Newsdesk Archive

No geoengineering methods are ready for use to combat climate change, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released late last month, citing concerns about cost, effectiveness and adverse consequences."Climate engineering technologies do not now offer a viable response to global climate change," GAO said in the report commissioned by former House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.).

RADIATION therapy to treat cancer is more effective in some people than others. A new discovery that reveals why could help to boost effectiveness of the therapy and reduce related radiation sickness.Vivian Cheung at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and colleagues exposed cells from 99 healthy individuals to a dose of radiation that prompts a cellular response similar to what happens during therapy. Following the dose, the activity of caspase - an "executioner" enzyme that causes cells to self destruct - increased by between 120 and 720 per cent, confirming that people respond differently to treatment.

NASA has combined nearly 1,000 photos of the moon to build the crispest view yet of the crater-pocked lunar north pole.The space agency created the new image by stitching together slices of 983 wide-angle photographs taken by a camera on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO. The image contains a psychedelic spiral in the center because the LRO collected the images from different angles over the course of a month.A prime goal of the $583 million moon-orbiting mission is to hunt for water ice and other useful materials that may help future human explorers establish a permanent base. Just as LRO found evidence of water ice in south pole craters untouched by the sun, it may also exist in shadowed north pole craters.

FORT WORTH -- After months of stealthy negotiations in Great Britain, the Kimbell Art Museum has acquired a $24.3 million work -- a painting that is considered one of the greatest by 17th-century French artist Nicolas Poussin.The Sacrament of Ordination (Christ Presenting the Keys to Saint Peter), painted between 1636 and 1642, depicts the Gospel account of Christ giving the keys of heaven and earth to the kneeling apostle Peter, vesting in him the authority of the Catholic Church.It is one of Poussin's series of seven Sacraments paintings that a pope once considered too important to leave Rome.

An analysis of 2 million-year-old bones found in South Africa offers the most powerful case so far in identifying the transitional figure that came before modern humans -- findings some are calling a potential game-changer in understanding evolution.The bones are from Australopithecus sediba. The research places that pre-human branch of the evolutionary tree as the best candidate to be the ancestor of the human line, said Lee R. Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.The bones, found in 2008 in the fossil-rich cave region of Malapa near Johannesburg, show a head-to-foot combination of features of Australopithecus and the human genus, Homo.

Stargazers will have the chance to see one of the brightest supernovas, or exploding stars, in decades tonight. The self-destructing star is 21m light years away from Earth but, weather permitting, is likely to be able to be seen with binoculars or a telescope after twilight.It was spotted by scientists using the Hubble Telescope at Oxford University on August 24 and is now at its maximum brightness. The supernova, known as PTF 11kly, occurred in the Pinwheel Galaxy, located in the Ursa Major constellation which is better known as The Plough.It will appear blueish-white just above and to the left of the last two stars in The Plough's handle.

New findings published Tuesday appear to undermine a controversial study - oft-cited by those who downplay the human impacts of climate change - that claimed variations in cloud cover are driving temperature changes across the globe.The analysis confirms - as most atmospheric scientists have long held - that the reverse is true: Clouds change in response to temperature changes. There is no evidence clouds can cause meaningful climate change, concluded the report's author, Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. "Suggestions that significant revisions to mainstream climate science are required are therefore not supported," he wrote.Dessler's findings are the third blow in less than a week to the research of University of Alabama, Huntsville, climatologist Roy Spencer.

Protection for key nature sites in UK seas has come a step closer with the unveiling of proposals to create over 100 Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs).The zones range from tiny stretches of coastline to large tracts of sea floor.The proposals stem from the 2009 UK Marine Bill and cover seas abutting the English coast and waters around Wales more than 12 miles from the coast.

Tanks could soon get night time invisibility thanks to a cloaking device that masks their infrared signature.Developed by BAE Systems, the Adaptiv technology allows vehicles to mimic the temperature of their surroundings.It can also make a tank look like other objects, such as a cow or car, when seen through heat-sensitive 'scopes.Researchers are looking at ways to make it work with other wavelengths of light to confer true invisibility.

Volcanic rock rafts could have played a key role in the origins of life on Earth, a team of scientists suggests.Researchers say the buoyant rock pumice has the right properties to have provided the conditions for early life to emerge more than 3.5bn years ago.Pumice "rafts" are found today on shores of islands such as the volcanic Greek island of Santorini (Thera).The team, from Oxford University and the University of Western Australia, calls for more research on the idea.

NATIONAL STOCKYARDS -- The largest excavation of a prehistoric site in the country is poised to solve a riddle about Illinois prehistory that has lingered for a century -- where did the Mississippians go?And why?An enormous dig of a village site first inhabited about 1050 A.D. on 78 acres of what used to be the National Stockyards is providing so much data and so many artifacts that archaeologists are daring to speculate that basic questions about the Mississippians will finally be answered.

Mariners may have been traveling the Aegean Sea even before the end of the last ice age, according to new evidence from researchers, in order to extract coveted volcanic rocks for pre-Bronze Age tools and weapons.A new technique which dates obsidian -- volcanic glass which can be fashioned into tools -- suggests that people were mining for obsidian in Mediterranean waters and shipping the once valuable rocks from the island of Melos in modern day Greece as far back as 15,000 years ago.

WASHINGTON: Paleontologists think the Tibetan Plateau may be a cradle of evolution for the Ice Age beasts after discovering the fossil of a ancient woolly rhino that lived some 3.6 million years ago.The ancient rhino, whose remains were found in southwest Tibet , is believed to be the oldest specimen of its kind yet found and was well-adapted for a frosty life in the Himalayas about one million years before the Ice Age.

Spain's "archaic" humans some 780,000 years ago were cannibals, sure. But at least they cared enough to share their food.In the current Journal of Human Evolution, a team led by Spain's Palmira Saladié of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Tarragona, reports from Spain's Gran Dolina cave. The cave was home to the early human species, Homo antecessor, a precursor to Europe's Neanderthals. The study looks at bones in the cave to see what was for supper back then, and whether meals were shared.

