Newsdesk Archive
Three people have been charged in last year's theft of the famous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, a prosecutor said Friday.The prosecutor, Robert Parys, said he could not immediately confirm details about those charged, but Poland's official PAP news agency reported the main suspect is a Swedish man, Anders Hoegstroem.Prosecutors say Hoegstroem incited two Poles to steal the sign, which sat atop the entrance to the camp, PAP reported. He pleaded not guilty, and would face a sentence of 10 years in prison if convicted, the news agency reported.
Some UFO sightings could be explained by ball lightning and other atmospheric phenomena, claims Australian astrophysicist Stephen Hughes.The scientist has made a detailed study of an unusual event in 2006 when large meteors were observed over Brisbane.Their appearance occurred at the same time as a brilliant green object was seen to roll over nearby mountains.Dr Hughes has put forward a theory linking the object - presumed to be ball lighting - to the fireballs.His idea is that one of the fireballs may have momentarily triggered an electrical connection between the upper atmosphere and the ground, providing energy for the ball lightning to appear above the hills.
Our modern-day environment is loaded with man-made chemicals. We breath car exhaust, gasoline fumes and secondhand smoke, and we eat food laced with pesticides and plasticizers and cooked in pans with nonstick coatings.Biomonitoring: An article in the Oct. 11 Health section on traces of man-made chemicals in human bodies incorrectly named an environmental advocacy group. It is the Natural Resources Defense Council, not the National Resources Defense Council.We use cosmetics on our skin, cleaning products in our houses and lawn products in our yards. We decorate our homes and clothe our kids with flame-retardant fabrics. And we drink municipal water that contains traces of pharmaceuticals and other chemicals
One person correctly remembers four of eight items just seen but is fuzzy on details. Another person recalls only two of the items but with amazingly precise clarity. So what ability translates to higher IQ?According to a University of Oregon study, the answer is very clear: More items stored in short-term memory is linked to greater fluid intelligence, as measured in IQ tests. The resolution of those memories, while important in many situations, shows no relationship with fluid intelligence.The notion that numbers of items is vitally important to short-term memory has been shown in previous studies at the UO. Those studies found that people, generally, have a capacity to temporarily store three to five items in short-term memory. Previous research has shown that capacity in short-term memory is a reliable predictor of an individual's IQ.
The talks that are meant to fix the world's climate resume on Monday for a two-week meeting in Cancún, Mexico's top beach resort. Almost 200 national governments are participating, and their objective is to agree a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which limits emissions of greenhouse gases from most industrialised countries except the US, and runs out at the end of 2012. But no one thinks this will happen. Diplomats are still bruised after their high-profile failure to reach agreement last December in Copenhagen. While governments argue, however, time is running out.Almost certainly not. There will be no Cancún protocol. With confidence shattered after Copenhagen, the best hope is for a deal at next year's climate summit in Durban, South Africa. But that would be a perilous delay: investment in renewable energy and carbon-offset projects is already being cut back because nobody knows what the rules on emissions will be in future.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Global warming devastated tropical rainforests 300 million years ago. Now scientists report the unexpected discovery that this event triggered an evolutionary burst among reptiles -- and inadvertently paved the way for the rise of dinosaurs, 100 million years later.This event happened during the Carboniferous Period. At that time, Europe and North America lay on the equator and were covered by steamy tropical rainforests. But when the Earth's climate became hotter and drier, rainforests collapsed, triggering reptile evolution.Dr Howard Falcon-Lang of Royal Holloway, University of London, UK explained: "Climate change caused rainforests to fragment into small 'islands' of forest. This isolated populations of reptiles and each community evolved in separate directions, leading to an increase in diversity."
(PhysOrg.com) -- The tooth enamel of lungfish and garfish could provide the basis for new material to make lighter more efficient aircraft or vehicles, says a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) physics researcher.Professor John Barry, from QUT's Faculty of Science and Technology, is on the hunt for new materials to develop from biology that will assist and enable technological advances."Without new materials we would never had had modern and efficient cars, for example. Compared with 60 years ago cars of today have much better handling, acceleration and braking and safety features thanks to the discovery of new materials along the way," Professor Barry said.
A gene therapy technique which aims to ease memory problems linked to Alzheimer's Disease has been successfully tested in mice.US scientists used it to increase levels of a chemical which helps brain cells signal to each other.This signalling is hindered in Alzheimer's Disease, the journal Nature reported.The Alzheimer's Research Trust said the study suggested a way to keep nerve cells in the brain communicating.Ageing populations in many countries around the world mean that Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia are set to increase.
A "killer" shrimp that feeds on native counterparts, young fish and insect larvae has been found at two sites in Wales, says the Environment Agency.The predatory Dikerogammarus villosus alters the ecology of habitats it invades, and can cause extinctions.It was found in the UK at a reservoir in Cambridgeshire in September.Environment Agency Wales said it has now been confirmed at Cardiff Bay and Eglwys Nunydd Reservoir in Port Talbot. It is not known how it arrived there.
MELBOURNE: A new study has shown that attractive couples are more likely to have daughters as compared to plainer parents who tend to have sons. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and author of 'Ten Politically Incorrect Truths about Human Nature', also argues that beauty is a stronger predictor of reproductive success for women than for men.
LAS VEGAS -- Authorities are offering a $2,500 reward for information about vandals who spray-painted graffiti over prehistoric rock art at the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area in Nevada.The federal Bureau of Land Management and supporters of Red Rock Canyon say spray paint covers pictographs drawn by ancient inhabitants and petroglyphs scraped long ago into rocks at the scenic preserve about 17 miles west of the Las Vegas Strip.Federal archaeologist Mark Boatwright calls the damage severe and estimates restoration will cost $10,000.
The mystery of how the moon got its surface water has just got deeper, following the failure of an attempt to replicate the mechanism that was thought to produce it.Three separate space missions last year reported detecting a sheen of water only molecules thick over large parts of the moon's surface. Many planetary scientists assumed the water was created when particles from the solar wind hit lunar soils, but this idea has now been thrown into doubt."The solar wind cannot produce water in sufficient quantities to account for the results of the three missions that observed it," says Raúl Baragiola, a member of the team at University of Virginia, Charlottesville, that tried to reproduce this effect in the lab.
