Newsdesk Archive
SANTA CLARA PUEBLO, N.M. (AP) - A wildfire that forced federal employees to flee the desert birthplace of the atomic bomb neared the sacred sites of several American Indian tribes on Saturday, raising fears that tribal lands passed down for generations would be destroyed.More than 1,600 firefighters were working to stop the 177-square-mile fire in northern New Mexico as it burned through a canyon on the Santa Clara Pueblo reservation and threatened other pueblos on the Parajito Plateau.
Blood may not always be thicker than water, if a controversial finding from one of the world's best-preserved Stone Age settlements is to be believed. At Çatalhöyük in Turkey, it appears that people did not live in families. Instead, the society seems to have been organised completely differently.Discovered in 1958, Çatalhöyük's many buildings are built so close together that people had to get in through the roof. Its inhabitants farmed crops and domesticated animalsMovie Camera, and experimented with painting and sculpture.
When archeologists recently excavated a 3,800-year-old palace near the eastern German city of Weimar, they discovered about 100 valuable weapons buried next to a massive structure. Now they are puzzling over how an ancient chieftain buried nearby became so rich.In 1877, when archeology was still in its infancy, art professor Friedrich Klopfleisch climbed an almost nine-meter (30-foot) mound of earth in Leubingen, a district in the eastern German state of Thuringia lying near a range of hills in eastern Germany known as the Kyffhäuser. He was there to "kettle" the hill, which entailed having workers dig a hole from the top of the burial mound into the burial chamber below.
Mexico City – Paleontologists found mammoth bones and a Clovis point, made by the oldest culture in the Americas and dating back at least 11,500 years, in northern Mexico, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.The discovery was made in 2008 south of Ciudad Juarez, a border city in the northern state of Chihuahua, but researchers did not conclude that the site was rich in remains of different animals and contained evidence of a human presence until this year, the INAH said in a statement.
Ceremonial Tibetan "singing bowls" are beginning to give up their secrets.The water-filled bowls, when rubbed with a leather-wrapped mallet, exhibit a lively dance of water droplets as they emit a haunting sound.Now slow-motion video has unveiled just what occurs in the bowls; droplets can actually bounce on the water's surface.A report in the journal Nonlinearity mathematically analyses the effect and could shed light on other fluid processes, such as fuel injection.At the heart of the phenomenon are what are known as Faraday waves, which arise when a fluid such as water vibrates, constrained by a closed boundary such as the edge of a singing bowl.
LONDON: Thomson Airways will become Britain's first airline to fly customers on biofuel - in this case cooking oil - when it operates a service to Spain on July 28.The airline said it planned to operate the flight from Birmingham to Palma, once final safety clearance was received.
With the space shuttle program ending, what does NASA have to look forward to? The future of deep-space exploration is already taking shape, inside the walls of Johnson Space Center's Building 220, the space agency's "Skunk Works" lab for human spaceflight.This is where NASA once worked on the X-38, a snub-nosed space plane that might have carried astronauts down to Earth from the International Space Station. The project was canceled in 2002, and today the 12,000-square-foot building houses hardware for a succession of projects that are not quite ready for prime time. But some of them may be ready sooner than you think.Take Robonaut 2, for example. The humanoid upper-body robot was shipped up to the space station in February, and taken out of its box at President Barack Obama's urging. ("Unpack the guy," he told Discovery's astronauts jokingly, but NASA took the request seriously.
In yet another stab at trying to prove the existence of dark matter, Dan Hooper and colleagues have published a paper on arXiv describing what they believe to be credible evidence of the material believed to comprise most of the mass in the Universe. They say, according to a recent BBC post, that it could be that electrons are created when high energy dark matter particles crash into one another, giving rise to the synchrotron radiation that has thus far puzzled scientists here on Earth. The result, it is postulated, are the so far unexplained non-thermal radio filaments (NRFs) found near the center of our galaxy.
LONDON (Reuters) – If Aubrey de Grey's predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" aging -- banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.
Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible. The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential applications - from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm's creators.
Four-room structure at Tel Shikmona site near Haifa also boasts mosaics, artifacts testifying to the considerable wealth of its owners.An archeological dig near Haifa recently uncovered a 3,000-year-old house that is the best-preserved structure yet discovered from the Israelite period.The four-room structure also boasts mosaics and artifacts testifying to the considerable wealth of its owners.
VIENNA (Reuters) - Otto Habsburg-Lothringen, the eldest son of the last Austrian emperor who became a champion of European unity, died aged 98 at his home in Germany on Monday, his family said."He died peacefully with his family present," a man who identified himself as a grandson said by telephone from Poecking, on Lake Starnberg in southern Germany, where Habsburg had lived since 1954 during a life spent mostly in exile.From there he honed a vision of overcoming the Cold War divide of Europe and worked to make it happen.
One of a number of seemingly implausible features of dark energy is that its density is assumed to be constant over time. So, even though the universe expands over time, dark energy does not become diluted, unlike the rest of the contents of the universe.As the universe expands, it seems that more dark energy appears out of nowhere to sustain the constant dark energy density of the universe. So, as times goes by, dark energy will become an increasingly dominant proportion of the observable universe – remembering that it is already estimated as being 73% of it.
