Newsdesk Archive

A prototype solar device has been unveiled which mimics plant life, turning the Sun's energy into fuel.The machine uses the Sun's rays and a metal oxide called ceria to break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported.Conventional photovoltaic panels must use the electricity they generate in situ, and cannot deliver power at night.

A team of experts hope to shed new light on one of Nottinghamshire's most mysterious ancient monuments.A 'Thing', or open-air meeting place where Vikings gathered to discuss the law, was discovered in the Birklands, Sherwood Forest, five years ago.In January 2011 experts plan to survey the hill and see if they can detect signs of buried archaeology and the extent of the site.The site was found by three local historians after a treasure hunt.

"Alien oceans could be detected by telescope," headlines a Web report about an article in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by Tyler Robinson and colleagues at NASA. The report projects that the $6.5 billion James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of such an impressive feat when it is launched some time after 2014 as a more powerful successor to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope.

Decades after it was excavated, an ancient fortress in the heart of Tel Aviv, Israel, is offering new hints about its past, archaeologists at Tel Aviv University say.

A particular type of ancient rock art in Western Australia maintains its vivid colours because it is alive, researchers have found.While some rock art fades in hundreds of years, the "Bradshaw art" remains colourful after at least 40,000 years.Jack Pettigrew of the University of Queensland in Australia has shown that the paintings have been colonised by colourful bacteria and fungi.

New research has uncovered a forgotten chapter in the history of the Bible, offering a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture.The study by Cambridge University researchers suggests that, contrary to long-accepted views, Jews continued to use a Greek version of the Bible in synagogues for centuries longer than previously thought. In some places, the practice continued almost until living memory.

Broken pieces of clay pottery have revealed the names of dozens of Egyptian priests who served at the temple of a crocodile god, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) announced.Engraved with text dating back to the Roman period, the small potsherds have been found by Italian archaeologists on the west side of the temple dedicated to the crocodile god Soknopaios in Soknopaiou Nesos, an Egyptian village in the Fayoum oasis.

Each year, a new bird is found and every four years a new mammal discovered in the Peruvian Amazon, a haven for biodiversity where conservation and danger often go hand in hand.Although Peru is known for its Andes mountain range, the Amazon actually covers 60 percent of the country's territory. It is a hotbed of bio-activity and is home to 25,000 species of plants -- 10 percent of the world's stock.

Formerly rare beak deformities are spreading rapidly among crows in southwestern B.C. and Puget Sound, according to researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey.The biologists observed an unusual concentration of crows with badly overgrown beaks in Alaska beginning a little over 10 years ago. According to the scientists, a capture program in 2007 and 2008 revealed that more than 16 per cent of the Alaskan crow population was afflicted, "the highest rate of gross deformities ever recorded in a wild bird population.

An experiment has found differences between the brains of progressives and conservatives.Head scans of students at University College London, conducted by neuroscientist Geraint Rees, showed a "strong correlation" between thickness in two regions, the amygdala and the anterior cingulate, and political viewpoint.

Scientists have found that people with conservative views have brains with larger amygdalas, almond shaped areas in the centre of the brain often associated with anxiety and emotions.On the otherhand, they have a smaller anterior cingulate, an area at the front of the brain associated with courage and looking on the bright side of life.

The following graphics are computer generated images of objects in Earth orbit that are currently being tracked. Approximately 95% of the objects in this illustration are orbital debris, i.e., not functional satellites. The dots represent the current location of each item. The orbital debris dots are scaled according to the image size of the graphic to optimize their visibility and are not scaled to Earth. These images provide a good visualization of where the greatest orbital debris populations exist. Below are the graphics generated from different observation points.

Sometime in mid-July 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and started to dance.She was still dancing several days later. Within a week about 100 people had been consumed by the same irresistible urge to dance. The authorities were convinced that the afflicted would only recover if they danced day and night.

Archeologists in Germany have discovered a 2,600-year-old Celtic tomb containing ornate jewellery of gold and amber. They say the grave is unusually well preserved and should provide important insights into early Celtic culture.German archeologists have unearthed a 2,600-year-old Celtic tomb containing a treasure of jewellery made of gold, amber and bronze.

A documentary detailing the underwater excavation of an ancient Greek city is being made by the BBC.The programme will depict work on Pavlopetri, off southern Laconia. The city is thought to have been inhabited from around 3500BC to 1100BC, with a population of between 500 and 2000 people.

As people on Earth celebrate the holidays and prepare to ring in the New Year, an ESA/NASA spacecraft has quietly reached its own milestone: on December 26, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) discovered its 2000th comet.Drawing on help from citizen scientists around the world, SOHO has become the single greatest comet finder of all time. This is all the more impressive since SOHO was not specifically designed to find comets, but to monitor the sun.

