Newsdesk Archive

A Pentagon effort to enable a human journey to the stars within 100 years aims to enlist the brainpower of science fiction writers, ethicists and researchers. This new call for ideas covers innovations such as faster than light travel and life-sustaining technologies as well as questions about who gets chosen for the starship crew and what happens if alien life turns up at the end of the journey.This latest step for the $1 million 100-Year Starship Study would lead up to a space technology conference scheduled to take place in Orlando, Fla., from Sept. 30 through Oct. 2. The new call for papers differs from a past request for proposals about setting up the organization that would lead the charge into the future of interstellar travel.

Iran plans to send a live monkey into space in the summer, the country's top space official said after the launch of the Rassad-1 satellite, state television reported on its website on Thursday."The Kavoshgar-5 rocket will be launched during the month of Mordad (July 23 to August 23) with a 285-kilogramme capsule carrying a monkey to an altitude of 120 kilometres (74 miles)," said Hamid Fazeli, head of Iran's Space Organisation.In February, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled a space capsule designed to carry a live monkey into space, along with four new prototypes of home-built satellites the country hopes to launch before March 2012.

George Mason University scientists discovered recently that a phenomenon called a giant magnetic rope is the cause of solar storms. Confirming the existence of this formation is a key first step in helping to mitigate the adverse effects that solar storm eruptions can have on satellite communications on Earth.The discovery was made by associate professor Jie Zhang and his graduate student Xin Cheng using images from the NASA Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) spacecraft.

Cops Hand-Deliver Report To Drug Czar's Office While Czar Refuses To MeetIn conjunction with this week's 40th anniversary of President Nixon declaring "War On Drugs," a group of police, judges and jailers who support legalization released a report Tuesday showing how the Obama Administration is ramping up a war it disingenuously claims that it ended two years ago.Following the report's release at a press conference Tuesday morning, the pro-legalization law enforcement officers attempted to hand-deliver a copy to Obama Administration Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, the former Seattle chief of police who claimed he ended the War On Drugs two years ago.

The unusual meeting was held in a conference room, but it might have been called a war room. Gathered inside a little-known research centre in southern Louisiana, the people who oversee chimpanzee research in the United States were preparing to battle for the survival of their enterprise.Although no other country besides Gabon carries out invasive experiments with chimpanzees, the United States continues such work at three major research facilities. Louisiana's New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) is the largest, with a population of 360 chimps, used by investigators from pharmaceutical companies and federal agencies to test new drugs and study diseases such as hepatitis. During the meeting, Thomas Rowell, director of the NIRC, stood up, surveyed the audience, and launched into a presentation about possible strategies to build public support for their work.

While most of us could find no better use for Google Earth than checking out a holiday destination, scientists in Sydney have shown it can reveal a lot about the behaviour of marine life on the Great Barrier Reef.In what is believed to be the first research of its kind, University of Technology, Sydney marine biologist Dr Elizabeth Madin and colleagues - including Dr. Joshua Madin of Macquarie University and Professor David Booth from UTS - have used Google Earth satellite images to observe the indirect effects of behavioural interactions between predators and prey in the lagoon habitat at Heron Island.

Organisms found in the Antarctic region are not quick to adapt to changes in the environment, new international research shows. The study, carried out by 200 scientists from 15 countries, is the culmination of a 7-month expedition on board the Polarstern vessel of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) for Polar and Marine Research in the German-based Helmholtz Association.The Polarstern research vessels returned to the Bremerhaven port in late May 2011. During their journey, the researchers measured the temperature of the Weddell Sea, discovering that while the warming of the deep water continues, the organisms found undersea are not adapting quickly to these changes.

For many years, the ruins of this ancient Roman villa retreat for the family and guests of four Roman emperors remained unnoticeable, far from the limelight of scholarly research and exploration. Now, it is the focus of new excavations and research by a team of archaeologists and other specialists who aim to resurrect what lies beneath the surface near a picturesque Italian town 18 miles from present-day Rome, Italy. What remains may say something about emperors Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus, all major players, for better or worse, in ancient Rome's illustrious 138-192 A.D. Antonine Dynasty.

Forests are vital to the livelihoods of millions of people in developing countries, providing on average more than one-fifth of their annual income, according to data presented today at a meeting in London.The study provides much-needed solid evidence for the importance of forests to the world's rural poor. It also overturns some existing assumptions, showing, for example, that forests provide vital income to whole communities, not just the poorest, and that richer households are most likely to contribute to deforestation.

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.

Old trees must be protected to save the homes of more than 1,000 different bird and mammal species who nest, says a new study from the University of British Columbia. Most animals can't carve out their own tree holes and rely on holes already formed. The study found that outside of North America, most animals nest in tree holes formed by damage and decay, a process that can take several centuries.

Sci-fi enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists tend to obsess about the possibilities of a space-faring Third Reich. Robert A. Heinlein authored a tale about a German lunar base as early as 1947. Nowadays, fans are abuzz for the 2012 release of "Iron Sky," the Finnish film full of scene-chewing space Nazis and swastika-stamped spaceships.Is there any factual basis for these outrageous fantasies? Did Nazi Germany actually have a space program?Absolutely not, according to Smithsonian Space History Curator Michael Neufeld.