Any parent fretting over a child's fever knows that temperatures just a few degrees above normal can kill. But cancer researchers have now found a way to make high temperatures heal. In a new study, a team found that injecting mice with tiny magnets and cranking up the heat eliminated tumors from the animals' bodies with no apparent side effects.
Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution.World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.
Lots of ants practise a rudimentary form of agriculture. Some are gardeners, gathering leaf fragments on which they cultivate a crop of tasty fungus. Others are dairymaids, "milking" the sweet excretion known as honeydew from aphids, scale insects and other related insects.But the Melissotarsus ants of continental Africa and Madagascar are special. If biologists' best guess proves correct, these ants raise their insect herds for meat, not milk – the first example of meat farmers other than humans. And that's not all. The insects they cultivate may be the best example of true domestication outside of our crop plants.
Reducing methane emissions from livestock may be a step closer thanks to the discovery of a previously unknown bacteria from the gut of a wallaby.Sheep, cattle and wallabies all produce methane while digesting plant material, and release the gas build-up by belching.For some time, scientists have known that tammar wallabies produce only one-fifth of the amount of methane compared to cows and sheep.Professor Mark Morrison from the CSIRO's division of livestock industry says the answer lies in the wallabies' digestive system.
The pigments preserved in fossils, including a 120 million-year-old bird, have been revealed using X-rays.A team, led by scientists from the University of Manchester, UK, scanned the beautifully preserved fossils.Their study, published in the journal Science, revealed the chemical fingerprint of pigments that once tinted the ancient bird's feathers.Manchester palaeontologist Phil Manning described the discovery as an insight into "the chemistry of life itself".
Many animals have eyes that are incredibly complex – others manage without. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have shown that sea urchins see with their entire body despite having no eyes at all. The study has been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).Most animals react to light and have developed a very sophisticated way of seeing complex images so that they can function in their surroundings. Good examples include insects' compound eyes and the human eye. Charles Darwin and other evolutionary biologists were bewildered by the eye's complexity and wondered how this kind of structure could have evolved through natural selection.
Palaeontologists have uncovered half-a-billion-year-old fossils demonstrating that primitive animals had excellent vision. An international team led by scientists from the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide found the exquisite fossils, which look like squashed eyes from a recently swatted fly.This discovery will be published on June 30, 2011) in the journal Nature. The lead author is Associate Professor Michael Lee from the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide's School of Earth & Environmental Sciences.
You may remember the hubbub that a Fermilab physicist caused last year when he started to investigate some strange results coming from the GEO600 gravitational wave experiment.In a nutshell, GEO600 -- a mindbogglingly sensitive piece of kit -- started to detect what particle physicist Craig Hogan interpreted as quantum "fuzziness." This fuzziness, or blurriness on the smallest possible scales, could be interpreted as evidence for the "holographic universe" hypothesis.
The European Space Agency's Integral gamma-ray observatory has provided results that will dramatically affect the search for physics beyond Einstein. It has shown that any underlying quantum 'graininess' of space must be at much smaller scales than previously predicted.Einstein's General Theory of Relativity describes the properties of gravity and assumes that space is a smooth, continuous fabric. Yet quantum theory suggests that space should be grainy at the smallest scales, like sand on a beach.
The Dalai Lama might like this one. Tibetan singing bowls, ancient instruments used for meditation, can be manipulated to produce droplets that levitate, bounce and skip across water.When one adds water to a Tibetan singing bowl and plays – often by tracing the edge with a mallet – the bowl's haunting sound is accompanied by ripples on the water's surface. That's because the mallet pushes on the side of the bowl – made from bronze alloy that is more malleable than glass – and deforms it on a microscopic scale.
US particle physicists are inching closer to determining why the Universe exists in its current form, made overwhelmingly of matter.Physics suggests equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been made in the Big Bang.In 2010, researchers at the Tevatron accelerator claimed preliminary results showing a small excess of matter over antimatter as particles decayed.The team has submitted a paper showing those results are on a firmer footing.
Vast deposits of rare earth minerals, crucial in making high-tech electronics products, have been found on the floor of the Pacific Ocean and can be readily extracted, Japanese scientists said on Monday."The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometer (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo.
New research from Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies is helping unravel the evolutionary history of the iconic tyrannosaurid dinosaurs, according to MSU scientists who reviewed past findings about a small dinosaur from Asia.The small-bodied tyrannosaur named Raptorex kriegsteini - about 10 feet long -- was named in 2009 by University of Chicago professor Paul Sereno and colleagues, and was described as having originated during the Lower Cretaceous of China, around 130 million years ago. The Raptorex was important because it seemed to show that characteristic features of tyrannosaurids, such as the short two-fingered arms, were acquired some 50 million years before previously thought. As a result, Tyrannosaurus was relegated to being just a particularly large, brutish version of a much older body plan.
