Newsdesk Archive

A new type of tree kangaroo, a 2.5-metre-long river shark, a frog with vampire-like fangs and a turquoise lizard are among hundreds of new creatures found and being documented in a report by conservationists working in the Pacific island of New Guinea.Some 1,060 previously unknown species of mammals, fish and birds have been spotted in the volcanic island over a 10-year period.The Final Frontier report, which was put together by WWF as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, marks a brief respite from the escalating rate of animal and plant extinctions which is taking its toll across the planet and has left a quarter of all known mammals on the endangered list.

They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans aloneMovie Camera have evolved grammatical rules.Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as syntax – says Kentaro Abe of Kyoto University, Japan. "Songbirds have a spontaneous ability to process syntactic structures in their songs," he says.To show a sense of syntax in the animals, Abe's team played jumbled "ungrammatical" remixes of finch songs to the birds and measured the response calls.

ACRE, Israel - Off the track beaten by most Holy Land tourists lies one of the richest archaeological sites in a country full of them: the walled port of Acre, where the busy alleys of an Ottoman-era town cover a uniquely intact Crusader city now being rediscovered.Preparing to open a new subterranean section to the public, workers cleaned stones this week in an arched passageway underground.

It’s just after dawn at the Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the ambition for the morning is to resurrect an Egyptian ale whose recipe dates back several hundred centuries.But will the za’atar—a potent Middle Eastern spice mixture redolent of oregano—clobber the soft, floral flavor of the chamomile? And what about the dried doum-palm fruit, which has been giving off a worrisome fungusy scent ever since it was dropped in a brandy snifter of hot water and sampled as a tea?“I want Dr. Pat to try this,” says Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head’s founder, frowning into his glass..

This may sound like late notice, but astronomers have just spotted a rather chunky asteroid heading our way, set to narrowly miss us on Monday.In fact, it will be such a narrow miss that astronomers in the Southern Hemisphere should be able to spot the flyby with fairly modest telescopes.Coincidentally, I was watching yet another re-run of Armageddon the other night when the heroic Bruce Willis and his motley crew of oil drillers-turned-astronauts saved Earth from certain asteroid doom. On arrival at the asteroid, and having sacrificed many of the team, Willis et al. succeeded in dropping a typical Hollywood-style uber-bomb into the depths of the incoming asteroid and blew it to bits, giving everyone on Earth a glitzy meteor shower.

According to multiple media reports, a 55-foot-long marine animal recently washed up dead on a beach at Guangdong, China. You can see its decaying body in the above image. Now the question is: What's this species that beach goers are calling a "sea monster?"Live Science showed the photo to three marine biology experts: Scott Baker of Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute, Bill Perrin, senior scientist for marine mammals at the National Marine Fisheries Service, and Bob Brownell, senior scientist for international protected resources with NOAA's Fisheries Service.

We seem to be inside a "local bubble" in a network of cavities in the interstellar medium, probably carved by massive star explosions millions of years ago. The interstellar medium (or ISM) is the matter that exists in the space between the star systems in a galaxy. This matter includes gas in ionic, atomic, and molecular form, dust, and cosmic rays. It fills interstellar space and blends smoothly into the surrounding intergalactic space.The ISM plays a crucial role in astrophysics precisely because of its intermediate role between stellar and galactic scales, with stars forming within the densest regions of the ISM and molecular clouds, and replenishes the ISM with matter and energy through planetary nebulae, stellar winds, and supernovae.

Dr. Steven Schwartz had been waiting 14 years to make the phone call. As an eye doctor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Schwartz sees his share of patients with serious diseases that slowly rob them of their sight. Yet when a 12-year-old girl went to him complaining of vision problems, he had the difficult job of diagnosing her with Stargardt's, one of the more common forms of macular degeneration, in which the photoreceptor cells start to deteriorate. He had to tell her that the world she knew would gradually, pixel by pixel, fade into darkness and that there was nothing he could do to treat her impending blindness. He suggested she try visual aids and vitamins to keep any remaining cells functioning, but that was all he could offer. She and her family were interested in participating in research trials, however, so he promised that he would call if any new opportunities arose.

iVillageWEDNESDAY, May 25 (HealthDay News) -- Older adults who say they've had a life-changing religious experience are more likely to have a greater decrease in size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical to learning and memory, new research finds.According to the study, people who said they were a "born-again" Protestant or Catholic, or conversely, those who had no religious affiliation, had more hippocampal shrinkage (or "atrophy") compared to people who identified themselves as Protestants, but not born-again.The study is published online in PLoS ONE.

The inside of a Mayan tomb thought to be 1,500 years old has been filmed by archaeologists for the first time.Using a tiny video camera, the researchers were able to capture images of the burial chamber in Palenque in south-eastern Mexico.As the device was lowered 16ft (5m) down into the tomb, they saw red paint and black figures emblazoned on its walls.The scientists say the images will shed new light on the Mayan civilisation.