Israeli archaeologists have discovered human remains dating from 400,000 years ago, challenging conventional wisdom that Homo sapiens originated in Africa, the leader of excavations in Israel said on Tuesday.Avi Gopher, of Tel Aviv University's Institute of Archaeology, said testing of stalagmites, stalactites and other material found in a cave east of Tel Aviv indicates that eight teeth uncovered there could be the earliest traces so far of our species.

Hundreds of previously classified reports detailing claims of UFO sightings and alien encounters have been released by the New Zealand military. Here are some examples:1. A man who in 1995 met the giant alien with size 440 shoes says the being told him that on dying humans ascend as hydrogen atoms. "You will remain in hydrogen form for 150 years. Then it will change to sodium."2. Sinister forces reported to be criss-crossing the sky over Auckland, the country's largest city, with what looked like aircraft contrails in May 1999. "A vast many people in Auckland will suffer flu-like sickness," the alarmed writer warned

The New Zealand military released hundreds of previously classified reports Wednesday detailing claims of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings and alien encounters.The reports, dating from 1954 to 2009, were released under freedom of information laws after the New Zealand Defence Force removed names and other identifying material

New Zealand's Air Force has just released over 2,000 pages of previously classified documents pertaining to UFO sightings and alien encounters. Including descriptions of aliens that wear "pharaoh masks," and a sample of alien writing.After weeding through hundreds of pages of the New Zealand Air Force's alien goodness, we've rounded-up a few choice entries. First up is a video recording of an alien sighting.

Could New Zealand become a new hot spot for close encounters?Just days after New Zealand authorities released 2,000 pages of previously classified UFO X-Files, mysterious lights were spotted over three locations.New Zealand's stuff.co.nz news service reports that on Sunday, Boxing Day in that country, unexplained orange and red lights appeared above Napier, Taranaki and Christchurch.One eyewitness, Allan White watched one of the UFOs with his family.

THE WASHINGTON POSTLISBON, Portugal -- These days, Casal Ventoso is an ordinary blue-collar community - mothers push baby strollers, men smoke outside cafes, buses chug up and down the cobbled main street.Ten years ago, the Lisbon neighborhood was a hellhole, a "drug supermarket" where some 5,000 users lined up every day to buy heroin and sneaked into a hillside honeycomb of derelict housing to shoot up. In dark, stinking corners, addicts - some with maggots squirming under track marks - staggered between the occasional corpse, scavenging used, bloody needles.At that time, Portugal, like the junkies of Casal Ventoso, had hit rock bottom: An estimated 100,000 people - an astonishing 1 percent of the population - were addicted to illegal drugs. So, like anyone with little to lose, the Portuguese took a risky leap: They decriminalized the use of all drugs in a groundbreaking law in 2000.

Researchers digging a cave in central Israel found teeth that may be 400,000 years old and human.The remains have to undergo testing to confirm if the find is indeed human and 400,000 years old. If they test proves positive, the find will overturn a long held belief that man's oldest remains are 200,000 years old.If the tests prove positive, the idea that man originated in Africa and then moved up and around the world will also be overturned.

A new meta-analysis study conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue is getting attention around the world. The groundbreaking study, "The Neuroimaging of Love," reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second.

Chinese archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an ancient workshop dating back 6,000 years that processed jade and stone objects.

Count this among the 10 things nobody ever expected to see in their lifetimes: 700 Club founder Pat Robertson, one of the cornerstone figures of America's Christian right movement, has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana.Calling it getting "smart" on crime, Robertson aired a clip on a recent episode of his 700 Club television show that advocated the viewpoint of drug law reformers who run prison outreach ministries.

LONDON: You may call it a miracle, but a woman, paralysed from the waist down in a car accident, has walked again, after nearly 23 years in a wheelchair, reports said.According to the Daily Mail, 46-year-old Delia Knox was paralysed when a driver in a drunken state ploughed into her car on Christmas Day in 1987. But during a recent visit to a British spiritual healer, she suddenly stood up and walked.

Freezing, distant Pluto seems an odd place to look for oceanfront real estate, but if a new computer model is correct, the dwarf planet harbors a sizeable pool of liquids beneath its thick icy shell.Scientists suspect Pluto holds a rocky core spiked with radioactive materials that are slowly breaking down, releasing enough heat in the process to melt ice and keep it liquid. The temperature on Pluto's surface is about -375 degrees Fahrenheit.Considering Pluto's size and composition, just 100 parts per billion of radioactive potassium would be enough to maintain an ocean 60 to 105 miles in depth 120 miles beneath the surface, says planetary scientist Guillaume Robuchon, with the University of California at Santa Cruz.

