Newsdesk Archive

An international team of archaeologists has unearthed what might be the earliest representation of childbirth in western art, they announced today.Consisting of two images of a woman giving birth to a child, the intimate scene was found on a small fragment from a ceramic vessel that is more than 2,600 years old.It was excavated by William Nutt, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington who is legally blind.

In Philadelphia, American and British lawyers have debated the legality of America's founding documents.On Tuesday night, while Republican candidates in Nevada were debating such American issues as nuclear waste disposal and the immigration status of Mitt Romney's gardener, American and British lawyers in Philadelphia were taking on a far more fundamental topic.Namely, just what did Thomas Jefferson think he was doing?Some background: during the hot and sweltering summer of 1776, members of the second Continental Congress travelled to Philadelphia to discuss their frustration with royal rule.

As is to be expected, King Tut gets star billing - and prime real estate - in the traveling exhibition Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs.While the first half of the exhibit, which opens today at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, includes objects associated with 30 Egyptian dynasties spanning 2,000 years, the second half is all Tut all the time. Treasures from his tomb are joined by replicas of his mummy and of British archaeologist Howard Carter's tent at the Valley of the Kings site where Carter discovered the tomb in 1922.

Scientists plumbing the depths of the Mariana Trench -- the deepest part of the ocean on the planet -- have identified gigantic amoebas lurking miles and miles beneath the waters.The creatures are called xenophyophores, and scientists from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego spotted them in the cold, crushing depths 6.6 miles beneath the white caps."They are fascinating giants that are highly adapted to extreme conditions but at the same time are very fragile and poorly studied," said Lisa Levin, a deep-sea biologist and director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS are examining whether one of the country's most popular tourist attractions may have more to it than meets the eye.Newgrange in Co Meath may have a second passage, and it too could be aligned with a solstice event.

HOHHOT, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- Archeologists have discovered 10 sites of ancient civilization in the Badain Jaran Desert, China's third largest desert located in northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.An archeological team composed of 11 experts from Inner Mongolia, Beijing and Sichuan have unearthed large quantities of stone and pottery handicrafts dating back 5,000 years from the sites, which, the experts believe, indicate civilization once flourished in the desert.Experts say one of the most distinguished findings was a black-red painted pottery jar, which represents Neolithic art that dates back 4,500 years.

SHIJIAZHUANG, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chickens began being domesticated in China about 8,000 years ago, far earlier than in the rest of the world,according to a recent study on fossils uncovered in north China's Hebei Province.Archaeologists said they had unearthed 116 fossil specimens from 23 types of animals, including pig, dog, chicken, tortoise, fish, and clam, at the Cishan Site, a Neolithic village relic in the city of Wu'an.Several bone fragments were identified to be from domesticated chickens, said Qiao Dengyun, head of the Handan Municipal Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

Charles Lang Freer, founder and financier of his famous namesake Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., collected the jade pieces because he was attracted to their beauty and fine craftsmanship. He bequeathed them at his death, along with many other priceless items from his vast collection, to the Smithsonian Institution in 1919. There they are housed to this day for the benefit of scholars and the visiting public. Little did he know at the time of his collecting career, however, that he was holding a priceless treasure of jade masterpieces created by ancient master craftsmen who lived as much as 5,000 years ago in the Liangzhu cultural region of the Yangtze River Delta of China.

A task force is evaluating the risk posed by a sunken oil tanker, the SS Montebello. It went to the bottom after being attacked by a Japanese submarine during World War II. State and federal officials want to know if the ship is still carrying its cargo of oil, and if that oil could escape.At stake is a coastline known for its stunning scenery and wildlife sanctuaries. The task force was put together a couple of years ago at the urging of state Sen. Sam Blakeslee.

More humpback whales are swimming in the waters of the North Pacific Ocean than previously thought, an analysis of the largest ever humpback whale survey finds.The number of North Pacific humpback whales in the 2008 study known as the Structure of Populations, Levels of Abundance and Status of Humpbacks, or SPLASH, was estimated at just under 20,000 based on the initial look at the data. But the new research puts the number at over 21,000 and possibly even higher.We feel the numbers may even be larger since there have been across-the-board increases in known population areas and unknown areas have probably seen the same increases," said Jay Barlow, marine mammal biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Fisheries Service at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif.

The upcoming movie In Time features digital clocks embedded in the skin; but imagine that instead of showing your life ticking, the image was part of your phone's interface. Need to make a call? Just dial it up on the palm of your hand.Chris Harrison, a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and a fellow at Microsoft Research, came up with a wearable device that projects an image onto a surface, which then doubles as a touch screen.

New University of Alberta research shows the first evidence that oxygen-breathing bacteria occupied and thrived on land 100 million years earlier than previously thought.The researchers show the most primitive form of aerobic respiring life on land came into existence 2.48 billion years ago.