The United Nations International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) has published on their website their annual report about the world situation on drugs in 2010. In this report, the INCB has included the preoccupying recommendation towards governments to outlaw traditional plants such as Ayahuasca (a decoction made with botanicals like Banisteriopsis Caapi and Psychotria Viridis) and Tabernanthe Iboga among others, neglecting their important role as traditional medicine, as a sacrament and as therapeutic tool. These are the primary uses of these plants found in societies all over the world.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A major earthquake of 7.4 magnitude struck in the Pacific Ocean more than 1,000 miles west of Anchorage on Thursday, prompting a brief tsunami warning for part of the remote Aleutian Islands chain.No damage or injuries were reported. The warning, which extended for roughly 800 miles -- from Unimak Pass, northeast of Dutch Harbor, westward to Amchitka Pass, west of Adak Island -- was canceled after a little more than an hour.A tsunami wave measuring just 6 centimeters tall was recorded at Nikolski, a tiny Aleut village on the island of Umnak, and a 10-centimeter wave was observed at Adak, said Becki Legatt, a spokeswoman for the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska.

Until recently, every invisibility cloak developed has operated at the microscopic scale, hiding objects that were already too small to see with the naked eye. If invisibility cloaks for invisible things seem disappointing, take heart: This year two separate teams stepped up with the first devices capable of concealing objects as big as a paper clip, bringing a practical invisibility cloak within reach.In both cases, the researchers carved out a hiding place in a crystal of the mineral calcite. Physicist Shuang Zhang and colleagues at the University of Birmingham in England hid a paper clip, while MIT engineer George Barbastathis and his team chose a rolled-up piece of paper. Both objects appeared to vanish.

A Newcastle University team has discovered that Type 2 diabetes can be reversed by an extreme low calorie diet alone. Affecting two and half million people in the UK – and on the increase – Type 2 diabetes is a long-term condition caused by too much glucose, a type of sugar, in the blood.In an early stage clinical trial of 11 people, funded by Diabetes UK, all reversed their diabetes by drastically cutting their food intake to just 600 calories a day for two months. And three months later, seven remained free of diabetes.

Recent research reported in PhysOrg showed that babies seem to be able to distinguish right from wrong even at the age of six months, and consistently choose helpful characters over unhelpful ones. Now new research suggests very young children are also able to use advanced reasoning to solve problems.Scientists Hyowon Gweon and Laura Schulz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US studied 83 16-month-old infants to find out if they could distinguish between events caused by themselves and outside influences and how the difference would affect their reactions to failed outcomes.

A firm from Austria, Austrian Innovative Aeronautical Technology (IAT21) has unveiled a new type of aircraft that flies without wings or rotors, at the Paris Air Show. Though not actually flown at the show, spokesmen for the new aircraft, named D-Dalus (no doubt after the tragic Greek figure Daedalus, who lost his son Icarus when his wings melted as he flew too close to the sun) claim the aircraft is capable of both hovering and flying forward as fast as a jet, all with very little noise.

On June 23, NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) observed the dwarf planet Pluto as it passed in front of a distant star. This event, known as an "occultation," allowed scientific analysis of Pluto and its atmosphere by flying SOFIA at the right moment to an exact location where Pluto's shadow fell on Earth."This was the first demonstration in practice of one of SOFIA's major design capabilities," said Bob Meyer, SOFIA's program manager. "Pluto's shadow traveled at 53,000 mph across a mostly empty stretch of the Pacific Ocean. SOFIA flew more than 1,800 miles out over the Pacific Ocean from its base in Southern California to position itself in the center of the shadow's path, and was the only observatory capable of doing so.

This is one homesick penguin, stranded on a New Zealand beach 2,000 miles from Antarctica and eating sand it mistook for snow.Wildlife officials stepped in Friday and moved the ailing young bird to a zoo. On Saturday it was on an intravenous drip and recovering from two medical procedures designed to flush sand from its throat and stomach.

Brazilian authorities say they have pinpointed the location of a community of ancient and uncontacted tribespeople in one of the remotest corners of the Amazon rainforest.Fabricio Amorim, a regional co-ordinator for Brazil's indigenous foundation, Funai, said the indigenous community had been found after three small forest clearings were detected on satellite images. Flyovers were carried out in April, confirming the community's existence.Four straw-roofed huts, flanked by banana trees and encircled by thick jungle, can be seen in photographs taken during the flyover.

About 100 million years ago, a tiny mayfly had a problem.Like most adult mayflies, she only had that one day to live anyway, so there was no time to waste. She took her mating flight, got fertilized, and was about to lay her eggs when something went horribly wrong. She got stuck in some oozing tree sap and died, preserved for all time in the magic of amber. There would be ho hatchlings.

A Mayan tomb closed to the world for 1,500 years has finally revealed some of its secrets as scientists snaked a tiny camera into a red-and-black painted burial chamber.The room, decorated with paintings of nine figures, also contains pottery, jade pieces and shell, archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) reported Thursday (June 23).The tomb is located in Palenque, an expansive set of stone ruins in the Mexican state of Chiapas. According to the INAH, the tomb was discovered in 1999 under a building called Temple XX. But the stonework and location prevented exploration.

PORTLAND, Maine (NEWS CENTER) -- When geologist Woodrow 'Woody' Thompson found sections of trees buried in clay in a gravel pit on Portland's western waterfront, he had know idea what he'd discovered."Well, this mystery started in 1976, when I was doing some geologic mapping around Portland," explained Thompson. "I was looking in a gravel pit, down near the Fore River next to what was then the Maine Central Rail Road, and I was surprised to find pieces of wood in a clay formation that dates back to the close of the Ice Age.

Looking for a source of renewable electricity? Researchers at the University of Toronto have found some serious current emanating from a huge cosmic jet 2 billion light years from Earth. At 1018 amps, the current is the strongest current ever seen, equalling something like a trillion bolts of lightning.The awesome current was found around the galaxy 3C303, whose core is the origin of a massive matter jet. While measuring the alignment of radio waves around 3C303, the researchers noticed a swift and sudden shift in the alignment of those radio waves, the telltale sign of an electrical current.

