Newsdesk Archive

An extremely powerful solar flare, the largest in over four years, rocked the sun early Tuesday (Aug. 9), but is unlikely to wreak any serious havoc here on Earth, scientists say."It was a big flare," said Joe Kunches, a space scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Space Weather Prediction Center. "We lucked out because the site of the eruption at the sun was not facing the Earth, so we will probably feel no ill effects."Today's solar flare began at 3:48 a.m. EDT (0748 GMT), and was rated a class X6.9 on the three-class scale scientists use to measure the strength of solar flares. The strongest type of solar eruption is class X, while class C represents the weakest and class M flares are medium-strength events.

Scientists have discovered how one species of butterfly mimics other species to avoid being eaten by birds, solving a mystery that has puzzled scientists since Darwin.The research, which was published today in Nature, looked at the Amazonian butterfly Heliconius numata. Members of a single population may exhibit up to seven different wing patterns, with each type looking exactly like those of unpalatable butterfly species belonging to the distantly related Melinaea family."Charles Darwin was puzzled by how butterflies evolved such similar patterns of warning colouration," says Dr Siu Fai (Ronald) Lee from the Department of Genetics and Bio21 Institute at the University of Melbourne.

Saturday Aug. 6 marked one of the United States' most important but unheralded anniversaries. It is remarkable not only for what happened on that date in 1945 but for what did not happen subsequently.What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped a uranium-based atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week after the dropping of a plutonium-based bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Approximately 140,000 died in Hiroshima from the acute effects of the "Little Boy" bomb, and about 74,000 more in Nagasaki from the "Fat Man" bomb.

Nancy Wake, Australia's greatest World War II heroine and a prominent figure in the French Resistance known as the "The White Mouse" for her ability to evade the Germans, has died in London.Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the woman who was once the Gestapo's most wanted person, was "a devastatingly effective saboteur and spy"."Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end," Gillard said.

"In fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue," goes the old elementary school rhyme.But it was Columbus' activities in the years that followed, says writer Charles C. Mann, that really created the New World. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, his journey prompted the exchange of not only information but also food, animals, insects, plants and viruses between the continents.

Ken Kesey, a leading figure of the counterculture movement, popularized LSD and other hallucinogens and wrote two of the era's most popular books, Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He was also the subject of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's account of West Coast hippies after spending three weeks with the Merry Pranksters.

The SETI Institute's search for extraterrestrial intelligence is back on track, thanks to more than $200,000 in donations from thousands of fans."We're not completely out of the woods yet, but everybody's smiling here," the institute's chief executive officer, Tom Pierson, told me today.In April, the institute had to put its big ear for hearing E.T.'s radio call, the 42-antenna Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, into "hibernation" due to budget woes. The biggest hit was the loss of funding by the University of California at Berkeley, the institute's partner for operating the antenna array.

An uncontacted Amazon tribe that made headlines earlier this year after being filmed from the air is feared missing after presumed drug traffickers overran the Brazilian guards posted to protect the tribe's lands.According to tribal advocacy group Survival International, Brazilian officials can find no trace of the Indians in the area after heavily armed men ransacked the guard post in western Brazil, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the Peruvian border. Like other uncontacted tribes, the Indians live a traditional life in the forest and do not have contact with the outside world.Workers from FUNAI, the government bureau of Indian affairs, found a broken arrow in one of the men's backpacks, raising fears for the tribe's safety.

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.

The rocket and capsule that NASA is proposing to return astronauts to the moon would fly just twice in the next 10 years and cost as much as $38 billion, according to internal NASA documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.The money would pay for a new heavy-lift rocket and Apollo-like crew capsule that eventually could take astronauts to the moon and beyond. But it would not be enough to pay for a lunar landing or for more than one manned test flight, in 2021.

In some people, the weather-beaten skin and deep lines that crease their face betray obvious clues about the hard life they have led, but now scientists have discovered everyone's facial features may betray their childhood.Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have found it is possible to learn about a person's childhood by looking at how symmetrical their face is.Using 15 different facial features, they found that people with asymmetric faces tended to have more deprived childhoods and so harder upbringings than those with symmetrical face.

With the holiday season underway, intimate security checks at American airports are continuing to upset travellers.When passengers refuse the full body scanners they may be submitted to what authorities are calling an enhanced pat-down.Politicians are calling for them to be outlawed but the department of justice has threatened that flights whose passengers are not screened will be cancelled.Nancy Campbell, a 33-year-old from Brooklyn, compared the experience to being "sexually assaulted".

They don't often pose for goofy photographs - the members of the Quantum Hacking group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. But everyone wants their picture taken with Eve.Lurking in the background, she is the one who is not smiling. She also happens to resemble a suitcase full of discarded electronic components - wires, lasers and circuit boards.But looks can be deceptive. 'Eve' is code-breaking parlance for 'eavesdropper' - and this latter-day Mata Hari might just be the ultimate spy. The researchers have used Eve to crack a type of coded communication thought to have been impossible to break, called quantum key distribution (QKD).