As reported by New Scientist last year, UK Met Office researchers have shown that the world could warm by 4 °C by 2060, devastating much of the Amazon rainforest and disrupting the monsoon cycle. Now the UK's Royal Society has published detailed study of how the world will look when it is 4 °C warmer.Water shortages will become more severe, says Fai Fung of the University of Oxford, and colleagues. The extent of the warming depends in large part on our actions. If, by cutting emissions we limit global warming to 2 °C, projections suggest water supplies will dwindle because of demand from the growing population. But at 4 °C, a warmer, drier climate will become the biggest threat to water availability.Most of sub-Saharan Africa will see shorter growing seasons, according to Philip Thornton of the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, and colleagues. As a result, average maize production will drop 19 per cent and bean production by 47 per cent compared with current levels.
A recent excavation programme at a standing stone known as Trefael, near Newport (south-west Wales) has revealed that what originally was a portal dolmen in later times was transformed in a standing stone, probably used as a ritual marker to guide communities through a scared landscape. This solitary stone has over 75 cupmarks gouged onto its upper surface. Following the complete exposure of the capstone through excavation, it is now considered by several astronomers that the distribution of the cupmarks may represent a section of the night sky that includes the star constellations of Cassiopeia, Orion, Sirius and of course the North Star.
A huge lake once waxed and waned deep in the sandy heart of the Egyptian Sahara, geologists have found.Radar images taken from the space shuttle confirm that a lake broader than Lake Erie once sprawled a few hundred kilometers west of the Nile, researchers report in the December issue of Geology. Since the lake first appeared around 250,000 years ago, it would have ballooned and shrunk until finally petering out around 80,000 years ago.Knowing where and when such oases existed could help archaeologists understand the environment Homo sapiens traveled while migrating out of Africa for the first time, says team leader Ted Maxwell, a geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Modern humans arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
Dissecting the brain was a messy affair in the early 16th century when cadavers might spend a while decomposing before finally going under the physician's knife. It was a predicament that Leonardo da Vinci circumvented with characteristic finesse: when he wanted to study deep cavities in the brain, he took the organ from a freshly killed ox and injected it with melted wax, taking care to make a hole at one end for fluid to escape. When the wax had cooled and hardened, he carved away at the brain tissue to reveal an exquisite, life-sized cast of the organ's inner structure.Da Vinci's casts became the basis for the Italian polymath's anatomical sketches in which he set out to document the appearance and even the workings of the brain. There was a lot to unravel and little to build on. One popular theory doing the rounds at the time held that animal spirits coursed through the human brain and crossed internal cavities by way of tubular and presumably hollow nerves.
A carved wooden hand and a marble head of a Greco-Roman god are just two of the 200 artifacts that had been stored away in the national bank of Egypt. The ancient pieces were just sent to the Supreme Council of Antiquities this week, according to Farouk Hosny, the minister of culture.The recovered collection was likely in the possession of foreigners who lived in Egypt during the late 19th and 20th centuries. These antiquities collectors had stored their collection inside boxes in the vaults of the Al-Ahly Bank, according to Tarek Amer, chairman of the bank. Since the early 20th century nobody had asked about the objects, so they remained under the bank's care until the executive board of the bank decided to offer the pieces to the SCA.
Too small to see, they're swigged in cups of tasteless, odorless clear liquid. Once swallowed, they lodge in the gut and produce larvae. They're parasites, known clinically as Trichuris suis. Are they the next big thing in allergy relief?Pathologist Marie-Helene Jouvin, who launched this study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center with allergist/immunologist Mariana Castells, hopes they are -- and the sooner the better, as America's allergy rate is soaring. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of young Americans with food allergies soared nearly 20 percent in the last decade. Eight percent of children under six now have food allergies. The number of adults with allergies has risen too.
It was already nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium" for its ability to withstand radiation. Now it seems Deinococcus radiodurans could, in theory, survive dormant on Mars for over a million years.Lewis Dartnell at University College London and colleagues froze the bugs to -79 °C, the average temperature at Mars's mid-latitudes. Then they zapped them with gamma rays to simulate the dose they would receive under 30 centimetres of Martian soil over long periods of time.The team worked out that it could take 1.2 million years under these conditions to shrink a population of the bacteria to a millionth of its original size.
Eyeless cave fish and a frog that carries its offspring on its back are among the new species a team of scientists have discovered in Indonesia's eastern Papua region.The researchers from the Institute of Research and Development (IRD) in Montpellier, southern France, studied caves, underground rivers and jungles in the remote Lengguru area of New Guinea island."In terms of discoveries almost everything remains to be done in this area, which is very difficult to access but which has exceptionally rich biodiversity," IRD scientist Laurent Pouyaud told AFP.For seven weeks, the team including biologists, paleontologists and archaeologists explored the vast limestone "labyrinth" where species have evolved in isolation for millions of years.
Evidence of events that happened before the Big Bang can be seen in the glow of microwave radiation that fills the Universe, scientists have asserted.Renowned cosmologist Roger Penrose said that analysis of this cosmic microwave background showed echoes of previous Big Bang-like events.The events appear as "rings" around galaxy clusters in which the variation in the background is unusually low.The unpublished research has been posted on the Arxiv website.The ideas within it support a theory developed by Professor Penrose - knighted in 1994 for his services to science - that upends the widely-held "inflationary theory".
The first satellite dedicated to delivering broadband services to Europe has launched on an Ariane 5 rocket.The Hylas spacecraft is designed to fill so-called "notspots" - remote locations such as rural villages where it is currently not possible to get a fast internet connection.Lift-off from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana occurred at 1539 local time (1839 GMT).The satellite was successfully placed in orbit 34 minutes later.A signal from Hylas was picked up almost immediately at an antenna sited in India.Controllers will now take a number of weeks to position the spacecraft properly in the sky some 36,000km above the equator, and to check out onboard systems.
When you hear "hybrid engine" you probably think of an automobile, right? There's actually another kind of hybrid: rocket engines. While there are environmental advantages to these special engines, critical challenges to adoption remain. A new approach patented this month could change everything.Admittedly, I didn't know much about hybrid rocket engines until reading Christopher Mims' Technology Review post about the new invention. With all the alt vehicles at the LA Auto Show, I've had automobiles on the brain more than aircraft. However, from what I gather, "hybrid" rocket engines use both solid and liquid or gas propellants. The advantages to these engines include better control, less risk of explosion and the ability to use nontoxic oxidizers to get everything going.