The Brazilian government has confirmed the existence of a previously unknown group of so-called uncontacted people who have remained isolated from industrial society.In April, the Brazilian government agency charged with protecting the country's indigenous tribes took aerial photographs of the group's Amazon dwellings. The photos were released June 22 by Survival International, an advocacy group for indigenous people.Survival International research director Fiona Watson talked to Wired.com about the photos.

Today archaeologists began excavating a pharaonic boat hidden for 4,500 years in an underground chamber on the southern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza.Consisting of disassembled beams and planks, the boat is one of two which were buried near the pyramid to follow the dead Khufu, also known as Cheops, in his journey into the afterlife.The first boat, entombed in a pit sealed by 41 stone blocks, was discovered in 1954. As with the newly excavated boat, it was completely dismantled.

The apes of Bossou, Guinea, have been studied for a quarter of a century by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, head of the Primate Research Institute in Inuyama, Japan.At a field station in Bossou, Matsuzawa and his colleagues have noted remarkable similarities between humans and our primate cousins. These apes regularly make and use tools. They manipulate twigs or grass to scoop up algae and ants, use rocks as anvils, and drink water with folded leaves.With Tatyana Humle and Yukimaru Sugiyama, Matsuzawa has documented the local chimpanzees' exceptional range of adaptations to living near people in a new book, The Chimpanzees of Bossou and Nimba.

A gene therapy treatment in monkeys may pave the way to curing the blind.Treating blindness has always been an appealing target for gene therapy due to the eye being one of the few sites in the body endowed with the ability to tolerate foreign substances without eliciting an inflammatory immune response.Although gene therapy has been used to partially restore sight in people who are blind from defects in the pigmented layer of the eye, providing the same treatment for those who are blind through loss of photoreceptor cells - the cells that respond to light - has proven a greater challenge.

Archaeologists working at the Roman legionary fortress at Hadrian's Wall have reportedly uncovered what they suspect is a refugee camp established for friendly tribespeople from north of the wall who were fleeing serious unrest in the early third century AD. These new discoveries, whether they really are ancient refugee camps or not, beg the question of quite what Roman attitudes towards refugees actually were, and how far they correspond (if at all) with modern sentiments towards displaced persons.

What is going on with monarch butterflies? Populations have been falling for 17 years at their wintering sites in Mexico, but a new study suggests they are holding steady in the eastern US.Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) famously migrate south to Mexico in the autumn, returning to the US and Canada in the spring. Earlier this year Ernest Williams of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and colleagues showed that winter populations in Mexico hit an all-time low in 2009-10.

Eguchi Aimi is your typical Japanese pop star: perfect skin, high-pitched girlish voice, lithe figure, and a team of computer designers, photographers, and other pop stars artificially constructing her every movement.You read that correctly. Aimi does not exist – at least not in the traditional sense. But this drawback has not stopped the girl, who was announced as the newest member of all-girl supergroup AKB 48 earlier this month, has already graced the cover of Japan's Weekly Playboy, and is part of a prestigious campaign for Ice no Mi – an ice cream product made by confectionary company Glico. But Aimi has not only infiltrated the uppermost echelons of superstardom in her brief lifetime, she also convinced much of a nation that she was a real girl for several weeks.

Shrouded mostly in jungle overgrowth, the ancient pyramidal structure known as "La Danta" is arguably among the largest pyramidal structures in the world. It marks the cultural centerpiece of what this early (beginning around the 6th century B.C.E.) Maya city has to offer to the world. In a very literal sense, it also represents only the tip of the iceberg -- most of the rest of this ancient city lies unseen, hidden by the green canopy of the Mirador Basin in the far northern Petén Region of Guatemala. In time it will disappear, even from the grasp of its protective jungle shroud, if nothing is done about it.

The rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, c, is one of the most fundamental laws of nature. But since this speed limit has only been experimentally demonstrated for information carried by large groups of photons, physicists have recently speculated as to whether single photons and the information carried by them may be able to exceed the speed of light. In a new study, physicists have performed the difficult task of producing single photons with controllable waveforms, and have shown that single photons also obey the speed limit c.

Conjurers frequently appear to make balls jump between upturned cups. In quantum systems, where the properties of an object, including its location, can vary depending on how you observe them, such feats should be possible without sleight of hand. Now this startling characteristic has been demonstrated experimentally, using a single photon that exists in three locations at once.Despite quantum theory's knack for explaining experimental results, some physicists have found its weirdness too much to swallow. Albert Einstein mocked entanglement, a notion at the heart of quantum theory in which the properties of one particle can immediately affect those of another regardless of the distance between them. He argued that some invisible classical physics, known as "hidden-variable theories", must be creating the illusion of what he called "spooky action at a distance".

Honeybee populations declined by 13.6% over the winter, according to a survey of beekeepers across England. Losses were most severe in the north-east, where the survey recorded a loss rate of 17.1%.Experts worry that the declines will affect plant productivity. There are also concerns that the declines, along with drought conditions in some areas, will mean less English honey this year.Martin Smith, president of the British Beekeepers Association, which carried out the survey, said: "If this was measured against similar losses in livestock it would be seen as disastrous and there would be great concern on the knock-on impact of food prices.

