Newsdesk Archive

You have to wonder what's going on in the DNA of Harvard genetics professor George Church.What extra bit of code does he have that the rest of us don't? If genes tell the story of a person's life, then some altered sequence of 'A's, 'C's, 'G's and 'T's must be at play, because his brain works like almost no one else's.About 30 years ago, Prof Church was one of a handful of people who dreamed up the idea of sequencing the entire human genome - every letter in the code that separates us from fruit flies as well as our parents. His lab was the first to come up with a machine to break that code, and he's been working to improve it ever since.

Artificial blood vessels made on a 3D printer may soon be used for transplants of lab-created organs.Until now, the stumbling block in tissue engineering has been supplying artificial tissue with nutrients that have to arrive via capillary vessels.A team at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has solved that problem using 3D printing and a technique called multiphoton polymerisation.The findings will be shown at the Biotechnica Fair in Germany in October.

BERLIN - In the current debate about the possible bankruptcy of the Greek state, one largely dormant argument has recently resurfaced with increasing frequency: the widespread damage inflicted by the Nazi regime during World War II means that Germany still owes Greece major outstanding wartime reparations.While the claims for payment of damages are based on very real facts, one could likewise argue that over the course of 60 years or so, those claims have already been satisfied under international law.

Sada Mire fled Somalia's civil war as a child, and lived as a refugee in Sweden. But now she is back in the Horn of Africa as an archaeologist, making some incredible discoveries.Sada Mire is only 35, but she has already revealed a dozen sites that could be candidates for Unesco world heritage status.She has a fellowship in the department of art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is head of the department of antiquities in the breakaway territory of Somaliland, in the north-west region of Somalia. She is the only archaeologist working in the region.

Archaeologists at the University of Liverpool are investigating three island groups around Britain to further understanding of why, in approximately 4,000 BC, humans altered their lifestyle from hunting and gathering to farming the land.Some scholars believe that this change occurred due to colonists from the continent moving into Britain, bringing farming and pottery-making skills with them, but others argue that the indigenous population of Britain adopted this new lifestyle gradually on their own terms.

Radiation hazards are likely to increase for air travelers and spacefarers in coming years due to changes in solar activity, researchers say.Cosmic rays from deep space and high-energy particles from the sun can be hazardous to astronauts and also can expose airline crews and passengers to radiation, as well as damage spacecraft, aircraft and satellites. Solar magnetic fields protect Earth by repelling incoming galactic cosmic rays, but the period of high solar magnetic activity known as the grand solar maximum that persisted throughout the Space Age now appears to be coming to an end, and solar particle levels might start rising at the same time.

At first glance, a weather forecaster for Venus would have either a really easy or a really boring job, depending on your point of view. The climate on Venus is widely known to be unpleasant -- at the surface, the planet roasts at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit under a suffocating blanket of sulfuric acid clouds and a crushing atmosphere more than 90 times the pressure of Earth's. Intrepid future explorers should abandon any hope for better days, however, because it won't change much."Any variability in the weather on Venus is noteworthy, because the planet has so many features to keep atmospheric conditions the same," says Dr. Tim Livengood, a researcher with the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, Capitol Heights, Md., and now with the University of Maryland, College Park, Md.

Researchers have designed a "cloak" that is invisible to magnetic fields both coming in and coming out.The idea of blocking magnetic fields has been proposed before, but the new design, in the New Journal of Physics, could even hide magnetic materials.It could thus find application in security or medical contexts, such as those surrounding MRI scans.

Ultra-high resolution images of several Dead Sea Scrolls are now available on the web, after Google helped digitise the ancient texts.The search firm lent its expertise in scanning documents to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.Both amateur and professional scholars will now have access to 1,200 megapixel images.Five scrolls have been captured, including the Temple Scroll and Great Isaiah Scroll.

(Reuters) - A Texas astronomer has used science to confirm one of the most famous tales in western literature, the "bright and shining moon" over Lake Geneva that inspired an 18-year-old Mary Shelley to write "Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus."Shelley has long been doubted for her version of events that led to the writing of one of the most beloved Gothic tales in the English language: That she wrote it on a challenge one night in June 1816 during a "waking dream" as the moon shone through her window.But Donald Olson, an astronomy professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, told Reuters on Monday that the night sky would argue that she was telling the truth.

NASA will reveal new findings about near-Earth asteroids during a press conference this Thursday (Sept. 29), agency officials announced today.Scientists will present results based on data gathered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. The briefing will take place at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) Thursday at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., and it will have "implications for future research," NASA officials said in a media advisory.From January 2010 to February 2011, WISE hunted for asteroids and comets in a mission called NEOWISE (with the NEO standing for "Near-Earth Object"). The observatory found more than 33,000 new space rocks in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The distant "ice giant" planets Uranus and Neptune look like worlds aflame in new photos captured by Hawaii's Keck Observatory.To the naked eye, Neptune would appear blue and Uranus bluish-green. But Caltech astronomer Mike Brown snapped the new pictures in infrared light, using Keck's adaptive optics system. So the two planets blaze reddish-orange, like embers glowing in the dark night of deep space.Brown posted the pictures via Twitter from Sept. 18 to Sept. 20. Two shots show bright streaks on Neptune, which is about 17 times as massive as Earth and orbits 30 times farther from the sun than our planet does.