At the opening of his legendary 1960s TV anthology "The Twilight Zone," writer Rod Serling spoke of an eerie place between "light and shadow." The dim outer periphery of our solar system is a gravitational twilight zone when drifters from other stars mingle with lost solar system debris, according to a recent study.At a distance of roughly six trillion miles from the sun an unknown number of ancient comet nuclei -- each just a few miles across -- drift at temperatures near absolute zero. When gravitationally perturbed they fall toward the inner solar system like apples shaken from a tree. At least we think they are there, based on the random direction and frequency at which comets dive-bomb the inner solar system.
Neanderthals reached full maturity faster than humans do today, suggests a new examination of teeth from 11 Neanderthal and early human fossils. The findings, detailed in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, portray Neanderthals as a live fast and die young species.Our characteristically slow development and long childhood therefore appear to be recent and unique to Homo sapiens. These traits may have given our early modern human ancestors an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals."I think Neanderthals retain a more primitive developmental condition that seems to be shared with earlier fossil humans," lead author Tanya Smith told Discovery News. "We know from other studies of dental and cranial development that australopithecenes (early hominids from Africa) and Homo erectus did not show long or slow developmental periods like our own."
An ancient Egyptian temple to the god Ptah in the village of Meet Rahina near Memphis, just south of Cairo, now sits submerged in sewage.The temple, which was built during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses II (1279 BC - 1213 BC) and was once a major tourist attraction, now serves as a home for stray dogs.According to local residents, sanitation authorities never removed the piles of garbage dumped around the temple by villagers. They also complain that many of their homes have likewise been flooded with sewage and underground water, which they have been forced to remove with the use of buckets.
A Nazi suspect indicted on charges of involvement in the murders of 430,000 Jews at Belzec death camp has died in Germany aged 89.Samuel Kunz was third on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi war crimes suspects and had been due to go on trial early next year.He was also accused of personally shooting dead 10 Jews at the camp in occupied Poland during 1942-43.State Prosecutor Andreas Brendel said Kunz died at home last Thursday.The cause of death was not clear.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers are creating a system that harvests heat from an engine's exhaust to generate electricity, reducing a car's fuel consumption.The effort is funded with a $1.4 million, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A Purdue University team is collaborating with General Motors, which is developing a prototype using thermoelectric generators, or TEGs, said Xianfan Xu, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering.TEGs generate an electric current to charge batteries and power a car's electrical systems, reducing the engine's workload and improving fuel economy.
When the First Fleet appeared in Sydney Cove in 1788, carrying British convicts and settlers, coastal-dwelling Aborigines were terrified. They thought that the tall, square-rigged ships must be giant birds or monsters, and that the figures climbing the masts were devils or possums. One naval officer wrote that "the natives, alarmed, ran along the beach in seeming great terror ... they took their canoes out of the water upon their backs and ran off with them into the country, together with their fishing tackle and children".But within a few years, and despite a smallpox epidemic that wiped out half the indigenous population, Aborigines in the Sydney area had adapted to the new reality. Having never ventured outside Sydney harbour before, they accompanied the English on globe-trotting voyages, witnessing the founding of new settlements and helping to explore new frontiers.
Crop diversification with shrubby legumes mixed with soybean and peanuts could be the key to sustaining the green revolution in Africa, according to a Michigan State University study.The study, which appears in the Nov. 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, states that diversifying crops would boost production of nutrient-enriched grain by 12 percent to 23 percent, said Sieglinde Snapp, a crop and soil scientist at Michigan State University's Kellogg Biological Station.Malawi has been called the cradle of Africa's green revolution. Through its government subsidizing 90 percent of fertilizer and superior corn seed costs, Malawi has reaped substantial gains in productivity of calorie-rich food. The successful program has had some unintended consequences, though, such as reliance on starchy cereals, expensive fertilizer and depleted soils.
Archeologists inspect a newly excavated sunken ship of ancient China's Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368) in Heze of east China's Shandong Province, Nov. 23, 2010. Archeologists in Shandong on Tuesday announced that they have discovered an ancient sunken ship of the Yuan Dynasty at a building site in Heze. The wooden ship, with 21 meters in length, 5 meters in width and 1.8 meters in height, contains 10 cabins. Some 110 precious antiques and porcelains have also been discovered in and around the ship. (Xinhua/Fan Changguo)
The nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way - Andromeda - was born when two smaller galaxies collided, say astronomers.An international team conducted a computer simulation of how Andromeda evolved over time.The results suggest that two galaxies collided some nine billion years ago and permanently fused about 5.5 billion years ago.The study has been published in the Astrophysical Journal.The lead author, Francois Hammer of the Paris Observatory, France, told BBC News that while scientists have been able to detect galaxies near the edge of the Universe, there many gaps in our knowledge of our immediate neighbourhood, known as the Local Group of galaxies.
A spacecraft has tasted oxygen in the atmosphere of another world for the first time while flying low over Saturn's icy moon, Rhea.Nasa's Cassini probe scooped oxygen from the thin atmosphere of the planet's moon while passing overhead at an altitude of 97km in March this year.Until now, wisps of oxygen have only been detected on planets and their moons indirectly, using the Hubble space telescope and other major facilities.Instruments aboard Cassini revealed an extremely thin oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere that is sustained by high-energy particles slamming into the moon's surface and kicking up atoms, molecules and ions.
Pity the poor female fruit fly. Being a looker is simply not enough, it seems. If you're to get a date, much less a proposal, you must also smell and act like a girl. Otherwise, you might just have a fight on your hands. Read more in next week's issue of the online, open access journal PLoS Biology.As with most animals, Drosophila face the problem of distinguishing between a potential mate and a potential competitor. If, when meeting a second fruit fly, a male fly thinks "female," he'll begin courting her. But if he senses another male, he'll fight. What triggers these sex-specific responses? According to new research by scientists at Harvard Medical School, it's pheromone profiles and behavioral patterns. The researchers discovered the separate and combined effects of smell and action by manipulating the expression of a gene that produces a protein that both governs the sex specificity of fruit fly pheromones and the sex-linked behavior cues in a fly brain. The results show that not only pheromonal but also behavioral cues can serve as triggers of aggression, underscoring the importance of behavioral feedback in the manifestation of social behavior.
The bizarre, newly-revealed squidworm -- a free-swimming worm with up to 10 squid-like limbs -- is one of a host of strange discoveries that await scientists in the vast, largely unexplored spaces of the deep ocean.New anatomical and genetic analysis of the squidworm Teuthidodrilus samae has revealed it to be a segmented worm -- an annelid, just as the earthworm is. But its appearance is far stranger than any backyard night crawler you've ever seen.The slimy animal's flattened body is about 3.5 inches long. It possesses 25 or more pairs of translucent white paddles arranged on its sides for swimming and up to 10 fragile, tentacle-like appendages at its head that are the same length as its body or longer.
They are an extraordinary and now rare group of animals but Earth has had some formidable marsupial carnivores.These pouched killers have included lions, wolves, and even sabretooths.Today, the only large marsupial carnivore left in existence is the Tasmanian Devil, and that is on the brink of extinction.These animals' past success though is illustrated by a new skull study that reveals the creatures to have been just as diverse as their cousins, the placental mammals.An international team examined the skulls of some 130 carnivores - marsupial and placental, living and extinct - from the past 40 million years.
Governments of 13 countries where tigers still live have endorsed a plan to save the big cats from extinction.Delegates at a summit in St Petersburg, Russia, agreed to double tiger numbers by 2022.The countries will focus on protecting tiger habitats, addressing poaching, illegal trade and providing the financial resources for the plan.In the last 100 years, tiger numbers have dropped from about 100,000 to less than 3,500 tigers in the wild today.There has been a 40% decline in numbers in a decade, and some populations are expected to disappear within the next 20 years.
Scientists have developed a technique to estimate the age of a suspect from blood left at a crime scene.Experts say the profiling method could be put to immediate use by forensic scientists where age information can provide investigative leads.The technique exploits a characteristic of immune cells carried in the blood known as T cells.The work by a team in the Netherlands has been published in the journal Current Biology.T cells play a key role in recognising foreign "invaders" such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, or tumour cells.
Amidst protests and rallies over airport security procedures, what's often overlooked is that flying itself dwarfs the radiation doses delivered by the new body scanners."Most people are unaware about the fact that there is significant radiation exposure associated with air travel because they are well above the Earth's atmosphere," said Robert J. Barish, a radiological and health physicist in New York City. "You'd get as much radiation in a whole-body scanner as you'd get in two minutes at 30,000 feet."For casual flyers, there probably isn't much to worry about, Barish said. But flying raises real risks for pilots, flight attendants, and the half a million business travelers who spend much of their time in the air.
Israeli archaeologists have discovered a swimming pool in which a legion of Roman soldiers bathed after sacking Jerusalem and expelling the Jews from their city.Featuring a number of plastered bathtubs and a pipe on its side used to fill it with water, the pool was part of a larger complex which included bathhouses and more swimming pools.
Alexander Shulgin, the "godfather of ecstasy" who became famous for discovering and experimenting with a host of psychoactive compounds, has suffered a stroke.His wife, Ann Shulgin, confirmed today that the 85-year-old was in hospital in San Francisco. "Sasha had a mild stroke over [last] weekend and is still in the hospital, where they are treating him. He will be undergoing speech therapy for a while," she said.Shulgin, a pharmacologist and psychedelic drug pioneer, has been demonised by anti-drug campaigners but also hailed as a counter-culture hero by many more. His work has covered the synthesis of hundreds of psychoactive compounds and his research was published in the 1990s in two books, TiHkal and PiHKAL, which he wrote with his wife.To donate directly to the Shulgins, follow the link on this page.
For December 2010 Author of the Month we are very pleased to welcome researcher and author Chris Carter. His new book Science and the Near Death Experience explains why near-death experiences (NDEs) offer evidence of an afterlife and discredits the psychological and physiological explanations for them. He will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout December to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article
WATSONVILLE -- From stone pestles picked up by a farmer plowing his fields west of Highway 1 more than half a century ago emerges a story of people's lives and advancing technology.The pestles and other artifacts unearthed by George Silva on his farm near Lee Road are on display at the Freedom Branch Library through Dec. 15.Rob Edwards, a retired Cabrillo College archeologist and one of the creators of the exhibit, explained the significance of the tools."One is that archeology can look at things and tell a story that isn't immediately apparent," he said. "And two, native people lived here for a very long time and adapted to their environment and changed their technology over time to make it more efficient and easier."
A PROMINENT local historian has speculated that a chance find on a housing development site could pre-date the Roman occupation of Scotland.Last week the Herald reported that contractors working in the grounds of the former Woodilee Hospital, between Kirkintilloch and Lenzie, had unearthed what is thought to be a wooden roundhouse dating back thousands of years.Don Martin, former assistant manager of information and archives at East Dunbartonshire Council, has his own ideas about the remains.Mr Martin told the Herald: "The building is clearly a native dwelling house, with remains of a kind sometimes referred to as a 'hut circle'.
London, England (CNN) -- Once lost to the deep, shipwrecks lying on the ocean floor are now accessible thanks to cutting-edge submersibles.Autonomous and remotely operated vehicles are capable of trawling the ocean floor at depths of up to 6,000 meters, to document ancient and recent shipwrecks, and recover key objects."RMS Titanic" is the most famous shipwreck to be visited by these vehicles. A recent expedition brought back images documenting the current state of the ship, nearly 100 years after it sank following a collision with an iceberg.
Noodles, cakes, porridge, and meat bones dating to around 2,500 years ago were recently unearthed at a Chinese cemetery, according to a paper that will appear in the Journal of Archaeological Science.Since the cakes were cooked in an oven-like hearth, the findings suggest that the Chinese may have been among the world's first bakers. Prior research determined the ancient Egyptians were also baking bread at around the same time, but this latest discovery indicates that individuals in northern China were skillful bakers who likely learned baking and other more complex cooking techniques much earlier."With the use of fire and grindstones, large amounts of cereals were consumed and transformed into staple foods," lead author Yiwen Gong and his team wrote in the paper.
Approximately 13 million metric tons of rare earth elements (REE) exist within known deposits in the United States, according to the first-ever nationwide estimate of these elements by the U.S. Geological Survey.This estimate of domestic rare earth deposits is part of a larger report that includes a review of global sources for REE, information on known deposits that might provide domestic sources of REE in the future, and geologic information crucial for studies of the availability of REE to U.S. industry.The report describes significant deposits of REE in 14 states, with the largest known REE deposits at Mountain Pass, Calif.; Bokan Mountain, Alaska; and the Bear Lodge Mountains, Wyo. The Mountain Pass mine produced REE until it closed in 2002. Additional states with known REE deposits include Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
Mid-way through the 4th century BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle turned his great mind to the wildlife around him and documented the behaviour and characteristics of hundreds of species in nine books that together became The History of Animals.The work is impressive for its sheer scope and ambition. In 130,000 words, the author divides and categorises animal life every which way: by basic physiology and anatomy; by habitat and mode of movement; by how and what these creatures ate. Humans are not excluded from examination, but are woven throughout the text, giving Aristotle the opportunity to compare and contrast the essence of other species with that of our own.