When time travel finally becomes possible, we might want to think twice about getting it on. According to a new study on tiny shrimp (Artemia franciscana), sex with partners from a different time could kill you.Researchers at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE) in Montpellier, France, collected preserved brine shrimp eggs from various generations, and then reanimated them with water. Nicolas Rode and colleagues mated pairs of brine shrimp that had been reanimated from eggs preserved since 1985, 1996 and 2007, a period representing roughly 160 generations. They found that females that mated with males from the past or future died off sooner than those that mated with their own generation. The longer the time-shift, the earlier they died: The 22-year time difference shortened female lifetimes by 12 percent; the effect was 3 percent for the 11-year time-shift.

The Roman Emperor Hadrian, who came to the throne AD117, claimed that the gods had instructed him to "keep intact the Empire", so he planned a massive wall to defend its northern boundary against the unruly tribes beyond. Building was carried out by Roman legionaries; they began while he was visiting Britannia AD122, and finished within six years. Hadrian's Wall is the largest Roman artefact anywhere; it runs a total of 73 miles from Bowness, near Carlisle, in the west to Newcastle in the east. There were turrets and milecastles for defence and signalling, and 16 full-sized forts, including Housesteads near the middle and Birdoswald (originally Banna) closer to Carlisle.The east end of the wall was constructed of stone blocks, cut from nearby outcrops and quarries. But west of the river Irthing the rocks were harder to find and the wall was originally built of turf; at Birdoswald both the turf original and the later stone wall can be seen side by side, since the stone wall was built 50 metres further north, in line with the fort's northern wall.

Japan issued a tsunami warning Thursday after a magnitude-6.7 earthquake struck in the northeast of the country, rattling the areas hardest hit by the March 11 quake and tsunami disasters.But the meteorological agency lifted the warning about an hour after the latest jolt hit at 6:51 am (2151 GMT Wednesday) some 50 kilometers (31 miles) off the east coast of Miyako, Iwate prefecture, at a depth of 20 kilometers in the Pacific.USGS also registered the quake at 6.7 in magnitude at a depth of 32 kilometers.

Gale Crater, a 150-kilometre wide depression named after an Australian banker-turned-amateur astronomer, has emerged as the preferred destination for the next spacecraft to set wheels on Mars.The proposed landing site, which includes a tantalizing 5-kilometre-high mound of ancient sediments, may have once been flooded by water. Nature has learned that it rose to the top last month following a secret ranking of four candidate sites by co-investigators working with NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, a 900-kilogram rover dubbed 'Curiosity' set to launch later this year.

Emperor penguins typically spend their entire lives in Antarctica and almost never make landfall near humans. It has been 44 years since a wild Emperor penguin was last sighted in New Zealand.Conservation experts say the penguin is about 10 months old, and stands about 32 inches high. It is believed to have taken to the water several months ago to search for squid and krill and lost its way.Experts say the bird is healthy but will need to find its way back south if it is to survive.

Tyrannosaurids, including the Tyrannosaurus Rex, have traditionally been portrayed by experts as formidable but solitary and dull-witted creatures because their skeletons were found alone.But new research based on finds in the Gobi Desert suggests that the species was not only equipped with the build and speed for pack hunting, but also the brain capacity to work together as a team, experts claim.

Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the ESA, claimed that while the space station itself has been a "splendid success", it was being severely hampered by the chaotic approach to project planning.A lack of discussion between national space authorities means that, from July, Russia will be the only country with a system that can carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) due to the phase-out of the US space shuttle.Speaking at the Paris Air Show on Monday, Mr Dordain said: ""We are not in a very comfortable situation, and that's just a euphemism.

"This finding is a crucial new piece of evidence showing that environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life can be sustained on icy bodies orbiting gas giant planets."Nicolas Altobelli, the European Space Agency's project scientist for Cassini.NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft's direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon.

Astronomers have found a nascent star 750 light years from earth that shoots colossal jets of water -- a cosmic fire hose -- out its poles in bullet-like pulses.In a process that almost defies adjectives and analogies, each jet of water is the equivalent of a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second and the speed of the jet is the equivalent of 80 times the muzzle velocity of an AK-47 assault rifle.

Bulgarian archaeologists have made crucial discoveries at the residence of the rulers of the Odrysian Kingdom, the state of the most powerful tribe of Ancient Thrace, including details about its sacking by the troops of Philip II of Macedon.The discoveries have been made within the project of Bulgaria's National History Museum, whose team started in early June 2011 the largest alpine expedition in the history of Bulgarian archaeology in order to excavate the residence of the rulers of the Odrysian Kingdom.Bulgarian archaeologists uncovered the unique residence of the rulers of the Odrysian Kingdom in July 2010, after its location was initially detected in 2005.

BRACEVILLE, Ill. - Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records reviewed as part of the AP's yearlong examination of safety issues at aging nuclear power plants. Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard -- sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.

Thousands of Aymaras, a native ethnic group of South America, celebrated the New Year, which coincides with the winter solstice.According to the Aymara calendar, this day is considered the start of the year 5519.

Last year, scientists confirmed the enigmatic Saturnian moon Enceladus possesses a sub-surface ocean of liquid water. This groundbreaking discovery was made by NASA's Cassini spacecraft currently in orbit around Saturn.Today, mission scientists have further analyzed Cassini data from various Enceladus flybys to find that it's not only a liquid water ocean; it could be salty too.Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer detected particles that were of relatively low salt content during distant passes over the Enceladean "tiger stripes" -- a complex series of fissures cutting grooves through the moon's icy crust, allowing prominent plumes of vapor and dust vent into space (pictured top). However, during closer flybys, the dust grains venting from the tiger stripes appear to have a very "ocean-like" composition, says NASA.