Nasa released three pictures snapped over the past month by its two-year-old Lunar Reconnaissance Vehicle.The pictures provide the sharpest images yet of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites and include a photo of the boot tracks left behind in 1972 by the last US astronaut to walk on the Moon."These images remind us of our fantastic Apollo history and beckon us to continue to move forward in exploration of our solar system," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at Nasa Headquarters in Washington.

For 460 days the men from Russia, China and America have been living together in a mock spacecraft with just three square metres of personal space each.The experiment is intended to simulate a manned mission to Mars, at least in terms of duration and isolation.In mid-August the marsonauts surpassed the milestone of 438 days, which was previously the longest time spent away from the natural world by a human being. This record was set by cosmonaut Valeri Polykov in 1994-5 on board the Russian space station, Mir.

Saved from the soup bowl at a Thai restaurant, the baby shark wriggled out of the bag and into the open sea -- a rare survivor of a trade that kills millions of the predators each year.On average an estimated 22,000 tonnes of sharks are caught annually off Thailand for their fins -- a delicacy in Chinese cuisine once enjoyed only by the rich, but now increasingly popular with the wealthier middle class.Thanks to a group of environmental activists calling themselves the Dive Tribe, dozens of sharks were returned to the wild in the Gulf of Thailand recently, bought from animal markets or restaurants.

Antimatter enthusiasts will love it; dark matter hunters not so much. NASA's FERMI satellite has confirmed a previous hint that there is more antimatter than expected coming from space. The bad news is that the result almost certainly rules out dark matter as the source.The results were reported online by the FERMI Large Area Telescope Collaboration. They hit the web just in time for the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics conference taking place in Munich, Germany, this week, where they were immediately incorporated into the first talks.

Are you talking to a person or a machine? It could soon be harder to tell amid claims that software called Cleverbot has passed one of the key tests of artificial intelligence: the Turing test.Proposed by British computer scientist Alan Turing in the 1950s, the test states that if a human talking to a machine believes the machine is human, it passes.

Our ancestors bred with other species in the Homo genus, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. The authors say that up to 2% of the genomes of some modern African populations may originally come from a closely related species.Palaeontologists have long wondered whether modern humans came from a single, genetically isolated population of hominins or whether we are a genetic mix of various hominin species.Last year, an analysis comparing the Neanderthal genome sequence to that of modern H. sapiens showed that some interbreeding did take place between the two species in Europe some time between 80 and 30,000 years ago and that, to a certain extent, Neanderthals 'live on' in the genes of modern humans.

In Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe still tell stories of a time when the Elwha River was so full of salmon that a person could cross from one bank to the other by walking atop the thrashing bodies of fish struggling to move upstream.No one has attempted such a feat since two dams were built, near the mouth of the river, in the early 20th century, blocking salmon runs.But on September 15, officials in Olympic National Park will begin the long process of dismantling the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams on the Elwha River.

Not all that glitters is gold. But Earth would have a lot less of the glittery stuff if not for a massive rain of meteors about 3.9 billion years ago, according to a new study.Based on analysis of some of the world's oldest rocks, scientists have the first direct evidence that a cataclysmic meteor shower changed early Earth's chemical composition. The find offers support for the theory that meteors delivered gold and other precious metals to infant Earth.The presence of precious metals in Earth's mantle and crust poses a puzzle, because these elements are attracted to iron.

It sounds like the opener to a sci-fi B-movie plot: Scientists find an old, dead satellite from the 1970's orbiting Earth. Out of interest, they send a command to the chunk of space junk to switch it on, just on the off-chance its circuits are still intact...However, this is not a fictional account of tinkering with 40-year old technology. A British Ph.D. student really wants to wake up an old satellite, one that hasn't transmitted since 1996.The satellite, called Prospero X3, is the only British satellite to have been launched by a British rocket in 1971. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of its launch, Roger Duthie and colleagues from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) want to reestablish contact with the 66 kilogram silent spacecraft.

If today feels odd, you might want to take a look at the date. There may not seem to be anything remarkable about 7/9/11, but it is one of just five dates this century featuring three consecutive odd numbers.The mathematical rarity occurs just five times every 100 years, and today is the penultimate one of the 21st century. The next day will be 9/11/13 so try to make the most of that because it will be the last one for 92 years,An American enthusiast has called on people to celebrate Odd Day by entering a competition to win the date - $791.10 [£491.19] - in cash.

Rocks can be many things: they were probably our earliest weapons, they've been ballast on our journeys of exploration, even modern-art pieces. But a pair recovered from Antarctica may be the grandest application yet - tombstones for an entire world. Lunar and Planetary Institute researcher Allain Treiman believes that them to be pieces of a destroyed dwarf planet, relics from the creation of the solar system.It's relevant to questions so important that most adults don't think to ask them - why are there only eight planets? Or nine, or however many there are now? Why are they where they are? Because of all the objects that formed during the birth of the solar system, the ones we see are the ones that survived. It's likely that many small proto-planets formed as the stellar dusts condensed into larger bodies - some collided and merged, some may have been pinballed out of the system by the varying gravitational fields, and it seems that some got smashed to bits in the confusion. The existence of the asteroid belt supports such planetary pile-ups - but we can look at these antarctic rocks much closer.

It is now widely accepted that the species Homo sapiens originated in Africa and eventually spread throughout the world. But did those early humans interbreed with more ancestral forms of the genus Homo, for example Homo erectus, the "upright walking man," Homo habilis, -- the "tool-using man" or Homo neanderthalensis, the first artists of cave-painting fame?Direct studies of ancient DNA from Neanderthal bones suggest interbreeding did occur after anatomically modern humans had migrated from their evolutionary cradle in Africa to the cooler climates of Eurasia, but what had happened in Africa remained a mystery -- until now.In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by Michael Hammer, an associate professor and research scientist with the the University of Arizona's Arizona Research Labs, provides evidence that anatomically modern humans were not so unique that they remained separate.