Treasure, thought to be worth billions of rupees, has been unearthed from secret underground chambers in a temple in the southern Indian state of Kerala.Precious stones, gold and silver are among valuables found at Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple.The riches are thought to have been languishing in the temple vaults for more than a century, interred by the Maharajahs of Travancore over time.They have not been officially valued and inspectors are taking an inventory.
A 1996 expedition resulted in conclusions that the ancient early human species, Homo erectus, coexisted for a time with modern humans in Indonesia. The most recent expedition suggests otherwise, challenging a widely held hypothesis of human evolution.Homo erectus, an ancient human ancestor that lived 1.8 million - 35,000 years ago, is said by theorists of human evolution to have lived alongside Homo sapiens (modern humans) in Indonesia, surviving most other Homo erectus populations that became extinct in Africa and most of Eurasia by 500,000 B.P. Perhaps not so, according to an international team of researchers, after conducting archaeological investigations and a new dating study at sites on the Solo river in Indonesia.
A disabled Japanese man on Friday embarked on an ambitious trip that will take him to a mediaeval French World Heritage site with the help of a cutting-edge robotic suit.Seiji Uchida, 49, who lost the ability to walk in a car accident 28 years ago, said his trip to the picturesque abbey of Mont Saint Michel, set on a rocky islet in Normandy, will be only the beginning of his dream."Right now, I cannot stand on my own feet without help," said Uchida at Tokyo's Narita airport before his departure to France."But I will never give up on my hope of someday walking on my own feet, no matter how many years it would take.
The oil painting, which depicts Christ with one hand raised in blessing and the other cradling a globe, is entitled 'Salvator Mundi' or 'Saviour of the World'.Its discovery has been hailed by scholars as one of the most important artistic finds of the last 100 years.For centuries it was believed to have been the work of a protégé of Leonardo.But recent restoration work convinced a panel of eminent scholars in Britain, Italy and the US that it was created by the Renaissance master.
Human remains discovered beneath the floors of mud-brick houses at one of the world's first permanent settlements, were not biologically related to one another, a finding that paints a new picture of life 9,000 years ago on a marshy plain in central Turkey.Even children as young as 8 were not buried alongside their parents or other relatives at the site called Çatalhöyük, the researchers found."It speaks a lot to the type of social structure that they might have had," study researcher Marin Pilloud, a physical anthropologist with the United States military at Joint Accounting Command, in Hawaii, told LiveScience.
US and European efforts to send joint missions to Mars have encountered yet another hitch.A letter from Washington formally committing to combined ventures at the planet this decade was expected in Paris this week, but has not arrived.It makes it harder for Europe to authorise its industry to start the next phase of building on an orbiter to hunt for Methane in Mars' atmosphere.
Unexplained "filaments" of radio-wave emission close to our galaxy's centre may hold proof of the existence of dark matter, researchers have said.Dark matter is believed to make up most of the mass of our Universe, but it has yet to be definitively spotted.A report now suggests the filaments' emission arises from dark matter particles crashing into each other.
IEM REAP, Cambodia (AFP) - It has taken half a century, but archaeologists in Cambodia have finally completed the renovation of an ancient Angkor temple described as the world's largest three dimensional puzzle.The restoration of the 11th-century Baphuon ruin is the result of decades of painstaking work, hampered by tropical rains and civil war, to take apart hundreds of thousands of sandstone blocks and piece them back together again."When I first saw how devastated the monument was, I never thought we would be able to put it back together," said Cambodian restorer Ieng Te, who joined the project as a young student in 1960 and was tasked with numbering stones.
IThe neck bone of a crocodile-faced dinosaur species has been found in Australia, scientists said, showing the creature roamed much further than previously thought.The vertebra of a Spinosaurus was found near southern Victoria's Cape Otway lighthouse and belonged to a relatively small two-metre (6.6-foot) beast which lived about 105 million years ago, said researcher Thomas Rich.A "spine lizard" with a long, narrow snout like a crocodile, the Spinosaurus was known to live in Europe, South America and South Africa, Rich said, but this was the first time its remains had been discovered in Australia.
When the first European settlers arrived in Australia in the 17th century, they observed a strange farming practice among the natives. The aborigines routinely burned grasslands and vegetation in many parts of northern Australia during the cool months of the dry season between winter monsoons. These controlled burns were intended to help stimulate regrowth during the upcoming rainy period. But they may have also inadvertently caused the end of that summer dry spell to be much warmer and drier than normal, a new study suggests.Previously, researchers have linked such burning to the extinctions of some species of Australian megafauna, including several species of kangaroos, wombats, and other marsupials, thousands of years ago. But whether these burns affected the region's climate was unclear. The fact that previous climate simulations were limited to the core months of the rainy season may have limited their scope, says Michael Notaro, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Public open day on Sunday June 26th, 11am to 4pm, Burrough Hill, near Melton MowbrayAn ancient Leicestershire hillfort will reveal some of its historic secrets over the next month, as archaeologists from the University of Leicester welcome the public to visit the second season of major excavation of the site.
