Newsdesk Archive

A suspected Iron Age road, made of timber and preserved in peat for 2,000 years, has been uncovered by archaeologists in East Anglia.The site, excavated in June, may have been part of a route across the River Waveney and surrounding wetland at Geldeston in Norfolk, say experts.Causeways were first found in the area in 2006, during flood defence work at the nearby Suffolk town of Beccles.

What do the characters in The Grapes of Wrath, Icelandic shepherds in the Middle Ages and ancient Peruvians have in common? They all suffered from the effects of intensive agriculture on sensitive environments.Throughout human history unsustainable agricultural practices have turned fragile ecosystems into wastelands and left people starving. During the Dust Bowl, American farmers learned the consequences of removing the deep rooted grasses from the Great Plains when the soil blew away in tremendous dust storms. Icelandic shepherds learned that the sheep rearing practices their ancestors used on the European mainland destroyed the thin soils of their island and left them with starving herds and little to eat.

KKCO - Archaeologists say they've discovered evidence of people living in Colorado's Grand Valley 8,000 years ago.During a recent dig researchers with the Dominguez Anthropological Research Group uncovered a prehistoric stone shelter.Due to an agreement with the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the land where the shelter was found, the group could not disclose its exact location, but says it was north of Grand Junction near the Bookcliffs.

With optogenetics, a technique that uses beams of light to control the activity of particular cells, researchers have already flicked on clusters of neurons that trigger aggressive behavior and ramped up insulin production in mice. Now, scientists are applying the technique to the heart, working towards a cardiac pacemaker driven by light, Courtney Humphries reports in Technology Review.

Archaeologists say the discovery of a 2,000-year-old port sheds new light on Wales' role in the Roman Empire.A team from Cardiff University discovered the harbour outside the Roman fortress at Caerleon (Isca) during ongoing excavation work. The remains are said to be well preserved and include the main quay wall, landing stages and wharves. Excavation leader Dr Peter Guest said the port was a "major addition to the archaeology of Roman Britain".Students using geophysical equipment, which can reveal outlines of buried structures, came across the remains of a site of large Roman buildings on the banks of the River Usk last year.

Proponents of panspermia theory say life on Earth came from elsewhere, hitching a ride on rocks sheared from other worlds or from migratory asteroids. But what if life did originate here and then it left, hitching a ride on Earth-departed rocks? Earth could seed other worlds, instead of the other way around. A new analysis says the rocks could conceivably make it as far as Jupiter.Scientists have found several meteorites that originated on Mars or the moon, after being ejected in asteroid collisions, forcefully thrown into space and finally arriving on Earth. It makes sense that the opposite could be true, and that after mega-collisions, some pieces of Earth could be thrown toward Mars or Venus.

A non-profit organization called The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) has announced that it is publicly offering $1 million to celebrity "psychic mediums" including James Van Praagh, Allison DuBois, Sylvia Browne, Carla Baron, John Edward, and others if they can prove their abilities in controlled experiments."James Van Praagh and Allison DuBois have turned the huckster art of 'cold reading' into a multi-million-dollar industry, preying on families' deepest fears and regrets," said James Randi, founder of the JREF and a renowned magician and skeptic.The JREF's Million Dollar Challenge Director, a mentalist performer named Banachek, said, "We're issuing a challenge...

If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again. There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements. In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.Their weapon of choice - the algorithm.Behind every smart web service is some even smarter web code. From the web retailers - calculating what books and films we might be interested in, to Facebook's friend finding and image tagging services, to the search engines that guide us around the net.

DNA tests on British prehistoric mummies revealed they were made of body parts from several different people, arranged to look like one person.The four bodies discovered in 2001 on South Uist, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides were the first evidence in Britain of deliberate mummification. It is thought the body parts may have come from people in the same families.Sheffield University's Prof Mike Parker Pearson said the mummies had not been buried straight after preservation. A team from the University of Sheffield first uncovered the remains of a three-month-old-child, a possible young female adult, a female in her 40s and a male under the prehistoric village of Cladh Hallan.

Skewed skulls may have helped early whales find the direction of sounds in water and are not solely, as previously thought, a later adaptation related to echolocation.Scientists affiliated with the University of Michigan and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) report the finding in a paper published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Asymmetric skulls are a well-known characteristic of the modern whale group known as "odontocetes" or toothed whales.These whales also have highly modified nasal structures with which they produce high-frequency sounds for echolocation--a sort of biological sonar used to navigate and find food.

How many vehicles are there on Earth?We'd ask you to guess, except the headline above gives away the answer.According to industry trade journal Ward's, which added up both reported vehicle registrations and historical trends, the total crossed 1 billion sometime last year.The vehicles include passenger cars, light-, medium-, and heavy-duty trucks, and buses, but not off-road or heavy construction vehicles.

Sixty-nine-year-old German Heidemarie Schwermer never thought she could go so long without money, but what begun as a 12-month experiment became a unique lifestyle 15 years ago. AFP's Estelle Peard reports.With only a touch of makeup, a light pink cotton sweater and string of fake pearls, the elegant pensioner with a warm smile says she can hardly remember the last time she spent a cent.Instead, since 1996, she has lived by a unique scheme of swaps and barters she says has held her in good stead.

We like to think our superior brainpower means we survived while they perished. But we may not have been alive today, if it were not for the Neanderthals.Studies show that we owe much of the power of our immune system to genes we picked up from our caveman cousins.Interbreeding with Neanderthals gave our ancestors a ready-made cocktail of DNA invaluable in fighting diseases common in northern climates, research by immunologist Peter Parham suggests.

