Newsdesk Archive

Near-death experiences are simply "manifestations of normal brain functions gone awry", researchers say.Psychologists from Edinburgh University and the Medical Research Council in Cambridge reviewed existing research.They say phenomena such as out-of-body experiences or encounters with dead relatives are tricks of the mind rather than a glimpse of the afterlife.One of the researchers, Dr Caroline Watt, said: "Our brains are very good at fooling us.

A landmark study in mice identifies a biological mechanism that could help explain how tobacco products could act as gateway drugs, increasing a person's future likelihood of abusing cocaine and perhaps other drugs as well, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study is the first to show that nicotine might prime the brain to enhance the behavioral effects of cocaine.The gateway drug model is based upon epidemiological evidence that most illicit drug users report use of tobacco products or alcohol prior to illicit drug use. This model has generated significant controversy over the years, mostly relating to whether prior drug exposure (to nicotine, alcohol or marijuana) is causally related to later drug use. Before now, studies have not been able to show a biological mechanism by which nicotine exposure could increase vulnerability to illicit drug use.

The B.C. doctor who allowed a film crew to document his use of a traditional Amazonian tea to help drug addicts has been ordered to end the treatments.Dr. Gabor Maté was using ayahuasca, which induces a trance that unlocks painful memories to help drug addicts end their addictive behaviour.The active ingredients in the plant are restricted.Since CBC News reported on Maté's work on Sunday, Health Canada has threatened him with criminal prosecution if he continues.

Russian scientists were racing against the clock today to find a way to fire the engines of an unmanned probe destined to collect surface samples from a moon of Mars, after a post-launch equipment failure left it stuck in Earth orbit.The Phobos-Grunt craft was successfully launched by a Zenit-2 booster rocket from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.It separated from the booster about 11 minutes later, and was to fire its engines twice to set out on its path to the Red Planet.Russia's Federal Space Agency chief Vladimir Popovkin said neither of the two engine burns worked, probably due to the failure of the craft's orientation system.

An asteroid that is 400m (1,300ft) wide has passed by Earth, much to the delight of astronomers.Although invisible to the naked eye, scientists said they spotted strange structures on its surface as it spun past at 30,000mph (48 280.32 km/h).Asteroid 2005 YU55's was the closest an asteroid has been to Earth in 200 years, according to Nasa.It is also the largest space rock fly-by Earth has seen since 1976; the next visit by a large asteroid will be 2028.

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.

Excavations of a series of medieval churches in central Sudan have revealed a treasure trove of art, including a European-influenced work, along with evidence of journeys undertaken by travelers from western Europe that were equivalent to the distance between New York City and the Grand Canyon.A visit by a Catalonian man named Benesec is recorded in one of the churches, along with visits from other pilgrims of the Middle Ages, according to lead researcher Bogdan Zurawski of the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences.The discoveries were made at Banganarti and Selib, two sites along the Nile that were part of Makuria, a Christian kingdom ruled by a dynasty of kings throughout the Middle Ages.

Pioneer individuals who were in the vanguard of colonization in a region of Quebec had a selective advantage in bestowing their genes as the predominant genetic makeup of the expanding populations that followed, concludes a recent study. By implication, the study suggests that similar range expansions that have occurred in human history may have played a key role in recent human evolution.The study team, led by Damian Labuda at the University of Montreal, Hélène Vézina from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (UQAC) and Laurent Excoffier from the University of Bern, along with the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, examined the impact of rapid territorial and demographic expansions on recent human evolution and diversity by using and analyzing genealogical data, including more than one million individuals, of Charlevoix Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, a recently colonized region of Quebec. Because of the availability of complete genealogies reconstructed from local parish registers, researchers were able to study human population range expansion in real time.

WASHINGTON - The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago."The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

The world's smallest fossil detected by 3D imaging in amber is a miniscule mite, which 49 million years ago decided to hitch a ride on a spider's head. The unusual pair, described in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters, has been entombed in amber ever since.Mites are rare in the fossil record because their small size makes them difficult to study. Using a modern method called phase contrast X-ray computed tomography, Jason Dunlop of Humboldt University Berlin and colleagues successfully scanned the mite and spider in an ancient chunk of Baltic amber. The process enabled them to reconstruct the duo in vivid three-dimensional detail.

By Earthly standards, Tharsis Tholus is a giant, towering 8 km above the surrounding terrain, with a base stretching over 155 x 125 km. Yet on Mars, it is just an average-sized volcano. What marks it out as unusual is its battered condition.Shown here in images taken by the HRSC high-resolution stereo camera on ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, the volcanic edifice has been marked by dramatic events.At least two large sections have collapsed around its eastern and western flanks during its four-billion-year history and these catastrophes are now visible as scarps up to several kilometres high. The main feature of Tharsis Tholus is, however, the caldera in its center.

The guardians of the world's most important standards of weights and measures have turned to the weird universe of quantum physics to try to resolve a dilemma.To the bafflement of scientists, a cylinder of metal sitting in a closely-guarded strongbox that is the global benchmark for the kilogram is changing mass.The enigma doesn't affect anyone who wants to buy 500-milligramme tablets of aspirin, half a kilo of carrots or a 50,000-tonne cruise ship.But it poses a hefty theoretical challenge to physicists, and complicates the work of labs which need ultra-precise, always-standard measurement.

Homes have been evacuated and roads closed on the southern-most Canary Island following a government-issued warning about a possible volcanic eruption.The southern tip of El Hierro was shaken by a 4.3-magnitude quake late on Saturday as an underwater volcano just off the coast started spewing matter some 60ft into the air.The island, which has 500 volcanic cones, has experienced more than 10,000 tremors in the past four months.Renewed fears of an eruption came as vast quantities of magma - the molten rock from just under the earth's crust - began bubbling into the sea off the port of La Restinga.

