Newsdesk Archive

Spirituality improves health outcomes for both men and women who are facing chronic illnesses, but in different ways, a new study shows.Being involved in religious or spiritual activities improves women's mental health, while men experience better physical health as well as improved mental health.Numerous previous studies have shown the positive effects of spirituality and religion on health. A 2006 study conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center showed that people who attend religious services weekly live longer than those who do not.

Belgium's political parties, which are negotiating the terms of a new government, on Sunday reached an agreement to shut down the country's two remaining nuclear power stations, owned by GDF-Suez unit Electrabel, Belgian media said.Electrabel said on Monday it did not want to comment on the nuclear exit as it had so far not received an official confirmation.The agreement would be an affirmation of a law passed in 2003 which outlined a shut down of the three oldest reactors by 2015 and a complete exit by 2025.

Seven billion people is a tough number to truly comprehend. It's like geologic time, or the number of neurons in your brain. It's on a scale that we have little mental framework to understand.We tried to gain a little perspective on this staggering total with some statistics, but sometimes the big picture is best understood as a collection of smaller scenes. National Geographic is marking the occasion with a free "7 billion" iPad app based on their yearlong series on world population, and we've got a preview of some of the images and videos in this gallery.

New research on brain cells could shed more light on neurological diseases, scientists have discovered.Researchers from The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh have found brain cells alter their genetic make-up during a person's lifetime.They have identified genes - known as retrotransposons - responsible for thousands of tiny changes in the DNA of brain tissue.

Researchers have found that people in East Asia share genetic material with Denisovans, who got the name from the cave in Siberia where they were first found.The new study covers a larger part of the world than earlier research, and it is clear that it is not as simple as previously thought.Professor Mattias Jakobsson, of Uppsala University in Sweden who conducted the study together with graduate student Pontus Skoglund, said hybridisation took place at several points in evolution and the genetic traces of this can be found in several places in the world.

Roaring and singing, the koala reveals a strangely human side, writes Simon Watt.Koalas are cute. That much is obvious. Though marsupials and not bears, their soft fur, stubby limbs and big fluffy ears make them appear as though the rigours of evolution have spent millions of years contriving to engineer the perfect teddy. The way they hold tightly to branches looks more like cuddling than climbin.

UCLA mathematicians working with the Los Angeles Police Department to analyze crime patterns have designed a mathematical algorithm to identify street gangs involved in unsolved violent crimes. Their research is based on patterns of known criminal activity between gangs, and represents the first scholarly study of gang violence of its kind.The research appears October 31 on the website of the peer-reviewed mathematical journal Inverse Problems and will be published in a future print edition.

Try to imagine a day without numbers. Try to imagine getting through the first hour of that day. No alarm clock, no time, no date, no television or radio, no stock market report or sports results in the newspapers, no bank account to check.The fact is, our lives depend on numbers. You may not have "a head for figures", but you certainly have a head full of them. Most of what we do each day is conditioned by numbers. Indeed, the degree to which our modern society depends on those that are hidden from us was made clear by the financial meltdown in 2008, when overconfident reliance on the advanced mathematics of the credit market led to a collapse of the global financial system.

It took 123 years for the world's population to go from one billion to two billion but only 12 to grow from six billion to seven billion. The planet is expected to hit 10 billion by 2083.Forecasts also show that the rapid growth will leave the distribution of people looking very different. In 1950, Europe represented nearly a quarter of the world's total population. A century later it looks set to only make up five per cent. While Asia has more than half of the world's people, its share will only rise slightly from 55.6 per cent to 57.1 by 2150.

These rules would include governments respecting international law, individual rights of privacy, and intellectual property, Hague told the London Conference on Cyberspace at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre on Tuesday."Behaviour that is unacceptable offline is also unacceptable online, whether it is carried out by individuals or by governments," said Hague. "In place of today's cyber free-for-all, we need a list of rules of the road."Governments should act proportionately and "in accordance with international law", and respect intellectual property and privacy, said Hague.

Walk through the Christian quarter of Jerusalem's Old City and you'll see souvenir shops selling assorted varieties of small plastic Christian prayer boxes displaying miniature icons, usually Mary and Jesus, surrounded by a gold halo. Not far from those shops, Israeli archaeologists have discovered what may be the oldest miniature Byzantine prayer box to date, archaeologist Yana Tchekhanovets announced last week.The discovery - made by Tchekhanovets and fellow archaeologist Doron Ben-Ami about a year ago during an Israel Antiquities Authority excavation in the Givati parking lot across from the City of David - sheds light on art in ritual in Byzantine-era Jerusalem.

Poland announced Thursday that it is reopening its probe into World War II war crimes at Auschwitz and other Nazi-era death camps. The goal: to track down and prosecute any living Nazis who worked at the camps, before time runs out.The Associated Press reports that Poland first opened up investigations into Nazi-era war crimes in the 1960s and '70s, but closed them in the 1980s before any convictions were made as the result of the "country's isolation behind the Iron Curtain."Still, any new convictions that result from the reopened investigations won't be the first since the 1980s in Poland; the nation's most recent Nazi-era crime prosecution was in 2001, when a guard was sentenced to 8 years in prison for working at Chelmno, a death camp. As the AP points out, Poland actually currently has the highest number of open cases, although few have been prosecuted.

Chemical factories around young stars may give rise to far more complex molecules than previously thought.Relatively complex, carbon-containing molecules are found in comets and on nearby planets, thought to have been made elsewhere in our Solar System.But a report in Nature suggests even larger molecules may be forged near young stars and flung outwards.The find adds to a large body of often conflicting evidence about the origin of our Universe's complex molecules.

