Newsdesk Archive

Investigators in Connecticut are planning to uncover a local legend, but they're facing a backlash of public sentiment.An archaeological team will open the grave of The Old Leather Man, a mysterious wanderer who from 1883 to 1889 walked a 365 mile loop from the lower Hudson River Valley into Connecticut and back. It took him 34 days to make the journey and he was so punctual that well-wishers used to to have meals ready for him when he showed up. He spoke French but little English, slept only in caves and rock shelters, and never revealed information about himself. He got his name from his homemade, 60 lb. suit of leather.

The site of one of Scotland's most important mainland broch settlements may have been home to early people for up to 1,000 years, evidence suggests.Archaeologists and volunteers have uncovered what could be the remains of walls dating back to 700 to 500 BC at Nybster in Caithness.Andy Heald, of AOC Archaeology, said further investigations would need to be made to confirm the structure's age.Evidence of possible Pictish and medieval occupation has been recorded.

MEXICO CITY.- A stairway with Maya hieroglyphs was discovered at El Palmar Archaeological Zone, in southeast Campeche, by experts from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the University of Arizona (UA) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), revealing the preliminary decipherment that this Maya city maintained contact with Calakmul, in Campeche, and Copan, Honduras, almost 1300 years ago.Leaders of the project Javier Lopez Camacho, from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) and Kenichiro Tsukamoto, from the University of Arizona (UA), announced that the 6-step stairway conserves 90 blocks with more than 130 glyphs that refer to events registered in the Classic Maya period (250-900 AD).

For many people, the mounds of eastern North America are nothing like the architectural wonders of Europe and Asia. Compared with the Parthenon in Athens or Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Ohio's Newark Earthworks and Fort Ancient might seem like piles of dirt.On the contrary, new research is revealing surprising sophistication in the form and structure of ancient American earthen architecture.

Centuries before Allied bomber crews would send gleefully personalised ordnance to Adolf Hitler, ancient skirmishers mastered the art of enemy taunts by slingshot, according to a researcher.Sling bullets recovered from the battlefields of Egypt, Greece and Rome often carry inscriptions designed to add insult to injury, archaeologist Amanda Kelly told an Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies lecture.

The largest-ever three-dimensional map of the distant universe has been created using the light of the brightest objects in the cosmos.Since this distant light took eons to reach Earth, the map is essentially a window back in time, providing an unprecedented view of what the universe looked like 11 billion years ago.Normally, researchers make maps of the universe by looking at galaxies.

WERE asteroids the factories that created life's building blocks? For the first time, rocks from an asteroid have been shown to power the synthesis of life's essential chemicals.The asteroid in question fell to Earth on 28 September 1969, landing on the outskirts of the village of Murchison in Victoria, Australia. Tests showed it was laced with amino acids and some of the chemicals found in our genetic material.

Now you see it, now you don't. Rather like a conjurer's white rabbit, the elusive Higgs boson may have slipped from sight again.A recent report hinted at a glimpse of the long-sought particle at a major detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. But a second detector has now checked its own data and found no corroborating sign of the particle.

A new article is now live on the articles page by Bibhu Dev Misra, titled 'Evolution by Catastrophe: Does it indicate Intelligent Design?'. More articles by Bibhu Dev Misra:The Opet Festival of Ancient Egypt: Has it been derived from the Jagannatha Rathyatra of Puri, India? and A Day and Night of Brahma: The Evidence from Fossil Records.

Scars on the jaw of a 120-million-year-old marine reptile suggest that life might not have been easy in the ancient polar oceans. The healed bite wounds were probably made by a member of the same species. Such injuries give important clues about the social behaviour of extinct sea creatures from the time of dinosaurs.The find is described in a forthcoming issue of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

Roughly 7,000 rural communities in the U.S. deal with sewage the old-fashioned way: by dumping it into an open holding pond and letting sunlight and bacteria do the rest. Not only do these ponds smell bad, but it takes the bacteria a long time to render the sewage nonhazardous, a situation that could pose a contamination risk to waterways.

EARLIER this year came news of a second successful voice boxMovie Camera transplant. But the recipient, Brenda Jensen, was able to have a new larynx only because she was already taking immunosuppressant drugs to stop her transplanted kidney and pancreas being rejected.Now Paolo Macchiarini of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues in Italy are developing a technique to treat the donor larynx so that the recipient's body accepts it as its own - and they have just announced their first successful partial transplant.

An experiment in a US lake suggests that ecosystem collapses could be predicted, given the right monitoring.Researchers changed the structure of the food web in Peter Lake, in Wisconsin, by adding predatory fish.Within three years, the fish had taken over, producing a decline in tiny water plants and an explosion in water fleas.