A huge asteroid about the size of an aircraft carrier will zoom past our planet next week, flying between the Earth and the orbit of the moon when it flies by on Tuesday (Nov. 8).The space rock, called asteroid 2005 YU55, poses no threat to the Earth but will be observed by excited astronomers around the world. It's about 1,300 feet (400 meters) wide, round and blacker than coal, NASA scientists said.At its closest point, asteroid 2005 YU55 will pass Earth at a range of about 201,700 miles (324,600 kilometers on Tuesday at 6:28 p.m. EST (2328 GMT). The average distance between the moon and Earth is about 238,854 miles (384,399 km).

The Sumerian story known today as the Epic of Gilgamesh is among the world's oldest surviving texts, commonly dated to the seventeenth to eighteenth century BC, though the earliest Sumerian poems can be traced to the Third Dynasty of Ur (2150-2000 BC). The Akkadian version, consisting of twelve tablets edited by the scribe Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between 1300 and 1000 BC, was rediscovered in 1853 in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. Sin-liqe-unninni conflated several much more ancient stories to create the Epic of Gilgamesh we know today, and he is also the oldest known 'author' in history, being the first to sign his name to his work.At heart, Gilgamesh combines two stories, that of the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and later, Gilgamesh's odyssey in search of immortality. Here, we will examine the first part of the epic: the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, "two-thirds god and one-third human... terrifying" in his perfection, and his "noble" companion Enkidu, the domesticated savage, his name literally meaning [the god] Enki's creation, formed of "a pinch of clay, let fall into the wilderness.

Late last week, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), which hosts the US's official emission-counting agency, released data showing a huge surge in carbon dioxide emissions from 2009 to 2010.Now, consultants Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) has an analysis showing that greenhouse gas emissions rose by more than economic growth.And this in a world where the vast majority of governments have endorsed reports saying that man-made climate change is set to bring serious impacts to societies and economies unless it's checked.

Japanese archaeologist Saburo Sugiyama discovered that the architects of the ancient city of Teotihuacán based their designs on a numerical measure equivalent to 83 centimeters (32.68 inches), Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, reported.Sugiyama presented the finding during the 5th Teotihuacán Round Table, an INAH-sponsored gathering of experts on the largest city build by indigenous peoples in Mexico.The researcher said that by making calculations based on the measurements of the pyramids at Teotihuacán, he was able to determine "the constant presence" of the 83-centimeter unit.

Astronomers have found more evidence that Mars was wet and warm in the ancient past, but the discovery comes with a twist: The water may have flowed below the Martian surface, rather than on top of it.The new study, which analyzed clay deposits on the Red Planet, revealed that the surface of Mars may have been dry and arid even in its distant past, with lakes and rivers dotting the Martian landscape for only brief periods.Water-carved landforms on Mars are just one source of evidence that liquid once existed on the planet. Orbiting satellites have also found beds of clay, created by chemical interactions between volcanic rock and water.

COLLEGE STATION -- Did climate change or humans cause the extinctions of the large-bodied Ice Age mammals (commonly called megafauna) such as the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth? Scientists have for years debated the reasons behind the Ice Age mass extinctions, which caused the loss of a third of the large mammals in Eurasia and two thirds of the large mammals in North America, and now, an inter-disciplinary team from more than 40 universities around the world led by Professor Eske Willerslev and his group from the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, have tried to answer the contentious question in one of the biggest studies of its kind ever.

Explorer David Livingstone has been credited with ending the east African slave trade by reporting a massacre of slaves in 1871. A new analysis of his original diary entries, however, shows that he sanitised his account.Deciphered through sophisticated digital imaging techniques, the entries reveal his previously unreported hunger to avenge the massacre of 400 out of 1500 slaves gathered for sale in a market in Nyangwe, a village in what is now the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were slaughtered by slave traders firing indiscriminately into the throng.News of the massacre emerged in the world press after Livingstone recounted the events to the journalist Henry Stanley after their famous meeting.

An alliance of four male dolphins, dubbed The Beatles have shown that when blokes co-operate, they have more sexual success.The research by a team at Macquarie University is published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.The study found that male dolphins who form an alliance fathered far more babies than those who worked in smaller groups or alone.The researchers studied a population of 70 male and 64 female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins living in Port Stephens, New South Wales. They collected skin samples from males and calves and looked for genetic markers which would reveal the paternity of the calves.

Greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost could be boosted by newly discovered methane-producing microbes, research suggests.Frozen soils in the Arctic alone are believed to keep an estimated 1,672 billion tonnes of carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere. The threat of permafrost releasing large amounts of trapped carbon as temperatures rise is a concern to experts.But new research has exposed a new and hidden danger - dormant bugs that awaken and generate methane when frozen soil thaws. As a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Scientists are set to begin a six-week mission to explore the Indian Ocean's underwater mountains.Aboard the UK research vessel the RRS James Cook, the team will study animals thousands of metres below the surface.This year a report in the journal Marine Policy found that deep sea trawling is one of the most damaging forms of fishing.The expedition will help scientists to better understand the threats to this environment.The mission, led by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is the second to visit the seamounts along the South-West Indian Ocean Ridge; the first set out in November 2009.

Russia hopes to end a humiliating two-decade absence from deep space with the launch on Wednesday of an ambitious three-year mission to bring back a soil sample from Mars' moon Phobos.Russian scientists have dreamed of probing the Red Planet's potato-shaped satellite since the 1960s heyday of pioneering Soviet forays into space.Dust from Phobos, they say, will hold clues to the genesis of the solar system's planets and help clarify Mars' enduring mysteries, including whether it is or ever was suited for life.

