Newsdesk Archive

NASA on Tuesday announced a plan to develop a new deep space vehicle, one based on an earlier capsule concept, in order to send astronauts on expeditions to an asteroid, and then on to Mars.The spaceship, known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), will be based on designs originally planned for the Orion spacecraft, NASA officials announced today (May 24). Orion was part of NASA's now-canceled Constellation program, which aimed to return astronauts to the moon by the 2020s.

More than just a tool for predicting health, modern genetics is upending long-held assumptions about who we are. A new study by Harvard researchers casts new light on the intermingling and migration of European, Middle Eastern and African and populations since ancient times.

OSLO: Microbes may be harnessed more easily to generate energy after a finding about how they naturally let off tiny electrical charges, scientists said on Monday.The bacteria, found to have microscopic "wires" sticking through their cell walls, might also be used to clean up oil spills or uranium pollution, according to the report in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

ALLAHABAD: Contrary to the popular belief that humans originated from the African continent, a recent study by an anthropologist from Allahabad University (AU) suggests that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the South Asian Islands witnessed the genesis of mankind.

A robot explorer sent through the Great Pyramid of Giza has begun to unveil some of the secrets behind the 4,500-year-old pharaonic mausoleum as it transmitted the first images behind one of its mysterious doors.The images revealed hieroglyphs written in red paint that have not been seen by human eyes since the construction of the pyramid. The pictures also unveiled new details about two puzzling copper pins embedded in one of the so called "secret doors."Published in the Annales du Service Des Antiquities de l'Egypte (ASAE), the images of markings and graffiti could unlock the secrets of the monument's puzzling architecture.

Some blind people are able to use the sound of echoes to "see" where things are and to navigate their environment. Now, a new study finds that these people may even be using visual parts of their brains to process the sounds.Echolocation is best known in bats, who send out high-pitched sounds and then use the echoes to track their prey in the dark. But a select few blind people use echolocation as well, making clicking sounds with their tongues to tell them where obstacles are. The new study, published May 25 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, is the first to peer into the brains of blind people who are doing just that.

Carbon found within ancient rocks has played a crucial role developing a time line for the emergence of biological life on the planet billions of years ago. But applying cutting-edge technology to samples of ancient rocks from northern Canada has revealed the carbon-based minerals may be much younger than the rock they inhabit, a team of researchers report in the latest edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.The team -- which includes researchers from Boston College, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, NASA's Johnson Space Center and the Naval Research Laboratory -- says new evidence from Canada's Hudson Bay region shows carbonaceous particles are millions of years younger than the rock in which they're found, pointing to the likelihood that the carbon was mixed in with the metamorphic rock later than the rock's earliest formation -- estimated to be 3.8 to 4.2 billion years ago.

Victims of third-degree burns and other traumatic injuries endure pain, disfigurement, invasive surgeries and a long time waiting for skin to grow back. Improved tissue grafts designed by Cornell scientists that promote vascular growth could hasten healing, encourage healthy skin to invade the wounded area and reduce the need for surgeries.These so-called dermal templates were engineered in the lab of Abraham Stroock, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell and member of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science, in collaboration with Dr. Jason A. Spector, assistant professor of surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, and an interdisciplinary team of Ithaca and Weill scientists. The research was published online May 6 in the journal Biomaterials.

How could the inhospitable Andean highlands of Peru nurture the great Inca civilisation that dominated South America for hundreds of years? The answer, unearthed in lake sediments high up in the Peruvian Andes, seems to be llama muck.South America's most important crop is maize. Its cultivation is what allowed people to stop being hunter-gatherers and settle as farmers instead. If crops were good and grain silos bulged, they had time for mining metals, developing culture and fighting wars with their neighbours.

Our home galaxy is in the midst of a mid-life crisis, with the bulk of its star-formation behind it, a new study suggests. An impending merger with another galaxy will provide only a brief flurry of activity in an otherwise dull future.Most galaxies fall into one of two camps: blue galaxies that form stars vigorously and are full of young, blue stars, and red galaxies that produce stars sluggishly or not at all and are dominated by older, red stars.

The most common brain cell, called the astrocyte, is often overlooked in the face of its cousin, the neuron. Researchers are finally realizing their importance and have, for the first time, been able to grow them in the lab."Not a lot of attention has been paid to these cells because human astrocytes have been hard to get," study researcher Su-Chun Zhang, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "But we can make billions or trillions of them from a single stem cell.

A massive radio telescope in rural West Virginia has begun listening for signs of alien life on 86 possible Earth-like planets, US astronomers said Friday.The giant dish began this week pointing toward each of the 86 planets -- culled from a list of 1,235 possible planets identified by NASA's Kepler space telescope -- and will gather 24 hours of data on each one."It's not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they're very good places to look for ET," said University of California at Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion.

Fractured human remains found on a German river bank could provide the first compelling evidence of a major Bronze Age battle.Archaeological excavations of the Tollense Valley in northern Germany unearthed fractured skulls, wooden clubs and horse remains dating from around 1200 BC.The injuries to the skulls suggest face-to-face combat in a battle perhaps fought between warring tribes, say the researchers.

CBS NEWSThe Large Hadron Collider sits 300 feet below the surface of the Earth on the rural France-Switzerland border, spinning and smashing particles at near-light speed, costing many billions of dollars, and consuming countless hours of some of the best scientific minds in the world, mostly to answer one important question: What, exactly, is matter?.

Islamabad, May 20: One might call it plain luck or God sent, a Pakistani archaeologist was gifted a manuscript of the Quran which turned out to be 900-year-old.Archaeologist Ghulam Akbar Malik found the valuable manuscript of the Quran dating back to the 12th century while on an excavation trip to the Pakistani city of Jhelum, the Express Tribune daily reported.

The ring was found 200 miles away in a sewer by a sanitation worker who happened to have gone to the same school and recognised it.Jesse Mattos had dropped the ring, which bore his initials JTM and the year of his graduation, into a toilet in a butcher's shop where he was working when a high school student in Mount Shasta, California.Tony Congi, 52, a sanitation woker who graduated from the same high school in 1976, found the piece of jewelley in the sewer system and recognised it immediately.

rizona leaders are preparing to ask to the feds to put a halt to Arizona's medical marijuana program.* UPDATE: Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne says no dispensary permits will be issued until a federal court rules on the legality of the program. He's not sure how long that could take.* The Arizona Department of Health Services just put this on its Web site:We understand that the Governor and the Attorney General are preparing to file a declaratory judgment in federal court regarding the implementation of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act. When further information is available, ADHS will update you. Until then, the Department will continue to issue Qualifying Patient and Designated Caregiver Registry Cards on our website.

Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids.The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak.She says she was amazed at how much she and her team has found.

THEY might be ancient graffiti tags left by a worker or symbols of religious significance. A robot has sent back the first images of markings on the wall of a tiny chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt that have not been seen for 4500 years. It has also helped settle the controversy about the only metal known to exist in the pyramid, and shows a "door" that could lead to another hidden chamber.The pyramid is thought to have been built as a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu, and is the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world still standing. It contains three main chambers: the Queen's Chamber, the Grand Gallery and the King's Chamber, which has two air shafts connecting it with the outside world. Strangely, though, there are two tunnels, about 20 centimetres by 20 centimetres, that extend from the north and south walls of the Queen's Chamber and stop at stone doors before they reach the outside of the pyramid (see diagram).

A detailed comparison of DNA and RNA in human cells has uncovered a surprising number of cases where the corresponding sequences are not, as has long been assumed, identical. The RNA-DNA differences generate proteins that do not precisely match the genes that encode them.

Archaeologists have discovered a 12,000-year-old iron oxide mine in Chile that marks the oldest evidence of organized mining ever found in the Americas, according to a report in the June issue of Current Anthropology.

Analysis of a 440-year-old document reveals new details about native population decline in the heartland of the Inca Empire following Spanish conquest in the 16th century.

While dinosaurs ruled the daytime, the earliest mammals may have prowled the night, guided by an elaborate sense of smell that set them apart from their ancestors and paved the path to modern mammals.By recreating the size and shape of the brains of two ancient great-uncles of modern mammals, researchers, whose work is published today in the journal Science, find that the initial boost in mammalian brain size came largely from a bigger olfactory system.

X-ray vision has long been a popular trope of science fiction and comic books. Many a superhero has summoned the unique power to squint their way to fame by glaring through walls.Arguably superheroes in their own right, physical therapists could soon be using a device, called AnatOnMe, that gives them the powr to see beneath a patient's skin. While it's not exactly X-ray vision, the Microsoft researchers who developed the technique hope its valiant power of persuasion will motivate patients to keep up with their therapies.

Researchers at the Lulea University of Technology in Sweden have developed an electric wheelchair that lets visually impaired users "see" their surroundings.The vehicle uses a laser to scan its environment and create a 3D map of potential obstacles such as nearby people or open doors. It alerts the wheelchair driver to these hazards via vibrating touch feedback, which lets them feel when they need to move out of the way using the wheelchair's joystick.

In days a high level global Commission, including five former Heads of State, will call on global leaders to end the utterly failed 'war on drugs'. But to get action it needs massive global public support. I just signed a urgent petition which will be delivered to the UN Secretary General in days.Click here to join me:http://www.avaaz.org/en/end_the_war_on_drugs_a/96.php

Marijuana advocates filed a suit in a U.S. Circuit Court today to force the Obama administration to answer a petition that seeks to have the federal government recognize cannabis as a drug with acceptable medical uses.The suit wants the court to order the administration to answer the original request within 60 days. This after nine years of stalling on the matter, according to California NORML, which is party to Monday's suit.If the coalition of pro-pot organizations is successful, marijuana would be taken out of the federal Schedule I category -- the group of outlaw drugs with no legitimate uses, to which cocaine doesn't even belong -- and, presumably, made available as a medicine from coast-to-cost. Wishful thinking?.

Two UK astronomers have found that the giant black holes in the centre of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the Universe. Dr Alejo Martinez-Sansigre of the University of Portsmouth and Prof. Steve Rawlings of the University of Oxford made the new discovery by using radio, optical and X-ray data. They publish their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Japan is considering a plan that would make it compulsory for all new buildings and houses to come fitted with solar panels by 2030, a business daily said Sunday.The plan, expected to be unveiled at the upcoming G8 Summit in France, aims to show Japan's resolve to encourage technological innovation and promote the wider use of renewable energy, the Nikkei daily said.Japan has reeled from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the nuclear crisis they triggered as it battles to stabilise the crippled Fukushima Daiichi atomic power plant.

Tiny fossil teeth discovered in Inner Mongolia are a new species of birch mouse, indicating that ancestors of the small rodent are much older than previously reported, according to paleontologist Yuri Kimura, Southern Methodist University in Dallas.Fossils of the new species were discovered in sediments that are 17 million years old, said Kimura, who identified the new species and named it Sicista primus to include the Latin word for "first.

The inner core of the Earth is simultaneously melting and freezing due to circulation of heat in the overlying rocky mantle, according to new research from the University of Leeds, UC San Diego and the Indian Institute of Technology.The findings, published tomorrow in Nature, could help us understand how the inner core formed and how the outer core acts as a 'geodynamo', which generates the planet's magnetic field.

From the outside, the Rosslyn Chapel does not look like a suitable place to hide Jesus' head. It's not much bigger than a country church, standing inconspicuously on a small hill in the miniature Scottish town of Roslin, a few miles south of Edinburgh. Its Gothic pinnacles, flying buttresses, and pointed arches have been battered by 500 years of capricious weather, and for years it has been encased in an exoskeleton of scaffolding as restoration efforts plod along. Until recently, it was covered by a giant black canopy.

Most people go through their daily lives assuming that tomorrow will be a lot like today. No pits of fire will open up, society won't collapse, and the world, most likely, won't end.But for others, doom has a certain appeal.The most famous example these days is Harold Camping, a California-based Christian radio broadcaster who believes that May 21, 2011, will mark Judgment Day, ushering in five months of torment for the unsaved until the universe finally ends on Oct. 21. Camping has bought billboards and dispatched caravans of believers around the country, warning the world of its fate.

There has been good news over the past 24 hours for Baton Rouge and New Orleans.Diversion of rising Mississippi River waters though the Morganza Spillway northwest of the cities and into the Atchafalaya River basin appears to have helped lower the chances that the urban areas will be swamped.Major tourist attractions and historic sites seem likely to be spared, including a necklace of antebellum-era plantations along the Great River Road. A few, including the white-pillared Nottoway Plantation, posted assurances of their dryness online, along with photos of nearby levees keeping water contained.

Pakistan is going to lose one of the most precious rock art carvings due to construction of the Diamer-Basha Dam. The proposed site of the dam hosts some 30,000 ancient art carvings and inscriptions which may vanish forever due to the construction of this reservoir.The northern area of Pakistan is a mountainous region which lies between the western Himalayas, the Korakoram in the east and the Hindukush in the west. Here, the junction of the ancient routes made the upper Indus a cradle and crossroads of different civilizations.

A University of Utah study shows that men hit harder when they stand on two legs than when they are on all fours, and when hitting downward rather than upward, giving tall, upright males a fighting advantage.This may help explain why our ape-like human ancestors began walking upright and why women tend to prefer tall men."The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that our ancestors adopted bipedal posture so that males would be better at beating and killing each other when competing for females," says David Carrier, a biology professor who conducted the study. "Standing up on their hind legs allowed our ancestors to fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making punching much more dangerous.

The protective excavation of the No.1 site at the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site was launched on May 16. This is the largest protective excavation since the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site was first excavated in 1921.Largest protective excavation in historyIn order to eliminate safety hazards, such as sliding, holes, cracks and dangerous rocks in the sections of cave deposits that may have been caused by the long-term weathering of natural forces, the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site Administration and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly launched a protective excavation of the western section at the No.1 site (Ape-man Cave).

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida - A mammoth cosmic ray detector arrived at the International Space Station on Wednesday, a $2 billion experiment that will search the invisible universe and help explain how everything came to be.It's the most expensive cargo ever carried by a space shuttle and almost didn't make it to orbit before the fleet retires this summer. It was launched this week aboard Endeavour on the second-to-last flight.Two astronaut teams were assigned to attach the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the outside of the space station on Thursday, using a pair of robot arms, where it will stay for the life of the outpost.

Sperm whales like to be individuals; they use accents to identify themselves to others in their extended family group, new research finds.The accents are specific to one call, or "coda," used by whales worldwide, enabling them to recognize strangers from any region."It's not that the individuals in a group are making different codas, they don't have different names, they just say the same things in different ways," said study researcher Shane Gero, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. "We believe they can pick between each other, that they can tell each other apart by this call.

The mysterious "worm lizard" has finally found its evolutionary home; the legless animals are closely related to a group of lizards named the lacertids, a new fossil intermediate indicates.The worm lizards, also called amphisbaenians, look so similar to primitive snakes that researchers weren't clear which group they belonged to, the snake or lizard family."They look like, basically, worms, or a group of snakes that we call blind snakes," said study researcher Robert Reisz, of the University of Toronto, Mississagua, in Canada. "They burrow for a living and eat grubs.

A gut feeling may help you make a quick decision, but one study credits the digestive system for possibly influencing our mental states and behavior as well.The results help scientists understand how inflammatory bowel diseases, irritable bowel syndrome and other digestive problems relate to the psychological issues that often accompany them. Anxiety and depression commonly occur alongside these bowel conditions.Scientists want to know whether certain gut bacteria influence humans' behavior. If so, doctors may be able to battle the physical and psychological effects of disease-causing bacteria by developing treatments such as probiotics.

Is truth stranger than conspiracy-theory fiction? A new book on Area 51 that's already generating a ton of buzz says there was no alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Instead, Stalin did it--maybe.According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored "Area 51," the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre-looking, genetically engineered child-sized pilots. Then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was hoping, Jacobsen alleges, that the news would cause widespread panic in the U.S.

Tests given to an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu suggest that our intuitions about geometry are innate.Researchers examined how the Mundurucu think about lines, points and angles, comparing the results with equivalent tests on French and US schoolchildren.The Mundurucu showed comparable understanding, and even outperformed the students on tasks that asked about forms on spherical surfaces.The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An Amazonian tribe has no abstract concept of time, say researchers.The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space - as in our idea of, for example, "working through the night".The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognise events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.

Earthquake scientists trying to unravel the mysteries of an unfelt, weeks-long seismic phenomenon called episodic tremor and slip have discovered a strange twist. The tremor can suddenly reverse direction and travel back through areas of the fault that it had ruptured in preceding days, and do so 20 to 40 times faster than the original fault rupture.

The Author of the Month for June will be Jason Gregory promoting his new book 'Way of the Weirdo'. He will be with us throughout June to discuss his book and his article on the AoM messageboards.

As recently as two weeks ago, Gary Vollmer was absolutely certain that on May 21, 2011, God would send devastating earthquakes, raise believers to heaven in the "rapture," and then destroy the world five months later. Now that it hasn't happened, Vollmer is unfazed."God is God, God's going to do what he has to do," he says.True, he says, believers got some of the details wrong. But the thrust of the message is right."Judgment day has come and passed, but it was a spiritual judgment on the world," he explains. "There is no more salvation. Salvation is over with. The fact is we have 153 days, and on the 21st of October, the world will end.

Billions of dollars lost each year as waste heat from industrial processes can be converted into electricity with a technology being developed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.The high-efficiency thermal waste heat energy converter actively cools electronic devices, photovoltaic cells, computers and large waste heat-producing systems while generating electricity, according to Scott Hunter, who leads the development team. The potential for energy savings is enormous.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A pattern of earthen berms, spread across a northern peninsula of the big island of Hawaii, is providing archeologists with clues to exactly how residents farmed in paradise long before Europeans arrived at the islands.The findings suggest that simple, practical decisions made by individual households were eventually adopted by the ruling class as a means to improve agricultural productivity.

Scientists have found that our cousins the Neanderthal employed sophisticated hunting strategies similar to the tactics used much later by modern humans. The new findings come from the analysis of subtle chemical variations in reindeer teeth.Reindeer and caribou are nowadays restricted to the northernmost regions of Eurasia and America. But many thousands of years ago, large reindeer herds roamed throughout Europe and were hunted by the Neanderthal people.

The four companies that recently won Nasa funds to develop astronaut "taxis" say they are convinced there will be a market to sustain their businesses.SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corporation are in line to receive $270m to help refine their spacecraft designs over the next year.They plan eventually to sell seats in these ships to Nasa and other agencies wanting to put humans in orbit.

Geologists have long puzzled over anecdotal reports of strange atmospheric phenomena in the days before big earthquakes. But good data to back up these stories has been hard to come by.In recent years, however, various teams have set up atmospheric monitoring stations in earthquake zones and a number of satellites are capable of sending back data about the state of the upper atmosphere and the ionosphere during an earthquake.

WE ALL BRING OUR OWN BAGGAGE AND FILTERS when it comes to evaluating the evidence from the past. I'm as guilty as the next person. When they told me in preparation for my first visit to Malta in 1990 that there were ruins of buildings older than the pyramids, I thought: well that's interesting but there can't be much left to see but excavation trenches and maybe a few foundation stones. Okay, I'll give my imagination a workout.

The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is starting to heal, say researchers in Australia. The team is the first to detect a recovery in baseline average springtime ozone levels in the region, 22 years after the Montreal Protocol to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and related ozone-destroying chemicals came into force.Each spring, those chlorine- and bromine-releasing chemicals eat a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic. Thanks to the Montreal agreement, levels of anthropogenic ozone depleters detected in the region's stratosphere have been falling since around the turn of the millennium. However, detecting any corresponding ozone recovery has been difficult.

An international team, of scientists, led by a team at Monash University has found the key to the hydrogen economy could come from a very simple mineral, commonly seen as a black stain on rocks.Their findings, developed with the assistance of researchers at UC Davis in the USA and using the facilities at the Australian Synchrotron, was published in the journal Nature Chemistry yesterday 15 May 2011.

Physical anthropologist Chris Kirk has announced the discovery of a previously unknown species of fossil primate, Mescalerolemur horneri, in the Devil's Graveyard badlands of West Texas.Mescalerolemur lived during the Eocene Epoch about 43 million years ago, and would have most closely resembled a small present-day lemur. Mescalerolemur is a member of an extinct primate group – the adapiforms – that were found throughout the Northern Hemisphere in the Eocene. However, just like Mahgarita stevensi, a younger fossil primate found in the same area in 1973, Mescalerolemur is more closely related to Eurasian and African adapiforms than those from North America.

A rocky world orbiting a nearby star has been confirmed as the first planet outside our solar system to meet key requirements for sustaining life, scientists said on Monday.Modeling of planet Gliese 581d shows it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life, they said.It orbits a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, located around 20 light years from Earth, which makes it one of our closest neighbors.

"Human beings are more or less like a computer," Jian-Jun Shu tells PhysOrg.com. "We do computing work, and our DNA can be used in computing operations." Shu is a professor at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. "For some problems, DNA-based computing could replace silicon-based computing, offering many advantages.".

Billions of dollars lost each year as waste heat from industrial processes can be converted into electricity with a technology being developed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.The high-efficiency thermal waste heat energy converter actively cools electronic devices, photovoltaic cells, computers and large waste heat-producing systems while generating electricity, according to Scott Hunter, who leads the development team. The potential for energy savings is enormous.

Efficiency is a problem with today's solar panels; they only collect about 20 percent of available light. Now, a University of Missouri engineer has developed a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 percent of available light, and he plans to make prototypes available to consumers within the next five years.

More than 1 million feral camels are thrashing the remote Australian desert, destroying water supplies and disturbing Aboriginal communities to the tune of 10 million Australian dollars a year.As part of plans to contain the camel's havoc and reduce the animals' numbers, managers have launched a website, CamelScan, where the public can report feral camel sightings and damages using a Google maps-based tool.

A study completed by scientists at the University of Utah shows that men can strike objects with greater power while standing, as opposed to kneeling or being down on all four limbs, and that downward thrusts are more forceful than lateral or upward thrusts. It provides additional support for the hypothesis that bipedalism was essential to the survival and evolutionary ascent of humans, and that fighting advantage was a key.Through a series of controlled experiments, biology professor David Carrier of the University of Utah had male boxers and martial arts professionals throw punches four ways: forward, sideways, down and up. For the forward and sideways punches, they struck a punching bag fitted with a sensor, and for the upward and downward punches, they struck a padded block connected to a lever that moved up and down as it was hit.

Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon enjoyed a privileged lifestyle in what is now Luxor about 3,500 years ago. But she may not have been a happy princess towards the end. Two of her three main coronary arteries were calcified, a marker of atherosclerosis. Someone in her situation today would have bypass surgery.Scientists discovered her condition with a full-body CT scan of her mummified remains. The princess has thus become the oldest known case of coronary artery disease. Researchers presented their finding at the International Conference of Non-Invasive Cardiovascular Imaging in Amsterdam. [A. H. Allam et al., "Atherosclerosis Was Common in Ancient Humans: Results of the Horus Study of Ancient Egyptian Mummies"].

Can we get a hallelujah? Scientists reckon Apple directly works on the bits of our brains that deal with religion, according to a BBC programme investigating brands. Secrets of the Superbrands shoves an Apple acolyte into a brain scanner and records the physiological effect of gadget lust, with fascinating results.Shown on BBC Three last night and available on iPlayer until 9 June, Secrets of the Superbrands shows tech-baffled presenter Alex Riley exploring the appeal of brands such as Nokia, Google and Microsoft. He starts the programme, and the series, with the world's biggest brand: Apple.

An exploding star spotted in 2005 defies the cuurent theories and observations. The theory of how it ignited could explain something unexpected: Why we have calcium in our bones. Astronomers have reported a whole new type of supernova, which seems to spew out calcium and titanium. While most reports focused on the calcium, it's the titanium that's really interesting - the finding could negate ongoing efforts to find signs of dark matter at the center of the Milky Way.

A red-crested tree rat, a rodent about the size of a guinea pig, has been sighted for the first time in decades. The relatively unknown creature made a casual reappearance in a Colombian nature reserve after over a century, and even stayed around for a photo shoot.Volunteers at the El Dorado Nature Reserve in the Sierra Nevada were overjoyed to receive an evening visit from the red-crested tree rat. The last recorded sighting was in 1898, when two of the critters were found and studied, and were the subsequent source of all information about the rat, until now.

Near the end of the new exhibit Synth-ethic at Vienna's Natural History Museum, visitors are encouraged to confide their anxieties about biotechnology to sculptures that are a twist on Guatemalan worry dolls. Instead of traditional materials, these tiny dolls are constructed from cultured tissue, making them "semi-living," according to the artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. The dolls, they write, "address the fascination with the precarious border between life and non-life, as well as with its artificial synthesis".

If you could snap your fingers and invent something that would cure a pressing global problem, what would it be?A cheap way to extract salt from seawater so we can drink it? Several countries are already coping with the impact of rising populations and shrinking lakes and wells. For example, in Amman, Jordan, the pipes go dry on some days because there is no water. Droughts in China, Australia and Ukraine have led to crop failures, rising food prices and dwindling grain stocks.

The Met Police is fighting a legal battle to keep files detailing the investigation into the notorious Jack the Ripper case secret - to maintain confidentiality for Victorian 'supergrasses'.The documents are said to include four new suspects for the serial killings which terrorised Whitechapel in 1888 and have become one of the world's most infamous unsolved cases.The historic ledgers have 36,000 entries detailing police interaction with informants between 1888 to 1912.

Researchers examining the San Andreas Fault in central California have found evidence that distant earthquakes can trigger episodes of accelerated (but still very slow) slip motion, deep on the fault.While a sudden slip on a fault generates earthquakes capable of strong shaking, a fault can also slip slowly. Sometimes, these slow movements on a fault, known as creep events, are accompanied by a weak ground vibration known as a tectonic tremor, which can be detected on sensitive seismometers.

Islamabad, May 19(ANI): Pakistan is going to lose one of the world's most precious rock art carvings due to the construction of the Diamer-Basha Dam, as the proposed site hosts some 30,000 ancient carvings and inscriptions.The Basha-Diamer area holds thousands of very important rock carvings, which may vanish forever due to the construction of this reservoir.

Work has started to excavate three Bronze Age burial mounds on Golden Cap in Dorset.The 4,000-year-old mounds are at risk from coastal erosion and are being excavated by the National Trust before they are lost to the sea.There are five burial mounds visible on the summit of Golden Cap, the highest point of the coast path through Dorset at 191m (626ft) above sea level.

Black holes are the universe's Energizer Bunnies. They are the most efficient "machines" for transforming matter into energy through their intense gravitational pull.For example, the early universe was ablaze with untold supermassive black holes pouring out prodigious amounts of energy from the cores of galaxies. 11 billion years ago the black holes did the heavy lifting by reheating the universe and therefore inhibiting new generations of stars to form in some small galaxies.As I mentioned in a previous blog, far-advanced technological civilizations might be highly motivated to manufacture their own mini-black holes as the ultimate power sources capable of Herculean feats.

Nearly half of the New Testament is a forgery, according to a provocative new book which charges that the Apostle Paul authored only a fraction of letters attributed to him, and the Apostle Peter just wrote nothing.Written by Bart Ehrman, a former evangelical Christian and now agnostic professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the book claims to unveil "one of the most unsettling ironies of the early Christian tradition:" the use of deception to promote the truth.

TWO months after the explosions and radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, the prime minister, Naoto Kan, has announced that the country will not build any new reactors.If Kan really means it, the government will have to abandon the plans for expanding nuclear power it adopted only last year. To make up the energy shortfall, Kan has set the ambitious goal of using renewables.

Funding woes may have shut down a major SETI observatory, but the search for extraterrestrial intelligence isn't dead. In fact, it's more focused than ever.Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, the SETI Institute of California, and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory are listening for alien signals from dozens of planets in the so-called "habitable zone" of their stars, the first time a targeted search of this kind has been undertaken."We've honed the list to the really exciting exoplanets," says team member Dan Werthimer of UC Berkeley.

The astronauts aboard the orbiting shuttle-station complex are accomplishing the No. 1 objective of their mission.Early Thursday, the two crews successfully hoisted a cosmic ray detector from Endeavour, for installation on the International Space Station. The $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was delivered by space shuttle Endeavour.The instrument has a 3-foot magnet at its core. It will study the invisible universe, searching for both antimatter and dark matter for the rest of the life of the space station.

WASHINGTON, May 18 (Reuters) - Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a "new normal" of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday."It's a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we're seeing," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.

Pluto, please step aside. The beleaguered world has for the past several years been at the center of the debate about what defines a planet. Now a new crop of astronomical objects has arrived to further cloud the matter.The Pluto issue was formally resolved in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) relegated Pluto and its diminutive ilk to dwarf planet status. (The conversation has not stopped, however; among a number of recent Pluto-centric books are titles like The Case for Pluto and How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.

Researchers have discovered the genes for sodium channels that occur in animal neurons in the single-celled choanoflagellate -- an essential component of animal nervous systems that evolved prior to the evolution of those systems."The first nervous systems appeared in jellyfish-like animals six hundred million years ago or so," says Harold Zakon, professor of neurobiology , a member of The University of Texas at Austin that made the discovery. "It was thought that sodium channels evolved around that time. We have now discovered that sodium channels were around well before nervous systems evolved.

A sharp increase in forest destruction in March and April in the Amazon has led Brazil to announce the creation of an emergency task force to fight against deforestation.The two-month total of 593 square kilometers (368 square miles) deforested represents a six-fold increase compared to the same period last year, according to official statistics.The office will be comprised of government experts and representatives of states badly impacted by recent deforestation, according to Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira, who announced the office at a press conference.

Researchers from Canada studying the highly salty coastal lagoons at Los Roques, Venezuela and the microbial mats found at the bottom of the sea there, have discovered that oxygen levels in the mats, at least in the day time, are high enough to support the development of mobile life forms. Led by University of Alberta palaeontologist, Murray Gingras, the team writes in Nature Geoscience, that levels of oxygen on the ocean floor were up to four times as high as that near the surface; high enough to support the development of mobile sea life; which the team believes could explain how early life forms could have evolved in waters with high salt concentrations.

Rare butterflies are thriving after targeted efforts to conserve them in nature reserves, but experts say that government cuts could threaten endangered species.Newly released figures from the charity Butterfly Conservation show that the endangered wood white increased in number by 600% in Britain last summer after a major decline, while the rare marsh fritillary increased by 134% and the silver-spotted skipper, once on the brink of extinction, rallied with a 78% rise.

In a new study, scientists have proposed that mini black holes may interact with matter very differently than previously thought. If the proposal is correct, it would mean that the time it would take for a mini black hole to swallow the Earth would be many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe.In their paper, which is posted at arXiv.org, Aaron P. VanDevender from Halcyon Molecular in Redwood City, California, and J. Pace VanDevender from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, wanted to find a way to detect the mini black holes that are thought to exist in nature. Their calculations suggest that mini black holes may be passing through the Earth on a daily basis, and pose a very minimal threat to the planet.

Films depicting the 1787 mutiny aboard the British ship HMS Bounty show sailors living cheek by jowl, being forced to dance, enduring storm-ridden Cape of Good Hope crossings to satisfy the ship captain's ego and being flogged for trivial reasons.We may not think that these harsh conditions have much relevance today. But mutinies continue to occur, especially in the armed forces of developing nations. And mutinies have similarities to other types of rebellions, including worker strikes, riots, prison rebellions and political uprisings.

Florence, 12 May (AKI) - Archaeologists digging for the remains of a 16th-century woman believed to be the model for Leonardo's Mona Lisa masterpiece have found a crypt and a stairway to a probably second tomb inside a former medieval convent in central Florence."What we found today confirms the precise corroboration between the historical documents and the preliminary results that emerged from geo-radar soundings," said Stefania Romano, a spokeswoman for the group behind the excavation at the former convent of Saint Orsula.

MSNBCNew research suggests that laboratory-created stem cells might not be a solution to all the ethical problems created by stem cells from embryos, as many as hoped.Yang Xu, professor of molecular biology, and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, in a paper published Friday in the prestigious British journal Nature find that so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) generate an immune response causing a mouse to reject them even when the iPSCs are made from the cells of that same mouse.

A real-life diagnostic device that does something akin to what the tricorder did on "Star Trek" just might earn its developers $10 million prize. And yes, the proposed competition is actually being called the Tricorder X Prize. It's just one more example of life imitating "Trek." In the words of Mr. Spock: Fascinating!The objective of the project, currently being explored by the X Prize Foundation and Qualcomm, is not just to create one more cool gadget for "Trek" fans ... although the idea of a hand-held, automated medical diagnostic device is pretty cool. The objective is to extend the reach of health information and services to billions more people in the world.

For the past few years, researchers have been using quantum dots to increase the light absorption and overall efficiency of solar cells. Now, researchers have taken a step further, demonstrating that quantum dots with a built-in electric charge can increase the efficiency of InAs/GaAs quantum dot solar cells by 50% or more.The researchers, Kimberly Sablon and John W. Little (US Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland), Vladimir Mitin, Andrei Sergeev, and Nizami Vagidov (University of Buffalo in Buffalo, New York), and Kitt Reinhardt (AFOSR/NE in Arlington, Virginia) have published their study on the increased solar cell efficiency in a recent issue of Nano Letters.

Light does not travel at the same speed in all directions under the effect of an electromagnetic field. Although predicted by theory, this counter-intuitive effect has for the first time been demonstrated experimentally in a gas by a French team from the Laboratoire 'Collisions Agregats Reactivite' at CNRS. The researchers measured with extreme precision, of around one billionth m/s, the difference between the light propagation speeds in one direction and in the opposite direction. These results open the way to more in-depth research aimed at improving the model that describes elementary particle interactions. Published on the 11 May 2011 in the journal Physical Review Letters, they point to novel applications in optics.

It must have been an awe-inspiring sight: four metres tall and weighing six tonnes. Its sharp teeth delivered a bone-crushing bite. Yet even "the tyrant from Zhucheng" reached its inevitable, ignominious end. Over time, half its skull was torn from its skeleton and jumbled with the bones of less imposing creatures at this site in what is now China's eastern Shandong province.Last month – tens of millions of years later – researchers resurrected Zhuchengtyrannus magnus. Impressive though the reconstruction was, it was just one of a succession of fossil discoveries that have put this "dinosaur city" on the map.

One cell is all it takes to rebuild a complete, functioning flatworm, researchers have learned. The animals possess a special type of cell throughout their bodies, which shares some qualities with human embryonic stem cells. If scientists can find out how this special cell works, they could someday study ways to use the cells for human tissue regeneration.The findings are the first time pluripotent stem cells have been found in an adult animal, according to researchers at MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The No. 1 reactor's emergency cooling system at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant was not functioning even before tsunami triggered by the March 11 earthquake struck the facility, according to initial data released on May 16 by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO).

The planetary system around the red dwarf Gliese 581, one of the closest stars to the Sun in the galaxy, has been the subject of several studies aiming to detect the first potentially habitable exoplanet. Two candidates have already been discarded, but a third planet, Gliese 581d, can be considered the first confirmed exoplanet that could support Earth-like life. This is the conclusion of a team of scientists from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (CNRS, UPMC, ENS Paris, Ecole Polytechnique) in Paris, France, whose study is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Hamilton, ON (May 17, 2011) - For the first time, researchers at McMaster University have conclusive evidence that bacteria residing in the gut influence brain chemistry and behaviour.

Tuesday evening, residents across Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Suffolk, Va., dialed 911 to report what sounded what a large explosion. Today, a NASA scientist explained that it might have been a meteor.The area is home to several military bases, so residents are accustomed to loud sounds. This was out of the ordinary, though; several 911 callers reported a loud noise that rattled their screen doors and windows. One woman told the local television station, WAVY, that it felt like an earthquake.That's not uncharacteristic for a sonic boom created by a meteor, said Joe Zawodny, a senior research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center.

Picture the scene: your boss phones to say he is working from home. A calm descends over the office. Workers lean back in their chairs. Feet go up on desks - this shift is going to be pretty chilled.Suddenly, a super-sized video feed of your boss, projected onto to the front of a helium-filled balloon equipped with a loudspeaker, floats silently into the room and starts issuing orders from above your head. Not such a good day.

Newly unearthed documents challenge whether Wernher von Braun, Nazi physicist and crucial figure in the US space programme, was really the inventor of Hitler's infamous V-2 rocket.German academic Uta Mense has discovered a bitter rivalry between von Braun and colleagues at the Nazi rocket base Peenemünde, one of whom told the Americans von Braun had had nothing to do with the V-2. More than 3,000 Vergeltungswaffe 2 (Vengeance Weapon 2) ballistic missiles were launched in the final years of World War II.

A German court has convicted John Demjanjuk of participating in the murder of more than 28,000 Jews at World War II death camps. The 91-year-old, who for years fought deportation from the United States, faces five years in prison. Now that Demjanjuk has been sentenced, how many Nazi war criminals are still at large?.

A 16-year-old from the Toronto area used a supercomputer system to find a new drug combination that shows potential in treating the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, and won top honors for his work.Marshall Zhang, an 11th-grade student at Richmond Hill's Bayview Secondary School, received first place Tuesday (May 10) in the 2011 Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge, a contest in which students conduct their own research projects with the help of mentors.