A British "shaman" caught administering a potion containing a class-A hallucinogenic drug to 17 followers at a candlelit "healing" ceremony has been jailed for 15 months.Peter Aziz, of Buckfastleigh, Devon, who claims to have spent years in the jungles of Peru learning the art of making the drink ayahuasca, provided the brew, which contained N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), during a week-long retreat in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.

Peter Aziz was jailed for providing consenting adults with a physiologically harmless substance which they took under close supervision for healing purposes ('Healer' jailed for providing drug potion, 3 September). I am an NHS doctor campaigning to see a re-emergence of psychedelic therapy in the UK. Drugs such as LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT (ayahuasca, as prescribed by Peter Aziz) can all be used safely with adequate preparation and under clinical conditions to improve people's lives and treat unremitting mental disorders. There is a growing wealth of scientific evidence and increasing medical support for this form of therapy. How sad therefore that another innocent bystander has been caught in the crossfire of the war on drugs.

You might be excused for thinking these are the words of a philosopher or a stoned Grateful Dead fan, but no. It's from an interview in 2000 with Mike Lynch, the CEO of Autonomy and Britain's first software billionaire, currently in the process of selling his company to Hewlett-Packard for $10bn (£6bn). Lynch, who was talking about the power of the pattern recognition that forms the basis of Autonomy's success, went on to talk about the fascination of dreams, near-death experiences and the accounts of those experimenting scientifically with LSD in the 1960s: all forms of altered perception.Did psychedelic drugs play a substantive role in the development of personal computing? In 2009, Ryan Grim, as part of publicising his book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America wrote a piece for the Huffington Post that made public a letter from LSD inventor Albert Hofmann to Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2007 asking for funding for research into the use of psychedelics to help relieve the anxiety associated with life-threatening illness.

After five long years, the high profile trial of accused Israeli forgers Oded Golan and Robert Deutsch was finally over, but not without raising a multitude of testimony statements from expert witnesses for both prosecution and defense concerning the innocence or guilt of the two defenders and the authenticity of the two famous ancient antiquities that made headlines in newspapers and journals during the first decade of the 21st century. The expert opinion of most of the scientists who have examined the inscriptions on the James Ossuary and the Jehoash Tablet : They may be real, after all. But the final decision on the case has yet to be made by the court, which concluded on October 3, 2010 with a pending verdict.

Restructuring the energy system without nuclear power by 2050 is in principle technologically possible and economically manageable. However, it will demand a concerted effort by the whole of society. This is the conclusion reached by ETH Zurich researchers in a study they presented at the Energy Talks 2011.Over the past few months, a group of researchers at the Energy Science Center (ESC) of ETH Zurich have carried out an intensive examination of whether the available options will enable Switzerland to scope out a medium-term energy future without nuclear power, as decided by the Swiss Federal Council in May. Their answer was yes.

For many exoplanet systems that have been discovered by the radial velocity method, astronomers have found excess emission in the infrared portion of the spectrum. This has generally been interpreted as remnants of a disk or collection of objects similar to our own Kupier belt, a ring of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Pluto. But as Kepler and other exoplanet finding missions rake in the candidates though transits of the parent star, astronomers began noticing something unusual: None of the exoplanet systems discovered through this method were known to have debris disks. Was this an odd selection effect, perhaps induced by the fact that transiting planets often orbit close to their parent stars, making them more likely to pass along the line of sight which could in turn, betray different formation scenarios? Or were astronomers simply not looking hard enough? A recent paper by astronomers at the Astrophysikalisches Institut in Germany attempts to answer that question.

A satellite orbiting Mars has discovered evidence that a giant crater was once a water-filled lake, scientists announced on September 2.The rare find was revealed by the presence of a delta, where flowing water has deposited sediment in a characteristic fan shape.The 40-mile wide (65-kilometer) crater is bone dry today, but is another sign of Mars' wetter ancient past, scientists said.

Nuclear physics might soon solve a long-standing Leonardo da Vinci mystery -- the fate of a lost masterpiece known as the "Battle of Anghiari."The project, one of the most ambitious in art history, involves developing a unique camera which can take photographs through a 5-inch-thick wall.The brick barrier is not just an ordinary wall. It stands in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence's 14th century city hall, in the imposing Hall of Five Hundred, and houses a mural known as the "Battle of Marciano". It was painted by the renowned 15th-century painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari.

In a first-ever comprehensive study of the species origins of nature-derived drugs, it is shown that drug-producing species are concentrated and clustered in a limited number of families, refuting the conventional view that as every nature species produces biologically active molecules, one can find drugs from almost any major block of species groups if one looks for them hard enough.Whether you have a mild headache or you are running a fever, there is a high chance that the drug that is used to treat you comes from nature. Today, about half of the drugs on the market were discovered by screening collections of small molecules made by bacteria, fungi, snails, leeches and other such species.

Astrophysicists believe there are two ways to trigger a Type 1a supernova. The first is when a white dwarf "steals" gas from a binary partner, grows to a certain mass limit and then explodes. The second is when two white dwarfs collide (as Larry O'Hanlon calls them, "loving dwarfs"), the mass limit is immediately exceeded and they explode.The debate as to which mechanism is most common has raged for decades, and only recently, it was thought there were more "loving dwarfs" than "thieving dwarfs" accreting matter from binary, sun-like partner stars.(In a nutshell, astronomers haven't detected hydrogen and helium in the Type 1a supernova signatures, suggesting there was no accretion disk.

New photos of the Apollo moon landing sites were released today (Sept. 6), showing extraordinary new details about the areas on the lunar surface visited by humans, including tracks left by the astronauts and their lunar rovers.In one image of the Apollo 17 landing site, the last tracks left by astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on the moon are visible. The crisscrossing footprints can be easily distinguished from the tracks left by the astronauts' lunar rover. [See the new photos of the Apollo moon landing sites]The images were taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a robotic probe in orbit around the moon.