Honda's backpack-wearing Asimo robot is lovable and smart (except for when it falls down a flight of stairs). And with smarter sensors, it's now more human-like than ever!Smaller, lighter, smarter, faster. These are the words that every tech company would like to use to announce their new products. The Asimo robot fulfills all of those.Asimo can now walk over non-flat surfaces without the entire thing ending up as an epic fail viral video, has improved voice recognition technology and can even do a handy trick: pour wine into a paper cup (without crushing the it).

A new technique to study the bright disc of matter surrounding a distant black hole is as precise as spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the moon.Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, combined with the gravitational lensing effect of stars in a distant galaxy, an international team of astronomers measured the disc's size and studied the colors - and hence the temperatures - of different parts of the disc.Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects, are glowing discs of matter that orbit supermassive black holes, heating up and emitting extremely bright radiation as they do so. But their size means there has been little opportunity to study them directly.

The Fermi paradox asks why, if intelligent life is common, no technological civilizations have ever been observed.As human beings send out probes into outer space, it's notable that we've never discovered evidence of other civilizations doing the same. Is this a sign that there really isn't anybody out there?Not necessarily, say two postdoctoral researchers at Penn State, who have approached the problem mathematically. They say we simply haven't looked in enough places to be certain that no extraterrestrial artifacts exist in our solar system.

New evidence of a lost civilization in an area of the Sahara in Libya has emerged from images taken by satellites."It is like someone coming to England and suddenly discovering all the medieval castles. These settlements had been unremarked and unrecorded under the (Moammar) Gadhafi regime," said project leader David Mattingly, professor of Roman archaeology at the university. The fall of the regime has opened up Libya to more exploration by archaeologists of its pre-Islamic heritage.These "lost cities" were built by a little-known ancient civilization called the Garamantes, whose lifestyle and culture was far more advanced and historically significant than ancient sources had suggested.

MYSTERIOUS goo, which inspired cult horror movie The Blob, is advancing across the English countryside.Scientists are baffled by the piles of translucent jelly which has bewildered experts for hundreds of years.Walkers have spotted it on the Yorkshire moors just days after it appeared in the Lake District.The gloop is thought to be star jelly which according to folklore is deposits from a meteor shower and was first reported in the 14th century. Another theory is that it is the remains of frogs, toads or worms.

Mass panic and hysteria swept the United States on the eve of Halloween in 1938, when an all-too-realistic radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds sent untold thousands of people into the streets or heading for the hills.The radio show was so terrifying in its accounts of invading Martians wielding deadly heat-rays that it is remembered like no other radio programme.Or, more accurately, it is misremembered like no other radio programme.Radio unrealityThe panic and terror so routinely associated with The War of the Worlds dramatisation did not come close to a nationwide dimension that night 73 years ago.

A former factory worker from the British Midlands may be the last living master of the centuries-old Sikh battlefield art of shastar vidya. The father of four is now engaged in a full-time search for a successor.The basis of shastar vidya, the "science of weapons" is a five-step movement: advance on the opponent, hit his flank, deflect incoming blows, take a commanding position and strike.It was developed by Sikhs in the 17th Century as the young religion came under attack from hostile Muslim and Hindu neighbours, and has been known to a dwindling band since the British forced Sikhs to give up arms in the 19th Century.

Boeing plans to make a 'major' announcement Monday morning that may bring hundreds of jobs to Florida's Space Coast."Boeing has reached an agreement with Space Florida to work in facilities at Kennedy Space Center," spokeswoman Susan Wells said late Sunday.She would not comment further.However, numerous news outlets reported this past week that Boeing plans to use the leased facility to build space vehicles.Citing company sources, the Reuters news agency reported that Boeing plans to build space taxis at a mothballed space shuttle processing hangar at Kennedy Space Center.

Introducing his book, Sasanian Persia, the Rise and Fall of an Empire, Dr. Touraj Daryee begins with a humble claim: there were no books in English dealing exclusively with Sasanian history, so he wrote one. Simple enough! But imagine the need if there were no English language books on Roman history. To gain insight into elements of their own governments, American and British students would have to study their own history through foreign eyes. For Iranian-Americans, particularly the younger generation with English as their first language, Sasanian Persia fills a correspondingly significant gap. Daryaee remains similarly down-to-earth throughout his reader-friendly yet erudite narrative. But by the final page of the book, there is a strong sense that the author has been generous far beyond his modest claim. Dr. Daryaee kindly agreed to answer some questions about Sasanian history that would be of interest to Iranian-American readers who also keep up with events in modern Iran.

A gang of Libyan looters have raided a priceless collection of gold and silver coins that are believed to date back to the time of Alexander the Great.The thieves carried off with the pieces, known as The Treasure of Benghazi, having drilled through a concrete ceiling at the National Commercial Bank of Benghazi.An expert has described the raid as 'one of the greatest thefts in archeological history.'Whilst the break-in was initially believed to have been part of the uprising against Muammar Gadaffi, Hafed Walada, a Libyan archeologist working at King's College London told The Sunday Times; 'It may have been an inside job.

As we enter the final months of 2011, the thoughts of tech watchers like me are turning to what we can expect in 2012.Voice recognition in all our devices? Touch control replacing the mouse and keyboard? The death of the wallet as mobile payments become mainstream?Maybe. But what I'm most excited about is something far more audacious: flexible screens.Expecting this much-anticipated technology to become widely available in 2012 is optimistic but not unthinkable.Last week, Nokia demoed a mindblowing prototype handheld device that lets you bend and twist the screen to complete actions like scrolling and zooming.