New findings by achaeologists at Lund Univ. have shown that advanced crafting of stone spearheads contributed to the development of new ways of human thinking and behaving. The technology of craftsmanship took a long time to acquire, required step by step planning and increased social interaction across the generations. Eventually, it led to the human brain developing new abilities.Around 200,000 years ago, small groups of people wandered across Africa; though they looked like contemporary humans (Homo sapiens) anatomically, they did not think in the same way. Studies of fossils and the rate of mutations in DNA show that Homo sapiens has existed for 200,000 years.

Late in the evening on June 20 the sun emitted a long lasting C7.7 small class flare that peaked around 11:25p.m. EDT. A C-class flare is a relatively small flare.The flare was associated with a coronal mass ejection (CME) that bloomed off the sun at 11:09p.m. EDT (0412 UT). The movie shown above was captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft.Preliminary NASA modeling shows the CME to be moving in Earth's direction at almost 500 mph (800 km/s). Geomagnetic effects and possible auroras on Earth should be moderate, appearing on June 23.

The health of the world's oceans is declining much faster than originally thought - under siege from pollution, overfishing and other man-made problems all at once - scientists say in a new report.The mix of interacting ingredients is in place for a mass extinction in the world's oceans, said a report by a top panel of scientists that will be presented to the United Nations on Tuesday.

A major dig close to Hadrian's Wall has revealed traces of a suspected refugee camp which would have housed tribespeople fleeing south from a breakdown of society north of the imperial border in the third century AD.Archaeologists were initially puzzled to unearth the foundations of temporary but well-built structures on the site of an earlier fort within the sprawling perimeter of the Roman fortress of Vindolanda.The director of excavations at the site, Dr Andrew Birley, said: "These are very unusual buildings and it looks as though they may number into the hundreds. Events clearly took place here on a large scale to lead to this sort of construction.

The first "independent" review of the Fukushima nuclear disaster was published today and it does not make reassuring reading.Japan is perhaps the most technologically advanced nation on Earth and yet, time after time, the report finds missing measures that I would have expected to already be in place. It highlights the fundamental inability for anyone to anticipate all future events and so deeply undermines the claims of the nuclear industry and its supporters that this time, with the new generation of reactors, things will be different.

The tallest tree in the world, a California redwood, stands 379 feet (116 m) tall, or slightly taller than a football field is long. Redwoods of the past that have since been cut down probably stood even taller, and may even have reached the theoretical maximum height for trees.Indeed, there is an upper bound.Two main opposing forces affect a tree's height; one pushes it upward while the other holds it down. By analyzing the interplay between these forces, a team of biologists led by George Koch of Northern Arizona University calculated the theoretical maximum tree height, or the point at which opposing forces balance out and a tree stops growing. This point lies somewhere between 400 and 426 feet (122 and 130 m).

HAMBURG, Germany -- Twenty-five years after Gerhard Knies conceived of powering Europe with the Sahara Desert's sun, the North Africa Solar project has grown into something considerably more than a mere mirage, but it's still less than a reality.Part of the plan is to erect a network of solar plants that generate electricity by concentrating the heat from sunlight to make electricity, generating 100 gigawatts or the equivalent of 100 large nuclear power plants. Another part is to develop a grid of high-voltage transmission lines that can carry the power from Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria to power-hungry markets in Europe.

BEIJING, June 21 (Xinhuanet) -- A paleolithic museum has opened in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region over the weekend. It specializes in exhibiting ruins of an ancient community inhabited by human begins more than 30-thousand years ago.The Shui-dong-gou Ruins Museum will exhibit an abundance of animal fossils and stone implements unearthed from the site.As the only Paleolithic Age historical site to be officially excavated in the Yellow River Region, the Shuidonggou site presents a vivid picture of ancient life 30-thousand years ago.

AHMEDABAD: Music was the integral part of tribal lifestyle in Gujarat. And, this love for music had seen the invention of many instruments which the tribal communities used for their entertainment. But not many of these ancient musical instruments have weathered the dip in interest and absence of exponents. Many of these unique musical instruments have all but disappeared.

CININATTI, Ohio, June 20 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say a Bronze Age fortress discovered on Cyprus may have protected an important urban economic center in the ancient world.University of Cincinnati archaeologist Gisela Walberg says the ancient city of Bamboula on the southwest coast of Cyprus, dating to 1500-750 B.C., was well protected from outside threats and may have functioned to protect an important urban economic center further inland, a university release reported Monday.

MEXICO: In Mayan, the name of this speck of a village means "the end." A long time ago, it was just the end of the road. Those who tell tall tales, though, say the strangers who settled here four years ago have come to await the end of the world. Down a country lane bordered by scrubland and parched fields, the newcomers have built their own colony of thick-walled houses at the end of a dirt drive a couple of miles outside the village.

