Newsdesk Archive

Modern humans may have some traces of genes from Neanderthals, but a new study suggests any breeding between the two was most likely a rare event.The new computational model, based on DNA samples from modern humans in France and China, shows successful coupling happened at a rate of less than 2 percent.

Alternative fuel sources for cars may have a glowing future as a Kansas State University graduate student is working to replace petroleum fuels with ones made from sunlight.Yen-Ting Kuo, a doctoral candidate in chemistry, Taiwan, has spent several years in K-State's chemistry program working to create new materials that better use sunlight in chemical reaction processes to generate energy.

Cornell University researchers may have solved a 100-year puzzle: How to safely open and close the blood-brain barrier so that therapies to treat Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis and cancers of the central nervous system might effectively be delivered. (Journal of Neuroscience, Sept. 14, 2011.).

Observations over the last decade suggest that methane clouds form briefly over Mars during the summer months. The discovery has left many scientists scratching their heads, since it doesn't fit into models of the martian atmosphere."The reports are extraordinary," says Kevin Zahnle of NASA Ames Research Center. "They require methane to have a life time of days or weeks in the martian atmosphere, which disagrees with the known behavior of methane by at least a factor of 1000.

Sexually transmitted disease experiments conducted by federal researchers from 1946 t0 1948 in Guatemala involved "gross violations of ethics," says a presidential commission's report."A civilization can be judged by the way that it treats it most vulnerable individuals," said President's bioethics council chief Amy Gutmann of the University of Pennsylvania, in a statement. "It is our moral responsibility to care for those who cannot protect themselves and clearly in this dark chapter of our medical history we grievously failed to keep that covenant.

THE cars of the future could be powered by electrified roadways. Such technology would allow electric cars to forgo their heavy batteries, which not only add to a vehicle's weight, increasing the energy needed to move it, but also force it to sit idle while recharging.The idea has been around for decades. Previous attempts used an electrified coil in the road to create an electromagnetic field that interacts with a coil attached to the car. "Since the coils must be exactly aligned face-to-face to achieve a high energy efficiency, such schemes may be useful for [charging] vehicles in a parking lot, but never very effective for cars while running," says Masahiro Hanazawa at Toyota Central R&D Labs in Nagakute, Aichi, Japan.

A MAJOR solar storm would not only damage Earth's infrastructure, it could also leave a legacy of radiation that keeps killing satellites for years.When the sun belches a massive cloud of charged particles at Earth, it can damage our power grids and fry satellites' electronics. But that's not all. New calculations suggest that a solar megastorm could create a persistent radiation problem in low-Earth orbit, disabling satellites for up to a decade after the storm first hit.It would do this by destroying a natural buffer against radiation - a cloud of charged particles, or plasma, that normally surrounds Earth out to a distance of four times the planet's radius.

There's a big new kid on the nuclear energy block. Last week British firm AWE (formerly the Atomic Weapons Establishment), based in Aldermaston, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell, UK, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said they would team up to develop laser fusion as a clean energy source.Laser fusion is an alternative to magnetically induced nuclear fusion, which is used in the Joint European Torus (JET) now operating in Culham, UK, and the test reactor ITER, under construction in Cadarache, France.

What does Earth look like from the International Space Station? Science educator James Drake has created a one-minute timelapse video of the ISS circling the globe, which provides a fascinating look at Earth from above.According to UniverseToday.com, Drake created the video by combining 600 photos that are available via the Johnson Space Center's Gateway to Astronomy Photograph of Earth, an online repository of photographs taken by astronauts.The images are taken from the front of the ISS as it orbits the planet at night. The video starts over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica.

An amateur astronomer from the U.K. has put together a team dedicated to tracking down "Snoopy," the lunar ascent module left behind by the Apollo 10 mission.Before the Apollo 11 mission made history in 1969 by landing the first men on the moon, Apollo 10 blazed the trail by conducting a test run that included every step except actually landing on the moon. When its maneuvers were completed, the lunar ascent module - the funky, blocky thing astronauts rode up from the moon's surface - was sent into orbit around the sun. As far as anybody knows, it's still there.

South Korea plans to propose talks with Japan this week over wartime sex slaves, an issue that has long proved an irritant in relations between the two countries, according to Yonhap news agency.The move comes after South Korea's constitutional court ruled last month in favour of former sex slaves battling for government help in claiming compensation from Japan, the report said.The court ruled that the Seoul government had violated the rights of the women by making no effort to take on Japan over its refusal to compensate them.

He walked out of a German forest, speaking English and knowing only his first name. Police in Berlin are trying to unravel the mystery of a teenager who says he has no idea who he is or where he comes from.The boy presented himself to the Berlin authorities last week saying all he knew was that his first name was Ray, he was probably 17 years old and he and his father had roamed through the woods for about five years."He speaks fluent English and very broken German," the Berlin police spokesman Michael Maaß told the Guardian. The police have not yet determined if his accent is American, British or that of some other English-speaking nationality.