A relative of a giant fish-eating dinosaur that dwarfed T. rex once roamed Australia, say researchers, providing growing evidence for the worldwide distribution of many dinosaur branches.They add the find provides "weak" evidence to support the theory that Africa was the first of the continents to split from Gondwanaland.Co-author, Thomas Rich of Museum Victoria, says the claims, published in Biology Letters, are based on a four-centimeter (1.6-inch) neck vertebra found by Michael Cleeland and George Caspar at Dinosaur Cove near Cape Otway, Victoria.

WHEN the first modern humans left Africa they were ill-equipped to cope with unfamiliar diseases. But by interbreeding with the local hominins, it seems they picked up genes that protected them and helped them eventually spread across the planet.The publication of the Neanderthal genome last year offered proof that Homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals after leaving Africa. There is also evidence that suggests they enjoyed intimate relations with other hominins including the Denisovans, a species identified last year from a Siberian fossil.

Deep in the Chihuahuan Desert not far from the Mexico border, archeologists are busy digging up the first bison bones ever found in this remote area of Texas, which they hope will shed light on the little-understood lives of the inhabitants of the region in prehistoric times.The discovery in the Nature Conservancy's Independence Creek Preserve is considered significant because it came at a place where two very different cultures lived in close proximity. The archaeologists hope that analysis of the bones, along with tools, charcoal from ancient fire pits and other artifacts found nearby, will provide clues to why the two peoples had different lifestyles, ideologies and possibly, religions.

A recently opened exhibition in Moscow's State Historical Museum is shedding some light on a long-guarded Russian secret: the origins of Soviet founding father Vladimir Lenin. Lenin's maternal grandfather, the exhibition revealed, was born Jewish.This fascinating morsel of information, gleaned from declassified KGB files, is not a minor detail in a country where anti-Semitism was a recognized state doctrine for decades. Starting in the 1930s, the Soviet regime - spurred on by its leader Joseph Stalin - launched a violent discriminatory campaign against Jewish citizens.

Often in the reporting about science, the adventure, the risk and the physical difficulty of the research gets shunted aside and ignored. Science tends to be seen as the work of people who don't willingly expose themselves to physical hardship and danger.Exceptions to this perception, including astronauts and heroic researchers such as Jonas Salk (who famously took an early dose of the polio vaccine, along with his wife and children, to hopefully demonstrate its safety), are few and far between.

The president of South Africa lashed out Tuesday at NATO's enforcement of the U.N. resolution authorizing the organization to act to protect innocent civilians threatened by Libya's civil war."We strongly believe that the resolution is being abused for regime change, political assassinations and foreign military occupation," said Jacob Zuma at a budget vote debate before the National Assembly in Cape Town.

Archaeologists in Peru have started registering 370 Inca tombs located just over two miles above sea level in the Andes mountains.Some of the tombs found in the South of Peru still have the remains of the deceased located inside baskets made of woven ropes.Experts believe the site could yield more tombs and artifacts. However, the terrain is difficult to explore.

Archaeologists found a treasure trove of everyday artefacts after digging up nearly 800 sacks of compacted human waste from the tank, which lies beneath the remains of a Roman apartment block in Herculaneum, destroyed after it was buried by ash from the volcano in AD79.The British team has found hundreds of objects, including bronze coins, precious stones, bone hair pins and an exquisite gold ring decorated with a tiny figure of the god Mercury.Close scrutiny of the composted human waste has revealed that the estimated 150 middle- and lower-class inhabitants of the three-storey block of flats had a much more varied diet than previously thought.

Evidence of beer making in Mediterranean France, as far back as the 5th century BC, has been unearthed by Laurent Bouby from the CNRS - Centre de Bio-Archeologie et d'Ecology in Montepellier, France, and colleagues. Their analyses at the Roquepertuse excavation site in Provence reveal the presence of poorly preserved barley grains suggesting germination, as well as equipment and other remains of deliberate malting in the home. Taken together, these findings suggest that, as well as regular wine making, the French had an early passion for beer brewing. The work has just been published online in Springer's journal Human Ecology.

Researchers from the University of York and Manchester have successfully extracted protein from the bones of a 600,000-year-old mammoth, paving the way for the identification of ancient fossils.Using an ultra-high resolution mass spectrometer, bio-archaeologists were able to produce a near complete collagen sequence for the West Runton Elephant, a Steppe Mammoth skeleton which was discovered in cliffs in Norfolk in 1990. The remarkable 85 per cent complete skeleton -- the most complete example of its species ever found in the world -- is preserved by Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service in Norwich.

A remarkably well-preserved shrunken head has just been authenticated by DNA analysis, which provides strong evidence that anecdotal accounts of violent head-hunting in South America were true.The study, published in the latest issue of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, marks the first successful effort to unveil the genetic make-up of a shrunken head."The shrunken heads were made from enemies' heads cut on the battlefield," co-author Gila Kahila Bar-Gal told Discovery News. "Then, during spiritual ceremonies, enemies' heads were carefully reduced through boiling and heating, in the attempt to lock the enemy's spirit and protect the killers from spiritual revenge.

Ten new planets outside our Solar System have been spotted by the French-led Corot satellite, bringing the total number of known exoplanets to 561.They include one planet orbiting an unusually young star, and two Neptune-sized planets orbiting the same star.Corot, launched in 2006, spots planets by measuring the tiny dip in stellar light that occurs when planets pass between the stars and the Earth.It has now added 23 planetary systems to the ever-growing roster.