Seeing regular updates from the International Space Station (ISS) is a special joy of mine, especially since the shuttle fleet was retired last month. As poignantly noted by Irene in "Atlantis' Final Reentry Seen From Space," although the shuttle is gone, the U.S. presence on the ISS certainly is not.So, in a stunning photograph taken by NASA astronaut Ron Garan through a space station window, a single Perseid meteor was captured as the piece of comet dust slammed into the Earth's atmosphere."What a 'Shooting Star' looks like #From Space Taken yesterday during Perseids Meteor Shower..." Garan tweeted from his Twitter account on Sunday.

In both chimpanzees and humans, portions of the brain that are critical for complex cognitive functions, including decision-making, self-awareness and creativity, are immature at birth. But there are important differences, too. Baby chimpanzees don't show the same dramatic increase in the volume of prefrontal white matter in the brain that human infants do.Those are the conclusions of a study reported in the August 11th Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, that is the first to track the development of the chimpanzee brain over time and to make the comparison to humans.

GAMBLERS already had enough to think about without factoring the end of time into their calculations. But a year after a group of cosmologists argued that they should, another team says time need not end after all.It all started with this thought experiment. In a back room in a Las Vegas casino, you are handed a fair coin to flip. You will not be allowed to see the outcome, and the moment the coin lands you will fall into a deep sleep. If the coin lands heads up, the dealer will wake you 1 minute later; tails, in 1 hour. Upon waking, you will have no idea how long you have just slept.

Agricultural pesticides are causing significant damage to the Great Barrier Reef, according to a new Australian government report on water quality at the site.The report says some farmers must be more careful with their chemicals.It found that nearly one-quarter of horticulture producers and 12% of pastoral farmers were using practices deemed unacceptable by the industry.The Great Barrier Reef is a World Heritage-listed natural wonder.

University of Hawaii scientists have installed a new observatory on the ocean floor about 70 miles north of Oahu.The observatory three miles below the water's surface is connected to Oahu by a telecommunications cable that will allow scientists to make sustained, real-time observations in the ocean.The University of Hawaii officials said Monday that the sustained, continuous recording of deep ocean conditions will help scientists better understand ocean acoustics, circulation, chemistry and ecosystem behavior.

Scientists have proposed a viable solution to the growing problem of space junk.The idea involves launching a satellite to rendezvous with the largest space debris, such as spent rocket bodies.The satellite would then affix a propellant kit, driving the debris to its doom in the Earth's atmosphere.The authors claim the scheme, in the journal Acta Astronautica, could inexpensively remove five to 10 such objects per year of operation.

Two bright galaxies on a cosmic collision path appear to be marking the occasion with a giant exclamation point in space. The spectacular new photo shows the galactic smash-up, called VV 340, in the early stages of collision. NASA released the cosmic crash scene and a video explaining the galaxy collision yesterday (Aug. 11).In the photo, the edge-on galaxy near the top of the image is VV 340 North and the face-on galaxy at the bottom of the image is VV 340 South.The colliding galaxies, which are also known as Arp 302, are located about 450 million light-years away from Earth. Over the course of millions of years, these two spiral galaxies will eventually merge in much the same way that the Andromeda galaxy is likely to merge with our Milky Way billions of years from now.

I enjoyed watching this presentation from 'alternative history' author Graham Hancock on the topics covered in his books, including the bestselling Fingerprints of the Gods.It was great to revisit some of these topics that I read in FotG way back in the 90s. Coincidentally I watched this not long after reading a Discovery Magazine story titled "Egypt's Lost Fleet", which discussed a recent archaeological excavation which appears to show that the 
ancient Egyptians "
mastered oceangoing technology and 
launched a series of 
ambitious expeditions 
to far-off lands" - something that Graham concluded in FotG sixteen years ago.

The incident had been known as Britain's Roswell: a group of American servicemen stationed in Suffolk go into a forest to investigate mysterious lights and emerge convinced they have seen an alien spacecraft.The sightings, in December 1980, remain unexplained and have become the country's most tantalising and enduring UFO riddle.One of those involved even claimed to have touched an alien spacecraft.

Although Arctic sea ice appears fated to melt as the climate continues to warm, the ice may temporarily stabilize or somewhat expand at times over the next few decades, new research indicates.The computer modeling study, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, reinforces previous findings by other research teams that the level of Arctic sea ice loss observed in recent decades cannot be explained by natural causes alone, and that the ice will eventually disappear during summer if climate change continues.

Astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet - a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b. Their measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system."TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it's truly an alien world," said astronomer David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), lead author on the paper reporting the research.

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

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 region1.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.But seconds after viewing the first image, Peter Thomas of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, shot off an e-mail to other members of the team: "Looks like HST results were fantas.

Think less sea monsters, more doting parents: the long-necked plesiosaurs that roamed the seas during the dinosaur era gave birth to live young. They probably cared for their offspring and may even have lived in large social groups, like modern-day whales.Plesiosaurs were reptiles, which as a group tend to lay eggs rather than giving birth. Other prehistoric marine reptiles were known to be exceptions to that rule, but until now fossil evidence that plesiosaurs did the same has been frustratingly elusive. "People have looked and looked," says F. Robin O'Keefe of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

Human remains found in an Irish bog could be up to 3,000 years old, according to archaeologists.The body, thought to be that of a woman, was discovered by the driver of a turf-milling machine in the bog near Portlaoise in the Midlands on Wednesday. Parts of the body, including the head and torso which had been enclosed in a leather bag, did not survive, but the legs had been preserved by the chemicals in the peat.Work was halted at the bog at Cul na Mona while police and archaeologists were called. Experts from the National Museum of Ireland believe the prehistoric find may have been the victim of a ritual sacrifice.

Three relatively bright space rocks recently found in Pluto's neighborhood may be new members of the dwarf planet family, astronomers say. The objects were discovered in a little studied section of the Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system that starts beyond the orbit of Neptune and extends 5.1 billion miles (8.2 billion kilometers) from the sun.Astronomer Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, and colleagues found the bodies using the 1.3-meter Warsaw University Telescope at Las Campanas in Chile.The region of the Kuiper belt visible from Earth's Northern Hemisphere has been fairly well studied. But until recently, a lack of instruments prohibited searches from the Southern Hemisphere.

A team of astronomers believes it has detected an extraordinary substance called graphene, floating around out in space.Graphene, or planar C24, is the substance than won its creators a Nobel Prize in physics in 2010. It's essentially a flat sheet of carbon atoms, one atom thick, that has incredible strength, conductivity, elasticity and thinness.It was first synthesised in the lab in 2004 by Russian physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. But now, astronomers from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona believe that they have detected the same substance out in space.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a beautiful picture of a giant cosmic necklace. Aptly dubbed the Necklace Nebula (PN G054.2-03.4), the image shows a recently discovered planetary nebula - the glowing remains of an ordinary, Sun-like star.The nebula comprises a bright ring that measures some 12 trillion miles across, dotted with dense, bright knots of gas which resemble diamonds in a necklace. According to astronomers, the knots glow brightly due to absorption of ultraviolet light from the central stars.A pair of stars orbiting very close together likely produced the nebula about 10,000 years ago, when one of the aging stars ballooned to the point where it enveloped its companion star.

Researchers say they have created the first ever animal with artificial information in its genetic code. The technique, they say, could give biologists "atom-by-atom control" over the molecules in living organisms. One expert the BBC spoke to agrees, saying the technique would be seized upon by "the entire biology community".The work by a Cambridge team, which used nematode worms, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The worms - from the species Caenorhabditis elegans - are 1mm long, with just a thousand cells in their transparent bodies.What makes the newly created animals different is that their genetic code has been extended to create biological molecules not known in the natural world.

The Perseid meteor shower 2011 peaks overnight. The nearly-full moon will mask all but the brightest meteors, but even if you can't see the shooting stars, you can hear them on your FM radio.One of the best meteor showers of the year, the Perseid meteor shower, peaks Friday night.While light from a nearly full moon will likely reduce the number of "shooting stars" you might see, head out after midnight to watch anyway. And bring along your FM radio. What you can't see, you just might be able to hear, as beyond-the-horizon FM radio signals bounce off the streaks of hot, ionized gas the meteors leave in their wakes. Some of those signals come as a single ping. Others last long enough to pick out a snippet of a song or a station ID.

For the first time since 2007, astronomers have spotted a new meteor shower over Earth. And while this sky show may not be as dazzling as the upcoming Perseids, it could provide the seeds for locating a mysterious and potentially hazardous comet.Scientists with the Cameras for All-sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project observed the handful of faint shooting stars on the night of February 4."I was really surprised to find that, over a seven-hour period, we managed to snap images of six meteors racing across the sky at nearly 80,000 miles [129,000 kilometers] an hour, all coming from the same direction," said study leader Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at the SETI Institute and the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

From a[n] 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. "The historic center of Mexico City is in desperate need for a pragmatic make-over," says BNKR's website.

Newly released government files on UFOs show a lack of will and resources to study thousands of reported sightings.The Ministry of Defence files released by the National Archives cover reported sightings of UFOs from 1985 to 2007.In one, a military officer predicts embarassment if the public discovered a "lack of funds and higher priorities" were stopping UFO investigations.The 34 files include sightings of lights over Glastonbury and a "flying saucer" in Nottinghamshire.

Defence experts were called in to examine a 2004 photo of a ''flying saucer'' taken outside Retford town hall in Nottinghamshire.The series of images were captured by Alex Birch and having ruled out lens flares and aircraft, he contacted the Ministry of Defence, who sent them to the Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency (DGIA) in July 2004.