The cultural and economic center of the ancient Mycenaean city of Bamboula, near what is now Cyprus, was well-protected by an ancient wall, and may have served as a fortress to protect the city from outside threats.Bamboula was flourishing in the late Bronze Age, between the 13th and 11th centuries B.C. The remains of the once-great city currently sit outside the modern village of Episkopi along the southwestern coast of Cyprus. It served as an ancient trading center, and grew wealthy off the copper from the nearby Troodos Mountains.The team, led by Gisela Walberg of the University of Cincinnati, started uncovering the site in 2001. Their most recent find is a set of walls that appear to belong to a Late Bronze Age (1500-750 B.C.) fortress that may have functioned to protect the urban economic center. The walls are about 15 feet (4.8 meters) thick, much more robust than any building walls would be.

In Measure of the Earth, Larrie Ferreiro recounts the fascinating tale of an equatorial expedition to determine the shape of the planetIN 1671, France sent astronomer Jean Richer to South America to map the skies of the southern hemisphere. Richer, whose work helped the French navy navigate the world, took with him two pendulum clocks. Though they had been carefully calibrated in Paris, he was dismayed to find that they lost 2 minutes 28 seconds per day in French Guyana compared with local clocks.

The nation's two major airports face the prospect of being shut down for up to 48 hours as the ash cloud from a Chilean volcano continues to drift across southern Australia.Thousands of passengers have already had their travel plans thrown into disarray as the lingering cloud forced Virgin to announce the cancellation of all of the airline's flights from Sydney and Melbourne from 4.00pm (AEST).Qantas this afternoon announced it was grounding all scheduled flights to and from Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra for the rest of the day and all day Wednesday.

A preliminary report from an international panel of marine experts said that the condition of the world's seas was worsening more quickly than had been predicted.The scientists, gathered for a workshop at Oxford University, warned that entire ecosystems, such as coral reefs, could be lost in a generation.Already fish stocks are collapsing, leading to a risk of rising food prices and even starvation in some parts of the world.

Flooding in China over the past two weeks has left more than 170 people dead or missing and forced out residents in regions along the Yangtze River. Since Monday, about 671,200 people have had to evacuate their homes, state-run Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the Ministry of Civil Affairs.The landslides and mudslides have toppled homes, and the torrential rains that caused them are forecast to last through the weekend.Landslides crushed parts of a railway line in southwestern China, stranding 5,000 passengers on four trains overnight and affecting train service, local railway authorities said on Friday.

The Library of Congress in Washington DC is about to be given a rare and unusual gift -- a 120-year-old map supporting the theory that the Earth is flat.There are five million maps in the library's collection, but not one matches the one belonging to Don Homuth.Mr Homuth, of Salem, Oregon, says the map was given to him by his eighth-grade English teacher John Hildreth.

A recent find by a University of Cincinnati archeologist suggests an ancient Mycenaean city was well protected from outside threats. That research, by UC's Gisela Walberg, professor of classics, will be presented at the annual workshop of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Center in Nicosia, Cyprus, on June 25, 2011.Since 2001, Walberg has worked in modern Cyprus to uncover the ancient city of Bamboula, a Bronze Age city that was an important trading center for the Middle East, Egypt and Greece. Bamboula, a harbor town that flourished between the 13th through the 11th century B.C., sits along a highway on the outskirts of the modern village of Episkopi, along the southwestern coast of Cyprus and near the modern harbor town of Limassol. The area thrived in part because the overshadowing Troodos Mountains contained copper, and the river below was used to transport the mined materials.

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.The buried treasures of Ur still beckon foreign archaeologists who have begun cautiously returning to Iraq, but experts like Hamdani say that preserving the sites is more urgent than digging for more.

A group of American and Filipino biologists have discovered seven previously unknown species of mammals in the Philippines, increasing the number of native mammals known from Luzon Island (excluding bats) from 42 to 49 (17 percent).

Eight years after shelving Concorde, European firm EADS now thinks supersonic passenger aircraft could make a comeback - but not until 2050.The Airbus owner believes that a novel combination of propulsion technologies might make supersonic travel both cost-effective and environmentally acceptable. The firm estimates speeds of Mach 4 are attainable - that's nearly 5000 kilometres per hour."Concorde was 1950s and 1960s technology. We think the three different propulsion types we're considering - one of which we have perfected for the Ariane rocket - could make this achievable by 2050," says EADS spokesman Gregor von Kursell.

The UN is failing to accurately measure the global climate benefits of preserving forests.As well as providing homes for many species, trees store carbon dioxide that would otherwise warm the planet. With this in mind, the UN set up the REDD programme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) in 2008, which will pay poorer countries to preserve their forests based on how much carbon dioxide they store.

Like the great pyramids of Egypt, it looms above a parched, flat and desolate landscape and easily dominates the skyline of this ancient, now long abandoned city. The Great Ziggurat is what most people think about when one mentions the city of Ur. Much more than a single monumental structure, however, Ur was a royal city that contained the public buildings, religious centers, and tombs of a people who, over 4,000 years ago, set the standards for civilizations that followed. It was one of the first great centers of Mesopotamia. Here Abraham, according to the Biblical account, was born and raised. And here, over the many centuries, elements and events, both natural and human, have combined to lay it to waste. It crumbles before our eyes. That is now changing.

When we think of the birth of the conservation movement in the 19th century, the names that usually spring to mind are the likes of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, men who wrote about the need to protect wilderness areas in an age when the notion of mankind's "manifest destiny" was all the rage.But a far less remembered American - a contemporary of Muir and Thoreau - can claim to be the person who first publicised the now largely unchallenged idea that humans can negatively influence the environment that supports them.