The fossilised remains of microbes that lived beside the sea in the earliest chapter of life on Earth have been discovered in a slab of rock in Western Australia.Researchers found the tiny fossils in rock formations that date to 3.4bn years ago, making them strong candidates to be the oldest microbes found. Some clung to grains of sand that had gathered on one of the first known stretches of beach.The findings paint a vivid picture of life arising when the first landmasses began to emerge in fragmentary fashion from the oceans. At the time, volcanic eruptions spewed gas and lava, while a blanket of thick cloud greyed the skies. The moon – much closer then than it is today – pulled the oceans into vast tidal surges. There was no breathable oxygen.

The scientists responsible for unearthing ancient fossils, believed to be the oldest ever discovered, argue that the existence of the microfossils demonstrates the possibility of alien life.The fossils were discovered in the remote Strelley Pool region of Australia and are believed to have developed more than 3.4 billion years ago, when the Earth was still oxygen-free.Incredibly small in size, the microfossils are said to clearly show precise cell-like structures. They were found preserved on the oldest shoreline known on Earth between the quartz sand grains of the oldest sedimentary rocks ever discovered..

Copying ancient sculptures is a traditional art in itself, which also relies on chemistry and technology. A 200-year-old workshop in Berlin specializes in reproducing the mysterious glance of Nefertiti and co.A pale sphinx is sitting on a pillar near the entrance to the atelier. Nearby, on the lawn in front of the brick building, a grim and mighty weather god from Tell Halaf in Syria is peering out of the window on the second floor of the plaster workshop.Works of art from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, from the Middle Ages are collected here, as well as pieces from Africa, Asia, America, and local Berlin sculptors. That's why Miguel Helfrich, the head of the workshop, likes to call it a universal museum.

RESEARCHERS at Macquarie University in Sydney have discovered unconventional properties in quantum mechanical particles called anyons which could help in the construction of quantum computers. Anyons are essential components in the development of quantum computers. They were previously through to behave like conventional quantum mechanical particles, which move very quickly.However, physics PHD student Lauri Lehman, in conjunction with researchers from the University of Leeds and Microsoft Research, found the anyon, when put into motion, moves relatively slowly and behaves like a classical non-quantum particle.The complex principles of quantum mechanics mean that the full implications of this research are still not fully understood.

A wet Mars is just a memory, but where did the water go?Geological observations suggest rivers and seas dotted the martian surface 3.5 billion years ago. The amount of water has been equated to a planet-wide ocean half-a-kilometer deep or more. For the planet to have stayed warm enough for liquid water, scientists assume that Mars had a greenhouse "blanket" of carbon dioxide atmosphere at least 1000 times thicker than what Earth has now.That carbon dioxide is mostly gone. So is the water. "Either they went up or they went down," says Dave Brain from UC Berkeley.

An international team of astronomers led by a former UA graduate student has set out on the largest program to date exploring the alien atmospheres of "Hot Jupiters" - massive planets in solar systems far away from our own.An international team of scientists has secured a large program of nearly 200 hours of observing time with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to explore the atmospheric conditions of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.The research will focus on "Hot Jupiters," exoplanets similar in size to Jupiter, but with temperatures of 1,000 degrees Kelvin (1,340 degrees Fahrenheit) or more because they orbit so closely to their respective stars.

With still a month to go until the official end of summer, some trees have already started to turn to their autumnal colour.An exceptionally hot and dry spring has prompted the change, according to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS).The colour, seen on trees such as maples and birches, is due to the dry soil.

Same-sex pairs of monogamous birds are just as attached and faithful to each other as those paired with a member of the opposite sex.The insight comes from a study of zebra finches - highly vocal, colourful birds that sing to their mates, a performance thought to strengthen the pair's bond.Scientists found that same-sex pairs of finches sang to and preened each other just like heterosexual pairs.The study is reported in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology.

Clouds may make a world orbiting a nearby star suitable for life, reports an international astronomer team.The Extrasolar Planets Catalogue now lists 573 planets orbiting nearby stars and international astronomer teams are vying to claim the first Earth-like inhabitable planet seen orbiting a star in our sun's neighborhood.Upping the exoplanet ante by bidding on another possible habitable planet, the team led by Lisa Kaltenegger of Germany's Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Heidelberg, reports a planet 3.6 times as massive as Earth orbits the star HD 85512. HD 85512 is about 69% the size of the sun and is roughly 36.23 light years away (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles).

The writer, who has always seemed to be ahead of his time, turns 91 Monday. His 30 books and more than 600 short stories have influenced a generation of American fiction writers.When my father took his leave of the family, he left behind a box of his books, and in doing so he gave me the gift of Ray Bradbury.The summer that I began reading Bradbury, even the ordinary world became magical. I inhaled the books: "Something Wicked this Way Comes," "Dandelion Wine," "The Illustrated Man," "The Martian Chronicles" and, of course, his master work, "Fahrenheit 451."

Robonaut, the humanoid robot delivered to the International Space Station in February, is finally getting to work -- and tweeting about the experience.So far, the droid's commentary is pretty dry -- "My power cable is plugged in and my status LEDs on my power backpack are on," Robonaut tweeted this morning. "Around 56 minutes left in my power soak test," it added an hour later. But Robonaut is responding to questions and even sent birthday greetings to one of its 35,000 followers.Once the testing period is over, the robot is expected to tackle some routine maintenance chores as a demonstration of how large robots and humans can safely and productively work together.