By the time women turn to in-vitro fertilization to conceive, any pregnancy sounds like a good pregnancy. As a result, women often choose to have multiple embryos transferred into their wombs in order to increase their chances of having at least one baby.But, according to a new study, the likelihood of having a healthy, full-term infant is five times higher in women who have just one embryo transferred than in women who opt for putting in two at once -- at least for certain groups.

The emergence of the beak on dinosaurs was "an evolutionary innovation," according to a new study that found this seemingly simple trait is like nature's Swiss Army knife because it functions as many tools in one.Over time, many dinosaurs replaced their toothy grins with beaks to aid their transition to plant eating, according to the new study that is published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Thirty years after claims that UFOs had been spotted in Rendlesham Forest, experts and enthusiasts still can't agree on what happened.Mysterious craft and lights around the airbases of Woodbridge and Bentwaters in Suffolk were reported around 26/27 December 1980.BBC Suffolk's Mark Murphy presented a special 30th anniversary radio show from the forest in December 2010.

If you listen to the Air Force tell it, there are simply no such things as UFOs. A two-decade investigation called Project Blue Book determined in 1969 that no extraterrestial life has made contact with Earth. And no unexplained aerial phenomena have exceeded humanity's scientific grasp, let alone threatened national security.

The theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from Dublin Castle In 1907 was an event that was to shake the British Establishment's seat of power in Ireland and wrecked the reputation of one of the key figures in Ireland. This event has becoming one of the most abiding mysteries in Irish history one that has never been solved.The year of the theft was 1907 and it saw the opening of the Irish International Exhibition in Herbert Park, Dublin, on 4th May Visitor to International Exhibition including members of the Royal Family to the Exhibition in July.

Artifacts from an ancient citadel in northern Peru were uncovered by rangers in AmazonasA metal war shield was recovered by rangers at the Cordillera de Colan Reserved Zone in Amazonas, Northern Peru. The presence of a detailed metal artifact such as this is suggestive of ancient metalsmithing, according to Biologist Leyda Gueiler.The likely discovery of an ancient citadel will be further examined by a team of archaeologists who have yet to arrive.

It is often said that we are our memories - that web of experiences, relationships, thoughts, and feelings that make us who we are. We don't remember it all of course. That would be impossible. Or would it?There has been a discovery in the field of memory recently, so new you won't find it in any textbook. It's so hard to fathom, there are some who remain unconvinced.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas from the team at GrahamHancock.com. May your holidays be filled with love, light, joy and happiness.

The remains of an Anglo-Saxon settlement have been discovered at a surface mine in Northumberland.Buildings and artefacts dating from the 6th to 8th centuries have been uncovered at Shotton Surface Mine, on the Blagdon Estate, near Cramlington.The site had been investigated by archaeologists before the start of open-cast mining work.

The innermost secrets of a colossal "sea monster" skull are being revealed by one of the UK's most powerful CT scanners.The X-rays are helping to build up a 3D picture of this ferocious predator, called a pliosaur, which terrorized the oceans 150m years ago.The 2.4m-long (7.9ft) fossil skull was recently unearthed along the UK's Jurassic coast, and is thought to belong to one of the biggest pliosaurs ever found.

Hundreds of millennial tombs have been spared destruction with the formation of a new archaeological preserve in the Jordan Valley.According to the Department of Antiquities (DoA), a new protected area has been declared in the Damiya dolmen fields, an area home to hundreds of megalithic structures dating back to 3000BC that has been under mining operations.According to DoA Director General Ziad Saad, a deal was reached with the mining company last month to set aside a 600 dunnum area in the northern part of the field which contains most of the dolmens for preservation as a national archaeological park.

Investigations at Kfar HaHoresh, a small site nestled in the Nazareth hills of lower Galilee, have revealed a stratigraphic sequence spanning the early through to the late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). Thirteen painstaking excavation seasons have demonstrated tremendous potential for exploring mortuary, ritual, subsistence and industrial activities in this region, and allow a glimpse into an exciting era in human prehistory.PPNB (ca. 8500-6750 calBC) corresponds to the period when the first large village communities were established in the fertile areas of the Near East. At this time the sphere of cultural interaction had widened, stretching from central Anatolia to southern Sinai and included Cyprus. Rectilinear houses became commonplace, while public and ritual architecture are also found. Although hunting and gathering remained important, plants and animals were becoming increasingly domesticated. Evidence shows there was intensive ritual activity, and prestige items were exchanged over considerable distances.

Contrary to the belief of many scientists (as well as many members of the public), new research confirms that Africa has two -- not one -- species of elephant. Scientists from Harvard Medical School, the University of Illinois, and the University of York in the United Kingdom used genetic analysis to prove that the African savanna elephant and the smaller African forest elephant have been largely separated for several million years.The researchers, whose findings appear online in PLoS Biology, compared the DNA of modern elephants from Africa and Asia to DNA that they extracted from two extinct species: the woolly mammoth and the mastodon. Not only is this the first time that anyone has generated sequences for the mastodon nuclear genome, but it is also the first time that the Asian elephant, African forest elephant, African savanna elephant, the extinct woolly mammoth, and the extinct American mastodon have been looked at togethe.