LIKE a sculpture that springs to life, a new type of robot makes its own body parts using spray-on foam. Such a design could one day be useful in situations in which the exact type of robot needed is not known beforehand, such as space exploration or reconnaissance.Created by Shai Revzen and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Foambot consists of a wheeled "mothership" platform along with several simple joint modules capable of powered bending and flexing. The platform has an on-board supply of chemical reagents and a spray nozzle; when mixed, the reagents expand into hard urethane foam. First the remote-controlled platform arranges the modules on the floor and then it sprays the foam to connect them into the required form.

The currently dominant evolutionary story for the origin of religions might be called the "byproduct theory". It goes something like this.The human brain evolved a series of cognitive modules, a bit like a smartphone downloading applications. One was good for locomotion, another seeing, another empathy, and so on. However, different modules could interfere with one another, called "domain violation" in the literature. The app for locomotion might overrun the app for empathy and, as a result, the hapless owner of that brain might discern a spirit shifting in the rustling trees, because the branches sway a little like limbs moving. The anthropologist Pascal Boyer calls such interpretations "minimally counterintuitive". They can't be too random or they wouldn't grip your imagination. But, clearly, they are not rational. Religion is, therefore, a cognitive mistake. It might once have delivered adaptive advantages: swaying branches could indicate a stalking predator, and so you'd be saved if you fled, even if you believed the threat was a ghost. But rational individuals such as, say, evolutionary theorists now see religious beliefs for what they really are.

The Ekso device - so named because it resembles an exoskeleton - helps the wearer walk of their own accord, by picking up small upper body movements and translating them into strides.The bionic legs were demonstrated on Friday, for the first time in Europe, at the London International Technology Show.Amanda Boxtel, who was paralysed from the waist down in a 1992 skiing accident, described them as "life changing."

Governments and aid agencies should help the world's poorest to move away from areas likely to be hit by flooding and drought, a UK report says.The government-commissioned report warns of potential humanitarian disasters because of climate change.It says the cost of acting now would be much less than the cost of the conflicts and huge loss of life that would otherwise ensue.The report focused on the issue of human migration patterns.

A defunct satellite hurtled toward the atmosphere and pieces of it were expected crash to the Earth within hours, the German Aerospace Center said early Sunday.Pieces of the ROSAT scientific research satellite were expected to hit Sunday morning European time, or between about 0030 and 0530 GMT (between 8:30 p.m. EDT Saturday and 1:30 a.m. EDT Saturday), the agency said.Most parts of the minivan-sized satellite were expected to burn up during re-entry into the atmosphere but up to 30 fragments weighing 1.87 tons (1.7 metric tons) could crash into Earth at speeds up to 280 mph (450 kph).

New results from the analysis of paddy grains found in the Porunthal graveyard archaeological site prove that writing systems in India were in existence in the 5th Century BC, predating the arrival of Asoka, according to history professor at the Pondicherry University and director of the excavation project at Porunthal K. Rajan.Rice paddy samples that were contained in an engraved pot found inside one of the graves were found to be from 450 BC when analysed using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) by the Beta Analytic Lab, USA, he said, addressing a private gathering organised by the Manarkeni journal.

Video:For 25 years, Denise Herzing has returned to the same place in the Bahamas to study a group of wild dolphins. Next year, she will pioneer a project to communicate with them.

Just 12 years after the arrival of the 6 billionth individual on the planet in 1999, humanity will greet the 7 billionth arrival this month. The world population continues its rapid ascent, with roughly 75 million more births than deaths each year. The consequences of a world crowded with 7 billion people are enormous. And unless the world population stabilizes during the 21st century, the consequences for humanity could be grim.A rising population puts enormous pressures on a planet already plunging into environmental catastrophe. Providing food, clothing, shelter, and energy for 7 billion people is a task of startling complexity.

Researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas say they have discovered a form of "invisibility cloak," but don't think you'll have "Harry Potter" powers quite yet.But, is it true that J.K. Rowling's fictional wizardry could become scientific fact? CNN Geek Out spoke with Dr. Ray Baughman, Director of The Alan G MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute there at UT Dallas, to find out.CNN Geek Out: How did this experiment come about and how does it work?

The most complete digital topographic ever made of the Earth was released by NASA Monday.The map, known as a global digital elevation model, was created from images collected by the Japanese Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or ASTER, instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite.The 3-D effect is achieved by merging two slightly offset two-dimensional images (called stereo-pair images) to create depth.The first version of the map was released by NASA and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in June 2009.

Nuralagus rex lived in the Late Neogene, which ended about 2.5m years ago, and was 10 times the size of extant rabbits, weighing an estimated average of 12 kg.The small skull of Nuralagus, which lived on Menorca, suggests dramatic decreases in hearing, sight, and motor-related abilities compared to typical rabbits. Because it had no known predators, there was no selection for detecting or outrunning them. The lagomorph, the largest ever seen, appears to have had reduced aerobic capacity and to have walked slowly rather than jumped quickly.

The plant doesn't look as if it had an unusual story to tell. A type of sedge, it tops out at a foot (0.3 meters) tall and has leaves that look just like blades of green grass.But after this plant turned up in a Mississippi cemetery four years ago, botanists put on their detective hats to figure out how it got there. The weedy species had never been found in North America before then.Their main theory: Gypsies.