Our ancient human ancestors may have put us on track toward meals a la Julia Child as long ago as 1.9 million years, according to new evidence that extinct hominids were cooking and processing their food. The finding may also explain modern humans' small teeth and guts (for some of us)."We see a dramatic shift in the tooth size of Homo erectus, which means it was likely responding to a history already of eating cooked and processed food," study researcher Chris Organ, of Harvard University, told LiveScience. "If you're cooking your food you have many more hours of your day free, and you can spend those hours doing other things," since you don't have to eat as much to get your daily requirements.Processed food is much easier to chew and digest and since chewing breaks up the food it means more surface area is available from which the gut can absorb nutrients, Organ said. The result means more available calories per serving and less gut time needed to digest those calories.

Swaying gently from side to side in what looks like human crop circles on top of a Bulgarian mountain, it's a far cry from how most people see in the New Year.Instead of drinking until dawn, members of the White Brotherhood today celebrated the passing of the summer season and the start of a new 12 months.Thousands of followers, who practice a synthesis of Christianity and Hinduism, dressed in white and sang spiritual songs as the sun came up over the Rila Mountains.

Sunspots, those dark regions on the surface of the sun whose high magnetic activity has ripple effects for Earthlings, seem to emerge and fade without warning. But now, by listening to the sounds the sun makes, scientists have managed to predict when a sunspot will appear up to two days beforehand.The findings, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, could help solar physicists understand how to better predict solar flares and other space weather events that can harm astronauts and damage power and electronics systems on Earth.

A large black cat believed to be a panther is stalking the fields and forests of southern Tuscany, striking fear into residents and holidaymakers. Hunters have angered animal rights campaigners by offering to kill it, but the debate is academic -- "Bagheera" is running rings around its pursuers.The blissfully peaceful rhythm of life in the olive groves and forests of southern Tuscany has been rudely disrupted this month by repeated sightings of a large black beast around the medieval Tuscan village of Prata, a few kilometers from the tourist center of Massa Marittima.

In 1950, Alan Turing invented a test for determining a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. At the time, some predicted that so-called "Strong A.I.," that is, artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds human intelligence, could be achieved in a few decades. Over sixty years later, every machine that has been tasked with simulating human intelligence has failed the so-called Turing Test.And yet, scientists have become both impressed and alarmed by the tremendous leaps forward in A.I. capabilities in recent years. A.I. has been put into common use by financial institutions, and found promising applications in medical equipment, search technology, games and transportation systems.

Archaeologists have unearthed a human dwelling in Haldummulla, Sri Lanka, which they believe is the oldest of its kind identified on the island so far.Prof. Raj Somadeva of the post graduate institute of Archaeology in the Kelaniya University said that it was discovered in an archaeological excavation carried out near Koswatta village in Haldumulla. Earlier a burial ground was found 0.5km from the recently discovered settlement.The archaeological site is situated 850 meters above sea level where the foundations of four houses, fireplaces, coal, iron, rock tools, pieces of clay pots and beads have been found.

GALAXIES are running out of gas - a discovery that explains why fewer stars are being born now than in the past. The culprit for this dimming of the lights appears to be the mysterious dark energy that pervades the cosmos and is pushing it ever faster apart.A CSIRO astronomer, Robert Braun, said that star formation peaked early in the universe's history, about 8 to 10 billion years ago, then began to decline.At first the drop-off in star birth was slow. ''Now it's really plummeting,'' Dr Braun said. To find out why, he and his colleagues looked back in time with the Mopra radio telescope near Coonabarabran.

The idea of an Atlantis, a lost civilization forgotten to history is an exciting and alluring concept, but is an advanced civilization predating our own even plausible?Is it nothing more than a form of intellectual temerity to posit these ideas, flying in the face of not only conventional understanding, but also decades of peer reviewed research.?There is also the problem of the fantasy hued image of Atlantis that popular culture such as television and comic books has ingrained in our minds. It is admittedly difficult not to imagine some dome covered sub-sea Utopian metropolis with technology advanced far beyond our own, much less that of the ancients.

A Christian ministry in Kentucky is building a massive ark to the scale of Noah's in the hopes of attracting visitors to their Bible-based theme park.

Range is a huge concern for anyone driving an electric vehicle. The fear of running out of juice with no means to recharge is very real as charging stations aren't exactly common. A zero-emission car technology currently being developed by Connecticut-based company, Laser Power Systems, completely eradicates this concern. In fact, if the technology ever takes off, you might never have to refuel again.

HAWTHORNE, Calif. (AP) -- SpaceX's next mission is to the International Space Station.The Hawthorne, Calif.-based private rocket maker said Monday its Dragon capsule will launch on Nov. 30 on a cargo test run to the orbiting outpost. SpaceX said the launch will be followed by a station docking more than a week later.

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.

About 1.1 billion years ago, what are now El Paso, Texas, and Antarctica appear to have existed side by side, scientists say.The find is part of a decades-long effort to piece together fragments of an ancient supercontinent that existed before Pangaea."Most people are familiar with Pangaea," said study co-author Staci Loewy, a geochemist at California State University, Bakersfield. "That was a supercontinent that formed 300 million years ago.

The moon may be 200 million years younger than widely believed, according to a new analysis of a rock brought back to Earth in 1972 by Apollo 16 astronauts. Or, if not, the moon may never have had the magma ocean that scientists think covered its surface soon after it formed.Either way, the findings published online Wednesday by the journal Nature could send lunar scientists back to the drawing board to reconsider the moon's evolution.

Within decades, solar storms are likely to become more disruptive to planes and spacecraft, say researchers at Reading University.The work, published in Geophysical Research Letters, predicts that once the Sun shifts towards an era of lower solar activity, more hazardous radiation will reach Earth.The team says the Sun is currently at a grand solar maximum.This phase began in the 1920s - and has lasted throughout the space age.

