Newsdesk Archive

Bulgarian archaeologists discovered what they believe to be the oldest town in Europe, local media reported. Dubbed a 'proto-town', the site is situated near the town of Pazardzhic, in the center of the country.In 2008 the team of archaeologist Yasen Boyadzhiev found in the area a large ancient graveyard, which became known under the current name of the area, Yunatsite (The Heroes). Later the excavations were extended and yesterday the researchers announced they have found a surprisingly large settlement, which during 4700-4600 BC spread over 100 000 sq m.

Guernsey States' archaeologist hopes to get a better understanding of early prehistoric settlements in the island with a major new excavation.The study is being carried out ahead of work to extend the runway safety areas at Guernsey Airport.The site will be raised by 2-3m (7-10ft) during the work.Dr Philip de Jersey said the Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement could provide a valuable insight into some of the island's earliest inhabitants.

Though 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.

It's further proof that Hitler was barking mad.In his new book Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities, Cardiff University historian Jan Bondeson mines obscure German periodicals to reveal the Nazis' failed attempt to breed an army of educated dogs that could read, write and talk. "In the 1920s, Germany had numerous 'new animal psychologists' who believed dogs were nearly as intelligent as humans, and capable of abstract thinking and communication," he writes. "When the Nazi party took over, one might have thought they would be building concentration camps to lock these fanatics up, but instead they were actually very interested in their ideas.

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan – Cucumbers may be out of favor on earth, but a Japanese astronaut said Monday that he plans to harvest the vegetable on board the International Space Station.Satoshi Furukawa is set to blast off early Wednesday for a half-year stint in orbit along with Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and NASA astronaut Michael Fossum.

Geoff Marcy is mad.Not mad as in 'crazy,' although many scientists thought he was nuts when he first started hunting for planets orbiting far-distant stars over 20 years ago.Now that over 500 exoplanets have been detected and the Kepler space telescope has over 1,200 candidate planets waiting to be confirmed, Marcy's dedication and hard work (and his sanity) have been vindicated.

As climate warming causes the oceans to rise, subsequent flooding and storm surges are sure to impact people in coastal areas around the world. But estimates for how many people will be inundated have fallen short by many millions of people, suggests a new study.For the first time, the study combined predictions of sea level rise with forecasts of how many people will live in vulnerable areas 20 years from now. Previous studies have factored in current population numbers, which are only getting bigger.

Scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have produced groundbreaking global maps of land plant fluorescence, a difficult-to-detect reddish glow that leaves emit as a byproduct of photosynthesis. While researchers have previously mapped how ocean-dwelling phytoplankton fluoresce, the new maps are the first to focus on land vegetation and to cover the entire globe.

They are some of the most isolated people on earth, a small civilisation which has spent its entire history cut off from the rest of the world by thousands of miles of wilderness, learning to eke an existence from the plants and creatures of the Amazon rainforest.Now they face a grave threat. Fears are growing about the future of one of the world's last un-contacted tribes, amid claims by a British human rights organisation that the government of Peru is planning to re-write strict laws supposed to protect their remote jungle territory.

BEIJING, June 4 (Xinhuanet) -- Northwest China's Shaanxi province initiated the comprehensive archaeological and excavation work at the K9901 attendant burial pit - one of 180 funerary pits of the Qin Shihuang (259-210 BC) tomb - and its surrounding construction sites on Friday, according to the site's archaeological team.The burial pit is located in the southeast area of the Tomb of Qin Shihuang (the "First Emperor" of a united China), and occupies a 700-square-meter area of the burial area. The tomb site, situated in the suburban area of Xi'an city, is divided into two parts: an 8-square-kilometer cemetery site and 56.25-square-kilometer multi-burial areas.

An archeological find in Hafnir on the Reykjanes peninsula (close to Keflavík Airport) may indicate that some men had started to come to Iceland before the year 874 AD, the year that has traditionally been considered the first year Nordic men came to Iceland to stay.Archeologist dr. Bjarni F. Einarsson says that research at Hafnir indicate ruins of a cabin (Icelandic: Skáli) built well before the traditional year of origin of settlement.

Mexican archaeologists have discovered several new Mayan sites as well as an important concentration of pre-Columbian graves in the state of Yucatan, according to a statement by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).The remains which include structures, ceramics, lithics and human burials were found in the rural community of Sitpach, five kilometres east of Merida, the state capital. The artefacts date back to the Maya Late Preclassic period (400 BC-200 AD) and the finding of them has resulted in a change in the local chronology for this particular region.

A city floating in the ocean, one where tens of millions of people can live? No, not Atlantis but a project that a group of self-styled "seasteaders" want to get built off the shores of San Francisco by the year 2040.Before dismissing this as a crackpot idea - and some experts have done just that - consider the following: Venture capitalists have already ponied up more than $2 million to fund an idea to build a nation flotilla - and a libertarian one at that - some 12 miles off the coast of California.

Astronomers in France say a rocky planet orbiting a star that's one of our closest galactic neighbors may have all the ingredients to make us earthlings feel right at home.The planet Gliese 581d, orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581 about 20 light years from Earth, could support oceans, clouds and rainfall with a greenhouse effect that would moderate its temperatures, the team of scientists from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris says in a study published this month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A plan to build a giant open pit mine has created a sharp rift between those who think Uruguay's rich agricultural land should be protected, and those wanting to exploit its wealth.The Aratiri project, owned by Zamin Ferrous, a London-based minerals company, will cost an estimated $2.5 billion (1.7 million Euros), the largest mining project ever in South America, and equivalent to more than six percent of Uruguay's gross domestic product.

Trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has become so routine that physicists are confident that they can soon begin experiments on this rare antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley."We've trapped antihydrogen atoms for as long as 1,000 seconds, which is forever" in the world of high-energy particle physics, said Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley professor of physics, faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

One of the volcanos in the Caulle Cordon of southern Chile erupted violently Saturday, billowing smoke and ash high into the sky and prompting more than 3,500 people living nearby to evacuate.There were no reports of injuries.Authorities initially said the Puyehue volcano was involved, but later said the eruption was occurring about 2 1/2 miles (four kilometers) from that peak.A rift more than six miles (10 kilometers) long and three miles (five kilometers) across was torn in the earth's crust, officials said Saturday night.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism.The annual prize is awarded to a journalist "whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it"."WikiLeaks has been portrayed as a phenomenon of the hi-tech age, which it is. But it's much more. Its goal of justice through transparency is in the oldest and finest tradition of journalism," Martha Gellhorn prize judges said in their citation.

Tokyo (CNN) -- Up a narrow flight of stairs in a modest, non-descript office building, three retirees sit in a cramped room, hunched over their computers and mobile phones. They look like the planning committee for a neighborhood senior breakfast, not the leaders of a 250-member team attempting to defuse one of the worst nuclear meltdowns in history.But that's exactly what 72-year-old Yasuteru Yamada hopes his seniors group, the Skilled Veterans Corps, will do: help end the crisis at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

A Roman ship found with a lead pipe piercing its hull has mystified archaeologists. Italian researchers now suggest that the pipe was part of an ingenious pumping system, designed to feed on-board fish tanks with a continuous supply of oxygenated water. Their analysis has been published online in the International Journal of Nautical ArchaeologyHistorians have assumed that in ancient times fresh fish were eaten close to where they were caught, because without refrigeration they would have rotted during transportation. But if the latest theory is correct, Roman ships could have carried live fish to buyers across the Mediterranean Sea.

It has taken technology almost two millennia to break one of the greatest secrets of the ancient Americas.Archaeologists have discovered 'a recreation of the underworld' at the ancient city of Teotihuacan in Mexico thanks to a radar device.Researchers have only advanced 7 metres along the tunnel but the radar has revealed it to be 120 metres long and covered in symbols. It is thought that the passage leads to three chambers and may help explain the beliefs of the civilisation.

An excavation of a southern French burial site from about 3,000 B.C. shows that the modern humans who expanded into the area from the Mediterranean lived in patrilocal communities and did not have the genetic mutation that allowed later Europeans to digest fresh milk.Scientists analyzed DNA extracted from the bones of 53 people buried in Cave I of the Treilles, located in the Grands Causses region at Saint-Jean-et-Saint-Paul, Aveyron in France. They were able to get useful information from 29 of those samples, 22 men, two women ad five for whom it was impossible to determine sex. Most of them appeared to be closely related, with two of them having a 99.9979% probability of being father and son and two others having a 99.9985% probability of being siblings.

A team of archaeologists and others will return to a site southeast of the Dead Sea in late September, 2011 to continue investigations of what is now considered to be one of the largest copper mines of the ancient Middle East. Among other things, scientists hope to be able to identify the ethnicity or nationality of the people who actually controlled the mining and smelting operation during the 10th century B.C.E., the time period when, based on the Biblical accounts, scholars have traditionally dated the kingdom of Edom, as well as that of David and Solomon of ancient Israel.

Incan fortresses built some 500 years ago have been discovered along an extinct volcano in northern Ecuador, revealing evidence of a war fought by the Inca just before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Andes."We're seeing evidence for a pre-Columbian frontier, or borderline, that we think existed between Inca fortresses and Ecuadorian people's fortresses," project director Samuel Connell, of Foothill College in California, told LiveScience.The team has identified what they think are 20 fortresses built by the Inca and two forts that were built by a people from Ecuador known as the Cayambe. The volcano is called Pambamarca.

CAIRO - A team of Egyptian and European archaeologists has unearthed a statue of the ancient Egyptian king Amenhotep III at his funerary temple in Luxor.The 2.5-meter alabaster head of the 18th dynastic king remains intact, Zahi Hawass, antiquities minister, said in a statement Tuesday. Amenhotep III ruled from 1390-1352 B.C.

JERUSALEM - Underneath the crowded alleys and holy sites of old Jerusalem, hundreds of people are snaking at any given moment through tunnels, vaulted medieval chambers and Roman sewers in a rapidly expanding subterranean city invisible from the streets above.At street level, the walled Old City is an energetic and fractious enclave with a physical landscape that is predominantly Islamic and a population that is mainly Arab.

Philadelphia -- University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeologists working at the renowned ancient site of Tiwanaku in Bolivia site sometimes called the "American Stonehenge" have joined forces with a team of engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists and anthropologists from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Computer and Information Science, School of Engineering, the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, University of Arkansas, and the Department of Anthropology, University of Denver, to begin a large-scale, subsurface surveying project using equipment and techniques that may one day serve as a model for future archaeological efforts worldwide.

Honeybee colonies in the United States reduced in number by 30 percent over the 2010-2011 winter, according to a recently released annual survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA).The loss was actually lower than for the previous winter, 2009-10, which saw a 34 percent drop in honeybee populations. A 29 percent drop in 2008-9, a 36 percent loss in 2007-8, and a 32 percent decline in 2006-7 preceded the new data.

In order to understand the ancient Egyptian concept of death and dying, one must first understand the absolute longing and love for life the ancient Egyptians had (Brewer & Teeter 2008: 166). The latter devotion and love for life propelled the ancient Egyptian people into an obsessive desire (Richards 1997: 33; Brewer & Teeter 2008: 166) for their lives to continue in heaven [the field of reeds] in the same manner of luxury, pomp and pageantry as their lives had been whilst they were alive.

The rise of agriculture in the Middle East, nearly 11,000 years ago, was a momentous event in human prehistory. But just how farming spread from there into Europe has been a matter of intense research. A new study of ancient DNA from 5000-year-old skeletons found in a French cave suggests that early farmers entered the European continent by at least two different routes and reveals new details about the social structures and dairying practices of some of their societies.

Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am - was coined by René Descartes in 1637. He was struggling to find a solid philosophical basis for how we know about reality and truth.This is also turns out to be of the most famous examples of recursion, the process of embedding ideas within ideas that humans seem to do so effortlessly. So effortlessly and so skilfully, in fact, that it's beginning to look like the one true dividing line between animals and humans that may hold up to close scrutiny.

Ancient Egyptians may have been exposed to air pollution way back when, according to new evidence of particulates in the lungs of 15 mummies, including noblemen and priests.Particulates, tiny microscopic particles that irritate the lungs, have been linked to a wide array of modern-day illnesses, including heart disease, lung ailments and cancer. The particulates are typically linked to post-industrial activities, such as fossil-fuel burning.But after hearing of reports of such particulates being found in mummy tissue, Roger Montgomerie, a doctoral student at the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at the University of Manchester, decided to take a closer look at mummified lung tissue. His work represents the first attempt to identify and study particulates in multiple Egyptian mummies.

These are epoch-making times. Literally. There is now "compelling evidence", according to an influential group of geologists, that humans have had such an impact on the planet that we are entering a new phase of geological time: the Anthropocene.Millions of years from now, they say, alien geologists would be able to make out a human-influenced stripe in the accumulated layers of rock, in the same way that we can see the imprint of dinosaurs in the Jurassic, or the explosion of life that marks the Cambrian. Now the scientists are pushing for the new epoch to be officially recognised.

Paleontologists have devised a new method to distinguish male from female dinosaurs, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.The technique, which involves analyzing upper-hind limb bones, may help to solve this long-standing male or female anatomical mystery, since the remains of dinosaurs today are not fleshed out with soft-tissue genitals.

Scientists from Finland and France have developed a new synchrotron X-ray technique that may revolutionize the chemical analysis of rare materials like meteoric rock samples or fossils. The results have been published on 29 May 2011 in Nature Materials as an advance online publication.

Researchers have shown off a "DNA computer" of unprecedented complexity, which can calculate square roots.DNA computing uses chemical reactions to solve problems in which a number of DNA strands act as "bits".The work, reported in Science, required 130 strands of DNA to work in a cascade of programmed chemical changes.

The belly of Antarctica has given up a little more of its mystery.Survey data taken across a great swathe of the east of the white continent has allowed scientists to map the shape of the bedrock buried deep under the ice.It reveals in new detail a huge trough hundreds of kilometres long that is cut by fjord-like features.Researchers tell Nature magazine that this hidden landscape was probably moulded by the action of glaciers more than 14 million years ago.

Afficionados of modern poured-concrete design were in for a rude awakening last month when they heard NJIT Assistant Professor Matt Burgermaster's presentation at the 64th annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. "Edison's 'Single-Pour System: Inventing Seamless Architecture" illustrated how Thomas Edison invented and patented in 1917 an innovative construction system to mass produce prefabricated and seamless concrete houses. Typically most people associate this style of architectural design and type of building technology with the European avant-garde of the early 20th century.

ON THE beaches of southern California you can sometimes find clumps of a sticky black substance with a texture halfway between molasses and rubber. Could these tar balls - collected by humans for thousands of years - provide evidence that our long-standing relationship with hydrocarbons was toxic from the outset?Long before we started asphalting roads, prehistoric people around the world used bitumen, which seeps from the ground naturally in places. Archaeological finds suggest that California's prehistoric locals, the Chumash people, eagerly collected the tar balls. They used them to caulk the seams of ocean-going craft and waterproof woven baskets to make drinking vessels, as well as for making casts for broken bones and poultices for sore joints. Some Chumash even chewed bitumen like gum.

Excessive use of antimicrobials in livestock promotes resistance and risks the future health of both animals and humans, warn experts in an editorial published by Student BMJ on June 1, 2011.Jorgen Schlundt and colleagues at the National Food Institute in Denmark argue that the routine use of antimicrobials can be reduced substantially, while maintaining profitable animal production, and call for their use to be monitored in all countries.

With 2.3 million people behind bars and an estimated 10 million Americans cycling in and out of correctional facilities each year, the United States is in the midst of an "epidemic of mass incarceration," say researchers from the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, a collaboration of The Miriam Hospital and Brown University.In a Perspective article to appear in the June 2 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the authors argue that much of this epidemic is due to inadequate treatment of addiction and mental illness in the community, which they say can be linked to policy changes over the last 30 years, such as severe punishment for drug users as a result of the nation's "War on Drugs.

Several high profile figures have signed an open letter urging Prime Minister David Cameron to consider decriminalising drugs.Dame Judi Dench and Sting were among more than 30 signatories.It comes as a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, whose members include Sir Richard Branson, urged legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of users.The Home Office said it had "no intention" of liberalising drugs laws.

The global war on drugs has "failed" according to a new report by a group of politicians and former world leaders.The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.The US and Mexican governments have rejected the findings as misguided.

The global war on drugs has failed and governments should explore legalising marijuana and other controlled substances, according to a commission that includes former heads of state and a former UN secretary general.A new report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy argues that the decades-old "global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." The 24-page paper was released on Thursday."Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won," the report said.

The people of Japan may be some of the most energy conscious in the world, and now Panasonic, with the help of eight partner companies, is looking to make them even greener. The project, which would as much re-building as it would be building, aims to turn on of Panasonic's former factory sites into a green smart town.The town will sit on 47-acres and have roughly 1,000-homes. The city will be named Fujisawa City and it will be found in the Kanagawa Prefecture. If the town turns out to be as energy conscious as the designers hope it could become a prototype for future energy efficient cities across Japan and the world.

For the past several years, Montreal-based company Enerkem has been working on a way to make ethanol from old utility poles and household garbage. Earlier this week, the company announced that they have received $60 million in new financing from the major independent oil refiner Valero and the trash-hauling company Waste Management. Total investment in Enerkem is now $130 million.

Thirty-eight million years ago, tropical jungles thrived in what are now the cornfields of the American Midwest and furry marsupials wandered temperate forests in what is now the frozen Antarctic. The temperature differences of that era, known as the late Eocene, between the equator and Antarctica were only half of what they are today. A debate has long been raging in the scientific community on what changes in our global climate system led to such a major shift from the more tropical, greenhouse climate of the Eocene to the modern and much cooler climates of today.

Assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, whose controversial tactics earned him the nickname "Doctor Death," has died at the age of 83, hospital officials said Friday.Kevorkian forced the United States to confront the ethical issues surrounding how best to treat the pain and suffering of the terminally ill when he went public with his suicide machines in 1990 and the videos of his patients begging him to help them die.Kevorkian, who spent more than eight years in jail for the murder of a man whose videotaped assisted suicide was aired on national television, claims he actively helped 130 people to die.

The ancient Romans might have traded live fish across the Mediterranean Sea by endowing their ships with an ingenious hydraulic system, a new investigation into a second century A.D. wreck suggests.Consisting of a pumping system designed to suck the sea water into a fish tank, the apparatus has been reconstructed by a team of Italian researchers who analyzed a unique feature of the wreck: a lead pipe inserted in the hull near the keel.

A long-standing and apparently simple puzzle that has left mathematicians stumped for nearly three-quarters of a century may finally be solved.The Collatz conjecture was proposed by Lothar Collatz in 1937. It is also known as the "3n + 1 problem" because of its deceptively-simple definition.Now mathematician Gerhard Opfer of the University of Hamburg, who was a student of Collatz, says he has proved the conjecture true.

Greenland's early Viking settlers were subjected to rapidly changing climate. Temperatures plunged several degrees in a span of decades, according to research from Brown University. A reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history from lakes near the Norse settlement in western Greenland also shows how climate affected the Dorset and Saqqaq cultures. Results appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The end of the Norse settlements on Greenland likely will remain shrouded in mystery. While there is scant written evidence of the colony's demise in the 14th and early 15th centuries, archaeological remains can fill some of the blanks, but not all.

Attending frequently with medically unexplained symptoms is distressing for both patient and doctor and effective treatment or management options are limited: one in five patients have symptoms that remain unexplained by conventional medicine. Studies have shown that the cost to the NHS of managing the treatment of a patient with medically unexplained symptoms can be twice that of a patient with a diagnosis.

This past winter, about 30 percent of all the managed honeybees in the U.S. died. That's according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Such a die-off is no longer unusual. About a third of honeybees have perished every winter since 2006.Given that recent history, USDA entomologist Jeff Pettis characterized this as quote "marginally encouraging" given that quote "the problem does not appear to be getting worse."Of course, the problem has been getting worse since at least the 1980s, when parasitic mites first invaded the U.S. Our friend Apis mellifera has never recovered. Now so-called "Colony Collapse Disorder" or CCD continues to kill bees--who provide some $15-billion worth of economic good via pollination and other efforts.

Spiral galaxies are perhaps the most fascinating structures in astronomy, yet their nature is still a mystery. Astronomers currently have two categories of theories that can explain this structure, depending on the environment of the galaxy, but a new study suggests that one of these theories may be wrong.For galaxies with nearby companions, astronomers theorize that tidal forces may pull out the spiral structure. But for isolated galaxies, another mechanism is required in which galaxies form these structures without intervention from a neighbor.

Precise measurements on the light from distant quasars suggest that the value of the fine-structure constant may have changed over the history of the Universe. If the quasar results are eventually confirmed, our concepts of space and time are sure to change our fundamental understanding of the Universe.The fine-structure constant, or alpha, is the coupling constant for the electromagnetic force. If alpha were just 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars wouldn't be able to make carbon and oxygen, which would have made it impossible for life as we know it in our Universe to exist.

Radiation from cell phones can possibly cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization. The agency now lists mobile phone use in the same "carcinogenic hazard" category as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform.Before its announcement Tuesday, WHO had assured consumers that no adverse health effects had been established.

Rising food prices are tightening the squeeze on populations already struggling to buy adequate food, demanding radical reform of the global food system, Oxfam has warned.By 2030, the average cost of key crops could increase by between 120% and 180%, the charity forecasts.It is the acceleration of a trend which has already seen food prices double in the last 20 years.

he males of two bipedal hominid species that roamed the South African savannah more than a million years ago appear to have favoured their home environment, while the women preferred to move away.The team from the University of Colorado Boulder, which studied teeth from a group of extinct Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus individuals from two adjacent cave systems in South Africa, found more than half of the female teeth were from outside the local area, said CU-Boulder adjunct professor and lead study author Sandi Copeland. In contrast, only about 10 percent of the male hominid teeth were from elsewhere, suggesting they likely grew up and died in the same area.

The world's deepest dwelling multicellular organisms have just been identified, according to a paper in the latest issue of Nature. If you were to dig down about 2.2 miles, you might encounter Halicephalobus mephisto ("Mephisto") and its other nematode relatives.You probably wouldn't want to go there, though.Food at such a depth consists of bacteria. Temperatures are unbearably hot. There's no sex.

The parents of an 18-month-old girl are set to go on trial soon, charged with first-degree criminal mistreatment. If convicted they could face a maximum of five years in prison.They are not being tried over what they did, but rather what they did not do: take their daughter to a doctor.Tim and Rebecca Wyland are members of the Followers of Christ Church, who refuse modern medicine and instead rely on prayer and faith healing. Their daughter, Alayna, has a large tumor over her left eye which went untreated and could leave her permanently blind. She was finally placed in temporary state custody and began receiving treatment.

The Wiltshire landscape around Avebury and Silbury Hill is the heart of prehistoric Britain, and has World Heritage designation. Now another monument can be added to its archaeological treasures: the Marlborough Mound.The Mound, in the grounds of Marlborough College, was already recognised as a feature of considerable historical significance. It was the motte on which the keep of Marlborough Castle was built fifty years after the Norman Conquest and it subsequently became the centrepiece of a major seventeenth century garden. The latest research has extended its history back by three millennia.

Compared to tigers and other charismatic creatures on the threatened lists, spiders and other creepy-crawlies are usually overlooked and often scorned.But a new study suggests that spiders, too, suffer from human activities around the world. In areas where people cut down trees, use pesticides or graze farm animals, among other activities, spider numbers drop.Besides calling into question the myth of infinite resilience among spiders, the study offers a rare opportunity to point out how important spiders actually are -- as both important predators of pest insects and indicators of environmental health.

Woolly and Columbian mammoths, two species of elephant that once lived in North America, may have interbred.Mitochondrial DNA analysis of a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) found in Utah suggests that its mitochondrial DNA was nearly identical to that of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius).`"We think this individual may have been a woolly-Columbian hybrid," said Jacob Enk of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre, the group that led the research, which was recently published in Genome Biology.

To chemists, the discovery of a microbe that has incorporated arsenic into its DNA would be akin to finding that the formulation for water can shift from H2O -- two hydrogen atoms paired up with an oxygen -- to H3O.Which is not to say that it couldn't happen, just that 100 years of organic chemistry says otherwise.That doesn't really bother Felisa Wolfe-Simon, an oceanographer working under a NASA fellowships at the U.S. Geological Survey and the lead researcher of a paper to be published this week claiming evidence for just such a microorganism.

A team of Egyptian and European archaeologists has unearthed a unique colossal statue of King Amenhotep III at his funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor, according to a statement released on Tuesday by Egypt's ministry of state for antiquities.Finely carved in alabaster, a stone hewn in the quarries of Hatnub in Middle Egypt, the sculpture shows King Amenhotep III seated, wearing the Nemes headdress (a striped headcloth that pharaohs put on), a pleated kilt and a royal beard.Measuring 1.20 meters (3.9 feet) in height, the well-preserved face of the pharaoh has been described by antiquities minister Zahi Hawass as "a masterpiece of royal portraiture.

TWO of the strangest ideas in modern physics - that the cosmos constantly splits into parallel universes in which every conceivable outcome of every event happens, and the notion that our universe is part of a larger multiverse - have been unified into a single theory. This solves a bizarre but fundamental problem in cosmology and has set physics circles buzzing with excitement, as well as some bewilderment.The problem is the observability of our universe. While most of us simply take it for granted that we should be able to observe our universe, it is a different story for cosmologists. When they apply quantum mechanics - which successfully describes the behaviour of very small objects like atoms - to the entire cosmos, the equations imply that it must exist in many different states simultaneously, a phenomenon called a superposition. Yet that is clearly not what we observe.

By her own admission there aren't many recreational substances that Courtney Love hasn't tried. In a candid interview with the latest issue of the American magazine Fix, the former Hole singer and widow of Kurt Cobain rattled off a long list of her past addictions. But there was one high that even a committed connoisseur like Love hadn't hit."The one drug I'd like to try one day is ayahuasca, which should be mandatory for everybody," she said. "It's apparently this crazy tea that gives you these intense hallucinations.

With the 2006 demotion of Pluto to a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), anything in the heavens that was once sacrosanct is now up for grabs.Amateur astronomer Mike Simonsen recently blogged about a move by astronomers at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society to remove Scorpius as a Zodiacal constellation and replace it with the constellation Ophiuchus.Ophi-who?.

A DNA-based study sheds new light on the complex evolutionary history of the woolly mammoth, suggesting it mated with a completely different and much larger species.The research, which appears in the BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology, found the woolly mammoth, which lived in the cold climate of the Arctic tundra, interbred with the Columbian mammoth, which preferred the more temperate regions of North America and was some 25 per cent larger.

HURT your hand? You might find that crossing one arm over the other eases the pain.Giandomenico Iannetti at University College London and colleagues gave 20 volunteers a series of painful "jabs" to the back of one of their hands using a laser, with each pulse lasting 8 to 12 seconds. In half of the experiments the group received the jabs while they laid their palms face down on a desk. In the other half they crossed their arms over one another on the desk. Volunteers rated the pain they felt on a scale from zero to 100.

HOT Neptunes are modestly giant planets that resemble their namesake but orbit close to their stars. But the puzzle is why we see so many hot Neptunes elsewhere but none in our solar system.The conventional view is that these worlds formed in cold regions far from their stars and then migrated inwards. Now Brad Hansen at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Norm Murray of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto say hot Neptunes may have arisen right where they are.

A new atlas combining ultraviolet and infrared images from the Spitzer telescope and Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spacecraft captures colliding galaxies from start to finish. Lauranne Lanz of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics unveiled the findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston on Wednesday. The images provide a better understanding of what could happen when our galaxy collides with the Andromeda galaxy five billion years from now.

Alas, poor Harald. Wired up to a satellite transmitter, he had much to teach science about the life of the great sturgeons of the Danube River and Black Sea.His probable demise is a cautionary tale of the multiplying threats to the great sturgeons, sought since Roman times for the wealth they yield in meat and caviar.Consider: A living creature from the age of the dinosaurs, a fish that can grow as long as a minibus, lives longer than most men, sniffs its way to its birthplace to spawn and can yield a fortune in caviar.

By controlling how light bends around an object, researchers have built a shrinking device that makes objects appear smaller than they actually are. Although the original object does not actually shrink, the illusion of the smaller object is convincing enough to confuse viewers since the real size of the object cannot be perceived.The team of engineers, led by Wei Xiang Jiang and Tie Jun Cui from Southeast University in Nanjing, China, has published their study on their shrinking device in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters.

Researchers found a tunnel under the Temple of the Snake in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan, about 28 miles northeast of Mexico City.The tunnel had apparently been sealed off around 1,800 years ago.Researchers of Mexico's National University made the finding with a radar device. Closer study revealed a "representation of the underworld," in the words of archaeologist Sergio Gomez Chavez, of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.

The US space agency Nasa has announced the ultimate smash-and-grab raid: the first attempt to collect a handful of asteroid rock and bring it back to Earth. There are three reasons why astronomers and space buffs should cheer the seven-year, $800m robot mission and one reason why they should sob.

Up to 420 whale sharks gathered off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, forming the world's largest known assembly of this species, according to a press release issued by the Smithsonian National Zoological Park.The discovery counters the widely held belief that whale sharks, which can weigh more than 79,000 pounds, are solitary filter feeders that prefer to be alone in the open ocean. The impressive shark assembly proves they will gather for the right reasons. Food now appears to be the draw.

What causes a magnet to be a magnet, and how can we control a magnet's behavior? These are the questions that University at Buffalo researcher Igor Zutic, a theoretical physicist, has been exploring over many years.He is one of many scientists who believe that magnets could revolutionize computing, forming the basis of high-capacity and low-energy memory, data storage and data transfer devices.In a recent commentary in Science, Zutic and fellow UB physicist John Cerne, who studies magnetism experimentally, discuss an exciting advancement: A study by Japanese scientists showing that it is possible to turn a material's magnetism on and off at room temperature.

A solar handbag from the Danish design studio, DIFFUS, could make it stylish and practical for a fashionista to charge her electronic devices. The Solar Handbag has 100 silicon solar cells into woven into conductive embroidery, that collect sunlight and generat 2 Watts of usable energy stored on a lithium-ion battery.

LONDON: Japanese scientists have unveiled plans to turn the moon into a gigantic mirrorball manned by robots to provide all the Earth's energy needs. The ambitious project would result in 13,000 terawatts of continuous solar energy being transmitted back to receiving stations on Earth, either by laser or microwave.

An ancient settlement site containing ancient tombs and ancient houses was found recently in Chengjiang County of southwest China's Yunnan Province. It is a rare settlement site with the characteristics of the ancient Dian culture, which will help fill a gap in the history of ancient Dian culture.

Today's Assyriology scholars study Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets with the help of digital photographs or handwritten copies of the texts, but ideally, they visit collections to see the tablets firsthand.Technology could introduce a new way to connect researchers to these precious, unique artifacts by creating exact replicas.Such an effort is under way at Cornell in the lab of Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, who specializes in the burgeoning field of 3-D scanning and printing of everyday objects.

The U.S. Forest Service is trying to find out who vandalized a popular cave in Central Oregon. Authorities say extensive damage was done to the cave's natural and cultural features.The vandalism occurred sometime in late April at the Hidden Forest Cave in the Deschutes National Forest. Vandals chopped down trees and set a fire inside the cave. They also spray-painted extensively both outside and inside the cave, covering native pictographs.Penni Borghi is a forest archeologist with the Deschutes National Forest.

The long, slow decay of carbon-14 allows archaeologists to accurately date the relics of history back to 60,000 years.And while the carbon dating technique is well known and understood (the ratio of carbon-14 to other carbon isotopes is measured to determine the age of objects containing the remnants of any living thing), the reason for carbon-14's slow decay has not been understood. Why, exactly, does carbon-14 have a half-life of nearly 6,000 years while other light atomic nuclei have half-lives of minutes or seconds? (Half-life is the time it takes for the nuclei in a sample to decay to half the original amount.)

Fossils from so-called Peking man are extremely rare, as most of the finds disappeared during World War II. A unique discovery has been made at the Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University -- a canine tooth from Peking Man, untouched since it was dug up in the 1920s in China."This is an absolutely incredible find. We and our Chinese colleagues are overwhelmed. With today's technology, a canine tooth that has not been handled can tell us so much more than in the past, such as what they ate," says Per Ahlberg, professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Uppsala University.

Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, much quicker than scientists previously thought.Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass of Earth.The study supports a 20-year-old theory that Mars remained small because it avoided collisions with planetary building material.

Germany's ruling coalition says it has agreed a date of 2022 for the shutdown of all of its nuclear power plants.Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen made the announcement after a meeting of the ruling coalition that lasted into the early hours of Monday.Chancellor Angela Merkel had set up an ethics panel to look into nuclear power following the disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan.Germany saw mass anti-nuclear protests in the wake of the disaster.

