Gyoung-Ah Lee, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon, add a new view to long-running assumptions about soybean domestication that had been based on genetic and historical records.

A giant wall of heated gas rises from the sun's surface in a false-color photograph taken by solar observer Stephen Ramsden last Friday. Known as prominences, these solar features are anchored to the sun's surface but can extend many tens of thousands of miles into space."If you see [videos] of these things, they're constantly in motion," said Joseph Gurman, a solar astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland."The material doesn't actually stay up there for very long. It's constantly being replenished."

A new project to carry out DNA analysis on a group of skeletons who were immigrants to Rome, has been created by Kristina Killgrove, a biological anthropologist from Vanderbilt University.Kristina has been raising money by Crowd-Funding in order to carry the project out and she has now exceeded the $6000 required to carry out the basic analysis of at least 20 individuals (the immigrants to Rome that she found through Sr/O isotope analysis). However, every additional contribution above the original target amount will help to test more samples.This project will be the first to study the DNA of immigrants to Rome and will help rewrite the history of everyday life there.

Mention the word dowsing and most people will think of a chap in muddy wellies trudging around a farm with a stick, looking for a good place to sink a borehole, or a fey type in a tie-dye T-shirt wafting about looking for mystical ley lines.For centuries there have been believers in dowsing, a form of divination traditionally used to locate groundwater sources, and argument rages in the archaeological community about whether dowsers, armed with no more than a bit of bent copper wire and the power of faith, can also locate long-vanished Roman roads, Bronze Age barrows or prehistoric rock carvings.

Hotels and bars made out of ice have been common for a while -- now a church is the latest project to get the cold treatment. In the Bavarian Forest, one congregation wants to build a place of worship out of 1,400 cubic meters of snow, just as their ancestors did 100 years ago.Everything is in place in Mitterfirmiansreut for the mountain village's biggest construction project in a century -- everything, that is, but the snow. Because residents in the Bavarian village near the Czech border are planning to erect a full-size church made entirely out of snow, in homage to their ancestors who did the same thing 100 years ago.

If the aliens really are landing, this latest picture seems to confirm that their first port of call on Earth will be Russia.After other claims of extraterrestrial life turning up in Siberia, the latest is from a Russian woman who says she kept a frozen alien corpse in her fridge.The mysterious 'lifeform' was reportedly kept by Marta Yegorovnam in her fridge in the western Russian city of Petrozavodsk for two years, while she took five pictures to prove its existence.

New research shows the jumbled ice blocks crowning the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa are signs of a large liquid lake the volume of the North American Great Lakes just below the surface, a key finding in the search for places where life might exist beyond Earth.Drawing from studies of underground volcanoes in Iceland and Antarctica, scientists ran computer models to see if the chaotic formations on Europa's surface could be explained by the same geologic processes seen on Earth."We looked at melt underneath the ice and the fracture and collapse of ice shelves," Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics, told Discovery News.

Scientists have found the best evidence yet for water just beneath the surface of Jupiter's icy moon, Europa.Analysis of the moon's surface suggests plumes of warmer water well up beneath its icy shell, melting and fracturing the outer layers.The results, published in the journal Nature, predict that small lakes exist only 3km below the crust.Any liquid water could represent a potential habitat for life.From models of magnetic forces, and images of its surface, scientists have long suspected that a giant ocean, roughly 160km (100 miles) deep, lies somewhere between 10-30km beneath the ice crust.

It is currently the hottest topic in palaeoanthropology, and visitors to London's Natural History Museum can now get to see what all the fuss is about.The institution has just taken delivery of casts of Australopithecus sediba.This 1.9-million-year-old creature caused a sensation when the discovery of its fossil remains in South Africa was first announced in 2010.A. sediba has a curious mix of ape and human features, suggesting it could be one of our direct ancestors.

The "Just Say No" generation was often told by parents and teachers that intelligent people didn't use drugs. Turns out, the adults may have been wrong.A new British study finds children with high IQs are more likely to use drugs as adults than people who score low on IQ tests as children. The data come from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which has been following thousands of people over decades. The kids' IQs were tested at the ages of 5, 10 and 16. The study also asked about drug use and looked at education and other socioeconomic factors. Then when participants turned 30, they were asked whether they had used drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin in the past year.

While the most common device for converting light into electricity may be photovoltaic (PV) solar cells, a variety of other devices can perform the same light-to-electricity conversion, such as solar-thermal collectors and rectennas. In a new study, engineers have designed a new device that can convert light of infrared (IR) and visible wavelengths into direct current by using surface plasmon excitations in a simple metal-insulator-metal (MIM) device.The researchers, Fuming Wang and Nicholas A. Melosh of Stanford University, have published their study on the new device in a recent issue of Nano Letters.