It's not just babies who like being rocked to sleep. Adults that are gently rocked fall asleep quicker and have a higher quality nap.So say a team led by Sophie Schwartz and Michel Mühlethaler of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, who asked 10 men to take two 45-minute afternoon naps, one on a bed that rocked gently and one on a static bed.Patterns of brainwaves monitored by an EEG while they slept revealed that it took 4 minutes to fall asleep when being rocked, about 30 to 40 per cent faster than in a static bed.

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.

See the latest forum article on grahamhancock.com about a mysterious phenomenon of spontaneous appearance of symbols on skin.See the articles page for more interesting reading material.

America's next great leap into space may very well be to a Near Earth Asteroid, or NEO (not to be confused the lead character, Neo, in the Matrix series films, who gets roughly ten times as many Google hits as interplanetary NEOs.)The scientific payoffs from such a mission include investigating the origins of the solar system, better understanding NEOs that could endanger Earth, and characterizing NEOs as space resources for propellant, life support and construction materials.This could be done by 2025 according to the Obama administration's long-term planning for NASA.

THE wild horses of the American west should be considered a native species as fully deserving of protection as elk or antelope, even though they are the descendants of domestic livestock introduced by European settlers. Or so claim animal rights groups.In a case before a US federal court they are arguing that wild horses should no longer be rounded up to make room for cattle. If the claim is successful, it could change the way the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages tens of thousands of wild horses on federal lands."Right now, the BLM treats them as if they are a nuisance or livestock. They deserve more respect than that," says Rachel Fazio, the lawyer representing In Defense of Animals and other plaintiffs in the suit.

In a paper soon to be published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, Professor Roger Byard from Adelaide University showed that sporting a tattoo of Ned Kelly or in reference to him was linked to a higher rate of violent deaths by homicide or suicide.Ned Kelly, who died in 1880 when he was hanged for murdering three police officers, was an Irish-Australian who became a symbol of the Irish resistance against the British. He was known for creating armor out of agricultural machinery and this can be seen in many of the different tattoo images supporting him.

Language means that we have self-consciousness, which makes us a unique species able to control ourselves and our environments in ways that other animals cannot. However, a visit to the Monkey Sanctuary, near Looe in Cornwall, provided striking evidence to me of connections between monkey mother-child relations and that in humans.

Fluctuations in climate can drastically affect the habitability of marine ecosystems, according to a new study by UCLA scientists that examined the expansion and contraction of low-oxygen zones in the ocean.The UCLA research team, led by assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences Curtis Deutsch, used a specialized computer simulation to demonstrate for the first time that the size of low-oxygen zones created by respiring bacteria is extremely sensitive to changes in depth caused by oscillations in climate. These oxygen-depleted regions, which expand or contract depending on their depth, pose a distinct threat to marine life.

Often the moon turns brown in an eclipse but can become a reddish, coppery colour or orange. Thursday's eclipse sent the moon into a "blood red" colour.The lunar face is usually tinged by light from the Sun that refracts as it passes through our atmosphere.But the intensity of the colour depends on the amount of ash and dust in the atmosphere.

Dramatic changes in behaviour have been reported as adult birds struggle to survive, including cannibalism of their chicks.Tadpoles and young slow worms have been eaten, and even baby mice have been snatched from their nests.Other popular garden birds are also affected, including the mistle thrush and song thrush.In East Anglia, the south east and south west, birds which would normally have already reared one or two batches of chicks have not yet managed any.

The hallucinogen found in "magic mushrooms" could help treat a variety of psychiatric disorders, including depression, anxiety and even addiction, researchers say.A new study provides clues on how much of the substance patients could take to get the greatest benefit with the least risk, researchers say.However, use of the substance, called psilocybin, is not without risk. Its side effects include paranoia and delusions.

An ancient campsite where people were manufacturing tools has been discovered near the Niagara Falls.This find, combined with other archaeological discoveries in the area over the past few decades, suggests that such campsites lined the Niagara River as far back as 4,000 years ago.So far, the team has unearthed more than 20,000 artifacts, mostly bits of rock broken off when people were creating stone tools, on the southeastern tip of Grand Island New York, about 12 miles upstream from Niagara Falls. The earliest artifacts at the site open a window on a time when people were living a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting, fishing and gathering plants.

Think the lunar eclipse was cool? Well, check out the view from Europe's Mars Express, which is the only known witness to a recent eclipse of Jupiter by the Martian moon Phobos.Spacecraft operators set up the shoot with a special maneuver to position their Mars-orbiting probe to capture the moment on June 1 when Phobos, a small moon of Mars, would align with Jupiter. At the time of the encounter, Mars Express was 11,389 kilometers (7,077 miles) from Phobos, with Jupiter another 529 million kilometers (329 million miles) beyond.

U.S. scientists said Friday they have developed an on-off memory switch that helped laboratory rats remember a behavior that they had forgotten.The brain prosthesis marks the first time that researchers have been able to duplicate the brain's learning process, restoring memories that test rats were drugged to forget, and could offer hope for people with dementia."Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget," said Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Biomedical Engineering.

The post-war trend of falling birth rates has been reversed across Europe, according to a new study. However, despite an increasing emphasis on family and fertility policies in Europe, this recent development involves social, cultural and economic factors more than individual policy interventions.For some decades, couples have been having children later in life. But birth-rates among younger women have stabilised and the long-term trend towards lower fertility rates has been reversed.