Harrier jets in a dogfight with a "bright light" above the Queen's Highland home at Balmoral and a glowing white ball "like a flying jellyfish" over East Kilbride are among the alleged UFO sightings made to the Ministry of Defence.The National Archives' latest batch of "alien activity", released yesterday, reveals sightings by the Scottish public, newspaper reports and official inquiries. The register shows that there were 61 reports between 2002 and 2006 alone.The also include a "glowing white flashing light" seen over St Andrews on the evening of New Year's Day 2002, to the "huge white ball that glowing. Looked like a flying jellyfish" over East Kilbride.

The Chinese government is investing $8.9m to restore and preserve the ancient Guge Kingdom ruins in Tibet.It is estimated that the project will be completed in five years making the 10th Century site more resilient to natural disasters.Increased rainfall in the dry region over the past decades caused cracks on the walls and landslides.

NEWPORT, Ore. – A team of scientists just discovered a new eruption of Axial Seamount, an undersea volcano located about 250 miles off the Oregon coast – and one of the most active and intensely studied seamounts in the world.What makes the event so intriguing is that the scientists had forecast the eruption starting five years ago – the first successful forecast of an undersea volcano.

For the first time, researchers at McMaster University have conclusive evidence that bacteria residing in the gut influence brain chemistry and behaviour.The findings are important because several common types of gastrointestinal disease, including irritable bowel syndrome, are frequently associated with anxiety or depression. In addition there has been speculation that some psychiatric disorders, such as late onset autism, may be associated with an abnormal bacterial content in the gut.

Can the most modern of technologies help solve the health woes in the poorest countries in the world? Some biomedical engineers say yes. They are designing diagnostic laboratories that fit on something as small as a credit card, and give results in minutes instead of hours or days.These devices are sometimes referred to as a "lab on a chip." To use them, all you need to do is obtain a drop of someone's blood.

This April, after only three and a half years of listening for life beyond our planet, the Allen Telescope Array suddenly closed its ears. The array, a collection of 42 radio telescopes in northern California, had to go into hibernation mode after money from the National Science Foundation and the state of California dried up. Allen can't be used to collect data but is being maintained by a reduced staff, says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with the Mountain View, Calif.-based SETI Institute, which runs the observatory along with the University of California, Berkeley. (SETI, which stands for "search for extraterrestrial intelligence," is also the name for the entire field and not just the institute.) "It's changed our job description from collecting data using the array to finding resources to put it back on the air," Shostak says.

Language is very probably the one characteristic that separates us from the chimpanzees, our closest relatives. All other major differences between us likely stem from language."[Language] allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind and they can attempt to do the same to you without either of you performing surgery", says Mark Pagel, professor and head of the Evolution Laboratory in the biology department at the University of Reading.

Even a century ago, scientists working out equations on paper understood that gases in the atmosphere absorbed and emitted energy, keeping Earth from being a ball of ice. Today they use supercomputers to make increasingly refined predictions about how the Earth's climate will change.The new efforts take the question from global to local scale. Nations, states and communities have lots of climate-related questions: Should they divert water from one area to another? Build higher sea walls? Store and manage water the way Israel does today? Plan for many more 100-degree days in future summers?.

If you're on a quest for "worms from Hell," you have to be prepared for some tough going. You have to be an intrepid adventurer and a scientific risk-taker, someone with a high tolerance for discomfort and, of course, heat. Gaetan Borgonie, a nematode specialist from Belgium, is such a person, and as a result the world now knows something new and quite surprising about the world deep below the Earth's surface: It is home not only to single-cell microbes, but also to far more complex creatures such as nematodes, which have thousands of cells.

SOME claim climate change will destroy our species; now it seems it also helped forge it. The rapid fluctuations in temperature that characterised the global climate between 2 and 3 million years ago coincided with a golden age in human evolution.The fossil record shows that eight distinct species emerged from one hominin species, Australopithecus africanus, alive 2.7 million years ago. The first members of our genus appeared between 2.4 and 2.5 million years ago, while Homo erectus, the first hominin to leave Africa, had evolved by 1.8 million years ago.

The allegations could have come straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. Three art dealers and a collector have been accused of running an antiquities smuggling ring that illegally shipped Egyptian treasures, including Egyptian sarcophagi, funerary boats and limestone figures over 2,000 years old, to the United States. The relics arrived stateside in innocuous freight boxes, labeled "antiques" and "wooden panels," in order to escape scrutiny.

A personal genomics company in Switzerland says they've reconstructed a DNA profile of King Tutankhamen by watching the Discovery Channel, claiming the results suggest more than half of Western European men are related to the boy king. But researchers who worked to decode Tut's genome in the first place say the claim is "unscientific."Swiss genomics company iGENEA has launched a Tutankhamen DNA project based on what they say are genetic markers that appeared on a computer screen during a Discovery Channel special on the famous pharaoh's genetic lineage.

An enormous jawbone found in Kazakhstan is further evidence that giant birds roamed - or flew above - the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs.Writing in Biology Letters, researchers say the new species, Samrukia nessovi, had a skull some 30cm long.If flightless, the bird would have been 2-3m tall; if it flew, it may have had a wingspan of 4m.