Some researchers claim to have analysed DNA from Egyptian mummies. Others say that's impossible. Could new sequencing methods bridge the divide?Cameras roll as ancient-DNA experts Carsten Pusch and Albert Zink scrutinize a row of coloured peaks on their computer screen. There is a dramatic pause. "My god!" whispers Pusch, the words muffled by his surgical mask. Then the two hug and shake hands, accompanied by the laughter and applause of their Egyptian colleagues. They have every right to be pleased with themselves. After months of painstaking work, they have finally completed their analysis of 3,300-year-old DNA from the mummy of King Tutankhamun.

LONDON: Many may find it a bit weird, but a new study says that left-handed people are affected by fear far more than those who are right-handed.Psychologists have found that people who watched an eightminute clip from a scary movie suffered more symptoms associated with post traumatic stress if they were left-handed than if they were right-handed.

As part of the European Union's commitment to remaining at the forefront of technology, the European Commission (the governing body of the European Union) has laid out plans for three initial high powered lasers to be built in Eastern Europe with a fourth to come at a later date. The first superlaser in the project is to be built near Prague, with a goal of achieving exawatt class, which would make it at least a hundred times more powerful than anything that exists today.

Using simple robots to simulate genetic evolution over hundreds of generations, Swiss scientists provide quantitative proof of kin selection and shed light on one of the most enduring puzzles in biology: Why do most social animals, including humans, go out of their way to help each other? In next week's issue of the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, EPFL robotics professor Dario Floreano teams up with University of Lausanne biologist Laurent Keller to weigh in on the oft-debated question of the evolution of altruism genes.

Chimpanzees are self-aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them, an ability once thought to be uniquely human, according to a study released Wednesday.The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, challenge assumptions about the boundary between human and non-human, and shed light on the evolutionary origins of consciousness, the researchers said.Earlier research had demonstrated the capacity of several species of primates, as well as dolphins, to recognize themselves in a mirror, suggesting a fairly sophisticated sense of self.

Dennis McKenna is writing a memoir telling the real story of the lives and adventures of he and his brother Terence McKenna, but he needs support in order to write and publish this book. If you are interested, please see the kickstarter page.This project will only be funded if at least $80,000 is pledged by Monday Jun 6, 1:47pm EDT.

China's population today is larger, more urban, aging and more mobile than ever before.The population of the second largest economy in the world shot up by 73 million people over the past decade, up 5.7 percent to 1.339 billion in November 2010 from 1.27 billion in 2000, according to new statistics released Thursday by China's Bureau of National Statistics.At of the end of 2010, population was expected to be 1.34 billion.

Space tourism has already reached low-Earth orbit, and now the industry is shooting for the moon.After helping to send seven private citizens on eight trips to the International Space Station -- starting with Dennis Tito, who became the world's first space tourist on April 28, 2001 -- the Virginia-based company Space Adventures is mapping out a tourist trip around the moon.

The mummy is indeed a lady - one who didn't make it to adulthood.Thursday, doctors at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., performed a CT scan on the mummified remains of Lady Gautseshenu, which reside at the Brooklyn Museum, and said the findings indicate her age at death was likely at least 16 years. Lady Gautseshenu is believed to have lived some 2,600 years ago in southern Egypt.

The production of wind energy in the U.S. over the next 30-50 years will be largely unaffected by upward changes in global temperature, say a pair of Indiana University Bloomington scientists who analyzed output from several regional climate models to assess future wind patterns in America's lower 48 states.Their report -- the first analysis of long-term stability of wind over the U.S. -- appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Singer Bob Dylan once asked "How many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?" -- an intriguing geological question for which an accurate answer is not easily provided.Mountain ranges are in a constant interplay between climatically controlled weathering processes on the one hand and the tectonic forces that cause folding and thrusting and thus thickening of Earth's crust on the other hand. While erosion eventually erases any geological obstacles, tectonic forces are responsible for piling and lifting up rocks and thus for forming spectacular mountain landscapes such as the European Alps. In reality, climate, weathering and mountain uplift interact in a complex manner and quantifying rates for erosion and uplift, especially for the last couple of millions of years, remains a challenging task.

It turns out that ancient "Nutcracker Man" ate grass, not nuts. So concludes researchers in a recent study on the dietary habits of Paranthropus boisei (popularly known as "Nutcracker Man"), a "cousin" species to prehistoric humans that lived from 2.3 to 1.2 million years ago in East Africa. The findings overturn long-held views about what this species ate and may challenge the conventional wisdom about what was on the table for other pre-human or hominid species in the human evolutionary family tree.