Europe has formally invited Russia to participate in space missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018.A "yes" from the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) may be the only way of saving the missions which are at risk of cancellation due to lack of funds.The 2016 mission involves a satellite to study the Martian atmosphere, while a big robot rover to investigate the surface is scheduled for 2018.

Scientists have found tiny bubbles beneath the blubber of dolphins that have beached themselves.The bubbles were discovered by taking ultrasound scans of the animals within minutes of stranding off Cape Cod, US.The team's findings help confirm what many researchers have long suspected: dolphins avoid the bends by taking long, shallow decompression dives after feeding at depth.The study is reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

University of Minnesota engineering researchers in the College of Science and Engineering have recently discovered a new alloy material that converts heat directly into electricity. This revolutionary energy conversion method is in the early stages of development, but it could have wide-sweeping impact on creating environmentally friendly electricity from waste heat sources.

The space tourism company Virgin Galactic has struck a deal with NASA worth up to $4.5 million for research flights on the company's new private spaceliner SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic officials announced today (Oct. 13).Under the deal, NASA will charter up to three flights on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, an air-launched spacecraft designed to carry eight people on trips to suborbital space.

Next week you will be travelling underwater off the coast of Florida as part of NASA's NEEMO undersea exploration mission. Why?In 2025 NASA wants to send humans to explore asteroids a kilometre in size or smaller. These are effectively microgravity environments. Nobody knows how to do field geology in microgravity – the best way to simulate it is underwater.This is quite a change from your usual job, managing NASA's Mars rovers.I have been saying publicly for years that I am a big supporter of human space flight. This is the chance for me to stop talking about it and actually do something towards it.

London (CNN) -- What if buildings had lungs that could absorb carbon emissions from the city and convert them into something useful? What if they had skin that could control their temperature without the need for radiators or air-conditioning? What if buildings could come "alive?"Science fiction?"Not as such," claims Dr Rachel Armstrong, senior TED fellow and co-director of Avatar, a research group exploring the potential of advanced technologies in architecture. "Over the next 40 years, 'living' buildings -- biologically programmed to extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere -- could fill our cities.

For the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that's cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets.Water is an essential ingredient for life. Scientists have found thousands of Earth-oceans' worth of it within the planet-forming disk surrounding the star TW Hydrae. TW Hydrae is 176 light years away in the constellation Hydra and is the closest solar-system-to-be.University of Michigan astronomy professor Ted Bergin is a co-author of a paper on the findings published in the Oct. 21 edition of Science..

At the bottom of plants' ability to sense touch, gravity or a nearby trellis are mechanosensitive channels, pores through the cells' plasma membrane that are opened and closed by the deformation of the membrane. Elisabeth Haswell, Ph.D., a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, is studying the roles these channels play in Arabdopsis plants by growing mutant plants that lack one or more of the 10 possible channel proteins in this species.

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 new study confirms what parents have long suspected: Adolescence can do a number on kids' brains. Researchers have found that IQ can rise or fall during the teen years and that the brain's structure reflects this uptick or decline. The result offers the first direct evidence that intelligence can change after early childhood and provides new hope for boosting the brain's abilities.

A "criminal" stone-stealing Adelie penguin has been captured on camera by a BBC film crew.The team, filming for the documentary Frozen Planet, spent four months with the penguin colony on Ross Island, Antarctica.The footage they captured shows a male penguin stealing stones from its neighbour's nest.The birds build their stone nests to elevate and protect their eggs from run-off when the Antarctic ice melts.

Experiments with worms show that altering an enzyme can not only lengthen their life spans, but that the longevity effect can be carried across several generationsIn October 2009 Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet was sitting in her office when graduate student Eric Greer came to her with a slightly heretical question. Brunet's lab had recently learned that they could lengthen a worm's lifetime by manipulating levels of an enzyme called SET2. "What if extending a worm's lifetime using SET2 can affect the life span of its descendants, even if the descendants have normal amounts of the enzyme?" he asked.

THE ETERNITIESFingerprints of the Gods author Graham Hancock has slammed the decades long 'War on Drugs' prevalent in Western societies.'[W]hen the state sends us to prison for essentially exploring our own consciousness, this is a grotesque abuse of human rights,' he said in an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.Today is the last day to sign the White House petition to legalise and regulate Marijuana. See here: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/legalize-and-regulate-marijuana-manner-similar-alcohol/y8l45gb1

Newspapers are the biggest threat to the nation's mental wellbeingI'm a lightweight; always have been. I didn't get properly drunk until I was 25, on a night out which culminated in a spectacular public vomiting in a Chinese restaurant. Ever wondered what the clatter of 60 pairs of chopsticks being simultaneously dropped in disgust might sound like? Don't ask me. I can't remember. I was too busy bitterly coughing what remained of my guts all over the carpet.

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.

Humans were hunting large mammals in North America about 800 years earlier than previously thought, new analysis of a controversial mastodon specimen – with what appears to be a spear tip in its rib – seems to confirm.The find suggests humans were hunting mastodons using tools made from bone about a thousand years before the start of the "Clovis culture", reputedly the first human culture in North America. Other evidence points to mammoth hunting using stone tools around this time, but the notion of pre-Clovis hunting has remained highly controversial.