NASA space junk experts have refined the forecast for the anticipated death plunge of a giant satellite, with the U.S. space agency now predicting the 6 1/2-ton climate probe will plummet to Earth around Sept. 23, a day earlier than previously reported.The defunct bus-size spacecraft is NASA's Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS), which launched in 1991 and was shut down in 2005 after completing its mission. The satellite was expected to fall to Earth sometime this year, with experts initially pegging a weeks-long window between late September and early October, then narrowing it to the last week of this month.That window, NASA now says, has been trimmed to just three days.

Thirteen thousand years ago, Clovis people roamed The Hill, and there are 83 stone age tools to prove it. Archaeologists now believe the prehistoric people may have had an ice age megafauna butchering station along the banks of Gregory Creek, where the tools were discovered.In May of 2008, landowner and biotechnology entrepreneur Patrick Mahaffy hired landscapers to excavate part of his yard to create a pond. When one of the crew members heard an unusual chink, he stopped to investigate. They had stumbled upon a collection of 83 stone implements.

Often referred to as a south-east Asian version of Stonehenge, the Plain of Jars is one of the most enigmatic sights on Earth. Shrouded in both mystery and myth, this place has fascinated archaeologists and scientists ever since its discovery in the 1930s.A remarkable collectionThousands of giant stone jars are scattered around the Xieng Khouang plain in Laos and form one of the most bizarre archaeological collections, appearing in clusters and ranging from a single jar to several hundred, on the lower foothills surrounding the central plain and upland valleys.

Researchers in India have found a dozen new frog species belonging to the night frog group, named for their nocturnal habits, and rediscovered three species, one of which had not been seen in nearly a century. The findings appeared in the journal Zootaxa on Sept. 15.Night frogs are a group endemic to India and require either fast moving rivers or moist forest floor for breeding. The researchers write that half of the newly discovered species reproduce without any physical contact between the sexes, with the female depositing her eggs on a leaf and the males later fertilizing them. Despite their chaste procreation, both parents are active guardians for the eggs, bringing them water to prevent drying out and warding off predators.

KODIAK -- Going into the community archaeology dig this summer, Alutiiq Museum curator Patrick Saltonstall hoped to find one of the oldest inhabited sites on the Kodiak archipelago.What Saltonstall and a team of volunteers unearthed this year at the Amak site, near the Salonie Creek Rifle Range, was something different but no less important for understanding the people who lived on Kodiak Island thousands of years ago.While the ocean is about a mile from the site today, 3,000 years ago Womens Bay extended farther inland. The site would have overlooked a beach area at the head of the bay.

Stevie Wonder gave Steve Jobs a shout out last weekend for making touchscreen devices accessible to the blind and disabled. The Motown icon paused during a performance at the Echoplex night club in Los Angeles, to pay a tribute to the former Apple CEO. Jobs, who has been battling pancreatic cancer for years, resigned in August to take care of his health."I want you all to give a hand to someone that you know whose health is very bad at this time," Wonder said. "His company took the challenge in making his technology accessible to everyone. In the spirit of caring and moving the world forward, Steve Jobs.""Because there's nothing on the iPhone or the iPad that you can do that I can't do."

Forget about the 2012 Mayan calendar, comet Elenin or the Rapture. The real threat to human civilization is far more mundane, and it's right in front of our noses. If Fukushima has taught us anything, it's that just one runaway meltdown of fissionable nuclear material can have wide-ranging and potentially devastating consequences for life on Earth. To date, Fukushima has already released 168 times the total radiation released from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb detonated in 1945, and the Fukushima catastrophe is now undeniably the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human civilization.

The coldest summer for 18 years has been blamed by conservationists for an 11% fall in butterflies seen during this year's Big Butterfly Count.More than 34,000 people took part in the survey and recorded 322,000 butterflies and day-flying months.The gatekeeper butterfly was seen the most, while numbers of common blue were down by 61% on last year's figures.Butterfly Conservation said eastern Scotland was among the areas worst hit by cold and wet weather.

Researchers have determined that dolphins found in southeastern Australia represent a previously unknown species.Around 150 of the dolphins live around the Melbourne area and had until now been assumed to be one of the known bottlenose dolphins.But detailed DNA studies and analysis of skulls in museums showed the two populations are in fact a new species.The new classification as Tursiops australis is described in PLoS One.

Scientists' predictions about the mysterious dark matter purported to make up most of the mass of the Universe may have to be revised.Research on dwarf galaxies suggests they cannot form in the way they do if dark matter exists in the form that the most common model requires it to.That may mean that the Large Hadron Collider will not be able to spot it.Leading cosmologist Carlos Frenk spoke of the "disturbing" developments at the British Science Festival in Bradford.

That's how The Associated Press describes the way scientists are describing "HD 85512 b ... a newly discovered planet about 35 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vela."It's the second planet outside our solar system that seems to be orbiting in "the habitable zone" around its star, according to the European Southern Observatory, which today announced the discovery of HD 85512 b and more than 50 other plants around other stars. In that habitable zone, "water may be present in liquid form if conditions are right," the ESC adds.