Rice originated in China, a team of genome researchers has concluded in a study tracing back thousands of years of evolutionary history through large-scale gene re-sequencing. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that domesticated rice may have first appeared as far back as approximately 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley of China. Previous research suggested domesticated rice may have two points of origin -- India as well as China.

It's been a severe start to the spring season in the United States. Tornadoes have ravaged the southeastern US, flooding threatens much of the Midwest, and wildfires are scorching Texas. But according to researchers, a confluence of seasonal oscillations in weather patterns, rather than climate change, is to blame. And growing populations mean that grim casualty figures from such events may become the norm."I don't think there's any way of proving climate change is responsible for the weather patterns this week and week before," says meteorologist Howard Bluestein, of the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

WILL a baby be a boy or a girl? If the mother started her period at a young age, it is more likely to be a girl.That's according to Misao Fukuda at the M&K Health Institute in Hyogo, Japan, and colleagues, who found subtle differences in sex ratios of children depending on when a mother entered menarche.Fukuda asked over 10,000 mothers the age at which they had begun their period and the sex of their baby. Forty six per cent of the children born to women who began their periods at age 10 were boys. This figure rose to 50 per cent when the woman began her period at 12, and 53 per cent when the women entered menarche at age 14.

An international team of scientists report on the first observatory experiment to study the dynamic microbial life of an ever-changing environment inside Earth's crust. University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science professor Keir Becker contributed the deep-sea technology required to make long-term scientific observations of life beneath the seafloor.

There's a crisis among the world's amphibians -- about 40 percent of amphibian species have dwindled in numbers in just three decades. Now, museum jars stuffed full of amphibians may help scientists decide whether this wave of extinctions was caused by a fungal infection.

University of Sydney researchers have gained a rare insight into the habits of koalas, discovering simple tree planting may be the solution to expanding their habitat and allowing their populations to grow.The study, conducted in the town of Gunnedah and using GPS collars fitted to koalas, also found the vulnerable mammals were most at risk from living in small patches of bush near roads and train tracks.

A pilot from New Zealand is in Nepal to return a replica of what some believe is the hand of a yeti to a remote monastery in the Everest region.Mike Allsop will fly from Kathmandu to the Everest region on Friday to take the models to Pangboche Monastery, which sits at 4,000m (13,123ft).The originals were stolen from the monastery in the 1990s.They first came to light in the 1950s when an expedition to find the mythical yeti came upon the monastery.Mr Allsop will also take with him a replica of a yeti skull-cap, which was also stolen in the 1990s.

Under threat of the federal government, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed key pieces of a medical marijuana law, saying she doesn't want to put state employees at risk of federal criminal charges."I will not subject my state employees to federal prosecution -- period," said Gregoire, who worries what would happen if the state started licensing medical marijuana dispensaries and growing operations, which are legal under state law, but not federal law.The legislation in question, Senate Bill 5073, would create a system of state-regulated medical marijuana dispensaries, patient registries and cooperative growing gardens.

Watch "The King's Speech" closely and you'll realize that the real villain of the Oscar-winning film isn't King George VI's debilitating stammer. It's his older brother, David.Feckless and hedonistic, David ascends the British throne in 1936 as Edward VIII but abandons it to his unprepared brother before the year is out. His famous declaration that he was abdicating to be with "the woman I love," the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, has proved irresistible fodder for breathless biographies and melodramatic made-for-TV movies ever since.

The peacock is found on both Harappan and Late Harappan (Cemetery H) pottery, the latter presumably being the burial urns being referred to. Interpretation as a representation of immortality cannot be confirmed. Is there any connection between the Harappan and the Medieval European unicorn? Different societies adopt images independently of one another, although contacts between them can lead to the spread of beliefs between cultures. The Romans apparently were in trade contact with South Asia during around the beginning of the Christian Era.

In July, Machu Picchu, Peru's biggest tourist attraction, will mark its 100th anniversary of rediscovery. Hiram Bingham III, a Yale professor, came upon the vine-covered ruins on July 24, 1911. Here, then, as we lead up to the century mark, are 100-plus facts about Machu Picchu, its country, its history and its players. We will post one each day for the next 100 days.15.Cuzco, with a population of about 300,000, is the gateway to Machu Picchu, but don't let the word "gateway" confuse you: Machu Picchu is 50 miles beyond Cuzco NEAR the town of Aguas Calientes, far below the Incan ruins.