The release of massive amounts of carbon from methane hydrate frozen under the seafloor 56 million years ago has been linked to the greatest change in global climate since a dinosaur-killing asteroid presumably hit Earth 9 million years earlier. New calculations by researchers at Rice University show that this long-controversial scenario is quite possible.Nobody knows for sure what started the incident, but there's no doubt Earth's temperature rose by as much as 6 degrees Celsius. That affected the planet for up to 150,000 years, until excess carbon in the oceans and atmosphere was reabsorbed into sediment.

Before Ed Turner and Avi Loeb tell you about their research, they want to make one thing perfectly clear: they do not claim that there's a city on Pluto. But if there were one, they say, we could see it. And as they suggest in a paper they've submitted to the journal Astrobiology, it's worth taking a look, just in case.The whole thing began a couple of years ago, when Loeb and Turner, astrophysicists at Harvard and Princeton, respectively, were at a conference in Abu Dhabi. The organizers sent them on a tour of nearby Dubai, where the guide bragged that his gleaming, ultramodern city was so brightly lit at night that from space it would outshine London, Paris or New York City.

Large Hadron Collider researchers have shown off what may be the facility's first "new physics" outside our current understanding of the Universe.Particles called D-mesons seem to decay slightly differently from their antiparticles, LHCb physicist Matthew Charles told the HCP 2011 meeting on Monday.The result may help explain why we see so much more matter than antimatter.The team stresses that further analysis will be needed to shore up the result.

The Oka boys are a true band of brothers. All seven served in the military, yet they fought on opposing sides."We were seven brothers -- seven soldiers," says 91-year old Chikara "Don" Oka, a World War II veteran now living in a retirement home in Los Angeles. "Five of us for the United States and two against us because they were stranded in Japan" when the war came. They're all American citizens born here in the United States.In the 1920s, Oka's parents operated a migrant labor hotel in Castroville, a farm town in central California. But their dreams of riches never materialized, and the entire family returned to Japan.

An ancient cockroach-like creature nearly a foot long once skittered along the seafloor in what is now Canada, a new fossil find reveals.The fossil, a series of 500-million-year-old tracks, captured the movement of a large seafloor-dwelling creature with at least 25 pairs of legs. The animal was likely an arthropod called Tegopelte, a rare giant very rarely found fossilized. Arthropods are invertebrates with exoskeletons, a group that includes today's crustaceans and insects.

This is crazy. New photos have appeared in Google Maps showing unidentified titanic structures in the middle of the Chinese desert. The first one is an intricate network of what appears to be huge metallic stripes. Is this a military experiment?They seem to be wide lines drawn with some white material. Or maybe the dust have been dug by machinery.It's located in Dunhuang, Jiuquan, Gansu, north of the Shule River, which crosses the Tibetan Plateau to the west into the Kumtag Desert. It covers an area approximately one mile long by more than 3,000 feet wide.The tracks are perfectly executed, and they seem to be designed to be seen from orbit.

High-tech scans of two baby mammoths pulled from the Siberian permafrost reveal that one, originally identified as male, was in fact a female.In addition, the scans showed major skeletal differences between the two mammoths, perhaps representing evolutionary change in the mammoth lineage."A lot of what we've done with mammoths in the past has been done based on dental anatomy, based on what we can see from teeth," study researcher Ethan Shirley of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology told LiveScience here in Las Vegas at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Follow Daniel Kish out onto a dock and ask him about the view."There's this pylon here and there's an object about 20 feet away -- here -- and another one, about 50 feet away," says Kish, overlooking a bay in coastal Maine during the recent PopTech conference, where he was a featured speaker. "I guess those are boats. I can't tell from this distance, really, but they're solid and we're on the water -- so it stands to reason."Kish is completely blind -- he lost sight in both eyes by age 13 months.Yet he uses his ears to see. When he walks around unfamiliar places -- he loves hiking -- he clicks his tongue and then listens as that sound bounces off nearby objects.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Nazi-occupied Paris was a terrible place to be in the waning days of World War II, with Jews, Resistance fighters and ordinary citizens all hoping to escape. Disappearances became so common they often weren't followed up.And one man used the lawlessness for his own terrible purposes, killing perhaps as many as 150 people.Yet it wasn't until thick black smoke seeped into buildings in a fashionable part of the city that firefighters and police were called to an elegant townhouse where they found body parts scattered around -- setting off a manhunt that led them, eventually, to Marcel Petiot.The crime was very much of its time, said David King, who chronicled the hunt for Petiot in "Death in the City of Light.

No wild black rhinos remain in West Africa, according to the latest global assessment of threatened species.The Red List, drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has declared the subspecies extinct.A subspecies of white rhino in central Africa is also listed as possibly extinct, the organisation says.The annual update of the Red List now records more threatened species than ever before.The IUCN reports that despite conservation efforts, 25% of the world's mammals are at risk of extinction. As part of its latest work it has reassessed several rhinoceros groups.

