Newsdesk Archive

Dinosaurs did not always enjoy mild climates. New findings show that during part of the Early Cretaceous, north-east China had a temperate climate with harsh winters. They explain the abundance of feathered dinosaurs in fossil deposits of that period.The discovery was made by an international collaboration coordinated by Romain Amiot of the Laboratoire de géologie de Lyon: terre, planètes et environnement (CNRS/ENS de Lyon/Université Lyon 1).

Scientists in Angola claim they have unearthed one of the largest ever dinosaurs to walk the planet.Although they have only found the first fossil, it is believed the creature was a long-necked plant eater.It has been dubbed the Angolatitan adamastor - or Angolan giant.The international team claims unique skeletal characteristics of the fossilised forelimb bone mean it is part of a previously unknown dinosaur.

One of the most complex human mysteries involves how and why we became an outlier species in terms of biological success.Research findings published in the March 11 edition of the journal Science by an international team of noted anthropologists, including several from Arizona State University, who study hunter-gatherer societies, are informing the issue by suggesting that human ancestral social structure may be the root of cumulative culture and cooperation and, ultimately, human uniqueness.

The major earthquake that hit Japan on Friday caused a massive ice stream in Antarctica to momentarily speed up.As the surface seismic waves generated by the quake travelled around the world, they appear to have given the Whillans ice stream in West Antarctica a nudge, causing it to slide by about half a metre.The movement was picked up by Jake Walter of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues, who monitor the glacier remotely from California. They say the event is an "interesting insight", but are not suggesting it will destabilise the ice stream in any way.

Six days after the earthquake that rocked Japan and left thousands dead, the nation is now struggling to avert disaster at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Events have moved fast and risks are hard to assess.The worst nuclear accident in history was the Chernobyl explosion of 1986 in what is now Ukraine. Nuclear experts have repeatedly stated that the Japanese situation cannot get as bad as Chernobyl. New Scientist explains why.

AT 2.46 pm local time on Friday last week, Japan shook like never before. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake wrenched the main island of Honshu 2.5 metres closer to the US and nudged the tilt of Earth's axis by 16 centimetres. At the epicentre, 130 kilometres offshore, the Pacific tectonic plate lurched westwards, and a 10-metre-high tsunami sped towards the coastal city of Sendai and the surrounding region.The devastation caused by the events is difficult to exaggerate - estimates suggest the number of fatalities could top 10,000. One of the few consolations is that quakes of magnitude 8.5 and above are rare: the Sendai earthquake is in the top 10 of the highest-magnitude quakes of the last 100 years.Yet three of these - the December 2004 Sumatra quake, the February 2010 Chile quake, and now Sendai - have struck in just over six years. This presents a horrifying possibility: that there is a link between these megaquakes and that, as a result, more could strike.

The collapse of the Mayan civilization was due to environmental damage caused by deforestation and damage to the agricultural system, said a leading US archaeologist.'It was a collapse and not an abandonment, because the second is temporary; while the first represents an abandonment over the long term and the destruction of the social and economic system that maintains a state, as occurred in the said region,' Richard D. Hansen said at the opening of the 3rd International Congress on Mayan Culture in the Caribbean city of Merida.

Unusually low temperatures in the Arctic ozone layer have recently initiated massive ozone depletion. The Arctic appears to be heading for a record loss of this trace gas that protects Earth's surface against ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This result has been found by measurements carried out by an international network of over 30 ozone sounding stations spread all over the Arctic and Subarctic and coordinated by the Potsdam Research Unit of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) in Germany."Our measurements show that at the relevant altitudes about half of the ozone that was present above the Arctic has been destroyed over the past weeks," says AWI researcher Markus Rex, describing the current situation. "Since the conditions leading to this unusually rapid ozone depletion continue to prevail, we expect further depletion to occur." The changes observed at present may also have an impact outside the thinly populated Arctic. Air masses exposed to ozone loss above the Arctic tend to drift southwards later. Hence, due to reduced UV protection by the severely thinned ozone layer, episodes of high UV intensity may also occur in middle latitudes. "Special attention should thus be devoted to sufficient UV protection in spring this year," recommends Rex.

The explosion Tuesday at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has elevated the situation there to a "serious accident" on a level just below Chernobyl, a French nuclear official said, referring to an international scale that rates the severity of such incidents.The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale -- or INES -- goes from Level 1, which indicates very little danger to the general population, to Level 7, a "major accident" in which there's been a large release of radioactive material and there will be widespread health and environmental effects."It's clear we are at Level 6, that's to say we're at a level in between what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl," Andre-Claude Lacoste, president of France's nuclear safety authority, told reporters Tuesday.

A core meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant is unlikely to result in a Chernobyl-like disaster, but its impact will still be significant, say experts.Despite a second explosion at the site, Japanese authorities are playing down the danger of a core meltdown in one of the reactors.Most experts are comparing the situation to the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, which resulted in radiation affecting an area 16 kilometres around the reactor.

A new study has found Aboriginal dreamtime stories were linking meteorites to impact craters and the origins of life, thousands of years before modern science.While the night skies play important roles in many traditional cultures around the world, Duane Hamacher from Sydney's Macquarie University says the Arrernte and Luritja people of central Australia have an unusually strong focus on meteors, meteorites and impact craters.Writing in a paper published on the pre-press website arXiv.org, Hamacher examined Arrernte and Luritja dreamtime stories collected by early European explorers, missionaries and scientists travelling through Alice Springs and Hermannsburg (Ntaria).

ALLAHABAD: Teachers of department of Ancient History, Culture and Archaeology, Ewing Christian College, a constituent college of the Allahabad University have discovered and ancient art relics in Koraon sub-division of Allahabad.The department's team under the head of the department BC Shukla, surveyed and explored the ancient sites located at Deoghat, Badokhar, Shobhnath and Jagnath in Koraon sub-division. "Deoghat situated on Koraon-Badokhar Road on the left bank of the river Belan was a centre of Shiva-worship in early medieval period," said Shukla.