(Reuters) - Nearly every morning for more than half a century, 85-year-old Ruth Ziolkowski rises around dawn, puts her feet on the ground and gives thanks she is part of a dream. Since 1947, she has worked at the Crazy Horse monument to Native Americans in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where she is leading the effort to literally move a mountain."I'm tickled to death to get up every morning and go to work," Ziolkowski, president of the non-profit Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, said in an interview this summer.Billed as the world's largest sculpture, Crazy Horse is only a 20-mile drive from better-known Mount Rushmore, where faces of presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt are carved into granite.

Tiny filaments growing from the surface of bacteria could help to improve the efficiency of uranium removal from contaminated waters.Uranium mining and atomic weapons testing during the Cold War era led to the contamination of sediments and groundwaters by toxic soluble uranium. Some clean-up methods use bacteria to solidify the uranium in sediments. But the mechanisms by which this occurs are not well understood, the US team reports in PNAS journal. As a result, control of uranium contamination is still problematic.A study by US researchers at Michigan State University has identified a group of bacteria known as Geobacter, which produces tiny protein filaments, or nano-wires, that remove the dissolved uranium from waters and precipitate it outside the cell.

In an attempt to mimic the photosynthetic systems found in plants and some bacteria, scientists have taken a step toward developing an artificial light-harvesting system (LHS) that meets one of the crucial requirements for such systems: an approximately 100% energy transfer efficiency. Although high energy transfer efficiency is just one component of the development of a useful artificial LHS, the achievement could lead to clean solar-fuel technology that turns sunlight into chemical fuel.

Researchers led by ETH professor Yaakov Benenson and MIT professor Ron Weiss have successfully incorporated a diagnostic biological "computer" network in human cells. This network recognizes certain cancer cells using logic combinations of five cancer-specific molecular factors, triggering cancer cells destruction.Yaakov (Kobi) Benenson, Professor of Synthetic Biology at ETH Zurich, has spent a large part of his career developing biological computers that operate in living cells. His goal is to construct biocomputers that detect molecules carrying important information about cell wellbeing and process this information to direct appropriate therapeutic response if the cell is found to be abnormal.

FORGET hydrogen: ammonia could be the answer to developing an emissions-free fuel for cars.Ammonia produces just nitrogen and water vapour when burned and, unlike hydrogen, it is relatively easy to store in liquid form. That means transporting ammonia will not require costly new infrastructure, says John Fleming of SilverEagles Energy in Lubbock, Texas.Fleming and Tim Maxwell at Texas Tech University, also in Lubbock, are developing a system to produce ammonia that can be installed in filling stations. Powered by mains electricity, it first produces hydrogen from water using electrolysis, then combines it with nitrogen from the air to produce ammonia.

REPORTS of dolphins interacting with dead members of their pod are raising questions about whether cetaceans understand the concept of death. Bottlenose dolphins in western Greece have been seen reacting to death differently depending on whether a pod member has died suddenly or after a longer period of illness, New Scientist has learned.Interpreting animal behaviour after the death of a companion is fraught with difficulty. Death is rarely observed in the wild, and it is easy to erroneously attribute human emotions to animals. Nevertheless, several species of intelligent, social animals, such as gorillas, chimpsMovie Camera and elephants can display particular behaviours when an animal dies - behaviours which some have interpreted as akin to mourning. Taken together with a growing number of reports of cetaceans interacting with dead animals and the discovery that they have specialised neurons linked to empathy and intuition, the Greek study suggests dolphins may have a complex - and even sophisticated - reaction to death.

Excavations have revealed evidence of some of the earliest Roman activity currently known in the Stroud Valleys dating from the mid to late 1st century, and therefore soon after the Roman invasion in AD43.Throughout the autumn and early winter of 2010 Cotswold Archaeology undertook an archaeological excavation at Foxes Field, Ebley Road, Stonehouse, in advance of housing development by Barratt Homes (Bristol).

Evolution adds and subtracts, and nowhere is this math more evident than in vertebrates, which are programmed to have five digits on each limb. But many species do not. Snakes, of course, have no digits, and birds have three.Yale scientists now have a good handle on how these developmental changes are orchestrated in the embryo, but there is still one outstanding debate on birds: Which digits are they: a thumb with index and middle fingers, or the index, middle and ring fingers?.

Some vegetarians will leap at the opportunity to taste meat without the ideological problem of harming an animal, but others will be repulsed by the mere idea of eating another creature.The issue of man-made meat is a complex one, and although scientists are a long way from creating a product that can be sold in supermarkets, there are a number of arguments for and against.

Scientists have used animal cells to create an artificial form of meat without the need for the rearing and slaughtering of livestock.The product, known as "in vitro meat", is made from thousands of stem cells which multiply to produce strips of muscle tissue without ever leaving the lab.Dutch scientists experimenting with pig cells say it could be just six months before the first test tube sausage is produced, and within a year lab-grown burgers could be created using similar techniques with cows.

A bacterial strain that specifically targets tumours could soon be used as a vehicle to deliver drugs in frontline cancer therapy. The strain is expected to be tested in cancer patients in 2013 says a scientist at the Society for General Microbiology's Autumn Conference at the University of York.The therapy uses Clostridium sporogenes -- a bacterium that is widespread in the soil. Spores of the bacterium are injected into patients and only grow in solid tumours, where a specific bacterial enzyme is produced. An anti-cancer drug is injected separately into the patient in an inactive 'pro-drug' form. When the pro-drug reaches the site of the tumour, the bacterial enzyme activates the drug, allowing it to destroy only the cells in its vicinity -- the tumour cells.

NASA may no longer be flying space shuttles, but it is set to put another craft into the skies ... airships.The US agency is building airships it believes will revolutionise the transport of cargo around the world, with its first prototype set to take off next year, London's Daily Telegraph reported."One of NASA's jobs is to solve the nation's air transportation challenges with research, and airships haven't seen much research in the past few decades," said Dr Pete Worden, the director of NASA research arm Ames at an airship conference in Alaska last month.

Research has found that a drug derived from the substance can thin blood and dissolve blood clots in the brain, saving lives and limiting the damage caused by strokes.Currently, patients who suffer most types of strokes need to have clot-busting injections within four hours of the attack for the treatment to work.But studies have found that jabs using a medicine derived from protein in bats' saliva can have the same effect for up to nine hours.

It's an event that any professional astronomer would consider to be a once in a lifetime discovery. But for one 18-year old British student, witnessing the fragmentation of a comet she was studying became the highlight of a summer work experience program using the multi-million pound (dollar) Faulkes Telescope Project (part of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network).But that was just the icing on the cake; Hannah Blyth of St Johns College, Cardiff, also assisted in the discovery of over 20 previously unknown asteroids, two of which she discovered herself.After capturing images of comet 213P Van Ness, Blyth quickly realized this was no ordinary observation.

Blocking key proteins could improve response to a common chemotherapy drug, suggests an Oxford University-led study which used cancer cells grown in the lab.The research offers several new targets for developing future drugs to boost the success rate of the tumour-shrinking drug paclitaxel (Taxol).Paclitaxel is a chemotherapy drug commonly used to treat breast and ovarian cancer, but some tumours can become resistant over time and start growing again. The drug blocks the growth of cancer by interfering with microtubules -- structures that help chromosomes to separate during cell division.

In 2009, we heard the wonderful news that scientists at Holland's Eindhoven University of Technology had successfully grown pork in a petri dish: a giant step toward the dream of eating a pork chop without slaughtering a pig for it. Unfortunately, the lab-grown meat was floppy, "soggy," and structureless, not at all what you'd like to toss on your grill and tuck into.Now, scientists at the same university have figured out a way to get cultured muscle cells to have structure and strength. Basically, you pull the muscle tight and attach each end of the tissue to a piece of Velcro, so as it grows it maintains its tense, stretched configuration.

Scientists from the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville have determined that an inexpensive semiconductor material can be "tweaked" to generate hydrogen from water using sunlight.The research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, was led by Professors Madhu Menon and R. Michael Sheetz at the UK Center for Computational Sciences, and Professor Mahendra Sunkara and graduate student Chandrashekhar Pendyala at the UofL Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research. Their findings were published Aug. 1 in the Physical Review Journal (Phys Rev B 84, 075304).

The tomb for the original builders of Stonehenge could have been unearthed by an excavation at a site in Wales.The Carn Menyn site in the Preseli Hills is where the bluestones used to construct the first stone phase of the henge were quarried in 2300BC.Organic material from the site will be radiocarbon dated, but it is thought any remains have already been removed.Archaeologists believe this could prove a conclusive link between the site and Stonehenge.

One of the best ways to know your platform has made it is when you see users start injecting their own creativity into it. Obviously, the most common indicator is when lots of programmers start developing apps and add-ons. But, the other big thing to watch is feedback from users on how they see the future trajectory of the product.Although there's not really a question that the Apple iPhone has made it as a platform, some of the passion and high expectations for future development of the product were on full display recently as a 3D animation company called Aatma Studio created what it refers to as a concept design for iPhone 5.

An asteroid approaching Earth? You say that like it's a bad thing.In a fascinating study published by researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, the closer the asteroid gets, the better.Why? So the chunk of space rock can be put into Earth orbit, of course.But why would you want to do that? Unless you're a megalomaniac hellbent on turning said asteroid into an orbital mount for a supersized laser, it may be difficult to imagine any reason to undertake such a gargantuan task.

Researchers have created and tested miniature devices that are implanted in tumors to generate oxygen, boosting the killing power of radiation and chemotherapy.The technology is designed to treat solid tumors that are hypoxic at the center, meaning the core contains low oxygen levels."This is not good because radiation therapy needs oxygen to be effective," said Babak Ziaie, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering. "So the hypoxic areas are hard to kill. Pancreatic and cervical cancers are notoriously hypoxic. If you generate oxygen you can increase the effectiveness of radiation therapy and also chemotherapy.

Scientists have identified the part of the brain responsible for controlling whether we conform to expectations and group pressure. The researchers found they were able to control whether volunteers conformed to social pressure by using powerful electromagnetic pulses that changed the activity of a small part of the brain.Volunteers whose posterior medial frontal cortex, an area in the middle of the brain that is associated with reward processing, were exposed to the magnetic pulses suffered reduced levels of conformity.The researchers believe this part of the brain dates back a long way in the evolution of animals and is responsible or automatically "correcting" our performance when we fall out of line with a group.

The alarm came too late, and the six men aboard the International Space Station hurried to Soyuz escape capsules.For a tense two minutes in June, they waited for the "all clear" to come as an unexpected bit of space junk, likely a small piece of an old rocket body or spacecraft, zipped by at 17,000 mph.

The mysterious substance known as dark matter may actually be an illusion created by gravitational interactions between short-lived particles of matter and antimatter, a new study says.Dark matter is thought to be an invisible substance that makes up almost a quarter of the mass in the universe. The concept was first proposed in 1933 to explain why the outer galaxies in galaxy clusters orbit faster than they should, based on the galaxies' visible mass.At the observed speeds, the outer galaxies should be flung out into space, since the clusters don't appear to have enough mass to keep the galaxies at their edges gravitationally bound.

One hallmark of Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans, was his stone tools, an advanced technology reflecting a good deal of forethought and dexterity. Up to now, however, scientists have been unable to pin a firm date on the earliest known evidence of his stone tool-making.A new geological study, being reported Thursday in the journal Nature, showed that tools from a site near Lake Turkana in Kenya were made about 1.76 million years ago, the earliest of their ilk found so far. Previous dates were estimates ranging from 1.4 million to 1.6 million years ago.

The Internet is delivering a slow death to newspapers, but many of us still have piles of the stuff around the house that a microbe called TU-103 will convert to butanol, a biofuel that is nearly as energy dense as unleaded gasoline."This is a bacterium that we isolated straight out of nature," David Mullin, a cell and molecular biologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, told me today.In fact, it was isolated from a truckload of feces he and colleagues collected from grass-eating animals at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, figuring their intestinal tracts likely harbored a naturally occurring microbe that had the qualities they sought.

On this day 123 years ago, Jack the Ripper claimed his first victim. But who was this serial killer? This new e-fit finally puts a face to Carl Feigenbaum, a key suspect from Germany.Jack the Ripper is the world's most famous cold case - the identity of the man who brutally murdered five women in London's East End in autumn 1888 remains a mystery.More than 200 suspects have been named. But to Ripper expert Trevor Marriott, a former murder squad detective, German merchant Carl Feigenbaum is the top suspect.

New investigations at an iconic cave site on the Channel Island of Jersey have led archaeologists to believe the Neanderthals have been widely under-estimated.Neanderthals survived in Europe through a number of ice ages and died out only about 30,000 years ago.The site at La Cotte de St Brelade reveals a near-continuous use of the cave site spanning over a quarter of a million years, suggesting a considerable success story in adapting to a changing climate and landscape, prior to the arrival of Homo sapiens.

As far as tax collectors in colonial Mexico went, Gonzalo de Salazar, often dubbed "El Gordo," was a pinchpenny. The conquistador-turned-regional-chief demanded steep tributes from his charges living in an area called Tepetlaoxtoc just north of what is now Mexico City. To expose El Gordo's greed, census takers from the Acolhua-Aztecs, a subset of the larger Aztec group, set out to count their own numbers in the mid-1500s and tally the extent of their farmland and hence their tax burden. They did a remarkably good job, a new study suggests. The early surveyors calculated the sizes of their farms with a degree of accuracy likely beyond the means of El Gordo or his cronies.

Possibly the UK's oldest example of cave art has been discovered in Gower, dating back to the Ice age.Experts say the faint scratchings of a speared reindeer are more than 12,000 years old.Their exact location is being kept secret to protect them from damage. But already they have been the target from a vandal.

For many people, the word "Antarctica" evokes images of endless sheets of ice. But it turns out that the southern continent has a wealth of varied and spectacular features to offer.Case in point: The Mt. Erebus ice caves. This winter on the Science Friday blog, Kayla Iacovino, a Ph.D. student in volcanology and petrology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, posted some jaw-dropping pictures of the caves.In a post a few months earlier, she explained how the caves formed.

The US National Research Council's report on space debris is not the first of its kind.A wide range of space agencies and intergovernmental organisations has taken a bite out of this issue down the years.The opinion expressed is always the same: the problem is inescapable and it's getting worse. It's also true the tone of concern is being ratcheted up.There is now a wild jungle of debris overhead - everything from old rocket stages that continue to loop around the Earth decades after they were launched, to the flecks of paint that have lifted off once shiny space vehicles and floated off into the distance.

A woolly rhino fossil dug up on the Tibetan Plateau is believed to be the oldest specimen of its kind yet found.The creature lived some 3.6 million years ago - long before similar beasts roamed northern Asia and Europe in the ice ages that gripped those regions.The discovery team says the existence of this ancient rhino supports the idea that the frosty Tibetan foothills of the Himalayas were the evolutionary cradle for these later animals.The report appears in Science journal.

Astronomy buffs, hold onto your telescopes. Scientists have discovered a new supernova, or exploding star, in the Pinwheel Galaxy. And, in a few weeks, you might be able to see it for yourself with nothing but a good pair of binoculars.Astronomers are especially excited about this newly discovered supernova -- although it's been given the decidedly unjazzy name SN 2011fe -- because it's a mere 21 million light-years away. In the language of astronomy, that puts it right in our backyard.

An airport in France is experimenting with "virtual" boarding agents in a bid to jazz up its terminals with 21st century avatars who always smile, don't need breaks and never go on strike.The pilot project at Paris' Orly airport began last month, and has so far been met with a mix of amusement and surprise by travelers, who frequently try to touch and speak with the strikingly life-like video images that greet them and direct them to their boarding gate.The images materialize seemingly out of thin air when a boarding agent -- a real live human -- presses a button to signal the start of boarding.

Like the Mary Celeste, the International Space Station (ISS) could be floating empty, devoid of humans by November. However, unlike the Mary Celeste, we'll know exactly what happened to the crew.In the wake of the Russian Progress vehicle crash shortly after launch on Aug. 24, a chain of events has been set into motion that could result in the decision not to fly astronauts into orbit. If this happens, the ISS will be temporarily mothballed before the end of the year to avoid landing astronauts during the harsh Kazakh winter.

In research that will help address a long-running debate and apparent contradiction between short- and long-term evolutionary change, scientists have discovered that although evolution is a constant and sometimes rapid process, the changes that hit and stick tend to take a long time.Give or take a little, one million years seems to be the magic number.A new study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combined for the first time data from short periods such as 10-100 years with much longer evidence found in the fossil record over millions of years.

Robot invasions. Typically not a good thing, at least in science fiction flicks, that feature lasers flashing, buildings falling and badly-dubbed actors over-gesticulating.But in classrooms, a robot invasion may be just the ticket, at least when when it comes to science education. That and a little healthy robot competition."Teachers have told us that students not as engaged in science class really come alive when you give them a challenge," says education maven Beth McGrath, who heads the Stevens Institute of Technology's Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education in Hoboken, N.J. "We have to give them that opportunity.

WRINGING electricity from the sea is no small task. But as firms start to test their wave-energy harvesters in the open ocean that could be about to change.Heaving water holds 40 times more energy than air moving at the same speed, and sea states change more slowly than breezes, making it easier for utilities to predict the availability of energy. Yet the tools needed to make use of the sea's energy are gargantuan.

Researchers at IBM's Almaden, California research lab are building what will be the world's largest data array--a monstrous repository of 200,000 individual hard drives all interlaced. All together, it has a storage capacity of 120 petabytes, or 120 million gigabytes.There are plenty of challenges inherent in building this kind of groundbreaking array, which, says, IBM, is destined to be used for, as Technology Review writes, "an unnamed client that needs a new supercomputer for detailed simulations of real-world phenomena." For one thing, IBM had to rely on water-cooling units rather than traditional fans, as this many hard drives creates heat that can't be subdued in the normal manner. There's also a sophisticated backup system that senses the number of hard disk failures and adjusts the speed of rebuilding data accordingly--the more failures, the faster it rebuilds. According to IBM, that should allow it to operate with the absolute minimum of data loss, even none.

Doctors whose bodies are regularly exposed to x-rays may be adapting at the cellular level to protect themselves against radiation, according to a new study. The research hints that humans could adapt to withstand radiation exposure.In a small study, interventional cardiologists, who perform heart operations using catheters guided by x-rays, had higher levels of hydrogen peroxide in their blood, which indicates potentially harmful changes. But they also had higher levels of an antioxidant that protects against cell damage, and their white blood cells had more of an enzyme involved in programmed cell death.

Archaeologists are researching the grave of an important figure they believe may have played a crucial role in the construction of Stonehenge.The burial chamber is sited above a ceremonial stone circle in the Preseli hills in west Wales, where it is believed bluestone was quarried before being taken to Stonehenge.More research will be done to establish if the important person buried there played a role in the moving of bluestone 190 miles from west Wales to the Wiltshire monument.

Rocket launches create a fiery spectacle, but they also creates a problem for NASA engineers. Those scientists want to see exactly what happens to a rocket, down to the finest detail, when the countdown clock hits zero and the engines ignite. The fury of blastoff, however, shrouds the scene in exceedingly bright flames and far dimmer smoke.Now, with a clever six-camera setup, NASA has found a way to see through a rocket launch or other blast. Researchers have built an image-fusing device, nicknamed "Walle," that merges the best parts of images taken by six different cameras. The combined shots offer a superhuman view of even the trickiest high-contrast scenes.

Archaeologists in contact with colleagues in Libya say that their nation's antiquities appear safe despite the chaos in the country. That news is contrary to reports earlier this week, which claimed that Libya's museums were being plundered and sites destroyed in NATO bombing raids. Libya boasts a host of ancient Phoenician and Roman sites, as well as major collections of ancient artifacts in Tripoli's Jamahiriya Museum and other smaller museums around the country. So the claims of damage prompted fears of a replay of Baghdad in 2003, when the famous Iraq Museum was looted. But Western archaeologists and Libyan sources say that there is no evidence that such destruction is taking place.

When most people think of asteroids or other objects coming near the Earth, they panic. Scientists from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, simply aren't most people.According to a study published recently in Chinese Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, researcher Hexi Baoyin and his team have determined that the closer a space rock gets to our planet, the better. They assert that an asteroid orbiting the Earth could be a rich source of minerals ripe for mining, and according to reports, have even come up with a possible scenario that would enable scientists to rein in the rock.As noted in Syfy's Dvice blog , Baoyin and others are "optimistic that they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough (a change in velocity of only about 1,300 feet-per-second or so) to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about twice the distance as the Moon."

You can't get much smaller than this: Physicists have fashioned a mirror from a single atom. The advance might lead to an atom-sized transistor for light, and experts say it bodes well for broader efforts to shrink optical elements to the nanometer scale."In terms of the basic physics, it's incredibly cute," says Christian Kurtsiefer, an experimental physicist at the National University of Singapore, who was not involved in the work. "It's a very striking effect because you wouldn't necessarily expect that a single atom would exert a lot of influence on the flow of light."In fact, the atom effectively reflects less than 1% of the light that hits it.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 2 (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers say they've discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way.At about160 million light years from Earth the pair, discovered with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, is the nearest known example of such a phenomenon, a NASA release said Wednesday. The black holes, located near the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393, are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago, astronomers said.Previous observations had indicated a single supermassive black hole existed in the center of NGC 3393, but Chandra's X-ray observations were able to discern two.

A small fleet of net-flinging spacecraft could clear every big piece of space junk out of low-Earth orbit within a dozen years, according to a researcher working on the concept.Each spacecraft, known as an ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator (EDDE), would capture orbital debris in a net, then drag the junk down out of harm's way. The EDDEs would draw their power from the sun and from Earth's magnetic field rather than rely on costly chemical propellants, helping keep costs down, said Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, Inc.And the cleanup of low-Earth orbit (LEO) could start happening soon, Pearson added.

Slathering on sunscreen could soon become a thing of the past as scientists in the UK are aiming to create a sunscreen pill that could offer weeks of protection from the sun's harmful rays.The secret to a better sunscreen may lie under the sea as the researchers aim to harness coral's natural defense again the sun in a tablet form for humans.A research team from King's College London headed to Australia's Great Barrier Reef to study a few samples of the endangered Acropora coral, according to the BBC on Tuesday. Their goal is to synthesis the coral's protective components - components which scientists have revealed not only protect the coral but also the fish feeding on them - to first create a lotion to test on human skin, and then a tablet version. The BBC reports that human testing could begin soon.

Engineers design probes with a certain lifespan in mind, but some hardy robots just keep going. The tradition begun by the Voyager twins, which outlasted their missions to Jupiter and Saturn by decades and are now reporting from the edges of the solar system, continues today: In March a combination of luck and solid engineering allowed the Stardust probe to complete its second comet-chasing mission. Here is how it and two other plucky space explorers have defied retirement.

A rare haul of picks, flakes and hand axes recovered from ancient sediments in Kenya are the oldest remains of advanced stone tools yet discovered.Archaeologists unearthed the implements while excavating mudstone banks on the shores of Lake Turkana in the remote north-west of the country.The largest of the tools are around 20cm long and have been chipped into shape on two sides, a hallmark of more sophisticated stone toolmaking techniques probably developed by Homo erectus, a long-dead ancestor of modern humans.