Textiles and rope fragments found in a Peruvian cave have been dated to around 12,000 years ago, making them the oldest textiles ever found in South America, according to a report in the April issue of Current Anthropology.The items were found 30 years ago in Guitarrero Cave high in the Andes Mountains. Other artifacts found along with the textiles had been dated to 12,000 ago and even older. However, the textiles themselves had never been dated, and whether they too were that old had been controversial, according to Edward Jolie, an archaeologist at Mercyhurst College (PA) who led this latest research.

NANJING, May 21 (Xinhua) -- Several submerged sections of a tomb built for the ancestors of Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) founder Zhu Yuanzhang recently resurfaced in east China's Jiangsu Province as the result of a severe drought that is still affecting the region.Located on the west bank of Jiangsu's Hongze Lake, the tomb was built by Ming Dynasty emperor Zhu Yuanzhang in AD 1386 to honor his ancestors.

A revolutionary UK spaceplane concept has been boosted by the conclusions of an important technical review.The proposed Skylon vehicle would do the job of a big rocket but operate like an airliner, taking off and landing at a conventional runway.The European Space Agency's propulsion experts have assessed the details of the concept and found no showstoppers.They want the next phase of development to include a ground demonstration of its key innovation - its Sabre engine.

Archaeologists are researching an archaeological site near Quito, Ecuador, that reveals remains of an ancient civilization that pre-dated the Inca and produced monumental architecture and a sophisticated system of trade and communication routes that fed a flourishing culture from 800 until 1660 A.D. Renewed excavations at the site are set to begin during the summer of 2011.

China will expand a ban on free shopping bags, state media said, as it tries to further curb its addiction to plastic in a bid to rid the country of "white pollution" that clogs waterways, farms and fields.Bookstores and pharmacies nationwide will soon be forbidden to give out free plastic bags, joining the ranks of supermarkets that have had to charge for shopping bags since June 1, 2008, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Consciousness: How do you go about explaining that? Indeed, many scientists are currently studying what happens in the brain and how the mind relates to the outside world, but quantifying what gives us consciousness is proving to be a rather tough nut to crack.Is there some supernatural influence? Is it purely biological? Or is there something else, something more... physicsy?In a fascinating column for New Statesman, writer Michael Brooks touches on this tricky subject, and it reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend not so long ago.

Archaeologists excavating an abandoned nunnery in Florence on Thursday unearthed a complete skeleton that might belong to Lisa Gherardini, the woman believed to have inspired Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.Found beneath the floor of an ancient church in the now derelict convent of St. Orsola, the grave contained a whole and connected skeleton which had partially collapsed under the weight of the earth."Preliminary analysis of fragments of the cranium and the pelvis suggest that this was an adult female," Giorgio Gruppioni, an anthropologist at the University of Bologna, told reporters.

Let's face it, sitting next to your friends as they scroll through the same 40 images of their trip to Mt. Rushmore is a total snooze-fest. Feigning interest while they subject you to each smiling pose beneath George, Tom, Teddy and Abe is so boring its enough to turn you to stone.Might you politely suggest Photofly to your shutterbug friends.

Chicago, no stranger to excruciatingly harsh winters, is a city that knows how to roll with the climatological punches. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Second City is spending its temperate summer preparing for the weather it expects down the road--60 years down the road. Chicago, home to regular lake-effect snow and subzero wind chills, is prepping for a sultry, more humid future more akin to that of the Deep South, the New York Times reports.

Metamaterials could make it possible to transmit wireless power while avoiding the complications associated with microwaves or lasers, engineers at Duke University say.The material would be situated between a power source and a device to be charged, and it would serve as a sort of a bridge so that there appeared to be no space between the transmitter and the recipient.

When Watson was competing on Jeopardy!, its massive databanks were filled with encyclopedias, novels, film scripts, and history books. These days, Watson is more into medical journals and misspelled Yahoo Answers blog posts about weird rashes and vague abdominal pains. Watson is maturing, and prepping for his first non-trivia, real-world application: medical diagnoses. He's all *sniff* grown up!.

A scrappy team of NASA engineers is testing a prototype robotic lander, hoping to build into a machine the quick thinking and precision piloting Neil Armstrong needed to land on the moon.Along the way, managers want to shake up the status quo at NASA, which has spent the past 30 years managing and operating the multi-billion space shuttle and space station programs.

In an attempt to home in on habitable worlds beyond Earth, scientists have developed a new technique to approximate a planet's age."We know from studying our own planet that if a star and its planet are about 1 billion years old, only the most primitive microbial life can exist," astronomer Soren Meibom with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in an email to Discovery News.A key strategy for finding ET then, is to is to focus on planets that not only are Earth-like in size and locale, but also in age.