Researchers in Oxford have treated a man with an advanced gene therapy technique to prevent him from losing his sight.It is the first time that anyone has tried to correct a genetic defect in the light-sensing cells that line the back of the eye.The president of the Academy of Medical Sciences said the widespread use of gene therapy of this treatment will be soon be possible.

LONDON: British scientists have developed artificial blood in the laboratory which they say is just two years away before being used in transfusions and saving millions who die every year due to blood shortages.Heart transplant, bypass and cancer patients would also benefit from having a guaranteed supply of blood on hand for their surgery, said the scientists behind the "holy grail" of blood research.

BEIJING: China has said that it will launch an unmanned spacecraft early next month that will attempt to dock with an experimental space station module.The Shenzhou 8 mission is the latest step in what will be a decade-long effort to place a manned permanent space station in orbit.

In talking to ARPAe chief Arun Majumdar last week, I asked him about the future of transportation fuels.Even with more hybrids and electric vehicles on the road, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says the American driver will rely on liquid fuels for the next 20 years. Corn-based ethanol needs big subsidies and is of dubious environmental benefit.So to break the stranglehold of foreign oil, scientists and engineers are developing something called electro-fuels. The alternative fuel comes from running a charge of electricity through a solution containing strange microorganisms that feed on harmful ammonia or hydrogen sulfides. The charge induces to the organisms to convert carbon dioxide into the same kind of fuels we use to run our cars.

A three-ton stone from Jerusalem's Western Wall, hundreds of biblical era artifacts, and a collection of 20 Dead Sea Scrolls will make their debut tomorrow in New York's Discovery Times Square Exposition.The largest collection of biblical artifacts ever displayed outside Israel, the exhibition "Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Biblical Times," aims to take visitors on a "fascinating archaeological journey through the Holy Land."The show's centerpiece is 20 Dead Sea Scrolls, containing sections from the biblical books of Genesis, Psalms, Exodus, Isaiah, and others. The scrolls include four pieces which have never been available for public viewing.

Asteroids are generally regarded as the solar system's scrap heap, the battered bits that broke off and were left behind when the planets were forming. But the lumpy asteroid 21 Lutetia may be a whole, unbroken building block left nearly untouched since the solar system's birth."We think planets were built of things like Lutetia," says Ben Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "We're getting a chance to see one of the building blocks of the solar system up close.

Emmy Award-winning television personality and patient activist Montel Williams said Sunday he was impressed with Israel's liberal attitude toward medical marijuana, and he believes the U.S. could learn a thing or two from the Jewish state.Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and he has since been an outspoken advocate of medical marijuana to relieve pain caused by the disease.The former host of the popular long-running talk show "The Montel Williams Show" is in Israel on a fact-finding mission to learn about its medicinal cannabis practices. He is meeting with legislators, scientists and physicians.

The Greenland ice sheet can experience extreme melting even when temperatures don't hit record highs, according to a new analysis by Dr. Marco Tedesco, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York. His findings suggest that glaciers could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming that would be difficult to halt."We are finding that even if you don't have record-breaking highs, as long as warm temperatures persist you can get record-breaking melting because of positive feedback mechanisms," said Professor Tedesco, who directs CCNY's Cryospheric Processes Laboratory and also serves on CUNY Graduate Center doctoral faculty.

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO - To the native Wixarika of Mexico, better known as the Huicholes, the mountains of Catorce and the desert at their feet are the centre of the world, a temple of prayer on the level of the Vatican. To a pair of Canadian mining companies, it's a mother lode of gold and silver in a market hungry for both.A battle for the UNESCO-recognised Wirikuta Natural and Cultural Ecological Reserve in the northern state of San Luis Potosí has been unfolding over the past year, since word got out that First Majestic Silver Corp. of Canada had been granted 22 mining concessions for more than 6,000 hectares, nearly 70 per cent of it within the reserve.

NEW YORK -- In 1986, as the crack cocaine epidemic ravaged America's inner cities, a Democratic Congress passed legislation dictating harsh mandatory sentences for possession of even small amounts of the drug, blamed for a nationwide wave of violence by dealers and addicts.The law created a staggering sentencing disparity for offenses involving crack versus powdered cocaine, filling prisons with low-level offenders and fueling a racially-charged debate over the fairness and efficacy of federal drug policy for nearly 25 years.Under its provisions, possession of just five grams of crack cocaine -- most often sold in poor black communities -- triggered an automatic five-year prison term. It required 100 times that amount of powdered cocaine, the choice of affluent whites, to earn the same mandatory sentence.

Bram Stoker's private journal sat unnoticed on his great-grandson's bookshelf in England for at least a year.Full of notes that would inform his legendary novel "Dracula" and other stories, the thin, unmarked book had probably been lugged down from the attic at some point, along with other things the Stoker family had passed down for more than a century and placed inconspicuously in Noel Dobbs' Isle of Wight home.

The largest dinosaurs to walk the Earth may have embarked on seasonal migrations that covered hundreds of kilometres when local watering holes dried up and food became scarce.Evidence that giant sauropods set off on epic journeys came to light when scientists examined fossilised teeth recovered from the remains of beasts unearthed in Wyoming and Utah in the US.The analysis of 32 teeth belonging to two species of Camarasaurus, among the most common sauropods found in North America, suggests the creatures migrated during hot, dry summers, from their usual habitats on flood plains in search of food and water in surrounding uplands.

The truth is out: Prince Charles is related to Vlad the Impaler.The heir to the British throne says he is related to Vlad the Impaler, the cruel 15th-Century Romanian warlord who helped inspire Bram Stoker's 1897 vampire novel "Dracula."He makes the comments on an upcoming TV show to promote his interest in protecting the forests of Romania's Transylvania region.