IN 1994, Jean-Marie Chauvet and two friends felt a draft of air coming from a small opening in the side of a cliff in the French countryside. Easing themselves through a narrow shaft, they came into a labyrinth of chambers.It must have felt like a step back in time. The skulls of cave lions and cave bears, long since extinct, littered the floors; within a glistening crust of calcite crystals, they could even make out the footprints of a prehistoric boy shadowed by a wolf. But it is the vivid depictions of galloping horses, tussling rhinos and courting lions stretching across the cave's vast walls that must have left the explorers breathless.

A team of electrical engineers and chemists at Lehigh University have experimentally verified the "rainbow" trapping effect, demonstrating that plasmonic structures can slow down light waves over a broad range of wavelengths.The idea that a rainbow of broadband light could be slowed down or stopped using plasmonic structures has only recently been predicted in theoretical studies of metamaterials. The Lehigh experiment employed focused ion beams to mill a series of increasingly deeper, nanosized grooves into a thin sheet of silver. By focusing light along this plasmonic structure, this series of grooves or nano-gratings slowed each wavelength of optical light, essentially capturing each individual color of the visible spectrum at different points along the grating. The findings hold promise for improved data storage, optical data processing, solar cells, bio sensors and other technologies.

If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider -- the world's largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year -- could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time."Our theory is a long shot," admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, "but it doesn't violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.

Nasa's Messenger spacecraft should finally enter orbit about the innermost planet Mercury at 00:45 GMT on Friday. Its journey, though, has taken more than six years and covered some 7.9 billion km, despite the fact that Mercury and the Earth are less than 100 million km apart at their closest. Messenger's trajectory around the Sun has carried it past the Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury three times as it strove to shed the energy it was gaining by falling deeper into the Sun's gravitational well. It could have made a more direct approach, but only by using much more fuel.

A new study shows clear evidence of the continuous control of fire by Neanderthals in Europe dating back roughly 400,000 years. The conclusion comes from the study of scores of ancient archaeological research sites in Europe that show convincing evidence of long-term fire control.

It appears that the supposed oldest examples of life on our planet -- 3.5 billion-year-old bacteria fossils found in Australian rock called Apex Chert -- are nothing more than tiny gaps in the rock that are packed with minerals.The new findings by geologists at the University of Kansas show that microscopic structures many scientists had thought to be primeval oxygen-producing cyanobacteria really are lifeless bits of hematite. The reexamination of the Apex Chert was published recently in Nature Geoscience, a respected peer-reviewed journal.

A new internet platform has been launched today to rescue cultural heritage sites on the verge of being irremediably lost, said Global Heritage Fund, a California-based nonprofit organization that focuses on historical preservation.Called Global Heritage Network (GHN), the platform is the first early warning and threat monitoring system for saving endangered sites in developing countries, where financial resources and expertise are limited.

It's no secret that I've been pessimistic about the state of our oceans. So when I saw there was a session entitled "2050: Will There Be Fish in the Ocean?" at this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), I knew it would be one I'd attend. And while the message wasn't particularly encouraging, it's not all doom and gloom on the seas.

AOL newsCrime solvers follow the money, but experts searching for the lost city of Atlantis? In archaeology, "you should follow the stones," Richard Freund said.Freund, a University of Hartford professor, believes he and his research team have found the legendary island-city described by Plato in about 360 B.C. as having "in a single day and night ... disappeared into the depths of the sea.

A new study involving the University of Colorado Boulder shows clear evidence of the continuous control of fire by Neanderthals in Europe dating back roughly 400,000 years, yet another indication that they weren't dimwitted brutes as often portrayed.The conclusion comes from the study of scores of ancient archaeological research sites in Europe that show convincing evidence of long-term fire control by Neanderthals, said Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. Villa co-authored a paper on the new study with Professor Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

In the next 20 years in large parts of China and India, there will be a 10% to 20% excess of young men because of sex selection and this imbalance will have societal repercussions, states an analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).A preference for sons in China, India and South Korea combined with easy access to sex-selective abortions has led to a significant imbalance between the number of males and females born in these countries. The sex ratio at birth (SRB) -- the number of boys born to every 100 girls -- is consistent in human populations in which about 105 males are born to every 100 females. However, with the advent of ultrasounds that enable sex-selection, the sex ratio at birth in some cities in South Korea climbed to 125 by 1992 and is over 130 in several Chinese provinces from Henan in the north to Hainan in the south.

The so-called cellular slime mold, a unicellular organism that may transition into a multicellular organism under stress, has just been found to have a tissue structure that was previously thought to exist only in more sophisticated animals. What's more, two proteins that are needed by the slime mold to form this structure are similar to those that perform the same function in more sophistical animals.Shortly after an animal embryo forms, it develops a single layer of cells that, shaped like a hollow ball, is empty at its center. Acting as a kind of "man behind the curtain" that directs these cells to organize into this hollow formation are several proteins that help each cell touch its neighbors but keep its top surface exposed to the formation's empty interior.

Banana peels are no longer just for composting or comedy shows: New science shows they can pull heavy metal contamination from river water.Metals such as lead and copper are introduced to waterways from a variety of sources, including agricultural runoff and industrial wastes. Once there, heavy metals can contaminate soils and pose health risks to humans and other species. Lead is known to affect the brain and nervous system.Traditionally, water quality engineers have used silica, cellulose, and aluminum oxide to extract heavy metals from water, but these remediation strategies come with high price tags and potentially toxic side effects of their own. They work as extractors due to the presence of acids such as those found in the carboxylic and phenolic groups, which attract metal ions.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have ruled out an alternate theory on the nature of dark energy after recalculating the expansion rate of the universe to unprecedented accuracy.The universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate. Some believe that is because the universe is filled with a dark energy that works in the opposite way of gravity. One alternative to that hypothesis is that an enormous bubble of relatively empty space eight billion light-years across surrounds our galactic neighborhood. If we lived near the center of this void, observations of galaxies being pushed away from each other at accelerating speeds would be an illusion.