A strong-to-severe (Kp=8) geomagnetic storm is in progress following the impact of a coronal mass ejection (CME) at approximately 8:15a.m. EDT (12:15 UT) on Sept. 26. The Goddard Space Weather Lab reported a strong compression of Earth's magnetosphere. Simulations indicate that solar wind plasma has penetrated close to geosynchronous orbit starting at 9am. Geosynchronous satellites could therefore be directly exposed to solar wind plasma and magnetic fields. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras after nightfall.

AN ARTIFICIAL cerebellum has restored lost brain function in rats, bringing the prospect of cyborg-style brain implants a step closer to reality. Such implants could eventually be used to replace areas of brain tissue damaged by stroke and other conditions, or even to enhance healthy brain function and restore learning processes that decline with age.Cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs have already proved that it is possible to wire electrical devices into the brain and make sense of them, but such devices involve only one-way communication, either from the device to the brain or vice versa.

Home fish tanks and aquariums may at first appear to be tranquil environments, but look closely and you might see a glaring goldfish or a ticked off tetra.A new study has found that ornamental fish across the U.S. -- all 182.9 million of them -- are at risk of becoming aggressive due to cramped, barren housing.In other words, fish can turn mean when their home sucks, according to a new study in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science.

If Prof Angela Belcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gets it right, the future of manufacturing will rest on the shoulders of tiny organisms.Although she's probably told the story a thousand times, Prof Belcher still talks with reverence about the shell she cradles in her hand.The humble abalone, a slimy sea snail that occasionally ends up as someone's dinner, pulls calcium and carbon from sea water and transforms them into a durable, protective shell. Crusty and dingy on one side, shimmery and alluring on the other, this body armour is 3,000 times stronger than chalk, which is its chemical equivalent.

A new study has found birds learn the art of nest-building, rather than it being just an instinctive skill.Researchers from Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews Universities studied film of southern masked weavers recorded by scientists in Botswana.This colourful species was chosen because individual birds build many complex nests in a season.Dr Patrick Walsh of Edinburgh University said the study revealed "a clear role for experience".

Grass-cutting ants build gigantic nests - underground cities where up to seven million insects live and tend a fungal garden that feeds their young.Scientists have now discovered how the ants build nests that stay at the right temperature for this precious fungus to grow.The ants build porous turrets, specifically to ventilate the nests.A study, reported in the Journal of Insect Behaviour, has revealed how they manage this feat.

The Kepler orbiting observatory is specifically designed to find Earth-like planets around nearby stars.Earlier this year, the Kepler team released the mission's first 136 days of data and it has turned out to be a veritable jackpot. In that time Kepler looked at some 150,000 target stars and found evidence for 1,235 potential exoplanets. That's quite a haul.Since then, most of the work on this database has been to identify the characteristics of all these exoplanets. But such a large dataset also allows for statistical analyses too, from which various projections can be made.

China will next week launch an experimental craft paving the way for its first space station, an official said on Tuesday, bringing the growing Asian power closer to matching the United States and Russia with a long-term manned outpost in space.The Tiangong 1, or "Heavenly Palace" , will blast off from a site in the Gobi Desert around Sept 27-30 , adding a high-tech sheen to China's National Day celebrations on Oct 1, the Xinhua news agency said.

Your credit card bill tells you how much you spent on gas last Tuesday, groceries on Wednesday, and football tickets on Friday night. Wouldn't it be helpful if your electric bill did something similar?This isn't pie in the sky for Shwetak Patel, a 29-year-old technologist who received a $500,000 "genius" grant Tuesday for his work on inexpensive and easy-to-deploy sensors that can make our lives more efficient and enjoyable.The computer science professor at the University of Washington in Seattle is among 22 innovators in fields ranging from music and journalism to genetics and history who were named 2011 MacArthur Fellows.

Human devices, from light bulbs to iPods, send information using electrons. Human bodies and all other living things, on the other hand, send signals and perform work using ions or protons.Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things. The study is published online this week in the interdisciplinary journal Nature Communications.

For much of Earth's history, the continents have shifted around, sometimes joining with others, sometimes tearing apart to form new continents. One such shift resulted in what Earth scientists call the Pangaea, or supercontinent, where nearly all of the land mass of Earth was consolidated into one single continent. Many Earth Scientists have predicted that such an event is likely to occur again over the next 250 million years or so. Yoshida and Madhava Santosh of Kochi University, Japan, disagree, if only slightly. They contend in their paper published in Terra Nova, that giant plumes far beneath the surface of the Earth will prevent South America and Antarctica from joining each other or the new continent.

Cornell researchers have developed new statistical methods based on the complete genome sequences of people alive today to shed light on events at the dawn of human history.They applied their methods to the genomes of individuals of East Asian, European, and western and southern African descent. They analyzed only six genomes, but made use of the fact that these genomes contain traces of genetic material from thousands of human ancestors, which have been assembled into new combinations over the millennia by genetic recombination.

If a robot is produced that behaves just like one of us in all respects, including thought, is it conscious or just a clever machine, asks Prof Barry C Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy.Human beings are made of flesh and blood - a mass of brawn and bone suffused with an intricate arrangement of nerve tissue. They belong to the physical world of matter and causes and yet they have a remarkable property - from time to time they are conscious.

Efforts over the past decade to save British mammals from extinction have failed to halt population declines in red squirrels, hedgehogs, harvest mice and Scottish wildcats.Red squirrels could be extinct within 20 years, while the UK hedgehog population has dipped to about 1.5m individuals compared with 30m in the 1950s, according to a report by Oxford University's wildlife conservation unit for the People's Trust for Endangered Species.The common dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius) and mountain hare are also under threat despite efforts to arrest their decline through nationwide biodiversity action plans.