A 5cm-wide (2in) fossil may have something big to say about how dinosaurs ranged across the Earth.The 125-million-year-old neck vertebra belonged to a spinosaurid - an animal with a crocodile-like snout that it probably used to prey on fish.The specimen is the first such dinosaur identified in Australia but one that is nearly identical to a UK creature.This suggests northern and southern hemisphere dinos had a lot more in common than previously thought.

Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years.The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces."The solar cycle may be going into a hiatus," Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network, said in a news briefing today (June 14).

NASA's rover on Mars, Opportunity, is closing in on Endeavour crater. It has taken the rover nearly three years to travel 11 miles across the Martian terrain.And you thought your grandpa drove slow.Opportunity will enter the crater at a spot named Spirit Point in honor of the rover's late partner. Spirit fell silent in March 2010, and its mission was terminated after one final attempt to communicate with it last month.

AHRAM ONLINEMohamed Ramadan, supervisor of legal affairs at the ministry of state for antiquities, denied today's claims by a national newspaper that the administrative court enforced the ruling issued in April against Zahi Hawass, minister of state for antiquities, sentencing him to one year in jail and a fine of LE1000.

Historian Bettany Hughes will star in Timewatch Special 'Atlantis: The Evidence', to première on BBC Two next week. She'll be tracing the origins of the Atlantis myth and presenting evidence that the Thera eruption inspired Plato's account of the mystical land.2,400 years ago Greek philosopher Plato wrote of an ancient island civilisation of unparalleled wealth and splendour, which was struck by earthquakes and floods and was swallowed up by the sea in one grievous day and nigh.

Bad news for fans of the X-Men: It may take longer to create a new class of mutant superhumans than previous estimates suggested. The first direct measurements of human mutation rates reveal that the speed at which successive generations accumulate single-letter genetic changes is much slower than previously thought.The study, published online June 12 in Nature Genetics, also shows that some individuals mutate faster than others. That means it may be fairly common for people to inherit a disproportionate share of mutations from one parent.

On 25 May, New Scientist was first to reveal some exciting findings from an innovative robotic exploration of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. A robot built at Leeds University in the UK, called Djedi, explored a mysterious tunnel thought to lead to a secret chamber in the pyramid - providing stunning pictures of so-far-undeciphered hieroglyphs written in red paint, alongside lines cut into the tunnel walls by stone masons. All are currently being analysed by egyptologists - and many more revelations are expected as Djedi's video streams are interpreted over time.

It seems humans really are the cooperative ape. A nomadic society in east Africa that lacks a centralised government can still regularly muster armies of several hundred warriors, most of whom are strangers to each other.We are the only species prepared to cooperate in large numbers with unrelated individuals. The feeling was that such behaviour was a recent development, requiring a centralised political authority. Now it seems possible that such cooperation could have predated these organisational structures and may have featured in numerous large prehistoric societies hundreds of thousands of years ago.

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University researchers ditched many of their high-tech tools and turned to large stones, fire and some old-fashioned elbow grease to recreate techniques used by Native American coppersmiths who lived more than 600 years ago.

Area 51 is one of the most enduring mysteries and sources of speculation in American history.Located inside the Nevada Test and Training Range, the flat-dry lake bed known as Groom Lake has been the home to some of the nation's most advanced espionage and weapons technology, hair-raising tales of Cold War brinksmanship, and possibly much worse, according to a new book about the top-secret military base.

Ten years ago, the Taliban blew up Afghanistan's ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan, provoking international outrage. Now, the country's rich heritage is facing a new threat. A Chinese mining venture has set its sights on another ancient Buddhist site, reports the BBC's Quentin Sommerville.Mes Aynak lies in Logar province, a short helicopter ride from Kabul.

NASA's Dawn mission to the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which launched in September 2007, is now approaching Vesta, a protoplanet that is currently some 143 million miles from Earth. Many surprises are likely awaiting the spacecraft."We often refer to Vesta as the smallest terrestrial planet," said Christopher T. Russell, a UCLA professor of geophysics and space physics and the mission's principal investigator. "It has planetary features and basically the same structure as Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. But because it is so small, it does not have enough gravity to retain an atmosphere, or at least not to retain an atmosphere for very long.

As the shuttle programme draws to a close, NASA has contracted Lockheed Martin to develop a next-generation vehicle for deep space exploration. Here, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), unveiled in May, is undergoing tests at the Lockheed Martin Vertical Test Facility in Colorado to ensure it can withstand the harsh conditions of deep space expeditions.Whereas the shuttle programme focused on low Earth orbit, the new spacecraft is designed to explore further afield possibly to an asteroid or Mars.

Red can symbolize danger, heat and even anger.It's true: The color's appearance in road signs, stoplights, labels and flushed cheeks often cautions humans to avoid harm.One study even found that Olympic competitors donning red uniforms were more successful at winning events, suggesting the color intimidates the competition.And a recent set of experiments featured in the journal Psychological Science indicates humans' apprehension of red may have evolutionary roots, leading to greater consideration of the color's use in human sports and primate habitats.