Monday morning, Patricia Howard, 66, was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, undergoing scans that led doctors to declare her cancer-free -- five years after her advanced breast cancer was diagnosed.A day later, she was in Silver Spring, Maryland, facing a panel of six experts at an unusual hearing held by the Food and Drug Administration: two days of discussion and a vote on the fate of Avastin, the drug that Howard says saved her life. "I'm not just a piece of anecdotal evidence. I'm a wife, a mother, sister, aunt, grammy, and a friend," she told them.
Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin's control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system's problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon.
An enigmatic message on a Roman gladiator's 1,800-year-old tombstone has finally been decoded, telling a treacherous tale.The epitaph and art on the tombstone suggest the gladiator, named Diodorus, lost the battle (and his life) due to a referee's error, according to Michael Carter, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. Carter studies gladiator contests and other spectacles in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.He examined the stone, which was discovered a century ago in Turkey, trying to determine what the drawing and inscription meant.
North Carolina's Eugenics Task Force is considering how to compensate thousands of victims of a state-sponsored sterilization program that lasted until the 1970s. Rationalization for eugenics ranged from protecting offspring of mentally disabled parents to improving overall health. To learn how and why N.C.'s eugenics board did what they did, host Michel Martin speaks with retired psychologist Mary Kilburn, who administered IQ tests on those deemed appropriate for sterilization by N.C.'s Social Services.
It took less than day, according to The New York Times' Lens blog, for readers to help identify the Nazi photographer who took 214 pictures in a recently discovered album that includes never-before-seen images of Adolf Hitler.After a call for help Tuesday from Lens and the German website EinesTages, it's been determined that it was Franz Krieger (1914-1993) of Salzburg, Austria.
A chemical in the brain controls sexual preference in mice, according to scientists in China.Male mice bred without serotonin lose their preference for females, a report in Nature says.The researchers say it is the first time that a neurotransmitter has been shown to play a role in sexual preference in mammals.Experts have warned about the dangers of drawing conclusions about human sexuality.
AFP - Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal's decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked."There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal," said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.The number of addicts considered "problematic" -- those who repeatedly use "hard" drugs and intravenous users -- had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.
NASA scientists are seeing new evidence that suggests traces of water on Mars are under a thin varnish of iron oxide, or rust, similar to conditions found on desert rocks in California's Mojave Desert.Mars could be spotted with many more patches of carbonates than originally suspected. Carbonates are minerals that form readily in large bodies of water and can point to a planet's wet history. Although only a few small outcrops of carbonates have been detected on Mars, scientists believe many more examples are blocked from view by the rust. The findings appear in the Friday July 1, online edition of the International Journal of Astrobiology.
Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible. The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential applications - from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm's creators.
Bulgarian archaeologists have found the remains of what seems to be a 7500-year-old prehistoric skeleton in the region of Koriyata, near the town of Suvorovo in northeast Bulgaria, Focus news agency reported on June 27 2011.The skeleton was found during excavations of an ancient village dated from fifth century BC.Historian from Varna university and leader of the expedition in the region Koriyata, Vladimir Slavchev, described the discovery as "an unusual finding" because complete prehistoric skeletons were very rarely preserved.
WASHINGTON -- An asteroid that is coming within cosmic kissing distance of Earth is going to be a little late for its date with our planet. But there is still no chance it will hit Earth.New observations now have astronomers saying the asteroid, called 2011 MD, will not swing close by Earth until 1 p.m. ET Monday, about three and-a-half hours later than they first thought. It will not come as close either. It will come about 7,600 miles near Earth, 100 miles farther than first forecast.
LONDON: A new video purportedly showing bright disc-shaped unidentified flying objects dashing through the blue skies over central London has become a big hit online in the UK.The footage, posted on video-sharing website YouTube, was filmed near the BBC Radio 1 building in Great Portland Street and it shows specks of white light flying at high altitude over the capital.
A NASA airborne telescope has chased Pluto's shadow over the Pacific Ocean to measure new details of the dwarf planet's atmosphere.The telescope, called the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), is a 100-inch reflecting instrument mounted on a highly modified Boeing 747SP aircraft. Astronomers used the flying observatory's mobility to position itself in the right place and time to catch a so-called "occultation" of Pluto, when the dwarf planet passed in front of a distant star, and its shadow hit a specific location on Earth.Probing the atmosphereThe June 23 observation allowed scientists to learn new details about Pluto and its moons.
A new design for sound cloaking brings us one step closer to hiding ships from sonar and designing new kinds of concert halls.The new sound shield is made of a stack of plastic sheets that have an intricate pattern of holes poked through them. When sound waves encounter the structure, they get re-routed in a specific path through the maze of holes and plastic plates. The result: instead of bouncing off the structure, as they would if they encountered any other obstacle, the waves keep on keepin' on, as if the device and the object under it were never there.Because of this behavior, anything that hid under this device would go undetected by traditional sonar.
A painstaking examination of the first direct and detailed climate record from the continental shelves surrounding Antarctica reveals that the last remnant of Antarctic vegetation existed in a tundra landscape on the continent's northern peninsula about 12 million years ago. The research, which was led by researchers at Rice University and Louisiana State University, appears online this week and will be featured on the cover of the July 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
IT IS a strange combination of clumsiness and beauty. Sitting on a cheap-looking worktop is a motley ensemble of flasks, trays and tubes squeezed onto a home-made frame. Arrays of empty pipette tips wait expectantly. Bunches of black and grey wires adorn its corners. On the top, robotic arms slide purposefully back and forth along metal tracks, dropping liquids from one compartment to another in an intricately choreographed dance. Inside, bacteria are shunted through slim plastic tubes, and alternately coddled, chilled and electrocuted. The whole assembly is about a metre and a half across, and controlled by an ordinary computer.
Archeologists report that Neanderthals, our vanished cousins who once occupied much of Europe, may have been more versatile hunters than once supposed.Neanderthals (or Neandertals) have long been seen as homebodies who stuck to hunting near their caves, but a Journal of Archaeological Science review of their tools and butchery sites in southwestern France suggests they got around when it came to hunting reindeer and bison starting about 75,000 years ago."Do Neandertal technologies relate to distinct mobility patterns? How do they vary in time? Do they differ significantly from the strategies developed by early Anatomically Modern Humans," asks Anne Delagnes and William Rendu of France's Université Bordeaux in the review. Neanderthals disappeared from the archeological record about 30,000 years ago, about the time modern humans moved into Europe. (A 2010 Science study of Neanderthals genes suggested 1% - 4% of most people of Eurasian descent carry some Neanderthal in them.
It may seem counterintuitive, but foods that are grown to organic standards can contain commercially manufactured pesticides.A U.S. Department of Agriculture survey of produce that found nearly 20 percent of organic lettuce tested positive for pesticide residues piqued our interest. Lots of the lettuce contained quite a bit of spinosad, a pesticide marketed by Dow Chemical under the brand name Entrust.So we called Jeff Gillman, a professor of nursery management at the University of Minnesota, who has written about organic practices for lay readers.
A man in the US, who was blinded in one eye 55 years ago, has had his sight restored, according to the Journal of Medical Case Reports.The patient was eight when his retina was detached after he was hit in the right eye with a stone.When the retina is detached for a long time it can be permanently damaged, so re-attaching it might not restore vision.Doctors said restoring sight after this length of time was a medical first.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A monster black hole shredded a Sun-like star, producing a strangely long-lasting flash of gamma rays that probably won't be seen again in a million years, astronomers reported on Thursday.That is definitely not the norm for gamma ray bursts, energetic blasts that typically flare up and end in a matter of seconds or milliseconds, often the sign of the death throes of a collapsing star.
Yahoo! News asked its readers and contributors to share their memories of the space shuttle program as it nears its end in July. Below is a story from a contributor.Intellectually, I am certain that it is time to retire the space shuttles from active service. We need to focus on the future instead of continuing to fly outdated vehicles into orbit. Emotionally, however, I have to say I have mixed feelings about the end of the space shuttle era.
Archaeologists have condemned a Tory council leader's threat to dismantle all archaeological controls on development, saying that the regulations are necessary to protect the UK's unique national heritage.Alan Melton, leader of Fenland District Council, dismissed opponents of development as "bunny huggers" in a speech last week. Archaeologists fear his views reflect a national threat to all heritage protection as a result of the government's determination to simplify the planning process to encourage development.
During routine excavation work, French excavators working at the San El-Hagar archaeological site unearthed hundreds of painted limestone blocks that were once used in the construction of the temple of the XXII dynasty king Osorkon II.Minister of State for Antiquities Zahi Hawass said that early studies on site revealed that these blocks were dismantled and reused in the construction of edifices during the Late Ancient Egyptian period and the Ptolemaic era.
A new investigation has revealed that human skeletons discovered in caves on the North York Moors were likely to have been the victims of ritual sacrifice 2,000 years ago.A forensic examination of their bones, for the BBC's History Cold Case series, has revealed evidence that at least one of them had been scalped.Human remains were first discovered in the series of caves, known as the Ryedale Windy Pits, in the 19th Century and further excavations took place in the 1950s.
Years ago, I got to know an archeologist that worked with archeological digs in East Texas in the area now covered by Lake Sam Rayburn.He and I discussed various subjects regarding archeology, not only regarding Texas, but some of the surrounding states and Egypt and the Holy Land.One of the subjects that caught my attention was one about several tablets being found in some of the Mayan temples of the Yucatan. He said that archeologists and other scientists studying these old tablets noted what appeared to be ancient Hebrew.
That's one small step for microbes, one giant leap for mankind's search for extraterrestrial life.NASA's Saturn-exploring Cassini spacecraft has gathered new evidence that conditions on Enceladus, one of Saturn's 53 named moons, could support life, said Dr. Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini Imaging Team at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado."On Enceladus we have conditions under the surface that we know could be enjoyed by organisms similar to types of organisms we find right here on Earth," she said Friday.