DNA sequencing shows that there were four human 'species' living and interbreeding in Europe and Asia 50,000 years ago, as opposed to the two species that were recognized as recently as ten years ago as the only species of the genus Homo. In addition it showed that there was an identifiably separate version of Homo sapiens sapiens living in Australia, who left Africa 70,000 years ago, at least 20,000 years before anyone believed the Homo sapiens exodus had begun.

Humankind will slip next week into ecological debt, having gobbled up in less then nine months more natural resources than the planet can replenish in a year, researchers said Tuesday.The most dominant species in Earth's history, in other words, is living beyond the planet's threshold of sustainability, trashing the house it lives in.At its current pace of consumption humankind will need, by 2030, a second globe to satisfy its voracious appetites and absorb all its waste, the report calculated.Earth's seven billion denizens -- nine billion by mid-century -- are using more water, cutting down more forests and eating more fish than Nature can replace, it said.

A six-ton satellite belonging to Nasa plunged to Earth early yesterday, yet more than eight hours later US space officials still didn't know where it had come down. Most of it fell over water and they believe the debris probably hurt no one.The bus-sized satellite first penetrated Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific, but that doesn't necessarily mean it all fell into the sea. Nasa's earlier calculations had predicted that the 20-year-old climate research satellite would burn up in the atmosphere with the surviving debris falling over a 500 square mile area that could include land.

Monsanto Co., the world's largest seed company, has prevailed in another lawsuit against a U.S. farmer, earning a ruling from a federal appeals court that protects Monsanto's interests even when its patented seeds are sold in a mix of undifferentiated "commodity" seeds.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington issued its ruling Wednesday, affirming the lower court decision that favored Monsanto.The St. Louis, Mo.-based company sued Indiana soybean farmer Vernon Bowman in 2007, accusing Bowman of patent infringement for planting and saving seeds that contained Monsanto's genetically altered Roundup Ready technology even though Bowman said he bought those seeds as part of a mix of commodity seeds.See the film "The Future of Food" to understand the significance of this problem.

What if particles really can exceed the speed of light?It is a fascinating and provocative question.But first, it should be said that Thursday's news that physicists have seen subatomic particles called neutrinos exceed the Universe's speed limit is a picture of science still at work.The researchers at Cern in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy have tried really hard to find what they might be doing wrong - over three years and thousands of experiments - because they can hardly believe what they are seeing.

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded physicists because it appears subatomic particles have beaten the speed of light.Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.Professor Antonio Ereditato of Cern said that the results needed to be confirmed and analysed before conclusions are drawn, but that it is "an understatement to say they are unexpected".

In a compact lab space at Stanford University, Oscar Abilez, MD, trains a microscope on a small collection of cells in a petri dish. A video recorder projects what the microscope sees on a nearby monitor. The cells in the dish pulse rhythmically, about once a second. The cells are cardiomyocytes, which drive the force-producing and pacemaker functions of the human heart. They are programmed to pulse. They will beat this way until they die.

A 90-year-old Michigan man who officials say rounded up and shot Jews in Nazi death camps during World War II is a step closer to being deported, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.In January, a judge found John Kalymon of Troy, Michigan, to have been an armed member of the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian Auxiliary Police from 1941 to 1944.

Fragments of Neolithic pottery and an ancient arrowhead represent the best finds yet from a dig at a quarry near Wrexham, say archaeologists.Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT) has been excavating at Tarmac's Borras Quarry site since 2008.The trust said about 500 pottery pieces and flint artefacts dating back to about 3,500 BC had been uncovered during this summer's dig at four sites.

Archaeologists have recently uncovered a fascinating new find at the world's largest and most famous Neolithic settlement, a site that, even after more than two decades of intensive study, still has much more to reveal to scientists and the world about a community that thrived in Anatolia (current-day Turkey) about 9,500 years ago. As reported recently in the New York Times and at the Global Heritage Fund's Heritage on the Wire, archaeologists came across a surprisingly well-preserved wall painting while excavating at Çatalhöyük, a site dated to 7500 - 5700 B.C.

The source of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago remains a mystery, a new study finds.Some researchers had thought the deadly asteroid was a piece of a larger space rock called Baptistina. Baptistina broke apart after a massive in-space collision about 160 million years ago, the theory went, spawning a swarm of mountain-size chunks of rock. One of those eventually slammed into Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and many other species.Scientists are confident that a 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer asteroid) is indeed what wiped out the dinosaurs. But new observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope suggest the space rock didn't come from Baptistina.

NASA launched a science mission to the moon last week with the forgettable name GRAIL, for Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory. I kept wondering if the engineers could have added the acronym HOLY. Say, for High Orbiting Lunar Year. A spacecraft called HOLY GRAIL might get public attention, especially among Monty Python fans.This may sound nit-picky to space enthusiasts, but political blogger Jeff Brooks, in a commentary posted in The Space Review, writes: "Rather than evoke the wonder and excitement of exploration or a sense of national pride, these spacecraft names seem designed to elicit a chorus of yawns.

Chalk up one more feat for Saturn's intriguing moon Enceladus. The small, dynamic moon spews out dramatic plumes of water vapor and ice -- first seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2005. It possesses simple organic particles and may house liquid water beneath its surface. Its geyser-like jets create a gigantic halo of ice, dust and gas around Enceladus that helps feed Saturn's E ring. Now, thanks again to those icy jets, Enceladus is the only moon in our solar system known to influence substantially the chemical composition of its parent planet.