It was two years in the making for a television crew to get access inside one of the holiest sites of the Greek Orthodox world, the monasteries on Mount Athos in Greece. The cluster of 20 monasteries has remained perched on the cliffs high above the Aegean Sea for centuries.In the monasteries, also known collectively as the Holy Mountain or The Garden of the Mother of God, the monks spend most of their time in prayer and are purposefully isolated from the outside world."A woman hasn't been allowed on the mountain for over a thousand years," said Bob Simon, correspondent for CBS News' "60 Minutes.

Female figurine with three sets of chokers and necklaces. One of the largest female figurines found at Harappa with common fan shaped headdress with cups on either side of the head. Discovered in 1991."I'd like the experts to confirm or refute that the Indus Valley civilization was a matriarchy following the scientific definition given by Heide Goettner-Abendroth in Modern Matriarchal Studies: Definitions, Scope and Topicality." Asked by Sede Decana Método DeRose and LucianoRichard MeadowIn an absence of a deciphered script and of graves with clear evidence of hierarchy, we cannot say whether the Indus Civilization was a matriarchy or not. As Sharri Clark has pointed out in articles and in her PhD dissertation, the female figurines cannot be defined as being mother-goddesses.

Native North Island saddlebacks have developed such distinctive new songs in the last 50 years that it is not clear if birds on one island recognise what their neighbors are singing about, a Massey University study shows.The phenomenon is an avian equivalent of the way human language develops regional accents and dialects as people migrate and settle in new locations, and provides fresh insights into how species evolve, says biology researcher Dr. Kevin Parker, from the Institute of Natural Sciences at Albany.

WIREDThe ability of rhesus macaques to draw shapes from memory suggests that monkeys may have as-yet-unexplored powers of recall, possibly similar in some ways to human recollection.In earlier studies, macaques have recognized previously-seen objects. Psychologists consider recall to involve different cognitive capacities than recognition, which seems to use different parts of the brain and is arguably less demanding. Recognition is just a matching task, but recall hints at a richer life of the mind.

A research team in Lund, Sweden has discovered primary biological matter in a fossil of an extinct varanoid lizard (a mosasaur) that inhabited marine environments during Late Cretaceous times. Using state-of-the-art technology, the scientists have been able to link proteinaceous molecules to bone matrix fibres isolated from a 70-million-year-old fossil -- that is, they have found genuine remains of an extinct animal entombed in stone.

For decades the debate on the familial similarity of humans and Neanderthals has continue back and forth despite DNA evidence showing potential sub-species status. Their classification as human or otherwise determines whether they fall into the category of mortuary archaeology, the study of human funerary sites in the past. So far, it has been questionable whether or not Neanderthals showed the symbolic capacity necessary for the funerary behaviour displayed by humans. However, regardless of whether they are a sub-species or distinct species, new evidence is emerging which supports the idea that Neanderthals may have engaged in patterned mortuary behaviour.

New EU rules came into force at the weekend banning hundreds of herbal remedies. The laws are aimed at protecting consumers from potentially damaging "traditional" medicines.Under the directive, herbal medicines will now have to be registered. Products must meet safety, quality and manufacturing standards, and come with information outlining possible side-effects.Herbal practitioners and manufacturers say they fear the new rules could force them out of business.

LONDON: After 50 years of tectonic improvements, the microchip may be finally be reaching its limits.April 25 marks the 50th anniversary of the patent for a silicon integrated circuit, awarded to Robert Noyce, a US electronics engineer who eventually earned the nicknamed "the mayor of Silicon Valley".

WASHINGTON: Researchers have for the first time created a synthetic synapse circuit whose behaviour duplicates the function of a brain cell. A synapse is a junction that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another nerve or brain cell.The team, led by professors Alice Parker and Chongwu Zhou at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, combined circuit design with nanotechnology to address the complex problem of capturing brain function.

The Triton 36,000 could be the first manned submarine to make repeated trips to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, according to the ship's manufacturer. Jorge Ribas reports.

A particle detector being prepared for launch Friday aboard space shuttle Endeavour is intended to answer some fundamental questions about physics, but it has a practical side as well -- testing a way to shield future astronauts from potentially harmful cosmic rays.At the heart of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, is a 2-ton magnet that will bend high-energy particles into five detectors for analysis. Scientists hope to learn about dark matter, antimatter and other exotic phenomenon, but engineers at NASA who are developing next-generation spaceships are keen to learn how similar magnets could be used not to attract particles, but to repel them.