TEHRAN -- Experts have proved that the artifact, which was unearthed at the Gohar-Tappeh prehistoric mound in Mazandaran Province in 2005, is a clarinet.In addition, a team of archaeologists has recently discovered dice for playing the game of craps at the site, team director Ali Mahforuzi told the Persian service of CHN last week.The musical instrument, which was very common in Mazandaran, had been discovered in a grave beside a skeleton that belonged to a woman, he said.

(CNN) -- An encoding device synonymous with one of the most remarkable episodes of World War II espionage will go under the hammer in London later this month.A version of the three rotor Enigma machine -- used by the German military to encrypt messages, the code of which was subsequently cracked by a team at the legendary Bletchley Park complex -- will be auctioned at Christie's on September 29.Although the number of the ciphering machines still in existence is thought to remain in the thousands, "it is rare for one to come up for sale," says Christie's specialist, James Hyslop. "Many are believed to have been produced but it's not a particularly high survival," he adds.

Panasonic's little battery-powered bot that could, the Evolta, has garnered our attention several times over the years. It's already climbed out of the Grand Canyon and walked 500km from Tokyo to Kyoto, but apparently neither was enough to prove it and its namesake batteries' true mettle. This time, Panasonic's putting three of the robots through the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii, and they've got a week to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112, and run a 26.2 mile marathon. Unlike the meatbags running the race who have a day to finish, the robots get a week -- though they'll be doing their thing 24 hours a day while only taking breaks to recharge their three AA batteries. Intrigued?

PASADENA, Calif. - A new video from NASA's Dawn spacecraft takes us on a flyover journey above the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta.The data obtained by Dawn's framing camera, used to produce the visualizations, will help scientists determine the processes that formed Vesta's striking features. It will also help Dawn mission fans all over the world visualize this mysterious world, which is the second most massive object in the main asteroid belt.The video, which shows Vesta as seen from Dawn's perspective, can be viewed at...

I can remember when the idea of a touchscreen phone was the thing of fantasy, straight out of the Back to the Future films. But who can remember a time when you needed both hands and bulging biceps just to hold your mobile phone? It's easy to forget the remarkable recent advances in technology that have made lightweight, technologically sophisticated gadgets possible.Futurists have predicted a future world full of even more exciting technologies, miniature gizmos and sustainable and environmentally friendly energy resources.But this fantastic future is at risk.

The ships that carried John Franklin on his fateful Arctic expedition remain at large after this summer's search, Canadian officials announced last week. Archaeologists hoped to finally shed light on the demise of Franklin and his crew, who died under mysterious circumstances while exploring the Northwest Passage in the mid-1800s. Find out more about their doomed mission and other famous expeditions that ended in disaster.

When aliens finally make contact with humankind, our leaders are going to be all "You totally dropped the ball in 1947 in Roswell, huh, aliens?" To which the aliens will laugh and nod, while collecting a large amount of whatever it is they came here for (most likely German beer).Since tonight's Paranormal Witness on Syfy at 10/9C is about a UFO encounter, we found 8 lesser-known sightings that are just as remarkable as four joyriding aliens crash-landing in New Mexico because they lost control for some reason (most likely German beer).

Planet-hunters say they've detected the first world that's absolutely known to circle two stars, like Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in the fictional "Star Wars" saga."Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality," said Carnegie Institution astronomer Alan Boss, a member of the team for NASA's Kepler mission and a co-author of a paper on the discovery in the journal Science.

Surrounded by the rocky Aravalli hills, Rajasthan is one of India's driest states. Despite good rains this year, water has always been an issue here.But the problem now is that beneath the lush, green, irrigated fields of north-western India, the groundwater is fast disappearing.In Neemrana, about 150km (95 miles) from Delhi, this has been made worse by human intervention.Situated on the national highway, this area is part of the industrial development under the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor..

UK waters may become more productive fishing grounds as climate change brings new species in from the south, according to researchers.Fish such as red mullet, hake and sole have become more abundant in the last 30 years, as the waters have warmed.But established favourites such as cod and haddock may be on the wane.The findings come from an analysis of trawl data going back to 1980, covering about 100 million fish caught, and is published in Current Biology journal.

Ancient and modern humans may have interbred, a study published in the journal Plos One suggests.Scientists analysed human remains found in West Africa, which date to 13,000 years old.Even though this was a time when modern humans were fully in existence, the team found that the cranial shape of the skull was primitive and was more closely related to African fossils that date to 140,000 years old than to modern humans.

Repeated calls to the Soyuz TMA-21 capsule from Mission Control in Korolyov, near Moscow, went unanswered for several minutes, well after the craft had left its orbit of the Earth.Communication was eventually established between the crew and a plane circling the landing site.

Prof Iain Stewart, the geologist and TV presenter, sealed himself in the foliage-filled chamber on Thursday night as part of a new BBC TWO series.The transparent box, measuring just 2m by 8m by 2.5m, contained nowhere near enough oxygen when it was shut to keep someone alive for 48 hours.To stay alive Prof Stewart will rely on 150 plants, which produce the oxygen he will need to keep breathing until he is released on Saturday.

Hundreds of Guernsey people have signed up to take part in the biggest national beach litter pick.More than 200 volunteers, including schoolchildren, families and voluntary groups, will record what they find along the coast before removing it.The annual event is organised by the Environment Department on behalf of the Marine Conservation Society (MCS).The results of the clean-up, held on 17 and 18 September, are then published in the annual MCS beachwatch report.