Trinitramid is the name of the new molecule that may be a component in future rocket fuel. This fuel could be 20 to 30 percent more efficient in comparison with the best rocket fuels available today, according to researchers. The discovery was made at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden."A rule of thumb is that for every ten-percent increase in efficiency for rocket fuel, the payload of the rocket can double. What's more, the molecule consists only of nitrogen and oxygen, which would make the rocket fuel environmentally friendly. This is more than can be said of today's solid rocket fuels, which entail the emission of the equivalent of 550 tons of concentrated hydrochloric acid for each launch of the space shuttle," says Tore Brinck, professor of physical chemistry at KTH.

Scientists from the US and Switzerland have created a prototype machine that harnesses the sun's energy to make liquid fuels from water."We have a big energy problem and we have to think big," Prof Sossina Haile, who led the study, told The Guardian.The solar device uses sunlight and cerium oxide to break down water or carbon dioxide into hydrogen or carbon monoxide.Cerium oxide, an oxide of the rare earth metal cerium, is almost as abundant as copper and when heated the chemical strips oxygen molecules from water and carbon dioxide.

Four tonnes of ancient coins have been found in China's Shaanxi province. The huge trove was dug out by workers in Huaxian, the China Daily reported Thursday. Authorities said the coins may be from the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider report that after a series of tests, they have not seen any mini black holes, to the chagrin of string theorists and the relief of disaster theorists.Researchers working on the Compact Muon Solenoid team have been crunching numbers to test a form of string theory that calls for the creation and instant evaporation of miniature black holes. They report that the telltale signs of these black holes are disappointingly absent, however.

It is the language that Christ spoke, but is regarded as "endangered" with ever fewer scattered groups of native speakers.But in Oxford, Aramaic has been flourishing again, with a course in the ancient language drawing people from as far afield as Liverpool and London. There are now 56 people learning Aramaic at the university, including three classics professors, solemnly completing their weekly homework tasks and regularly attending the free lunchtime lessons, more than the numbers studying Greek.

A study of bumblebees by a group of Devon children has become the first primary school project to be published in a Royal Society scientific journal.The children, aged between eight and 10, discovered that bees could be trained to recognise colour patterns.They worked with a professional scientist, but he said the paper was "entirely conceived and written" by the pupils from Blackawton School.The editor of the journal, Biology Letters, said it was a "world first".

Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of an ancient marine ecosystem that arose in the aftermath of the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history.The spectacular haul of 20,000 fossils from a hillside in southwestern China represents the first discovery of a complete ecosystem which bounced back after life was nearly wiped off the face of the planet 252m years ago.The beautifully preserved remains include molluscs, sea urchins and arthropods, alongside much larger animals that occupied the top of the food chain, such as carnivorous fish and the first icthyosaurs, predatory marine reptiles that grew to four metres long.

Scientists say an entirely separate type of human identified from bones in Siberia co-existed and interbred with our own species.The ancient humans have been dubbed "Denisovans" after the caves in Siberia where their remains were found.There is also evidence that this population was widespread in Eurasia.A study in Nature journal shows that Denisovans co-existed with Neanderthals and interbred with our species - perhaps around 50,000 years ago.

A pinky bone points to an extinct family of human relatives that once lived in East Asia, report genome researchers on Wednesday.Dubbed "Denisovans" for Denisova cave, the site of the bone and a tooth used to generate a draft genetic blueprint for the vanished archaic humans, the study appears in the journal Nature. Most intriguing, the study shows faint DNA links between the Denisovans and the modern population of New Guinea.

Deep in a cave in the forests of northern Spain are the remains of a gruesome massacre. The first clues came to light in 1994, when explorers came across a pair of what they thought were human jawbones in the cave, called El Sidrón. At first, the bones were believed to date to the Spanish Civil War. Back then, Republican fighters used the cave as a hide-out. The police discovered more bone fragments in El Sidrón, which they sent to forensic scientists, who determined that the bones did not belong to soldiers, or even to modern humans. They were the remains of Neanderthals who died 50,000 years ago.

If you're in a room of 100 people, odds are likely about 40 think God created humans about 10,000 years ago, part of a philosophy called creationism, according to a Gallup poll reported Friday (Dec. 17). That number is slightly lower than in years past and down from a high of 47 percent in both 1993 and 1999.And 38 percent of Americans, the poll estimates, believe God guided the process that brought humans from "cavemen" to today's incarnation over millions of years, while 16 percent think humans evolved over millions of years, without any divine intervention.This secular view, while a relatively small number, is up from 9 percent in 1982, according to Gallup.