Seen here is the birth of a juvenile exoplanet. Using data from the Keck telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, astronomers have directly imaged a newly formed planet growing from the gas and dust of a sun-like star.The star, LkCa 15, is just slightly smaller than our sun but much younger, only around two million years old. This means that the planet (the blue dot in the right image) is at least five times younger than any other extrasolar planet discovered. The findings, which were presented at a conference on Oct. 19, indicate that the planet is around six times the mass of Jupiter and orbits its parent star at approximately the distance that Uranus is from our sun.

Long-lived worms can transmit their extended lifespan to the next generation by passing on changes in the way their genes are used, rather than differences in DNA itself.A study has shown that nematode worms can inherit a "memory of longevity" from their parents, even though their genome remains unchanged.It is not clear if the same processes apply to humans, but Anne Brunet from Stanford University, who led the study, noted that some genes that affect the lifespan of nematodes were later found to influence human longevity too. "In several cases, the worm has proved to be a good model for humans, who live 2,000 times longer," she said.

An ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end - once and for all - a long-held idea of how the Americas were first populated.The rib, from a tusked beast known as a mastodon, has been dated precisely to 13,800 years ago.This places it before the so-called Clovis hunters, who many academics had argued were the North American continent's original inhabitants.

A tree not found anywhere else in the world has been discovered in a nature reserve in an unlikely part of England.Conservationists have found the unique willow - a combination of four different types - in an area of Leicester that was earmarked for a football pitch.Staff at the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust found the unusual specimen in Aylestone Meadows, on the edge of the city.Neill Talbot, senior conservation officer at Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, was in the team who made the discovery.

The Herschel Space Observatory has captured for the first time a huge 'disc' of icy vapour clustered round a young star as it develops into a solar system.The water round the star stretches far out into the 'edge' of its system. The water is likely to form into icy comets, which would crash into young worlds, bringing oceans with them.The find suggests that water-covered planets such as Earth may be common.

However, Svante Björck, a climate researcher at Lund University in Sweden, has now shown that global warming, i.e. simultaneous warming events in the northern and southern hemispheres, have not occurred in the past 20 000 years, which is as far back as it is possible to analyse with sufficient precision to compare with modern developments.Svante Björck's study thus goes 14 000 years further back in time than previous studies have done."What is happening today is unique from a historical geological perspective", he says.

The Antarctic ozone hole, which yawns wide every Southern Hemisphere spring, reached its annual peak on September 12, stretching 10.05 million square miles, the ninth largest on record. Above the South Pole, the ozone hole reached its deepest point of the season on October 9 when total ozone readings dropped to 102 Dobson units, tied for the 10th lowest in the 26-year record.The ozone layer helps protect the planet's surface from harmful ultraviolet radiation. NOAA and NASA use balloon-borne instruments, ground instruments, and satellites to monitor the annual South Pole ozone hole, global levels of ozone in the stratosphere, and the manmade chemicals that contribute to ozone depletion.

The UK mainland's first fully intact Viking boat burial site has been uncovered in the west Highlands, archaeologists have said.The site, at Ardnamurchan, is thought to be more than 1,000 years old.Artefacts buried alongside the Viking in his boat suggest he was a high-ranking warrior.Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb said the "artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain".Dr Cobb, from the University of Manchester, a co-director of the project, said: "This is a very exciting find.

New research has brought us a step closer to untangling the complex reasons why certain plant species triumph over others.A recent experiment shows that the interplay between the amount of silicon in the soil and the presence of herbivores can have a big effect on which plants come out on top in the struggle for dominance. But it also shows that the relationship between these variables is much more complicated than previously thought.

Family living conditions in childhood are associated with significant effects in DNA that persist well into middle age, according to new research by Canadian and British scientists.The team, based at McGill University in Montreal, University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the UCL Institute of Child Health in London looked for gene methylation associated with social and economic factors in early life. They found clear differences in gene methylation between those brought up in families with very high and very low standards of living. More than twice as many methylation differences were associated with the combined effect of the wealth, housing conditions and occupation of parents (that is, early upbringing) than were associated with the current socio-economic circumstances in adulthood. (1252 differences as opposed to 545).

Many living things have stripes, but the developmental processes that create these and other patterns are complex and difficult to untangle. Now a team of scientists has designed a simple genetic circuit that creates a striped pattern that they can control by tweaking a single gene."The essential components can be buried in a complex physiological context," said Terence Hwa, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the leaders of the study published October 14 in Science. "Natural systems make all kinds of wonderful patterns, but the problem is you never know what's really controlling it.

Two of the holy grails of medicine - stem cell technology and precision gene therapy - have been united for the first time in humans, say scientists.It means patients with a genetic disease could, one day, be treated with their own cells.A study in Nature corrected a mutation in stem cells made from a patient with a liver disease.Researchers said this was a "critical step" towards devising treatments, but safety tests were still needed.