A 90-year-old tuft of hair has yielded the first complete genome of an Aboriginal Australian, a young man who lived in southwest Australia.He, and perhaps all Aboriginal Australians, the genome indicates, descend from the first humans to venture far beyond Africa more than 60,000 years ago, and thousands of years before the ancestors of most modern Asians trekked east in a second migration out of Africa."Aboriginal Australians are descendents of the first human explorers. These are the guys who expanded to unknown territory into an unknown world, eventually reaching Australia," says Eske Willerslev, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who led the study. It appears online today in Science.

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, told lawmakers Thursday that the end of the space shuttle era has left the American human spaceflight program in an "embarrassing" state."We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future," Armstrong told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Scientists around the world reacted with shock yesterday to results from an Italian laboratory that seemed to show certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light. If true, the finding breaks one of the most fundamental laws of physics and raises bizarre possibilities including time travel and shortcuts via hidden extra dimensions.

We the people want to know when we can have our "perfectly legitimate" discussion on marijuana legalization. Marijuana prohibition has resulted in the arrest of over 20 million Americans since 1965, countless lives ruined and hundreds of billions of tax dollars squandered and yet this policy has still failed to achieve its stated goals of lowering use rates, limiting the drug's access, and creating safer communities.Isn't it time to legalize and regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol? If not, please explain why you feel that the continued criminalization of cannabis will achieve the results in the future that it has never achieved in the past?.

An energy scavenger device that can convert both solar energy and movement energy into electricity to power portable electronics has been made by scientists from Korea and the US. The device could find its way into your home in the future as it's flexible enough to be attached to clothes, bags, curtains or flags, say the researchers.Sang-Woo Kim from Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon and colleagues made the device from piezoelectric zinc oxide and an organic solar cell so that electrical energy can be provided either by sunlight or wind or body movement, depending on which source is available at the time.

NASA vitally needs new private spaceships, vehicles capable of carrying U.S. astronauts and from the International Space Station (ISS), in order to maintain the future health of the massive orbiting laboratory. And they need them soon, agency officials said Friday (Sept. 16) in an industry forum."Every year we do not have a commercial crew capability, the ISS is at risk," Philip McAlister, acting director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters in Washington, stressed before an audience of private spaceflight industry representatives.

How the Indus Civilization Was DiscoveredEvents leading to the IVC's public recognition as a major episode in Indian history in 1924. Told in an accessible way and based on new research into original documents from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) archives by a well-respected scholar.This book is a pleasure to read, a well-told series of tales that converged in Simla one day in the early 1920s, when a group of archaeologists figured out that an unknown civilization was lurking deep in India's past. It was only when they published their results around the world, however, that the remote age of this civilization became clear.

Before he became a Professor of literature at Harvard, and way before he wrote his classic Shakespeare biography, Will in The World, Stephen Greenblatt was an I'll-read-anything kind of kid. One day, he was standing in the campus book store, and there, in a bin, selling for ten cents (good price, even in 1961) he noticed a thin, little volume called On the Nature of Things, by a Roman writer named Lucretius.When he opened it, he found a description of how the universe came to be. Because Lucretius lived a couple of generations before the birth of Jesus, Stephen was expecting a tale of how gods, goddesses, earth, air, fire and water and an assortment of miracles created everything we see, but as he turned the pages, he says "his jaw dropped" and "his head began to burst open," because Lucretius' creation story doesn't feel remotely ancient. First of all, it's a radically secular account, ignoring gods, goddesses, heaven, hell, life after death, and intelligent design, but more surprising, its logic is eerily, almost spookily modern.

XCOR Aerospace and Space Expedition Curacao announced today that they're going forward with a deal worth more than $10 million to start offering rocket plane rides beyond the edge of space from the Caribbean island starting in 2014.The wet-lease arrangement follows up on an agreement in principle reached a year ago. Under this type of contract, the Curacao venture would have XCOR's Lynx rocket plane available for its use, but XCOR would be in charge of the ground operations and provide the pilot.

A popular saying in medical school has long been "See one, do one, teach one" -- meaning that young doctors are expected to learn as they go. CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook looks at one new technology that is changing the way doctors prepare for surgery.Dr. Neel Kantak is a first-year plastic surgery resident at Harvard Medical School."I don't think that anything we do in surgery is natural," he said. "I think most of the movements are things people are not born with the coordination to do.

Although birds survived the mass extinction that claimed their brethren, the rest of the dinosaurs, birds did not emerge unscathed, scientists now find.Apparently many ancient lineages of birds died off at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, researchers added.Nearly all the modern bird groups, from owls to penguins and so on, began to emerge within 15 million years after the rest of the dinosaurs went extinct. These birds are subtly but significantly different from many of the ancient lineages that existed before a cosmic impact at the end of the Cretaceous period about 65 million years ago wreaked havoc around the globe.

By monitoring the brain activity of people while they watched Hollywood movie trailers, researchers were able to recreate a moving picture similar to the real footage being played.While the technology is not yet capable of reading our thoughts, it could eventually lead to ways of translating our dreams and memories onto screen.If it is refined enough the method could even be used to explore the minds of stroke patients, experts said.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done."We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

Prof Jenny Thomas, of University College London, says the claims, if proven true, would call into question our very understanding of physics and the universe.She said: "It would turn everything on its head. It is too awful to think about."The basic thing it that would be questioned is that there is an absolute speed limit which is the basis of special relativity and that is a huge building block of modern physics.