This essay will provide evidence for the ritual purpose of blood sacrifice using examples of information sourced from various Mexican Codices and other documents and will include 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.The Aztec's reigned during 1376 to 1521 CE from their capital at Tenochtitlan which was situated in the heart of Lake Texcoco in the Basin of Mexico (Renfrew & Bahn 2004: 76; Scarre 2005: 634-635)). Constructed on an island in Lake Texcoco, Tenochtitlan had three causeways that connected the capital to the mainland (McIntosh & Twist 2003: 222; Renfrew & Bahn 2004: 76) that were easily defendable from enemy attack until the Spaniards arrived.
In 1968, 17-year-old busboy Juan Romero held Robert Kennedy's hand as the senator lay dying at the Ambassador Hotel. On what would have been RFK's 85th birthday, Romero visits his grave at Arlington National Cemetery.As a skinny teenage busboy, Juan Romero knelt beside a mortally wounded Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. On Saturday morning, more than 42 years later, he knelt again, this time beside RFK's grave on what would have been Kennedy's 85th birthday.
Peru and Yale University have reached an agreement that will return a massive collection of pre-Columbian Inca artifacts to the South American country -- a settlement that could end a lengthy dispute over relics excavated nearly a century ago.A high-level university representative pledged in a 90-minute meeting Friday to return the artifacts excavated from the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, Peruvian President Alan Garcia said.
(CNN) -- He was an adventurer, a scholar, and possibly a spy -- but as Dutchman Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje proved with his rare 1885 photographs and sound recordings of Mecca, he was also a pioneering multimedia journalist.Snouck's extraordinary collection of sepia-tinted images of Mecca in a bygone age have gone on display in Dubai ahead of the annual Hajj pilgrimage that originally drew him to the heart of Islam.Accompanied by crackling, eerie soundscapes captured by Snouck using Thomas Edison's newly-invented wax cylinders, the exhibition paints a very different picture from the ornate and built-up Mecca familiar to modern visitors.
New research into the cause of dolphin "strandings" - incidents in which weakened or dead dolphins are found near shore - has shown that in some species, many stranded creatures share the same problem.They are nearly deaf, in a world where hearing can be as valuable as sight.That understanding - gained from a study of dolphins' brain activity - could help explain why such intelligent animals do something so seemingly dumb. Unable to use sound to find food or family members, dolphins can wind up weak and disoriented.Researchers are unsure what is causing the hearing loss: It might be old age, birth defects or a cacophony of man-made noise in the ocean, including Navy sonar, which has been associated with some marine mammal strandings in recent years.
Neolithic engineers may have used ball bearings in the construction of Stonehenge, it was claimed today.The same technique that allows vehicles and machinery to run smoothly today could have been used to transport the monument's massive standing stones more than 4,000 years ago, according to a new theory.Scientists showed how balls placed in grooved wooden tracks would have allowed the easy movement of stones weighing many tons.No-one has yet successfully explained how the heavy slabs used to build Stonehenge were shifted from their quarries to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.
Researchers are uncovering the secrets of ancient civilizations who built fun house-like temples that may have scared the pants off worshipers with scary sound effects, light shows and perhaps drug-induced psychedelic trips.The emerging field of acoustic archaeology is a marriage of high-tech acoustic analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. The results of this scientific collaboration is a new understanding of cultures who used sound effects as entertainment, religion and a form of political control.
A "sensational" discovery of 75-century-old copper tools in Serbia is compelling scientists to reconsider existing theories about where and when man began using metal. Belgrade - axes, hammers, hooks and needles - were found interspersed with other artefacts from a settlement that burned down some 7,000 years ago at Plocnik, near Prokuplje and 200 km south of Belgrade.The village had been there for some eight centuries before its demise. After the big fire, its unknown inhabitants moved away. But what they left behind points to man's earliest known extraction and shaping of metal.
Nuclear decay-driven machines could gather gases from the atmosphere of Mars, giving future robotic missions leaps of a kilometre, researchers say.A design concept in Proceedings of the Royal Society A outlines an approach to compress CO2 and liquefy it.The liquid would then be heated much as in a standard rocket, expanding violently into a gas to propel exploratory craft great distances.The authors suggest this is a better strategy to see more of the Red Planet.
In the coming decades we will begin to characterize planets in the habitable zones around nearby stars. The problem is that just because they are habitable we will still be hard pressed to understand if the chemistry of their atmospheres comes only from microorganisms, or six-legged giraffes, or even sentient beings.A huge influence on a planet's ability to evolve complex life is not just location, location, location, but rather environment, environment environment. The difference? Some planetary systems may have gas giant planets that accelerate the rate of comet or asteroid impacts on the surface of their terrestrial siblings.
In July, nine-year-old Ming Li lost her hand in a tractor accident. Her arm was too damaged to reattach it, so they grafted it to her leg instead. Three months later, her hand's back on her arm and regaining function.I'm having trouble finding much in the way of detail on the story, which admittedly seems almost too crazy to be true, but then there is that picture! Anyway, here's the account Orange gives, ostensibly gleaned from the Zhoukou Evening Post.When Ming Li arrived at the Zhengzhou hospital after having been run over by a tractor last June, her left hand was completely severed from her body and her arm was mangled. To keep her hand alive, doctors temporarily attached the appendage it to her right calf.
ONE of the great nocturnal mysteries of coral reefs has finally been solved - the spectacular mucous cocoons that some fish wrap around themselves like duvets each night are the fish equivalent of mosquito nets.Parrotfish and wrasses spend an hour each night producing the cocoons from glands inside their mouths. They were thought to protect the fish against predators such as moray eels, but lab experiments on the bullethead parrotfish suggest the cocoons ward off the bites of bloodsucking parasites called gnathiids that spread diseases.Lexa Grutter and her colleagues at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, placed 38 bullethead parrotfish into individual tanks. At midnight, they delicately removed the cocoon from half the fish without waking them. Then they added 20 gnathiids to each tank (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.0916).