First it was chess. Then it was Jeopardy. Now computers are at it again, but this time they are trying to automate the scientific process itself.An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Vanderbilt University, Cornell University and CFD Research Corporation, Inc., has taken a major step toward this goal by demonstrating that a computer can analyze raw experimental data from a biological system and derive the basic mathematical equations that describe the way the system operates. According to the researchers, it is one of the most complex scientific modeling problems that a computer has solved completely from scratch.

The newly published diary of an indignant small-town official in Nazi Germany has stirred the sensitive debate over how much ordinary Germans knew of atrocities committed under Hitler, creating a wave of interest at home and abroad.The diary of Friedrich Kellner "'All Minds Blurred and Darkened' Diaries 1939-1945" came to prominence thanks to the intervention of the elder former U.S. President George Bush.

Americans like to style their nation as the land of the free. Yet the government is engaged in a war on its own people. The misnamed Drug War.As Prof. Douglas Husak of Rutgers pointed out:The war, after all, cannot really be a war on drugs, since drugs cannot be arrested, prosecuted, or punished. The war is against persons who use drugs. As such, the war is a civil war, fought against the 28 million Americans who use illegal drugs annually."Arresting and jailing people because they use a substance which some people abuse is dubious enough on moral grounds. Even more it fails the test of cost-effectiveness.As Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman argued:"We need not resolve the ethical issue to agree on policy. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse for both the addict and the rest of us."

It is every government's dream: a system that can predict future events such as riots, political upheavals and the outbreak of wars. Last week, a collection of academics and private businesses was scrambling to meet the deadline for proposals for research aiming to do just that.The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research arm of the US intelligence community, is sponsoring the work under the Open Source Indicators (OSI) programme. The three-year project, with an unspecified budget, is designed to gather digital data from a range of sources, from traffic webcams to television to Twitter. The goal, according to IARPA, is to provide the intelligence community with predictions of social and political events that can "beat the news".

A huge oarfish was caught on camera in the Gulf of Mexico recently, giving scientists a rare glimpse of the bizarre fish in its native deep sea habitat. Researcher Mark Benfield describes the fish, a likely inspiration for the sea serpent myth.

(NaturalNews) Overuse and overprescription of antibiotic drugs has become a widely known culprit in causing the emergence of antibiotic-resistant "superbugs," as well as the onset of digestive and other health problems, caused by the elimination of beneficial gut flora. But a new review published in the journal Nature suggests that such gut flora alterations could be permanent.Professor Martin Blaser from New York University's (NYU) Langone Medical Center has been studying the long-term effects of antibiotics on gut flora, which has already confirmed a definitive link between antibiotics and the disruption of beneficial bacteria in the digestive system. But what his research also seems to confirm is the possibility that such disruption might be permanent, at least in some individuals, and thus carry with it lifelong health consequences.

We are one step closer to achieving my personal dream of owning a hoverboard from "Back to the Future 2". Check out the above video displaying quantum levitation in action that proves once again just how cool science can be.The amazing video demonstrating quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field was posted by YouTube user ASTCvideos and filmed at Tel-Aviv University.

The American people have spoken, and they want to know about ET.That query is among more than 10,000 citizen petitions filed under an Obama administration initiative to open government to the people.Petitions garnering 25,000 electronic signatures within 30 days will get an official government response, The Wall Street Journal reports.The petition for the government to fess up to what it knows about extraterrestrial intelligence had gathered about 9,500 signatures as of Monday, making it the 20th most popular query in the White House's "We the People" project.What's more important than learning about ET? Legalizing pot, apparently. The WSJ reports that five of the top 10 petitions involve reforming marijuana laws.Sign the petition here: Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol

Newsflash: The world will end on Friday night.This shocking prediction comes from US Christian broadcaster Harold Camping, the same man who said the world would end on May 21 - and also on September 6, 1994.We're still here, he believes, because on May 21 only God's true believers were "withheld" while the rest of us were left to be under "final judgment" for the next five months.In a rambling explanation posted on the website for the 90-year-old's California-based radio station, Family Radio, he said earthquakes were known to be an important sign of impending Judgment Day.

CNN VideoLibyans protect ancient treasures at Roman sites, but experts fear many have been looted. CNN's Nic Robertson reports.

This year marks the seventh "billion-person" milestone in the planet's history. On or around Oct. 31, 2011, the world's 7 billionth person will be born, the United Nation estimates.Even more staggering is that of the 7 billion people on Earth, about 1.4 billion of them will be old enough to have observed the arrivals of the 6 billionth, 5 billionth, 4 billionth and 3 billionth people in the world. About 42.5 million people could have blown the party horn for the birth of the 2 billionth baby.

For the first time, neutron images in 3 dimensions have been taken of rare archaeological artifacts here at ORNL. Bronze and brass artifacts excavated at the ancient city of Petra, in Jordan were recently imaged in 3 dimensions using neutrons at HFIR's CG-1D Neutron Imaging instrument. The data that is now being analyzed will for the first time give eager archeologists and ancient historians significant, otherwise wholly inaccessible insight into the manufacturing and lives of cultures that once occupied settlements within the Roman Empire, Middle East, and Colonial-period New England.

