Newsdesk Archive

When Louis XIV died in 1715, surgeons still belonged to the same profession as barbers and wigmakers in France, and the only functions they were allowed to perform were to shave, bleed and bring babies into the world. When a surgeon was called to remove the king's anal fistula in 1686, he did the job with a slightly modified barber's razor.

After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.

Plans were unveiled in Russia last month to construct an underground city that could become home to up to 100,000 people. Named Eco-City 2020, it would be constructed inside Siberia's abandoned Mir diamond mine, which, at a quarter of a mile wide and over 1,700ft deep, is the second largest excavated hole on the planet. The site would be covered completely by a vast glass dome, under which multiple levels would plunder its depth, with natural light piped down through the central core.

All illicit substances, including heroin and cocaine, should be legalised, according to a former drugs minister who will today become the most senior politician to push for a dramatic change in the strategy for tackling Britain's drug problems.Bob Ainsworth will argue that it is better for addicts to receive their fixes on prescription rather than relying for their supply on the international criminal gangs that make billions of pounds from the trade.

FROGS across Australia and the US may be recovering from a fungal disease that has devastated populations around the world."It's happening across a number of species," says Michael Mahony at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, who completed a 20-year study of frogs along the Great Dividing Range in Australia for the Earthwatch Institute. Between 1990 and 1998 the populations of several frog species crashed due to chytridiomycosis infection (chytrid) caused by the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, but Mahony's surveys suggest that the frogs are re-establishing.

On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big.It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity."The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before.

The world honey bee population has plunged in recent years, worrying beekeepers and farmers who know how critical bee pollination is for many crops. A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined--electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.

In half a century of spaceflight, only a few countries have been able to send a capsule into space and have it return to Earth intact, a technological and financial feat reserved for the wealthiest of nations.That may all change as early as Wednesday, when a Hawthorne-based rocket venture plans to send an Apollo-like capsule into space and have it splash down in the Pacific, becoming the first commercial spacecraft to orbit the globe and survive the fiery reentry back to Earth.

From atomic crystals to spiral galaxies, self-assembly is ubiquitous in nature. In biological processes, self-assembly at the molecular level is particularly prevalent.Phospholipids, for example, will self-assemble into a bilayer to form a cell membrane, and actin, a protein that supports and shapes a cell's structure, continuously self-assembles and disassembles during cell movement.

A new species of ancient balloon-headed dolphin has been identified from a fossil pulled up by fishers in the North Sea (map), a new study says.The 2.5-million-year-old species was named Hoekman's blunt-snouted dolphin after Albert Hoekman, the Dutch fisher who trawled up a bone from the creature's snout in 2008.Measuring up to 20 feet (6 meters) long, the newfound dolphin had an extremely short and spoon-shaped snout that supported a large, high, and protruding forehead.

Prehistoric humans, along with Neanderthals and Homo antecessor, made meals of each other, suggests new research on probable human teeth marks found on prehistoric human bones.The findings, which will be published in the January issue of The Journal of Human Evolution, support prior theories that the first humans to re-colonize Britain after the last ice age practiced nutritional cannibalism 12,000 years ago at a site called Gough's Cave in what is now Somerset, England.It was a survival strategy, according to authors Yolanda Fernandez-Jalvo and Peter Andrews.

Under just the right conditions -- which involve an ultra-high-intensity laser beam and a two-mile-long particle accelerator -- it could be possible to create something out of nothing, according to University of Michigan researchers.

In what is believed to be the first controlled human study of the effects of salvinorin A, the active ingredient in Salvia divinorum, a controversial new hallucinogen featured widely on You Tube and other internet sites, Johns Hopkins researchers report that the effects are surprisingly strong, brief, and intensely disorienting, but without apparent short-term adverse effects in healthy people.

CANCUN: By 2030, climate change will indirectly cause nearly one million deaths a year and inflict US$157 billion in damage, according to estimates presented at U.N. talks last week.The biggest misery will be heaped on more than 50 of the world's poorest countries, but the United States will pay the highest economic bill, it said."In less than 20 years, almost all countries in the world will realise high vulnerability to climate impact as the planet heats up," the report warned.

IKAROS would do well to watch its back, for the Japanese solar-sailing spacecraft may just have some competition that's fast enough to catch up. The EU is funding a three-year project at the Finnish Meteorological Institute to build the fastest man-made device in the universe: an electric sail, or ESAIL, that researchers say could make Pluto in just five years' time.Like the more well-known solar sail, the ESAIL is propelled by solar radiation and therefore requires no chemical or ion propellant. But rather than actually unfurling a huge membranous sail to catch photons from the sun to provide thrust, the ESAIL repels protons.

Paleontologists have unearthed a nearly complete fossil of a dimetrodon, a reptile-like predator that roamed the Permian landscape 287 million years ago.This weekend, the team is working to transport the 400-pound animal's torso from its resting place in north Texas to Houston, where the fossil will be prepped for display in the newly renovated Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) paleontology hall in 2012.

SIR BANI YAS ISLAND // One of the most significant archeological finds in the Gulf is about to reveal important details about life 1,400 years ago.The remains of a Christian monastery and church on Sir Bani Yas Island, believed to have been settled around 600 AD by a community of 30 to 40 monks, opened for public viewing on Saturday.

Through precise cosmological measurements, scientists know that about 4.6% of the energy of the Universe is made of baryonic matter (normal atoms), about 23% is made of dark matter, and the remaining 72% or so is dark energy. Scientists also know that almost all the baryonic matter in the observable Universe is matter (with a positive baryon charge) rather than antimatter (with a negative baryon charge). But exactly why this matter and energy came to be this way is still an open question. In a recent study, physicists have proposed a new mechanism that can generate both the baryon asymmetry and the dark matter density of the Universe simultaneously.

Alcohol is more dangerous than illegal drugs like heroin and crack cocaine, according to a new study.British experts evaluated substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, ranking them based on how destructive they are to the individual who takes them and to society as a whole.

For decades, the U.S. Department of Defense has operated classified spacecraft loaded with high-tech gear to carry out a range of reconnaissance duties. But the satellites have also spotted the high-altitude explosions of natural fireballs that routinely dive into the Earth's atmosphere, and talks are under way to offer scientists access to that data.

Argentine anthropologists found human skeletal remains some 8,270 years old on a lakeside beach in the central province of Santa Fe, the scientists said from their university offices.The remains were found together with the bones of guanacos from 7,000 years ago and ceramics between 1,500 and 2,300 years old near the town of Venado Tuerto, 375 kilometers (230 miles) northwest of Buenos Aires.

A tiny bone fragment could provide crucial information about the fate of Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 73 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.Collected on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, the bone has raised the interest of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the Earhart mystery, as it may be from a human finger.

MEXICO CITY.- Diverse Prehispanic objects, mainly ceramic fragments and greenstone beads, 1,300 years old, were found in the crater of nevado de toluca Volcano, Estado de Mexico, by researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).The material found dates from the Late Classic period (650-900 AD) and Early Post Classic (900-1200 AD), representing the earliest ritual objects found to present at the high mountain ceremonial space.After a fruitful exploration season in 2007, research focused in the analysis of material found; during the last week of November and the first of December 2010, 30 specialists conducted a second in-site research season, in charge of archaeologist Roberto Junco.

The great-grandmother of Jesus was a woman named Ismeria, according to Florentine medieval manuscripts analyzed by a historian.The legend of St. Ismeria, presented in the current Journal of Medieval History, sheds light on both the Biblical Virgin Mary's family and also on religious and cultural values of 14th-century Florence.

Astronomers have been busy trying to determine the spin period and composition of Venus' moon. On December 8, 2010, results of the study were announced by JPL/Caltech scientists, led by Michael Hicks.Wait a minute; back up, I hear you ask. Venus has a Moon? Of course it does. Well, kind of... Let me explain.It has the rather unfortunate name of 2002 VE68. That's because it was discovered on November 11, 2002 by LONEOS, the Lowell Observatory Near Earth Object Search.

If I ever wrote, "Today Neil Armstrong wrote in to say..." you can safely assume I'm either a) off my medication or b) I'd just won the space blogging equivalent of the lottery. For NPR blogger Robert Krulwich, it's the latter.In an article he wrote for "Krulwich Wonders...," Krulwich pondered why the 1969 Apollo 11 astronauts didn't venture more than 90 yards from the Lunar Module. With a whole moon to explore, you'd think Armstrong and Aldrin would be hopping up the nearest mountain, or spelunking down a lunar skylight. Right?.

The US Navy announced a successful test Friday of an electromagnetic cannon capable of firing a projectile 110 nautical miles (200 kilometers) at five times the speed of sound."This demonstration moves us one day closer to getting this advanced capability to sea," said Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, chief of naval research.Tested at the Navy's Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, the futuristic weapon uses powerful jolts of electric current to propel a non-explosive slug along rails before launching it at supersonic velocities.

It is estimated that 38 million people worldwide are currently infected with HIV and that 4.1 million more are added each year. For scientists to design treatment therapies that are effective over the long-term it is essential to learn more about how the virus mutates and develops resistance to medications.

Nuclear fission, or the splitting of a heavy nucleus, usually results in symmetrical fragments of the same mass. Physicists attribute the few known examples of fission that is asymmetric to the formation in the resultant fragments of "magic" nuclei, which are extremely stable nuclei with all energy levels filled. Now, experiments at the European particle physics laboratory at the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva in Switzerland have found the isotope mercury-180 splits asymmetrically into ruthenium-100 and krypton-80 rather than the expected zirconium-90.

Using lasers to contain some ultra-chilled atoms, a team of scientists has measured the viscosity or stickiness of a gas often considered to be the sixth state of matter. The measurements verify that this gas can be used as a "scale model" of exotic matter, such as super-high temperature superconductors, the nuclear matter of neutron stars, and even the state of matter created microseconds after the Big Bang.

Experts from UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and the International Council of Monuments and Sites will arrive in Pompei on 2 December to examine the state of conservation of the World Heritage site. The mission follows the destruction in early November of the Schola Armaturarum and further collapses yesterday and today, including that of a wall at the House of the Moralist.This advisory mission will seek to identify potential threats to other structures at the site and possible measures, including the implementation of legal and management provisions, to avoid any further incidents. The mission will also study the impact of these collapses on the site's integrity, authenticity and outstanding universal value. A report on the mission's findings will be presented to the next session of the World Heritage Committee (Bahrain, June 2011).

KYOTO (Kyodo) An excavation team from Kyoto University working in Lebanon has found a lead plate believed to date from between the second and fourth centuries that was apparently used to invoke the spirits of the dead.The 6-cm-wide, 14.7-cm-long plate, discovered near the entrance of an underground grave, is adorned with ancient Greek text that reads "May the unjust be removed from them" and "May signs of a gag and shame, and disgrace be given to them," along with the names of four people, the team said Tuesday.

Scientists are still trying to explain how the gray wolf could evolve into over 400 breeds of dogs, ranging from the pug to the pinscher. One aid in solving this riddle has been found in an unlikely place: a giant animal shrine from ancient Egypt.At first, he panned for gold in the East Indies. Then he poked around in Stonehenge. And then, during his forays into the Orient, he discovered mankind's oldest legal codes.Later, in 1897, French adventurer Jacques de Morgan found himself standing in a dark crypt in Egypt, knee-deep in bones that crackled and snapped with every step he took: He had discovered the world's largest dog cemetery.

Men with type 1 diabetes may be able to grow their own insulin-producing cells from their testicular tissue, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) researchers who presented their findings today at the American Society of Cell Biology 50th annual meeting in Philadelphia.Their laboratory and animal study is a proof of principle that human spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) extracted from testicular tissue can morph into insulin-secreting beta islet cells normally found in the pancreas. And the researchers say they accomplished this feat without use of any of the extra genes now employed in most labs to turn adult stem cells into a tissue of choice.

For decades, the U.S. Department of Defense has operated classified spacecraft loaded with high-tech gear to carry out a range of reconnaissance duties. But the satellites have also spotted the high-altitude explosions of natural fireballs that routinely dive into the Earth's atmosphere, and talks are under way to offer scientists access to that data.In the past, the data on the fireballs, caused by small asteroids called bolides, was shared with the near-Earth object (NEO) science community, information deemed ideal for understanding the size of small NEOs and the hazard they pose.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have identified components in pomegranate juice that both inhibit the movement of cancer cells and weaken their attraction to a chemical signal that promotes the metastasis of prostate cancer to the bone. The research could lead to new therapies for preventing cancer metastasis.Performed in the lab of Manuela Martins-Green, a professor of cell biology, the research was presented today (Dec. 12, 2010) at the 50th annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology taking place in Philadelphia.Prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men in the United States.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The arrival of the first people in Australia about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity, according to a landmark new research report on the continent's fire history going back 70,000 years.Despite a widely held belief that the frequent use of fire by Aboriginal people resulted in vegetation change and other environmental impacts in prehistoric times, the most comprehensive study of Australian charcoal records has found they had no major impact on fire regimes.The arrival of European colonists after 1788, however, resulted in a substantial increase in fire activity, according to the report by an international team of 19 scientists led by palaeoecologist Dr Scott Mooney, of the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

Answering e-mail while toggling between telephone conversations. Monitoring social networking sites while working. Supervising the kids' homework while listening to the news and cooking dinner. The abundance of contemporary distractions offers many reasons to curse multitasking.But a UCLA anthropologist refuses to join the chorus. In a new book that explores the long history of multitasking, Monica L. Smith maintains that human beings should appreciate their ability to sequence many activities and to remember to return to a task once it has been interrupted, possibly even with new ideas on how to improve the activity."I don't think it's worth saying multitasking is bad," said Smith, the author of "A Prehistory of Ordinary People" (University of Arizona Press). "We can do it, and that is astonishing."

A large ancient burial cairn has been uncovered at the site of a proposed £100m nuclear waste dump.But archaeologists found no remains in the cairn or its central cist, suggesting the site at Dounreay was robbed of its artefacts in the past.The cairn dates from about 4,000 years ago during the Bronze Age.An archaeological survey was made of the area on the Caithness coast ahead of construction work on the store for low-level radioactive waste.

(CNN) -- When the Southern African Large Telescope -- or "Salt" -- opens its shutter it offers astronomers a view far beyond its location in the vastness of South Africa's semi desert, known as the Karoo.Distant galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters are all in the reach of a telescope large enough to see all the way to the edge of the observable universe, back in time to the aftermath of the big bang.Astronomer Alexei Kniazev is one of the handful of scientists who run experiments for fellow researchers from 15 institutional partners around the world.

The hypothetical "X" particle recently suggested as a dark matter candidate by scientists at Brookhaven isn't the only exotic particle that physicists have proposed in recent years.In fact, Fermilab's CMS collaboration has an "exotica hotline" staffed by about 10 physicists who review the previous day's collisions looking for anything that might break the rules or expectations of the Standard Model. And with its unprecedented energies, the Large Hadron Collider is hot on Fermilab's heels. It could turn up some exciting new physics, too: mini black holes, large extra dimensions, and a host of exotic subatomic particles, just to name a few.

Skywatchers, grab your blankets. December's night sky spectacular will feature the best meteor shower of 2010 as well as the only total lunar eclipse of the year -- sights that should outshine any New Year's Eve fireworks display in terms of sheer wonder.The massive Geminid meteor shower returns every year, so you'll have more chances if the cold proves too daunting on the night of Dec. 13. But anyone in North America who skips the total lunar eclipse on the night of Dec. 20 will be missing what promises to be the best lunar eclipse show until April 2014.

On the ground floor of the Natural History Museum in London, arrays of Formica-covered cabinets stretch from floor to ceiling and from one end of the great building to the other. Some of nature's finest glories are stored here: pygmy hippo bones from Sicily, mammoth tusks from Siberia and skulls of giant sloths from South America.Many treasures compete for attention, but there is one sample, kept in a small plywood box, that deserves especial interest: the Swanscombe skull. Found near Gravesend last century, it is made up of three pieces of the brain case of a 400,000-year-old female and is one of only half-a-dozen bits of skeleton that can be traced to men and women who lived in Britain before the end of the last ice age. Human remains do not get more precious than this.

The end of the universe's "dark age" was long and drawn out, according to the first direct measurement of the period when the first stars and galaxies heated up intergalactic gas.Right after the big bang, the universe was a roiling soup of subatomic particles. These cooled and coalesced into neutral atoms within 400,000 years, beginning the cosmic dark age. This only ended when ultraviolet light from the first stars and giant black holes had once again ionised the fog of neutral atoms filling the universe. How long this process of "re-ionisation" took isn't clear.

The discovery of a fourth giant world around the star HR 8799 is straining the two leading theories of how planets form.Planets are thought to coalesce from a dusty disc around a young star. One model, called core accretion, says that giant planets form when the dust gathers into a rocky core, which then draws in gas to form a massive atmosphere. Another, called disc instability, says that these planets collapse suddenly from sections of the disc.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using lasers to contain some ultra-chilled atoms, a team of scientists has measured the viscosity or stickiness of a gas often considered to be the sixth state of matter. The measurements verify that this gas can be used as a "scale model" of exotic matter, such as super-high temperature superconductors, the nuclear matter of neutron stars, and even the state of matter created microseconds after the Big Bang.The results may also allow experimental tests of string theory in the future.Duke physicist John Thomas made the viscosity measurements using an ultra-cold Fermi gas of lithium-6 atoms trapped in a millimeter-sized bowl made of laser light.

Crocodiles can no longer be referred to as "living fossils", according to scientists.Members of the crocodilian family have previously been thought to have changed little since prehistoric times.However, new fossil analyses suggests that modern crocodilians actually evolved from a very diverse group.Recently discovered ancient ancestors include small cat-like specimens, giant "supercrocs" and a pug-nosed vegetarian species.

In a stunning debut test flight, Space Exploration Technologies' Dragon capsule returned from a two-orbit trial run around the planet, demonstrating it has the right stuff to carry NASA cargo -- and perhaps eventually its astronauts as well -- to the International Space Station.The mission marked the first time a private company had returned a spacecraft from orbit, a key milestone in the company's quest to shoulder some of the cargo runs to the space station after NASA retires the shuttles next year. SpaceX, which is owned and operated by Elon Musk, is expected to share the work with Orbital Sciences Corp., which plans to test-fly its Taurus 4 rocket and Cygnus capsule next year.

The great-grandmother of Jesus was a woman named Ismeria, according to Florentine medieval manuscripts analyzed by a historian.The legend of St. Ismeria, presented in the current Journal of Medieval History, sheds light on both the Biblical Virgin Mary's family and also on religious and cultural values of 14th-century Florence."I don't think any other woman is mentioned" as Mary's grandmother in the Bible, Catherine Lawless, author of the paper, told Discovery News. "Mary's patrilineal lineage is the only one given.""Mary herself is mentioned very little in the Bible," added Lawless, a lecturer in history at the University of Limerick. "The huge Marian cult that has evolved over centuries has very few scriptural sources."

The hallucinogenic plant Salvia divinorum has been used for centuries in shamanistic ceremonies led by spiritual healers in Mexico. But now the drug has gotten so popular among recreational users in America (street names: Magic Mint, Sally D) that the government has taken notice: it's been banned in 15 states and federal legislation has been introduced to regulate the plant as a Schedule 1 drug, like marijuana, heroin and ecstasy.According to recent surveys, users say burning and inhaling the smoke of dried Salvia leaves produces powerful hallucinogenic effects, and helps reduce anxiety, improve mood and increase insight.

Archaeologists have discovered an iron oxide mine from 12,000 years ago in northern Chile, making it the oldest mine yet discovered in all the Americas, the El Mercurio daily says.The iron oxide mined by the Huentelauquen Indians was used as a pigment in dying cloth and in religious rituals, revealing an unexpected sophistication in what was previously considered a primitive group of people, University of Chile researcher Diego Salazar said on Sunday."The fact they developed a mine shows the importance religion had in their lives, because iron oxide was not used as food, was not bought or sold," he told the daily.

Scientists have modeled the structure of the enzyme used by the dirty rotten Lactobacillus reuteri bacterium to attach itself to tooth enamel and cause cavities. "This knowledge will stimulate the identification of substances that inhibit the enzyme. Just add that substance to toothpaste, or even sweets, and caries will be a thing of the past."

Prospectors who lost out in the gold rush probably wouldn't agree but Earth has more gold than it should. The shiny stuff is one of several metals that are puzzlingly common. Now it seems a last-minute bombardment, after Earth formed, may have supplied these extra elements.The planets formed when tiny rocks collided, forming ever larger lumps. Then, after Earth was born a second planet about the size of Mars crashed into it. This cataclysmic shock blasted a huge cloud of material into orbit, where it coalesced to form the moon.

Light has been used to generate aerodynamic-like lift for the first time. The technique, which takes advantage of the fact that light bends, or refracts, when moving from one medium to another, could be used to create solar-sail spacecraft that could steer using light itself.Photons create pressure when they bounce off objects. Solar sail prototypes are made highly reflective to maximise this push, but the effect does not allow the sails to be easily steered. "It's well known you can use a light source to push on something, but the steering mechanisms are still up for grabs," says Grover Swartzlander of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Nuclear fission, or the splitting of a heavy nucleus, usually results in symmetrical fragments of the same mass. Physicists attribute the few known examples of fission that is asymmetric to the formation in the resultant fragments of "magic" nuclei, which are extremely stable nuclei with all energy levels filled. Now, experiments at the European particle physics laboratory at the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva in Switzerland have found the isotope mercury-180 splits asymmetrically into ruthenium-100 and krypton-80 rather than the expected zirconium-90.The nucleus of mercury-180 contains 80 protons and 100 neutrons, and symmetrical fission would result in two nuclei of zirconium-90, which contains 40 protons and 50 neutrons. This result was expected to be dominant especially because 50 and 40 are magic and semi-magic numbers respectively, meaning the levels in the nucleus would be completely filled with protons/neutrons.