Meet ULAS J1120+0641, the most distant quasar ever found. A team of European astronomers have used a number of telescopes, data from The European UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) and five years of searching to find it.A quasar is a very bright, very distant galaxy that is juiced up by a supermassive black hole at its centre. The black hole in the middle of ULAS J11 has a mass two billion times that of our Sun, and the overall galaxy is the brightest object in the early Universe.
If UFOs are real and trying to get our attention perhaps they are getting a little more savvy about the way we humans work.A new video has emerged purporting to show 'a mothership and its fleet' zipping around in the clouds above a BBC building in West London.Perhaps the group of intergalactic travellers was hoping for some coverage from Auntie.
While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration notes "some concern" with the controversial chemical BPA, and many other countries, such as Japan and Canada, have considered BPA product bans, disagreement exists amongst scientists in this field on the effects of BPA in animals and humans. The latest research from the University of Missouri shows that BPA causes male deer mice to become demasculinized and behave more like females in their spatial navigational abilities, leading scientists to conclude that exposure to BPA during human development could be damaging to behavioral and cognitive traits that are unique to each sex and important in reproduction.
Contaminated water can be cleaned much more effectively using a novel, cheap material, say researchers.Dubbed "super sand", it could become a low-cost way to purify water in the developing world.The technology involves coating grains of sand in an oxide of a widely available material called graphite - commonly used as lead in pencils.The team describes the work in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.
Scientists have developed a technique that could be used to deliver precise doses of hormones to people who don't make them naturally.To do this, they rewired kidney cells with light-sensitive molecules from the eye, they reported in the journal Science.When pulsed with blue light, these cells churned out proteins on demand.Ultimately, this technique could avoid the need for people with diabetes to inject themselves regularly.
Scientists have shown off a "cloaking device" that makes objects invisible - to sound waves.Such acoustic cloaking was proposed theoretically in 2008 but has only this year been put into practice.Described in Physical Review Letters, the approach borrows many ideas from attempts to "cloak" objects from light.It uses simple plastic sheets with arrays of holes, and could be put to use in making ships invisible to sonar or in acoustic design of concert halls.
PARIS (AFP) – French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, known for her books on art and history and for saving the Nubian temples from flooding caused by the Aswan Dam, has died at the age of 97, her editor Telemaque said Friday.In a career spanning more than half-a-century, Desroches-Noblecourt also helped preserve the mummy of King Ramses II, which was threatened by fungus, and became the first French woman to lead an archaeological dig in 1938.
The European Space Agency (Esa) is pressing ahead with its re-entry demonstrator known as the IXV, which it expects to launch in 2013.This distinctive wedge-shaped vehicle will be put at an altitude above 400km from where it will begin its flight back to Earth.Its suite of sensors should give engineers new insights into how objects fall back through the atmosphere.Ultimately, the data should inform better spacecraft design.
Exactly a century ago, on June 28, 1911, an explosion shook the Nakhla region of Alexandria in Egypt at 9 a.m. Soon after, around 40 chunks of meteorite debris from the high altitude blast rained down. 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of the bolide were recovered by witnesses of this cosmic event.The Smithsonian received two samples of the Nakhla meteorite the following August and then acquired a larger 480 gram (one pound) piece in 1962 (pictured top). By the 1970's, the Smithsonian had collected 650 grams (1.4 pounds) of the meteorite.
Crows remember the faces of threatening humans and often react by scolding and bringing in others to mob the perceived miscreant, according to a new study published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B.Since the mob members also then indirectly learn about the threatening person, the findings demonstrate how just a single crow's bad experience with a particular human can spread information about this individual throughout entire crow communities.
The six-member crew aboard the International Space Station took shelter in their Soyuz lifeboats Tuesday morning after NASA learned about a piece of orbital debris that was heading uncomfortably close to the outpost.Typically, the space station will maneuver out of the way if any debris will pass within a predetermined safety zone, but there wasn't time to orchestrate any moves Tuesday. Instead, NASA told the crew to head to the two Russian Soyuz capsules parked at the station.
New research has shown that happier orang-utans live longer which may shed light on the evolution of happiness in humans.Dr. Alexander Weiss and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Arizona, who are presenting their paper published in Royal Society journal Biology Letters at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Glasgow on Sunday the 3rd of July, used an innovative approach to assessing happiness by asking keepers who work with orang-utans to answer questions on the animals' behalf.
Llamas can't really manage it. Giraffes aren't very good at it and while big horn sheep and muskox excel at it, it turns out a small plant eating dinosaur – the pachycephalosaur Stegoceras validum – was probably even better at it: head butting.Researchers surveyed the heads of a large number of modern animals as well as one of the world's best dinosaur fossils, the Stegoceras specimen from the University of Alberta. They found that the bony anatomy of some pachycephalosaur domes are better at protecting the brain than in any modern head butter. The results of their research is published in PLoS One.
When explorers Ann Bancroft and Liv Arneson teamed up in 2000, they caught the attention of millions of kids around the world as they each pulled a 250-ton sled more than 1,700 miles through Antarctica -- becoming the first women to sail and ski across the icy continent.The journey took more than three months, and the explorers offered web updates and related curriculum for teachers and students.