THREE years of trundling across treacherous dunes has brought NASA's Opportunity rover to its most significant target yet - a huge crater called Endeavour that was once soaked with water and could hold clues as to whether there was ever life on Mars.Orbital observations suggest the rocks on Endeavour's rim are more than 3.5 billion years old and so date from the earliest, wettest phase of Martian history, when water carved out vast drainage channels across the planet. Until now, neither Opportunity nor its now-defunct sister Spirit had examined rocks that clearly date from this period.

Recent archaeological activities are yielding new and exciting finds in the ancient city of Dikranagerd, located in Artsakh.Dikranagerd, the city built by Dikran the Great, was discovered in 2005. Since then, archaeologists have carried out excavations in various parts of the city and revealed such structures as the Mijnaberd Fortress and the Basilica Church, the director of the Atsakh Archaeological Expedition, Hamlet Petrosyan, told Armenpress.Archaeologists now believe that Dikranagerd, founded in the first century B.C., was a large city with an advanced building plan and construction modes, many gardens, and a large population of several thousands.

24 rare dinosaur footprints have been discovered in Victoria, Australia, making them the largest and best preserved collection of polar dinosaur tracks in the Southern Hemisphere, reports the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.The tracks date back to around 105 million years ago, when Victoria, Australia was still connected to Antarctica.These three-toed tracks were most likely created during a polar summer when the earth was experiencing its last period of pronounced global warming, causing glaciers to melt and create a floodplain soft enough for the dinosaurs to leave tracks.

BOULDER, Colo., Aug. 8 (UPI) -- U.S. and international geologists say they've discovered a billion-year-old piece of North America they can trace back to Antarctica. Researchers say it's the strongest evidence yet found suggesting North America and Antarctica were connected 1.1 billion years ago, long before the supercontinent Pangaea formed, a Geological Society of America release reported Monday."I can go to the Franklin Mountains in West Texas and stand next to what was once part of Coats Land in Antarctica," study leader Staci Loewy, a geochemist at California State University, Bakersfield, said. "That's so amazing."The geologists found rocks collected from both locations have the exact same composition of lead isotopes, are the same age and have the same chemical and geologic properties.

Archaeologists leading the University of Toronto's Tayinat Archaeological Project in southeastern Turkey have unearthed the remains of a monumental gate complex adorned with stone sculptures, including a magnificently carved lion. The gate complex provided access to the citadel of Kunulua, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 950-725 BCE), and is reminiscent of the citadel gate excavated by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1911 at the royal Hittite city of Carchemish.The Tayinat find provides valuable new insight into the innovative character and cultural sophistication of the diminutive Iron Age states that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean following the collapse of the great civilized powers of the Bronze Age at the end of second millennium BCE.

New computer modeling work shows that by 2100, if society wants to limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to less than 40 percent higher than it is today, the lowest cost option is to use every available means of reducing emissions. This includes more nuclear and renewable energy, choosing electricity over fossil fuels, reducing emissions through technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide, and even using forests to store carbon.

Boeing says two of its own employees will crew the first manned mission of its new astronaut capsule.The US company has confirmed it will use the Atlas 5 rocket to test its CST-100 ship on three flights in 2015.An unmanned capsule will be used on the first and second launches. On the third, Boeing test pilots will take the vessel to the space station.

MSNBCA robot outfitted with a rudimentary brain-like neural network is able to tackle new tasks by calling on its past experience and knowledge to think and act for itself.This breakthrough demonstrates the evolving ability of robots to adapt to ever-changing environments, according to Osamu Hasegawa, an associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who is developing the technology.

The drought in Texas has gotten so severe municipal water managers have turned to a once untenable idea: recycling sewage water."When you talk about toilet-to-(water) tank it makes a lot of people nervous and grossed out," says Terri Telchik, who works in the city manager's office in Big Spring, Texas.Water for the town's 27,000 residents comes through the Colorado River Municipal Water District, which has broken ground on a plant to capture treated wastewater for recycling.

Could radiation from full-body scanners be responsible for a "cancer cluster" among airport security workers? That's what Transportation Security Administration union representatives in Boston have claimed.Now, the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has obtained documents from the Department of Homeland Security, which EPIC says provide evidence that the government failed to properly test the safety of full-body scanners at airports, and dismissed concerns from airport agents about excessive exposure to the machines' radiation.

WHEN a star is torn apart it's a rare event, happening only once every 10,000 years per galaxy. The odds of the light show also being captured by telescope or analysed by astronomers are slim.So there was some excitement when an international group of astronomers reviewing observations taken in 2006 realised just what they were looking at.The team, including Sydney University astrophysicist Sean Farrell, spent three years reviewing archival footage taken by the European Space Agency's X-ray telescope in the hope of spotting a rare event or object.