Scientists think they can now explain the sequence of events deep inside the Earth that led to the major volcanic eruptions on Iceland earlier this year.Using data from satellite radar, GPS, and seismometers, the group has sketched a blueprint for the "plumbing" underneath Eyjafjallajokull.The analysis is published in the journal Nature.It goes someway to explaining why the volcano caused so much disruption to European air traffic."We can say that each volcano has a plumbing system and with our observations we have come up with a model for the plumbing system that was active at Eyjafjallajokull during this whole event," said Professor Freysteinn Sigmundsson from the University of Iceland.
The outlook is grim for amphibians with nearly one third of the world's species at risk of extinction. But there's a bit of good news: a critically endangered frog species has just been bred in captivity for the first time.The La Loma tree frog is notoriously difficult to breed but the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project recently managed the tricky feat. "We were warned that we might not be able to keep these frogs alive, but through a little bit of guesswork, attention to detail and collaboration with other husbandry experts - we've managed to breed them," says Brian Gratwicke, the international coordinator for the project.
IT'S crawling with life down there. A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth's oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet. It is the first time that life has been found in the crust's deepest layer, and an analysis of the new biosphere suggests life could exist lower still.On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer before, but as the basalt is difficult to pierce it happens rarely.To facilitate the task, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme set its sights on the Atlantis Massif. Tectonic activity beneath this submerged mountain in the central Atlantic Ocean has pushed the gabbroic layer within 70 metres of the sea floor, making it easier to reach (see diagram). A team led by Stephen Giovannoni of Oregon State University in Corvallis drilled down to 1391 metres, where temperatures reach 102 °C.
The study, published in The Anatomical Record, shows that T. rex's long tail didn't just serve to counterbalance the up-front weight of the massive carnivore's extremely large head. Paleontologists had previously suspected that was the tail's primary function.Instead, the new research led by University of Alberta researcher Scott Persons reveals that T. rex's powerful tail muscles helped to give this dinosaur super speed.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Elliptical galaxies were once thought to be aging star cities whose star-making heyday was billions of years ago.But new observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are helping to show that elliptical galaxies still have some youthful vigor left, thanks to encounters with smaller galaxies.Images of the core of NGC 4150, taken in near-ultraviolet light with the sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), reveal streamers of dust and gas and clumps of young, blue stars that are significantly less than a billion years old. Evidence shows that the star birth was sparked by a merger with a dwarf galaxy.
The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests.The findings boost widely-accepted theories, based on Icelandic medieval texts and a reputed Viking settlement in Newfoundland in Canada, that the Vikings reached the American continent several centuries before Christopher Columbus traveled to the "New World."Spain's CSIC scientific research institute said genetic analysis of around 80 people from a total of four families in Iceland showed they possess a type of DNA normally only found in Native Americans or East Asians.
In this week's cover story, writer Keegan Hamilton investigates the controversy surrounding ibogaine, the experimental hallucinogen drug that has helped kick meth and heroin addictions.Ibogaine is illegal, even though its power to cure addicts has been proven. Hamilton's story describes the many reasons the medical establishment and the government are wary of Ibogaine, despite its benefits, but one of them really stood out:Because Ibogaine is an outright cure, drug companies want nothing to do with it.
Belmont, MA - Researchers at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital have shown that those who start using marijuana at a young age are more impaired on tests of cognitive function than those who start smoking at a later age.In a paper that will be presented on Monday, Nov. 15 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, Staci A. Gruber, PhD, reported that subjects who started using marijuana before age 16 made twice as many mistakes on tests of executive function, which includes planning, flexibility, abstract thinking and inhibiting inappropriate responses as those who began smoking after age 16.
Antimatter atoms have been trapped for the first time, scientists say.Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have held 38 antihydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second.Antihydrogen has been produced before but it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter.The team, reporting in Nature, says the ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics.
Would you eat a genetically engineered salmon? Are you even sure what the difference is between the regular variety and one that's been tweaked to grow faster?Don't feel bad if you're unsure. Only a quarter of Americans say they fully understand what genetically engineered food is all about, according to a survey of more then 3,000 people conducted for NPR by Thomson Reuters last month.
In a vast cosmic experiment equivalent to hitting "redial," astronomers in a dozen countries are aiming telescopes to listen in once again on some of the stars that were part of the world's first search for alien life 50 years ago.The coordinated signal-searching campaign began this month to mark the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, a 1960 experiment that was christened the world's first real attempt in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI.Like Project Ozma, which got its name from a character in L. Frank Baum's series of books about the Land of Oz, the new search is called Project Dorothy.
Individuals and families constantly reflected upon the achievements of their ancestors. How your father, your grandfather and members of earlier generations conducted themselves was meant to guide you in your actions.What would someone from ancient Greece think about Remembrance Day? He or she would have no objections to it, but would see it as only one part of a wider process whereby public remembrance should be accompanied by private reflection as one thought specifically about one's family members who died.
It's hard to avoid superlatives when describing China. The country's landmass is enormous, covering roughly 9.6m sq km, with a huge population of some 1.3 billion people. Having recently overtaken Japan as the world's second largest economy, it is well on the way to cementing a dominant position on the global markets. Yet one key fact to understand about China is that these developments are seen as nothing new, but a return to the old order of things. During the Tang dynasty (AD618-907) a census from the year 750 revealed a population of one million within the walls of the capital city, Chang'an, making it the largest city in the world at the time. And it was not just its size that was spectacular. The Chinese capital was probably the most powerful economic centre in the ancient world, attracting traders from the west who travelled along the Silk Road to buy and sell. There were Arabs, Persians and Sogdian traders from Samarkand, whose spiritual needs were served by mosques and Zoroastrian temples in the cosmopolitan city.
A study led by researchers in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine shows unexpected and extensive natural recovery after spinal cord injury in primates. The findings, to be published November 14 in the advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience, may one day lead to the development of new treatments for patients with spinal cord injuries.While regeneration after severe brain and spinal cord injury is limited, milder injuries are often followed by good functional recovery. To investigate how this occurs, UC San Diego and VA Medical Center San Diego researchers studied adult rhesus monkeys. The team was surprised to see that connections between circuits in the spinal cord re-grew spontaneously and extensively, restoring fully 60% of the connections 24 weeks after a mild spinal cord injury.