The Sahara, the world's largest desert, was once fertile grassland. This fact has been common knowledge in the scientific community for some time, but scientists are still grappling with historic data to determine whether that transition took place abruptly or gradually.

During the 19th century, most of the mining peasants -- whose task was to produce pig iron -- gradually lost control of both iron ore mines and pig iron production. However, a few worked as local bankers. By lending money and goods, they managed to continue production. They profited from their colleagues, and over time became mining peasant capitalists, known as pig iron merchants. This is revealed in a history thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.The mining peasants were farmers who, alongside their agricultural work, also carried out mining and produced pig iron from ore. During the 17th century, mining in Sweden was organised through specific rights. The period prior to 1810 featured a clear division of labour between mining peasants and ironworks. The mining peasant's job was to break up the ore and produce pig iron. The pig iron was then processed at the ironworks to produce malleable bar iron, which for many years was Sweden's most important export product. Beginning in 1810, these restrictions, rights and freedoms started to be eroded, and were eventually dissolved during the years leading up to 1860.

Female chimpanzees treat sticks and small logs as dolls by cuddling them, creating games and even putting them to bed, new research finds.Since young male chimps were less inclined to play dollies, the authors say their study presents the first evidence of an animal species in the wild in which play differs between males and females."Our data fit with previous studies of humans and other primates to suggest that there is something innate that predisposes girls and boys to react differently to the same objects," co-author Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates College told Discovery News.

The great sweep of water around Planet Earth has been captured from space in greater detail than ever before.New observations from Europe's Goce gravity mapping satellite have allowed scientists to plot ocean currents with unprecedented precision.Understanding gravity is fundamental to being able to track the direction and speed of water across the globe.The data should improve the climate models which need to represent better how oceans move heat around the planet.

An Indian amateur archaeologist has claimed to have discovered a prehistoric rock painting stretching up to 35 kilometres in the Garadha area of Bundi district (northwest India)."The rock painting stretches up to 35 kilometres, with its tail at Mandal dam, Bhilwara district and head at Banki village in Garadha area of the district," Om Prakash Sharma alias 'Kukki' said. The painting has images of human beings, animals such as tigers, panthers, antelopes and various antique tools, Kukki said, claiming that the painting dates back to nearly ten thousands years.

John Roach writes:The collective genome of all life on Earth today went through a rapid growth spurt between 3.3 billion and 2.8 billion years ago, according to scientists who used computer algorithms to reconstruct the evolutionary history of thousands of genes.The growth spurt coincides with the advent of a biochemical pathway known as electron transport that is "integral for photosynthesis as well as for respiration," Lawrence David, a computational biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me.He and colleague Eric Alm named this growth spurt the Archean Expansion. The expansion precedes an era known as the Great Oxidation, when oxygen began to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere and likely killed off large numbers of non-oxygen breathing life forms.

Over 1,000 years before Pythagoras was calculating the length of a hypotenuse, sophisticated scribes in Mesopotamia were working with the same theory to calculate the area of their farmland.Working on clay tablets, students would "write" out their math problems in cuneiform script, a method that involved making wedge-shaped impressions in the clay with a blunt reed.

Petroglyph panels at Agua Fria National Monument have been damaged by white paint and obscenities scrawled on nearby boulders, the Bureau of Land Management said this week.

The ancient city of Palmyra is home to many ancient temples, palaces and tombs, reflecting the city's cultural richness as one of the most prominent kingdoms of the East, once competing with Rome and extending over vast areas.One of Palmyra's distinguishing monuments is the Temple of Bel, whose oriental and western decorations reflect its greatness as one of the most important milestones of the old Orient, Syrian Archaeologists say.

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has sought to measure the effects of five major climate change events in North America.Samuel Munoz, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and geologist Konrad Gajewski at the University of Ottawa looked at samples of sedimentary pollen and charcoal collected between Maine and Pennsylvania. This gave a historical record of temperatures, vegetation patterns and fire history which could be matched with data from the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (containing over 35,000 radiocarbon dates). The period they examined ranged from the time humans first settled the region from at least 13,500 years ago to the first European-settled colonies around 500 years ago.

A new method of capturing detailed, three-dimensional images of minute samples of material under extreme pressures is shedding light on the evolution of the Earth's interior. Early results suggest that the early Earth did not have to be entirely molten to separate into the rocky crust and iron-rich core it has today. Researchers at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are leading the group pioneering the technique, which could lead to a wide range of new experiments.

