Newsdesk Archive

A cosmic impact two millennia ago may have sent tsunamis deluging what is now the Big Apple, scientists suggest.Many of the giant sea waves known as tsunamis are caused by underwater earthquakes and volcanoes -- for example, the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was triggered by a quake off the northwestern coast of Sumatra. Still, the causes of nearly 10 percent of all tsunamis nowadays remain uncertain.Cosmic impacts have been known to cause tsunamis in the past. For instance, scientists have found evidence that the Chicxulub impact in Mexico, which may have ended the age of dinosaurs, triggered gigantic waves.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has detected six isotopes, never seen before, of the superheavy elements 104 through 114. Starting with the creation of a new isotope of the yet-to-be-named element 114, the researchers observed successive emissions of alpha particles that yielded new isotopes of copernicium (element 112), darmstadtium (element 110), hassium (element 108), seaborgium (element 106), and rutherfordium (element 104). Rutherfordium ended the chain when it decayed by spontaneous fission.Information gained from the new isotopes will contribute to a better understanding of the theory of nuclear shell structure, which underlies predictions of an "Island of Stability," a group of long-lasting isotopes thought to exist amidst a sea of much shorter-lived, intrinsically unstable isotopes of the superheavy elements.

A new species of monkey with unusual upturned nostrils has been discovered in north eastern Myanmar.Scientists surveying in the area initially identified the so-called snub-nosed monkey from skin and skulls obtained from local hunters.A small population was found separated from the habitat of other species of snub-nosed monkeys by the Mekong and Salween rivers.The total population has been estimated at just 260-330 individuals.

FIFTY-million-year-old insects preserved in amber are helping to rewrite the story of India's almighty crash into the Eurasian continent, suggesting that for as long as a few million years before the collision, India was connected to Asia by archipelagos.India spent tens of millions of years as an island before colliding with Asia. Yet the fossil record contains no evidence that unique species evolved on the subcontinent during this time, so India may not have been as isolated as it seemed to be.

Should global warming cause sea levels to rise as predicted in coming decades, thousands of archaeological sites in coastal areas around the world will be lost to erosion. With no hope of saving all of these sites, archaeologists Torben Rick from the Smithsonian Institution, Leslie Reeder of Southern Methodist University, and Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon have issued a call to action for scientists to assess the sites most at risk.Writing in the Journal of Coastal Conservation and using California's Santa Barbara Channel as a case study, the researchers illustrate how quantifiable factors such as historical rates of shoreline change, wave action, coastal slope and shoreline geomorphology can be used to develop a scientifically sound way of measuring the vulnerability of individual archaeological sites. They then propose developing an index of the sites most at risk so informed decisions can be made about how to preserve or salvage them.

Flexible materials technology may just bring the next wave of trendy to the markets, in the form of glowing tattoos and T- shirts. Or the hot new tech could be used for its intended purpose: monitoring medical conditions.This flexible light-emitting diode (LED) array uses many already existing materials and techniques to create a nano-sized, flexible patch of light. A team lead by John Rogers developed the array as a medical device; it could be implanted to serve as a readout for monitoring internal body conditions, like blood oxygenation or glucose levels, or it could turn on light-activated drugs.

Last summer's drought in Russia pushed wheat prices to their highest levels in years, and the fallout is a reminder of how much humanity depends on the rain. Now, scientists are searching for novel approaches to make wheat less vulnerable to drought.Some efforts are trying to replace the genes that made possible the dramatic boost in wheat harvests in the latter half of the 20th century in India known as the Green Revolution.Few people can see the accomplishments of the Green Revolution more clearly than Kulvinder Gill, who grew up in a village in India where, half a century ago, some predicted catastrophe because food production wasn't growing as fast as the population.

Four days before the fateful 1963 motorcade in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in the head, the young president had requested that his secret service agents give him some space."President Kennedy made a decision, and he politely told everybody, 'You know, we're starting the campaign now, and the people are my asset,'" said agent Jerry Blaine. "And so, we all of a sudden understood. It left a firm command to stay off the back of the car."

The myth about chupacabras, also known as goatsuckers, started after reports of livestock attacks in Puerto Rico and Mexico, where dead sheep were discovered with puncture wounds, completely drained of blood. Similar reports began accumulating from other locations in Latin America and the U.S. Then came sightings of evil-looking animals, variously described as dog-like, rodent-like or reptile-like, with long snouts, large fangs, leathery or scaly greenish-gray skin and a nasty odor. Locals put two and two together and assumed the ugly varmints were responsible for the killings.OConnor, however, and other scientists conclude that an 8-legged mite that burrows under the skin of coyotes can give these animals the "chupacabra" look.

Wild dolphins in Australia are naturally learning to "walk" on water.Six dolphins have now been seen mastering the technique - furiously paddling their tail fluke, forcing their body out and across the water.The dolphins seem to walk on water for fun, as it has no other obvious benefit, say scientists working for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.That makes the behaviour a rare example of animals "culturally transmitting" a playful rather than foraging behaviour.

Commercial space travel took a step closer with the opening of the runway at the world's first spaceport in the US state of New Mexico.The event was marked with a flypast of an aircraft carrying SpaceShip Two.The vehicle has been designed to take fee-paying tourists on trips to the edge of space and back.British billionaire Sir Richard Branson - whose Virgin group has backed the venture - said the first passenger trip should take place within 18 months.