Eyeballing the leftover heat from the aftermath of the Big Bang, an Israeli physics team reports more signs that the early universe may have taken some lumps.Posted on arXiv physics paper database Monday, the report led by Ben-David Assaf of Tel Aviv University, looks at NASA's WMAP probe's sky survey. WMAP measured temperature variations in the "cosmic microwave background", heat left from the first few hundred thousand years of the universe, after the Big Bang took place some 13.7 billion years ago.

Early this morning, a powerful X-class flare rocked the solar surface, creating a dazzling show for the orbiting NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). As can be seen by the high-definition SDO photograph above, the flare erupted near the solar limb, directed (mostly) away from Earth.The "X7" flare erupted at the site of the particularly active sunspot 1263 at 3:48 a.m. ET. X-class flares are the strongest classification of solar flares, with C- and M-class flares representing the weakest and medium-strength flares, respectively. The Earth's atmosphere has been buffeted by a series of M-class flares in sunspots 1263 and 1261 over the past few days, prompting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to issue warnings to satellite operators and power companies around the globe.

The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space.Past research had revealed a range of building blocks of life in meteorites, such as the amino acids that make up proteins. Space rocks just like these may have been a vital source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth.

Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, according to a doctoral candidate at Montana State University.That surprising fact falsifies a 13-year-old study and may help explain why dinosaurs were able to dominate the planet for 160 million years, said Holly Woodward, MSU graduate student in the Department of Earth Sciences and co-author of a paper published Aug. 3 in the journal PLoS ONE.

A new study of plants that are reproduced by 'cloning' has shown why cloned plants are not identical.Scientists have known for some time that 'clonal' (regenerant) organisms are not always identical: their observable characteristics and traits can vary, and this variation can be passed on to the next generation. This is despite the fact that they are derived from genetically identical founder cells.

Supermassive black holes - objects with masses of millions or even billions of suns - are found at the nuclei of galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy, for example, has a massive black hole at its core, albeit one that is relatively quiescent. Despite their reputation for being implacable sinks for matter and energy, both radiation and matter can be ejected from the vicinity of a black hole, often in powerful jets, when it is ringed by a disk of matter and material accretes onto it.Thus in dramatic cases, like quasars, nuclear black holes are responsible for some of the most spectacular phenomena in the cosmos.

Animal's brains are only roughly aware of how high-up they are in space, meaning that in terms of altitude the brain's 'map' of space is surprisingly flat, according to new research.In a study published online today in Nature Neuroscience, scientists studied cells in or near a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which forms the brain's map of space, to see whether they were activated when rats climbed upwards.

Months after the death of the Mars rover Spirit, its surviving twin is poised to reach the rim of a vast crater to begin a fresh round of exploration.Driving commands sent up to Opportunity directed the six-wheel rover to make the final push toward Endeavour crater, a 14-mile-wide depression near the Martian equator that likely could be its final destination.At its current pace and barring any hiccups, Opportunity should roll up to the crater's edge on Tuesday. The finish line was a spot along a ridge that the rover team nicknamed "Spirit Point" in honor of Opportunity's lost twin.

For the first time, researchers from St Andrews University have been able to chart the levels of a vital fertility hormone in women of different ages.The move could revolutionise family planning by predicting when a woman is likely to start the menopause and may ultimately show how long she can delay having children.It could also save couples expensive – but ultimately futile – in vitro fertilisation treatments by predicting their chances of successful conception.

Scientists say current concerns over a tipping point in the disappearance of Arctic sea ice may be misplaced.Danish researchers analysed ancient pieces of driftwood in north Greenland which they say is an accurate way to measure the extent of ancient ice loss.Writing in the journal Science, the team found evidence that ice levels were about 50% lower 5,000 years ago.They say changes to wind systems can slow down the rate of melting.

A thin band of antimatter particles called antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time.The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter.The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped "normal" matter.The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

On the eve of Tisha B'Av, commemorating the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temples, artifacts were exposed that breathe new life into the story of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.A sword in a scabbard that belonged to a Roman soldier and an engraving of the Temple's menorah on a stone object were discovered during work the Israel Antiquities Authority conducted in the 2,000 year old drainage channel between the City of David and the Jerusalem Archaeological Garden.The channel served as a hiding refuge for the residents of Jerusalem from the Romans during the destruction of the Second Temple.

Cairo, (Pal Telegraph) - This week, during their routine excavation work, the French-Egyptian archaeological team working at the Karnak Temple in Luxor uncovered two major monuments. The first is the wall that once enclosed the New Kingdom temple of the god Petah and the second is a gate dated back to the reign of 25th dynasty King Shabaka (712-698 BC).Christophe Tiers, director of the Karnak French mission, said that the mission has also unearthed a number of engraved blocks from the Petah temple. During the restoration process, archaeologists realised that the blocks date to the reign of King Tuthmosis III (1479-1425 BC) which means that the construction of the temple started under Egyptian rule and not during the Ptolemaic dynasty as was previously thought.

For nearly 140 years, this tiny scrap of an island on West Africa's Atlantic coast was the point of no return for hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who were stolen from their homes and sold into slavery, many of them bound for the rice plantations of Georgia or South Carolina.It's a place of singular importance to both African and American history, but today Bunce Island is an overgrown mess of jungle that gets just a handful of tourists every year. The ruins of the slave castle that once dominated the island's 1.5 acres have been smothered by vines and eroded by the 13 feet of rain that fall every year here in Sierra Leone. A couple of rusting signs are the only indication of Bunce's grisly place in history.

The earliest known image of an Egyptian ruler wearing the "White Crown" associated with Egyptian dynastic power has been brought to light by an international team of archaeologists led by Egyptologists from Yale University.Carved around 3200 BCE, this unique record of a royal celebration at the dawn of the Egyptian dynastic period was found at a site discovered almost a half-century ago by Egyptologist Labib Habachi at Nag el-Hamdulab, on the West Bank of the Nile to the north of Aswan.

A remarkable 33,000 year old dog from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains shows evidence of dog domestication, the earliest ever found.The extraordinary preservation of the dog from the Razboinichya Cave, including skull, mandibles and teeth, allowed a Russian-led international team of archaeologists to conduct a complete morphological examination.

In September 2010, Dr George Nash was exploring the rear section of a limestone cave that stands within the eastern part of an inland valley on the Gower Peninsula in Wales. Located within a small niche on a near-vertical panel covered with stabilized botryoidal calcite flowstone was a faint engraving of a stylised reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), along with other yet to be identified marks. Fortunately, part of this unique engraving was covered by a datable later flowstone deposit.

She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name.She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper. Natalie Yazinska. Her mother, Sima, sobbed."The little one must make it," Leon Weinstein told his wife. "We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive."He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: "I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this.

GRAND JUNCTION, Tenn. - Here once was the home of American Indians with a culture far removed from the tepees, wigs and wigwams of TV Indians.A village slowly being unearthed on the Ames Plantation was a distant neighbor to Memphis' Chucalissa Indian Village. The residents were among hundreds of Mississippian Culture villages along the waterways of the Mississippi River Valley."In many ways their surroundings would be like a church today," says Ames cultural resource manager Jamie Evans.

ZHENGZHOU, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Archaeologists from China and Japan said that a technique used to make stone tools in north China later made its way to Japan in what might've been the earliest exchange between the two cultures some 20,000 years ago.A joint research project conducted by the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Nara Research Institute for Cultural Property found considerable similarities in stone tools unearthed in China, the Republic of Korea and Japan, suggesting a trans-regional spread of the technique used to create them.

Viewing the African landscape that our distant human ancestors saw millions of years ago may not require much imagination, if a recent University of Utah study has anything to do with it. The study, involving a new method of measuring and analyzing chemical isotopes in comparative samples of modern and fossil-bearing (paleosol) soils, allowed a team of scientists to determine the canopy density or tree cover in East African prehistoric environments going back more than 7 million years, the time when human ancestors and their ape cousins were evolving.

What will it take to build a spaceship capable of traveling to the stars? And what if you wanted it to be ready to launch in just 100 years?It may sound like the premise of a science fiction show or reality TV series. But these are serious questions being asked by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research-and-development arm of the U.S. military.

THEY built the iconic pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza, which still stand as a monument to their skills and tenacity to this day.But the fall of the great Egyptian Old Kingdom may have been helped along by a common problem which remains with us now - drought.Researchers from the University of St Andrews have confirmed that a severe period of drought around 4,200 years ago may have contributed to the demise of the civilisation.

Hidden beneath an ancient palace in what is now central Sudan, archaeologists have discovered the oldest building in the city of Meroë, a structure that also may have housed royalty.The capital of a vast empire that flourished around 2,000 years ago, Meroë was centered on the Nile River. At its height, the city was controlled by a dynasty of kings who ruled about 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) of territory that stretched from southern Egypt to areas south of modern-day Khartoum.People of Meroë built palaces and small pyramids, and developed a writing system that scholars still can't fully translate today.

KXANGRANITE SHOALS, Texas (KXAN) - Terry LeBleu of Granite Shoals in the Texas Hill Country is not worried about how to water his lawn or water restrictions in this time of drought. He also is not rushing out to buy bottled water. That is because he invented a machine that makes water out of the air.The machine is called the Drought-Master."These make pure water," said LeBleu. "The water never touches the ground. It is strictly straight out of the air. We have oceans of water in the air, in the sky. All you have to do is pull it out and condense it down.

Not long ago, the site was the backdrop for an Al Queda training camp. That camp is now gone, but the site still lies within an area considered to be a major transit route for insurgents infiltrating from nearby Pakistan. Today, archaeologists are racing against time to save a treasure of immeasurable significance to the cultural interests of war-ravaged Afghanistan and, by extension, the world. Not everything can be salvaged, but what archaeologists and other specialists are thus far recovering promises to represent a cultural heritage that will do enormous credit to a country that, until now, has not been prominently depicted on the archaeological map of the world.