Scientists from all over the world are taking a second, more expansive, look at the car-sized asteroid that exploded over Sudan's Nubian Desert in 2008. Initial research was focused on classifying the meteorite fragments that were collected two to five months after they were strewn across the desert and tracked by NASA's Near Earth Object astronomical network. Now in a series of 20 papers for a special double issue of the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, published on December 15, researchers have expanded their work to demonstrate the diversity of these fragments, with major implications for the meteorite's origin.

How many words in the English language never make it into dictionaries? How has the nature of fame changed in the past 200 years? How do scientists and actors compare in their impact on popular culture?These are just some of the questions that researchers and members of the public can now answer using a new online tool developed by Google with the help of scientists at Harvard University. The massive searchable database is being hailed as the key to a new era of research in the humanities, linguistics and social sciences that has been dubbed "culturomics".

THE world's first xenotransplantation treatment - where animal cells are transplanted into humans - has been approved for sale in Russia.The treatment, developed by Living Cell Technologies in New Zealand, is for type 1 diabetes. It consists of insulin-producing pig cells coated in seaweed, says Bob Elliott of LCT.Type 1 diabetes occurs when insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are destroyed. Insulin is vital in controlling blood glucose levels, so people who lack the cells need daily insulin injections.

A University of Leicester researcher has discovered two photographic images, presumed lost, of native Americans brought to Britain by Roger Casement a century ago.Dr Lesley Wylie, Lecturer in Latin American Studies in the School of Modern Languages, University of Leicester, made the discovery during her research for a book on the Putumayo, a border region in the Amazon. Her book forms part of the AHRC-funded research project, American Tropics: Towards A Literary Geography, based at the University of Essex.

Skywatchers around the world are gearing up to observe a rare total lunar eclipse.The best viewing conditions for the eclipse are from North and Central America, parts of northern Europe and East Asia.Astronomers say the Moon could turn a pink or blood red hue during the eclipse, which begins early on Tuesday morning GMT.It will be the first total lunar eclipse in three years.

Scientists have discovered amino acids, the building blocks of life in a meteorite where none were expected.The finding adds evidence to the idea that some of life's key ingredients could have formed in space, and then been delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite impacts.The meteorite in question was born in a violent crash, and eventually crashed into northern Sudan.

Three Armenian American descendants of victims of the Armenian genocide nearly a century ago filed suit Wednesday against the government of Turkey and two Turkish banks, claiming they are owed at least $65 million for property seized from their relatives and untold millions more for the profits their lands generated.The lawsuit filed by two Los Angeles-area residents and a Washington, D.C. man could be the start of a flood of litigation spurred by last week's ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a California law recognizing the crimes committed against Armenians after 1915 as genocide.

In remembrance of the Union and Confederate soldiers who served in the American Civil War (1861-1865), the Liljenquist Family recently donated their rare collection of almost 700 ambrotype and tintype photographs to the Library of Congress.

Jaw bones discovered in pre-Hispanic ruins are the first evidence that wolves and dogs were intentionally cross-bred by ancient Mexicans, the Associated Press (AP) reported on Thursday.The remains, which were discovered by archaeologists at a Teotihuacan pyramid burial chamber, are the first physical proof that wolf-dogs were intentionally crossbred "as a symbol of the city's warriors," the AP reported. The bones were found by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in 2004 and analyzed that the National Autonomous University (UNAM).

Few research tools in the history of science can match the achievements of Alvin, the US manned deep-submersible.It was this 46-year-old vessel which discovered the hot volcanic vents on the ocean floor that transformed ideas about where and how life could exist.The sub is also famed for finding an H-bomb lost at sea and for making one of the first surveys of the Titanic.But this veteran of the abyss has been withdrawn from service this week as it gets ready for a major re-fit.

A plan to rescue European financing of the Iter nuclear fusion reactor project has been rejected at the final hurdle.Member states had wanted to reallocate 1.4bn euros from the existing Brussels budget to cover a shortfall in building costs in 2012-13.But the European Parliament has refused to approve the plan.Member states will now have to table a new proposal for early next year but access to the EU's 2010 budget is now closed.Iter's director-general Osamu Motojima is due in Brussels tomorrow for critical talks with officials from the European Commission.

The mountainous ridge that circles the equator on the Saturnian moon Iapetus is both weird and spectacular.Discovered in 2004, the icy rim is as much as 20km high and runs fully 1,600km from end to end.No explanation for its existence has yet won total support; it is a puzzle.Dr Andrew Dombard and colleagues have now made a compelling case for the ridge being the remains of a huge ring of debris that once orbited Iapetus but which eventually fell on to the moon.

Scientists think they now have the best evidence yet for an ice volcano on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.The Cassini probe has spotted a 1,500m-high mountain with a deep pit in it, and what looks like a flow of material on the surrounding surface.The new feature, which has been dubbed "The Rose", was seen with the probe's radar and infrared instruments.Titan has long been speculated to have cryovolcanoes but its hazy atmosphere makes all observations very difficult.Researchers are now wondering how active this mountain might be, and what sort of lava it could spew.