Let′s face it, Indiana Jones was a pretty lousy archaeologist. He destroyed his sites, used a bullwhip instead of a trowel and was more likely to kill his peers than co-author a paper with them. Regardless, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which celebrates its 30th anniversary on June 12, did make studying the past cool for an entire generation of scientists. Those modern archaeologists whom "Raiders" inspired luckily learned from the mistakes of Dr. Jones, and use advanced technology such as satellite imaging, airborne laser mapping, robots and full-body medical scanners instead of a scientifically useless whip.

To say it has been an archaeological mystery may be an understatement: why are fragments of beautiful but deliberately smashed bronze age figurines buried in shallow pits on a small, rocky Greek island whose main inhabitants have always been goats?Today, academics at Cambridge University will release findings that shed light on the 4,500-year-old puzzle of Keros, a tiny Cycladic island in the Aegean.It appears Keros was the ceremonial destination for a ritual that involved islanders breaking prized possessions and making a pilgrimage with fragments for burial.

Cuttack, June 9: An intricately carved khondolite stone statute of a lion has been recovered from the silt being excavated from the Barabati fort moat.Labourers engaged in levelling the excavated material, dumped along the banks of the Mahanadi river, spotted the three-feet tall statue, which is believed to be 800 years old. The two wheels, engraved on two sides of the statue, resemble the Konark wheel.

A 2,700-year-old pyramid tomb excavated in the western Chiapas state of Mexico, and the monumental center in which it was discovered, is shedding new light on the possible origins or connections it may have to a well-known ancient Olmec capital to its east on the Mexican Gulf Coast. The discovery presents a tantalizing new piece in the emerging picture of state formation in southern Mexico and of a people and civilization that may have had trade and cultural affiliations with La Venta and possibly other Olmec centers from 1,000 to 400 B.C.

A study using NASA's Swift satellite and the Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a second supersized black hole at the heart of an unusual nearby galaxy already known to be sporting one.The galaxy, which is known as Markarian 739 or NGC 3758, lies 425 million light-years away toward the constellation Leo. Only about 11,000 light-years separate the two cores, each of which contains a black hole gorging on infalling gas.

The Internet is often thought of as a forum that enables egalitarian communication among people from diverse backgrounds and political persuasions, but a University of Georgia study reveals that online discussion groups display the same hierarchical structure as other large social groups."About 2 percent of those who start discussion threads attract about 50 percent of the replies," said study author Itai Himelboim, assistant professor in the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. "So although we have this wide range and diversity of sources, only a few of them are actually attracting attention.

A group of physicists working out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in proving what was until now, just theory; and that is, that visible photons could be produced from the virtual particles that have been thought to exist in a quantum vacuum. In a paper published on arXiv, the team describes how they used a specially created circuit called a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to modulate a bit of wire length at a roughly five percent of the speed of light, to produce visible "sparks" from the nothingness of a vacuum.

NASA's Voyager probes are truly going where no one has gone before. Gliding silently toward the stars, 9 billion miles from Earth, they are beaming back news from the most distant, unexplored reaches of the solar system.Mission scientists say the probes have just sent back some very big news indeed.It's bubbly out there.

Using a combination of hypnosis and local anaesthesia (LA) for certain types of surgery can aid the healing process and reduce drug use and time spent in hospital, anaesthesiologists have found. The combination could also help avoid cancer recurrence and metastases, according to new research to be presented today (Sunday) at the European Anaesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam.

The ruins of this mysterious ancient monumental center bespeak a majesty long forgotten through centuries of abandonment and decay. Built over 1,600 years ago atop a highland mesa at 3,200 meters (10,000 feet), it commands a sweeping view of the three northern Peruvian mountain valleys below it. Archaeologists call it the "Machu Picchu of the North", and rightly so. Covering more than 3 kilometers of land, it is known for its impressively massive castillos and circular double-walled structures and enclosures. But over the years, its impressive remains have fallen prey to the elements, both natural and human-derived, such as weathering, plant growth, livestock grazing, and lack of conservation. Now, it appears its long decline ends and a new lease on life begins.

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Charlie Bragg gazes across his lush fields where fat lambs are grazing, his reservoirs filled with water, and issues a sigh of relief. Things are normal this year and that's a bit unusual of late.His 7,000-acre farm near the Australian town of Cootamundra is testament to the plight facing farmers around the globe: increasingly wilder weather is making food production more unpredictable. It's the new normal they must prepare for.Bragg's farm in New South Wales state has been in the family for generations and has weather records for the area stretching back 110 years. After seven years of costly drought, the weather switched last year to unseasonably wet with flooding rains.

The outer edges of the Milky Way's appear to be orbited by innumerable invisible galaxies, one of which appears to be crashing into our own. Back in 2005 astronomers discovered the first evidence of mysterious dark galaxies with no starlight - VIRGOHI 21 - a mysterious cloud of hydrogen in the Virgo Cluster 50 million light-years from the Earth found to be colliding with our galaxy - revealed its existence from radio waves from neutral hydrogen coming from a rotating cloud containing enough hydrogen gas to spawn 100 million stars like the sun and fill a small galaxy.

A huge storm on the sun this past week unleashed what some have called the most massive eruption of solar plasma ever seen. NASA astronomers said the huge June 7 solar eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, probably wasn't the biggest ever, but it is notable both for its size and its odd behavior, as massive waves of plasma roared off the sun only to rain back down on the solar surface.