All life on Earth relies on a standard set of 20 molecules called amino acids to build the proteins that carry out life's essential actions. But did it have to be this way?All living creatures on this planet use the same 20 amino acids, even though there are hundreds available in nature. Scientists therefore have wondered if life could have arisen based on a different set of amino acids. And what's more, could life exist elsewhere that utilizes an alternate collection of building blocks?"Life has been using a standard set of 20 amino acids to build proteins for more than 3 billion years," said Stephen J. Freeland of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of Hawaii.

The New Zealand Mint has taken one innovative step to saving the economy, and the galaxy! The government body has introduced a new line of coins that feature an assortment of Star Wars characters.This unique coin collection has such Star Wars favorites as Darth Vader, R2-D2 and Han Solo adorned on them, and would no doubt garner serious geek-cred in any wallet. The Star Wars coins hold a value of two New Zealand dollars each, and they are legal tender, meaning you could go buy a replica lightsabre with your coinage.Not only that but these coins are probably the only place where you will ever see the Dark Lord himself just a flip away from Queen Elizabeth II, whose on the other side.

(Reuters) - A reindeer herder in Russia's Arctic has stumbled on the pre-historic remains of a baby woolly mammoth poking out of the permafrost, local officials said on Friday.The herder said the carcass was as perfectly preserved as the 40,000-year-old mammoth calf Lyuba discovered in the same remote region four years ago, authorities said, adding that an expedition had set off hoping to confirm the "sensational" find. "If it is true what is said about how it is preserved, this will be another sensation of global significance," expedition leader Natalia Fyodorova said in a statement on the Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region's official website.

For the first time, a spacecraft far from Earth has turned and watched a solar storm engulf our planet. The movie, released today during a NASA press conference, has galvanized solar physicists, who say it could lead to important advances in space weather forecasting."The movie sent chills down my spine," says Craig DeForest of the Southwest Researcher Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It shows a CME swelling into an enormous wall of plasma and then washing over the tiny blue speck of Earth where we live. I felt very small."CMEs are billion-ton clouds of solar plasma launched by the same explosions that spark solar flares. When they sweep past our planet, they can cause auroras, radiation storms, and in extreme cases power outages. Tracking these clouds and predicting their arrival is an important part of space weather forecasting.

There's no subject more fertile for debate than hypothesizing about the nature of extraterrestrial beings.So, in a study carried out by NASA and Pennsylvania State University scientists ("Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis," arXiv:1104.4462v2 [physics.pop-ph]), several intelligent extraterrestrial encounter scenarios are examined. One of the scenarios is a sci-fi favorite: what if we encounter an alien race hellbent on destroying us?But this isn't mindless thuggery on behalf of the aliens, and they're not killing us to get at our natural resources, they have a cause. They want to exterminate us for the greater good of the Milky Way.

To President Dilma Rousseff:"We call on you to take immediate action to save Brazil's precious forests by vetoing the changes to the forest law. We also urge you to prevent further murders of environmental activists and workers by increasing law enforcement against illegal loggers and ramping up protection for people at risk from violence or death. The world needs Brazil to be an international leader on the environment. Your strong action now will safeguard the planet for future generations."

It's usually the assumption that the first man or woman to first set foot on Martian dirt will be American. After all, the only men to walk on the lunar surface were employed by NASA.This assumption could be turned on its head if a recent announcement by the head of the European Space Agency (ESA) follows through.Speaking to reporters at an air show near Moscow on Wednesday, Jean-Jacques Dordain said ESA and Roskosmos (the Russian space agency) would "carry out the first flight to Mars together," according to RIA Novosti.

IBM has unveiled a new experimental computer chip that it says mimics the human brain in that it perceives, acts and even thinks.It terms the machines built with these chips "cognitive computers", claiming that they are able to learn through experience, find patterns, generate ideas and understand the outcomes.In building this new generation of chip, IBM combined principles of nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing.

Roughhousing, or tossing your children around on purpose, can be a hard sell to many parents. We worry our kids will get hurt. We don't want rowdy behavior carrying over into the classroom, especially in schools with no-touching policies. And many of us aren't really even sure how to physically interact with our kids.

Researchers from the University of St Andrews discovered that about 1.5 million tiny diamond nanoparticles are created every second as a candle burns.Evidence of diamonds was also discovered in tests on natural gas and wood flames, according to a study published in the Chemical Communications journal.Prof Wuzong Zhou, who led the research, said that if a way of extracting the particles is discovered, it could lead to new methods of manufacturing diamonds.

Chickens and other birds are thought to have descended from dinosaurs through a series of genetic changes.But by altering the DNA of chicken embryos in the early stages of their development, scientists are able to undo the progress made by evolution and give them qualities they lost millions of years ago.Ethical regulations prevent the eggs from being hatched but Arhat Abzhanov, an evolutionary biologist based at Harvard University in America, said he hopes to one day to complete his work by turning chickens into Maniraptora, small dinosaurs believed to have spawned 10,000 species of birds.

Researchers from Birmingham University claimed the designer drug, also known as MDMA, could be used to treat leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma after making it 100 times more effective at suppressing growth.Ecstasy was already known to be effective against more than half of white blood cell cancers, but previously the large dose required to treat a tumour would also have killed the patient.In a study published in the Investigational New Drugs journal, the scientists said the new drug could be used by doctors to treat cancer if it can be produced in a safe form.

(Reuters) - A mysterious orange goo that collected on shorelines in a village in Alaska is made up of fungal spores, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.The new analysis corrected an announcement made last week by Alaska-based NOAA scientists who had initially concluded the material was a conglomeration of microscopic eggs or embryos deposited by some form of crustacean.Scientists from NOAA's Center for Coastal Environmental Health and Biomolecular Research, based in Charleston, South Carolina, did a follow-up examination on a sample sent from Alaska and determined the material was fungal, not the product of crustaceans, the agency said.