The deepest point in the ocean, the bottom of the Marianas Trench off the coast of Guam, is the scene of a new kind of space race: a deep-sea submarine race, undertaken by such private investors as director James Cameron, Virgin Group mogul Richard Branson, and Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt. Citing the excitement of exploration, all are involved in the construction of next-generation submersibles to plumb the trench and other deeps, taking advantage of price reductions in many components and the dearth of such innovation in the scientific community. Though designed to take the builders and other thrill-seekers to incredible depths, the ships are by and large not intended to be one-shot wonders.

Today, seven traditional Polynesian ocean-going canoes are scheduled to arrive in San Francisco after traveling 15,000 nautical miles from the South Pacific.The 70-foot long boats, called vaka, have been navigating by the stars. Besides catching wind in their sails, the boats have also been drawing energy from solar-powered motors. A major goal of the trip is to draw attention to environmental and sustainability issues.But there is also something deeper driving the journey, explains the Pacific Voyagers website. Some three billion people live in 56 Pacific Island and Pacific Rim countries and territories. And those people have strong historical connections with the sea.

A Montana State University researcher who analyzed 100 years of data has found a significant link between extreme Montana weather and the ocean temperatures near Peru.Montanans who want to know what to expect from the weather should look to the Pacific Ocean in the fall or maybe find a way to chat with some Peruvian fishermen, according to Joseph Caprio, professor emeritus in MSU's Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences and former Montana State Climatologist.

Operators of electrical grids are working to avoid outages, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says some satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems could face problems.Three solar flares erupted on the sun starting on Tuesday, and the strongest electromagnetic shocks were being felt on Friday by the ACE spacecraft, a satellite that measures radiation bursts a few minutes before they strike Earth, said Joseph Kunches, a scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado.

The Ancient Lives project is putting hundreds of thousands of images of Greek papyri fragments online. Many of these papyri have remained unstudied since they were discovered more than a century ago, and the team is asking you to help expedite the process of transcription and cataloguing. The goal is to increase the momentum by which scholars have traditionally identified known and unknown literary texts, and the private documents and letters that open up a window into the ancient lives of Graeco-Roman Egypt.

New evidence suggesting the existence of water flowing on Mars indicates the possibility for life to exist on the Red Planet.NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have taken images and videos of dark, finger-like features running down a number of Martian slopes in the middle latitudes of the Planet's southern hemisphere. The lines become more visible in the warm season, suggesting that they could have been created by the flow of certain volatile chemicals which boils at low temperatures.These flows then dry up in colder seasons. The strongest candidates are water and carbon dioxide, according to a study by planetary geologists at the University of Arizona.

The lost wreckage of a ship belonging to 17th century pirate Captain Henry Morgan has been discovered in Panama, said a team of U.S. archaeologists -- and the maker of Captain Morgan rum.Near the Lajas Reef, where Morgan lost five ships in 1671 including his flagship "Satisfaction," the team uncovered a portion of the starboard side of a wooden ship's hull and a series of unopened cargo boxes and chests encrusted in coral.The cargo has yet to be opened, but Captain Morgan USA -- which sells the spiced rum named for the eponymous pirate -- is clearly hoping there's liquor in there.

The relatively large size of the mammalian brain evolved due to a capacity for endurance exercise, researchers conclude in a recent study.In the study published in the journal PLoS ONE this month, anthropologists David A. Raichlen of the University of Arizona and Adam D. Gordon of the University at Albany conclude that the brain size in mammals may have evolved in conjunction with increases in exercise capacity, rather than solely in response to natural selection for higher cognitive abilities.

Police have been called in to patrol the area near the village of Sougraigne, population 82, in the Aude region over fears the startling claims will lead to a sudden, massive influx of unwanted treasure hunters.The cave's whereabouts on a rocky, wooded hillside were a long kept secret by the three would-be "raiders" and only made public last week because of an acrimonious dispute between the men.

Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, according to a doctoral candidate at Montana State University.That surprising fact falsifies a 13-year-old study and may help explain why dinosaurs were able to dominate the planet for 160 million years, said Holly Woodward, MSU graduate student in the Department of Earth Sciences and co-author of a paper published Aug. 3 in the journal PLoS ONE."If we were trying to find evidence of dinosaurs doing something much different physiologically, we would expect it to be found in dinosaurs from an extreme environment such as the South Pole,"

European forests are regularly attacked by fire with often disastrous ecological, economic and social consequences. The most common reaction has been to fight fires at all costs. Today, a new concept for managing fire is emerging, taking into account its positive aspects.When correctly managed, fire is a means to prevent and fight uncontrolled events by limiting the accumulation of combustible vegetation.

Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere.

How many different shapes of human noses are there? Ten? Fifty? Hundreds?The correct answer is 14, according to Abraham Tamir, an Israeli scientist. And while the study has its limitations, it is the first-of-its-kind survey detailing the shapes of schnozes.Tamir set out to count, sort and categorize the shapes of human noses mainly because no one had ever done this experiment before. A professor of chemical engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, Tamir also teaches a course on the interaction between art and science.