Sometime next week a dead NASA satellite will fall back to Earth, read that as part of it may crash back into the ground uncontrollably into an area yet undefined.NASA expects the satellite to break up into pieces during re-entry -- though they say not all of it will burn up in the atmosphere and estimate that more than two dozen pieces may make it to terra firma.They also say we shouldn't worry and that no one has ever been hit by falling space junk in the past. I trust NASA and take some solace in their assurances, however when the odds of getting struck by some part of the 6-ton upper atmosphere research satellite (UARS) are 1-in-3,200 ... well, those odd's aren't exactly as high as I'd like them to be.

NASA's Opportunity rover has found an intriguing rock that could offer clues into Mars' wetter past.Opportunity is more than seven years into its roving mission on Mars and arrived at the rim of the giant Endeavour crater in August. Just last week, the rover began studying a rock scientists have named "Chester Lake." The Mars rock appears to be much older than the geologic formations Opportunity has so far encountered."We've never seen a rock that looks remotely like this on Mars before," the rover's chief scientist Steve Squyres, a Cornell University geologist, said during a Planetary Foundation luncheon in Washington Sept. 9.

Cairo, 14 September 2011 - The Giza Pyramids are among the most famous monuments in the world. They also raise endless questions by their visitors. Part of their mystery is the fact that there are no definite answers to questions such as: Why they were built? How they were built? Who built them? What do they symbolize? In our attempt to find answers, we find many theories.Approximately 90 percent of the theories in Egyptology are based on hypothesis, and only 10 percent are proven ones. Bearing in mind that there are 3 mysteries connected to the pyramids, namely the mystery of the tools used, the mystery of the colors and the mystery of mummification, the pyramids are a challenge to all the technologies that we have in the 21st century.

(Livescience.com) They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines -- ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru -- and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago.

Fluffy structures trapped in thumbnail-sized bits of ancient amber may represent some of the earliest evolutionary experiments leading to feathers, according to a new study. These filaments of "dinofuzz" are so well preserved that they even provide hints of color, the researchers say.The oldest bird, Archaeopteryx, lived in what is now Germany about 150 million years ago, and the oldest known feathered dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi, lived in northeastern China between 151 million and 161 million years ago. Both creatures had modern-style feathers, each of which had a central shaft; barbs, which made up the feather's vane; and substructures called barbules tipped with Velcro-like hooklets that held the barbs together to form a sturdy aerodynamic surface.

The design for a huge rocket to take humans to asteroids and Mars has been unveiled by the US space agency Nasa.The Space Launch System (SLS), as it is currently known, will be the most powerful launcher ever built - more powerful even than the Saturn V rockets that put men on the Moon.On top of the SLS, Nasa plans to put its Orion astronaut capsule, which is already in development.The agency says the first launch should occur towards the end of 2017.

A huge helium-filled balloon attached to a 1km length of hosepipe is to be launched next month to help investigate the feasibility of climate engineering.One method involves pumping particles into the stratosphere, to mimic the short-term cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.The balloon test next month will investigate the engineering challenges posed by such a project.Representatives discussed the project at the Science Festival in Bradford.

Astronomers using a telescope in Chile have discovered 50 previously unknown exoplanets.The bumper haul of new worlds includes 16 "super-Earths" - planets with a greater mass than our own, but below those of gas giants such as Jupiter.One of these super-Earths orbits inside the habitable zone - the region around a star where conditions could be hospitable to life.The planets were identified using the Harps instrument in La Silla in Chile.

Europe's first two Galileo satellite-navigation spacecraft are ready for launch.The platforms passed a key technical review at the weekend, paving the way for their flight to orbit on a Russian Soyuz rocket on 20 October.One satellite has already made the journey to the launch complex in French Guiana; the second will ship this week.The European Commission is investing billions of euros in its own version of the American GPS system.

A Japanese Venus probe fired its main engine last Wednesday for the first time since overshooting the planet in December, paving the way for a possible comeback bid in 2015.The Akatsuki spacecraft was slated to enter orbit around Venus on Dec. 6. But its engine failed during a crucial orbit-insertion burn, and the probe went sailing off into space.They want the probe to take another shot at Venus during the next available opportunity, which could come as soon as 2015. So they've started testing the probe's main engine, called the "orbit maneuver engine."

Legend tells of Greek engineer and inventor Archimedes using parabolic mirrors to create "heat rays" to burn the ships attacking Syracuse. Though the underpinnings of that claim are speculative at best, a modern-day team of researchers at the Scientific and Production Association in Uzbekistan has proposed a more scientifically sound method of harnessing parabolic mirrors to drive solar-powered lasers.

Nestled between radio waves and infrared light is the terahertz (THz) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. By adding a nanoscale bit of graphene, researchers have found a better way to tune radiation for a THz transmitter.Researchers from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana have harnessed another one of graphene's remarkable properties to better control a relatively untamed portion of the electromagnetic spectrum: the terahertz band.