NASA's Dawn mission to the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which launched in September 2007, is now approaching Vesta, a protoplanet that is currently some 143 million miles from Earth. Many surprises are likely awaiting the spacecraft."We often refer to Vesta as the smallest terrestrial planet," said Christopher T. Russell, a UCLA professor of geophysics and space physics and the mission's principal investigator. "It has planetary features and basically the same structure as Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. But because it is so small, it does not have enough gravity to retain an atmosphere, or at least not to retain an atmosphere for very long.

SOURCE: Andian, PeruAUTHOR: Machine translation of the Spanish textURL: http://www.andina.com.pe/Espanol/Noticia.aspx?id=RT87MrHPjyo=DATE: 07.06.2011SUMMARY: "The Plenary Session of the Congress, approved the opinion of the law project that declares a moratorium of ten years that prevents the import of Genetically Modified Organisms on the national territory for cultivation, breeding or of any transgenic production.

THE AUSTRALIANTHE Ganges River, India's heavily polluted spiritual artery, has dropped to alarmingly low levels and begun receding from the historic Varanasi Ghats, which attract millions of pilgrims and tourists each year.Environmentalists say levels in the upper reaches of the river below the Himalayas, as well as downstream, are several metres lower than they should be at a time when heavy rains and spring melt from Himalayan glaciers normally increase flows.

A "modern" disease of humans may have been what sickened ancient Nubian cultures, research on more than 200 mummies has found. The mummies were infected by a parasitic worm associated with irrigation ditches.The disease, called schistosomiasis, is contracted through the skin when a person comes into contact with worm-infested waters. The disease infects over 200 million people worldwide a year; once contracted, the disease causes a rash, followed by fever, chills, cough and muscle aches. If infection goes untreated, it can damage the liver, intestines, lungs and bladder.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: For the first time researchers have been able to watch what happens to the brain as it loses consciousness. Using sophisticated imaging equipment they have constructed a 3-D movie of the brain as it changes while an anaesthetic drug takes effect.

With the completion of a successful prototype, engineers at Oregon State University have made a major step toward addressing one of the leading problems in energy use around the world today -- the waste of half or more of the energy produced by cars, factories and power plants.New technology is being developed at OSU to capture and use the low-to-medium grade waste heat that's now going out the exhaust pipe of millions of automobiles, diesel generators, or being wasted by factories and electrical utilities.

The kea, a New Zealand parrot, and the New Caledonian crow are members of the two most intelligent avian families. Researchers from the Department of Cognitive Biology of the University of Vienna investigated their problem solving abilities as well as their innovative capacities.They are publishing two new studies -- one in cooperation with members of the Behavioral Ecology Research Group in Oxford -- in the scientific journals PLoS ONE and Biology Letters.

T hough people with autism face many challenges because of their condition, they may have been capable hunter-gatherers in prehistoric times, according to a paper published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in May.The autism spectrum may represent not disease, but an ancient way of life for a minority of ancestral humans, said Jared Reser, a brain science researcher and doctoral candidate in the USC Psychology Department.

Swiss solar-powered aircraft Solar Impulse will make its second international flight from Brussels to Paris on Saturday, where it will be showcased at an international air show.The pioneering aircraft is expected to take off between 1200 and 1600 GMT in Brussels and land around 2200 GMT at the earliest at Le Bourget near Paris, its press office said Friday, after several delays due to unfavorable weather conditions.Rain and strong winds will keep the lightweight plane grounded as the maximum wind speed for it to take off safely is seven knots.

Construction can resume on a massive Southern California solar energy project after wildlife officials determined it will not jeopardize the threatened desert tortoise, federal officials said Friday.The U.S. Bureau of Land Management approved the next phase of construction on the nearly $2 billion Ivanpah project located in eastern San Bernardino County, about five miles from the Nevada border.

A signed letter by Adolf Hitler, which contains what is believed to be the earliest written expression of his views on Jews and anti-Semitism, was unveiled at a press conference in New York on Tuesday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.Rabbi Marvin Hier said the letter, written in 1919, is "one of the most important documents in the entire history of the Third Reich."Wearing white gloves to protect the fragile, yellowing document, Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center, pointed out what he considered to be the most significant phrase in the four-page, typed letter - the words "Entfernung der Juden," German for "removal of Jews" - which Hitler wrote must be the government's "final goal.

Every morning, she climbed the wide marble steps of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was not trained for this work. She was a homemaker, not a historian. But she had a lifetime of simmering anger and unanswered questions.By lamplight in the grand reading room, she scoured thousands of documents, inventing her own organizing system to keep track of the information she found. She brought home so many copies that she commandeered a bathtub and used it as a filing cabinet.

The worrisome, hormone-disrupting chemical BPA showed up in every urine sample taken from more than 80 preschoolers in two states, reported a recent study of kids, ages 2 through 5.And even though BPA often appears in samples of dust, air and surfaces of objects, the new study found that most of the BPA that got into the little kids came from their food.

Marta Orellana says she was playing with friends at the orphanage when the summons sounded: "Orellana to the infirmary. Orellana to the infirmary."Waiting for her were several doctors she had never seen before. Tall men with fair complexions who spoke what she guessed was English, plus a Guatemalan doctor. They had syringes and little bottles.They ordered her to lie down and open her legs. Embarrassed, she locked her knees together and shook her head. The Guatemalan medic slapped her cheek and she began to cry. "I did what I was told," she recalls.