Some 5,200 years ago, in the mountains of western Iran, people may have used takeout windows to get food and weapons, newly presented research suggests.But rather than the greasy hamburgers and fries, it appears the inhabitants of the site ordered up goat, grain and even bullets, among other items.The find was made at Godin Tepe, an archaeological site that was excavated in the 1960s and 1970s by a team led by T. Cuyler Young Jr., a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, who died in 2006.

As the Byzantine Empire was in decline, Islam began to dominate the Middle East, with a remarkable culture that showed a command of technology and an appreciation of art and decoration, research by archaeologists shows.In order to study Islamic civilization in its earliest days, Donald Whitcomb, who directs the Islamic Archaeology project at the Oriental Institute, is undertaking a project with Palestinian colleagues to further excavate an early Islamic site north of Jericho that contains a palace, a bathhouse and what was probably a settlement to the north.

It stands upon a land dotted with ancient dolmens or tombs that recall a distant time before the great urban centers of civilization arose in Mesopotamia and Egypt. According to legend, it was a land of ancient giants. Like stonehenge, its stone construction is concentric. At its center, however, is a tumulus of stone 65 feet in diameter and 15 feet tall. Long a mystery, scientists and scholars have puzzled and theorized about the meaning and identity of the site. Today, however, some investigations by archaeologists may be coming closer to the truth behind the enigmatic stone structure.

During human evolution our ancestors mated with Neanderthals, but also with other related hominids. In this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Uppsala University are publishing findings showing that people in East Asia share genetic material with Denisovans, who got the name from the cave in Siberia where they were first found."Our study covers a larger part of the world than earlier studies, and it is clear that it is not as simple as we previously thought. Hybridization took place at several points in evolution, and the genetic traces of this can be found in several places in the world. We'll probably be uncovering more events like these," says Mattias Jakobsson, who conducted the study together with Pontus Skoglund.

THE VANCOUVER SUNA 340-year-old coin from China has been unearthed by archeologists near a planned Yukon gold mine, shedding fresh light on historic trade links between 17th-century Chinese merchants, Russian fur traders and first nations in the northwest corner of North America.The coin is etched with traditional Chinese characters indicating it was minted during the Qing Dynasty reign of Emperor Kangxi, who ruled China from 1662 to 1722. But other information stamped on the money piece - which has a large central hole and four smaller ones - shows it was minted in China's Zhili province between 1667 and 1671.

Vikings used rocks from Iceland to navigate the high seas, suggests a new study.In Norse legends, sunstones are said to have guided seafarers to North America.Now an international team of scientists report in the journal the Proceedings of the Royal Society A that the Icelandic spars behave like mythical sunstones and polarise light.By holding the stones aloft, voyaging Vikings could have used them to find the sun in the sky.

US space agency Nasa has funded a study of "tractor beams" to gather samples for analysis in future missions.The $100,000 (£63,000) award will be used to examine three laser-based approaches to do what has until now been the stuff of science fiction.Several tractor-beam ideas have been published in the scientific literature but none has yet been put to use.Nasa scientist Paul Stysley says the approach could "enhance science goals and reduce mission risk".

TEHRAN -- The Jiroft artifacts, which were delivered to the Iranian embassy in London last week, have been returned to Iran.The 5000-year-old collection, which consists of two jars, five cups, six vases, a bowl, a vessel and three weights, were delivered to Iranian officials in Tehran in the early hours of Friday, Hassan Faqih, an Iranian diplomat in London, told the Persian service of the IRNA.

On Friday night Oct. 28, four bright lights were seen and videotaped during a high school football game in Scottsdale, Ariz., near Phoenix. The strange lights, which were seen by hundreds of people and videotaped by at least two of them, seemed to move slowly in the sky, sometimes blinking randomly. The entire sighting lasted for about a minute and a half.According to Fox 10 News, one fan at the high school took a video and posted it to YouTube, where within days it became one of the top stories on Yahoo News, sparked "a national mystery" and garnered over 50,000 views.Several explanations were put forth to explain the mysterious lights, ranging from helicopters to camera lens flares. But of course the favored explanation was spacecraft: did we finally have good video proof that mankind is being visited by aliens?.

The discovery of a puzzling 340-year-old coin etched with traditional Chinese characters in Canada's Yukon territory suggests that the area was already aflurry with trading even before the Gold Rush.Minted during the Qing Dynasty reign of Emperor Kangxi, the coin is 60 percent copper and 40 percent zinc. It was cast between 1667 and 1671 -- long before the 1898 gold rush, when people from all over the world headed to Dawson City and the Klondike gold fields.The coin adds to an intriguing small collection of ancient Chinese coinage discovered in Yukon near gold rush trails.

A 17-month mock mission to Mars on Earth could be followed up by a shorter simulation in low-Earth orbit, Russian space officials say.Today, a six-man, four-nation crew emerged one by one after 520 days in a sealed habitat in Moscow meant to simulate a mission to Mars - the longest isolation experiment ever achieved.The Mars 500 "astronauts" smiled and waved as they greeted a sea of faces, glimpsed their first daylight and breathed their first fresh air in almost a year and a half. As they lined up for photos and brief remarks, Diego Urbina, the Italian participant, pummelled his fists in the air in a classic victory gesture as if to say, "Yes! We did it!".

Imagine making a night-time trek to a remote stretch of desert, far from any sign of civilisation. You crest a hill and are astonished to find a building ablaze with artificial lighting.That is a little like the puzzlement that greeted the discovery of Hanny's Voorwerp, a curious gas cloud found floating in intergalactic space in 2007. It is brighter than 30,000 suns but has no obvious power source. Now, 19 similar clouds have been discovered, all glowing apparently without internal power.

While searching for relief from migraines and general malaise, a friend recently consulted a nutritionist who told her, matter-of-factly, that because she has Type O blood, she should be eating lots of meat and eliminating gluten, dairy and many grains. A Chinese medicine doctor she consulted confirmed the advice, saying, basically: Duh.For someone who had hoped to go vegetarian - and who is among the 45 percent of people in the U.S. with Type O blood - the news was surprising.But was it true?.

Rising temperatures will force many species of animals and plants to move to other regions and could leave some marine species with nowhere to go, according to new research just published in the journal Science.An international research team, led by Dr Mike Burrows from the Scottish Association for Marine Science, compared changing temperatures for both land and sea and from place to place over a 50 year period, from 1960 -- 2009.The team used the data to project how quickly populations of both terrestrial and marine species would have had to relocate to keep up with the changing temperatures. They found that there was very little difference between movement rates in either environment.

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminium, selenium and hydrogen ... Now school pupils will have to add three more names to the famous song that helps them memorise the names of the elements on the Periodic Table.The General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), taking place at the Institute of Physics in London, has approved the names of three new elements.Elements 110, 111 and 112 have been named darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn).

I imagine most people would be hard put to place Burkina Faso on a map; it neatly fits that cliché of a faraway country of which we know nothing.It is a landlocked state in West Africa, a bit bigger than Britain, once a French colony; it used to be called Upper Volta. Burkina is in the Sahel, that semi-arid belt of savannahs, grasslands and dry forest which runs across Africa below the Sahara, the transitional zone between the desert to the north and the rainforest to the south.

Humans have evolved as a migratory species with the highest fertility shown by those who move first into unoccupied habitats, a new study suggests.Women among the first "wave front" of migrants into a new area marry earlier and have more children than women who settle in the central "core" of a region that already has an established population, the study found.Scientists believe the findings demonstrate the importance of being in the first migratory wave of people who move to new, unoccupied regions.

An asteroid a quarter-mile-wide will, astronomically speaking, narrowly miss Earth next week.And while it is the closest an asteroid this size has come to the home planet since 1976, there's no need to call Bruce Willis ... yet."There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon," Don Yeomans, the manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program office, told Reuters.But that doesn't mean the asteroid -- named 2005 YU55 -- won't be a threat to earth in the future.

Can anything travel faster than light? You may think it's a cosmic limit imposed by Einstein's special theory of relativity, but that's actually not the case. In this One-Minute Physics episode, animator Henry Reich shows how you can break the speed of light in your backyard, without violating any laws of physics.

Aircraft designers test their creations in a wind tunnel and now spacecraft designers can do the same in a "space tunnel". Researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Göttingen have built a 12-metre-long vacuum chamber designed to replicate the conditions of outer space at a few degrees above absolute zero.The chamber is large enough to test entire sections of satellites and will be used to research ion engines and other electric spacecraft propulsion systems. The ion beams from these engines can hit sensitive electrical parts of satellites, such as solar panels, and cause them to fail. The researchers hope that a better understanding of the beams will reduce the damage they cause.

It is 10 years since a deal to protect the world's thousands of shipwrecks, but the UK and several other major maritime powers are yet to ratify it. Should this underwater heritage be protected or is it acceptable to plunder?When a ship sinks and lives are lost, it is a tragedy for the families involved.For the relatives of the dead, the ship becomes an underwater grave but as the years pass the wreck can become a site of archaeological interest.In recent years technological innovations have allowed commercial archaeologists, decried by some as "treasure hunters", to reach wrecks far below the surface.

Space has long been a battleground for disputes between the United States and its rivals, but news this week that the Chinese military may have been behind a hacking attack on NASA satellites has confirmed for some experts that a technological Cold War is well underway."The reason why space is the must-win region is because, especially for the West, much of our information is collected, transmitted and controlled through space," said Dean Cheng, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

Theoretical physicist Brian Greene admits that the world he describes in his new public-TV documentary series, "The Fabric of the Cosmos," is nothing like everyday experience. He's not even sure some of the things he describes are for real. For example, how can we possibly know other universes exist? Believe it or not, there are ways to find out.The four-part "Nova" series makes its debut on PBS stations on Wednesday night with an episode that delves into the mysteriously substantial properties of empty space. "As it turns out, empty space is not nothing," the Columbia University professor says at the start of the show. "It's something. ... So real, that empty space itself helps shape everything in the world around us, and forms the very fabric of the cosmos.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $1m grant to an astrophysicist developing a laser-based solution to a decidedly terrestrial problem: malaria-spreading mosquitoes."I wanted to apply my astrophysics, optics, laser expertise towards some humanitarian goal that can help people," says Columbia University associate professor Szabolcs Márka in video outlining his laser "light wall"."I had this idea that maybe that optics and light can repell or affect insects, and maybe that can be used to eradicate malaria.

Extraterrestrial civilisations could give themselves away by the night-time glow of their cities. And if there is one lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system, we are ready to find it.Existing telescopes could spot cities the size of Tokyo out to the edge of the solar system, and future telescopes could detect well-lit planets around other stars, a new study suggests. "This opens a new window for a search for extraterrestrial civilisations," says Avi Loeb of Harvard University.The mainstream search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), now running for more than 50 years, relies on the hope that aliens will either leak or broadcast radio signals out into space.