The brain-eating amoeba that killed three people this summer is an organism that thrives in warm fresh water and can be found in lakes, rivers, hot springs and soil, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.All three deaths this year occurred in the South: a 16-year-old girl in Florida, a 9-year-old boy in Virginia and a 20-year-old man in Louisiana.A brutal summer and drought make the conditions perfect for the amoeba. The threat of N. fowleri could potentially be elevated for weeks in some areas. According to the CDC, infections occur mainly in July, August and September.

Computer simulations have revealed the reason why some exoplanets are inclined at large angles and why this might lead to habitable planets being evicted from planetary systems.Planets are thought to form within giant discs of gas and dust which surround young protostars. Clumps of material start to stick together and eventually collide with each other to create a protoplanet, which then sweeps up even more material from the disc. This protoplanetary disc rotates in the same direction as the protostar and should result in planets orbiting in the same plane as the equator of the star. However, there are many exoplanets which have broken the rules and orbit at large angles from the equatorial plane.

Finding ways to image neurons -- the active nerve cells that transmit signals throughout our bodies -- without interfering with their function has been difficult. For example, electrodes and fluorescent dyes employed to "see" a neuron's activity under a high-power microscope have the potential to skew results. What's more, these techniques also limit the number of neurons that can be studied at once, which hinders researchers' understanding of how the nerve cells work collectively.But one research team from Switzerland says it has found a way to capture neuronal activities in real time without disturbing the cells themselves. They reported their results in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For its 100th anniversary, the Oxford English Dictionary is proving it's still hip with the times by adding some tech-centric terms to its pages.Cyberbullying, sexting, retweet, textspeak and woot have joined the ranks as real words, along with some 400 new entries the OED has added to its 12th edition."These additions are just carrying on the tradition of a dictionary that has always sought to be progressive and up to date," OED said in an online statement, describing itself as a word curator that had always "sought primarily to cover the language of its own time."That includes kicking out some "tremendous" words that have fallen out of use, the OED regretfully noted, including brabble ("paltry noisy quarrel") and growlery ("place to growl in, private room, den -- what we might call a man cave these days").

Who needs sun and dirt? PlantLab is the latest in hydroponic, lightless plant growing, so any food can be local.There is no shortage of hydroponic produce startups aiming to capitalize on the world's growing desire for fruits and vegetables that don't need to be trucked in thousands of miles to their destination. But Dutch agricultural startup PlantLab may win the award for most psychedelic hydroponic setup--the company grows its plants (including tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and lettuce) indoors using red and blue LED lights.By customizing the light spectrum, nutrients, irrigation, and climate to meet each plant's needs, PlantLab believes it can create a "plant paradise" for the crops.

Fifteen years after "Trekkie" King Abdullah II briefly appeared in an episode of Star Trek, Jordan is planning to construct a $1.5-billion-dollar park themed on the cult American science fiction series. The "Red Sea Astrarium" will be built in the country's sole port of Aqaba, 350 kilometers (217 miles) south of Amman, spanning 184 acres (74.4 hectares), and will include a Star Trek-themed center."Revolving around ancient history with Nabatean, Babylonian, British and Roman influences," the park is scheduled for opening in 2014, according to Jordan's Rubicon Group Holding (RGH), which announced the plan.Bordering Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Aqaba is a popular tourist center and close to the ancient rose-red Nabatean city of Petra and Wadi Rum in the desert.

A new type of acoustic cloak would allow sound waves to travel around an object unimpeded, and could be used to build better concert halls, quiet spaces and noise-shielding head gear, researchers say.Much like an optical invisibility cloak works to fool light waves, an acoustic cloak would allow sound waves to travel around an object like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream. To the sound wave, whose wave form would propagate without obstruction, it would seem as though nothing is present. A noise-canceling system, on the other hand, would create an exact opposite wave form to cancel out the sound wave.

The moon may be 200 million years younger than widely believed, according to a new analysis of a rock brought back to Earth in 1972 by Apollo 16 astronauts. Or, if not, the moon may never have had the magma ocean that scientists think covered its surface soon after it formed.Either way, the findings published online Wednesday by the journal Nature could send lunar scientists back to the drawing board to reconsider the moon's evolution.The moon is thought to have formed from debris ejected into space after a Mars-sized body collided with the still-molten Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The young moon would have been hot and blanketed by magma.

Germany and Egypt have long been at odds over the return of the famous bust of Nefertiti. Now documents found in archives show that the conflict was started by a Frenchman who had fought the Germans in World War I and considered them to be swindlers. He may have been right.This queen owes her immortality to a gifted artist. The bust he fashioned out of gypsum and limestone some 3,350 years ago became an eternal monument to her beauty. As realistic as the image is, it has the radiance of a goddess. "It's no use describing it; you have to see it!" said the German archeologist who unearthed the bust of the Egyptian queen in the desert sand almost a century ago.

You may have seen the scary headlines. You may have read those alarming emails. But do you believe it? Just in case, NASA has issued the facts about a comet called Elenin. And no, these aren't the "facts" doomsayers will tell you.In short, the 3-5 kilometer-wide comet can't hurt us. Really, it can't. It's too small and its closest approach to Earth will bring it 90 times the Earth-moon distance. 90 times the Earth-moon distance. That's a whopping 35 million kilometers (22 million miles) away. Could there be any conceivable impact to our everyday lives by this dirty snowball?