The hunt for the Higgs particle is well ahead of schedule, say researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Earlier this year they said they would either discover the Higgs or confirm it does not exist by the end of 2012.Now, because the machine is working so well, an LHC spokesman, Professor Guido Tonelli, has told BBC News that the search could be completed much sooner.The Higgs Boson is the particle that in the physics "Standard Model" allows other particles to have mass. Discovery or elimination of the particle is one of the LHC's major objectives; and it could come as early as Christmas 2011.

For a tense two minutes in June, they waited for the "all clear" to come as an unexpected bit of space junk, likely a small piece of an old rocket body or spacecraft, zipped by at 17,000 mph."Orbital debris is part of the cost of doing business in space," says space scientist Nicholas Johnson of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which manages the space station. Like the debris that spurred the alarm in June, and passed safely by, thousands of bits of metal scraps, loose screws, paint chips, big rocket pieces and more are circling the planet at orbital speeds.

Planet-hunters say they've developed a relatively simple method for determining how livable a faraway world might be, and they've used the formula to identify a top candidate: a super-Earth that's 36 light-years away.The research paper was submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics just two weeks ago, but it's quickly making the rounds among those who follow the accelerating search for planets beyond our solar system. The big reason for all the interest is that the paper points to a new prospect for the short list of potentially habitable planets: HD 85512 b, a world that's at least 3.6 times as massive as Earth, circling an orange star in the constellation Vela.

A new study that matches words with brain activity patterns could help neuroscientists understand how people think about abstract, complex concepts, researchers say. It lends a physiological definition to the concept of higher thinking, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a computer program that condensed 3,500 Wikipedia articles.Researchers at Princeton University looked at fMRI scans to identify brain regions that were activated when participants thought about certain objects, like a carrot or a house. Then the team generated a list of topics that were also associated with those words. They looked at the same fMRI scans to determine the brain activity that was shared by the words within each topic, as a Princeton news release puts it.

Ever since ancient farmers called on the gods to send rain to save their harvests, humans have longed to have the weather at their command. That dream has now received a boost after researchers used a powerful laser to produce water droplets in the air, a step that could ultimately help trigger rainfall.While nothing can produce a downpour from dry air, the technique, called laser-assisted water condensation, might allow some control over where and when rain falls if the atmosphere is sufficiently humid.Researchers demonstrated the technique in field tests after hauling a mobile laser laboratory the size of a small garage to the banks of the Rhône near lake Geneva in Switzerland.

We tend to think of garden design as a relatively new vocation. The truth told by archaeological findings not only lays such thoughts to rest, it tells a tale of a rich and ancient heritage of garden design.One such finding shows a garden of Ninevah, in present-day Iraq, that dates back to 650 BC. There are date palms, trees and shrubs of many types. True, an enemy's severed head is seen hanging from one of the trees, but times were different, or are they? They did like their gardens, however.Our vision of ancient Egyptian temples is one of stark stone against a background of sand and rock. When these amazing temples and tombs were built they were surrounded by gardens.

An analysis of 30,000-year-old bacteria whose DNA has been recovered from the Yukon permafrost shows that they were able to resist antibiotics.Antibiotics, before they became used as drugs, were natural products. The new finding is the first direct evidence that antibiotic resistance is a widespread natural phenomenon that preceded the modern medical use of antibiotics.Experts had long predicted this on theoretical grounds, but they say the new finding underlines the need to use antibiotics sparingly, given that the genes for antibiotic resistance are ubiquitous and can easily be promoted by antibiotics.

Nestled on the southern bank of the Pithlachascotee River, on Sunset Boulevard, is one of the oldest historic sites in Port Richey-- the Eschaskotes Mound site, also known as Oelsner Mound.The Eschaskotes Mound site is an archaeological legacy spanning more than a century. But today, 132 years after it was first excavated, it is merely a fraction of it[s] original size, the burial mound since destroyed by area development.This site-- one of the most significant in West Pasco history-- was once the nucleated village of Native American tribes dating from the Weeden Island II period (750 CE- 1000 CE) to the Safety Harbor period (800 CE- European contact).

The mysterious substance known as dark matter may actually be an illusion created by gravitational interactions between short-lived particles of matter and antimatter, a new study says.Dark matter is thought to be an invisible substance that makes up almost a quarter of the mass in the universe. The concept was first proposed in 1933 to explain why the outer galaxies in galaxy clusters orbit faster than they should, based on the galaxies' visible mass.At the observed speeds, the outer galaxies should be flung out into space, since the clusters don't appear to have enough mass to keep the galaxies at their edges gravitationally bound.

For 27 years, marine biologist Denise Herzing and colleagues have been regular visitors in the Atlantic Ocean home of a 200-member pod of spotted dolphins living north of the Bahama Islands.Understanding the relationships between the members of the pod is key to unraveling what their dozens of whistles, clicks and other signals mean."The large goal of this project is to tell the story of what it's like to be a dolphin," Herzing, a researcher with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and the founder and head of the Wild Dolphin Project, told Discovery News.

Yale University researchers have identified a key genetic gear that keeps the circadian clock of plants ticking, a finding that could have broad implications for global agriculture.The research appears in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Molecular Cell."Farmers are limited by the seasons, but by understanding the circadian rhythm of plants, which controls basic functions such as photosynthesis and flowering, we might be able to engineer plants that can grow in different seasons and places than is currently possible," said Xing Wang Deng, the Daniel C. Eaton Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale and senior author of the paper.

A group of scientists led by researchers from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) has quantified dust and iron fluxes deposited in the Antarctic Ocean during the past 4 million years. The research study published in Nature evidences the close relation between the maximum contributions of dust to this ocean and climate changes occurring in the most intense glaciation periods of the Pleistocene period, some 1.25 million years ago. Data confirms the role of iron in the increase in phytoplankton levels during glacial periods, intensifying the function of this ocean as a CO2 sink.