The image of a Tyrannosaurus rex racing after a jeep in the 1993 film Jurassic Park inspired a generation's ideas about the extinct predator, but for decades studies have concluded that dinosaurs could not move quicklyAn analysis now suggests that although big dinosaurs are unlikely to have been able to run, the animals could instead have reached a fair clip by power-walking.Heinrich Mallison, a palaeontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, presented his theory4 last week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Scientists are in the process of excavating a desert fossil bed in Chile containing dozens of whole skeletons of ancient whales dating back seven million years.One of the researchers said 15 whales were found in 15 days, far exceeding expectations.Carolina Robino reports.

In two images, available on Google Earth, reflective rectangles up to a mile long can be seen, a tangle of bright white intersecting lines that are clearly visible from space.Other pictures show enormous concentric circles radiating on the ground, with three jets parked at their centre.In one picture from 2007, a mass of orange blocks have been carefully arranged in a circle. In a more recent image, however, the blocks, each one the size of a shipping container, appear to have been scattered as far as three miles from the original site.Another image shows an array of metallic squares littered with what appears to be the debris of exploded vehicles while another shows an intricate grid that is some 18 miles long.

Regions where the oral contraceptive was commonplace had higher incidents of the cancer, it was found.Scientists say they cannot be sure what causes the link - but suggest that male exposure to oestrogen could heighten the risk.Excess oestrogen exposure has been linked to cancer, and it is thought that widepsread use of the pill may have led to more oestrogen, which is not easily broken down, entering the water supply and food chain.

What material can you find in toothpaste, sunscreen, solar cells, on the baseline at Wimbledon, in a Roman church, and along a tunnel in Brussels?Full marks if you guessed titanium dioxide, a nearly ubiquitous but wholly unsung material.Its brilliant white has made it a staple in pigments - hence Wimbledon - but its eco-credentials are still coming to the fore.Titanium dioxide does a couple of clever tricks that mean we may well be seeing a lot of it in the future: it's self-cleaning, and it breaks down pollutants in the air.

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

Britain's native trees are producing ripe fruit, on average, 18 days earlier than a decade ago, probably as a result of climatic shifts, a study reveals.It shows that acorns are ripening 13 days earlier, while rowan berries are ready to eat nearly a month earlier.Experts warn that one consequence could be that animals' food reserves would become depleted earlier in the winter.The findings were published by Nature's Calendar, a data collection network co-ordinated by the Woodland Trust.

Astronomers have found pristine clouds of the primordial gas that formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang. The composition of the gas matches theoretical predictions, providing direct evidence in support of the modern cosmological explanation for the origins of elements in the universe.Only the lightest elements, mostly hydrogen and helium, were created in the Big Bang. Then a few hundred million years passed before clumps of this primordial gas condensed to form the first stars, where heavier elements were forged.Until now, astronomers have always detected "metals" (their term for all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) wherever they have looked in the universe.

The tropical forests of Amazonia may be giving up their role as buffers against the continuing buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, scientists report, a circumstance that could accelerate climate change.The warning comes in the new issue of the journal Science, where an international research team reports that the drought in the Amazon during 2010 was even worse than what scientist called the "once-in-a-century" drought of 2005.Simon L. Lewis of the University of Leeds in the UK and colleagues analyzed a decade of satellite-derived rainfall data which showed that the dry season drought spread over 57 percent of the Amazon Rainforest in 2010, compared with 37 percent in 2005. According to other studies, the 2005 drought was associated with unusually high sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean -- conditions which prevailed again in 2010.

A Russian spacecraft carrying three astronauts - two Russians and one American - has launched successfully from Kazakhstan.They are the first to travel on a Russian Soyuz craft since a similar unmanned rocket carrying cargo crashed shortly after launch in August.All manned space travel was suspended after that crash for almost three months.The astronauts are on their way to the International Space Station.

THIS year Texas had the hottest summer ever recorded in any state. In September wildfires swept through the town of Bastrop, outside Austin, destroying more than 1,000 homes. Thousands of cattle have been sold. The town of Big Spring, up the road from the oil hub of Midland, is planning to recycle wastewater for drinking; two of the reservoirs that supply the city are almost empty. The severe drought that has parched most of the state this year shows no signs of abating. The state climatologist reckons that it could last for the rest of the decade.

The UK will soon see the launch of the world's first paper wine bottle. It may have oenophiles spluttering into their claret, but the company behind the product is already in talks with a leading supermarket chain and insists it will be on the shelves early next year.With the UK poised to run out of space for landfill within seven years, the bottle's makers claim biodegradable packaging will become a paramount issue for both consumers and manufacturers. The paper bottle weighs only 55g compared with 500g for a glass bottle, meaning transport costs will be hugely reduced. In addition, its carbon footprint is only 10% of that of a glass bottle. The paper bottle is compostable and decomposes in weeks.

We each produce 2.5 litres of the stuff a day and a total of 6.4 trillion litres globally, but until now it has been widely regarded as a rather unpleasant waste product.However, a team of UK scientists reckon they may have found an extremely useful application for urine by turning it into electricity.Dr Ioannis Ieropoulos and his team of scientists at the University of the West of England, Bristol, published research this week investigating whether urine could be used in microbial fuel cells.