Imagine the vast, empty tundra in Alaska and Canada giving way to trees, shrubs and plants typical of more southerly climates. Imagine similar changes in large parts of Eastern Europe, northern Asia and Scandinavia, as needle-leaf and broadleaf forests push northward into areas once unable to support them. Imagine part of Greenland's ice cover, once thought permanent, receding and leaving new tundra in its wake.

One of India's most historic landmarks is to be digitally recorded by a group of Scottish experts in an effort to preserve its every detail.The team, from Glasgow School of Art and Historic Scotland, will scan the Rani Ki Vav Stepwell in Gujarat.The site, which dates back to 1050, is made up of decorated stepped terraces descending into the ground.

Stonehenge is being scanned using modern laser technology to search for hidden clues about how and why it was built.All visible faces of the standing and fallen stones, many of which are obscured by lichen, will be surveyed.Some ancient carvings have previously been found on the stones, including a famous Neolithic "dagger".The survey is already in progress and is expected to finish by the end of March.

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 6.4 jolted Shizuoka Prefecture and its vicinity, including Tokyo, on Tuesday evening, at a time when Japan is struggling to tackle the aftermath of the catastrophic quake in the country's northeast last week.The 10:31 p.m. quake registered upper 6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in the eastern part of Shizuoka in central Japan, and upper 5 in the eastern part of neighboring Yamanashi Prefecture, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Weird 11, The UK's Premier Unknown, Mysterious, UFO & Paranormal Conference Launches The organisation behind the UK's premier conferences has announced the launch of Weird 11. The two day event which will be held on the 17th and 18th of September follows on from the hugely successful Weird 10 event held in August last year. With high profile speakers, live music and the screening of the award winning film 'The Stone', Weird 11 will push the boundaries of alternative conferences in the UK.This years speakers will be Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Nick Pope, Andy Thomas, Andy Roberts, Andrew Gough, Marcus Allen, Tony Eccles, Lucy Wyatt and Dennis Price. Over the weekend they will be discussing a variety of fascinating, thought provoking, controversial and evidence based topics from ancient technologies to cryptozoology, myths and legends to alien existence.

Nasa is installing a network of surveillance cameras called the All-Sky Fireball Network to track meteorites as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. Each of the cameras has a special lens that can view the entire sky above it and a black and white video recorder that documents any meteors that are brighter than Venus nightly. The cameras have overlapping fields of view to ensure that the same meteorite can be detected by more than one camera. Nasa triangulate the fireball to assess where the meteorites came from and where they will land to help scientists recover space rock and help inform spacecraft designers striving to design meteor-proof shuttles.

The powerful earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami Friday appears to have moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis."At this point, we know that one GPS station moved (8 feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass," said Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).Reports from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy estimated the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches (10 centimeters).

Japan fought on Sunday to avert a disastrous meltdown at two earthquake-crippled nuclear reactors as estimates of the death toll from the tsunami that charged across its northeast rose to more than 10,000.Broadcaster NHK, quoting a police official, said more than 10,000 people may have been killed as the wall of water triggered by Friday's 8.9-magnitude quake surged across the coastline, reducing whole towns to rubble.

Japanese officials were trying frantically to thwart partial meltdowns presumed under way Sunday at two earthquake-stricken nuclear reactors in Japan.Fuel rods were briefly exposed and radiation levels briefly rose above the legal limit at the second reactor Sunday, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano.A partial meltdown in the unit is "highly possible," he told reporters. "Because it's inside the reactor, we cannot directly check it but we are taking measures on the assumption of the possible partial meltdown."He also said a hydrogen explosion could occur at the reactor, Unit 3 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. That would follow a Saturday blast at Unit 1 of the same complex as operators attempted to prevent a nuclear meltdown by injecting sea water into it.

You won't notice it, but the day just got a tiny bit shorter because of Friday's giant earthquake off the coast of Japan.NASA geophysicist Richard Gross calculated that Earth's rotation sped up by 1.6 microseconds. That's because of the shift in Earth's mass caused by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.That change in rotation speed is slightly more than the one caused by last year's larger Chile earthquake. But 2004's bigger Sumatra earthquake caused a 6.8-microsecond shortening of the day.

A popular homeopathic flu remedy boasts that it comes with no side effects, no drug interactions and won't make you drowsy. But the product also lacks something most people expect to find in their medicine: active ingredients.Oscillococcinum (O-sill-o-cox-see-num), a tongue-twisting concoction used to treat flulike symptoms, is a staple in many European homes. Sales are steadily growing in the U.S., where it can be found everywhere from storefronts to major retailers.

Humans share 98.7 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, but we share one important similarity with one species of chimp, the common chimpanzee, that we don't share with the other, the bonobo. That similarity is violence. While humans and the common chimpanzee wage war and kill each other, bonobos do not. "There has never been a recorded case in captivity or in the wild of a bonobo killing another bonobo," notes anthropologist Brian Hare.

Air is one of the few things that you really cannot do without. At least if you want to continue to live. As the population of the earth gets bigger and bigger and increasing amounts of the globe become industrialized cityscape, the quality of air is a major environmental concern. Poor air quality can lead not only to increased instances of respiratory disease, but to global issues such as acid rain, as CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise.Fortunately, nature has given as us a way to counteract this effect. That is trees, which convert CO2 back to breathable oxygen, it is a byproduct of photosynthesis that helps to keep us alive. Sadly, we have been cutting down all of those trees which means as we produce more CO2, we have less to convert the gasses back with.