Could veterans of war, rape victims and other people who have seen horrific crimes someday have the traumatic memories that haunt them weakened in their brains? In a new study, UCLA life scientists report a discovery that may make the reduction of such memories a reality."I think we will be able to alter memories someday to reduce the trauma from our brains," said the study's senior author, David Glanzman, a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology and of neurobiology.

When you get into your car, for the daily commute or for a relaxing weekend visit to a friend house you give off energy. Not just the energy from the fossil fuels that you burn, but a different kind of energy, vibrational energy. Most of us do not give that energy a second thought, unless we're trying to do something that requires fine motor skills, such as putting the lid back onto your slightly deformed cup of scalding hot coffee, but it is there.

Alcohol prohibition did little to stop Americans from guzzling booze, though it helped make gangsters rich, cops and courts busy, and encouraged foreign imports of "medicinal whiskey" (sound familiar?)That experiment was short-lived -- ratified in 1920, the 18th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was repealed in 1933 -- and particularly short-lived in comparison to the country's experiment with outlawing marijuana -- which turns 100 years old today.In stark contrast to fermented grapes and grain, the intoxicating qualities of the cannabis sativa plant were unknown to Americans outside of a few Southwest border towns in 1911, according to Dale Gieringer of California NORML. Gieringer spent the better part of 10 years trying to find evidence of marijuana use among 19th-century American writers.

Prosecutors dropped criminal charges today against a Palm Beach County man who had claimed a medicinal marijuana defense in a case that could have sent him to prison for five years for growing pot plants.Jeffrey Kennedy, a 53-year-old Boynton Beach resident, had turned down a plea deal in the case in the hopes that his medicinal marijuana defense could set a legal precedent in Florida, where such cases are rare.

SCIENTIFIC research in the Arabian, Persian and Turkish Middle East lags behind that of the west. Of course, there are individual scientists who produce world-class research and there are institutions and nations which make significant contributions in certain fields. Publication and citation indicators show some encouraging trends. But naturally one asks: "Why have Arab, Persian and Turkish scientists as a group underperformed compared with their colleagues in the west or with those rising in the east?".

Robotic moon bases, chips implanted in our brains, self-driving cars, and high-speed rail linking London to Beijing. According to a dazzling number of technology predictions that single out the year 2020, it's going to be to be one hell of a year. Here, we take a look at some of the wonders it holds in store.2020, of course, is just a convenient target date for roughly-ten-years-off predictions. "It's not any more particularly interesting, in my opinion, than 2019 or 2021," says Mike Liebhold, a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future, and an all-around technology expert with a resume that includes stints with Intel, Apple, and even Netscape. "There's a continuum of technological development, and that's just an easy date for an editor or a writer to get a handle on.

A scientist at the Gladstone Institutes has made two significant stem-cell discoveries that advance medicine and human health by creating powerful new approaches for using stem cells and stem-cell-like technology.

The geological penetrator CHOMIK (Polish word for hamster), built at the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences for the purpose of collecting a soil sample from one of the Martian moons, has completed the first stage of the journey. Following successful tests, the flight model has been handed over to Moscow. At the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences the device will be integrated with the manipulator of the Phobos Sample Return mission lander and will fly towards Mars in a few months.

More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA's twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they're still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling.The message is, "Expect the unexpected.

An international team of astronomers have revealed details of a "super-exotic" exoplanet that would make the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar pale in comparison.The planet, named 55 Cancri e, is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth but eight times as massive. Twice as dense as Earth -- almost as dense as lead -- it is the densest solid planet known, according to a team led by astronomers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of British Columbia (UBC), the Harvard‑Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Interstellar space contains vast quantities of dust that obscures our view while helping to catalyze the chemical reactions that turn atomic gases into complex molecular species. Most dust is made in the winds of older stars (called asymptotic giant branch, "AGB," stars) that have completed the hydrogen burning phase of their lives. The sun is still in its "main-sequence" stage of life. Astronomers think that the process of dust manufacturing is quite general, and is also responsible for dust seen in the early universe. Although dust production is important, exactly how it is made remains a mystery.

Algae could soon become a valuable biofuel resource, according to research at the University of Arizona.It's green, it's slimy and it smells. It also abundantly produces lipids, sugars and sometimes hydrogen gas, all of which are sought-after sources for renewable energy. You may think of it as mere pond scum, but algae could be a highly productive biofuel crop in the near future.

A fossil discovery is improbability squared. First, to become fossilised, human remains must survive the normal process of decay that returns flesh and bone to dust and ashes.On the African plains, a carcass will be torn to pieces by vultures and hyenas. Perhaps a skull, or thighbone or jaw is dragged apart, perhaps carried into a depression or dry river bed where, white and bleached, it will be carried away by the next flash flood.