Water feels good when we're thirsty, cools us when we're hot, looks great in a pond, a lake, a cloud. Because we ourselves are two-thirds water, we like the stuff, we're drawn to it. We search the universe looking for signs of water and when we look back at our planet, we are small and pale, yes, but we're dazzlingly blue.
Civilization is on a collision course. That's the message Paul Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace International, is sounding in his new book, The Great Disruption.The facts, as Gilding spells them out, are frightening. The United Nations predicts the world's population will reach 9.3 billion by 2050 and humans are already using 140 percent of the Earth's resources.
Aboriginal elders call the ancient paintings and engravings that dot the landscape their history books.But while Australia has some of the world's most outstanding and abundant rock art, experts say half of it could disappear over the next 50 years unless it is better protected.Urban development, mining and vandalism – as well as erosion and other natural processes – are among threats to the art found in rock shelters, often in remote areas. Some sites have already been bulldozed, or had paintings defaced or carved out. Many Aboriginal communities have lost their connection with the art, which their ancestors looked after and retouched over generations.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have conducted an initial survey of what appears to be an important, ancient water source in a cave that was been discovered during excavation work for a new train station being constructed at the entrance to Jerusalem.The work was done by members of the Cave Research Unit of the university, headed by Prof. Amos Frumkin of the Department of Geography. The cave was exposed near the base of a deep service shaft that was dug for the train tunnel leading into the new station, located opposite the main bus station in Jerusalem. The full length of the cave is as yet unexplored.
Hadrian's villa 30 kilometres east of Rome was a place where the Roman Emperor could relax in marble baths and forget about the burdens of power. But he could never completely lose track of time, says Marina De Franceschini, an Italian archaeologist who believes that some of the villa's buildings are aligned so as to produce sunlight effects for the seasons.For centuries, scholars have thought that the more than 30 buildings at Hadrian's palatial country estate were oriented more or less randomly. But De Franceschini says that during the summer solstice, blades of light pierce two of the villa's buildings.
Piraeus, the main port of Athens, was an island from 4 800 -- 3 400 BC, in other words 4 500 years before the Parthenon was built on the Acropolis. This discovery was made by a French-Greek team (1) led by Jean-Philippe Goiran, a CNRS researcher at the 'Archéorient -- Environnements et Sociétés de l'Orient Ancien' Unit (CNRS/Université Lyon 2), who studied and dated sediments collected in the Piraeus area. The research was carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the Universities of Athens, Paris 1 and Paris Ouest, and is published in the June 2011 issue of the journal Geology.
Aramaic is the lingua franca of the ancient Middle East, the linguistic root of modern day Hebrew and Arabic."Once you understand Aramaic," says Karen Stern, "you can read anything. You can read Hebrew, you can read Phoenician. I always call it the little black dress of Semitic languages.
Our species' origins have been a source of fascination for millennia and account for the huge range of creation myths that are recorded in different cultures. Linnaeus, that great classifier of living things, gave us our biological name Homo sapiens (meaning "wise man") and our high rounded skulls certainly make us distinctive, as do our small brow ridges and chins. However, we are also remarkable for our language, art and complex technology.The question is: where did these features evolve? Where can humanity place its homeland? In terms of our earliest ancestors, the answer is generally agreed to be Africa. It was here that our first ape-like ancestors began to make their homes on the savannah. However, a fierce debate has continued about whether it was also the ultimate birthplace of our own species.
When the monotheistic Pharaoh Akhenaten converted to the worship the sun god Aten during the 18th Dynasty, he abandoned the capital city of ancient Thebes where Amun had been worshipped for generations and moved downriver to Minya, where he founded his new capital at the present day Tuna Al-Gabal. Between the fifth and eighth years of his reign, Pharaoh Akhenaten built a new capital which he called Akhetaten, or the Horizon of Aten.
Advanced crafting of stone spearheads contributed to the development of new ways of human thinking and behaving. This is what new findings by archaeologists at Lund University have shown. The technology took a long time to acquire, required step by step planning and increased social interaction across the generations. This led to the human brain developing new abilities.200 000 years ago, small groups of people wandered across Africa, looking like us anatomically but not thinking the way we do today. Studies of fossils and the rate of mutations in DNA show that the human species to which we all belong – Homo sapiens sapiens – has existed for 200 000 years.
Standing before the imposing ziggurat which was once part of a temple complex at the Sumerian capital of Ur, Iraqi archaeologist Abdelamir Hamdani worried about the natural elements that are eating away at one of the wonders of Mesopotamia."Is there anybody thinking about preserving these monuments?" asked the doctoral student from New York's Stony Brook University who is one of the leaders of a nascent project to conserve the few unearthed remains of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the cradles of civilization." width="50%" height="50%">
MEXICO CITY.- When looking for archaeological elements of the first constructive stage of Tlatelolco, to confirm a foundation date, researchers of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found at Templo Mayor (Main Temple) a staircase that gave access to a shrine that dates from the earliest architectural stage, as well as a stuccoed floor, probably dated between 900 and 1200 of the Common Era.