The Norwegian tourist board is unhappy about an attempt by its counterpart in Finland to market the country using a video of the northern lights. The Norwegians claim the Finns are trying to "steal" the celestial phenomenon from them.The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, normally inspires awe in those who are lucky enough to see it. But in Norway and Finland, the spectacular celestial phenomenon -- which is caused by charged particles entering the Earth's atmosphere -- is currently provoking mainly envy and resentment.A recent attempt by the Finnish Tourist Board to use the aurora in a marketing campaign has sparked concerns among Norwegians, who like to think that the northern lights are associated first and foremost with their country, that the Finns may be looking to muscle in on their territory.

A Russian probe that was to visit a moon of Mars but is stuck in orbit around the Earth could burn up in the Earth's atmosphere in January, the head of the Russian space agency said Monday.Vladimir Popovkin denied that the Phobos-Grunt probe was considered lost and said scientists had until December to try to re-establish contact, re-programme the probe and send it on its planned trajectory to Mars."The probe is going to be in orbit until January, but in the first days of December the window will close" to re-programme it, he told Russian news agencies at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Look around and it's impossible to miss the importance of social interactions to human society. They form the basis of our families, our governments, and even our global economy. But how did we become social in the first place? Researchers have long believed that it was a gradual process, evolving from couples to clans to larger communities. A new analysis, however, indicates that primate societies expanded in a burst, most likely because there was safety in numbers.It's a controversial idea, admits anthropologist and study author Susanne Shultz of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. "We're likely going to cause a bit of trouble."

Harvesting the Sun's energy from space could provide a cost-effective way to meet global power needs in as little as 30 years, says an international scientific group.Orbiting power plants capable of collecting solar energy and beaming it to Earth appear "technically feasible" within a decade or two based on technologies now in the laboratory, a study group of the Paris-headquartered International Academy of Astronautics reports.Such a project may be able to achieve economic viability in 30 years or less, says the report.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have come up with a way to make two-dimensional patterns self-assemble into three-dimensional objects by simply shining light on them.Researchers take a pre-scored plastic sheet -- made out of the same polystyrene material used in popular 80s craft toy Shrinkies that shrinks uniformly when heated -- and cut it into the relevant pattern. They run the sheet through an inkjet printer to add a grid of bold black lines to the material. It is then cut into the relevant pattern and placed under an infrared light, such as a heat lamp.The black lines -- printed along the folding points -- absorb more energy than the rest of the material and cause the plastic to contract, creating a hinge that folds the sheets into 3D objects such as cubes and pyramids without anyone physically touching the material -- check out the process in action in the video above.

Next time you're out to dinner, you may want to think twice before ordering your steak rare.In a first-of-its kind study, Harvard researchers have shown that cooked meat provides more energy than raw meat, a finding that suggests humans are biologically adapted to take advantage of the benefits of cooking, and that cooking played a key role in driving the evolution of man from an ape-like creature into one more closely resembling modern humans.

A man visiting British Columbia's Lake Okanagan last week claims to have captured video of Ogopogo, Canada's version of the Loch Ness Monster.According to a report in the Vancouver Sun, "An Okanagan man has video he says proves the Ogopogo may be more than just a figment of our imagination. Richard Huls says he always believed in the possibility of the monster rumored to be living in Okanagan Lake. Last Thursday, while visiting a West Kelowna winery, Huls shot video that he believes proves something does indeed live in the water. 'It was not going with the waves,' Huls said. 'It was not a wave obviously, just a darker color. The size and the fact that they were not parallel with the waves made me think it had to be something else."

PARIS, Nov 8 (Reuters) - How can mankind signal to future generations thousands of years from now that hazardous radioactive waste is buried deep underground in eastern France -- by building a giant pyramid, a museum or a site for art projects or by employing geology?Patrick Charton, who is in charge of a memory project at France's radioactive waste agency Andra, has been grappling with this philosophical question for the past 16 years.France, the world's most nuclear-dependent country dotted with 58 reactors, has so far stored the radioactive waste produced in the past three decades in above-ground facilities at a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in La Hague on the coast of Normandy.

Russian engineers are fighting to save the country's latest mission to Mars.The Phobos-Grunt probe launched successfully but then failed to fire the engine to put it on the correct path to the Red Planet.Russian space agency officials say the craft is currently stuck in an Earth orbit and that engineers have two weeks to correct the fault before the probe's batteries run out.The project is Russia's most ambitious space venture in recent years.

THE traditional image of the fossil-hunting palaeontologist - traipsing across parched badlands armed with nothing but hand tools and a sharp eye - may be in for an overhaul. Artificially intelligent software that scans satellite images of potential dig sites could greatly increase the number of fossils unearthed.Success in finding bones boils down to a lot of luck, says Robert Anemone of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, who once blundered into "the best locality we ever found" - a cache of early primate bones from between 40 and 50 million years ago - after making a wrong turn during a trip in the Great Divide basin of south-western Wyoming.