One of the very pillars of physics and Einstein's theory of relativity - that nothing can go faster than the speed of light - was rocked Thursday by new findings from one of the world's foremost laboratories.European researchers said they clocked an oddball type of subatomic particle called a neutrino going faster than the 186,282 miles per second that has long been considered the cosmic speed limit.The claim was met with skepticism, with one outside physicist calling it the equivalent of saying you have a flying carpet. In fact, the researchers themselves are not ready to proclaim a discovery and are asking other physicists to independently try to verify their findings.

Early humans settled eastern Asia in two waves rather than just one, say two genetic studies that weigh in on a long-running debate among experts trying to trace the migrations of early humans.The first wave brought in ancestors of present-day aborigines of Australia, while the second brought forerunners of most current residents of east Asia, the studies conclude.

When Werner Herzog was just 12, he spotted a book in a display window that changed his life."It had a picture on the cover of a horse painted on an ancient cave wall," the acclaimed German filmmaker recalls of the memory as if it was yesterday."I didn't know then that this horse painting from Lascaux cave was regarded as the most renowned of all cave-painting images. All I knew was the sense of indescribable awe that took hold of me. I wanted this book. I had to have it.

The chances may be extremely slim of anyone being struck by the remnants of a six-tonne US satellite expected to crash to Earth today, but there is at least one precedent for such an unfortunate occurrence.On 22 January 1997, Lottie Williams of Tulsa, Oklahoma, became (and remains) the only person ever to have been hit by falling space junk. She was out walking with friends when a 6cm piece of metal just glanced off her shoulder. It was a remnant of a Nasa Delta rocket falling back to Earth after a launch some months earlier. She told the Toronto Sun: "It looked like burnt trash. If you ever see something like that, you're in awe of it.

An international team of researchers will begin gathering in the Indian Ocean in October 2011, using aircraft, ships, moorings, radars, numerical models and other tools to study how tropical weather brews there and moves eastward along the equator, with reverberating effects around the globe.The six-month field campaign, known as DYNAMO or Dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, will help improve long-range weather forecasts and seasonal outlooks and enable scientists to further refine computer models of global climate.

Deserts keep growing around the world, but the process can be reversed if governments act in time, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday.Speaking at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, Ban sounded the alarm, saying that 40 percent of the world's land - home to about two billion people - is arid or semi-arid."Let us resolve today to reverse this trend," Ban said. "Contrary to common perception, not all dry lands are unproductive," he added. "Timely action on our part can unlock these riches and provide a solution.

One of the most powerful storms to hit Tokyo in years brought back bitter memories of Japan's tsunami disaster in March, and threatened to further damage the Fukushima nuclear plant.Typhoon Roke barrelled into the capital during evening rush hour last night, packing gusts of more than 124mph, cutting off public transport and stranding hundreds of thousands of people in the world's most populated metropolis. "It's just one thing after another," said Takeshi Goto, a businessman who sheltered in the world's busiest station, Shinjuku, in central Tokyo.

A stunning new photo from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows five moons of Saturn hovering around two of the gas giant planet's dazzling rings.The image, which NASA released Wednesday (Sept. 21), shows Saturn's moons Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea. The planet's rings are beyond Rhea and Mimas, while bright Enceladus appears behind the rings. Cassini took the picture in visible green light on July 29, 2011.The view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane, researchers explained in a description. The five Saturn moons in Cassini's photo vary greatly in size, with Pandora (50 miles wide, or 81 kilometers) and Janus (111 miles, or 179 km) the smallest.

Australia has unwittingly become the Google Earth archaeology capital of the world.After announcing in February that he had unearthed almost 2000 potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia from his armchair, Professor David Kennedy, from the University of Western Australia, has now uncovered thousands more prehistoric man-made stone structures across the entire Arabian peninsula, stretching from northern Syria to Yemen.Aerial archaeology transformed our understanding of north-western Europe two or three generations ago but Professor Kennedy said "that opportunity was lost in the Middle East". It's only now, thanks to Google Earth, that the areas that were previously off-limits to archaeologists are being fully understood.

Using the Herschel Space Telescope, astronomers are set to obtain the first-ever images of asteroid 1999 RQ36 in far infrared light, a wavelength that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will not be able to see once it approaches the charcoal-black chunk of rock floating in space. Peering through forest-fire smoke with the 61-inch telescope on Mt. Bigelow north of Tucson, Carl Hergenrother observed the asteroid known as 1999 RQ36 on its 2011 Earth-approaching orbit early last June.The 1,900-foot (580 meter) diameter, blacker-than-coal asteroid is the destination asteroid for the U.S.' first asteroid-sample return mission, NASA's OSIRIS-REx.Hergenrother, of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, heads the OSIRIS-REx asteroid astronomy working group of more than three dozen scientists from the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Just 2 months after Zahi Hawass was removed as chief of Egypt's antiquities, his successor has submitted his resignation. Mohammad Abdel Fatah, a former Cairo University professor, told ScienceInsider today that he wants to leave his job because of "instability" in the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), which oversees the country's myriad ancient monuments as well as all archaeological work. "We are in such a difficult situation," he added.That situation, other Egyptian and foreign archaeologists say, includes strikes and demonstrations by SCA employees who want higher pay and an improved working environment. The upheavals in recent days led Fatah to call in military police to clear demonstrators who were trying to force their way into SCA headquarters in downtown Cairo, according to some reports. Fatah told Egypt's official MENA news agency that he felt "powerless and overwhelmed," adding that his organization is "paralyzed."