The latest evidence of the dominant role humans play in changing Earth's climate comes not from observations of Earth's ocean, atmosphere or land surface, but from deep within its molten core.Scientists have long known that the length of an Earth day - the time it takes for Earth to make one full rotation - fluctuates around a 24-hour average. Over the course of a year, the length of a day varies by about 1 millisecond, getting longer in the winter and shorter in the summer. These seasonal changes in Earth's length of day are driven by exchanges of energy between the solid Earth and fluid motions of Earth's atmosphere (blowing winds and changes in atmospheric pressure) and its ocean. Scientists can measure these small changes in Earth's rotation using astronomical observations and very precise geodetic techniques.

A three-member team from Egypt on Tuesday re-preserved a 2,300 old Egyptian mummy in Jaipur, Rajasthan.The mummy is that of Tutu, a female member of a priest''s family, dating from Egypt''s Ptolemaic period (322 BC to 30 BC).The Central Museum''s Director of Archaeology, S. P. Singh, said the team was happy with the condition of the mummy, but gave recommendations about threats of future damage."They have studied the condition of the mummy, and told us that it is in a good condition. However, they also gave some recommendations for the maintenance of the mummy. We were also informed about the possible damage threats" Singh said.

The 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rumbled through Japan today (March 11), triggering a devastating tsunami, was the strongest felt in that country since seismic monitoring was invented. It's also comparable in scale to a few other recent temblors, including last year's 8.8-magnitude quake in Chile and 2004's 9.1-magnitude undersea rupture off Indonesia that caused a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people.But researchers say these catastrophes shouldn't be taken as evidence of a larger trend. According to the United States Geological Survey, the number of earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 7 has remained constant in the last century. And the occurrence of a few big quakes in a few years is most likely a statistical anomaly. (The upcoming "supermoon," by the way, also did not cause the Japanese earthquake.).

The discovery has important implications for the welfare of farm and laboratory animals, say researchers.Empathy, long thought to be a defining human trait, causes one individual to be affected by the emotional state of another.Feelings are ''mirrored'' in the observer, leading to a shared experience of being happy, sad or distressed.The research demonstrated that hens possess a fundamental capacity to empathise, at least with their own chicks.Scientists chose hens and chicks for the study because it is thought empathy probably evolved to aid parental care.

Life.com has obtained a set of newly released photos from the personal albums of Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's longtime girlfriend and, in their final hours, wife.The photos "reveal new dimensions" of the woman who married Hitler as the Russian army closed in on his Berlin bunker and then committed suicide with him a day later. He was 56. She was 33.The 30 photos cover almost all of Braun's life, from images of her as a toddler and schoolgirl to her spending time with Hitler at his mountaintop retreat in the Alps.

Another day, another earthquake. Except the Magnitude 8.9 tremor off the coast of Honshu, Japan, will be a standout event for 2011 - if not in terms of the eventual death toll it brings, then certainly in scale.There are usually only one or two quakes of M 8.0 and above every year. And even for a country such as Japan, which is very familiar with seismic hazards, this is extraordinary.The history books show there have been seven quakes rated at M 8.0 or greater since 1891 in Japan. And with big tremors come big aftershocks.Following the initial M 8.9 event at 1446 local time (0546 GMT), a sequence of major tremors was initiated - six of them within an hour-and-a-quarter that were all bigger than or all equal to last month's quake in Christchurch, New Zealand (M 6.3). The largest of the aftershocks was a M 7.1.

HONOLULU, March 10 (Reuters) - Hawaii ordered evacuations of its coastal areas and braced for a possible tidal wave set off by Friday's earthquake in Japan as a tsunami warning was extended to most of the Pacific basin, including northern California and Oregon.Some 3,800 miles (6,200 km) from Japan, the main airports on at least three of the major Hawaiian islands -- Maui, Kauai and the Big Island of Hawaii -- were shut down as a precaution, and the U.S. Navy ordered all warships in Pearl Harbor to remain in port to support rescue missions as needed.

Workers are battling to stave off a possible nuclear meltdown at a plant in north-eastern Japan as the country struggles with the aftermath of Friday's enormous earthquake and tsunami.Japanese media said officials had detected caesium, one of the elements released when overheating causes core damage, around the reactor at Fukushima No 1 plant in Futuba, 150 miles north of Tokyo.The Tokyo Electric Power Company said it did not believe a meltdown was underway but Ryohei Shiomi, an official with Japan's nuclear safety commission, said that it was possible.

The US Air Force is delivering a cargo of liquid coolant to the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant - where one of six reactors seriously affected by today's quake is still alarmingly hot many hours after it was automatically shut down when the quake struck.Electrical, mechanical and diesel generator failures are said to have combined to deprive the reactor of power for its coolant pumps.

IN AN echo of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous book, a lost world containing a community of animals that has changed little since Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops walked the Earth has been found. But while Conan Doyle's lost world was on a South American plateau, its real life equivalent lies on a submerged mountain off the Antarctic coast.Rather than dinosaurs, this lost world is filled with crinoids, the stalked cousins of sea stars and sea urchins. Also known as sea lilies, crinoids were abundant in the shallow seas of the Mesozoic, 250 to 65 million years ago. Today, however, they were only thought to exist in small numbers in the deep sea, possibly because of pressure from recently evolved predators.

The latest figures on the earthquake that struck Japan on Friday suggest that, despite all the headlines, it was actually surprisingly small.That is, the area of fault that ruptured was small - somewhere between 300 and 400 kilometres long. By comparison, the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004 broke along an area of fault 1300 km long.How then, did today's quake get so powerful? What the fault lacked in size, it made up for when the two adjoining tectonic plates slipped a whopping 40 metres. This calculation comes from Chen Ji of the University of California, Santa Cruz (in the figure below, red colouring indicates areas of 40 metres' slip).

Single-celled slime moulds work together to improve their chances for survival. Now Daniel Dickinson and his colleagues at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, have discovered that the humble slime Dictyostelium discoideum forms a specialised tissue known as a polarised epithelium that rivals forms found in multicellular animals. The findings suggest the building blocks for multicellularity existed long before the first animals evolved.When food is scarce for the slime mould, a fungus-like creature that lurks in damp soils, they join up to create a stalk and cap structure that spreads their spores to a new home. The tip of this fruiting body is made up of the polarised epithelium (pictured above). Proteins similar to the animal equivalents of alpha- and beta-catenins (in orange) help the slime mould organise components within each cell to specialise the function of the overall tissue.

In the first census of its kind, research led by UC Davis and Stanford University found that there are far fewer white sharks off central California than biologists had thought.The study, published in the journal Biology Letters, is the first rigorous scientific estimate of white shark numbers in the northeast Pacific Ocean. It is also the best estimate among the world's three known white-shark populations (the others are in Australia/New Zealand and South Africa).The researchers went out into the Pacific Ocean in small boats to places where white sharks congregate. They lured the sharks into photo range using a seal-shaped decoy on a fishing line. From 321 photographs of the uniquely jagged edges of white sharks' dorsal fins, they identified 131 individual sharks.

Seismologists were crunching data Friday to figure out if the magnitude 8.9 quake that rocked Japan increased the chances of a mega-quake hitting the Tokyo basin, home to 30 million people.The Japanese government's Earthquake Research Committee has long warned that Tokyo faces a serious risk of a major quake -- 8.0 or higher -- in the coming decades.Japan is still haunted by the "Big One" that devastated its capital in 1923 and left more than 140,000 dead. The 1995 Kobe quake, which claimed 6,400 lives, added to this ever-present fear.

Carbon nanoparticles promise multifaceted benefits in transporting drugs.Attaching chemotherapy drugs to small particles called nanodiamonds can make the drugs more effective, according to a study published this week in Science Translational MedicineAnticancer drugs tend to become ineffective because cancer cells quickly pump them out before they have had time to do their work. This kind of drug resistance accounts for 90% of treatment failure in malignant cancer.

A gene defect that can triple the risk of a child developing an allergy to peanuts has been identified, scientists have said.An international research team led by Dundee University said it had made a "significant breakthrough" in understanding the disease.The gene responsible - Filaggrin - has already been shown to be a factor in causing eczema and asthma.Peanut allergy affects 1-2% of children in the UK and can be life-threatening.

London's Natural History Museum (NHM) will return the skeletal remains of 138 indigenous people taken from the Torres Strait Islands in the 19th Century.Early explorers, missionaries, and others had collected the body parts for all manner of reasons, including as curios.Repatriation follows a long campaign by indigenous leaders who regarded the removal as an affront to local customs.The souls of the dead had not been able to rest, the islanders said.

The last few years have seen a few incidents like this around the UK. A 10m long sperm whale washed up in Lincolnshire in 2004, a bottle-nosed whale became stranded in the Thames in 2006, and a humpback whale was found dead in the Thames in 2009. It's very difficult to tell the real cause of incidences like this but the million dollar question is, are we to blame?Juvenile whales may simply get lost and find themselves in shallow waters or those lacking in sufficient food. Whales that have collided with ships may become injured or get infections and so end up on our shores. Illness too can affect an animal's ability to navigate, but it has also been suggested that shipping noise might significantly disturb whales' sonar navigation.

A court in the Indian capital, Delhi, has ordered the authorities to test vegetables for toxic substances.The government has been ordered to randomly buy vegetables from big markets and street vendors.The order came after news reports said that banned pesticides were being used in vegetables and fruit, putting the health of consumers at risk.A recent study claimed that the amount of pesticides used in India is as much as 750 times European standards.

MARCO ISLAND, Fla. (Newscore) - A Pennsylvania woman on vacation in Florida took a tip from two dolphins to save a lost Doberman Pinscher that got stranded on a sandbar.When Audrey D'Alessandro and her husband, Sam, walked out of their home on Marco Island, near Naples, Fla., to go fishing, "we saw these two dolphins, and they were splashing and making this big commotion" in a canal behind their vacation home, she said.Although it is not uncommon to see dolphins swimming through the canal on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, Audrey D'Alessandro said that this time, "they were just there, in one place, splashing water against the canal wall.

A new University of Florida study of 45-million-year-old pollen from Pine Island west of Fort Myers has led to a new understanding of the state's geologic history, showing the land which is now Florida could be 10 million to 15 million years older than previously believed.The discovery of land in Florida during the early Eocene opens the possibility for researchers to explore the existence of land animals at that time, including their adaptation, evolution and dispersal until the present.

An experimental robotic space plane developed for the Air Force is slated to launch Friday from Cape Canaveral, fueling an ongoing mystery about its hush-hush payload and overall mission.Watching the pilotless spacecraft along with the Pentagon will also be wary Russian and Chinese military officials who have raised questions about U.S. intentions since the government launched its first version of the secret plane into orbit almost a year ago.The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle. Because of its clandestine nature, some industry analysts have theorized it could be a precursor to an orbiting weapon, capable of dropping bombs or disabling foreign satellites as it circles the globe.

Illinois has abolished the death penalty after two decades of deliberation on the grounds that the justice system could execute innocent people by mistake, in a move that is likely to renew calls for other states to follow.The move will save fifteen men from execution who are currently on Illinois' death row, moving them to life in prison with no hope of parole.Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat who has long supported capital punishment, spent two months deliberating on the decision, which he described as the most difficult he has made in office."If the system can't be guaranteed, 100-% error-free, then we shouldn't have the system," Quinn said. "It cannot stand.

Remember that $9 billion fine that was Chevron was slapped with last month for the 18 billion gallons of pollution in Ecuador that were never cleaned up? A judge in New York has granted Chevron the preliminary injunction it requested, ruling that plaintiffs in Ecuador cannot seek damages in the U.S. or essentially anywhere outside Ecuador.Environment New Service explains how Chevron got here:On February 1, Chevron sued the Ecuadorian plaintiffs in U.S. District Court in New York, accusing them of fraud, interfering with contracts, trespass, unjust enrichment, and conspiracy. Chevron levied even more serious charges against their main U.S. lawyer Steven Donziger, expert witnesses and affiliated organizations, accusing them of racketeering.

Scientists have identified a clutch of subtle genetic changes that have shaped our minds and bodies into the unique form that sets humans apart from chimpanzees and the rest of the animal kingdom.The work by researchers in the US represents a landmark in a search that has occupied philosophers and scientists for millennia and one that goes to the heart of understanding what it means to be human.The findings offer up the humbling conclusion that the secret of human success may owe more to what we lost along the path of evolution, rather than anything we gained.

The Weld Range in Western Australia joined other iconic sites like the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru and the Sydney Harbour Bridge on the prestigious National Heritage List.The Weld Range is of significant cultural importance to the traditional owners of the area, the Wajarri Yamatji people, as well as neighbouring Indigenous groups.

Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has announced a long-awaited plan to devolve his political responsibilities to an elected figure.The Dalai Lama said he would begin the formal process of stepping down at a meeting of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile next Monday.He said the move would be to the long-term benefit of Tibetans.The announcement came in a speech by the Dalai Lama marking the anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising."As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power," he said in Dharamsala, the Indian town that has become his base.

The Dalai Lama has announced he will retire from political life within days.In a speech posted on the internet and delivered in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamasala, the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader said he would ask the Tibetan parliament in exile to make the necessary constitutional changes to relieve him of his "formal authority" as head of the Tibetan community outside China.The assembly, which meets early next week, is expected to approve his request. Though long-anticipated, the move away from the limelight by one of the world's best known political figures signals a dramatic change.

On Saturday, aliens invaded.On Monday, NASA denied their existence.This might sound like the perfect X-Files storyline for conspiracy theorists to chew over (and they probably will, for months), but as you may have already guessed, something wasn't quite "right" about Richard Hoover's announcement of an extraterrestrial discovery inside samples of meteorites.Here's NASA's take on said piece of research, via SpaceRef.com:"NASA is a scientific and technical agency committed to a culture of openness with the media and public. While we value the free exchange of ideas, data, and information as part of scientific and technical inquiry, NASA cannot stand behind or support a scientific claim unless it has been peer-reviewed or thoroughly examined by other qualified experts. This paper was submitted in 2007 to the International Journal of Astrobiology. However, the peer review process was not completed for that submission. NASA also was unaware of the recent submission of the paper to the Journal of Cosmology or of the paper's subsequent publication. Additional questions should be directed to the author of the paper." - Dr. Paul Hertz, chief scientist of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Sheepish scientists refer to it as a tail, but the appendage dragging behind the male frog recently discovered in Mendocino County is no tail.The little amphibian, known as a coastal tailed frog, is unique among frog and toad species for its comparatively magnificent, let's call it, copulatory organ.The unusual species was found recently for the first time in the 23,780-acre Garcia River Forest, farther south than it has ever been known to exist. Biologists say the 1- to 2-inch-long amphibian has a lot going for it, most notably its genitalia, which can get up to a quarter of the length of its body.

The first full test firing of the rocket that will power a British car to over 1,000mph (1,610km/h) will take place in the coming months.Producing 122kN (27,000lbf) of thrust, the hybrid Falcon motor will be the largest rocket to be ignited in the UK for 20 years.It will not be the only power unit in the Bloodhound vehicle when it tries to break the land speed record next year.There will also be a jet from a fighter plane and the engine from an F1 car.

We're in Siberia, shivering. It's November, November 11, 2003, and two boys, Kolya and Maksim Muravyev, are ice fishing along the Lena River, where it's 13 below zero. All of a sudden, up in the sky, they see what looks like a flamingo. "We thought it was a swan or a stork," Kolya says, a flamingo being so preposterously improbable.It was large, and made ever lower circles in the sky. It seemed to be losing energy until finally it fell and lay quietly on the snow. The two boys ran over, called their father, Vasily, who picked up the bird and took it home. It was still alive. "[This is the ] first time I see a bird like this," he told a TV reporter.

Last week I attended a discussion group chaired by the Observer's health correspondent Denis Campbell where one of the other experts, a public health doctor, asserted that alcohol should be treated differently from tobacco (and by inference other drugs) because there is no safe dose of tobacco whereas alcohol is safe until a person's drinking gets to "unsafe" levels. Its health benefits for the cardiovascular system are also often used to support the claim that in low doses alcohol is safe, for how else could it be health-promoting?The myth of a safe level of drinking is a powerful claim. It is one that many health professionals appear to believe in and that the alcohol industry uses to defend its strategy of making the drug readily available at low prices. However, the claim is wrong and the supporting evidence flawed.

EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain, which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties - the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi Psilocybe hispanica, a local species with hallucinogenic properties.

A new technique has allowed scientists to pin down the timing of ancient glaciations, linking them more firmly to two bursts of extinction.A team of researchers, including earth and planetary scientists from Washington University in St. Louis, for the first time has been able to reconstruct both ocean temperature and general ice thickness of massive glaciers during one of the biggest mass extinctions in history hundreds of millions of years ago.