Rome - The Holy Shroud of Turin, one of the most venerated objects of Christianity, was made by Italian pre-Renaissance artistic great Giotto, an Italian expert says.Luciano Buso, who has written a book on his sensational claim, says several veiled appearances of the number 15, hidden in the fabric by the artist, indicate Giotto created the shroud in 1315." width="50%" height="50%">
Ancient remains uncovered in Ukraine represent some of the oldest evidence of modern people in Europe, experts have claimed.Archaeologists found human bones and teeth, tools, ivory ornaments and animal remains at the Buran-Kaya cave site.The 32,000-year-old fossils bear cut marks suggesting they were defleshed as part of a post-mortem ritual.Details have been published in the journal PLoS One." width="50%" height="50%">
It's a no-brainer: ending the 'war on drugs' would create jobs, cut law enforcement costs, raise revenue – and benefit patients.Marcy Dolin, of Rohnert Park, California, smokes eight joints (marijuana cigarettes) every day, and eats a marijuana cookie before he goes to bed every night. He prefers the peanut-butter cookies.A 71-year-old man who has struggled with multiple-sclerosis for over half his life, Dolin is not the typical drug user often parodied in popular culture. He does not smoke recreationally, but rather because marijuana is the only thing that takes away the pain and stops the muscles spasms." width="50%" height="50%">
University of Minnesota engineering researchers in the College of Science and Engineering have recently discovered a new alloy material that converts heat directly into electricity. This revolutionary energy conversion method is in the early stages of development, but it could have wide-sweeping impact on creating environmentally friendly electricity from waste heat sources.
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Researchers are coming closer to developing an "artificial pancreas," a long-sought system of insulin pumps and glucose sensors that deliver insulin to diabetics, mimicking the function of a real pancreas.The devices have been in development for more than three decades, but lawmakers and diabetes advocates are ramping up the pressure and U.S. regulators this week outlined a regulatory path for a preliminary version of the device.
An international research team including University of Pennsylvania scientists has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and that there is a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.The research was conducted by members of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in Penn's School of Arts and Science: Benjamin Horton, associate professor and director of the Sea Level Research Laboratory, and postdoctoral fellow Andrew Kemp, now at Yale University's Climate and Energy Institute.
Dark matter, inferred to exist from its gravitational effects on the universe, is still a mystery to scientists. But a new study says that dark matter could help life evolve and survive on distant worlds outside of our solar system.Dark matter is perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind when considering how life can be supported on another planet, but to Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, dark matter could be a contributing factor in allowing life to evolve and survive on distant worlds outside of our solar system.
The quantum mechanical entanglement is at the heart of the famous quantum teleportation experiment and was referred to by Albert Einstein as "spooky action at a distance". A team of researchers led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences used a system which does not allow for entanglement, and still found results which cannot be interpreted classically. Their findings were published in the latest issue of the renowned scientific journal Nature.
This spring, scientists from the California Academy of Sciences braved leeches, lionfish, whip-scorpions and a wide variety of other biting and stinging creatures to lead the most comprehensive scientific survey effort ever conducted in the Philippines, documenting both terrestrial and marine life forms from the tops of the highest mountains to the depths of the sea. They were joined on this unprecedented, multi-disciplinary undertaking by more than two dozen colleagues from the Philippines, as well as by a team of Academy educators who worked to share the expedition's findings with local community and conservation groups. Over the course of the expedition, which was funded by a generous gift from Margaret and Will Hearst, the scientists discovered more than 300 species that are likely new to science, including dozens of new insects and spiders, deep-sea armored corals, ornate sea pens, bizarre new sea urchins and sea stars, a shrimp-eating swell shark, and over 50 colorful new sea slugs. These discoveries will be confirmed and described over the coming months, as the scientists use both microscopes and DNA sequencing to analyze their specimens.
Not so very long ago, we shared this planet with several other species of human, all of them clever, resourceful and excellent hunters, so why did only Homo sapiens survive?Huge debates rage about human origins, but the broad consensus among scientists is that all the different species of human that have ever existed were descended from ape-like creatures that walked upright in Africa more than six million years ago.These creatures had many descendants, most of which became extinct, but the first creature we would recognise as human first appeared in Africa two million years ago.
I am at a conference in Dubai on science, religion and modernity, and the best question to come up was "should we clone Neanderthals?" Let's assume the kind of technical progress which would make this look like a possibly ethical thing to do: the failure rate with mammalian cloning has been so high that it really would be rather dodgy to inflict the process on a human being. But for the sake of argument assume a reliable technology and a sufficiency of DNA to work with.Of course, the first difficulty from the strictly utilitarian point of view is that we don't know what the consequences would be. Neanderthal brains were physically different from ours and we have no idea how that impacted their consciousness. We assume they had speech, but this is obviously something that does not fossilise. So it's hard to judge the consequences inflicted on a sentient being when we have no clear idea of what kind of sentience is involved.