Sebastian Elser, Prof. Ben Moore and Dr. Joachim Stadel of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in cooperation with Ryuji Morishima of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tried to estimate how common Earth-Moon planetary systems are. They have found that 1 in 12 Earth-like planets probably hosts a Moon-like satellite. Since the Moon might have played an important role in the history of life on Earth, this estimate is important concerning the search for habitable planets.

The rumbling you feel driving along a bridge may soon serve a purpose beyond just waking you up behind the wheel. Researchers at MIT have developed a tiny energy-harvester that is able to harness low-frequency vibrations like those made by a bridge or pipeline and converting them to electricity for wireless sensors.Wireless sensors are used for all kinds of things, from monitoring factory machines and oil pipelines to keeping track of pollution. While the efficiency of their energy consumption has improved, the sensors' batteries still need to be changed occasionally. MIT's device, a microelectromechanical system (we prefer the term energy-harvester) makes electricity from the vibrations of foot traffic and other low-power energy sources from the environment, potentially removing the need for batteries completely.

Breathing in large amounts of traffic fumes can trigger a heart attack up to six hours after exposure, according to research which reaffirms the health risks associated with pollution.The study, in the British Medical Journal, found that high levels of pollution can increase the risk of suffering a heart attack. It identifies exposure to pollutant particles and nitrogen dioxide expelled by cars, which are both markers of contaminated urban atmospheres, as the main culprits.

Scientists have collected more evidence to suggest that ancient and modern humans interbred in Africa.Reanalysis of the 13,000-year-old skull from a cave in West Africa reveals a skull more primitive-looking than its age suggests.The result suggests that the ancestors of early humans did not die out quickly in Africa, but instead lived alongside their descendents and bred with them until comparatively recently.The results are published in PLoS ONE.

YOU can now hold your brain in the palm of your hand. For the first time, a scanner powered by a smartphone will let you monitor your neural signals on the go.By hooking up a commercially available EEG headset to a Nokia N900 smartphone, Jakob Eg Larsen and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby have created a completely portable system.This is the first time a phone has provided the power for an EEG headset, which monitors the electrical activity of the brain, says Larsen. The headset would normally connect wirelessly to a USB receiver plugged into a PC.

A "hidden" code linked to the DNA of plants allows them to develop and pass down new biological traits far more rapidly than previously thought, according to the findings of a groundbreaking study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.The study, published today in the journal Science, provides the first evidence that an organism's "epigenetic" code - an extra layer of biochemical instructions in DNA - can evolve more quickly than the genetic code and can strongly influence biological traits.

A new book about evolution that couldn't get published in the United States has won a Canadian book award.On Wednesday the book, "Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be," by Daniel Loxton, won the 2010 Lane Anderson Award in the young reader category for a book published in the field of science and written by a Canadian. Loxton's book was also a finalist for the prestigious Silver Birch Award earlier this year and is in the running for a third book award for Canadian children's nonfiction.Loxton's book is, of course, not the first book devoted to evolution; for example, eminent biologist Richard Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" came out in 2009. So why were American publishers reluctant to take Loxton's award-winning book?.

Archaeologists in southern Maryland say they have solved a mystery that has baffled historians since at least the 1930s. They say they have found Zekiah Fort.The fort was established in 1680 by Gov. Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, for the protection of the Piscataway people and other Maryland Indian groups that were the targets of raids by "foreign" Susquehannock and Seneca warriors from the north.

The earth's most successful bacteria are found in the oceans and belong to the group SAR11. In a new study, researchers from Uppsala University provide an explanation for their success and at the same time call into question generally accepted theories about these bacteria. In their analysis they have also identified a rare and hitherto unknown relative of mitochondria, the power stations inside cells.The findings were published in two articles in the journals Molecular Biology and Evolution and PLoS One in the last week.

Halloween is still more than one month away but archeologists working in Ireland have uncovered a couple of 8th century human skeletons that point to a ghoulish story.The skeletons, dug up between 2005 and 2009 at Kilteasheen, near Loch Key in Ireland, were found with stones stuck into their mouths. Researchers examining the remains suggest this may have been related to a belief among the locals that this practice would prevent the dead from returning to walk the Earth as zombies.

New data from space have cast into doubt the identity of the asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.The current theory is that a large asteroid called Baptistina collided with another rock, throwing out huge fragments into the Solar System.One of these fragments is believed to have struck Earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.But new data from the Nasa-run Wise telescope suggest that the Baptistina fragments are just far too young.

Astronomers have just discovered the first "circumbinary planet." Like Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine in the "Star Wars" films, this strange world, labeled Kepler-16b, orbits two closely spaced suns.What would such a planet be like? For that matter, what if Earth had two suns instead of one? Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., is a member of the Kepler-16b discovery team. He describes the scenery on the Tatooine-like planet, and how Earth would fare in such a binary star system.

Stem cell technology is coming to the rescue of the world's endangered animals. Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park are building what they call a ''zoo'' of animal stem cells which could be used to repopulate species on the verge of extinction. Ben Gruber reports.

A blistering summer melted Arctic sea ice to near-record lows, and scientists say two more weeks of high temperatures could bring ice coverage in the polar region to the lowest since satellite measurements were first taken in 1979.That's the grim assessment released Thursday by the National Climatic Data Center, which also calculated that last month's global temperatures amounted to the eighth-warmest August on record. Federal forecasters predicted a return to La Nina conditions, bringing slightly drier and warmer weather to much of the country.