The large impact-scarred Huygens basin, known for its unusual elongated craters, is about 450 km in diameter and lies in the heavily cratered southern highlands. One of these odd craters, shown above, sits just to the south of the much larger Huygens basin. It is about 78 km in length, opens from just under 10 km wide at one end to 25 km at the other, and reaches a depth of 2 km.So, why is this impact crater elongated rather than round? The clue, according to NASA experts, comes from the surrounding blanket of material, thrown out in the initial impact. This 'ejecta blanket' is shaped like a butterfly's wings, with two distinct lobes. This hints that two projectiles, possibly halves of a once-intact body, slammed into the surface.

Tobacco will no longer be displayed in shops under new legislation being implemented by the Government.Only temporary displays in "certain limited circumstances" will be allowed, with the rules phased in to minimise the impact on businesses, according to a statement from the Department of Health.

TOKYO, March 9 (Reuters) - A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.2 hit off the coast of northeastern Japan on Wednesday, the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) said, but there were so far no reports of damage from the quake.A tsunami advisory of up to 50 cm (about 20 inches) was issued for northeastern Japan after the quake hit around 11:45 a.m. (0245 GMT), JMA said.

Scientific investigations have revealed that human DNA may be present in fragments of material that could provide crucial information about the fate of Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 74 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to circle the world at the equator.Collected on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited, waterless tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati where Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan might have made an emergency landing, the material consisted of a tiny bone fragment and clumps of material resembling soil or feces.

The Internet has been buzzing about a recent photograph allegedly depicting a monster surfacing in a British lake. As Eric Niiler of Discovery News noted, "The latest entry in the lake monster sweepstakes is making a bid for glory [is the] 'Bownessie' of Lake Windermere, England....Tom Pickles and Sara Harrington, work colleagues who were kayaking at the lake as part of a team-building exercise, snapped this photo of the possible sea creature with a mobile phone. It appears to show a multi-humped black object moving through the water from left to right.

The Russians have their Almastis, in the Himalayas it is the 'Yeti', within China it is known as the 'Chaing Mi', there is the 'Mie Tie' of Malaysia, and the 'Kiboornee' of New Guinea...(SALEM, Ore.) - Society's sphere of influence is like a campfire in the darkness, and we peer beyond the circle of light into the unknown. Beyond where the roads have ended, and only the brave and curious continue into the shadows of the forest, there are furtive sounds that cannot be explained, and cunning movements we cannot follow. It is here, in the sanctity of the wild places, that the ancient ones live, watching, and waiting.

Eleven Italian researchers who were evacuated from Libya in a C-130 Hercules military aircraft on Saturday are thought to have been among the last foreign archaeologists in the country. With Libya's people being attacked by forces loyal to the regime of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, the scientists were thankful to escape to an air-force base south of Rome.The team of seven men and four women were from the Italian-Libyan Archaeological Mission in the Acacus and Messak, an expedition to research prehistoric archaeology and rock-art. They took temporary refuge in an oilfield camp in the open desert. Stress levels were high, explains Savino di Lernia, head of the team: "We were hundreds of kilometers from an airport, with the entire country to be crossed to reach it," he says. In a Twin Otter light aircraft, they had to make their way at short notice to Sebha airport in central Libya to rendezvous with the evacuation plane.

It is hard to believe that some of these delicate ivory carvings, excavated from the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, are almost 3,000 years old. Yet perhaps more remarkable is the fact their lustre was first restored, at a dusty archaeological site in Iraq, by the novelist Agatha Christie through the patient application of face cream.The British Museum has paid £1.2m for the Nimrud Ivories, the finest collection of decorative ivories ever excavated in the Middle East. They were discovered by the British School of Archaeology between 1949 and 1963, on a dig led by Sir Max Mallowan, Christie's second husband and head of an excavation team of which his wife was also a member.

STANDING in a container full of pipes and valves, wearing a hard hat and sturdy boots, we gaze at a dull grey panel with green and red on and off switches."This panel means we're connected to the grid," says my companion Rob Morgan, grinning proudly. "To an engineer, this is really exciting."We are on an industrial estate in Slough in the UK, on the grounds of a 100-megawatt biomass plant owned by energy firm Scottish and Southern. But what we've come to see is the small cluster of containers and a gleaming white liquid nitrogen tank tucked away in one corner of the site. Here Morgan, chief engineer at Highview Power Storage, London, and his colleagues have been running a pilot plant designed to store potential energy in the form of liquid air.

Some shark species make "mental maps" of their home ranges, allowing them to pin-point destinations up to 50km (30 miles) away, research suggests.US-based scientists analysed data from tiger sharks tagged with acoustic transmitters, and found that they took directed paths from place to place.Other species such as blacktip reef sharks did not show this behaviour.Writing in the Journal of Animal Ecology, researchers suggest this shows a capacity to store maps of key sites.

The last of Europe's permanent modules has been attached to the International Space Station (ISS).Astronauts used the platform's robotic arm on Tuesday to lift the Leonardo cylinder out of the Discovery shuttle's payload bay and berth it to the underside of the 350km-high lab.Leonardo will be used as extra storage space on the ISS.Originally built to transport cargo to and from the station inside shuttles, the module is now being left in orbit.

Video: Something strange happened this week back in 1942.

Plastics are great because they are so easily moldable into just about anything, but that manipulability also often introduces a degree of fragility as well. For high strength and durability, what you really want is a metal alloy of some kind. Now Yale scientists are doing away with this strength-moldability tradeoff by developing novel metal alloys that are as moldable as plastic.The resulting materials are stronger than steel, yet easily formed under low heat and pressure into all kinds of shapes and forms. Materials scientists at Yale were looking into the properties of some recently developed bulk mettalic glasses--metal alloys whose atoms are randomly arranged rather than organized into highly-ordered crystalline structures--and found that they can be blow molded just like plastics while retaining their strength and durability.