PhysOrg.com) -- In today's world of sophisticated organisms proteins are the stars. They are the indispensible catalytic workhorses, carrying out the processes essential to life. But long, long ago ribonucleic acid (RNA) reigned supreme.Now Northwestern University researchers have produced an atomic picture that shows how two of these very old molecules interact with each other. It is a rare glimpse of the transition from an ancient, RNA-based world to our present, protein-catalyst dominated world.The scientists are the first to show the atomic details of how ribonuclease P (RNase P) recognizes, binds and cleaves transfer RNA (tRNA).
The laws of physics say that you can't get energy for nothing -- worse still, you will always get out of a system less energy than you put in. But a nanoscale experiment inspired by a nineteenth-century paradox that seemed to break those laws now shows that you can generate energy from information. Masaki Sano, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have demonstrated that a bead can be coaxed up a 'spiral staircase' without any energy being directly transferred to the bead to push it upwards. Instead, it is persuaded along its route by a series of judiciously timed decisions to change the height of the 'steps' around it, based on information about the bead's position. In this sense, "information is being converted to energy", says Sano. The work is published by Nature Physics today1.
A new forum article is now available, "The Sacred Science of the Ancients: A Conversation With John Anthony West", covering the mysterious site of Gobekli Tepe. See the articles page for all the latest submissions to GrahamHancock.com.
We've heard that fossil fuel reserves are dwindling. Now research suggest we may have less wind resources to tap in the future as well.Wind turbines may have less fuel in a warmer world, because as the polar regions warm up there will be less wind, said Diandong Ren a researcher at the University of Texas in Austin.Using wind power now is therefore more efficient than in the future said Ren in an article published in the American Institute of Physics' Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy."Delayed investment means more investment," said Ren in the journal article.
Maybe we won't even need plugs to recharge electric cars in the future. It will be like magic: Simply drive around and the whole thing gets powered wirelessly with help from magnetic fields. The New Zealand-based company HaloIPT recently unveiled its commercially available charging technology that makes that magic possible.HaloIPT's debut definitely isn't the first time I've heard of wireless car charging. Not long ago, a team of German university students announced that they had created a small aerodynamic vehicle that draws power from conducting paths on a track. HaloIPT's technology seems more advanced, though, and the company says it can work in all kinds of weather conditions.
With 25 guns and a plunder-thirsty crew, La Marquise de Tourny was the scourge of the British merchant fleet some 260 years ago. For up to a decade, the French frigate terrorised English ships by seizing their cargoes and crew under a form of state-sanctioned piracy designed to cripple British trade.Then, in the mid-18th century, the 460-ton vessel from Bordeaux, which seized three valuable cargo ships in a single year and distinguished itself by apparently never being captured by the English, disappeared without a trace. Nearly 300 years later, the fate of La Marquise and its crew can finally be revealed.Wreckage from the frigate, including the remarkably well-preserved ship's bell carrying its name and launch date of 1744, has been found in the English Channel some 100 miles south of Plymouth by an American exploration company, suggesting that the feared privateer or "corsair" sank with the loss of all hands in a storm in notoriously treacherous waters off the Channel Islands.
Salt Lake City, Utah (CNN) -- A lunchtime crowd is gathering beside the parking lot at Raytheon Sarcos, the defense contractor, on a recent day in Salt Lake City. White-collar workers from nearby office parks stand with their yogurt cups and sandwiches, watching with quiet awe as a man in a metal suit -- sort of half-man, half-robot -- performs superhuman feats of strength.This may be the closest these people will get to a real-life "Iron Man," the character from the comic books and hit movies.Inside a prosthetic shell of metal and hydraulics, Raytheon test engineer Rex Jameson is putting an XOS-2 exoskeleton through its paces.
Oxygen levels on Earth reached a critical threshold to enable the evolution of complex life much earlier than thought, say scientists.The evidence is found in 1.2-billion-year-old rocks from Scotland.These rocks retain signatures of bacterial activity known to occur when there is copious atmospheric oxygen.The microbes' behaviour is seen 400 million years further back in time than any previous discovery, the researchers tell the journal Nature.The team is not saying complex life existed 1.2 billion years ago, merely that the conditions would have been right for it to start to take hold.
A conservation expedition to a remote area of Paraguay poses a risk to isolated tribal groups, according to an indigenous peoples' protection group.Scientists from London's Natural History Museum (NHM) aim to record biodiversity in the Dry Chaco region.An open letter from Iniciativa Amotocodie (IA) to the NHM has highlighted a dilemma: how to balance the need for research against the risks of disturbing indigenous communities.IA says the trip should be called off.But the museum, which is collaborating with Paraguayan colleagues in the project, said it was taking measures to ensure that the expedition would not threaten indigenous tribes.
Aleppo, Northern Syria- According to the head of the national archeological mission working at the site Thayer Yerta, carved panels and archeological findings dating back to the beginning of the agricultural revolution in the 10th Millennium B.C. were unearthed at Tel al-Abar 3 site, left bank of the Euphrates River, the panels are made from chlorites (green precious stone) with different engravings and figures. He added that "one of these panels portrayed an eagle with wings spread wide and snake-form sculptures on the two sides. Another panel has an abstract sculpture of three eagle sculptures spreading their wings behind which the sun appears."
To help focus a world-class planetary defense against threatening near-Earth objects, the space experts are seeking to establish a high-level Mission Planning and Operations Group, or MPOG for short.Veteran astronauts and space planners gathered here at the European Space Agency's European Space Operations Center Oct. 27 to 29 to shape the asteroid threat response plan and establish an Information Analysis and Warning Network.The MPOG workshop was organized by the European Space Agency, the Association of Space Explorers and Secure World Foundation (for whom this columnist is a research associate).
Devices that use the wasted mechanical energy from clothing movements or even a heartbeat seem far out, if not just a bit creepy, but new advances in nanogenerators are making such energy-scavenging electronics possible.Now researchers at Georgia Tech have made the first nanowire-based generators that can harvest sufficient mechanical energy to power small devices, including light-emitting diodes and a liquid-crystal display. [Technology Review]The new generators use materials that have a particularly odd property: They collect a charge and drive a current when flexed (this is called piezoelectricity).
Four new articles are now available, one by Doug Fisher and three by Jim Elvidge:The Walls of Atlantis by Doug FisherThe Singularity, Infomania, and Programmed RealityDNA: Evidence of Intelligent Design or Byproduct of Evolution?The Odds of Contacting ET Are Nil, Despite That They Are Already Watching
The laws of physics say that you can't get energy for nothing -- worse still, you will always get out of a system less energy than you put in. But a nanoscale experiment inspired by a nineteenth-century paradox that seemed to break those laws now shows that you can generate energy from information. Masaki Sano, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have demonstrated that a bead can be coaxed up a 'spiral staircase' without any energy being directly transferred to the bead to push it upwards. Instead, it is persuaded along its route by a series of judiciously timed decisions to change the height of the 'steps' around it, based on information about the bead's position. In this sense, "information is being converted to energy", says Sano. The work is published by Nature Physics today1.