An ancient monument has crashed to the ground after standing for more than 4,000 years as an important landmark.The famous standing stone at Bedd Morris, on Newport mountain, was snapped over the weekend, toppling over and crushing a nearby fence.Archaeologist Professor Geoffrey Wainwright, an expert who has worked on several sites in the Preselis, plans to play an active role in getting the stone reinstated.

New assessments by researchers using the latest high-tech tools to study the diets of early hominids are challenging long-held assumptions about what our ancestors ate, says a study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Arkansas.By analyzing microscopic pits and scratches on hominid teeth, as well as stable isotopes of carbon found in teeth, researchers are getting a very different picture of the diet habitats of early hominids than that painted by the physical structure of the skull, jawbones and teeth. While some early hominids sported powerful jaws and large molars -- including Paranthropus boisei, dubbed "Nutcracker Man" -- they may have cracked nuts rarely if at all, said CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer, study co-author.

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.

Researchers from the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project, which oversees the Poggio Colla excavation site some 20 miles northeast of Florence, discovered the images on a small fragment from a ceramic vessel that is more than 2,600 years old.The images show the head and shoulders of a baby emerging from a mother represented with her knees raised and her face shown in profile, one arm raised, and a long ponytail running down her back.The excavation is a project of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Tex., Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn., and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in collaboration with The Open University in Milton Keynes, England.

For 121 years, it has been widely accepted that Vincent Van Gogh killed himself in a field in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, ending a troubled, solitary life on his own terms.But a new book, along with a '60 Minutes' segment that aired on Sunday night, explores a very different possibility: that Van Gogh was accidentally shot and killed by one or more local children, and chose to cover up their crime before he died.

New York University scientists have developed artificial structures that can self-replicate, a process that has the potential to yield new types of materials. The work, conducted by researchers in NYU's Departments of Chemistry and Physics and its Center for Soft Matter Research, appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

Researchers in Singapore have exploited advanced nanostructure technology to make a highly efficient and yet cheaper silicon solar cell. With this development, the researchers hope that the cost of solar energy can be halved.Developed jointly by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME), the new thin-film silicon solar cells are designed to be made from cheaper, low grade silicon. However it is able to generate electricity currents close to that produced by traditional solar cells made from costly, high quality silicon.

Scientists have taken skin cells from a patient with liver disease and turned them into replacement liver cells, in a biological tour de force that promises to transform how the condition is treated.The procedure will have to undergo several years of trials before it can be used in humans, but if approved, it could launch a new era of personalised therapies for serious genetic disorders.In Britain 30,000 people carry a genetic defect that causes antitrypsin deficiency, a disease that can only be cured by a liver transplant. The operation requires a suitable donor organ and costs around £500,000, with drugs to prevent rejection by the immune system adding more than £20,000 a year to medical costs.

AN AMAZONIAN TRIBE DO not live their lives by the clock and do not even have the language to describe time or dates, scientists have revealed.Professor Chris Sinha, of the University of Portsmouth, led the research which found that the Amondawa people of north-western Brazil do not even have words for 'time', 'week', 'month' or 'year'.In his study, published in the journal Language and Cognition, he argues that it is the first time scientists have been able to prove time is not a deeply entrenched universal human concept, as previously thought.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have directly determined the surface temperature of early Mars for the first time, providing evidence that's consistent with a warmer and wetter Martian past.By analyzing carbonate minerals in a four-billion-year-old meteorite that originated near the surface of Mars, the scientists determined that the minerals formed at about 18 degrees Celsius (64 degrees Fahrenheit). "The thing that's really cool is that 18 degrees is not particularly cold nor particularly hot," says Woody Fischer, assistant professor of geobiology and coauthor of the paper, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on October 3. "It's kind of a remarkable result.

Astronomers have one more reason to scratch their heads over the unseen material known as dark matter. Observations of two dwarf galaxies, Fornax and Sculptor, show the dark matter within them is spread out smoothly rather than heaped into a central bulge, contradicting cosmological models.Researchers know dark matter comprises a far greater percentage of the universe than the ordinary matter making up things like people and stars. Because of this, the distribution of dark matter determines the structure of the cosmos. Galaxies form when they are attracted to and anchored by large clumps of dark matter.

In Western Europe, Japan and Russia, the milestone comes amid worries about low birthrates and aging populations. In China and India, the two most populous nations, it's an occasion to reassess policies that have already slowed once-rapid growth.But in sub-Saharan Africa, the demographic news is mostly sobering as the region staggers under the double burden of the world's highest birthrates and deepest poverty. The regional population of nearly 900 million could reach 2 billion in 40 years at current rates, accounting for about half of the projected global population growth over that span.

Rising global temperatures and changes in weather patterns have knock-on effects which are already stunting the growth of a wide range of species.The change could have a major impact on the expanding human population, with major food sources like fish likely to reduce in size and crops expected to grow smaller and less reliably than today.Species which are unable to adapt quickly enough are at risk of extinction as ecosystems shift dramatically, altering the balance of food and other resources needed for survival.