One of the largest sunspots in years has appeared on the sun, darkening part of its glowing face.The massive sunspot, called AR1339, is about 50,000 miles (80,000 km) long, and 25,000 miles (40,000 km) wide, reports SpaceWeather.com. For comparison, Earth itself is only 8,000 miles (12,800 km) wide.The sunspot behemoth isn't yet facing our planet, but was spotted today (Nov. 3) by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite. The spacecraft's photos of the giant sunspot show the solar region as it comes into view on the northeastern edge, or limb, of the sun.

WHEN Charles Moore sailed his 50-foot catamaran Alguita through one of the remotest, least-visited parts of the Pacific Ocean in 1997, he was appalled to find plastic flotsam everywhere.This discovery of what has come to be called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a vast area of the central Pacific where debris accumulates because of ocean current patterns - set Moore off on a crusade to measure, identify and, ultimately, try to prevent plastic pollution of the ocean. A decade and a half later, Moore's obsession has led to several scientific papers, documentary films, numerous media appearances, and now a book.

Dr Gregg Homer of Stroma Medical, a clinical equipment company based in California, claimed his new "Lumineyes" treatment could be a permanent alternative to coloured contact lenses.The treatment uses a laser to remove melanin, the brown pigment, from the upper layer of the iris, leaving the blue colour free to replace it within two to three weeks of the procedure.But the process is irreversible because the melanin will not grow back and can not be replaced.

NASA is exploring ways to use tractor beams in future robotic probe missions. The agency has recently awarded a team of engineers $100,000 to study three experimental techniques for trapping small particles with lasers.Spacecraft flying by comets and asteroids or rovers landing on Mars could use the methods to continuously sample their target.While such technology has been used in biological and surgical applications for years, there has been little work on using it for remote sensing in space, said Paul Stysley, a NASA engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who leads the group studying the techniques.

*ADULT LANGUAGE WARNING*Russell Brand joined Daniel Pinchbeck, Graham Hancock and a galactivated group of RS retreat-goers at the Boulder Mountain Guest Ranch in Utah for a frank and funny conversation covering a wide range of topics including the nature of contemporary media, quantum physics, the difference between psychedelics and "horrible drugs that nullify you", what comes after time, and the idea that people have been "coded" by society not to anticipate change.

After years of quiet, the sun is coming alive with solar storms in a big way.The sun shot off a flare Thursday afternoon from a region that scientists are calling a "benevolent monster."Scientists at the federal Space Weather Prediction Center say that region is the most active part of the sun since 2005. It has dozens of sunspots, including one that is the size of 17 Earths.

Scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc -- a glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole. Their study makes use of a novel technique that uses gravitational lensing to give an immense boost to the power of the telescope. The precision of the method has allowed astronomers to directly measure the disc's size and temperature across different parts of the disc.

New research in the UK on rhesus macaque monkeys has found for the first time that if they live in larger groups they develop more gray matter in parts of the brain involved in processing information on social interactions.The researchers, led by Jerome Sallet of Oxford University, said the results of the new study bear some similarities to research by other groups working with humans, that related brain size to the extent of social interactions. These studies include recent work that suggested a link between the volume of some regions of the brain and the number of online friends people have in social networking sites such as Facebook.

The iceberg started out as a surface crack in the sheet of ice, which is located in front of the Pine Island Glacier (PIG) in the Antarctic region.The rift, which was first noticed in October, runs for almost 20 miles from end to end and is thought to be 200ft deep.With the crack widening every day, the iceberg will be formed - or 'calved' as it is scientifically known - when it breaks away from the floating ice mass.This is expected to take place at the end of the year or in early 2012.

Habitats suitable for Martian life are most likely to have existed underground, a new study suggests.Scientists are now re-thinking the possibility of seas or lakes covering large regions of the Red Planet long ago.New mineral-mapping data from more than 350 Martian sites indicates that water may have only been on the surface for short periods of time.An alternative idea is that warm water, with the potential to harbour life, was mostly confined underground.

A recent study showed that certain brain areas expand in people who have greater numbers of friends on Facebook. This was welcome news for online social network addicts, particularly teenagers: "Mom, I'm not just on Facebook; I'm doing my temporal lobe calisthenics."There was a problem, though. The study, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was unable to resolve the question of whether "friending" plumps up the brain areas or whether people with a type of robustness in brain physiology are just natural social butterflies. "Our own previous study on Facebook could only show correlation between social network size and the brain, but we could not determine the direction of causation between social brain regions and social network size," notes Ryota Kanai of University College London, one of the researchers on the study.

The largest bear that ever lived also had the strongest bite of any land mammal, say scientists.Agriotherium africanum was a giant short-faced bear that became extinct five million years ago.Reconstructions of the carnivore's skull revealed that it was well adapted to resist the forces involved in eating large prey.By comparing the skulls of several species, scientists also found polar bears to have surprisingly weak bites.

Sydney Morning HeraldWASHINGTON: The global output of carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the US Department of Energy has calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.The new figures for last year mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by climate experts four years ago.

Our human ancestors did come from Africa but left the continent to spread across the world via a different route than first thought, scientists have revealed.A six-year study mapping genetic patterns found that people who ended up in Europe, Asia and Oceania got there by crossing the sea to Arabia around 70,000 years ago.Scientists had thought that humankind left for other continents in a northern direction through Egypt's Sinai region but now it seems they wandered further south, probably via Yemen.

The skeleton of a Maya Queen - with her head mysteriously placed between two bowls - is just one of the treasures found in a 2,000-year-old rodent-infested tomb.Priceless jade gorgets, beads, and ceremonial knives were also discovered in the cavern - which was found underneath a younger 1,300-year-old tomb which also contained a body - in the Guatemalan ruins of Nakum.The two royal burials are the first to be discovered at the site, which was once a densely packed Maya centre.