A team of scientists have managed to unlock the secrets surrounding the dating of the burial site of Combe Capelle that was discovered by the Swiss researcher and archaeologist Otto Hauser in 1909.Since his sensational discovery, the site of Combe Capelle, situated in the Couze valley in the Périgord region of southern France, has long been considered to be the earliest evidence of the remains of modern Homo sapiens anywhere in Europe.Due to the circumstances of the find however, doubt was sometimes cast on its speculative dating of more than 30,000 years old and its connection with the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic period (Châtelperronian). In spite of this, the remains (buried with a chain of perforated shells) were nevertheless thought to have originated in the Ice Age.

Modern human have been around for over 100,000 years. Science would have us believe that in the first 90,000 years humans foraged like animals, hunting and gathering things to survive on, made rudimentary tools and did nothing much else.And that it is only in the past 10,000 years that we, as a species, have been able to grow our food and to domestic animals - for food, as beasts of burden, as labour-saving devices and for companionship.

A dog that an Oklahoma shelter "euthanized" and confirmed to be dead was recently found alive and well in the facility's dumpster, News 9 in Oklahoma City has reported.The three-month-old male black and white puppy had supposedly been put to (permanent) sleep with injections to one of his limbs and to his heart. A stethoscope test at the Sulphur, Okla., shelter led to the declaration that he'd died."You might say that he's an angel dog," animal control officer Scott Prall told News 9, after Prall found the resurrected dog, now named Wall-e, wandering around inside the trash bin.PETFINDER: Find Animals That You Can Adopt in Your Area

Are humans causing a mass extinction on the magnitude of the one that killed the dinosaurs?The answer is yes, according to a new analysis -- but we still have some time to stop it.Mass extinctions include events in which 75 percent of the species on Earth disappear within a geologically short time period, usually on the order of a few hundred thousand to a couple million years. It's happened only five times before in the past 540 million years of multicellular life on Earth. (The last great extinction occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out.) At current rates of extinction, the study found, Earth will enter its sixth mass extinction within the next 300 to 2,000 years.

A Vatican newspaper has forgiven the late English singer John Lennon for saying four decades ago that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.In an article praising The Beatles, L'Osservatore Romano said Lennon had just been showing off.Lennon told a British newspaper in 1966 - at the height of Beatlemania - that he did not know which would die out first, Christianity or rock and roll.At the time, the comparison sparked controversy in the US.

Sperm quality significantly deteriorated and testicular cancers increased over recent years, a Finnish study says.The study in the International Journal of Andrology looked at men born between 1979 and 1987.The University of Turku research suggests environmental reasons, particularly exposure to industrial chemicals, may be behind both trends.

German scientists said Friday they believed it possible to reconstruct one of the world-famous Bamiyan Buddhas dynamited by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, prompting worldwide condemnation.Scientists from the University of Munich, in southern Germany, have examined fragments of the statues -- the world's largest Buddhas -- and concluded that the smaller one could be pieced together.The two sculptures, 53 metres (173 feet) and 35 metres tall, had stood sentinel for 1,500 years in Bamiyan province before they were blown up by Islamists who believed them to be idolatrous.

NASA's Glory atmospheric research mission satellite crashed into the southern Pacific Ocean early today after a protective nose cone fairing failed to separate during launch aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp. Taurus XL rocket. The $424 million failure was the second in a row for the Orbital Sciences booster following the 2009 loss of another environmental satellite due to a similar nose cone malfunction."I think it's not an understatement to say tonight we're all pretty devastated," said Ronald Grabe, a former space shuttle commander who now manages Orbital's Launch Systems Group. "But we will recover, the team will bounce back because they're all professionals. Orbital Sciences will bounce back with the Taurus vehicle.

Two companies in Australia have developed a beer that can be safely consumed in space.With space tourism preparing to take off as early as next year, Saber Astronautics Australia and the Four Pines Brewing Company came up with the thirst quenching beer.

An experimental robotic space plane was launched into orbit atop a massive Atlas V rocket Saturday for a classified Air Force mission that could last up to nine months.The 19-story Atlas V and the space plane, dubbed the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 5:46 p.m. Eastern time.The unmanned X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, is about 29 feet long with a wingspan of about 15 feet. The spacecraft draws solar power for energy using unfolding panels.

Fossilized alien microbes have been discovered in a sample extracted from a meteorite, according to research carried out by a NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center astrobiologist. What's more, he has challenged any scientist to investigate his work.Published in the online Journal of Cosmology, Richard Hoover's paper claims to have made the discovery after finding "large complex filaments" inside "freshly fractured internal surfaces" of carbonaceous chondrite meteorite samples (including new fragment samples from the famous French Orgueil meteorite).Some of the "alien" fossils appear to resemble bacteria found on Earth (such as types of cyanobacteria, a microorganism that helped make early-Earth hospitable to life by producing oxygen), whereas others don't look so familiar.

A Nasa scientist has stirred up fresh debate over life elsewhere in the cosmos after claiming to have found tiny fossils of alien bugs inside meteorites that landed on Earth.Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the US space agency's Marshall space flight centre in Alabama, said filaments and other structures in rare meteorites appear to be microscopic fossils of extraterrestrial beings that resemble algae known as cyanobacteria.Some of the features look similar to a giant bacterium called Titanospirillum velox, which has been collected from the Ebro delta waterway in Spain, according to a report on the findings.

Sites on the Channel Islands indicate that seafarers may have been among the first settlers of North America.Delicate stone arrowheads and tools and a wide variety of marine and bird skeletons unearthed on the Channel Islands off the coast of California provide strong evidence that North America was settled by two separate groups of immigrants some 13,000 years ago, one that came overland from Asia and a second group of maritime explorers who sailed along the coast.