After nine months of tests, researchers in France have identified the head of France's King Henry IV, who was assassinated in 1610 aged 57.The scientific tests helped identify the late monarch's embalmed head, which was shuffled between private collections ever since it disappeared during the French Revolution in 1793.The results of the research identifying Henry IV's head were published online Wednesday in the medical journal, BMJ.

William Trubridge on Monday accomplished what had long been regarded as an impossible feat: swimming to a depth of 100 meters, or 328 feet, on a single breath and with only hands and feet for propulsion.The New Zealander did not use swim fins; he wore no weights and required no heavy sled during the descent. Nor did he use an inflatable airbag to swiftly reach the surface after his dive.

A very unusual blood transplant appears to have cured an American man living in Berlin of infection with the AIDS virus, but doctors say the approach is not practical for wide use.The man, who is in his 40s, had a blood stem cell transplant in 2007 to treat leukemia. His donor not only was a good blood match but also had a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to HIV.Now, three years later, the recipient shows no signs of leukemia or HIV infection, according to a report in the journal Blood.

The skeletons of kings and queens lying in mass graves in the Royal Basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris could finally have the solemn funeral ceremonies they deserve, say experts in the Christmas issue published in the British Medical Journal.Many of the graves in the Royal Basilica were destroyed by revolutionaries in 1793 and very few remains of the mummified bodies have been preserved and identified.

Archaeologists working through the Victorian spoil heaps at Creswell Crags in 2006 uncovered a stone with a familiar carved geometric pattern, it opened yet another aspect of the ever-developing story of the important prehistoric caves.Creswell Crags located in Worsop, UK, represents one site among a significant cluster of cave sites inhabited during the last Ice Age in Britain. Archaeological and environmental evidence excavated from the caves show how the area witnessed dramatic changes in climate at the edge of the northern ice sheets and was populated by Ice Age animals such as hyenas, mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, and migrating herds of reindeer, horse and bison.

Decades from now people may remember 2010 for the BP oil spill, the Tea Party, and the iPad. But for our money, it's a lock people will still be excited about the year's most remarkable archaeological discoveries, which we explore (along with one "undiscovery") in the following pages.

The oldest temple of the Sun has been discovered in northwest Bulgaria, near the town of Vratsa, aged at more then 8000 years, the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) reported on December 15 2010.The Bulgarian 'Stonehenge' is hence about 3000 years older than its illustrious English counterpart. But unlike its more renowned English cousin, the Bulgarian sun temple was not on the surface, rather it was dug out from under tons of earth and is shaped in the form of a horse shoe, the report said.

Parts of four continents will be treated to a view of a total eclipse of the moon during the overnight hours of Dec. 20 to Dec. 21. This spectacle of celestial shadows will be the best of its kind residents of North America will see until the year 2014.

An ancient mummified forest, complete with well-preserved logs, leaves, and seedpods, has been discovered deep in the Canadian Arctic, scientists say.The dry, frigid site is now surrounded by glaciers and is completely treeless, except for a few bonsai-size dwarf trees.The forest was discovered recently by a research team who'd heard a surprising story from rangers in Quttinirpaaq National Park. The park is located on Ellesmere Island (see map), one of the world's northernmost landmasses.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that Dutch authorities can ban coffee shops from selling marijuana to foreign visitors.Many tourists who visit the Netherlands like to sample the local delights, smoking cannabis joints or inhaling bongs in the coffee shops, where it has been legal for decades.But that could soon be a thing of the past after the Luxembourg-based court ruled that Maastricht was within its rights when it introduced a 'weed passport' in 2005, and the country sticks to plans to crackdown on the smoking.

THz waves are found between microwaves and infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum. This type of radiation was chosen for security devices because it can penetrate matter such as clothing, wood, paper and other porous material that's non-conducting.This type of radiation seems less threatening because it doesn't penetrate deeply into the body and is believed to be harmless to both people and animals.

THE WASHINGTON POSTCAIRO -- Archaeologists found what may be a trove of 3,400 year old statues on the west bank of the ancient temple city Luxor, said the head of Egypt's antiquities department on Thursday.Teams unearthed two rose granite statue fragments from an area west of the burial temple of Pharaoh Amenhotep III earlier this week, said Zahi Hawass.

OTTOWA CITIZENOpponents of development in the Beaver Pond forest of Kanata say they have found new tools for the fight -- stone tools carved about 10,000 years ago and found in an archeology survey.The area's councillor isn't so sure these artifacts will help them, but she's going to do some legal checking.The newest wrinkle is based on a 2005 survey of nearby land -- not the Beaver Pond forest itself, but a neighbouring site at the same elevation.