Nigeria has successfully launched two Earth observation satellites which could be used to monitor weather in a region seasonally ravaged by disasters. The NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X spacecraft were lofted into orbit aboard a Russian Dnepr rocket from a launch pad in the town of Yasny, southern Russia.Nigeria collaborated with UK engineers on the project, and the satellites are being monitored from control stations in Guildford, UK, and Abuja in Nigeria. Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan praised the successful launch.Mr. Jonathan called the event "another milestone in our nation's effort to solve national problems through space technology". The imaging satellites could have a variety of applications, including the monitoring of disaster-prone areas.

Shark Week may be winding down, but just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, along comes a host of fearsome-looking creatures from the black lagoon ... or from your drinking water.Our summer slideshow from the international Nikon Small World competition features aquatic organisms ranging from the bdelloid rotifer, which has gone without sex for more than 80 million years, to an embryonic bamboo shark.

In 1943, British archaeologist Bernard Fagg received a visitor in the central Nigerian town of Jos, where he had spent the previous few years gathering and classifying ancient artifacts found on a rugged plateau. The visitor carried a terracotta head that, he said, had been perched atop a scarecrow in a nearby yam field. Fagg was intrigued. The piece resembled a terracotta monkey head he had seen a few years earlier, and neither piece matched the artifacts of any known ancient African civilization.

A pendant some 25,000 years old has been found in the Irikaitz dig in northern Spain's Basque region by archaeologists from the Sociedad Aranzadi.The piece, an oblong gray smooth stone some 10 centimeters (4 inches) in length, is perforated at one end and apparently was hung from a thong or cord around a person's neck, according to the director of the excavation, Alvaro Arrizabalaga, who added that the other end of the stone was used as a tool to retouch the edges of tools made from flint, like arrows or scrapers.

The Egyptian Military Operations Authority on Tuesday discovered the nameplate of King Apries in the Tal Defna area in Ismailia, which is located to the west of the Suez Canal.The plate is made up of two pieces of red sandstone with two cartouches bearing the name Wah-ib-ra (Apries ) inscribed. Apries (589-570 BC) was the fifth king of the 26th Dynasty.

DENVER - A spaceship that could carry the next wave of astronauts to an asteroid or beyond is being prepared for a new round of tests at a Lockheed Martin facility near Denver.Engineers have attached a launch-abort system to the nose of the capsule and will subject the combined spacecraft to a series of experiments to see if it can withstand the rigors of blastoff, Lockheed Martin said Friday.The launch-abort system, essentially a rocket attached to the nose of the capsule, could lift the capsule off its booster rocket and carry it to safety if a problem developed before or during launch.

Last weekend, at the 14th International Mars Society Convention in Dallas, Texas, the message was clear: it is imperative that we send a manned mission to Mars.The slogan was: "Mars or Bust."This may sound dramatic, but as highlighted by Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin during his closing speech, human spaceflight is at a crossroads and it's anyone's guess as to whether U.S. manned exploration beyond low-Earth orbit will ever become more than a Cold War memory.Zubrin blames manned spaceflight stagnation squarely on a lack of leadership in space. Many other speakers echoed this criticism.

Planetary scientists thought they knew what to expect when NASA's Dawn spacecraft returned the first close-up portrait of the giant asteroid Vesta last month. Fuzzy images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) taken in 1996 seemed to show that something had taken a big bite out of the asteroid's south polar region.The crater was posited as the source of Vesta-like fragments that populate the asteroid belt, and of a surprisingly large fraction of the meteorites found on Earth.

Archaeologists in Cornwall have found remains of a "unique" stone house, which could date back 1,500 years.Gunwalloe on the Lizard - possibly once the home of St Winwaloe from Brittany - is thought to have been the site of an early medieval settlement.The west Cornwall site is eroded by winter storms every year.As well as the stone house, the archaeologists from the University of Exeter have also unearthed several small pots from the early settlement.

After two years of painstakingly searching for targets, a team of dedicated researchers believes it is within striking distance of uncovering cultural evidence of early human occupation in the now submerged continental shelf of the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Put the arguments over how fast Antarctic ice is melting to one side for the moment. The latest study of the southern continent, by a group of scientists led by Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, shows how fast the ice rivers are moving and where they are going.The map of ice in motion, which traces parts of the eastern Antarctic region that have previously been hard to see, offers a new and powerful tool for the study of the dynamics of ice melting into the southern seas.The data used in the map was obtained from satellites in polar orbit. Dr. Rignot said in an interview that 3,000 different orbital tracks were studied, then combined into a mosaic of the continent.

Prime Minister Essam Sharaf has resolved a crisis at the Supreme Council of Antiquities by appointing Mohamed Abdel Fattah as secretary general.The council was temporarily headed by Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, who had no decision-making powers.Abdel Fattah promised to resolve differences among council members and root out corruption. He also vowed to complete a number of unfinished projects, such as the Rams Road in Luxor, the Step Pyramid and the Sharm el-Sheikh Museum.

A newly discovered eel that inhabits an undersea cave in the Pacific Ocean has been dubbed a "living fossil" because of its primitive features.It is so distinct, scientists created a new taxonomic family to describe its relationship to other eels.The US-Palauan-Japanese team say the eel's features suggest it has a long and independent evolutionary history stretching back 200m years.Details appear in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

I'm sitting on the lawn of the village church in Ticehurst, East Sussex, clutching a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In between swotting up on the hierarchy of the afterlife (the paradise of the gods, the realms of the demi-gods, men, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings) I glance up at the passing snowy-haired gentlemen in crisp linen blazers talking of cricket, and they're starting to freak me out.It probably wasn't a great idea to leave the Singing Rainforest sanctuary, a frosted-glass locale on the village high street, sandwiched between Cheryl's Dry Cleaning and CLeach the greengrocer.