Extremophiles are tiny microbes that are able to thrive in hot, salty and even acidic or gaseous environments that would kill other forms of life. Now scientists are using these hardy dwellers of the seafloor and hot springs to produce biofuels such as ethanol more efficiently and at lower cost.These heat and salt-loving microorganisms are good at breaking down biological material such as wood chips, waste crops or other sorts of plant material. They also literally "take the heat" when it comes to punishing industrial processes. Until recently, researchers have had trouble culturing these wild-growing extremophiles and harnessing their properties. But recent advances have allowed them to turn them into bio-powered refineries.

The Academy of Natural Sciences today announced the discovery of a new species of large predatory fish that prowled ancient North American waterways during the Devonian Period, before backboned animals existed on land.Drs. Edward "Ted" Daeschler and Jason Downs of the Academy and colleagues from the University of Chicago and Harvard University describe the new denizen of the Devonian they named Laccognathus embryi in the current issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

New evidence of sea-level oscillations during a warm period that started about 125,000 years ago raises the possibility of a similar scenario if the planet continues its more recent warming trend, says a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).In a paper published online in the Sept. 11 Nature Geoscience, the researchers report data from an improved method of dating fossil coral reef skeletons in the Bahamas. By calculating more accurate ages for the coral samples than previously possible, they found that sea levels were considerably less stable than earlier believed--oscillating up and down by 4 to 6 meters (13-20 feet) over a few thousand years about 120,000 years ago during a period known as the Last Interglacial.

[Updated at 10:39 a.m. ET] The U.S. Geological Survey has revised downward the magnitude of Thursday morning's earthquake off Cuba to magnitude 5.1 from magnitude 6.0.[Updated at 5:20 a.m. ET] A magnitude 6.0 earthquake hit off the southeastern coast of Cuba early Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

See 3 new articles up on the forum by David Sproull.1 - Ancient Mysteries and Graham Hancock2 - Uncovering Atlantis: Evidence of a lost chapter in human histor3 - The Fall of the Kingdom of Atlantis: Envisioning a Lost Civilization in a Upper Paleolithic Context

When hunting for terrorists, seeing them before they see you is a must.Regular night-vision goggles are good, but not good enough. Sure, they let a soldier see at night as well as he would by day -- but they don't let him see any better. That just changed.A new device developed over seven years by Optics1 gives warfighters "Predator"-style vision to better tag those terrorists and other threats. Only recently made available, the COTI (Clip On Thermal Imager) adds the ability to see thermal signals to existing night-vision devices.

Wiring systems powered by highly-efficient superconductors have long been a dream of science, but researchers have faced such practical challenges such as finding pliable and cost-effective materials. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University have found a way to make an old idea new with the next generation of superconductors.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - African farm yields may fall as much as 20 percent in the next four decades because of climate change, placing a huge burden on a continent whose population is set to double by 2050 to two billion people, a conference heard on Tuesday.Most experts say the poorest continent has to double its food output by the middle of the century to feed itself, but faces an uphill battle as more droughts and floods compound the existing problems of poor access to finance and markets.

UCLA life scientists have identified for the first time a particlular gene's link to optimism, self-esteem and "mastery," the belief that one has control over one's own life -- three critical psychological resources for coping well with stress and depression."I have been looking for this gene for a few years, and it is not the gene I expected," said Shelley E. Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and senior author of the new research. "I knew there had to be a gene for these psychological resources.

FIELD trials for experiments to engineer the climate have begun. Next month a team of UK researchers will hoist one end of a 1-kilometre-long hose aloft using a balloon, then attempt to pump water up it and spray it into the atmosphere (see diagram).The water will not affect the climate. Rather, the experiment is a proof of principle to show that we can pump large quantities of material to great heights. If it succeeds, a larger-scale version could one day pump sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, creating a sunshade that will offset the greenhouse effect.

Visitors to Stonehenge in Wiltshire rarely experience the historic site without the rumble of traffic noise from the nearby A303. But UK researchers have managed to recreate the sound of a ritual there, as heard by our ancestors 4,000 years ago.

As the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks approaches, NASA is stressing the role that cooperative space exploration can play in making the world a better place.Projects such as the International Space Station help blur the differences that can pit nations and peoples against each other, highlighting instead what humanity can accomplish when it works together, NASA officials said.

Traumatised cats are getting another shot at rehabilitation thanks to a novel research method being explored at The University of Queensland.PhD student Nadine Gourkow is looking into a technique known as "gentling", where cats receive petting that mimics allorubbing and allogrooming (rubbing or grooming by another cat) in short and repetitive sessions to change their emotional state from negative to positiv.

Earth experienced its most dramatic extinction crisis of all time 250 million years ago when about 90 percent of ocean-dwelling species and 70 percent of land-dwellers disappeared. Exactly what caused the massive die-off, however, has long been a matter of debate.Now, a new study offers new clues.Ocean acidification caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air, the study suggests, may have played a major role in the ancient extinction event, which was particularly hard on marine creatures that make calcium carbonate shells -- a process that's much harder for them to do in acidic conditions.