The recent rapid pace of discovery of "candidate planets" -- distant worlds that seem suitable for life -- make scientists engaged in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) hopeful that they could find alien signals within the next 15 years.On Sept. 12, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile announced the discovery of 16 new "super-Earths," planets orbiting distant stars that are smaller than gas giants, and most likely have rocky surfaces where life could gain traction. One of the newfound super-Earths, labeled HD 85512b, is the strongest candidate among them: It resides in its star's "habitable zone," where the temperature is just right to sustain liquid water -- the elixir of life as we know it.

In its heyday, the ancient city of Mari was the throne of one of ancient Mesopotamia's great kings, located at the western edge of the Sumerian civilization. It played a key role in the trade of goods and information between Sumer and the kingdoms to its west. It was here that the famous Mari Tablet Archive was discovered, a collection of 25,000 fired-clay tablets inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform, affording archaeologists and the rest of the world with a rich trove of information about lives and business in 2nd century, B.C. Mesopotamia. To look upon its remains today, however, one would see a slow tragedy in the making. Its exposed walls are gradually eroding away, melting back into the natural landscape. Some of its excavated remains are now unrecognizable. The need for better general site management and conservation would be an understatement. What it really needs is urgent rescue.

Much as modern day man enjoys tucking into a plateful of seafood paella when visiting the Costa del Sol, Neanderthals living on the Iberian coast 150,000 years ago supplemented their diet with molluscs and marine animals.Archaeological examination of a cave in Torremolinos unearthed early tools used to crack open shellfish collected off rocks along the Iberian coast and found fossilised remains of the early meals.The discovery is the earliest of its kind in northern Europe and shows that early man were fish eaters in Europe some 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Floating rafts of volcanic rock could have been cradles of life in the early days of Earth, some scientists suggest.The circumstances under which life emerged sometime before 3.5 billion years ago remain largely mysterious. Commonly believed settings for the origin of life include deep-sea hydrothermal vents.Now scientists in England and Australia suggest that rafts of pumice, which is essentially solidified lava froth, were instrumental as vessels for first life. This pale volcanic rock, which is rich in gas bubbles, is the only known rock type that naturally floats on the surface of the sea.

Norwegian physicist and Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever has quit a major US physics society due to its stance on global warming, a spokeswoman for the group told AFP Thursday."I can confirm he has resigned," American Physical Society spokeswoman Tawanda Johnson said, noting that Giaever, 82, sent a letter to that effect to the group's executive director Kate Kirby on Tuesday."His reason is that he takes issue with APS's stance on climate change.

An estimated 60,000 people have taken to the streets of Tokyo in the the largest anti-nuclear demonstration since the Fukushima nuclear meltdown six months ago.They're calling on the Japanese government to end what they describe as their country's "addiction to nuclear power", but the new prime minister has signalled that Japan needs nuclear energy.Earlier the former prime minister revealed that the evacuation of 30 million people from Tokyo and surrounding areas was contemplated in the days after the meltdowns.

NO NEED TO THINK you're going bird-brained if you hear mysterious voices from the trees - it's likely just a curious cockatoo wanting a chat. Native parrots, especially cockatoos, seem to be learning the art of conversation from their previously domesticated friends.The Australian Museum's Search and Discover desk, which offers a free service to identify species, has received numerous reports of encounters with talkative birds in the wild from mystified citizens who thought they were hearing voices.Martyn Robinson, a naturalist who works at the desk, explains that occasionally a pet cockatoo escapes or is let loose, and "if it manages to survive long enough to join a wild flock, [other birds] will learn from it.

A new article is now available on the forum by Thomas Razzeto, titled: "2012 and the Psychedelic Shamans: Why Their Experiences Are the Key to Understanding the Message of 2012".IntroductionAs I explored the puzzle of 2012, one of the things that I least expected turned out to be the most important. My exploration of this subject was initially focused on the astronomy that will unfold on December 21, 2012 and this is indeed crucial in understanding why the Maya picked that exact day. But this essay will not focus on the astronomy; it will focus on something completely different. It will focus on the psychedelic effects of the chemicals that the Maya shamans got from the Bufo toad. These psychedelic experiences are the key to understanding the message of the ancient Maya.

Researchers at Princeton University and New York University have developed a ready-made method for detecting the collision of stars with an elusive type of black hole that is believe to make up dark matter.They believe this method will be beneficial to as astronomers who are seeking to capture evidence of dark matter, which is the invisible substance thought to constitute much of the universe.Postdoctoral researchers Shravan Hanasoge of Princeton's Department of Geosciences along with Michael Kesden of NYU's Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics managed to simulate visible result of a primordial black hole passing through a star.

For the first time, NASA astronomers using Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) captured the innermost part of the black hole's (GX 339-A) active jets.The rare data collected by the engineers show fluctuations in the infrared light from the flares. These jets help learn about the extreme environments around the black holes. The black hole, called GX 339-4, had been observed previously. It lies more than 20,000 light-years away from the Earth near the center of our galaxy. It has a mass at least six times greater than the Sun."Imagine what it would be like if our Sun were to undergo sudden, random bursts, becoming three times brighter in a matter of hours and then fading back again. That's the kind of fury we observed in this jet," said Poshak Gandhi, a scientist with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

If you want to be a part of discovering the future of solar power, you can be. You don't need any special knowledge or equipment, just let Alán Aspuru-Guzik borrow your computer when you're not using it.Aspuru-Guzik and the rest of the Clean Energy Project are using distributed computing to search for an organic molecule that will make a more efficient solar cell. More efficient than silicon solar cells, anyway, which are ten times more expensive than other energy sources. Distributed computing uses multiple PCs around the web and harnesses them to get the equivalent processing power of a supercomputer. Many other projects are using this method to work on cures for Alzheimer's, cancer and other diseases, to detect earthquakes early, and to search for extraterrestrial life.