There has been a lot of publicity this year about the search for "potentially habitable planets," specifically in the much coveted area around stars where the "Goldilocks" temperature is "just right" for liquid water to exist.The irony is, however, that the nearest form of extraterrestrial life in the solar system may only be 1 billion miles away, say astrobiologists.At that distance, the sun is a feeble 1/100th its brightness as seen from Earth, and therefore temperatures are a chilly -330 Fahrenheit (-200 degrees Celsius). The majority of solar system bodies out there froze rock solid billions of years ago.But an unlikely oasis is Saturn's frost-covered moon Enceladus. This would be a place for life on the edge, so said scientists at a recent meeting of the Enceladus Focus Group at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

Alternative vehicles are still "alternative" in part because fuel cell and battery technologies still have many hills to climb -- cost, efficiency, weight to name a few. A group of MIT researchers thinks they can pave the way. They recently combined the strongest aspects of traditional batteries and fuel cells to create a whole new kind of battery."It's a flowing electrode that's electrically conductive all of the time. That's the secret sauce," said Yet-Ming Chiang, the professor of material science and engineering at MIT who led the development. His interdisciplinary team included researchers Mihai Duduta, Bryan Ho, Pimpa Limthongkul, Vanessa Wood, Victor Brunini, MIT professors Craig Carter, Angela Belcher, Paula Hammond, and Rutgers University professor Glenn Amatucci.

We are finding that the universe is such an extraordinarily energetic place that it leaves us at a loss for superlatives.Take the latest discovery announced on Wednesday in the journal Nature: Astronomers have uncovered a new class of objects they are calling "ultra-luminous supernovas."But hold on. Supernovae -- exploding massive stars -- are the biggest bangs since the Big Bang. Their light flashes across billions of light-years like cosmic flashbulbs: it's brief and intense.A supernova sky survey called the Palomar Transient Factory, has uncovered four of these super-duper explosions that are ten times brighter than normal supernovas, and unusually bluer. Using stellar forensics, a team of astronomers also reclassified two previously mysterious flashes in the night as belonging to the same new class of brighter-than-bright supernovas.

You might shudder at the mere thought of ancient brain surgery, but recent studies of the practice at Bronze Age sites in Turkey suggest that early neurosurgeons were surprisingly precise and that a majority of their patients may have survived.At Ikiztepe, a small settlement near the Black Sea occupied from 3200 to 1700 B.C., archaeologist Önder Bilgi of Istanbul University has uncovered five skulls with clean, rectangular incisions that are evidence for trepanation, or basic cranial surgery. The procedure may have been performed to treat hemorrhages, brain cancer, head trauma, or mental illness. Last August Bilgi also unearthed a pair of razor-sharp volcanic glass blades that he believes were used to make the careful cuts.

Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, which is heading for a rendezvous with a comet in 2014, has been put into hibernation by its controllers.The command was sent from Germany on Wednesday, instructing the probe to enter a deep sleep. Only heaters and an "alarm clock" have been left running.Nothing will be heard from the spacecraft for the next two-and-a-half years - not even a reassuring beep.Rosetta should wake up at 1000 GMT on 20 January 2014.

Humankind's most distant emissaries are flying through a turbulent sea of magnetism as they seek to break free of our Solar System.Nasa's Voyager probes, which were launched in 1977, are now approaching the very edge of our Sun's influence, more than 14 billion km from Earth; and they are still returning data.That information has allowed scientists to build a better picture of what conditions are like in the zone where matter blown out from our star pushes up against interstellar space.

WHEN Alan Price found himself with an hour to spare he decided to walk along the beach looking for the semi-precious stones which are often washed ashore.Instead, he stumbled upon an ancient axe which could be up to 450,000 years old and may change our understanding of Scottish history.The 14cm-long flint axe discovered on the shore at St Ola in Orkney was described as "incredibly exciting" by Caroline Wickham-Jones, a lecturer in archaeology for the University of Aberdeen.

South Americans helped colonise Easter Island centuries before Europeans reached it. Clear genetic evidence has, for the first time, given support to elements of this controversial theory showing that while the remote island was mostly colonised from the west, there was also some influx of people from the Americas.Easter Island is the easternmost island of Polynesia, the scattering of islands that stretches across the Pacific. It is also one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world.

Along with causing water droplets to dance (which you can try at home) and protecting hands from liquid nitrogen (which you should definitely not try), the storied Leidenfrost effect can apparently help reduce drag, possibly cutting fuel emissions for cargo ships.Fast, hot boats, in other words, are better.Researchers in Australia and Saudi Arabia have figured out that a hot object moving quickly through water forms an insulating vapor layer, which isolates the object from friction. The drag on the object is reduced to nearly nothing, which means less energy is required to overcome the drag.

To find it, you have to go digging in rainforests. And to the untrained eye, it does not seem special at all--just a thick layer of dark earth that would not look out of place in many gardens. But these fertile dark soils are in fact very special, because despite the lushness of tropical rainforests, the soils beneath them are usually very poor and thin. Even more surprising is where this dark soil comes from.