It is one of the mysteries of Japan's ongoing nuclear crisis: How much damage did the 11 March earthquake inflict on the Fukushima Daiichi reactors before the tsunami hit?The stakes are high: if the earthquake structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every similar reactor in Japan may have to be shut down. With almost all of Japan's 54 reactors either offline (in the case of 35) or scheduled for shutdown by next April, the issue of structural safety looms over any discussion about restarting them.

It started with such a simple concept: A solar light bulb that charges up during the day and lights the night when the sun sets.Inventor Steve Katsaros perfected his design in June 2010, and four days later he had a patent in hand.He knew it was a good product, but he didn't know what to do with it."It wasn't until after we created it that we asked ourselves, 'How do we market this,'" Katsaros says. "And we learned that the largest market was the developing world.

The Marianas are among the first Pacific islands inhabited. Archeologists discovered the Marianas archipelago's first inhabitants arrived around 2000 B.C., or 4,000 years ago. In comparison, Hawaii's first inhabitants arrived 800 to 900 A.D. -- 2,200 years after the Marianas was inhabited.Our Marianas ancestors were in the first of three Pacific migrations. Professor Patrick V. Kirch of the University of California at Berkley's Archeology Research Facility notes the following discoveries.

Archaeologists have many tools at their disposal these days, from handpicks and sharp triangular trowels for excavation to sophisticated computer-graphic software and high-tech laboratory processes for virtual reconstruction and date determination. But the most basic, powerful equipment in the diverse archaeological toolkit remains the imagination. With the ancient landscape in Athens now buried beneath asphalt streets and massive modern buildings, the imagination is more important than ever for both archaeologists and laymen alike when considering the physical setting in which past Athenians once pursued their daily lives.

DANMASCUS- In a statement to SANA, Director of Damascus Countryside Antiquities Department Mahmud Hammoud said that the national archeological mission working at Tal al-Humira archeological site in Deir Attiya in Damascus suburb.Mud brick houses dating back to the late Jomon period (from about 2000 to 1000 BC) were discovered at the site and also the national archeological mission unearthed stamps, pottery vessels and stone basins and ovens of different sizes in addition to Basalt instruments and vessels.

Scientists say that there has been a mysterious decline in the growth of methane in the atmosphere in the last decades of the 20th century.Researchers writing in the journal Nature have come up with two widely differing theories as to the cause.One suggests the decline was caused by greater commercial use of natural gas, the other that increased use in Asia of artificial fertiliser was responsible.

From a architect's perspective, several problems impede the development of Mexico City, one of the world's largest cities with a population teeming around 21.2 million. A scarcity of new construction plots, height restrictions that limit new edifices to eight stories and laws that prohibit demolishing historic structures leaves little room for building up.The solution: build down.Up to the task is BNKR Aquitectura and their ambitious 'Earthscraper' project. The Mexico City urban architecture and research firm has proposed building an inverted pyramid underneath the Plaza de la Constitución, the heart of the Mexico City's historic district, commonly known as The Zócalo.

A new Public Policy Polling survey shows support for marijuana legalization in Colorado at 51%, with 38% opposed. The poll comes as activists there are prepare to put at least one marijuana legalization initiative on the November 2012 ballot.The poll did not ask whether Coloradans should "regulate marijuana like alcohol," which is the language used in the best positioned initiative, the one led by SAFER and Sensible Colorado. Instead, the poll simply asked, "Do you think marijuana usage ought to be legal or illegal?"Pot legalization was favored by people who voted for Obama in 2008 (68%), moderates (53%), liberals (68%), and the very liberal (82%). In terms of party affiliation, legalization scored well with Democrats (65%) and independents (55%), but only won the support of 31% of Republicans.

The so-called "Dog Days" of summer in the Northern Hemisphere officially came to an end this week, when the Sirius, the bright Dog Star, returned the night sky.Everyone talks about "Dog Days," but few may know what the expression actually means. Some might suggest it signifies hot, sultry days "not fit for a dog." (If during you live in Dallas or Oklahoma City this summer, you may probably more than agree with this particular definition.) Others, meanwhile, may say it's the weather in which dogs go mad.But the actual Dog Days, or "Canicular" days as they're known, are defined as the period from July 3 through Aug. 11 when the Dog Star, Sirius, rises in conjunction (or nearly so) with the sun. As a result, the classical Greek and Roman belief was that the combination of the brightest luminary of the day (the sun) and the brightest star of night (Sirius) were responsible for the extreme heat that is experienced during the middle of the northern summer. Other effects, according to the ancients, were droughts, plagues and madness.

New Jersey legalized medical marijuana last year, but Garden State resident and multiple sclerosis-sufferer John Wilson, 37, faces a five-year prison sentence for growing pot plants in his back yard. Wilson was busted back before the state legislature legalized weed for medical purposes, but despite pleading for clemency with Governor Chris Christie, Wilson will do time for "drug manufacturing." Yesterday an appellate court panel rejected Wilson's appeal, ruling that someone accused of manufacturing a drug cannot claim "personal use."Wilson's debilitating disease affects the brain and spinal chord, and those who suffer from chronic illnesses like M.S. say that the THC in marijuana provides great relief. But during Wilson's trial, the judge barred him from telling jurors that he was only growing the plant for his personal use, not for sale, and his lawyers were not allowed to call an expert to testify on the medical uses of marijuana. The appeals court found that the judge ruled correctly, and did not find the sentence overly harsh.

Shock waves travel in straight lines, so when most bikes hit potholes, the shocks run through the frame and into the rider. One way to avoid the discomfort that can cause is to channel those vibrations onto another path, as the Tortola RoundTail road frame does.THE TECHWhen this bike hits a bump, shocks are transferred into two hollow steel circles, which replace the typical rear triangles. The hoops force the waves into a spiral, where their energy dissipates. In the lab, the RoundTail cut vibration 50-fold.