According to Viking legend, the marauding seafarers found their way in bad weather using glowing sunstones that revealed the position of the sun even when it was obscured by cloud or had sunk beneath the horizon.Scientists have long argued over whether such a trick is feasible, but new research on a crystal recovered from a 16th century shipwreck reveals that such stones could indeed have helped the Vikings navigate from Norway to North America.Vikings are known to have sailed vast stretches of open water to reach North America more than a thousand years ago, finding their way from the sun and stars, and the direction of the wind, waves and swell.

This week, a research breakthrough at the University of Washington brings us one step closer to living as cyborgs. Chao Zhong and his colleagues have built a biocompatible solid state device made from the shells of crustaceans tha's able to monitor and control the flow of protons. Unlike electronic machines that transfer information via electrons, our bodies and brains do it via ions and protons. And that difference between machines and bodies -- we're incompatible technology -- has been one challenge to advancing cybernetics.

A fragment of human jaw unearthed in a prehistoric cave in Torquay is the earliest evidence of modern humans in north-west Europe, scientists say.The tiny piece of upper jaw was excavated from Kents Cave on the town's border in the 1920s but its significance was not fully realised until scientists checked its age with advanced techniques that have only now become available.The fresh analysis at Oxford University dated the bone and three teeth to a period between 44,200 and 41,500 years ago, when a temporary warm spell lasting perhaps only a thousand years, made Britain habitable.

Two baby teeth and a jaw fragment unearthed in Italy and the UK have something revealing to say about how modern humans conquered the globe.The finds in the Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia, and Kents Cavern, Devon, have been confirmed as the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens in Europe.Careful dating suggests they are more than 41,000 years old, and perhaps as much as 45,000 years old in the case of the Italian "baby teeth.

Astronomers have found more evidence that Mars was wet and warm in the ancient past, but the discovery comes with a twist: The water may have flowed below the Martian surface, rather than on top of it.The new study, which analyzed clay deposits on the Red Planet, revealed that the surface of Mars may have been dry and arid even in its distant past, with lakes and rivers dotting the Martian landscape for only brief periods.Water-carved landforms on Mars are just one source of evidence that liquid once existed on the planet. Orbiting satellites have also found beds of clay, created by chemical interactions between volcanic rock and water.

A video that Microsoft posted last week under a mind-numbingly dull title has been sparking conversation since then.Called "Future Productivity Vision," the 6:17 clip -- embedded below -- aims to present the technologies that Microsoft thinks will drive how we work and play in five to 10 years.The most striking thing about it may be how spotless everything appears, as if we're looking at a techie version of the photo spreads in those glossy design magazines. That polished perfection has led people to mock the whole production as "inane and completely lifeless" or "imaginary futuristic [hooey].

Dogs being walked by men are four times more likely to threaten and bite other dogs and dogs on a leash are more likely to act aggressively than dogs off the leash.These are just a couple of revelations about dog walking behavior from an extensive new study that examined how a dog's age, sex and size, as well as the owner's sex and use of a leash affect how canines act on their walks.The study, accepted for publication in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science, surprisingly found that the sex of the owner had the biggest effect on whether or not the dog would threaten or bite another dog.

The six-strong crew of the European Space Agency's most gruelling mission yet will emerge from their capsule on Friday afternoon after an 18-month voyage that went, literally, nowhere.The would-be spacefarers spent more than 500 days in windowless isolation in a simulated mission to Mars that played out in a complex of chambers at a research centre in Moscow. Once sealed inside the crew's only contact with the outside world was over the internet and by phone lines that carried a delay of up to 20 minutes to simulate the time it takes for radio signals to pass between Earth and Mars.

In the autumn of 2009, blobs of a jelly-like substance appeared in various parts of Scotland. People reported finding piles or single blobs of the mucus on the ground, on posts, even on a tractor. BBC Radio Scotland sent samples to experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen, which researches soils and other environmental factors, but the tests were inconclusive.In fact, the mystery jelly has been known about for centuries. As one account described in 1910, "Among the Welsh peasants there is a belief that when a meteor falls to the earth it becomes reduced to a mass of jelly. This they name pwdre ser.

A planetary derby may be playing out around the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, according to a new theory that could help solve a dusty mystery.Almost all of the large galaxies observed so far have central black holes, each billions of times the mass of our sun.But about half of these cosmic monsters are obscured by dense rings of dust, and astronomers have been uncertain where all this dust comes from and how it's remained intact over time.According to the new theory, it's possible that newly formed planets and asteroids whirling close to these giant black holes are continually being smashed to smithereens, creating the thick, donut-shaped clouds of debris.

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, many local medical marijuana proponents felt they finally had a friend in the White House.How times have changed.Many of those same proponents now decry Obama and his administration for the heavy hand they have placed on medical marijuana dispensaries and cooperatives in California."Definitely all cannabis patients, all advocates who believed Obama wouldn't take away state access rights would certainly feel that way," said Jan Werner, vice president of The Clearview Lake Corp., which runs marijuana collectives in Bloomington and Corona.

A 25-year-old chimpanzee named "Panzee" has just demonstrated that speech perception is not a uniquely human trait.Well-educated Panzee understands more than 130 English language words and even recognizes words in sine-wave form, a type of synthetic speech that reduces language to three whistle-like tones. This shows that she isn't just responding to a particular person's voice or emotions, but instead she is processing and perceiving speech as humans do.