The high-tech magnets in modern MRI systems encountered at the doctor's office may soon generate electricity from the wind, according to researchers at the General Electric Company.MRI systems are the tube-like contraptions that make images of damaged hearts, torn ligaments, brains, and other body tissues. Instead of X-rays, the images are made with superconducting magnets, which are electromagnets made from coils of superconducting wire.

King crabs have been found on the edge of Antarctica, probably as a result of warming in the region, scientists say.Writing in the journal Proceedings B, scientists report a large, reproductive population of crabs in the Palmer Deep, a basin cut in the continental shelf.They suggest the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water.

Unraveling the mystery surrounding the shipwreck found last year during excavations of the World Trade Center site has resulted in several facts as well as theories. The 18th century vessel, likely a single-masted sloop, measured approximately 50 feet long, and had a shallow, double-ended draft aided by a small, tapered keel built of squared-off hickory that that ran from stem-to-stern. The hull was built from Philadelphia oak trees -- one of which had lived for at least 111 years and was still growing in 1773, its youngest sapwood preserved in one of the boat's timbers.

A three-year mapping project covering nearly 150,000 air miles between the Arctic and the Antarctic has produced what scientists on Wednesday called unprecedented details about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.The data, which scientists will chew on for years, likely will influence policy in California and around the globe as governments seek strategies to slash the amount of airborne carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for speeding climate change. They already are reshaping and refining understanding of the global movement of greenhouse gases, much like transoceanic explorations did for marine science in the mid-20th century.

A nearby star is drubbing its close-orbiting planet with a barrage of X-rays 100,000 times more powerful than what the Earth receives from the sun, a new study has found.That intense, high-energy radiation is blasting about 5 million tons of matter from the gigantic planet into space every second, researchers said. They made the observations using NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile."This planet is being absolutely fried by its star," said study lead author Sebastian Schroeter, of the University of Hamburg in Germany, in a statement. "What may be even stranger is that this planet may be affecting the behavior of the star that is blasting it."

ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory has discovered that galaxies do not need to collide with each other to drive vigorous star birth. The finding overturns this long-held assumption and paints a more stately picture of how galaxies evolve.The conclusion is based on Herschel's observations of two patches of sky, each about a third of the size of the full Moon.It's like looking through a keyhole across the Universe -- Herschel has seen more than a thousand galaxies at a variety of distances from the Earth, spanning 80% of the age of the cosmos.

IRD researchers and their partners (1) have succeeded in explaining 10 000 years of glacial melt in the Andes through work recently published in Nature. They showed that the Telata glacier in Bolivia retreated 3 km during the Holocene epoch covering that time and continuing in the Present. This regression was linked mainly to a 3°C increase in atmospheric temperatures resulting from warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, itself a response to a rise in insolation (2) in the tropics.

Last year, radioactive boars frustrated hunters in Germany. This year poisonous rhinoceroses are discouraging poachers in South Africa.Like the boars, the rhinos are not a product of nature, but a result of human actions. In this case though, the toxic treatment was intentional.The Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve in Krugersdorp, north of Johannesburg, South Africa, discovered that a medical mixture used to kill parasites on the rhinos also made their horns toxic to humans. The AFP recently reported on this new tool in the fight to protect wildlife.

The latest spacecraft to go to the Moon have launched from Florida.Nasa is sending twin probes called Grail to map tiny variations in the pull of gravity around the lunar body.The information should give scientists fresh insight into the internal structure of Earth's satellite.This will help explain many mysteries, such as why the farside of the Moon looks so different from that of the nearside with its great swathe of dark volcanic plains, or maria.

Young men spring through the air, performing elegant punches and kicks; others bound across the dirt, swords flashing through the misty air. An ancient tree has dozens of small dents, made by "finger punches" of warrior monks over the centuries.This is the Shaolin temple complex, in the mountains of central China, where kung fu was born 1,500 years ago. Now a place of pilgrimage for martial arts enthusiasts and Zen Buddhists, thousands of young people come to study kung fu, or wushu as it is known in China, in schools around the temple.

The UK's first ever plant for recycling nappies is to open today. The facility, which will also recycle feminine hygiene and adult incontinence products, is the first of five planned over four years by Knowaste, an organisation which specialises in absorbent hygiene product (AHP) waste recycling.Knowaste said the first site in West Bromwich will use state-of-the-art technology to recycle AHPs, sterilising and separating the materials to recover plastic and fibre that can then be used for making new products, such as roof tiles or plastic components and fibre based construction and commercial tubes.

Is it possible to make valid climate predictions that go beyond weeks, months, even a year? UCLA atmospheric scientists report they have now made long-term climate forecasts that are among the best ever -- predicting climate up to 16 months in advance, nearly twice the length of time previously achieved by climate scientists.

Scientists at the University of Glasgow say they have taken their first tentative steps towards creating 'life' from inorganic chemicals potentially defining the new area of 'inorganic biology'.Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry in the College of Science and Engineering, and his team have demonstrated a new way of making inorganic-chemical-cells or iCHELLS.