What do the characters in The Grapes of Wrath, Icelandic shepherds in the Middle Ages and ancient Peruvians have in common? They all suffered from the effects of intensive agriculture on sensitive environments.Throughout human history unsustainable agricultural practices have turned fragile ecosystems into wastelands and left people starving. During the Dust Bowl, American farmers learned the consequences of removing the deep rooted grasses from the Great Plains when the soil blew away in tremendous dust storms. Icelandic shepherds learned that the sheep rearing practices their ancestors used on the European mainland destroyed the thin soils of their island and left them with starving herds and little to eat.The ancient inhabitants of what is now Peru also learned the unhappy consequences of farming in a delicate ecosystem.

This mummy seems to be missing a brain and other vital organs, new images reveal, and the finding suggests the man held a high status when alive 2,500 years ago in ancient Egypt.The images indicate that embalmers removed the man's brain and major organs and replaced them with rolls of linen, a superior embalming method used only for those of high status, researchers at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History said in a statement.When this mummy was transferred to the Smithsonian from the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in the late 1950s, it was partially unwrapped, and very little was known about the individual, until now.

Tiny particles made of polymers hold great promise for targeted delivery of drugs and as structural scaffolds for building artificial tissues. However, current production methods for such microparticles yield a limited array of shapes and can only be made with certain materials, restricting their usefulness.In an advance that could broadly expand the possible applications for such particles, MIT engineers have developed a way to make microparticles of nearly any shape, using a micromold that changes shape in response to temperature. They can also precisely place drugs into different compartments of the particles, making it easier to control the timing of drug release, or arrange different cells into layers to create tissue that closely mimics the structure of natural tissues.

A rare statue depicting the Roman god Hercules has been discovered during an excavation in the Jezeel Valley in the north of Israel.The white marble figure stands at 0.5 metres and is thought to have originally decorated an alcove in a Roman bathhouse. It has been dated to the second century AD and is said to be of exceptional quality.Dr Walid Atrash of the Israel Antiquities Authority said: "This statue is unusual because it is small. Most statues of gods from this period were life-size. This is something special." The demigod is depicted leaning on a club, draped with the skin of the Nemean lion that he slew in the first of his twelve labours.

The mystery of a giant arrow-shaped cloud on Saturn's largest moon Titan may now be solved, a new study suggests. The enigma was likely caused by a massive wave rippling through the moon's atmosphere. The discovery could help scientists better understand similar phenomena on Earth, especially in light of changing global climate, researchers said.NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected the cloud at Titan's equator in September 2010. The cloud is huge, with each side running about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) long.To understand just how such a bizarre cloud might have formed, planetary scientist Jonathan Mitchell at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues simulated the moon's atmosphere with a three-dimensional global climate model.

NASA has put to rest any speculations that Earth maybe expanding or contracting. New research has found that there has been no statistically significant expansion of the solid Earth.Tectonic forces like earthquakes and volcanoes push mountains higher, while erosion and landslides wear them down, helping to change the Earth's shape. However, despite the facelift, this new research - using space measurement tools and a new data calculation technique - says Earth's size will remain the same.Researchers referenced their measurements against the International Terrestrial Reference Frame established by the global science community. This reference frame is used for ground navigation and for tracking spacecraft in Earth orbit.

New research suggests oxygen may have been made on Earth hundreds of millions of years before its debut in the atmosphere.MIT researchers found evidence that tiny aerobic organisms may have evolved to survive on extremely low levels of the gas in these undersea oases. Former MIT graduate student Jacob Waldbauer found while working with colleagues that yeast is able to produce key oxygen-dependent compounds, even with only minuscule puffs of the gas.The research suggests that early ancestors of yeast could have been similarly resourceful, working with whatever small amounts of oxygen may have been circulating in the oceans before the gas was detectable in the atmosphere.

Scientists have shown how an enzyme from a microbe can produce hydrogen from water more quickly and cheaply.Hydrogen is seen as vital to future energy systems, but a major problem has been making this reaction fast and cheap enough to be viable.The new research published in Science takes us a step closer to this vision by avoiding the use of rare and costly chemicals to extract it from water.

US military scientists lost contact with an unmanned hypersonic experimental aircraft on its second test flight, officials said.The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) successfully separated from its rocket but lost contact shortly into its "glide phase".The plane is designed to travel at Mach 20, or 20 times the speed of sound.

Around 30 genetic risk factors for developing multiple sclerosis have been discovered by a UK-led team.It brings to more than 50 the total number of genetic clues to the disease.The research, published in Nature, will help identify risk factors and perhaps future treatments or even a cure, said the MS Society.

The ancient ship burial site in Salme on the island of Saaremaa still has some surprises in store.The archeological excavations in Salme, soon to be completed, have yielded evidence that the ship that had been buried with 35 warriors and nobles had a keel, which in turn leads to the conclusion that it used sails. This represents the earliest known use of sails on a vessel in the Baltic Sea region, reported ETV.

ON THE western fringes of Siberia, the Stone Age Denisova cave has surrendered precious treasure: a toe bone that could shed light on early humans' promiscuous relations with their hominin cousins.New Scientist has learned that the bone is now in the care of Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who revealed the first genetic evidence of interbreeding between ancient humans and other hominins.

SMHA team of archaeologists believe the famed figure picked up his travel stories second-hand from Persian merchants.HIS journeys across mountain ranges and deserts opened the eyes of mediaeval Europe to the exotic wonders of China and the Silk Road, establishing him as one of history's greatest explorers.