Excavations at Liang Bua Cave exhibit skeletal evidence of a new species named Homo floresiensis; grounded the mosaic of primitive and derived features. Standing at approximately one meter tall, with a cranial capacity of 417cc, scientists argue that this species is the primary outcome of insular dwarfing, resulting from a long period of evolutionary isolation.Also reviewed in this assessment is that attributes of Homo floresiensis are unlikely to represent microcephaly; a pathological disease resulting in an abnormal size head and mental retardation. Furthermore, Homo floresiensis demonstrates cranial and postcranial attributes congruent with both Homo and Australopithecine specimens, concluding that this new species is from a primitive ancestry that diffused out of Africa earlier than previously documented. Importantly, Homo floresiensis displays that the genus Homo is far more morphologically and behaviourally varied and complex in its adaptive responses than previously recognised.

My step-mom refuses to sleep in any building higher than the reach of a firetruck ladder, which is why we live on the 56th floor (Just kidding, Judy). But after seeing the sketches of Mexican architect, Esteban Suarez, I wonder how she would do in an "earth scraper?"Suarez has imagined a massive building for those who prefer holes to heights and a novel solution around a law that bans structures higher than eight stories in the crowded, historic center of Mexico City.Instead of a soaring tower, Suarez wants to dig an inverted pyramid nearly a thousand feet deep with enough apartments, stores and offices to hold 100,000 people.

A remote colony of birds kept flying away before anyone could count them, so a team of ecologists built a do-it-yourself aerial drone to spy on them from above.The team made their drone out of a 4.6-foot-wide radio-controlled airplane, two cameras and a GPS tracking unit, all for less than $2,000.It was the first time scientists have used an unmanned aerial vehicle to inventory a remote bird population, said ecologist and project leader Francesc Sardà-Palomera of Centre Tecnològic Forestal de Catalunya Solsona in Catalonia, Spain.

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.Bodies 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.In all, the archaeologists have found 281 individuals, about one-third of which seem to have been naturally mummified. It is currently not precisely known when the mummies date to as the church was in use as a burial ground from the mid 16th to the late 18th centuries.

Scientists have shown off what can be described as the world's smallest electric car - made of a single, carefully designed molecule. The molecule has four branches that act as wheels, rotating when a tiny metal tip applied a small current to them. With 10 electric bursts, the car was made to move six billionths of a metre.The approach, published in Nature, joins recent single-molecule efforts, and seems to overcome the forces that often dominate at such tiny scales.The "batteries" of the electric car come by way of the tip of what is called a scanning tunnelling microscope - an extraordinarily fine point of metal that ends in just an atom or two.

TOKYO: A Japanese supercomputer has broken its own record as the world's fastest machine by performing 10 quadrillion calculations per second, its developers announced.The "K Computer" , which has more than 88,000 central processing units - the computer's "brain" - compared with fewer than four in the average desktop, smashed its own record of just over 8 quadrillion calculations during an experiment in October.A quadrillion is a thousand trillion.

It's the Year of Our Lord 1609. John Smith has left the Virginia Colony's two-year-old settlement at Jamestown to return to England. The natives have only enough food to feed their own population and won't trade with the colonists, who begin taking food forcibly. Smith's fragile truce with the Indians rapidly falls apart. The First Anglo-Powhatan War has started.We now know that the Jamestown colonists' fear of Indian attacks kept them pinned inside their palisade during that winter, a period that became known as "the starving time." Only 10 percent of the colonists survived that winter.James Whittenburg, a historian at the College of William & Mary's National Institute of American History & Democracy (NIAHD), said that starving-time colonists ate their own domestic animals. When the horses and dogs ran out, they turned to rats and snakes. When they got thirsty, they had wells inside the fort, but the water was just plain awful.

t was not always smooth sailing for the six young men who huddled in uncomfortably close quarters on a 520-day fake mission to Mars, a Russian scientist has revealed.The multinational crew emerged blinking from its Moscow isolation module on Friday and was quickly bundled away for further observation after being briefly presented to the world's press.But a scientist who was one of the brains behind the Mars-500 mission -- an unusual experiment designed to test the long-term effects of stress and isolation -- revealed that nerves had frayed on a few occasions.

Heated to extreme temperatures of up to 150 million degrees Celsius, the plasma in ITER's giant experimental fusion reactor will be fed a fuel of frozen pellets of deuterium-tritium, fired into the tokamak vacuum vessel by pellet injectors. Testing of the most recent pellet injection design technology developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and US ITER is under way this fall at the DIII-D research tokamak in San Diego, operated by General Atomics for the Department of Energy through the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.

Brain cells that die off in Parkinson's disease have been grown from stem cells and grafted into monkeys' brains in a major step towards new treatments for the condition.US researchers say they have overcome previous difficulties in coaxing human embryonic stem cells to become the neurons killed by the disease. Tests showed the cells survive and function normally in animals and reverse movement problems caused by Parkinson's in monkeys.The breakthrough raises the prospect of transplanting freshly grown dopamine-producing cells into human patients to treat the disease.