The brain cherry-picks what people remember during sleep, resulting in sharper and clearer thinking, a new study suggests.Previous research had shown that sleep helps people consolidate their memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. (Read about secrets of why we sleep in National Geographic magazine.)But the new study, a review based on new studies as well as past research on sleep and memory, suggests that sleep also transforms memories in ways that make them somewhat less accurate but more useful in the long run.For example, sleep-enabled memories may help people produce insights, draw inferences, and foster abstract thought during waking hours.

A never-before-seen microbe has been found in the wreck of RMS Titanic.The Halomonas titanicae bacterium was found in "rusticles", the porous and delicate icicle-like structures that form on rusting iron.Various bacteria and fungi live within the delicate structures - first identified on the Titanic - actually feeding off the rusting metal.The find is described in the journal International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.Samples of rusticles from Titanic were gathered in 1991 by the Mir 2 robotic submersible.

Sacrifice is an age-old ritual, but the inhabitants of 10th-century Peru brought sinister novelty to their rites by slaughtering children.In the Lambayeque valley on the north coast of the country, the earliest definitive evidence of ritual child sacrifice has been uncovered. The bloodletting took place at a site called Cerro Cerrillos."The scale and sheer complexity of the blood sacrifice of children at Cerro Cerrillos appears to be something completely new," said Haagen Klaus of Utah Valley University in Orem.

John Roach writes:NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has captured what appears to be a giant snake slithering along the sun's southeastern limb. The feature is actually a magnetic loop of dense gas suspended over the solar surface.The snaky filament, which was first noticed last week by NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft stationed over the sun's eastern horizon, showed signs of instability and had the potential for an impressive eruption, according to SpaceWeather.com. You've got to see SpaceWeather's time-lapse animated image of the flare-up.

Ministers will not be required to seek the advice of scientists when making drug classification policy in future, under new government proposals.The police reform and social responsibility bill, published last week, contains an amendment to the constitution of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) that would remove the requirement on the home secretary to appoint at least six scientists to the committee.A further amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 would allow the home secretary to place temporary controls on substances for a year by statutory instrument.

Are the orange circles in this picture (right) different sizes? Your answer can reveal the size of your brain.Most people perceive the central circle to be smaller, an effect known as the Ebbinghaus illusion. Samuel Schwarzkopf and colleagues at University College London created a series of images in which the relative sizes of the two circles varied, and asked 30 volunteers to estimate which of the two was larger.The team then scanned each volunteer's brain using fMRI while they were shown a black dot in various points of their visual field. From the scans, they were able to assess the size of the visual cortex.

A grant from the D. J. Angus-Scientech Educational Foundation has made it possible for a student from a suburban Indianapolis high school to co-author, along with his mentor and two other scientists, a theoretical physics study in a top tier peer-reviewed scientific journal, a paper which has been selected for rapid communication due to its importance to the field."It is extremely rare for a high school student to be a co-author on a physics paper. Statistics on this aren't available, but it is likely less than 1 paper in 1,000, that's one tenth of one percent of physics research papers, has a high school co-author. It is unusual even for upper class undergraduates to publish in physics. This is usually the province of graduate students and faculty," said Andrew Gavrin, Ph.D., chairman of the Department of Physics at the School of Science at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis.

Bacteria are among the simplest organisms in nature, but many of them can still talk to each other, using a chemical "language" that is critical to the process of infection. Sending and receiving chemical signals allows bacteria to mind their own business when they are scarce and vulnerable, and then mount an attack after they become numerous enough to overwhelm the host's immune system.This system, called "quorum sensing," is an interesting example of sophistication among microbes, says Helen Blackwell, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In practical terms, she adds, quorum sensing may provide an alternative therapeutic target as bacteria continue to evolve resistance to antibiotics.Theoretically, blocking quorum sensing would prevent the bacteria from turning pathogenic and producing the toxins that are an immediate cause of disease in bacterial infections.

More than 35,000 new species of flowering plants may be lying undiscovered in cupboards around the world, it is claimed.Botanists looked at how long it takes for new species collected in the field to be identified, and found it often took decades.They concluded that of the 70,000 flowering plants that experts believe are yet to be found, over half may already be in collections, awaiting identification.The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Plants have been catalogued for hundreds of years. Traditionally, potential new species are dried and mounted on cardboard, labelled and placed in what is known as a herbarium for safekeeping.

Alan Boyle writes:When Space Exploration Technologies sends its Dragon capsule toward orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, hopefully sometime this week, the spaceship company's founder figures it will have only about a 60 percent chance of coming back down successfully.But for some reason, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he's feeling "calmer about this flight" than he did about the last one, back in June, when the Falcon 9 made its debut. For one thing, he's not having recurring nightmares about rockets crashing and burning.