Overhauling planning rules is "no magic bullet" to boost economic growth, the head of the National Trust has said.Sir Simon Jenkins said there was "no evidence" that relaxing rules on development would help the economy.He told MPs examining controversial government planning changes there was a "massive" amount of brownfield land already available for building on.Ministers say the rules must prioritise sustainable development to ensure more homes are built and jobs created.

Officials at the state environmental agency in Texas have altered a scientific report they commissioned on Galveston bay, deleting mentions of human-induced climate change and rising sea levels.The 2010 State of the Bay report has been delayed for a year by disputes between the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and scientists at the Houston Advanced Research Center, who are contracted to provide the state with regular reports on the bay.John Anderson, an oceanographer at Rice University in Houston, Texas, who wrote the chapter of the report that was apparently edited by TCEQ management, told British newspaper The Guardian that the cuts reflected what he called "denial" throughout the state of Texas about the effects of global warming.

Sunshine can be turned into electricity at night in this thermosolar plant. Gemasolar, in Fuentes de Andalucía near Seville in Spain, is the first commercial-scale plant to use an innovative "battery" that stores energy as molten salts.More than 2600 heliostats - flat mirrors - over 185 hectares reflect and concentrate sunlight onto the top of a tower. In the "power tower", potassium and sodium nitrate salts are heated to 565 °C and then pass through a heat exchanger where they turn water into steam to drive turbines in the 19.9 megawatt plant.

THE lake-spotted landscape of Canada is home to a watery mystery. According to a painstaking satellite survey of 1.3 million lakes stretching from coast to coast, the country lost 6700 square kilometres - or 1.2 per cent - of its water surface area between 2000 and 2009. Yet what we know about the physical processes at play suggests the lakes should be growing, not shrinking.Whatever the cause, the loss could impact local wildlife and human populations. "It's an important finding. We need to find out what's driving it," says Larry Hinzman, director of the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. The comprehensiveness of the study makes it significant, he says.

A small Oregon company is working with NASA to develop a balloon that could fly through the skies of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.With its thick atmosphere and lakes filled with organic materials, Titan holds particular intrigue for scientists curious about how life began on Earth and whether it exists elsewhere in the solar system. But exploring Titan will not be easy.The moon's skies are perpetually cloudy, blocking the view from orbit. Radar and infrared instruments can provide some details of what's below, but what scientists really covet is a mission that could explore Titan's diverse terrain in detail.

Physicians in California say cannabis should be legalised, and a Gallup poll says 50% of Americans support the move. Are you one of them?.

A powerful new computer virus that some are calling the "Son of Stuxnet" has been discovered, and researchers are concerned about its potential for attacking critical infrastructure computers around the world.The mysterious Stuxnet worm -- perhaps the most powerful ever created -- managed to infiltrate computer systems in Iran and do damage to that nation's nuclear research program. The new worm, dubbed Duqu, has no such targeted purpose. But it shares so much code with the original Stuxnet that researchers at Symantec Corp. say it must either have been created by the same group that authored Stuxnet, or by a group that somehow managed to obtain Stuxnet's source code. Either way, Duqu's authors are brilliant, and mean business, said Symantec's Vikrum Thakur.

Whether he was at a youth tournament, the NCAA finals or the Olympics, the late wrestling public address announcer Ed Aliverti used to greet fans in every arena the same way. "Welcome to the world's oldest and greatest sport," said Aliverti, who died in 2010.The "greatest" part of that is a matter of taste. But when it comes to "oldest," the sport of wrestling now is showcasing some ancient documentation to make its case.Written in Greek on an 18-inch wide fragment of papyrus and dated to between 100 and 200 A.D., it is a list of instructions on how to wrestle.

For the first time since the French expedition to Egypt in 1789, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) is to establish a comprehensive inventory of the land it owns around Egypt.Such an inventory will entail archaeologists carrying out major archaeological surveys of these plots in order to declare them protected archaeological sites.Mostafa Amine, secretary-general of the SCA, told Ahram Online that lands declared free of monuments or artefacts will be offered for investment. He continued that lands housing movable artefacts will be declared open for investment after all authentic objects have been removed to museums.

Across the developing world, new technologies are helping to distribute resources for education, connectivity and health far and wide. Innovators are finding ways to make technology cheaper and therefore accessible to millions previously excluded by high costs.Affordability is often the greatest hurdle to overcome in products from sanitation devices to tablet computers, mobile phones to solar panels.

The genetic code of the germ that caused the Black Death has been reconstructed by scientists for the first time.The researchers extracted DNA fragments of the ancient bacterium from the teeth of medieval corpses found in London.They say the pathogen is the ancestor of all modern plagues.The research, published in the journal Nature, suggests the 14th Century outbreak was also the first plague pandemic in history.

Following nine months of delay, an American-Egyptian mission responsible for lowering ground water at archaeological sites in Luxor resumed its work today. The project aims to decrease the subterranean water level that has affected the foundation stones of five temples in Luxor: Karnak and Luxor temples on the east bank, and Seti I, the Ramessium, and Merneptah and Haremhab on the west bank.