IN 1919, William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming, an allegory of the atmosphere in Europe after the carnage of the first world war.Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.The poem draws heavily on the mythic narrative of the apocalypse - or at least the first half of it, destruction. What usually follows is rebirth and redemption, a second chance, life born anew. The archetype is the Noahian flood myth, the world born again after being washed of its sins.

IT IS time for cinema to take its next step. 3D technology now fills our screens with beautifully rendered characters and virtual environments, but we could have so much more.So says Dennis Del Favero, director of what he calls the world's first 3D interactive film, Scenario. Rather than having audience members sit back and enjoy the action, the interactive narrative has them drive the story.Undoubtedly, the ultimate synthetic interactive environment must be the virtual worlds generated by Star Trek's "Holodeck". To date, steps in this direction have been restricted because computer-generated characters cannot yet understand and speak in natural language. One solution is to sidestep the need for language and interact with audience members using physical markers, like movement.

The world's oceans could be littered with thousands of undiscovered 'lost cities' housing communities of creatures that thrive in some of the Earth's most extreme conditions, a new discovery suggests.A team of French and UK scientists have unearthed fossilised remains of mussels, clams and snails from the sea floor over a kilometer away from their usual home - the 'black smoker' hydrothermal vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

A new study of one of the oldest scourges in history -- human plague -- shows how variations of weather can set in motion environmental changes that can lead to disastrous effects.An international team led by Chinese scientists took a hard look at a plague outbreak known as the Third Pandemic, which killed an estimated 2.2 million people in China from the 18th Century to the early 20th Century -- comparing plague data with measures of yearly wetness and dryness going back 500 years.

If, like me, you've spent countless hours staring at astronomical photographs, you know the score: there's a lot of noise, artifacts and anomalies. (And no, when I say "artifacts" I don't mean big, black monoliths standing erect on the moon.)How many times have you seen a star "with wings" that appears to be orbiting the sun? Some people jump to the conclusion that it's the mythically stupid planet Nibiru. Scientists know that its actually Mercury reflecting too much light, causing the camera's CCD ("charge-coupled device") to become oversaturated.Often a smudge in an old photographic plate is confused for an invading hoard of angry aliens hell-bent on giving us a bad 2012. In fact, astronomers know that the odd-looking smudge is... a smudge.

The U.S. military is developing a new technology to find and track terror suspects -- small satellites, known as CubeSats, which can be quickly and inexpensively built and launched."Orbital assets can provide persistent, worldwide coverage -- anywhere, anytime," Wes Ticer, spokesman with the U.S. Special Operations Command at Florida's MacDill Air Force Base, told Discovery News.

June has been declared National Oceans Month, via a writ from the White House a few days ago, and this week communities around the planet will mark World Oceans Day.The flurry of recognition seems appropriate for a region that covers 70 percent of the Earth's surface and provides about half the air we breathe, courtesy of the microscopic, oxygen-producing phytoplankton floating in it.Yet much about the planet's oceans remains a mystery. As of the year 2000, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated that as much as 95 percent of the world's oceans and 99 percent of the ocean floor are unexplored.

The sun unleashed a massive solar storm Tuesday in a dazzling eruption that kicked up a vast cloud of magnetic plasma that appeared to rain back down over half of the sun's entire surface, NASA scientists say.The solar storm hit its peak at about 2:41 a.m. EDT, but the actual flare extended over a three-hour period, said C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who runs a website called The Sun Today, in a video describing the event.

Australia's military has lost its X-Files, detailing sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, across the country, a newspaper report said Tuesday.After a two-month search in response to a newspaper Freedom of Information (FOI) request, which forces government officials to release documents of public interest, Australia's Department of Defense had been unable to locate the files, the Sydney Morning Herald said."The files could not be located and Headquarters Air Command formally advised that this file is deemed lost," the department's FOI assistant director, Natalie Carpenter, told the paper. Defense officials could not be contacted by Reuters.

The state has decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana.Last week, the Senate narrowly approved the legislation that supporters call a common sense reform to the judicial system. Today, it passed the House.Gov. Dannel P. Malloy supports the measure, which would eliminate the misdemeanor offense from possession of less than a half-ounce of marijuana. It would instead result in a $150 fine for a first offense and a fine ranging from $200 to $500 for subsequent offenses.

Planetary scientists have long wondered why Mars is only about half the size and one-tenth the mass of Earth. As next-door neighbors in the inner solar system, probably formed about the same time, why isn't Mars more like Earth and Venus in size and mass? A paper published in the journal Nature this week provides the first cohesive explanation and, by doing so, reveals an unexpected twist in the early lives of Jupiter and Saturn as well.

Do the principles of quantum mechanics apply to biological systems? Until now, says Prof. Ron Naaman of the Institute's Chemical Physics Department (Faculty of Chemistry), both biologists and physicists have considered quantum systems and biological molecules to be like apples and oranges. But research he conducted together with scientists in Germany, which appeared recently in Science, shows that a biological molecule -- DNA -- can discern between quantum states known as spin.