What is going to happen when our machines wake up? What will happen when all these computers that run our lives suddenly become intelligent and self-aware? It's a question that makes sense to ask today, as the world marks the recent passage of John McCarthy.McCarthy was an emeritus professor at Stanford who was known for pushing the boundaries of what was possible with computers. He developed the venerable computer programming language called Lisp, using it to develop one of the first computer chess programs. He also helped spur the growth of the Internet through his early time-sharing technologies (these were like an early version of cloud computing). But it is for A.I. that he will be remembered.

Archeology groups are lining up against a proposal, currently being debated on the floor of the House of Representatives, to give a major copper mining company a large chunk of federal land in Arizona in exchange for private lands. The groups are particularly concerned that any mine built on the former federal land would destroy archeological sites near Oak Flat, a popular Arizona recreational area.

Historians believe the camp, once home to an estimated 1,000 legionaries and located on the River Lippe near the town of Olfen, may well have been served as a key base for the Roman General Drusus, who waged a long and bloody war against the tribes that once inhabited what is now western Germany.The find comes 100 years after the discovery of a bronze Roman helmet near Olfen indicated the presence of ancient remains but it took a century of searching to finally discover the exact location of the camp.

Archaeologists have discovered what is believed to be a prehistoric ceremonial site on Cave Hill in north Belfast.It follows a community excavation involving more than 400 people at the site of Ballyaghagan cashel on the Upper Hightown Road, which had never before been unearthed.Dr Harry Welsh, an archaeologist with Queen's University, which led the Big Dig project, said some of the earliest items on the site dated back to 3,500 years BC.

The casual visitor to this site might ask: "Why didn't the world know about this place before?"In almost every way, its architectural and artistic grandeur impresses the onlooker much like the famous Cambodian temple complex of Angkor Wat.But comparatively fewer people know of its existence.

ATHENS, OCTOBER 24 - Minoan civilisation, and Zakros Palace in particular, are the focus of the 11th International Cretological Congress on October 21-27 in Rethymnon, one of the three big cities on the island. The Minoan Zakros Palace, located on the eastern part of the island, is one of the four Minoan palaces - the others are Knossos, Festos and Malia - uncovered by archaeological excavations last century. The palace spans 4,500 square metres (one fifth of the area of the Palace of Knossos) and was the religious and administrative centre for a settlement that spanned 8,000 square metres. The palace has two main structures, built over 2 different periods.

There is now broad agreement on the circumstances of Ötzi's death. Around 100 experts on mummies from nearly every single continent gathered for the "2nd Bolzano Mummy Congress" held at the European Academy of Bolzano from the 20th to the 22nd October 2011, with the aim of discussing any diseases he might have been suffering from and the events surrounding his death. From the moment of his discovery 20 years ago, Ötzi -- the 5,000-year-old glacier mummy -- has been puzzling the scientific research community, though little by little he is also revealing many of his secrets.

Experts from the Bruning National Archaeological Museum have discovered the tomb of a dignitary who belonged to the 10th-century Lambayeque culture in northern Peru, project director Carlos Wester La Torre told Efe.After five years of excavations at the pre-Columbian Chotuna-Chornancap Archaeological Complex in the Lambayeque region, the group of archaeologists uncovered "the first level of the tomb of a dignitary, a member of the local elite, from the first millennium after Christ," Wester said.Found in the tomb was a kind of cloak measuring almost 6 square meters (65 square feet), used in the funerary ritual and decorated with an iconography displaying the "anthropomorphous wave and circles" that were a recurring theme in the art of Lambayeque culture.

Chilean authorities were still evacuating residents living near a volcano in the country's far south after a volcano spewed a jet of steam 3,200 feet into the air and seismic activity triggered an avalanche.Government officials flew over the Hudson volcano, which lies around 1,000 miles south of the Chilean capital Santiago.More than 100 residents from the sparsely populated area have been evacuated as a precaution as the state emergency office ONEMI increased the volcanic alert status to Level 5 in preparation for an imminent major eruption.

The scientists who last month appeared to have found that certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light have fine-tuned their experiment to check whether the remarkable discovery is correct.Their modified experiments – which are the result of suggestions from other physicists about potential flaws in their research – should be completed before the end of the year.The original experiment, reported last month, involved firing beams of neutrinos through the ground from Cern near Geneva to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy 720 kilometres (450 miles) away. The neutrinos seemed to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they would if they had been travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum.

In the predawn hours, NASA launched a 13-story rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base that lighted the night sky for miles around.The Delta II rocket launched at 2:48 a.m. PDT on Friday from Space Launch Complex-2 at the base, located northwest of Santa Barbara. It was carrying a $1.5-billion weather satellite that's armed with new state-of-the-art sensors that will observe the ozone, atmospheric temperatures, snow and vegetation coverage.

Humans may have undergone a gradual rather than an abrupt transition from fishing, hunting and gathering to farming, according to a new study of ancient pottery.Researchers at the University of York and the University of Bradford analysed cooking residues preserved in 133 ceramic vessels from the Western Baltic regions of Northern Europe to establish whether these residues were from terrestrial, marine or freshwater organisms.

Has bacteria in astronaut poop left on the moon been genetically altered? Did solar wind and ultraviolet radiation destroy the flag at Tranquility Base, landing site for the first Apollo moon mission? Are the lunar rovers dented with micrometeoroid impacts?These are among the science questions raised by a NASA team tasked to come up with guidelines to preserve lunar artifacts before contenders in a $30-million competition sponsored by Google arrive on the moon beginning in about two years.

Marine archeologists say that the ancient wreckage of a ship discovered in the seabed off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, belongs to the ancient "lost fleet" of ships deployed by China's 13th century Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, CNN reports.Explorers found the 20-meter-long shipwreck some 25 meters off the coast of Nagasaki using ultra-sound equipment, buried about a meter deep in the sandy seabed. Archeologists believe the ship dates back to 1281, and was part of a 4,400-vessel fleet that China's Mongol rulers deployed in a thwarted attempt to invade Japan.

The ability to dream is a fascinating aspect of the human mind. However, how the images and emotions that we experience so intensively when we dream form in our heads remains a mystery. Up to now it has not been possible to measure dream content. Max Planck scientists working with colleagues from the Charité hospital in Berlin have now succeeded, for the first time, in analysing the activity of the brain during dreaming. They were able to do this with the help of lucid dreamers, i.e. people who become aware of their dreaming state and are able to alter the content of their dreams. The scientists measured that the brain activity during the dreamed motion matched the one observed during a real executed movement in a state of wakefulness.

This year's hunt for the Higgs boson is drawing to a close. On 30 October, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, will end its 2011 run of the proton–proton collisions that search for the elusive particle, thought to give other fundamental particles their mass.But physicists believe that the collider will have collected enough data by the end of 2012, after experiments resume in March, to say whether the Higgs exists. In fact, they say, strong hints of whether or not it exists may be present in data already collected. "We are entering the golden year for the Higgs search," says Guido Tonelli, spokesman for the LHC's CMS experiment, one of the detectors that is used in the search for the Higgs boson, "and in the next few months we may be able to give important messages.

In a small room lined with shelves of skulls, fossils, bones and antique violins, researchers are using advanced computer imaging to study priceless objects, including a mummy from Peru. So what's inside?Some patients find CT scanners and other medical imaging devices claustrophobic.But this lady, a high-born Peruvian woman in her 40s, was not complaining - she has been dead for about seven centuries. And researchers at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History would like to know a bit more about her.

A celebrity psychic who claims to speak with the dead in sellout shows across the country has been challenged by sceptics to prove her supernatural powers. They have invited TV "star psychic" Sally Morgan to demonstrate her ability to connect with the spirit world in a specially designed test in Liverpool on Monday.The Halloween challenge is backed by the US paranormal investigator James Randi, and qualifies as the first step towards claiming a million-dollar prize established by the James Randi Educational Foundation for any psychic who can prove their "gift" to be real.

In today's issue of the journal Nature, astronomers report that organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe. The results suggest that complex organic compounds are not the sole domain of life but can be made naturally by stars.Prof. Sun Kwok and Dr. Yong Zhang of the University of Hong Kong show that an organic substance commonly found throughout the Universe contains a mixture of aromatic (ring-like) and aliphatic (chain-like) components. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble those of coal and petroleum. Since coal and oil are remnants of ancient life, this type of organic matter was thought to arise only from living organisms. The team's discovery suggests that complex organic compounds can be synthesized in space even when no life forms are present.

A previously unknown portrait by Spanish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez has been unveiled in London.Portrait of a gentleman, bust-length, in a black tunic and white collar, was previously owned by 19th Century British artist Matthew Shepperson.It was discovered after a number of artworks by Shepperson were consigned for sale last year.Further examination and an x-ray confirmed the work to be Velazquez.

The chemical factories around young stars may give rise to far more complex molecules than previously thought.Relatively complex, carbon-containing molecules have been found in comets and on planets before, thought to have been made elsewhere in our Solar System.But "unidentified infrared emissions" seen from the cosmos, says a new report in Nature, may come from even larger molecules forged near young stars.They say these "stellar organics" may have been delivered to the early Earth.

Penn Museum in Philadelphia has developed the world's largest collection of hominid fossil casts, most of them painstakingly recreated from molds of important original fossils in what makes up the human evolutionary record. Over several decades, these molds have been made at different sites around the globe by physical anthropologists Janet Monge (Associate Curator of the Physical Anthropology Collection) and Alan Mann (Curator Emeritus of that collection).The importance of those casts to the ongoing study of human evolution remains, even in this age of three dimensional scans and other hi tech imagery, vital. The reproduction casts from those molds are requested by teachers and scholars around the world, as they allow students and scholars to study and compare fossils from disparate parts of the world, learning from the direct evidence.

WASHINGTON: Astronomers have discovered a mysterious little dwarf planet which they believe is covered in ice and may sport the wispy remnants of an atmosphere.The planet, nicknamed "Snow White", lies outside Neptune and is orbiting the Sun as part of the Kuiper belt - the ring of icy bodies that orbit the sun beyond Neptune.Officially known as 2007 OR10, it is actually red, half of its surface is covered by water ice that probably spewed from ancient cryovolcanoes, researchers said.

TELEGRAPHThe Frau Maria was commissioned by Catherine the Great to transport precious porcelain, gold, silver, bronze and 27 paintings by Dutch masters for her art collection, which became the basis for the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg.But the ship was struck by a storm in October 1771 and sank 41 metres (135 feet) off the coast of what was then Sweden, Tarasov said.Artem Tarasov, head of the Rescue of National Cultural and Historic Valuables fund, said the project would take two years.

The skeletal remains of a Roman-era couple reveal the pair has been holding hands for 1,500 years.Italian archaeologists say the man and woman were buried at the same time between the 5th and 6th century A.D. in central-northern Italy. Wearing a bronze ring, the woman is positioned so she appears to be gazing at her male partner."We believe that they were originally buried with their faces staring into each other. The position of the man's vertebrae suggests that his head rolled after death," Donato Labate, the director of the excavation at the archaeological superintendency of Emilia-Romagna, told Discovery News.

A team of Mexican archaeologists has discovered hundreds of rudimentary man-made tools and artifacts dating back to the Early Holocene era (between 8,000-11,000 years ago) in the northwestern state of Baja California Sur, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.The objects were found at an archaeological site known as El Coyote, located in the Los Cabos region, the INAH said, adding that they "bolster the hypothesis" that the first colonists of the hemisphere populated the region via watercraft migration, following coastlines from northeast Asia southward into the Americas.

An anthropoid sarcophagus and other ancient Egyptian artefacts are recovered by the Tourism and Antiquities PoliceFollowing comprehensive investigations carried out by the Tourism and Antiquities Police (TAP), a collection of missing ancient Egyptian artefacts were recovered buried by antiquity smugglers in the desert south of Saqqara necropolis.According to a release submitted by TAP, the restituted collection includes of an anthropoid painted wood sarcophagus, two wooden statues depicting the god Ptah and seven pieces of inscribed limestone which were parts of a false door. The objects were stolen from Saqqara necropolis and taken out of the archaeological space in order to be sold.

Asteroid 21 Lutetia may be hiding a once molten metal-rich core underneath its battered surface, say planetary scientists analysing data from the Rosetta spacecraft that swooped past the ancient asteroid last summer.The European Space Agency's Rosetta probe is on its way to rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, but on 10 July 2010 it flew past asteroid 21 Lutetia, snapping shots of a cracked and dented surface as a result of eons worth of impacts. At the time, 132 x 100 x 76km Lutetia was the largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft; Vesta now holds that record with the Dawn spacecraft in orbit around it since July of this year.

In the last 9 billion years, just about every galaxy has had, on average, one major collision with a neighbor, a new study reveals.The discovery, made by astronomers studying data from the Hubble Space Telescope, provides the most accurate check yet on the rate of galaxy collisions in our universe, scientists said. Researchers used Hubble photos of galaxies large and small, as well as a computer model of how these cosmic car crashes take place.Though such cosmic fender-benders sound violent, the stars within galaxies almost always emerge unscathed, because of the vast distances between them. The galaxies themselves do get bent out of shape and end up merging into larger galactic systems, bound by mutual gravity.

Graham will be speaking at Mind Body Spirit at the Royal Horticultural Halls, Victoria, London on Sat 12th Nov. 3.30-5.30pm.Encounters with non terrestrial beings have occurred for more than 35,000 years. Graham's research into shamanism, ancient cave art , ayahuasaca and hallucinogenics has led to his hypothesis that through induced altered states of consciousness, our brains retune, allowing interaction with these other dimensional beings. These communications are fundamental to the future of our species. We need to listen and take sovereignty over our own consciousness.

To visible-light telescopes, this star-forming cloud appears to be chomping through the cosmos, earning it the nickname the "Pacman" nebula, like the famous Pac-Man video game that debuted in 1980. When viewed in infrared light by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, the Pacman takes on a new appearance. In place of its typical, triangle-shaped mouth is a new set of lower, sharp-looking teeth. The Pacman is located at the top of the picture, taking a bite in the direction of the upper left corner.The teeth are actually pillars where new stars may be forming. These structures were formed when radiation and winds from massive stars in a central cluster blew gas and dust away, leaving only the densest of material.

There is strong support among the public in the US, UK and Canada for more research on geo-engineering technology, a study has suggested.The survey focused on "solar radiation management", which involves reflecting energy from the Sun away from the Earth's surface, and received support from 72% of respondents.The internet survey was commissioned by researchers from North America.The findings appear in the Environmental Research Letters journal.

Future microchips may have only one type of component, capable of rewiring itself to do different jobs.Researchers from Northwestern University in the US have developed a material that can radically change its electronic properties.A resistor made from it could become a transistor or a diode, according to the report in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.The discovery could lead to cheaper, smaller and more powerful computers.

These silvery threads stretching around the dark globe create a dramatic spider's web showing the patterns of our global sprawl.The stunning images are the result of 13 years of devotion by Canadian anthropologist Felix Pharand who uses them to show how human technologies such as data cables, aeroplanes and roads are colonising the surface of our planet.Using an ordinary home PC, Pharand input data from agencies such as the Geospatial Intelligence Agency and Atmospheric Administration to create accurate illustrations of how humans have 'domesticated' our planet - superimposing the data on images of the earth's cities lit up at night.Pharand claims three per cent of the planet's land surface is under tarmac - an area the size of India.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," science fiction author Arthur Clarke once suggested.Say a magic carpet and a genie's lamp, the stuff of Arabian Nights, which made the Arab desert famous for fables and legends?Well, how about Google Earth instead? Like a friendly genie, that modern technology has started answering archeologist's wishes with its worldwide catalog of satellite views of the Earth. A pair of studies in the Journal of Archaelogical Science this year suggest these views are revealing a vast and ancient story, one only starting to emerge from the fabled desert of Arabia.

Think the best place for solar panels is the desert? Think again. In Antarctica, the sun shines 24 hours a day.The standard vision is a desert filled with solar panels. Solar power is at home in the desert, because the desert is hot. But the Arctic is calling.Most of us have a hard time imagining solar panels among the frigid expanses and mountain ranges of South America or Nepal, but those sun-drenched regions can generate more energy per hectare than many of the world's deserts, according to an article in the Environmental Science & Technology.

Tiny stars are being created by the world's largest and most energetic lasers in the hope of tapping what could be a relatively clean energy source - nuclear fusion.The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is at the forefront of efforts to harness the power of fusion. It is also being used to understand how materials behave under extreme temperatures and pressures, similar to those found inside a detonating nuclear warhead.

Remember Michael Jackson's music video for "Billie Jean"? Where the sidewalk tiles lit up whenever the King of Pop's patent leather shoes would touch them? Wouldn't it be cool if those tiles actually existed and, besides lighting up, produced electricity every time someone stepped on them?Laurence Kembell-Cook, director of Pavegen Systems, thought it was a good idea. So he went ahead and designed Pavegen tiles that harvest the kinetic energy of pedestrian footsteps and converts it into electricity.Intended for areas with high-foot traffic, the tiles store energy in a lithium polymer battery or can be used to generate wattage for street lights, speakers, pedestrian crossings, alarms, signs and advertising.

A summer research expedition organized by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has led to the identification of gigantic amoebas at one of the deepest locations on Earth.During a July 2011 voyage to the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, the deepest region on the planet, Scripps researchers and National Geographic engineers deployed untethered free-falling/ascending landers equipped with digital video and lights to search the largely unexplored region. The team documented the deepest known existence of xenophyophores, single-celled animals exclusively found in deep-sea environments. Xenophyophores are noteworthy for their size, with individual cells often exceeding 10 centimeters (4 inches), their extreme abundance on the seafloor and their role as hosts for a variety of organisms.

Being a headbanger doesn't have to be a damaging way of going about things, new scientific research on woodpeckers suggests.When they rapidly "drum" on tree trunks, the birds experience enormous stresses to the head that would gravely injure humans, yet they are completely unscathed.Now Chinese researchers have investigated how they protect their brains from impact damage while pecking wood, in the hope of finding new approaches to prevent and treat human head injury.

Africa will struggle to escape from poverty and hunger this century because its rapidly expanding population will continue to grow significantly faster than any other region of the world, says a United Nations report. Every continent has seen the stabilisation of their populations, with Asia's expected to peak in the middle part of the 21st century, but the number of people living in Africa by 2100 is likely to treble, the report says.The UN calculates that the global population, which on 31 October 2011 is estimated to reach seven billion people, will hit 9.3 billion by 2050 and more than 10 billion by the end of the century. But it warns that, if fertility rates in Africa do not begin to fall from present levels as demographers predict, then the global population in 2100 could reach as high as 15 billion, more than twice the present level.

No cheese, bread or sugar are available at a recently opened Berlin eatery. In fact, guests are served dishes made only of ingredients that would have been available to their hunter-gatherer ancestors. The Stone Age fare is prepared by adherents of the Paleolithic movement, who say their restaurant is the first of its kind in Europe.The restaurant menu shows a stereotypical image of modern humanity's forbearer, the jutting profile of a hirsute caveman. Inside, diners eat at candle-lit tables with a contemporary cave painting hanging in the background. These hints aside, Berlin's Sauvage restaurant looks similar to many of the German capital's other trendy eateries. But the chalkboard out front announcing a "Real Food Revolution -- Paleolithic Cuisine!" alerts diners to the fact that their Stone Age menu might offer up some surprises.

A German tourist has disappeared in mysterious circumstances on the South Pacific island of Nuku Hiva. Shortly after he went missing, human bones were found in a remote fire pit, triggering media speculation that he was eaten by a cannibal. Justice officials, however, are dismissing such conjecture.A German holidaymaker who had set out to tour the South Pacific island of Nuku Hiva with a local guide has disappeared, and the discovery of human bones and teeth in a remote fire pit has led to media speculation that the tourist may have fallen victim to cannibalism.

The cloud ejected from the sun Saturday arrived on Monday more intensely and quickly than people were expecting, said Doug Biesecker, a physicist and researcher for the Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Weather Service."We knew there would be something, but we were calling for very low level system impacts and for aurora to only be visible to those who are used to seeing aurora," Biesecker said. "Boy was I wrong.

The retreat of Antarctica's fast-flowing Thwaites Glacier is expected to speed up within 20 years, once the glacier detaches from an underwater ridge that is currently holding it back, says a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.Thwaites Glacier, which drains into west Antarctica's Amundsen Sea, is being closely watched for its potential to raise global sea levels as the planet warms. Neighboring glaciers in the Amundsen region are also thinning rapidly, including Pine Island Glacier and the much larger Getz Ice Shelf. The study is the latest to confirm the importance of seafloor topography in predicting how these glaciers will behave in the near future.

Some 2250 years ago in Egypt, a man known today only as M1 struggled with a long, painful, progressive illness. A dull pain throbbed in his lower back, then spread to other parts of his body, making most movements a misery. When M1 finally succumbed to the mysterious ailment between the ages of 51 and 60, his family paid for him to be mummified so that he could be reborn and relish the pleasures of the afterworld.Now an international research team has diagnosed what ailed M1: the oldest known case of prostate cancer in ancient Egypt and the second oldest case in the world.

The sun battered the Earth's magnetosphere with an "epic" geomagnetic storm over the last couple of days, generating beautiful auroral displays at low latitudes. Now it's Mars' turn.On Saturday (Oct. 22), a large bubble of solar plasma was blasted from the sun's surface. Unlike the coronal mass ejection (CME) that struck us on Monday, Saturday's CME was sent in a different direction -- toward the Red Planet.As per simulations carried out by NASA's Goddard Space Weather Laboratory (shown below), the CME should have arrived in Mars orbit by now (Oct. 26). However, its impact on Mars will be very different than a CME's impact on Earth.

(Reuters) - Archaeologists raised another cannon on Wednesday from the sunken wreck of pirate Blackbeard's legendary ship off the coast of North Carolina.The eight-foot (2.4-metre) cannon, which had rested at the bottom of Beaufort Inlet since the ship Queen Anne's Revenge sank in 1718, was covered in a cement-like shell of sand, salt and sea life. "It's like Christmas," project director Mark Wilde-Ramsing said in a statement.Blackbeard, whose real name was widely believed to be Edward Teach or Thatch and who had a residence in North Carolina, captured a French slave ship in 1717 and renamed it Queen Anne's Revenge.

Our ancestors' move from hunter-gathering to farming happened gradually rather than abruptly, food residues found in 6,000-year-old cooking pots suggests.Evidence from pots found around the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe shows farmers at the beginning of the Neolithic period continued to cook the same types of food foraged by their immediate hunter-gatherer ancestors. The finding challenges the traditional view that farming quickly and completely replaced the more ancient lifestyle.

An instrument on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity can check for any water that might be bound into shallow underground minerals along the rover's path."If we conclude that there is something unusual in the subsurface at a particular spot, we could suggest more analysis of the spot using the capabilities of other instruments," said this instrument's principal investigator, Igor Mitrofanov of the Space Research Institute, Russia.

In the fifth century, Champasak was thought to be the centre of the Laotian universe. Today it's a drowsy one-car village clutching the western bank of the Mekong River in southern Laos and home to the tiny Hindu-built Vat Phou, which some archaeologists believe may have been the first Angkor temple ever built.At a glance, Vat Phou doesn't seem like the kind of structure that would initiate an empire. A tiny prayer hall at the top of a precarious stone stairway, with two reception halls on the plains below, Vat Phou lacks the jaw-dropping awesomeness of temples in Cambodia's Angkor Archaeological Park. But as with the Angkor temples, its symbolism is extraordinary.

The Earth's surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the "Climategate" affair has concluded.The Berkeley Earth Project has used new methods and some new data, but finds the same warming trend seen by groups such as the UK Met Office and Nasa.The project received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change."Climategate", in 2009, involved claims global warming had been exaggerated.

Wave and tidal stream power are set to get more funding in proposed changes to the level of support for renewable energy.Subsidies for offshore wind will be reduced but more gradually and later than had previously been plannedThe Government says the proposals, put out to consultation today, will cost less than leaving the funding as it is.But DECC figures also show the cost will amount to £50 for an average household by 2016.

A reconstruction based on the skull of Norway's best-preserved Stone Age skeleton makes it possible to study the features of a boy who lived outside Stavanger 7 500 years ago."It is hoped that this reconstruction is a good likeness and that, if someone who knew him in life had been presented with this restoration, they would hopefully have recognised the face," says Jenny Barber, an MSc student at the University of Dundee in Scotland.She has scientifically rebuilt the face of the strong and stocky Viste Boy, who lived in the Vistehola cave near Stavanger, so that people can now look him right in the eye.

Based on new dating results, the tip of a bone point lodged within the rib bone of a mastodon excavated in the 1970's near Manis, Washington, turns out to be about 13,800 years old, say scientists. The finding suggests that hunters who killed the mastodon likely lived in North America before the traditionally accepted dawn of the "Clovis" culture, thought previously by many scientists to be the earliest human culture established on the continent.

It's like something out of "The Da Vinci Code": Hundreds of thousands of fragments from medieval religious scrolls are scattered across the globe. How will scholars put them back together?The answer, according to scientists at Tel Aviv University, is to use computer software based on facial recognition technology. But instead of recognizing faces, this software recognizes fragments thought to be part of the same work. Then, the program virtually "glues" the pieces back together.

As biting winds cut through the below-freezing air around them, a team of researchers will next year seek to discover previously-unknown life by exploring an Antarctic lake that redefines the notion of "remote."Lake Ellsworth is roughly 10 km (6.2 miles) long and is estimated to be several tens of meters deep. The reason Its depth can only be estimated is that, although it has been mapped by radar, Lake Ellsworth has never been seen by human eyes.

A research project at Microsoft Research Cambridge has brought forth a prototype called Holodesk, which lets you manipulate virtual objects with your hand. You literally "get your hands on" the virtual display. According to the official description from its creators, there is at work a "novel real-time algorithm for representing hands and other physical objects" allowing physically realistic interaction between real and virtual 3-D objects.

Culture is not a trait that is unique to humans. By studying orangutan populations, a team of researchers headed by anthropologist Michael Krützen from the University of Zurich has demonstrated that great apes also have the ability to learn socially and pass them down through a great many generations. The researchers provide the first evidence that culture in humans and great apes has the same evolutionary roots, thus answering the contentious question as to whether variation in behavioral patterns in orangutans are culturally driven, or caused by genetic factors and environmental influences.

New research from the University of Reading overturns conventional views on the nature of evolution, arguing that mammals did not develop into their many different forms in one early and rapid burst of evolution but rather found many different evolutionary routes.It is widely assumed that species often diverge rapidly early in their evolution, and that this is followed by a longer, drawn-out period of slower evolutionary fine-tuning.

Nuclear fusion drives the stars, including our sun. But on Earth, despite efforts dating to the 1940s, sustained and controlled fusion for electrical power production has never been realized. Research persists, because few energy sources could be greener. Fusion yields far more energy than any other source per unit of mass; its heavy-hydrogen fuel is plentiful in sea water; burning it produces not a trace of carbon.

Scientists have successfully demonstrated that they can build some of the basic components for digital devices out of bacteria and DNA, which could pave the way for a new generation of biological computing devices, in research published today in the journal Nature Communications.The researchers, from Imperial College London, have demonstrated that they can build logic gates, which are used for processing information in devices such as computers and microprocessors, out of harmless gut bacteria and DNA. These are the most advanced biological logic gates ever created by scientists.

The United States Department of Defense is looking for ways to repurpose space junk thousands of miles above Earth back into valuable satellite parts, or even completely new spacecraft.The military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has started a program called Phoenix, which seeks to recycle still-functioning pieces of defunct satellites and incorporate them into new space systems on the cheap.

John McCarthy helped found the study of artificial intelligence, named the discipline and spent decades making computers understand things that for humans are common sense. He devised the programming language Lisp, a favored tool of software developers for more than a half-century.Mr. McCarthy, who died Monday at age 84, brought a mathematician's rigor to computing. "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense," he wrote in a 1995 paper.Collaborating with other pioneers of early computing, Mr. McCarthy worked on one of the first chess-playing programs with British researcher Alan Turing and edited an early volume of papers on artificial intelligence with Claude Shannon, the father of information theory.

The wreck of a ship thought to have taken part in a failed Mongol invasion of Japan has been found off the Japanese coast.A team of researchers uncovered a 12-metre (36ft) section of keel buried in deep sand off Nagasaki prefecture. They said it was the first time such a large piece of hull had been recovered from the Mongol invasion fleets. The 13th Century attacks on Japan were a rare setback for the Mongols at the height of their powers.Experts expressed surprise that the wreck was so well preserved after so many centuries on the seabed.

Confirming suspicions, federal and academic biologists concluded Wednesday that a deadly white fungus is killing bats across North America.More than one million bats have been killed by "White Nose Syndrome" (WNS), tied to the fungus. The fungus, Geomyces destructans, kills little brown bats exposed in lab conditions and directly infects bats exposed to their infected brethren, reports the Nature journal study team led by Jeffrey Lorch of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Some researchers had suggested the fungus was simply an opportunistic infection suffered by bats with immune systems weakened from other causes, particularly after it was shown that European bats exposed to the fungus seem unaffected. However, the new results suggest that North American bats represent a population immunologically naive, and thus highly-vulnerable, to the fungus.

Scientists in Hong Kong believe they have found traces of organic compounds deep in interstellar space that have similar structures to coal and oil. The findings - which are based on infrared spectroscopic data - suggest that these organic compounds exist throughout the universe, and may have seeded life on Earth.For decades astronomers have been aware of a band of mid-infrared emissions coming from interstellar space, but haven't been certain of its origin. Many believe the emissions arise from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) that are excited by ultraviolet photons. Others claim that there are flaws with this hypothesis.

The United Nations will warn this week that the world's population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.That figure is likely to shock many experts as it is far higher than many current estimates. A previous UN estimate had expected the world to have more than 10 billion people by 2100; currently, there are nearly 7 billion.

As part of my article about the search for extraterrestrial life, I interviewed Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, about when we'll find ET, why intelligent beings will be artificial, not biological, and why arms and legs make more sense than wheels. Here's the fascinating transcript of what he had to say.Jennifer Abbasi: How soon do you think we'll find extraterrestrial life?Seth Shostak: I've said that we'll do it within 20 years, because it's a three-way horserace. Each of these horses has about an equal chance of crossing the finish line first and doing so within two decades.

What do a 7th century Irish brooch, a hanging bowl from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, a carved stone in Donegal, Ireland and a Marigold have in common? The answer is an unknown Irish craftsman who was in his time international famous.We start our story with the discovery in the 1930s of an object that was to have a startling effect on our understanding both on our trade networks and the outside influence on Irish art. The object became known as the Ballinderry brooch from the crannog (manmade island dwelling) that was excavated in Ballinderry Lough in Co Offaly. This complex object which combines element of many diverse cultural influences clearly demonstrates that early medieval Ireland was not isolated in the post Roman era. It demonstrates that Ireland at this time was absorbing influences from many cultures adopting and adapting them and then exporting this hybrid art form to early medieval Europe.

The United States may have put the first man on the moon, but Russian scientists and space explorers are now gazing at a new goal -- setting up a colony on the moon.The discovery of volcanic tunnels on the moon could provide a natural shelter for the first lunar colony, cosmonauts and scientists said on Tuesday.Researchers have long suspected the moon's volcanic past left an underground network of lava tubes as its legacy, and 2008 images from Japan's Kaguya spacecraft showed a possible way down -- a mysterious, meters-deep hole breaching the surface.

Researchers have turned a former British taxi driver into an Egyptian-style mummy, with television cameras tracking every step in the process.The results will be on view next Monday in "Mummifying Alan: Egypt's Last Secret," a documentary airing on Britain's Channel 4 television.The show's producers chronicled the months-long procedure of preserving the body of Alan Billis, a 61-year-old retired taxi driver from Torquay in Devon, applying the techniques that the ancient Egyptians used on Tutankhamun.

In August, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration upheld the federal monopoly on marijuana for research by denying University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Lyle Craker, Ph.D., a license to start his own medical marijuana facility.On September 16, we saw why the federal monopoly needs to end when the Department of Health and Human Services rejected our planned, FDA-reviewed study of marijuana for 50 veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and refused to sell us the marijuana we require for the study.

A Japanese systems engineer using a homemade computer has doubled his own world record for calculating the value of pi, crunching the mathematical constant to 10 trillion digits, according to news reports.Just 14 months after hitting 5 trillion digits, Shigeru Kondo, 56, bested his record Sunday, Kyodo News said in a report picked up by other outlets, including The Telegraph. He began his quest last October.Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, commonly noted as 3.14. Math whizzes celebrate it March 14.