A plaster covered structure, likely a ritual bath (or mikveh in Hebrew), dated to the Second Temple period (first century BCE-first century CE) was unearthed during an archaeological excavation near Kibbutz Zor'a in Israel.Conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority in advance of plans by a company to install a water line at the location, the excavation uncovered a plaster-treated square structure with three walls designed to store water. In a corner, a channel was installed anciently to drain the water into the associated ritual bath. Moreover, a plaster floor and three descending stairs were exposed.

For the past 200 years, ever since Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population, big thinkers have been wondering whether Earth-dwellers will eventually run out of food.Today, a global group of scientists released a fresh look at the question. They add a different, environmental twist to it. Can we feed the world without destroying the environment?It's a good question, because agriculture is probably the single most destructive thing that humans do to the earth.

The high peaks of the Himalayas may soon be a beacon for adventurous solar power entrepreneurs, suggests a new study that identified the lofty region as having some of the world's greatest potential to capture energy from the sun.Other regions not traditionally considered hotbeds of solar power potential include the Andes of South America and Antarctica, note Takashi Oozeki and Yutaka Genchi with the National Institute of Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.In addition to copious amounts of sunlight, these regions are chillier than the usual suspects such as the southwestern United States and the deserts of North Africa. Colder temps increase the operational efficiency of certain photovoltaic solar cells, which turn sunlight into electricity.

Archaeologists have uncovered the legendary grotto in which Rome's founders were said to have been nursed by a "she-wolf." James Williams reports.

The iconic T. rex dinosaur grew bigger and faster than previously estimated, according to new methods based on actual skeletons instead of scale models, British and US scientists said Wednesday.In a new study just published in the journal PLoS One, a team of scientists led by Professor John R. Hutchinson of The Royal Veterinary College, London, and Peter Makovicky, PhD, curator of dinosaurs at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago applied cutting edge technology and computer modeling to "weigh" five Tyrannosaurus rex specimens, including The Field Museum's iconic SUE skeleton. Their results reveal that T. rex grew more quickly and reached significantly greater masses than previously estimated.

One of the supposedly best understood and least interesting landscapes on Mars is hiding something that could rewrite the planet's history. Or not. In fact, about all that is certain is that decades of assumptions regarding the wide, flat Hesperia Planum are not holding up very well under renewed scrutiny with higher-resolution, more recent spacecraft data."Most scientists don't want to work on the flat things," noted geologist Tracy Gregg of University at Buffalo, State University of New York. So after early Mars scientists decided Hesperia Planum looked like a lava-filled plain, no one really revisited the matter and the place was used to exemplify something rather important: The base of a major transitional period in the geologic time scale of Mars. The period is aptly called the Hesperian and it is thought to have run from 3.7 to 3.1 billion years ago.

"The first time I went to Egypt and saw the Sphinx with my own eyes, I was deeply shocked," writes Robert Temple, Ph.D in his recent book (with Olivia Temple), The Sphinx Mystery, for "the Sphinx did not look at all like a lion."Everyone knows that the Great Sphinx, ensconced for millennia on the Giza plateau near modern-day Cairo, is a lion with a man's head; specifically the head of the Pharaoh Chephren, thought by archaeologists to have built the Sphinx during Egypt's Old Kingdom, roughly the mid-third millennium B.C..

Walking through this place might be a puzzling, yet surprisingly delightful experience for the first-time visitor. Where are all the great stone pyramids, ball-courts, temples, and other monuments so often attributed to great ancient Maya centers? One sees a tropical landscape that is anything but flat. There is a jungle-shrouded mound here, another one over there. A well-planned walking path winds through what one could describe as the Maya version of the Garden of Eden. Like the very first 18th and 19th century explorers of the Maya world, one sees what could be ancient structures still hidden beneath their canopy shroud. Some of them have been partially exposed, betraying what might lie beneath and leaving the rest to the imagination. Visitors soon acquire the impression that this place is very different than any other encountered in the Maya world.

The names "Donald Johanson" and "Lucy" are now household names in the world of human evolution. Dr. Johanson's discovery of the fossilized, 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton (nick-named "Lucy") in 1974 at Hadar in the Afar region of Ethiopia shook the field of paleoanthropology and human origins research and established a new standard, a benchmark species against which new-found species are still measured. He is perhaps the most sought-after and quoted scientist in the field, despite the fact that major new discoveries and theories have arguably eclipsed the impact and sensation of the Lucy discovery and the evolutionary paradigm that it represented.

A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as "flaking," on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low.

HERSHEY, Pa. -- A nondisease-causing virus kills human breast cancer cells in the laboratory, creating opportunities for potential new cancer therapies, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers who tested the virus on three different breast cancer types that represent the multiple stages of breast cancer development.Adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2) is a virus that regularly infects humans but causes no disease. Past studies by the same researchers show that it promotes tumor cell death in cervical cancer cells infected with human papillomavirus. Researchers used an unaltered, naturally occurring version of AAV2 on human breast cancer cells.