Scientists have identified amino acids, a fundamental building block of life, in a meteorite where none were expected."This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided. The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway," said Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center."Finding them in this type of meteorite suggests that there is more than one way to make amino acids in space, which increases the chance for finding life elsewhere in the Universe," he said.

Chinese archaeologists have unearthed what they believe is a 2,400-year-old pot of soup, state media report.The liquid and bones were in a sealed bronze cooking vessel dug up near the ancient capital of Xian - home to the country's famed terracotta warriors.Tests are being carried out to identify the ingredients. An odourless liquid, believed to be wine, was also found.The pots were discovered in a tomb being excavated to make way for an extension to the local airport.

This is part two of three articles which provides evidence for the ritual purpose of blood sacrifice using examples of information sourced from various Mexican Codices and other documents. It includes some Aztec creation myths and religious doctrine to hypothesise the true meaning and belief behind the Aztec people's constant need for ritualistic blood sacrifices.According to Bernardino de Sahagún (cited from Townsend 2003: 128); the Aztecs believed there were many suns that had existed before the present sun which was the fifth one (Tompkins 1990: 130). Each of the previous suns had died, thus destroyed and ended the world. The creation of the fifth sun is described in the world myth. When the end of the fourth world had passed, all that existed was in darkness.

Polynesian people began burning the forests of the South Island of New Zealand almost as soon as they arrived about 800 years ago, researchers have found.Within as little as 200 years, they had removed 40% of the moist closed canopy forests of the South Island, according to research published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The study of lake sediments reveals that dense beech and podocarp forests were rapidly replaced with tussock grassland and fern shrubland.

The remains of the Roman town of Pompeii destroyed by a volcanic eruption in AD79 continue to provide intriguing and unexpected insights into Roman life - from diet and health care to the gap between rich and poor.The basement storeroom under a large agricultural depot in the little suburb of Oplontis was full of pomegranates. To many of the Pompeiians trying to find shelter from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, it must have seemed strong and safe.About 50 people took cover there. We know they did because archaeologists in the 1980s found their skeletons, well preserved.

A list of the most important battle sites in Scotland has just been issued by Historic Scotland. The list contains a total of 17 different battle locations dating to wide variety of time periods.The list contains sites in the Borders, Aberdeenshire, the Highlands, North Lanarkshire, Stirling and East Lothian.The list by Historic Scotland aims to make the public more aware of historic importance of the locations of the battles. One of the key objectives is to make planning authorities aware of how decisions they make could affect their landscape.

Stone stairs and the foundations of a temple built on the ruins of an older temple from the pre-Hellenistic period were unearthed at the site of Tal Ahmar in Sweida province, reports according to archaeological sources.Yaser al-Shaar, Member of the national archaeological mission working at the site, told SANA that the excavations also revealed floors from the Islamic period in the northern cave in Tal Ahmar, as well as remains of a stone cemetery engraved in rock.

The self styled leader of a branch of Druids in the UK, King Arthur Pendragon went to The Royal Courts of Justice in London seeking a Judicial Review for the return of cremated human remains taken from Stonehenge in 2008.In a 36-page document submitted to the court he asked for the Review on the decision by the Minister of Justice to grant Sheffield University an extension to retain and examine the remains for five years. The remains are a key part of a research project on the area around Stonehenge supported by National Geographic under the leadership of Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, has led to new insights into the possible uses of the site.

New data and methods have been developed to examine the potential for thermal concentrating solar power (CSP) plants to help meet energy and environmental goals. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Maryland, and NASA analyzed the interactions between CSP plants and the electricity system and found that CSP power plants have the potential to supply a significant fraction of future electricity needs.

Deep sediment cores retrieved from the Bering Sea floor indicate that the region was ice-free all year and biological productivity was high during the last major warm period in Earth's climate history.Christina Ravelo, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present the new findings in a talk on December 13 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Ravelo and co-chief scientist Kozo Takahashi of Kyushu University, Japan, led a nine-week expedition of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) to the Bering Sea last summer aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution. The researchers drilled down 700 meters through rock and sludge to retrieve sediments deposited during the Pliocene Warm Period, 3.5 to 4.5 million years ago.

NASA has been unable to make contact with its solar sail NanoSail-D. The small spacecraft was set to become the agency's first solar sail to be unfurled in orbit last week, but it is not clear whether the parent satellite that carried it ever ejected it into space.NanoSail-D, which was folded into a package about the size of a loaf of bread, is one of six experiments carried into orbit in November inside a NASA satellite called FASTSAT. The sail was stowed inside a mechanism called a P-POD (Poly PicoSatellite Orbital Deployer), which uses a jack-in-the-box-like mechanism to fling smaller satellites into space.