On this Easter Sunday, we're going to take you to a place outside our world. It's not Mars or Venus but it might as well be. It's a remote peninsula in northern Greece that millions believe to be the most sacred spot on Earth.It's called Mount Athos and prayers have been offered there every day, with no interruption, for more than a thousand years. It was set aside by ancient emperors to be the spiritual capital of Orthodox Christianity and has probably changed less over the centuries than any other inhabited place on the planet. The monks come to Mount Athos from all over and do everything they can to keep what they call "the world" far away.

In a laboratory tucked away off a noisy New York City street, a soft-spoken neuroscientist has been placing Tibetan Buddhist monks into a car-sized brain scanner to better understand the ancient practice of meditation.But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world's more mysterious diseases?Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves during the exercise.

A new article is now live on the articles page by Shunyamurti, titled The Ascendancy of Psychotic Knowledge. This article publication is part of a cooperative effort by grahamhancock.com and realitysandwich.com/ to promote cross pollination of thoughts and ideas between the two sites.

For May 2011 Author of the Month we are very pleased to welcome Robert Bauval & Thomas Brophy. They will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout May to discuss their latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

A new article is now live on the articles page by Lynne McTaggart, titled 'The Bond: Connecting through the Space Between Us'. This article includes an excerpt from her latest book, 'The Bond'.

A scientific battle over the fate of Easter Island's natives is ready to erupt this summer with the publication of a book challenging the notion that their Neolithic society committed ecological suicide.The debate has a modern political dimension. At stake is the central example, cited by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, of the dire consequences that threaten if humans don't take care of the planet.

BEIJING: An unknown kingdom dating back to 1046 B.C. has been unearthed in north China, archaeologists said.The kingdom is probably from the Xizhou dynasty (1046 to 771 B.C.), Xinhua reported.

A team of archaeologists is trying to unravel the pages of history in a small village in Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh as remains from the New Stone Age are being regularly excavated.

In 1939 archaeologists discovered fragments that may be parts of one of the world's oldest sculptures, a lion-faced figurine estimated at 32,000 years old, from a cave in southern Germany. The ivory figure, along with a tiny figurine known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, marks the foundation of human artistry, even if its significance wasn't recognized until 30 years after the discovery.

Just before the first electric vehicles (EV) rolled into garages in late 2010, there was speculation that transformers would be exploding in neighborhoods if multiple cars were plugged in at the same time around a cul-de-sac.Each car, such as the Nissan Leaf, has an electrical load similar to a house. For a transformer that is built to handle only so much electricity, too many EVs can overload it and cause it to fail.

How baby Earth managed to keep hold of its organic matter after the clubbing it took by a Mars-sized object roughly 4.4 billion years ago has long puzzled scientists.The throttling was so severe scientists believe Earth melted. Splatters that ended up in space eventually came together to form the moon. Lightweight materials, like water and carbon, would have vaporized. How then did the building blocks for life manage to survive?.

When atoms combine to form compounds, they must follow certain bonding and valence rules. For this reason, many compounds simply cannot exist. But there are some compounds that, although they follow the bonding and valence rules, still are thought to not exist because they have unstable structures. Scientists call these compounds "impossible compounds." Nevertheless, some of these impossible compounds have actually been fabricated (for example, single sheets of graphene were once considered impossible compounds). In a new study, scientists have synthesized another one of these impossible compounds -- periodic mesoporous hydridosilica -- which can transform into a photoluminescent material at high temperatures.

A new low cost test for acute pancreatitis that gets results much faster than existing tests has been developed by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin.The sensor, which could be produced for as little as a dollar, is built with a 12-cent LED light, aluminum foil, gelatin, milk protein and a few other cheap, easily obtainable materials.

Right-handedness reaches back a half million years in the human evolutionary family, at least if scratched-up fossil teeth have anything to say about it.Stone-tool scratches on the front teeth of Neanderthals and their presumed European ancestors occur at angles denoting right-handedness in most of these Stone Age hominids, just as in human populations today, say anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas in Lawrence and his colleagues.

For decades, scientists and scholars have been searching for the fabled cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and the "cities of the Plain", the cities that, according to the Biblical record, were destroyed anciently by God because of the great iniquity of their inhabitants. Recent archaeological investigations, including two currently in progress, are now raising some fascinating prospects that may possibly bring us closer to identifying the location and remains of at least one of these infamous cities, Sodom, the kingpin itself. One of these investigations may overturn long-held theories about where the infamous city was located.