You might think that by working at an observatory, one might become "immune" to excitement over new science projects. That may be the case for some, but I still get ridiculously excited over a cool new idea. Lucky for me, I get to hear about a lot of interesting stuff before it becomes widespread. I'll admit, you might even call me an astronomical hipster.This month, I was particularly intrigued by an article by Jeremy Darling in the newsletter of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The title of the article asked, "Will the Andromeda Galaxy Collide with the Milky Way?.

Of all the planets in our solar system, I'm usually guilty of thinking poor old Uranus is pretty bland and uninteresting.In fact, the only interesting things I can ever think to say about it are that it orbits the sun on its side... and has a pretty exciting story attached to its discovery.Other than that, well... let's look at Neptune instead. NO, WAIT! Something exciting has happened on Uranus!.

A chill autumn wind rustles dry leaves in the dark heart of the forest. Or was that a footstep? A raspy voice whispers your name as a clammy hand closes on your shoulder. Fear seizes your heart as you repent your decision to visit the haunted forest.Take a Halloween trip with Discovery News to some of America's most supernatural natural areas and paranormal parks. Here are the best places to tell ghost stories this weekend:First stop is Dudleytown, Conn. Legend has it that a royal curse caused the founders of the town, the Dudley family, to go mad in the 1850s. Or maybe it was the high concentration of lead in the groundwater. One way or the other, the town was reportedly the site of numerous murders and suicides. By 1899, everyone had either died or run away.

A Chinese Long March rocket has blasted off, propelling an unmanned spacecraft into orbit in the next step towards the country's ambitious plans for a manned space station.The Shenzhou 8 was launched at dawn from the north Gobi desert, entering orbit successfully, the official Xinhua news agency reported. It should dock with the Tiangong 1 module within two days, more than 200 miles above Earth."Mastering the technology of rendezvous and docking will lay a firm foundation for China to build a space station," Zhou Jianping, the chief designer of China's manned space engineering project, told Xinhua.

Doing yoga is a more effective way for people with lower back pain to become more mobile than the treatments currently offered by GPs, according to new research.The study found that back pain sufferers recorded greater improvements in everyday physical tasks such as walking, bending down and getting dressed if they did weekly yoga sessions.Participants who had practised yoga reported enhanced function compared with those receiving standard care, even nine months after the yoga classes had finished.

THEY may have been partial to a chunky slab of meat, but very early on Neanderthals also had a taste for fine dining treats like fish and small birds. The findings show that our long-lost cousins were cognitively advanced from the get-go, long before modern humans appeared in Europe.Discoveries of jewellery and make-up at 50,000-year-old sites show that around the time they went extinct Neanderthals had a taste for the finer things in life. Now that evidence has been pushed back to their first appearance in Europe.

Happy people don't just enjoy life; they're likely to live longer, too. A new study has found that those in better moods were 35% less likely to die in the next 5 years when taking their life situations into account.The traditional way to measure a person's happiness is to ask them about it. But over the past few decades, psychologist and epidemiologist Andrew Steptoe of University College London (UCL) says, scientists have realized that those measures aren't reliable. It's not clear whether they "assess how they're actually feeling or how they remember feeling," he says. When answering, people are more likely to count their blessings and compare their experience with the lives of others.

Birds are getting bigger in central California, and that was a big surprise for Rae Goodman and her colleagues. Goodman uncovered the trend while working as a graduate student for Associate Professor of Biology Gretchen LeBuhn, analyzing data from thousands of birds caught and released each year at two sites near San Francisco Bay and Point Reyes National Seashore.The SF State scientists found that birds' wings have grown longer and birds are increasing in mass over the last 27 to 40 years.

While most studies have concluded that a cold climate led to the short lower legs typical of Neanderthals, researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that lower leg lengths shorter than the typical modern humans let them move more efficiently over the mountainous terrain where they lived. The findings reveal a broader trend relating shorter lower leg length to mountainous environments that may help explain the limb proportions of many different animals.Their research was published online in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and will appear in print in the November 2011 issue.

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.

These mosquitoes are genetically engineered to kill - their own children. Researchers on Sunday reported initial signs of success from the first release into the environment of mosquitoes engineered to pass a lethal gene to their offspring, killing them before they reach adulthood.The results, and other work elsewhere, could herald an age in which genetically modified insects will be used to help control agricultural pests and insect-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria. But the research is arousing concern about possible unintended effects on public health and environment, because once genetically modified insects are released, they cannot be recalled.

A new evolutionary tree has once again defined archaeopteryx as the most primitive of birds.The new research appearing today in Biology Letters is by evolutionary biologist, Dr Michael Lee of the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Museum and Dr Trevor Worthy of the University of New South Wales.The magpie-sized archaeopteryx, which lived 150 million years ago in Bavaria, had feathers and flew like a bird, but had a long tail and serrated teeth like a reptile."It was immediately recognised as half bird-half reptile when it was first discovered," says Lee.Archaeopteryx has generally been seen as the most bird-like of dinosaurs, and the most primitive ancestor of birds.

Neanderthals weren't the only ancient cousins that humans frequently mated with, according to a new study that finds that East Asian populations share genes with a mysterious archaic hominin species that lived in Siberia 40,000 years ago.This group, the Denisovans, is known only by a few bone fragments: A finger bone, a tooth and possibly a toe bone, which is still undergoing analysis. The Denisovans likely split off from the Neanderthal branch of the hominin family tree about 300,000 years ago, but little else is known about their appearance, behavior or dress. But just as researchers have learned that ancient humans and Neanderthals mated, they've also found genetic echoes of the Denisovans in modern residents of Pacific islands, including New Guinea and the Philippines.