Research may shed light on why dementia sufferers have memory difficulties.Memory difficulties such as those seen in dementia may arise because the brain forms incomplete memories that are more easily confused, new research from the University of Cambridge has found. The findings are published today in the journal Science.Currently, memory problems are typically perceived to be the result of forgetting previously encountered items or events. The new research (using an animal model of amnesia), however, found that the ability of the brain to maintain complete, detailed memories is disrupted.

A lucky placement of acoustic survey equipment has allowed scientists to get some rare insight into what sperm whales did in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The bottom line: they left town.An acoustic site just nine miles from the spill and 1,000 meters (0.6 miles) down has nine years of data on local sperm whales. That, along with other acoustic archives of sperm whale calls from around the Gulf of Mexico and a rapid response grant from the National Science Foundation given to gather more acoustic data right after the spill, has allowed scientists to draw some preliminary conclusions about sperm whales' reactions to the spill.

Researchers have found compelling evidence for an extensive biological community living in porous rock deep beneath the seafloor. The microbes in this hidden world appear to be an important source of dissolved organic matter in deep ocean water, a finding that could dramatically change ideas about the ocean carbon cycle.Matthew McCarthy, associate professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led a team of researchers from several institutions who analyzed the dissolved organic matter in fluids from natural vents on the seafloor and from a borehole that penetrated the basement rock deep beneath the seafloor sediments.

SYDNEY: Alteration of a single gene could turn some male embryos into female ones, according to a study that may help treat males who develop feminine appearance. The study will improve diagnosis and clinical management of patients with disorders of sex development (DSD).These disorders occur when the testis or ovary does not develop properly in the embryo, causing genital abnormalities in one out of 4,500 babies, reports the American Journal of Human Genetics.

This little video, brought to us by NASA Goddard, shows off all of the galaxies we're currently aware of, in one swirling, fluid shot. It's like the visualizer your freshman college roommate used to stare at on his laptop while listening to Sigur Ros, under the influence of who knows what--but for real.Apparently the video was created by taking images from the Hubble telescope and several other sources and placing them in a virtual 3-D space, corresponding to our viewing vantage point. Basically, it's a 3-D video tour of the universe as we know it at the moment. You can check out the full-sized video here. Enjoy!

A giant marabou stork has been discovered on an island once home to human-like 'hobbits'.Fossils of the bird were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores, a place previously famed for the discovery of Homo floresiensis, a small hominin species closely related to modern humans.The stork may have been capable of hunting and eating juvenile members of this hominin species, say researchers who made the discovery, though there is no direct evidence the birds did so.The finding, reported in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, also helps explain how prehistoric wildlife adapted to living on islands.

Emerging archeological evidence points to early human habitation 120,000 years ago in a Persian "Gulf Oasis" now underwater, suggests one archeologist.In the upcoming Current Anthropology journal study, Jeffrey Rose of the United Kingdom's University of Birmingham, points to stone tools from 40 archeological sites throughout the Middle East to suggest that modern humans left Africa earlier than many model suggest (typically around 60,000 years ago), and populated Arabian coastal areas now underwater.

HOW did the giant panda lose its taste for flesh? The answer may lie in the gene that codes for the umami taste receptor.It seems that pandas have an inactive version of the Tas1r1 gene that allows us to taste umami, say Jianzhi Zhang at the University of Michigan and his colleagues.They discovered that Tas1r1 stopped working about 4.2 million years ago. Fossil records show that ancestors of the giant pandas swapped meat for bamboo between 7 and 2 million years ago.

(AP) -- The Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador is billowing ash into the sky and sending super-hot pyroclastic flows surging down its slopes, causing authorities to evacuate nearby villages.Hugo Yepez, director of Ecuador's Geophysical Institute, says no one has been injured nor any village damaged. He says people within 8 miles of the volanco's center were evacuated Saturday as a precaution.An eruption of ash from Tungurahua last May caused a one-day shutdown of the international airport at Ecuador's largest city, Guayaquil.

"Has NASA discovered extraterrestrial life?" asked blogger Jason Kottke on Tuesday, in a post that spread like wildfire around the web.The speculation was prompted by a cryptic notice on NASA's website about "an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life".Physicist Michio Kaku mused about several possibilities, including that "NASA might announce they found some form of evidence of microbial life in the universe".

ABSOLUTE zero sounds like an unbreachable limit beyond which it is impossible to explore. In fact there is a weird realm of negative temperatures that not only exists in theory, but has also proved accessible in practice. An improved way of getting there, outlined last week, could reveal new states of matter.Temperature is defined by how the addition or removal of energy affects the amount of disorder, or entropy, in a system.

A critical breakthrough has been made in efforts to save the giant panda, one that could kick-start attempts to reintroduce the animals to the wild.Conservationists say they have perfected the difficult task of reproducing pandas, having reached their target of successfully raising 300 of the bears in captivity.The breakthrough, mainly by scientists at the Chengdu Panda Breeding Research Centre, China, should lead to the first panda being reintroduced into the wild within 15 years.

These days, a sedan that only runs 5 miles per gallon would be laughed off a car lot.Yet in the air -- where Boeing 747s get about .2 miles to the gallon -- that kind of gas mileage would be revolutionary. Like their automobile counterparts, airplane engineers have been looking for ways to safely send those 70-ton metallic birds into the air on a leaner fuel diet to cut down on carbon emissions and rising transportation costs.

(AP) -- Like the warming atmosphere above, a once-taboo idea hangs over the slow, frustrating U.N. talks to curb climate change: the idea to tinker with the atmosphere or the planet itself, pollute the skies to ward off the sun, fill the oceans with gas-eating plankton, do whatever it takes.As climate negotiators grew more discouraged in recent months, U.S. and British government bodies urged stepped-up studies of such "geoengineering." The U.N. climate science network decided to assess the options. And a range of new research moved ahead in America and elsewhere."The taboo is broken," Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist, told The Associated Press.

CANNABIS is a double-edged sword: by dampening the immune system, it provides relief from inflammatory diseases, but this also increase the risk of infections. Now we know how it does this: its active ingredient targets a newly discovered type of cell that lowers the immune response.Prakash Nagarkatti at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine and colleagues injected the main active ingredient of cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), into mice. THC activated two types of cannabinoid receptor on immune cells, called CB1 and CB2. Activation of these receptors led to a "massive mobilisation" of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), which play a crucial role in lowering the immune system response back down to normal levels (European Journal of Immunology, DOI: 10.1002/eji.201040667).

Hello everyone and welcome back to Evolver the Podcast. In this episode we have interviews with Graham Hancock, bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, the Sign and the Seal, Supernatural, and most recently Entangled. After that we interview Robin Gunkel who is a regional coordinator for Evolver Baltimore. Then we have Erin Shaw from Evolver LA interviewing Daniel Pinchbeck, co-founder of Evolver, and bestselling author of Breaking Open the Head, 2012 the Return of Quetzalcoatl, and most recently Notes from the Edge Times.

Peruvian foraging societies were already chewing coca leaves 8,000 years ago, archaeological evidence has shown.Ruins beneath house floors in the northwestern Peru showed evidence of chewed coca and calcium-rich rocks.Such rocks would have been burned to create lime, chewed with coca to release more of its active chemicals.Writing in the journal Antiquity, an international team said the discovery pushed back the first known coca use by at least 3,000 years.

Archaeologists have recovered remains from at least eight people after initial excavation at a Neolithic tomb site in Orkney discovered in October.A narrow, stone-lined passageway leads to five chambers, two of which have been part-excavated so far.Fragments of skull and hipbone have been unearthed, some carefully placed in gaps in the stones, suggesting the 5,000-year-old site is undisturbed.The bones point to a range of ages at death including a child of about six.

The Indus Valley civilization existed in India five thousand years ago. This great urban civilization, contemporaneous with those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, covered an expanse that stretched from Baluchistan in the west to the Upper Ganga-Yamuna Doab in the east. Harrapa, Mohen-jo-Daro, Channu Daro, Rakhigarhi, Lothal and Dholavira are among the famous towns of the Indus Valley civilisation that were dug out by archaeologists.Dholavira, located near Khadir Bet in the Great Rann of Kachchh of Gujarat is an incredible example of this Indus Valley civilization town.The area of the civilization was larger than that of today's Western Europe. Dholavira perched at one end of it on a small island, possibly surrounded then by the sea. Surrounded by a unique geographical location, Dholavira was literally a paradise in the desert.

The atmosphere surrounding a "super-Earth" extrasolar planet has been measured for the first time.The planet, GJ 1214b, is three times larger than Earth and about seven times heavier, and is the first planet of its kind known to have an atmosphere.Researchers reporting in Nature have said it appears to have either a dense atmosphere of water steam, or is wrapped in thick clouds like Venus.More experiments measuring more colours of light will bear out which it is.The method used could be used on many ground-based telescopes to yield atmospheric data on other exoplanets.

A new book claims Africa could feed itself within a generation, and become a major agricultural exporter.The book, The New Harvest, by Harvard University professor Calestous Juma, calls on African leaders to make agricultural expansion central to all decision-making.Improvements in infrastructure, mechanisation and GM crops could vastly increase production, he claims.The findings are being presented to African leaders in Tanzania today.The presidents of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi are holding an informal summit to discuss African food security and climate change.Speaking to the BBC ahead of the meeting, Professor Juma said African leaders had to recognise that "agriculture and economy for Africa are one and the same".

You might not run faster or jump higher with shoes soled in new super rubber, but they could save your knees and eventually power your iPod.Japanese scientists have created a new kind of carbon-based rubber that can withstand extreme temperatures. This new super rubber could be used in everything from electricity-generating sneaker soles to spaceships traveling to distant moons."These properties are totally new and unique and have not previously been shown by any materials," said Ming Xu, a scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan. Xu and his colleagues' research was published today in the journal Science.

If you've been following the ongoing hunt for the elusive dark matter, you probably noticed the recent article in Physics World about a new paper in Physical Review Letters proposing a hypothetical "X" particle as an alternative candidate to Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).As an added bonus, an "X" particle could solve another perplexing cosmological mystery: why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? (It's known as "baryon asymmetry" among physicists.)

An ancient lake bed 350 kilometres long has been discovered beneath the sands of the Sahara desert, in Egypt. Geologist Ted Maxwell at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, and colleagues examined high resolution pictures of south western Egypt taken by NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), a modified radar system used onboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in February 2000. The radar identified a region in an area called Tushka where water formed a lake after overflowing from the Nile. At its largest extent - shown in the right hand image - the lake would have covered an area of 68,200 square kilometres. The lake appeared around 250,000 years ago - during a period of wet climate when the region would have been covered in grasslands - and dried up 80,000 years ago (Geology, DOI 10.1130/G31320.1).

After a series of wall collapses at Italy's ancient city of Pompeii, a team from UN cultural organisation Unesco has arrived to examine the site.One wall gave way on Tuesday and two more the next day, three weeks after the House of Gladiators crumbled.Officials blamed Wednesday's wall collapses on heavy rain but Unesco says concerns have been raised about Pompeii's state of preservation.The UN team will assess the World Heritage site for further problems.