The movie Fantastic Voyage had a miniature submarine sent into a VIP's bloodstream to destroy a life-threatening clot. A new probe is hot on the fictional microsub's tail fins: it can pass through arteries to spot the most dangerous clots and deposits.Existing probes are essentially cameras that can travel inside arteries. Doctors must spot deposits and judge whether they are likely to come loose and block an artery. The new probe, developed by Guillermo Tearney at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, also detects molecules that mark out the most harmful clots and fatty plaquesn.

The Maya lowlands during the ancient Maya Classic period (250 - 900 A.D.) were known to have been among the densest populated areas in the world. And archaeologists have estimated that, even in places such as the southern Maya Mountains area of Belize where geographic and other environmental conditions could be assumed to have mitigated population growth, population density has been estimated to have been approximately 300 persons per square kilometer at one time.How did the ancient Maya sustain these numbers?Recent studies shed new light on how they may have done it, and how they kept their people healthy.

In July 2002, an Italian man named Mr Francioni found something strange. Francioni owns a marble-cutting company in the Tuscan town of Pietrasanta, and he had just acquired a block of Egyptian marbleized limestone. After slicing the block into six slabs, he discovered the fossilised bones of an animal within. Fossils weaken the strength of cut stone and many people discard them outright. But Francioni was excited: he thought he had found a dinosaur, and contacted the nearby University of Pisa.

Scientists are cooking up new ways of satisfying the world's ever-growing hunger for meat."Cultured meat" -- burgers or sausages grown in laboratory Petri dishes rather than made from slaughtered livestock -- could be the answer that feeds the world, saves the environment and spares the lives of millions of animals, they say.Granted, it may take a while to catch on. And it won't be cheap.

An experiment to recreate the extreme conditions of the centre of the Earth was officially opened on Thursday.The ID24 beam line at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) will use X-ray beams to subject iron and other materials to extraordinary temperatures and pressures.How the X-rays are absorbed should give insight into the mysterious processes going on at and near the Earth's core.For example, the work could unravel why the Earth's magnetic field can "flip".

London (CNN) -- The looting of a large collection of priceless coins, statues and jewelry from a bank vault during Libya's recent civil war has highlighted the risk of looting during times of conflict.Interpol is hunting for the hoard of Roman and Hellenistic objects -- dubbed the "Benghazi Treasure" --stolen from the city's Commercial Bank in May 2011. But the theft is not an isolated incident.According to UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Culture Francesco Bandarin, the looting of antiquities and archaeological sites occurs regularly during times of conflict and even during peacetime.

A British team is developing a car that will capable of reaching 1,000mph (1,610km/h).Powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine, the Bloodhound SSC (SuperSonic Car) vehicle will mount an assault on the land speed record.Wing Commander Green is writing a diary for the BBC News Website about his experiences working on the Bloodhound SSC (SuperSonic Car) project and the team's efforts to inspire national interest in science and engineering.

Sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies can help predict the severity of Amazon fire seasons, a study has suggested.A team of US scientists found there was a correlation between El Nino patterns in the Pacific and fire activity in the eastern Amazon.Writing in the journal Science, they say they also found a link between Atlantic SST changes and fires in southern areas of South America. They said the data could help produce forecasts of forthcoming fire seasons.

Russian scientists were working against the clock last night to save the country's first Mars mission for over a decade after an engine failure left the spacecraft stranded in orbit above Earth.Phobos-Grunt, which is supposed to be destined for the Mars moon of Phobos, blasted off on from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan late on Tuesday night, but after reaching orbit and separating successfully from its Zenit launch vehicle, disaster struck and an engine failure left the craft trapped orbiting Earth, rather than the Red Planet's moon."Neither the first nor the second engine fired. That meant it was unable to orientate itself with the stars," Russian space agency chief Vladimir Popotkin told journalists at Baikonur.

A huge asteroid's close approach to Earth tomorrow (Nov. 8) reinforces that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery, and we can't just sit around waiting to get hit again, experts say.Asteroid 2005 YU55, which is the size of an aircraft carrier, will zip within the moon's orbit tomorrow, but it poses no danger of hitting us for the foreseeable future. Eventually, however, one of its big space rock cousins will barrel straight toward Earth, as asteroids have done millions of times throughout our planet's history.If we want to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs, which were wiped out by an asteroid strike 65 million years ago, we're going to have to deflect a killer space rock someday, researchers say. Fortunately, we know how to do it.

Does Smokey Bear need a space helmet? NASA isn't headed back to the moon anytime soon, but some day space tourists may be on the way to the Apollo mission lunar landing sites.And you know the one thing that tourists love to bring home."Looting, that would be pretty bad," says archaeologist Beth O'Leary of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Looting is the bane of archaeological sites and O'Leary has spearheaded efforts to declare moon landing sites as historic preserves or national parks, seeking to head off similar depredations before before tourists leave Earth for the moon. "I put landing people on the moon up there with creating fire as a technological achievement."

Italian physicist and inventor Andrea Rossi has conducted a public demonstration of his "cold fusion" machine, the E-Cat, at the University of Bologna, showing that a small amount of input energy drives an unexplained reaction between atoms of hydrogen and nickel that leads to a large outpouring of energy, more than 10 times what was put in.The first successful cold fusion experiment was reported two decades ago, but the process has forever been met with heavy skepticism. It's a seemingly impossible process in which two types of atoms, typically a light element and a heavier metal, seem to fuse together, releasing pure heat that can be converted into electricity. The process is an attractive energy solution for two reasons: Unlike in nuclear fission, the reaction doesn't give off dangerous radiation. Unlike the fusion processes that take place in the sun, cold fusion doesn't require extremely high temperatures.

Grenoble -- Scientists will soon be exploring matter at temperatures and pressures so extreme it can only be produced for microseconds using powerful pulsed lasers. Matter in such states is present in the Earth's liquid iron core, 2500 kilometres beneath the surface, and also in elusive "warm dense matter" inside large planets like Jupiter. A new X-ray beamline ID24 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, allows a new quality of exploration of the last white spot on our globe: the centre of the Earth.We know surprisingly little about the interior of the Earth. The pressure at the centre can be calculated accurately from the propagation of Earthquake waves, and it is about three and a half million times atmospheric pressure. The temperature at the centre of the Earth, however, is unknown, but it is thought to be roughly as hot as the surface of the sun.

Astronauts in orbit around the Earth often gaze down on a world lit at night by city lights. Now researchers suggest that scientists could detect alien civilizations from similarly bright lights.Science fiction has long imagined entire planets covered with cities. Examples include galactic capitols such as Coruscant from the "Star Wars" films and Trantor from sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" books.Assuming that aliens need light to see at night much as we do, theoretical astrophysicist Abraham Loeb at Harvard University and astronomer Edwin Turner at Princeton University reasoned that extraterrestrial civilizations would switch on city lights during the hours of darkness on their world.

Within our solar system, an extra giant planet, or possibly two, might once have accompanied Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.Computer models showing how our solar system formed suggested the planets once gravitationally slung one another across space, only settling into their current orbits over the course of billions of years.During more than 6,000 simulations of this planetary scattering phase, planetary scientist David Nesvorny at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., found that a solar system that began with four giant planets only had a 2.5 percent chance of leading to the orbits presently seen now.

Around the world, thousands of patients lie somewhere between life and death. They're seemingly unconscious, but in what doctors call "a persistent vegetative state."They can no longer move and appear to be unaware. For family members, however, one question always haunts them: is their loved one still "in there"?Answering that question has usually meant relying on elaborate brain scans to look for brain activity. But now, scientists in Canada and Europe have found that they can detect awareness using a cheap, widely-available device called an EEG.

Scientists may be a step closer to understanding the origins of human social behaviour.An analysis of over 200 primate species by a University of Oxford team suggests that our ancestors gave up their solitary existence when they shifted from being nocturnal creatures to those that are active during the day.Communal living was likely adopted to protect against day time predators, the researchers say.The results are published in Nature.

A while back, a memo surfaced that reportedly came from a Fox News executive, in which he directed his staff to always present opposing views on something we can essentially regard as a fact: our planet has been getting warmer. There has been plenty of anecdotal indications that this strategy has been carried out, including a truly bizarre incident in which Bill Nye, on the channel in order to discuss volcanic activity on the Moon, was asked if these volcanoes raised doubts about climate change.But it hasn't been clear whether these incidents add up to a clear pattern and, perhaps more importantly, whether they actually caused the Fox viewership to become more confused about the state of climate science. Now, some academics have done an exhaustive evaluation of Fox broadcasts (along with those of CNN and NBC) and demonstrated that there is a systematic bias against presenting the scientific community's conclusions on Fox. And, at least among those with a conservative bent, it works. These viewers are far less likely to understand the state of the science, or even accept the reality that our planet has gotten warmer.

High-tech scans of two baby mammoths pulled from the Siberian permafrost reveal that one, originally identified as male, was in fact a female.In addition, the scans showed major skeletal differences between the two mammoths, perhaps representing evolutionary change in the mammoth lineage."A lot of what we've done with mammoths in the past has been done based on dental anatomy, based on what we can see from teeth," study researcher Ethan Shirley of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology told LiveScience here in Las Vegas at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Twenty years ago, as Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police officers, a private citizen in a nearby apartment turned on his video camera. Largely because of that tape, four officers were criminally charged. In July, a homeless schizophrenic man died after a police beating in Fullerton. Audio from a cellphone video caught Kelly Thomas' cries for his father and helped force an investigation that resulted in a first-degree murder charge against one police officer.The increasing availability of cellphones and video cameras has fundamentally changed police abuse cases, creating vital evidence in cases that were once dismissed as matters of conflicting accounts between officers and citizens. With that change, however, has come a backlash from officers who, despite court rulings upholding the right of citizens to tape police in public, have been threatening or arresting people for the "crime" of recording them. In many states, prosecutors have fought to support such claims and put citizens in jail for videotaping officers, even in cases of police abuse.

Birds of prey have a macho image, but some male raptors look and act feminine, fooling everyone into thinking they are females.These she-males often win out in the end. They avoid conflicts with other puzzled males, and yet they establish territories and enjoy successful mating with females."Permanent female mimicry," as the phenomenon is called, has already been confirmed in the shorebird ruff Philomachus pugnax. Now a paper in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters has determined that 40 percent of all sexually mature marsh harrier Circus aeruginosus males exhibit lifelong female behaviors and attributes.

At least five people died and more than 100 others were buried under rubble from a magnitude-5.7 earthquake that struck eastern Turkey Wednesday night, officials said.The death toll came from Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, who spoke to reporters while visiting the stricken zone. He said the deaths occurred when two hotels collapsed. Another 20 people were rescued from the crumbled structures, he said.In all, 25 buildings collapsed, but 22 of them had been empty since a 7.2 earthquake devastated parts of eastern Turkey, including the area around Van, on October 23. Last month's quake killed more than 500 people.

As powerful space telescopes seek out Earth-like planets, and SETI radio telescopes listen for transmissions from aliens, physical evidence for intelligent extraterrestrials might be right in our backyard.I'm not talking about flying saucers or oddball ancient artifacts attributed to visits by so-called "space gods," however. Instead, I'm looking for something as mundane as the pieces of interstellar probes that could have visited our solar system on numerous occasions over geologic time.If technological extraterrestrial civilizations are common in our galaxy, then they should have the wherewithal and curiosity to send robotic probes to other star systems. We already have five star-bound spacecraft destined to roam the galaxy forever: two Pioneer probes, a pair of Voyagers, and the New Horizons craft now speeding toward Pluto.

Scientists may have solved one of the Moon's enduring mysteries: why there are magnetised rocks on the lunar surface, when the Moon has no global magnetic field.Lunar rock samples brought back by the Apollo astronauts provided evidence of an ancient magnetic field on the Moon about 100 times weaker than the Earth's magnetic field.On Earth, heat from the solid inner core drives complex fluid dynamics through convection in the planet's molten outer core, causing an electrical charge which generates a global magnetic field.

A brand new Canary island is emerging from the sea as an underwater volcano bubbles to the surface.Magma off the Canary Island of El Hierro has been spewing 20 metres high as the sea boils with a smell of sulphur.As it grows and gets closer to the surface, more and more debris such as stones start to shoot out of the volcano which, until now, has only shown its explosive power below the surface.It is now just 70 metres from the surface and islanders are already trying to come up with a name for the new island. It is quite close to El Hierro and if it continues to erupt it could eventually meet up with the mainland.

An enormous solar flare that erupted from the sun on Thursday has been classed an X1.9 flare - making it one of the largest storms our star can produce.The solar flare came from a giant sunspot that was sighted earlier this week, itself one of the largest seen in years.Experts at Nasa knew to expect big things from the sunspot, but the sheer magnitude of the flare left them in awe.The flare was so powerful that it disrupted communications systems on earth around 45 minutes later.The event began at 8.27pm GMT, and Nasa officials said in a statement that it 'triggered some disruption to radio communications on Earth'.

Construction of one the world's largest hydroelectric dams can proceed without additional consultation with indigenous communities in the region, a Brazilian court said.Federal prosecutors had filed a motion calling for suspension of construction of the Belo Monte dam in the state of Para until indigenous groups are consulted and given access to environmental impact reports.In a 2-1 vote, the court upheld the decree issued by Para state authorising the dam's construction.

A species of Himalayan yew tree that is used to produce Taxol, a chemotherapy drug to treat cancer, is being pushed to the brink of extinction by over-harvesting for medicinal use and collection for fuel, scientists warned on Thursday.The medicinal tree, Taxus contorta, found in Afghanistan, India and Nepal, has seen its conservation status change from "vulnerable" to "endangered" on the IUCN's annual "red list" of threatened species.Taxol was discovered by a US National Cancer Institute programme in the late 1960s, isolated in the bark of the Pacific yew tree, Taxus brevifolia. All 11 species of yew have since been found to contain Taxol. "The harvesting of the bark kills the trees, but it is possible to extract Taxol from clippings, so harvesting, if properly controlled, can be less detrimental to the plants," said Craig Hilton-Taylor, IUCN red list unit manager.

Astronomers have discovered a strange population of tiny, distant galaxies forming stars at a surprisingly rapid clip.The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to spot the 69 hyperactive dwarf galaxies, which are about 9 billion light-years away from Earth. They're churning out stars so fast that their stellar population would double in just 10 million years. By contrast, it took the Milky Way 1,000 times longer to double its number of stars, researchers said.The new results are unexpected, since they're somewhat at odds with other recent studies of ancient dwarf galaxies.

More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn't exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled "honey."The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's food safety agencies.The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.