The public release of the genome of the cacao tree - from which chocolate is made - will save the chocolate industry from collapse, a scientist has said.Howard Yana-Shapiro, a researcher for Mars, said that without engineering higher-yielding cacao trees, demand would outstrip supply within 50 years.Dr Yana-Shapiro said such strains will also help biodiversity and farmers' welfare in cacao-growing regions.The genome's availability will likely lead to healthier, tastier chocolate.The sequencing of the genome was an international, multidisciplinary effort between firms including Mars and IBM, the US department of agriculture and a number of universities, and was announced in September.
Sir John Madejski is about to find out what is going on inside his head.After final preparations by a team of scientists the leading British businessman lies down on a stretcher and is wheeled gently into an MRI scanner.But Sir John is not ill. The 45-minute brain scan is part of a unique experiment to try to work out whether science can be applied to the study of leadership.Neuroscientists, psychologists and management experts at Reading University are collaborating on a study which aims to examine the brains of chief executives and leaders in other field like the military or voluntary organisations.
EVER wondered how many of our everyday laughs, groans and sighs are instinctive rather than learned from our peers? It now seems that only expressions of laughter and relief are instinctive, whereas other emotional outbursts need to be learned from other people.To find out which sounds are instinctive, a team led by Disa Sauter of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, asked eight deaf and eight hearing individuals to vocalise nine different emotions, but without words. These included fear, relief, anger, hilarity, triumph, disgust and sadness.
UK space companies have defied the recession, growing by an average of 10% a year from 2007.So says a report from the Oxford Economics consultancy, which predicts the growth will continue in 2010.The space business is now said to have a turnover worth some £7.5bn, with employment rising at about 15% a year.The best performing areas are in so-called downstream activities - services such as satellite broadcasting and telecommunications.But even the upstream sector - such as satellite manufacturing - recorded a very healthy performance, averaging annual growth of 3% over the period 2006/07 to 2008/09.
The James Webb Space Telescope, already billions of dollars over budget and several years behind schedule, will be delayed by at least another year, to 2015, and will cost $1.5 billion more than current estimates, an independent review panel says. Costs and delays could escalate even further if funding for the project does not increase substantially in 2011 and 2012.Cost estimates have risen for the ambitious mission, billed as the Hubble Space Telescope's heir, since the idea for the telescope was floated in the late 1980s. At that time, proponents estimated that the project would cost about $1 billion. In 2008, NASA officials upped that amount to $5 billion. Though Congress approved all requested funding for JWST in 2009 and 2010, NASA came back asking for an additional $95 million and $20 million in each respective year.
The Earth may have played a major role in shaping the lunar surface, according to a new research study by US researchers.The team members say our planet's gravitational pull distorted the shape of the Moon in ancient times.This led to "bulging" at the equator and could explain why the far side is more elevated than the near side of the Moon even today.Details of the study are published in the journal Science.The far side of the Moon remains a mystery in many ways. Densely cratered, it has few of the volcanic plains that characterise the near side with which we are all familiar, and it is much higher - several kilometres higher in places.
ROCKY planets a few times heavier than Earth that we thought might be life-friendly may lack one vital feature: a protective magnetic field.Planets are thought to owe their magnetic fields to an iron core that is at least partly molten. But a simulation of super-Earths between a few times and 10 times Earth's mass suggests that high pressures will keep the core solid, according to Guillaume Morard of the Institute of Mineralogy and Physics of Condensed Matter in Paris, France, and his team (arxiv.org/1010.5133).
Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center can now show, using functional MRI images, why it is that behavior in children and young adolescents veers toward the egocentric rather than the introspective.In findings being presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego on November 14, the researchers say that the five scattered regions in the brain that make up the default-mode network (DMN) have not started working in concert in youngsters aged six to nine. These areas light up in an fMRI scan, but not simultaneously.The DMN is only active when the mind is at rest and allowed to wander or daydream. This network is believed to be key in how a person introspectively understands themselves and others, and forms beliefs, intentions, and desires through autobiographical memory.
CELLS absorb chemotherapy drugs more readily if they are zapped with red light. The finding could help produce more effective cancer treatments.Most cancer chemotherapy relies on cells absorbing drugs by diffusion across the cell membrane. This does not always work, because some cells simply push the drug molecules back out using a natural pump mechanism.To overcome this problem, Andrei Sommer at the University of Ulm in Germany and colleagues exposed cells to pulsed red laser light. Light of this wavelength decreases water density and pushes water out of the cell. When the laser is switched off, the water returns to its high-density state, forcing the cell to "suck in" water and any other molecules, including drugs, from its surroundings.
The stock market has a worrying message for the future. It suggests we may run out of oil a century before we have an alternative fuel ready to replace it.Nataliya Malyshkina and Deb Niemeier at the University of California, Davis, used the share prices of publicly traded oil and renewable-energy companies to predict when the new technologies are likely to be adopted.The price of a new-technology company's shares reflects investors' forecasts of when its technologies will be introduced. Because their money is at stake, investors tend to put a lot of work into collecting and understanding relevant information, such as progress in the development of a technology and applicable government regulations and taxes, says Malyshkina.
The past is set in stone, right? Everything we have learned tells us that you can not change the past, 88-MPH DeLoreans notwithstanding. However, it would probably surprise you to learn that many highly respected scientists, as well as a few out on the fringe, are questioning that assumption, based on real evidence.For example, leading stem cell scientist, Dr. Robert Lanza, posits that the past does not really exist until properly observed. His theory of Biocentrism says that the past is just as malleable as the future.
Have you ever been embarrassed by introducing yourself at a party to someone only for them to point out that you've met before? Don't feel too bad: your superior reading skills may be to blame, according to a new brain-scan study.Stanislas Dehaene at the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, has previously proposed a "neuronal recycling" theory, which suggests that new skills are handled by existing brain-cell circuits with older but related functions.To test the hypothesis Dehaene and colleagues carried out functional MRI brain scans on 10 people who could not read, 22 who learned to read as adults and 31 who did so as children, while they were shown text and images.