Although a piece of legislation that would legalize medical marijuana in Illinois failed by a slim margin last December, a Republican leader in the House has shifted his support, raising the chances that the bill could pass. Tom Cross, the House Minority Leader, announced last week that he would support legalization. His change of heart, he said, was because he spoke with some people who use medical marijuana, including a disabled veteran.

Note to ET: Try back laterThe SETI Institute is suspending its search for extraterrestrial radio beacons using its most advanced alien signal-seeking tool while it hunts for new sources of funding.The privately financed group, based in Mountain View, Calif., has been using an array of radio telescopes at Hat Creek Observatory, about 300 miles north of San Francisco, since October 2007, to study stars for non-naturally occurring radio signals that could indicate the presence of a technologically advanced civilization beyond Eart.

Dark matter not only had a role to play in fueling early stars, it may have created "dark stars" so massive that they went on to spawn supermassive black holes found at the cores of the one trillion galaxies estimated to populate the universe.This is an exciting theory developed by Katherine Freese, Associate Director of the University of Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, where she has been working to identify the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the universe as well as to build a successful model for the early universe immediately after the Big Bang. Freese has shown that most of the mass in galaxies does not consist of ordinary stellar material, and has proposed ways to look for alternatives such as supersymmetric particles. Currently there is a great deal of excitement about possible detections of these particles.

"This star likely is almost as old as the universe itself."Anna Frebel, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe -- a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way's oldest stars. Its presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a "cannibal" phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.

Five days after the passenger ship the Titanic sank, the crew of the rescue ship Mackay-Bennett pulled the body of a fair-haired, roughly 2-year-old boy out of the Atlantic Ocean on April 21, 1912. Along with many other victims, his body went to a cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the crew of the Mackay-Bennett had a headstone dedicated to the "unknown child" placed over his grave.

GPS has become such an integral part of the new technology in our lives that we really do not give it much of a thought. It gets us to our destination without getting lost. It helps the ambulance to find us when we dial 911 on our cell phones. It lets you become the mayor of your gym for all those check in's.

It is a beautiful thing that Peter Higgs did. He took a very complicated description of reality that explained some things so well it could not be ignored, and utterly failed to explain other things, things that we couldn't ignore. He didn't ignore the fact that the standard model was rendering all things massless, which would mean we could not possibly exist.

" Three generations of imbeciles is enough," thundered Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in the 1927 Buck vs. Bellcourt decision, legalizing forced sterilizations nationwide.A triumph of the "eugenics" movement, which aimed at breeding "better" humans, the decision was embraced by dozens of states, from Virginia to California, leading to more than 60,000 forced sterilizations by the 1960's. The sterilizations were aimed at ensuring no offspring for poor people exhibiting "feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, (and) alcoholism," among other "unfit human traits," in the words of Yale historian Daniel Kevles.

The hunt for extraterrestrial life just lost one of its best tools. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a field of radio dishes in rural northern California built to seek out transmissions from distant alien civilizations, has been shuttered, at least temporarily, as its operators scramble to find a way to continue to fund it.In an April 22 letter to donors, Tom Pierson, CEO of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., explained that the ATA has been put into "hibernation," meaning that "starting this week, the equipment is unavailable for normal observations and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff." The ATA is a partnership between the SETI Institute, which is responsible for building the telescope array, and the University of California, Berkeley, which is responsible for operating it. Astronomer Franck Marchis, who is affiliated with both institutions, broke the news on his blog April 22.

If you gaze up at the night sky on April 26 or 27, you might catch a glimpse of a promising new technology, a cult favorite of astrogeeks and something of a taxpayer treat in one shiny package -- NASA's NanoSail-D2 cruising past Earth using the power of the sun.The 100-square-foot polymer solar sail unfurled in low Earth orbit about 400 miles out on Jan. 20. Since then, it's been making its way through space, spawning a Twitter feed, photo contest and winning some surprisingly enthusiastic followers.Not bad for a little satellite that almost wasn't -- more than once.

OUR closest cousins' mental agility has been cast into doubt. Chimps seem curiously unable to use their own initiative to gain the best possible reward if this means behaving in a different way to a dominant group member.Lydia Hopper of Georgia State University in Atlanta trained a dominant female chimp to exchange one of two types of token for a chunk of carrot. This female was then housed with five subordinate chimps, and they quickly learned to ape her reward-receiving style. But the rules of the game had changed: now, alongside the carrot-giving first token, the second token was worth a better prize of grapes.