A team of EU-funded researchers has, for the first time, successfully carried out a constant stabilisation experiment of a quantum state - something Albert Einstein himself once dreamt of.Einstein famously stated he wanted to trap a photon in a box for around a second, and now a team of French scientists has managed to go one step further by maintaining a constant number of photons in a high-quality microwave cavity in a permanent manner, as they outline in a new study published in the journal Nature.The study was led by scientists from the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel in Paris.

Big brown bats learn to hunt by eavesdropping on the sonar of other bats, according to researchers.A team from the University of Maryland, US, tracked bats as they flew around a room hunting for a mealworm suspended from the ceiling.Young bats that flew with "experienced" bats - that had been trained to find the worm - were quickly able to find the treat alone.The results are published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

As Irene battered the East Coast two weeks ago, Frank Lombardo knew that only after the rain and wind stopped and the floods receded, would his work begin.That's because as a forensic meteorologist, Lombardo is often called on to consult on legal and insurance cases resulting from violent storms. His job, and that of any forensic meteorologist, is to reconstruct the weather conditions that occurred at a specific time and location in question by retrieving and analyzing archived atmospheric data and re-creating a time line of meteorological events.

Addiction has been moralized, medicalized, politicized, and criminalized. And, of course, many of us are addicts, have been addicts or have been close to addicts. Addiction runs very hot as a theme.Part of what makes addiction so compelling is that it forms a kind of conceptual/political crossroads for thinking about human nature. After all, to make sense of addiction we need to make sense of what it is to be an agent who acts, with values, in the face of consequences, under pressure, with compulsion, out of need and desire. One needs a whole philosophy to understand addiction.

A European observatory will announce what it describes as "major" alien planet findings on Monday (Sept. 12).The European Southern Observatory (ESO) will hold a press conference at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) Monday to "report significant new results in the field of exoplanets," ESO officials said in a media alert.The results were obtained with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher instrument, better known as HARPS, officials said. HARPS is a spectrograph on ESO's 11.8-foot (3.6-meter) telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile.

After six months of non-stop writing, I'm looking forward to attending the Conscientia retreat organised by Reality Sandwich at the Boulder Mountain Guest Ranch in canyon country of southern Utah. My wife Santha and I have attended this amazing five-day retreat each Fall for the last three years. This will be our fourth stay there. It is a wonderful, healing, nurturing place to be, surrounded by wild nature and exploring some of the most exciting and worthwhile ideas about the past and future of humanity. Join us there if you are able, 25th through 30th September. This is one of the great places in the world to spend five days amongst a like-minded group of people.To book visit:http://www.realitysandwich.com/conscientia_retreatSee our page here: http://www.grahamhancock.com/tours/BoulderRetreat.php-Graham

The area covered by Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point this week since the start of satellite observations in 1972, German researchers announced on Saturday."On September 8, the extent of the Arctic sea ice was 4.240 million square kilometres (1.637 million square miles). This is a new historic minimum," said Georg Heygster, head of the Physical Analysis of Remote Sensing Images unit at the University of Bremen's Institute of Environmental Physics.

Six months after the disaster that caused three meltdowns, efforts to stabilize the Japanese nuclear power plant continue.On 11 March, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Sendai in Japan, knocking out power at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. In the hours and days that followed, three of the plant's six reactors melted down, triggering a series of explosions and fires at the site. Six months later, what progress has been made to stabilize the plant, and what is yet to be done?.

Stressed out by the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the double-dip recession or just the day to day grind of modern life? Need a break? Don't turn to alcohol or caffeine, try a nature walk instead.That's according to a growing body of research from psychologists that examines what really produces mental refreshment in humans. For example, a study from 2008 showed that walking through an arboretum boosted people's performance on memory tests. And a 2005 study showed that even just looking at a picture of nature had a similar, though more muted effect.

Astrobiologist Dr Terry Kee, from the University of Leeds, has found meteorite fragments contain a precursor to a key chemical that allows biological cells to capture energy from their surroundings.He believes debris from meteorites that hit the Earth billions of years ago may have combined with slightly acidic water on the planet to produce early forms of the compound.This would then have allowed the first forms of cellular life to form and to use energy from their surroundings.

Google seeks to meet its carbon neutrality goal the same way Tina Turner powered the Thunderdrome in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdrome. Pig excrement.Google recently invested in a system that turns methane from pig waste into energy.The poo-to-power system, on a hog facility 25 miles west of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, collects methane gas from decomposing hog waste and burns it to power a turbine and produce electricity. Since the system is preventing the release of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, it also produces carbon offset credits.

PUNE: The tides of time wash away many a relic of history; cultures and traditions fade away. What remains are the memories. Will this be the fate of the Meitei religion of Manipur too? Hopefully not. And that precisely is the assurance that emerges from city-based filmmaker Kaushik Gupta Ray's documentary 'Sacred Space', which forays into a hitherto unknown territory (both geographically and spiritually) and unveils the magic of the Maibis. These are the female mediators between spirits and men and as such have been the guardians of scripture.

Two graduate PhD students at Cornell University gave voices and 2D avatars to a pair of online "chatbots", which they named Alan and Sruthi.A chatbot is a computer programme designed to hold a spoken or written coversation with a human.The students Jason Yosinski and Igor Labutov said that they wanted to see what happened when two chatbots talked to each other. So they created Alan, a British man, and Sruthi, a south Asian woman.

In Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, the future of masses of people can be predicted with "psychohistory," a method of predicting future political and social trends, using a device called the "Prime Radiant." In the 1950s, there wasn't the math or the computational power available to make such a thing reality. Now there might be.Supercomputers, such as the Nautilus at the University of Tennessee's Center for Remote Data Analysis and Visualization, may have brought the world closer to Asimov's vision, though it is still early days. The key is seeking patterns in massive amounts of data and being able to visualize them. Kalev Leetaru, assistant director for text and digital media analytics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, did just that.

There is a sector of Britain's business that is in serious crisis. Companies are going bankrupt or simply shutting down as they find themselves unable to profit.The sector in question trades on a basic staple: a raw product that isn't in short supply. If we don't act now to preserve it, then this relatively quiet crisis will be over before most of us realise it is happening.One day we will look out of the window and ask what happened to our countryside, where our cows went and why we only have a few hundred massive factory dairies instead of thousands of dairy farms, shaping our landscape and rural life.

More numerous and extensive than that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, this massive trove of ancient writings on Papyrus discovered at the site of Oxyrhynchus in the late 19th century has revealed not only lost literary works of the ancient Greeks and Romans and ancient biblical texts, but also an intimate glimpse on the personal lives and business of the everyday citizens of a Greco-Roman city now long gone and covered by the sands of Egypt. The finds are so voluminous that translation work continues to this day, and will continue for years into the future. But most significant is the fascinating window they open on the daily lives, feelings, and issues of people who lived more than 2,000 years ago.

Ancient Israel's United Monarchy under kings David and Solomon is thought by many to be the stuff of myth, biblical embellishment designed by ancient writers or story-tellers to give the message of the scriptures form and color. Archaeologically speaking, the evidence to support the United Monarchy as described in the biblical record has been meager.But some new excavation discoveries are beginning to make scholars take a second look. They are presenting material remains that could possibly strengthen the traditional view that kings David and Solomon, and the great kingdom that they built as described in the biblical record, may have actually existed as something more than a scattered collection of tribal groups or villages.

An animal rights group urged the Philippines to free what is thought to be the world's largest crocodile in captivity, even though it allegedly killed two people.The monster 21-foot (6.4-metre) male saltwater crocodile was placed in a penned pond after it was caught in a remote southern creek on September 3, with officials planning to use it as a tourist attraction once it adapts to its cage.

My first expedition to Sumatra took place in 2003. As the zoological director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology I have been all over the world in search of creatures such as the giant anaconda, the almasty and the Mongolian death worm. But it is Sumatra and the orang pendek that keep pulling me back.In 2003 I accompanied Dr Chris Clark and Jon Hare to Gunung Tujuh, the Lake of Seven Peaks, in Kerinci Seblat National Park. The jungle around the lake is a hotspot for orang pendek sightings. Our guide Sahar Dimus found tracks of a bipedal creature, but they were too rain-damaged to cast.

Years of drought had dried up the ancient water supply networks existing around the Mediterranean Rim. However, with rainfall returning over the past 5 years, the hydraulic heritage has come to life again. The names of the tunnels that carry the revived streams -khettaras in Morocco, foggaras in Algeria or qanâts in Iran- evoke the trickling sounds of water. These underground infiltration galleries are the most characteristic and original illustration of local communities' recovery of ancestral schemes. As IRD researchers and their partners1 show, these water mines in the middle of the desert, most of which had been abandoned, have now been restored by oasis inhabitants.

The man in the moon is about to have his innards' scanned. NASA has launched two probes that will study the moon's internal structure in unprecedented detail, shedding light on whether a second moon crashed into it long ago.The probes, together called GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory), lifted off on Saturday at 0908 EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Lift-off was originally set for 8 September but was postponed due to high winds.

The sun's surface dances. Giant loops of magnetized solar material burst up, twist, and fall back down. Some erupt, shooting radiation flares and particles out into space. Forced to observe this dance from afar, scientists use all the tools at their disposal to look for patterns and connections to discover what causes these great explosions. Mapping these patterns could help scientists predict the onset of space weather that bursts toward Earth from the sun, interfering with communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) signals.Analysis of 191 solar flares since May 2010 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has recently shown a new piece in the pattern: some 15 percent of the flares have a distinct "late phase flare" some minutes to hours later that has never before been fully observed. This late phase of the flare pumps much more energy out into space than previously realized.

The UK has formally joined forces with a US laser lab in a bid to develop clean energy from nuclear fusion.Unlike fission plants, the process uses lasers to compress atomic nuclei until they join, releasing energy.The National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US is drawing closer to producing a surplus of energy from the idea.The UK company AWE and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have now joined with Nif to help make laser fusion a viable commercial energy source.

Nasa says one of its dead satellites will soon fall to Earth but there is very little chance that it will hit anyone.The space agency does not know when or where its 20-year-old satellite will drop. It will probably be in late September but could fall in October. And it could land anywhere south of Juneau, Alaska, and north of the tip of South America. Nasa says there is only a one in 3,200 chance of satellite parts hitting someone.