LOOK into my eyes and sniff: a whiff of oxytocin can make even the least suggestible people amenable to hypnotism.Richard Bryant at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues, tried to hypnotise 40 men who scored low in an initial test for hypnotisability. They gave 19 of the men a nasal spray containing oxytocin - a hormone involved in social bonding - and the rest a placebo.Eight of those given oxytocin shifted from a low to medium level of hypnotisability, compared with just three using the placebo .

Scientists have come up with the radical suggestion that the universe's end may come not with a bang but a standstill - that time could be literally running out and could, one day, stop altogether.The idea that time itself could cease to be in billions of years - and everything will grind to a halt - has been set out by Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain.

Two NASA satellites built to study the sun have discovered 122 previously unknown sets of twin stars, scientists say.A team from the United Kingdom used NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or Stereo, to spot the paired stars. The Stereo observatories noticed the dimming that occurs when one of the stars passes in front of the other, as seen from EarthSince their launch in 2006, the two nearly identical Stereo spacecraft have snapped images of almost 900,000 background stars. Both satellites contain two heliospheric imagers, which record eruptions from the sun. But they also gather information about the stars that routinely pass through the instruments' field of view.

Scientists using the world's largest atom smasher have created some of the hottest and densest matter ever achieved on Earth achieving a state of matter called a quark gluon plasma that existed in the milliseconds after the big bang 13.7 billion years ago.Physicists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, smashed heavy lead ions together at close to the speed of light, generating temperatures of more than 1.6 trillion degrees Celsius, 100,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun.In the process they recreated the densest material ever observed - only black holes are denser.

Belfast - By ferry or by aeroplane is the usual way to travel from Ireland to Britain.But a major geological research project by scientists at the University of Ulster is trying to discover if people could have once walked from one landmass to the other via a land bridge.The three-year international seabed study will be spearheaded by Professor Andrew Cooper and an expert team of researchers.The underwater investigation will focus on how far the water level of the Irish Sea fell during the last ice age.

Occasionally supermassive and always super-ominous, light-devouring black holes may be the most spectacular byproduct of our Newtonian universe, and now we know a little more about how long they've been out there and what they're up to, thanks to NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.Astronomers pointed Chandra at a strip of sky for over six weeks, searching for black holes among 200 galaxies distant enough to represent the universe when it was between 800 million and 950 million years old.What they found: throngs of hyperactive black holes.

How many people does it take to change this light bulb? None.On June 18, the oldest-known working light bulb in the world will celebrate the 110th year it has burned bright. The bulb, which hangs idly about in a fire station in Livermore, California, holds the Guinness World Record.

Google and rooftop solar power company SolarCity announced a $280 million investment deal Tuesday, the largest such deal for home-based solar power systems in the United States.The investment will give San Mateo, Calif-based SolarCity the funding to build and lease solar power systems to a 7,000 to 9,000 homeowners in the 10 states where it operates.Founded five years ago, SolarCity has 15,000 solar projects around the nation completed or under way. Customers who wish to have the company's solar system installed at their home can pay for it outright, but most choose instead to let SolarCity retain ownership of the equipment and rent back the use of it through monthly solar lease payments.

A team of researchers have been delving into the origins of the Japanese people, with some interesting findings. The research was centred on a study of Japanese dialects with the aim of finding the roots of the language.The language family is known as Japonic and this includes Japanese and a similar language called Ryukyuan, which is spoken in the chain of islands to the south of Japan.

Reports in recent years of soft dinosaur tissue from fossil bones of a T. rex and a duck-billed hadrosaur elicited skepticism from the scientific community. But a new analysis of the bits of protein that survived supports claims of ancient origins.The particular kinds of collagen building blocks extracted from the dinosaur fossils are also found in sheltered, physically protected areas of collagen fibers in rats and humans, researchers report online June 8 in PLoS ONE.

A group of researchers from the University of Alicante (Spain) present the results of a pilot project where fly larvae are used to reduce animal feces and manure in a sustainable manner.The research group Bionomics, Systematics and Applied Research in insects, coordinated by Professor Santos Rojo, conducts the research and development work of this project. With the company Flysoil SL, they have managed to produce at industrial scale the Hermetia illucens fly. It is a species of tropical origin but naturalized in the Mediterranean region since the 1960's and their larvae have a natural ability to feed on organic matter from different sources, including waste.

After one Mercury year (88 Earth days) in orbit, NASA's Messenger spacecraft is getting comfortable around the first rock from the sun.Since becoming the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury on March 17, Messenger (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) has sent back more than 20,000 high-resolution images, enough to include Mercury in Google Earth.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of a settlement which could date back to the Iron Age on one of Europe's most inhospitable islands.It had been thought that no people had ever lived on the St Kildan island of Boreray, 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides in the Atlantic Ocean.Inhabitants of nearby Hirta island used to visit Boreray only in the summer to hunt birds and gather wool, a practice which ended in the early 20th century.

Mountain View, Calif., genomics startup 23andMe just hit a milestone: As of Wednesday, 100,000 people have uploaded their genetic code to the 4-year-old company's database.Co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki says her scientists now have one of the world's largest genetic databases, which will enable them to do "a tremendous amount of discovery" into the possible causes of ailments such as Parkinson's disease. The company is also helping customers better understand their own DNA, the genetic blueprint that determines everything from whether someone is prone to breast cancer to whether their urine smells funny after eating asparagus (for 70 percent of us, the answer's yes on the latter).