It is a small, quiet village in Bulgaria. Before now, few people knew of its existence. It sits adjacent to mountains in a river valley and any photographer might say that, from a distance and at the proper elevation, viewing it from afar would be a scenic experience. What may place this little village on the map, however, has nothing to do with scenery. In the coming months, it will be the focus of a group of archaeologists who hope to find some answers to questions about the first farmers of Europe.

It was previously thought that land plants evolved from stonewort-like algae. However, new research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology shows that the closest relatives to land plants are actually conjugating green algae such as Spirogyra.

LHASA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Brain surgery was practiced by doctors at least 2,900 years ago, a specialist on Tibetan culture and literature said Wednesday after four decades of research on the Tibetan Tripitaka, an ancient encyclopedia.

CBS NEWSAs the world celebrates Earth Day, researchers at the University of Puerto Rico's Planetary Habitability Laboratory marked the occasion with a look back - make that a long look back. 500 million years, to be more specific.In this computer-generated video animation, you can get an idea of how the Earth looked during the Cambrian Period, when our planet was a very different place. It's hard to recognize that world, one in which most of the continents were found in the southern hemisphere and the only green plants of note were fungi, algae, and lichens.

Private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years, the head of the firm said."We'll probably put a first man in space in about three years," Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. "We're going all the way to Mars, I think... best case 10 years, worst case 15 to 20 years.

Some chemical elements appear much more abundantly in nature than others, which is partly due to how the elements originally formed. Scientists know that the light elements (hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and traces of lithium) were produced by fusion in the early Universe. Today, lithium, beryllium, and boron are constantly being produced in cosmic rays, while the heavier elements (up to iron) are formed by fusion in stars. Elements heavier than iron are formed by supernovae.

What do we mean when we speak about human enhancement? New York University professor Wafaa Bilal recently had a video camera implanted on a titanium base in the back of his skull. Leaving wires dangling awkwardly along his neck, the camera sent images to a remote server every 60 seconds. Students' concerns over their privacy, faced with a teacher who for once really did have eyes in the back of his head, forced Bilal to wear a lens cap while teaching, somewhat defeating the point.

The spark plugs driving combustion in your car may soon be getting an optical upgrade, thanks to a team of Japanese researchers. Laser ignition systems, which are exactly what they sound like, could replace spark plugs as the primary means to ignite the fuel-air mix in engines, boosting fuel efficiency and cutting down on carbon emissions.In a conventional combustion engine, the fuel-air mix is compressed by a piston and ignited by a spark plug seated in the top of the cylinder. That spark is generated by electricity arcing between two electrodes, which is a good enough way to ignite fuel but also limiting in what kind of fuel you can burn.

Its name is FRIDA, and it's a creation of ABB, the Swiss power and automation giant, which introduced it early this month at the Hannover trade show, Europe's largest industrial fair.Designed for assembly applications, FRIDA is capable of using its human-like arms to grasp and manipulate electronic components and other small parts. The machine is a concept robot that ABB created to show off its vision for a new kind of industrial robot.

A breath test that can sniff-out cancer is a step closer to reality, according to a preliminary study.Researchers found an "electronic nose" was able to identify chemical signals of cancer in the breath of patients with lung or head and neck cancer.A cancer charity said it would take years of research to see if the breath test could be used in the clinic.

A leading nanotechnology scientist has raised questions over a billion dollar industry by boldly claiming that there is a limit to how small nanotechnology materials can be mass produced.In a paper published today, Thursday, 21 April, in IOP Publishing's journal Nanotechnology, Professor Mike Kelly, Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics, University of Cambridge, stated that you cannot mass produce structures with a diameter of three nanometres or less using a top-down approach.

You're probably the member of a club you didn't even know existed. According to research published this week, we all have one of three ecosystems of bugs in our guts. New Scientist explores what this surprising discovery means, and how our internal fauna might affect our everyday lives.Why might the types of bugs we carry be important?We think of our bodies as our own, but actually only a tenth of our cells are human. The rest are all hitch-hikers, mainly harmless bacteria that have evolved with us.

They were able to travel between settlements with pinpoint accuracy thanks to a complex network of hilltop monuments.These covered much of southern England and Wales and included now famous landmarks such as Stonehenge and The Mount.New research suggests that they were built on a connecting grid of isosceles triangles that 'point' to the next site.Many are 100 miles or more away, but GPS co-ordinates show all are accurate to within 100 metres.

Members of the international STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider -- a particle accelerator used to recreate and study conditions of the early universe at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory -- have detected the antimatter partner of the helium nucleus: antihelium-4. This new particle, also known as the anti-alpha, is the heaviest antinucleus ever detected, topping a discovery announced by the same collaboration just last year.