A United Nations report said Friday that disconnecting people from the internet is a human rights violation and against international law.The report railed against France and the United Kingdom, which have passed laws to remove accused copyright scofflaws from the internet. It also protested blocking internet access to quell political unrest (.pdf).While blocking and filtering measures deny users access to specific content on the Internet, states have also taken measures to cut off access to the Internet entirely. The Special Rapporteur considers cutting off users from internet access, regardless of the justification provided, including on the grounds of violating intellectual property rights law, to be disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Early members of the genus Homo, possibly direct ancestors of people today, may have evolved in Asia and then gone to Africa, not vice versa as many scientists have assumed.Most paleoanthropologists have favored an African origin for the potential human ancestor Homo erectus. But new evidence shows the species occupied a West Asian site called Dmanisi from 1.85 million to 1.77 million years ago, at the same time or slightly before the earliest evidence of this humanlike species in Africa, say geologist Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas in Denton and his colleagues.

Mysterious hieroglyphs written in red paint on the floor of a hidden chamber in Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza are just numbers, according to a mathematical analysis of the 4,500-year-old mausoleum.Shown to the world last month, when the first report of a robot exploration of the Great Pyramid was published in the Annales du Service Des Antiquities de l'Egypte (ASAE), the images revealed features that have not been seen by human eyes since the construction of the monument.

In the winter of 1993, miners came across a body with long red hair and a beard, and associated artefacts, in the Chehrabad salt mines located to the west of the city of Zanjan, Iran. They found the remains of a body, a lower leg still inside a leather boot, three iron knives, a pair of woollen trousers, a silver needle, sling, parts of a leather rope, a grindstone, and even a walnut. The body had been buried in a tunnel approximately 45 metres in length.As the years went by a further five corpses, including a teenager and a woman, were discovered in the salt mine.

The 1960s marked a turning point for agriculture in Asia: that's when plant breeders launched a "green revolution" in rice production, selecting variants of a single gene that boosted yields across the continent. A new study finds that prehistoric farmers were revolutionaries, too. They apparently harnessed that same gene when they first domesticated rice as early as 10,000 years ago.

A new scientific dating technique has revealed there was a building spree more than 5,500 years ago, when many of the most spectacular monuments in the English landscape, such as Maiden Castle in Dorset and Windmill Hill in Wiltshire, were built, used and abandoned in a single lifetime.The fashion for the monuments, hilltops enclosed by rings of ditches, known to archaeologists as causewayed enclosures, instead of being the ritual work of generations as had been believed, began on the continent centuries earlier but spread from Kent to Cornwall within 50 years in about 3700 BC.

THE VANCOUVER SUNA team of Canadian scientists has used geology-style drill cores from an Ontario lake bottom to gather evidence of toolmaking and perhaps even duckhunting by ancient aboriginals about 10,000 years ago -the first discovery of its kind in North America, and one that could point the way to further breakthroughs in underwater archeology around the world.Led by researcher Lisa Sonnenburg of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., the team took sediment samples from a shallow section of Rice Lake -a popular summer vacation spot northeast of Toronto -where prehistoric First Nations were known to have camped soon after the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age.

Archaeology's grasp of the past ordinarily becomes less secure the further back in time it reaches. That's why it is something of a paradox that the period of Ohio's past about which we seem to know the least is the mid-18th century - the period immediately preceding the arrival of Europeans in the Ohio Valley.The reasons for this glaring exception to the rule relate to the catastrophic effects of the European arrival on the continent more than 200 years earlier. Foreign diseases and inter-tribal warfare swept though the region leading to a massive emigration of refugees.

In the first century AD, a Greek geographer and historian named Strabo noted that a peninsula just south of Athens called Piraeus had, at one time in the past, been an island. It's unusual for landforms to change so quickly that humans can take notice, even over generations, so that's a pretty interesting claim. The idea pops up elsewhere in Athenian oral tradition, as well as in the etymology of the name itself ("peran" means "beyond" or "on the other side"), so a group of French and Greek geologists and archaeologists decided to put it to the test.

WASHINGTON -- The worldwide spread of ancient humans has long been depicted as flowing out of Africa, but tantalizing new evidence suggests it may have been a two-way street.A long-studied archaeological site in a mountainous region between Europe and Asia was occupied by early humans as long as 1.85 million years ago, much earlier than the previous estimate of 1.7 million years ago, researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An ancient settlement has been discovered in the Ethiopian highlands using non invasive geophysical surveys. This discovery will help tell the story of ancient indigenous cultures in the Horn of Africa and their exchange with nearby civilizations.In early May, Jorg Fassbinder from the Geophysics Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich and his colleague Margaret Schlosser of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) began a joint project.

If you are thinking that this has something to do with the revolts that are occurring today across the Arab world, you would be wrong. Aside from the turmoil that is making current headlines about that region of the world, archaeologists are quietly and systematically exploring the pieces and landscape left behind by the events of World War I in the deserts of Jordan. You might recall the cinematic images of Lawrence of Arabia, leading a surprise attack with Arab forces on camel-back into Aqaba and later ambushing Ottoman-controlled trains along the Hejaz railway. Remember the movie? For the past five years archaeologists working in Jordan have been showing us that there is more to the war story that defined the context of these events. They will return again in November, 2011, this time to investigate the historic road to Aqaba that T.E. Lawrence and many others took to wrest control of the strategic city from the Ottoman Turks. It was a key element for eventual victory in World War I. Investigations will also include an exploration of Abu al Lissan, the site of a major historic battle between the Hashemite and Ottoman forces.

SYDNEY (AFP) – A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called "missing mass" of the universe during her summer break.Undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie made the breakthrough during a holiday internship with a team at Monash University's School of Physics, locating the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies."