Newsdesk Archive

Buildings that eat smog? Alcoa, a maker of aluminum products, introduced an architectural panel Thursday that it says not only cleans itself but also the air around it.The aluminum panel has a titanium dioxide coating that, when combined with sunlight, acts as a catalyst to break down pollutants such as smog into harmless matter that rain washes away.

An ecosystem is like a great organism in that the species in it behave in a manner similar to the manner in which cells behave within the human body: the group forms a permanent entity, although the entities that form it are constantly being substituted. This is is the conclusion that can be drawn from a theoretical study carried out by researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M -- Carlos III University of Madrid).

Io is the most volcanic world in the Solar System and scientists think they now have a better idea of why that is.The moon of Jupiter erupts about 100 times more lava on to its surface each year than does Earth.A re-assessment of data from Nasa's Galileo probe suggests all this activity is being fed from a giant magma ocean under Io's crust.

The world is set to consume three times more natural resources than current rates by the middle of the century, according to a United Nations report.It predicts that humanity will annually use about 140 billion tonnes of fossil fuels, minerals and ores by 2050.The authors call for resource consumption to be "decoupled" from economic growth, and producers to do "more with less".Growth in population and prosperity are the main drivers, they observe.

A 2,300-year climate record University of Pittsburgh researchers recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals that as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rise, the planet's densely populated tropical regions will most likely experience severe water shortages as the crucial summer monsoons become drier. The Pitt team found that equatorial regions of South America already are receiving less rainfall than at any point in the past millennium.The researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that a nearly 6-foot-long sediment core from Laguna Pumacocha in Peru contains the most detailed geochemical record of tropical climate fluctuations yet uncovered. The core shows pronounced dry and wet phases of the South American summer monsoons and corresponds with existing geological data of precipitation changes in the surrounding regions.

Attacks on churches, communal divisions – Cairo has recently seen conflicts between some Muslims and Coptic Christians. But who exactly are the Copts and how did they come to be in Egypt? Part of the answer lies in Coptic art.The sands of Egypt make it an archaeological wonderland. Ancient Egyptian statues and buildings rise above those sands, and these stony sepulchres made the wonders of the pharaohs famous down the millennia. But in the 19th and 20th centuries excavators such as William Flinders Petrie developed truly scientific archaeological techniques and looked beyond the tombs of the kings into the buried worlds of Egypt's past. Petrie, who excavated at Fayoum, looked not just for treasures but pottery and cloth.

A new mathematical model could fuel a long-standing debate over the nature of Aboriginal population growth in Australia, prior to European settlement.The model supports the idea that there was a marked increase in the growth of the continent's Aboriginal population towards the end of the Holocene, says ecologist Professor Christopher Johnson of the University of Tasmania.

Electromagnetic interference is everywhere, coming from appliances and electrical systems.Now a team from Microsoft Research wants to harness this unorganized ambient noise as an affordable way to control everything from the TV channel to room temperature. Their experiments demonstrate that human interaction with the noise is actually predictable.

By building a robotic ground-effect vehicle that flies inches above the ground, researchers from Japan may be offering a glimpse into the future of high-speed rail. The researchers, led by Yusuke Sugahara at Tohoku University, are currently testing the robotic prototype, which they have described earlier this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Shanghai.

NUUK, Greenland (Reuters) – Arctic nations agreed on Thursday to improve cooperation including on preventing oil spills as a thaw of ice and snow opens access to the remote region's rich mineral and petroleum resources.The Arctic Council, comprising eight countries that surround the Arctic and representatives of indigenous Arctic peoples, signed a deal to split up search-and-rescue responsibilities as far as the North Pole in case of shipwrecks or plane crashes.

To most Costa Ricans – Ticos and expats alike – Costa Rican history begins with the arrival of the Spanish in 1502. Recent developments and archeological finds are painting a far different picture however. In fact, there is increasing evidence that ancient cultures thrived in the land of Pura Vida long before European explorers cast covetous eyes upon its beauty and natural riches.Three archeological sites in various parts of the country give an interesting glimpse into pre-Columbian life: Guayabo and La Montana complex in Turrialba, the footpaths of Lake Arenal, and . Each site offers a different window into who the ancient Costa Ricans were and how they lived.

When Sada Mire fled war-torn Somalia as a frightened teenager, the nation was descending into darkness, mired in the grip of a long civil conflict.But several years later, when she returned to the Horn of Africa as an ambitious archaeologist, her fierce determination and meticulous fieldwork brought to light the region's rich cultural heritage.In 2007, her archaeological pursuits resulted in the discovery of 5,000-year-old rock art in Somaliland, a breakaway state in the northwest corner of Somalia.

The next time you're having a disagreement with a work colleague or annoying neighbour, bear this in mind: Chances are you're related.A new study of DNA patterns throughout the world suggests that North America was originally populated by no more than 70 people.Most experts agree that, around 14,000 years ago, a group of humans crossed the land bridge that connected what is now Siberia in Russia with Alaska.

A Navy-funded effort to harness nuclear fusion power reports that its unconventional plasma device is operating as designed and generating "positive results" more than halfway through the project.The latest quarterly update from EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. comes amid other signs that seemingly oddball approaches to fusion research may not be all that oddball after all. Just last week, General Fusion announced that Amazon.com's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, was part of a $19.5 million investment round to further the company's plan to take advantage of a technology called magnetized target fusion. Another billionaire, Paul Allen, is an investor in Tri Alpha Energy, which is working on its own hush-hush fusion project (and occasionally publishing its research).

By replacing catalysts made of expensive noble metals like platinum with cheaper, earth-abundant materials, researchers have taken a step toward enabling the large-scale production of hydrogen from sunlight and water. In a recent study, the researchers have demonstrated that catalysts made of molecular clusters based on molybdenum and sulphur can generate hydrogen from sunlight at rates comparable to those of platinum.

Saving the oceans seems like an impossibly daunting task, one most people would have no idea how to even begin. So we asked 12 of the world's foremost ocean experts--scientists, policymakers, and a reality TV star/sea captain--how they'd do it. The answers were varied, from political to high-tech solutions, from big to small, but they were all very clear: this is something we all must do, and it's something we all can do.

A 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite from northwest Africa has yielded one of the earliest minerals of the solar system.Officially called krotite, the mineral had never been found in nature before, though it is a human-made constituent of some high-temperature concrete, according to study researcher Anthony Kampf, curator of Mineral Sciences at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County."This is one that simply was not known in nature until we found it here," Kampf told LiveScience. "That's pretty dramatic.

Astronomers from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland have found that a recently discovered asteroid has been following Earth in its motion around the Sun for at least the past 250,000 years, and may be intimately related to the origin of our planet.Their work appears in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Marsupials aren't as sociable as they used to be.Today most marsupials are solitary, but this 64-million-year-old adult female and juvenile of the extinct marsupial Pucadelphys andinus were found in a bumper cache of 35 skeletons.Sandrine Ladevèze of Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels discovered the group in rocks from Tiupampa, Bolivia. The marsupials were buried together when their riverside burrows flooded in the early Palaeocene epoch - a crucial period for South American marsupials. Dinosaurs had just gone extinct, and remaining species were taking advantage of the ecological niches this had freed up to diversify.

A DIVER carrying a computer that tries to recognise dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins.Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between "bring the surfboard to the man" and "bring the man to the surfboard", for example.

Arlington, Virginia (CNN) – Three German torpedoes ripped through the icy waters of the Atlantic off the coast of Greenland. On February 2, 1943, the USS Dorchester was transporting 902 U.S. servicemen to war. Only one torpedo hit, but it struck a deathblow - killing scores instantly and resetting the ship's course to the bottom of the ocean.Amid the chaos, survivors later recalled, four U.S. Army chaplains fought to bring calm and comfort, praying for the dead and encouraging the living to fight for survival. They helped frightened servicemen find life jackets and head to rescue craft. Each of the four chaplains gave up his life jacket to save the life of another.

Brian Haubert grabs some pamphlets and marches toward the flea market in Palmyra, N.J. Armed with a poster that trumpets Judgment Day on May 21, 2011, he braces for rejection. Announcing God's wrath is not always a popular message.

The 2004 crash-landing of a returning NASA space capsule in the deserts of Utah had scientists fearing for a while that samples collected by the Genesis mission, sent to capture particles from the sun's solar wind, were lost.But much of the collected material survived the crash, and it's now turning up surprises: discrepancies between the composition of the sun and the inner solar system, which contains the sun's four closest planets, including Earth.

Heritage Without Borders (HWB) is a unique social enterprise which will build heritage skills in developing countries, helping to preserve important cultural objects that could otherwise be damaged or lost forever. It will support heritage projects in situations of poverty and in the aftermath of conflict and disaster, closing the gap in heritage skills between the developed and developing world.

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.

Technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are unlikely to offer an economically feasible way to slow human-driven climate change for several decades, according to a report issued by the American Physical Society and led by Princeton engineer Robert Socolow.

For carbon, the basis of life, to be able to form in the stars, a certain state of the carbon nucleus plays an essential role. In cooperation with US colleagues, physicists from the University of Bonn and Ruhr-Universitat Bochum have been able to calculate this legendary carbon nucleus, solving a problem that has kept science guessing for more than 50 years.

An excavation at a Westmoreland County site once occupied by Monongahela Indians produced abundant evidence of two villages and allowed researchers to piece together the violent end of the later settlement at the hand of invaders who sacked it, massacred its inhabitants and burnt houses and food stores, said William C. Johnson, who served as an adviser to the project.But when Mr. Johnson returned to the dig site last year he was stunned by what he found.

Still hoping for that job as an astronaut, even as the last days of the space shuttle are winding down?You may want to practice your Russian.As the country marked the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's 1961 Cold War space trip Thursday, things have changed for the modern astronaut.

As the world's leading authority on beads manufactured from shells by California's Chumash Indians, UCLA archaeologist Jeanne Arnold was stumped by a series of anomalous artifacts excavated at former settlements on the Channel Islands.

An improvement in the dating of fossils suggests that the Neanderthals, a heavily muscled, thick-boned human species adapted to living in ice age Europe, perished almost immediately on contact with the modern humans who started to enter Europe from the Near East about 44,000 years ago. Until now bones from several Neanderthal sites have been dated to as young as 29,000 years ago, suggesting there was extensive overlap between the two human species. This raised the question of whether there had been interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals, an issue that is still not resolved.

More than 1,500 years before the Maya flourished in Central America, 25 centuries before the Aztecs conquered large swaths of Mexico, the mysterious Olmec people were building the first great culture of Mesoamerica. Starting in 1200 B.C. in the steamy jungles of Mexico's southern Gulf Coast, the Olmec's influence spread as far as modern Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica and El Salvador. They built large settlements, established elaborate trade routes and developed religious iconography and rituals, including ceremonial ball games, blood-letting and human sacrifice, that were adapted by all the Mesoamerican civilizations to follow.

AHMEDABAD: The recent discovery of a stupa in Girnar sanctuary by Delhi University historian Dr Nayanjot Lahiri has suddenly caught the attention of not only archaeologists but even the Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh.

SHIJIAZHUANG, May 7 (Xinhua) -- Experts in north China's Hebei Province said they had invented a special kind of liquid that can restore heavily-corroded bronzeware dating back over 2,000 years.The liquid could eliminate bronze rust on bronzeware surfaces and convert it into a firm coating to prevent further corrosion, said researchers with the Hebei Provincial Relics Protection Center.

The Monumento Nacional Guayabo (Guayabo National Monument), located on the slopes of Turrialba Volcano, was recognized on May 22, 2009 by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) as an engineering achievement for being one of the most important archaeological sites and the largest discovered in the country.The Guayabo National Monument dates to pre-Columbian times.Guayabo was the third pre-Columbian settlement in Latin America to receive the distinction, after Peru's Machu Picchu buildings and Tipon who are also declared World Heritage for its hydraulic engineering.

As much as we all enjoy the warm weather, some rain would be welcome.The scale of just how dry the start of 2011 has been is evident in some fascinating data from one of Europe's latest Earth observation satellites.Smos senses the moisture in the top layers of soil, and it is very clear in these maps that the ground across the UK and much of Europe is now gasping for water.Last month was the warmest April on record in Britain.It was also the 11th driest month (since 1910), with on average just half the usual rainfall. And in parts of south-east England, there was less than 10% of normal precipitation.

Renewable technologies could supply 80% of the world's energy needs by mid-century, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).In a report, it says that almost half of current investment in electricity generation is going into renewables.But growth will depend on having the right policies in place, it says.The IPCC is charged with providing analysis on climate issues to the world community, and its conclusions have been endorsed by governments.

LONDON: Imagine charging your mobile phone by simply speaking into the handset. Well your imagination may soon turn into a reality, thanks to a research that promises a way to recharge cell batteries using the power of speech.

WASHINGTON: In what's being claimed as a major breakthrough, scientists have pioneered a new method to patch a damaged heart using a tissueengineering platform that enables cardiac tissue to repair itself . A team at Columbia University has claimed that the breakthrough, published in the 'Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences' journal, is an important step forward in combating cardiovascular disease.

To appreciate the wide range of systems needed for in interstellar mission, let us consider a nominal profile for Icarus. The Icarus study is still underway, but we will take a bird's eye view of the mission, keeping in mind the importance of achieving its scientific objectives.Icarus ConstructionThe spacecraft construction would necessarily take place in space. If constructed in low-Earth orbit (LEO), we would most likely need a high thrust chemical propulsion system, and ideally a reliable single-stage-to-orbit solution, such as SKYLON or perhaps a revised program for mass production of launch vehicles.

In Star Wars Episode II "Attack of the Clones," a deadly cat-and-mouse chase between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Boba Fett takes place in a rocky ring encircling the desert planet Geonosis.We don't have such a planet in our solar system, but rings made of rock or silicates might be common in the Milky Way galaxy. And, there is a chance the planet-hunting Kepler space observatory might find them says Hilke Schlichting of UCLA, in a recently posted paper.

My birthday is coming up and although I'm not sure what you should get me, I know what you shouldn't get me: a Kindle, or any other electronic book. I don't care that they're lightweight or easy to read outside. I don't like them. I like book books. Regular books. The kind made of paper. I like shopping for books, browsing in a bookstore and lingering over the possibilities.But wouldn't it be cool if you could combine a regular book with an electronic book? My idea is this: a paperback that's about 250 pages long, give or take. It would be made of paper. You could leaf through it and read it the way one reads books. But the whole thing would be electronic. The cover might have a touchpad interface not unlike the iPhone. The user could scroll through the list of books stored in memory. Once they chose the book, the 250 pages of electronic paper would automatically fill with the words and/or pictures (for those of you less inclined to read).

A new article is now live on the articles page by art historian Paula Nunn, titled 'Visualising Giza'. Part one is called 'The early renderings and influence (1200 - 1800)', and part 2 is called 'The artists on the plateau (1800 - 1900)'.

Direct dating of a fossil of a Neanderthal infant suggests that Neanderthals probably died out earlier than previously thought. Researchers have dated a Neanderthal fossil discovered in a significant cave site in Russia in the northern Caucasus, and found it to be 10,000 years older than previous research had suggested.

It is a tale of two caves. Each has a story to tell about ancient human occupants who scratched a living out of Ice Age Europe. They may have lived in one of these caves as long ago as 900,000 years B.P. (before the present era). Scientists in southeastern Spain have been methodically piecing together the stories in these caves through careful excavation and analysis of finds that may significantly expand our knowledge of early humans and how they lived in what is today southern Europe. What is more, their finds may help fill in an important chapter in human evolution.

Direct dating of a fossil of a Neanderthal infant suggests that Neanderthals probably died out earlier than previously thought.Researchers have dated a Neanderthal fossil discovered in a significant cave site in Russia in the northern Caucasus, and found it to be 10,000 years older than previous research had suggested. This new evidence throws into doubt the theory that Neanderthals and modern humans interacted for thousands of years. Instead, the researchers believe any co-existence between Neanderthals and modern humans is likely to have been much more restricted, perhaps a few hundred years. It could even mean that in some areas Neanderthals had become extinct before anatomically modern humans moved out of Africa.

The first humans to reach Europe may have found it a ghost world. Carbon-dated Neanderthal remains from the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains suggest that the archaic species had died out before modern humans arrived.The remains are almost 10,000 years older than expected. They come from just one cave in western Russia, called Mezmaiskaya, but bones at other Neanderthal sites farther west could also turn out to be more ancient than previously thought, thanks to a precise carbon-dating technique, says Thomas Higham, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's no accident that we see stars in the sky, says famed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins: they are a vital part of any universe capable of generating us. But, as Dawkins emphasizes, that does not mean that stars exists in order to make us."It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table," Dawkins wrote in The Ancestors Tale -- A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, "and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars.

We keep reading that agriculture was prevalent in the Indus Valley Civilisation. But when I read about the planning of the settlements, I was confused as to where exactly the fields were located. Were they outside the walled settlements? Or were they located somewhere within the Lower Town?

I would like to draw some comments about the nature of the transformation that took place after 1800 BC, the spread of the Harappan culture over different parts of the subcontinent and their linkages with some of the Megalithic cultures of South India, non-Harappan Chalcolithic cultures and Vedic cultures.

Should humans set foot on Mars dirt in the next few decades, I doubt our ultra-connected future-Earthlings would want anything less than to watch the event via a high-speed, high-definition (3D?), surround-sound direct link to the Red Planet's surface. We'll want to see every grain of Mars dust in the air, hear every astronaut's boot crunch in the regolith and experience the emotion felt by the small band of humans exploring an alien planet for the first time in history.Who knows, our first Mars astronauts might even want to do a spot of micro-blogging -- or whatever the mid-21st Century equivalent may be -- as they document that historic moment, transmitting data over tens of millions of miles back home for the consumption of billions of viewers.

To push mankind deeper and deeper into space, more expensive and ambitious missions are needed. Therefore, international collaboration is sought after to share the load. For NASA, however, China won't be a part of any joint scientific endeavor for the next fiscal year, at least.As noted by Forbes blogger William Pentland last week, and reported by the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) Science Insider blog in April, a clause included in the U.S. spending bill approved by Congress to avert a government shutown a few weeks ago has prohibited NASA from coordinating any joint scientific activity with China. The clause also extends to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

An epic victory over daunting challenges, or a costly project that should never have flown? After nearly half a century of work and US$750 million spent, Gravity Probe B, one of NASA's longest-running mission programs, has finally achieved some scientific closure. But it has yet to quiet its critics.

In July 1994 the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 created a series of massive impacts on Jupiter's surface, providing the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of solar system objects. Could it happen to Earth?The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has become the single greatest comet finder of all time discovering its 200th comet as 2010 drew to a close. Drawing on help from amateur scientists around the world, the ESA/NASA spacecraft quietly reached the milestone on 26 December, 15 years after it was launched.

The European Space Agency's Herschel infrared space observatory has detected raging winds of molecular gas streaming away from galaxies. Suspected for years, these outflows may have the power to strip galaxies of gas and halt star formation in its tracks.The winds that Herschel has detected are extraordinary, some blowing at a speed of more than 1000 km/s, or about 10,000 times faster than the wind in a terrestrial hurricane.This is the first time that such molecular gas outflows have been unequivocally observed in a sample of galaxies. This is an important discovery because stars form from molecular gas, and these outflows are robbing the galaxy of the raw material it needs to make new stars. If the outflows are powerful enough, they could even halt star formation altogether.

With a nod to the zany flying machines of the days of yore, some University of Maryland students will attempt to make history this Wednesday when they test-fly their human-powered helicopter for the first time.In hopes of propelling them towards winning the Sikorsky Prize, a team of more than 50 graduate and undergraduate students from the A. James Clark School of Engineering will be taking their helicopter, Gamera, for its maiden voyage.Gamera has rotors at each of the four ends of its X-shaped frame. Each crossbar of the frame is 60-feet long and each rotor is 42 feet in diameter. Under the frame sits a pilot's model, where a student will power the helicopter with a combination of hand and foot pedaling.

The aroma of marijuana is rarely far away in the town of Garberville, in northern California's Humboldt County, but as a topic of conversation it remains taboo - at least for outsiders.It feels like a 1960s hippie town that never quite grew up. Garberville nestles in the thick of the mighty redwood forest to the north of San Francisco - but it isn't just the ancient tall trees that draw people to these parts.This is the marijuana heartland of the US. So I anticipated an openness among people when broaching the subject of weed. But I was mistaken.

El Nino and its partner La Nina, the warm and cold phases in the eastern half of the tropical Pacific, play havoc with climate worldwide. Predicting El Niño events more than several months ahead is now routine, but predicting how it will change in a warming world has been hampered by the short instrumental record. An international team of climate scientists has now shown that annually resolved tree-ring records from North America, particularly from the US Southwest, give a continuous representation of the intensity of El Nino events over the past 1100 years and can be used to improve El Niño prediction in climate models.

Antarctica's Ross Sea is no place for swimming. Covered in ice in its southern half, the frozen bay's summer temperatures hover just enough above freezing to spark a yearly retreat of melting sea ice.So, what to do if you are a doughty team of oceanographic explorers trying to gather more information about conditions in its waters? Send in the robots.

Three ambitious space missions have made NASA's shortlist for a planned robotic planetary expedition to launch in 2016. The candidates include a mission to glimpse Mars' interior, a voyage to the extraterrestrial sea of Saturn's moon Titan and a probe to take an unprecedented look at the surface of a comet's core.Ultimately, only one mission will win the coveted rocket launch, NASA officials said. The investigation team for each mission proposal will receive $3 million for a preliminary design stage, they added.

Remains of extinct birds found at excavation siteErbil city has more than 1,000 potential archeological sites. The hills were once villages that were abandoned, destroyed or the inhabitants wiped out by disease. According to Erbil Directorate of Archeology, of the 1,000 archeological sites in Erbil, only one percent has been excavated.

Europe and the US could be building a spaceship together later this decade.It is one of the ideas being considered as Europe ponders the next evolution of its ATV orbital freighter.The sophisticated robotic vessel is used to transport up to 7.5 tonnes of supplies to the space station, but only three more units are in production.Europe is now looking to develop a derivative of the ship and a joint venture with the Americans on a future vessel is being discussed.

The last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals was a tall, well-traveled species called Heidelberg Man, according to a new PLoS One study.The determination is based on the remains of a single Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis) known as "Ceprano," named after the town near Rome, Italy, where his fossil -- a partial cranium -- was found.Previously, this 400,000-year-old fossil was thought to represent a new species of human, Homo cepranensis. The latest study, however, identifies Ceprano as being an archaic member of Homo heidelbergensis.

Paintings depicting horses and human hands made by prehistoric humans around 25,000 years ago have been discovered in a cave in northern Spain, regional officials said on Wednesday.The red paintings, found by chance by archaeologists looking for signs of ancient settlements, were made around the same time as the Altamira Cave paintings -- some of the world's best prehistoric paintings discovered in northern Spain in 1879.

Scientists in China and the US have modified a common thermoelectric material to vastly improve its thermoelectric properties. The development could lead to new devices capable of converting waste heat into useful amounts of electricity.A thermoelectric material consists of alternating n-type and p-type semiconductors that together convert heat into electricity. In theory the heat could be sourced from any process that generates heat, but at present the materials are too inefficient to provide a commercially feasible way of generating electricity from waste heat, such as that produced in car exhausts.

AS HUMANS migrated out of Africa around 50,000 years ago and moved across the planet, evolution may have latched onto a gene linked to risk-taking and adventurousness.The idea, first put forward by Chuansheng Chen at the University of California, Irvine, more than a decade ago, was originally met with scepticism. Now Luke Matthews of Harvard University and Paul Butler of Boston University have shown that a link between two versions of a specific gene and ancient migration patterns stands up to rigorous analysis.

The end-Permian extinction, by far the most dramatic biological crisis to affect life on Earth, may not have been as catastrophic for some creatures as previously thought, according to a new study led by the University of Bristol.An international team of researchers studied the parareptiles, a diverse group of bizarre-looking terrestrial vertebrates which varied in shape and size. Some were small, slender, agile and lizard-like creatures, while others attained the size of rhinos; many had knobbly ornaments, fringes, and bony spikes on their skulls.

Oddities in the rotation of Saturn's largest moon Titan might add to growing evidence that it harbors an underground ocean, researchers suggest.Titan, which is larger than Mercury, is the only world besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface. Its seas, made of liquid methane instead of water, have often led to speculation as to whether or not they could host life.

The ice of Greenland and the rest of the Arctic is melting faster than expected and could help raise global sea levels by as much as 5 feet this century, dramatically higher than earlier projections, an authoritative international assessment says.The findings "emphasize the need for greater urgency" in combating global warming, says the report of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), the scientific arm of the eight-nation Arctic Council.

Newly released images from the European Space Agency's Mars Express show Nili Fossae, a system of deep fractures around the giant Isidis impact basin. Some of these incisions into the martian crust are up to 500 m deep and probably formed at the same time as the basin.

Depression may have an analytical upside. People hospitalized for this mood disorder display a flair for making good choices when many options must be considered one at a time, a new study finds.Depression may prompt an analytical thinking style suited to solving sequential problems, such as deciding when to stop a house hunt and purchase a property or when to stop playing the field and marry a suitor, say psychologist Bettina von Helversen of the University of Basel in Switzerland and her colleagues.

WE HAVE stellar-mass, intermediate and supermassive black holes. Might they also come in "dwarf" sizes too?The controversial proposal by two researchers suggests that the lightweight objects might form when gas and dust is compressed from without rather than collapsing from within, and could account for some of the universe's dark matter.

A contender for the oldest surviving plant genus on land, a new fossil from the horsetail plant group, Equisetum suggests the plants date back 150 million years and lived in hot springs much like some varieties do today. Researchers previously thought the genus deviated from other plant groups only 136 million years ago. Now new fossil evidence clears up their contested evolutionary history.

Did NASA have a dirty little secret about the Apollo 12 mission? A team of researchers have located and reviewed NASA's archived Apollo-era 16 millimeter film --and have come up with a definitive answer to the persistent claim in both the press and on the Web that a microbe survived 2.5 years on the moon.Apollo 12 was launched at 11:22:00 a.m. EST on November 14, 1969. The mission plan called for a landing in the Oceanus Procellarum -Ocean of Storms-area. This site was near the Surveyor III and other earlier unmanned missions to the moon. It landed there almost five days after their launch. They collected rock samples, mostly basalt and igneous rocks.

Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is descended from that of the rice-growing farmers who arrived in Japan from the Korean Peninsula, and not from the hunter-gatherers who first inhabited the islands some 30,000 years ago.

Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other, according to scientists.A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland filmed a group of the animals in order to decipher this "gestural repertoire".The team then studied 120 hours of footage of the chimps interacting, looking for signs that the animals were intentionally signalling to each other.The findings are published in the journal Animal Cognition.

A genetics research group working in a lab in Kansas, has succeeded in creating a new species of lizard by mating two distinct species of North American Whiptails, both native to New Mexico. The offspring, all females are not only fertile, but can reproduce by laying eggs that don't need to be fertilized, which means, they actually clone themselves.

Almost 50 million years ago, ants the size of hummingbirds roamed what is now Wyoming, a new fossil discovery reveals. These giant bugs may have crossed an Arctic land bridge between Europe and North America during a particularly warm period in Earth's history.At about 2 inches (5 cm) long, the specimen is a "monstrously big ant," said Bruce Archibald, a paleoentomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reported the discovery today (May 3) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Though fossils of loose giant ant wings have been found before in the United States, this is the first known full-body specimen.

A 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite from northwest Africa has yielded one of the earliest minerals of the solar system.Officially called krotite, the mineral had never been found in nature before, though it is a man-made constituent of some high-temperature concrete, according to study researcher Anthony Kampf, curator of Mineral Sciences at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM)."This is one that simply was not known in nature until we found it here," Kampf told LiveScience. "That's pretty dramatic.

Close allies of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).

From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain self-sacrificing behavior. If evolution is all about the survival of the fittest, then why do animals from bees to people help others when it can hurt them or their chances to reproduce? Simulations of miniature robots that "evolve" helping behaviors have now provided a possible answer, confirming a 47-year-old theory that recently has come under attack: We help those who are most related to us because they are able to pass some of our genes to the next generation.

It is the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, and now whisky is to be used to create electricity for homes in a new bioenergy venture involving some of Scotland's best-known distilleries.Contracts have recently been awarded for the construction of a biomass combined heat and power plant at Rothes in Speyside that by 2013 will use the by-products of the whisky-making process for energy production.

The Department of Environment and Conservation says it will be investigating what has caused a spike in the numbers of whales coming ashore over the past few years.Strandings are a continual problem for the DEC during migration season, which has just begun, with the mammals embarking on their annual trip north.The numbers of beached whales have been gradually rising, peaking in 2009 with 46 whales coming ashore.

OK, I've had enough. I've been looking up at the night sky for 20 years and not once have I ever seen anything that has aroused my suspicion that an alien visitor has popped by Earth to take a look.The thing is, I am contacted far too often by people saying they have seen an unidentified flying object, or UFO. Being terribly literal, they probably have seen something "unidentified," and it may look like it's flying; whatever it is, it certainly is an "object," but it doesn't mean it's aliens.

Had we been traveling overland, it would have taken two or three days to get from the end of the road at Carmelita to El Mirador: long hours of punishing heat and drenching rain, of mud and mosquitoes, and the possibility that the jungle novice in our party (that would be me, not the biologists turned photographers Christian Ziegler and Claudio Contreras) might step on a lethal fer-de-lance or do some witless city thing to provoke a jaguar or arouse the ire of the army ants inhabiting the last great swath of subtropical rain forest in Mesoamerica.

The choice of diet for Homo neanderthalensis was dependant on geographical location is the conclusion of Dr. Luca Fiorenza, lead author of the recently published article in PLoS ONE. Whereas previous studies assume specific dietary specializations, the team suggest that the diet of both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens is determined by ecological conditions.

In 250 million years of insect evolution, the appearance of new wings is unprecedented. Transformations and losses of wings, yes, but additions, never. A team from the Institut de Biologie du Développement de Marseille-Luminy (CNRS/Université Aix-Marseille 2) has shattered this belief by providing proof that the exuberant helmet of Membracidae, a group of insects related to cicadas, is in fact a third pair of profoundly modified wings.The discovery is published in the journal Nature on May 5, 2011 and is also featured on its cover.

Two years ago, retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine headed up a commission that led the White House to scrap NASA's "unexecutable" back-to-the-moon program and focus instead on a step-by-step path to send humans beyond Earth orbit, to an asteroid by 2025, and to the environs of Mars by the 2030s.Now NASA is nearing the end of the shuttle program, gearing up to mark Thursday's 50th anniversary of U.S. human spaceflight ... and dealing with an uncertain future for human spaceflight. Augustine says NASA is mostly following the short-term prescription he and his colleagues have laid out, but he worries that NASA's long-term future could be a case of deja vu all over again.

In a speech in Washington, the Prince said that the need for vast amounts of irrigation in industrialised food production was threatening to deplete reserves of the "magical substance we have taken for granted for so long"."For every pound of beef produced in the industrial system, it takes two thousand gallons of water," he told the Future of Food conference at Georgetown University."That is a lot of water and there is plenty of evidence that the Earth cannot keep up with the demand."

A desperate father whose son was suffering from a life-threatening brain tumour has revealed he gave him cannabis oil to ease his pain. And he has now apparently made a full recovery.Cash Hyde, known as Cashy, was a perfectly healthy baby when he was born in June 2008 but became sick shortly before his second birthday.At first he was misdiagnosed with glandular fever before his parents Mike and Kalli, from Missoula in Montana, were given the devastating news he had a serious brain tumour.The little boy had to have arduous chemotherapy treatment to reduce the growth, which had drastic side effects including seizures and a blood infection.

The most powerful solar flare unleashed from the sun in nearly five years was triggered by interactions between dark regions on the solar surface that rotate and twist the sun's magnetic field, a new study shows.Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire in England studied observations of the sun's flaring region taken over a five-day period by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). They found that the rotation of these dark regions, called sunspots, played a role in a massive solar flare that erupted from the sun in February.

For decades the prevailing wisdom in biology has been that individual self-sacrifice enables a group's genes to keep going in the long run. Now Swiss researchers have actually proven this is true by evolving generations of tiny autonomous robots that are confronted with a basic decision to share food."For biologists, this rule had never been tested empirically before in a quantitative way," said Laurent Keller, a biologist in the University of Lausanne's Department of Ecology and Evolution who worked on the study, published today in PLoS Biology. "It's the first field test to show it's working.

Science continues to alter the shape of religious belief, so how does devotion to a god change in orbit? Would long-distance space travel require the use of on-ship burial plots for Jewish or Muslim astronauts? And what happens if the Christian rapture or some comparable end-of-days event were to occur while you're in space?Certainly, these are far from pressing theological or scientific concerns, but the topic of religious belief in space continues to pop up. Here are some quick examples in Judaism, Christianity and Islam:Jews in space: Yes, Kosher food has already appeared on our orbital menus. It was the year 2003 and Ilan Ramon enjoyed Rabbi-approved Florentine lasagna, beef stew, chicken Mediterranean and chicken and rice (nice overview here). And when it came to observing the Sabbath, Ramon mirrored the terrestrial Sabbath progression instead of counting every orbital sundown (as this would make the Sabbath a 90-minute affair that occurs every nine hours).

UCLA scientists have discovered a way to wake up the immune system to fight cancer by delivering an immune system-stimulating protein in a nanoscale container called a vault directly into lung cancer tumors, harnessing the body's natural defenses to fight disease growth.The vaults, barrel-shaped nanoscale capsules found in the cytoplasm of all mammalian cells, were engineered to slowly release a protein, the chemokine CCL21, into the tumor. Pre-clinical studies in mice with lung cancer showed that the protein stimulated the immune system to recognize and attack the cancer cells, potently inhibiting cancer growth, said Leonard Rome, a researcher at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, associate director of the California NanoSystems Institutes and co-senior author of the study.

Researchers have developed an aluminum alloy that could be used in a new type of mobile technology to convert non-potable water into drinking water while also extracting hydrogen to generate electricity.Such a technology might be used to provide power and drinking water to villages and also for military operations, said Jerry Woodall, a Purdue University distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering.

How Neolithic humans lived 11,000 years ago, just as agriculture was first being developed in the Middle East, may have been different than current archeological theories believe, a new paper suggests.About 12,000 ago, in what's now southern Jordan, a group of humans built large structures whose use is still being determined. At the time, people were just learning to grow grain and beginning the transition from mobile hunter/gatherers to sedentary villages.

The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt.Far safer than the Hindenburg, whose tragic 1937 docking remains an icon of aerospace gone wrong, these modern airships are a hybrid of lighter-than-air and fixed-wing aircraft. They can loft enormous payloads without requiring the acres of tarmac or miles of roadway necessary for conventional air and truck transport. And they do so at a fraction of the fuel and cost of aircraft.

Seventeen minutes may not seem like much, but to physicists working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) project at the CERN physics complex near Geneva, 1000 seconds is nearly four orders of magnitude better than has ever been achieved before in capturing and holding onto antimatter atoms. In a paper published in arXiv, a team of researchers studying the properties of antimatter, describe a process whereby they were able to confine antihydrogen atoms for just that long, paving the way for new experiments that could demonstrate properties of antimatter that until now, have been largely speculation.

The parrel, a three-inch wooden ball used as part of the mechanism to hoist the sails of Henry VIII's flagship, is to be taken on the final flight of the Nasa space shuttle when it launches tomorrow.The memento was presented to the crew of the Atlantis space shuttle when they visited the home of the Mary Rose at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard last June.John Lippiett, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust, who made the presentation to the astronauts, said: ''It was really tremendous to have the opportunity to present this little piece of the Mary Rose to the visiting shuttle crew to take back to Houston and we are thrilled that she will be making history once more on the final mission for Endeavour.

A few weeks back, we wrote about a tiny, tossable recon robot small and sturdy enough to be thrown to and from rooftops, over walls, through windows, and pretty much anywhere a military, police, or first responders might need an extra set of remote-controlled eyes. Now Recon Robotics, makers of the Throwbot, have developed a similar beer can-sized robot that can be fired from a cannon, stick magnetically to the side of a ship, and scale the hull to get up to the deck.