Prominent polar scientists have said there is "no support" for potentially "damaging" claims, made by The Times Atlas of the World last week, that Greenland's ice cover has shrunk by 15 per cent over the past 12 years as a result of global warming.The publisher Harper Collins made international headlines when it declared that the new edition of its "comprehensive" atlas, which claims to be the "most authoritative" in the world, had been forced to depict an area the size of the UK and Ireland, previously part of Greenland's permanent ice sheet, as "green and ice-free" due to climate change.

There will be a new type of racing car soon. It's supposed to look something like a Formula 1 car and drive just as fast -- but with an engine that makes no noise.The International Automobile Federation (FIA) has announced that a new racing championship series is being developed for the circuit that could ideologically decontaminate the racing world. The plan envisions having automobiles with 700 horsepower electric engines zooming about with absolutely no emissions.

The 6.5-ton Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, was carried into orbit during a space shuttle mission in 1991. It operated for 14 years, collecting measurements of ozone and other chemicals in the atmosphere.Since completing its mission in 2005, UARS has been slowly losing altitude, tugged by Earth's gravity. On Friday, the 35-foot-long, 15-foot diameter (10.6-metres long, 4.5-metres diameter) satellite is expected to plunge into the atmosphere, NASA reported on its website.

Man may be a distant relatives of chimpanzees and bonobo monkeys, but scientists working in Uganda came back to Paris with a new addition to the primates' family picture.Found amid the layers of sediment beneath the volcanoes of the Karamoja region, on the Napak XV hillside, scientists said the Ugandapithecus skull is the most complete of its kind to have ever been unearthed.

The "missing heat" needed to balance the Earth's energy budget may be lurking in the deep oceans, a new study finds.That deep ocean heat storage could help explain periods when global warming has slowed, even though satellite data show no change in the amount of energy trapped in the Earth's atmosphere.That "missing heat" is hiding out in ocean waters at depths of 1,000 feet or more, according to researchers from the United States and Australia. Their findings, based on computer climate simulations, were published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Hydrogen has potential as a clean-burning fuel. It leaves behind only water as it burns. But as a scalable alternative to fossil fuels, it's yet to make good: most methods of making large amounts of hyrdrogen require energy (often from fossil fuels) to power its production, which sort of defeats the purpose. But a new energy-efficient way to make hydrogen using wastewater and sea water could turn a energy-intensive water treatment plant into a source of hydrogen.Bruce Logan, professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University, has been working on bacteria that can serve as a cog in a fuel cell. In the right combination, they chew through the organic materials in wastewater and release electrons that can be harvested as electricity--or turned into hydrogen.

Feisty, raptor dinosaurs didn't just use their sharp claws for show -- a new fossil suggests they may have brandished their butcher's hook-like talons as weapons.A newly found feathered dinosaur, named Talos sampsoni, is related to the iconic velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame. The fossil shows the dinosaur's foot was damaged, and researchers think they know why."This raptor dinosaur specimen is special because it shows evidence of having broken the toe on the foot that bears an enlarged talon, an injury we are interpreting as sustained during combat with other members of the species or in hunting prey," Lindsay Zanno, lead author of a study published in PLoS ONE, told Discovery News.

The source of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago remains a mystery, a new study finds.Some researchers had thought the deadly asteroid was a piece of a larger space rock called Baptistina. Baptistina broke apart after a massive in-space collision about 160 million years ago, the theory went, spawning a swarm of mountain-size chunks of rock. One of those eventually slammed into Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and many other species.Scientists are confident that a 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer asteroid) is indeed what wiped out the dinosaurs. But new observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope suggest the space rock didn't come from Baptistina.

German industrial and engineering conglomerate Siemens is to withdraw entirely from the nuclear industry.The move is a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March, chief executive Peter Loescher said.He told Spiegel magazine it was the firm's answer to "the clear positioning of German society and politics for a pullout from nuclear energy".

The government may not want you to know that it set off nuclear bombs willy-nilly in the atmosphere or tested LSD on unwitting subjects, but at least the Science Channel does!In case you believed that elaborate government conspiracies were merely the driving force behind X-Files episodes, the Science Channel is setting the record straight. As a compendium to their latest show, "Dark Matters," which explores the darker side of science, the Science Channel has published introductions and full transcripts from government hearings on some of the most unbelievable -- yet true -- conspiracies, including the highly-controversial MKULTRA project.

The dusky grouper, one of the major predators in the Mediterranean sea, used to be so large in antiquity that it was portrayed as a "sea monster," a new study into ancient depictions of the endangered fish has revealed."Amazingly, ancient mosaic art has provided important information to reconstruct this fish's historical baseline," Paolo Guidetti of the University of Salento in Italy, told Discovery News.Considered one of the most flavorful species among the Mediterranean fish, the dusky grouper (Epinephelus marginatus) is a large, long-lived, slow-growing, protogynous hermaphrodite fish (with sex reversal from female to male). It can be found mainly in the Mediterranean, the African west coast and the coast of Brazil.