For February 2011 Author of the Month we are very pleased to welcome physicist and researcher Nassim Haramein. He will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout February to discuss his Unified Field Theory, 'Holofractographic Universe theory'. Please see his Forum Article, and see his website for his excellent DVD presentation 'Crossing The Event Horizon'.

The Battle of Towton was one of the bloodiest battle to ever take place on English soil, with nearly 1% of the English population of the time killed during the battle. New finds on the site has produced the earliest evidence of the use of guns on the battle field.The Battle of Towton took place on a snowy 29 March 1461 on high ground between the villages of Towton and Saxton in Yorkshire (about 12 miles (19 km) southwest of York and about 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Tadcaster).The battle was one of the key battles of the Wars of the Roses. This civil war was fought between the Houses of York and Lancaster for control of the English throne. The result of battle was a decisive victory for the Yorkists. The Lancastrian army suffered heavy losses and was broken on the field of battle.

Animals have been exploited for thousands of years for food, labor, religious figures and pets. Archaeologically, domestication, animal treatment, economy and religion can all be witnessed.For thousands of years, animals have been exploited all over the world for agricultural and food production purposes. The presence of different types of exploited animals may shift over time. As societies progress and incorporate new technologies, create new trade routes and extend or morph existing routes, the result is often the introduction of new species to the location. The site of Durrington Walls in Wiltshire for example, reveals evidence of a late-Neolithic shift from cattle based to pork based economy (Albarella and Serjeantson 2002, 33).

The British company Festo was inspired by the elephant trunk to develop a bionic arm.Called the Bionic Handling Assistant, the free-moving "third hand system," as Festo calls it, has plenty of uses in situtations that require support from machines. That can include medical technology, rehabilitation and as an aid for the handicapped, as well as in agriculture, private homes and educational institutes.Festo also hopes its invention will be used widely in industrial practices, particularly as a handling system to support assembly processes.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A mysterious high-altitude layer of sulphur dioxide discovered by ESA's Venus Express has been explained. As well as telling us more about Venus, it could be a warning against injecting our atmosphere with sulphur droplets to mitigate climate change.Venus is blanketed in sulphuric acid clouds that block our view of the surface. The clouds form at altitudes of 50 km when sulphur dioxide from volcanoes combines with water vapour to make sulphuric acid droplets. Any remaining sulphur dioxide should be destroyed rapidly by the intense solar radiation above 70 km.So the detection of a sulphur dioxide layer at 90-110 km by ESA's Venus Express orbiter in 2008 posed a complete mystery. Where did that sulphur dioxide come from?

A new data-driven statistical model that incorporates the surrounding landscape in unprecedented detail describes the transfer of an inserted bacterial gene via pollen and seed dispersal in cotton plants more accurately than previously available methods.Shannon Heuberger, a graduate student at the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and her co-workers will publish their findings in PLoS ONE on Nov. 30.The transfer of genes from genetically modified crop plants is a hotly debated issue. Many consumers are concerned about the possibility of genetic material from transgenic plants mixing with non-transgenic plants on nearby fields. Producers, on the other side, have a strong interest in knowing whether the varieties they are growing are free from unwanted genetic traits.

(AP) An unmanned Air Force space plane that spent seven months in orbit is set to return to Earth. The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is scheduled to land at Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles sometime between Friday and Monday, depending on the weather and other factors. The Air Force Space Command said in a statement Tuesday the base has begun preparations for the landing.The X-37B resembles a small space shuttle. Since it launched in April, space enthusiasts have speculated about its ultimate purpose. The Air Force has said the space plane was to serve as a test platform for unspecified experiments.

Astronomers say the Universe may contain three times the number of stars as is currently thought.Their assessment is based on new observations showing other galaxies may have very different structures to our Milky Way galaxy.The researchers tell the journal Nature that more stars probably means many more planets as well - perhaps "trillions" of Earth-like worlds.The Yale University-led study used the Keck telescope in Hawaii.

Mary and Matt, my guides, sat beside me on the couch at Johns Hopkins Medical Center to look at an art book until the psilocybin took effect. In only about fifteen or twenty minutes I knew I had received an active dose rather than a placebo. "I'm going down," I told them. On went the eye mask, the headphones, the blanket, and the blood pressure cuff, and I began to sink into another world.The descent seemed even rougher than the previous time, a rattling, lurching, high-speed roller coaster ride straight downhill through tingling geometric shapes and tunnels of textured blackness. The music on the soundtrack exaggerated the eerie atmosphere and kept me wary. Once again the abdominal spasms started up as well. Chemicals washed over me in repeated waves, bringing hot sensations and a bad taste in my mouth. As soon as I managed to get stabilized from one wave, another would follow. The sheer number of these cycles suggested that this was a stronger dose than I'd had the first time.

A new peer-reviewed scientific study says the backscatter full-body imaging X-ray machines being used by the federal Transportation Security Administration could be fooled by terrorists who simply would mold explosives to conform to their bodies.WND obtained an advance copy of the report, titled "An evaluation of airport X-ray backscatter units based on image characteristics," in which University of California scientists Leon Kaufman and Joseph Carlson demonstrated that packages of explosives contoured to the body or worn along the sides likely would not be detected by TSA X-ray units built to "see" hard edges and anatomical features, and used primarily to image the front and back of the body.