Wild dolphins in Australia are naturally learning to "walk" on water.Six dolphins have now been seen mastering the technique - furiously paddling their tail fluke, forcing their body out and across the water.The dolphins seem to walk on water for fun, as it has no other obvious benefit, say scientists working for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.That makes the behaviour a rare example of animals "culturally transmitting" a playful rather than foraging behaviour.

NASA will play a leading part in protecting the United States and the world from the threat of a dangerous asteroid strike, according to letters sent by John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), to Congressional committee leaders on Friday.Holdren's letters to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the House Committee on Science and Technology assign responsibilities to the US space agency that go beyond its 2005 Congressional mandate to detect and track 90% of potentially hazardous asteroids with a diameter greater than 140 metres. To date the agency has found 903 of the estimated 1,050 asteroids with diameters of a kilometre or more passing within about 50 million kilometres of the Earth.

A major neutrino observatory set to be built in India cleared a major hurdle this week, when the Ministry of Environment and Forests formally approved the project.The $250 million underground laboratory, called the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), will be built in the Bodi West Hills Reserved Forest in the state of Tamil Nadu.The hills there rise very steeply, so workers will have to tunnel only about 2 kilometres horizontally to provide the laboratory with about 1300 metres of high-quality granite cover above. The rock cover is needed to shield the neutrino detector from particles called muons that form when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere.

Honeybees in search of food have to feel their way towards it. High-speed video footage has shown that foraging bees use their sense of touch to decode the famous waggle dance.The waggle dance that honeybees use to communicate the location of nearby food sources was discovered more than 60 years ago. The waggle is performed in a straight line as the dancer runs up a honeycomb in its hive. This line's angle relative to the vertical gives the direction to the food relative to the sun's position, and the length of the waggle phase gives the distance.

Conservation groups have expressed concern that a major UN conference on nature protection is stalling, with some governments accused of holding the process hostage to their own interest.Their warning comes halfway through the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in Nagoya, Japan.During negotiations some countries have proposed weaker rather than stronger targets for protection, they say.

The most illustrious meteorite in history continues to inspire heated debate. Does it carry microbial fossils from Mars or are its strange features just the product of some unique geochemistry? After almost 20 years, dueling papers are still coming out, and the opposing parties are no closer to a resolution.Most scientists agree that the meteorite ALH84001 is the oldest meteorite ever found to have come from Mars."The meteorite is so old that if Martian life existed back then, it probably floated by the rock at some point," says Timothy Swindle of the University of Arizona. "But did it leave any record?"

AS THE climate changes and the world warms, will humans evolve to handle the effects? Maybe, if the Yoruba people of west Africa's response to living in arid conditions is anything to go by. Whether there is enough time to adapt is another matter.The Yoruba have been exposed, historically, to the dry conditions of the Sahel on the edge of the Sahara desert. To find out whether they had evolved to cope, Andres Moreno at Stanford University in California and colleagues looked at the variation of a gene known to be involved in water retention in the kidney, called FOXI1, in DNA samples from 20 Europeans, 20 east Asians and 20 Yoruba.

Difficult-to-read fonts make for better learning, according to scientists.The finding is about to be published in the international journal Cognition.Researchers at Princeton University employed volunteers to learn made-up information about different types of aliens - and found that those reading harder fonts recalled more when tested 15 minutes later.They argue that schools could boost results by simply changing the font used in their basic teaching materials.

Astronomers in Japan, using an X-ray detector on the International Space Station, and at Penn State University, using NASA's Swift space observatory, are announcing the discovery of an object newly emitting X-rays, which previously had been hidden inside our Milky Way galaxy in the constellation Centaurus.The object -- a binary system -- was revealed recently when an instrument on the International Space Station named MAXI (Monitor of All-Sky X-ray Image) on the Exposed Facility of the Japanese Experiment Module "Kibo" caught it in the act of erupting with a massive blast of X-rays known as an X-ray nova. The MAXI mission team quickly alerted astronomers worldwide to the discovery of the new X-ray source at 2:00 a.m. EDT on 20 October, and NASA's Swift Observatory quickly conducted an urgent "target-of-opportunity" observation nine hours later, which allowed for the location of the X-ray nova to be measured accurately.

The title of the 1909 hit song By the Light of the Silvery Moon was not just poetic, it was also prophetic. A NASA spacecraft that crashed into the moon last year has found what appears to be silver, perhaps buried under a small layer of moon dust.Last October, NASA crash-landed a rocket near the lunar south pole, lofting water in the resulting debris. Newly published studies of this mission, called LCROSS, reveal that about 5.6 per cent of the ejected material was water, and that similar concentrations of water may exist under the surface in a "permafrost" layer. Lead scientist Anthony Colaprete at NASA's Ames Research Center in California estimates that there could be a billion gallons of water within 10 kilometres of the probe's impact site.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory observed this ultraviolet image of one of the most intense solar flares witnessed in the past few months in sunspot 1112. A filament of magnetised material can be seen streaking 500,000 kilometres across the sun's southern hemisphere. The bright spot just above the filament's midpoint is UV radiation released from the sunspot.A solar flare occurs when magnetic energy that has built up in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released, emitting radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum. In this case, the energy has been released into deep space. There have been no reports of energetic particles from this flare interfering with spacecraft or making their way towards Earth.

When life on Earth first emerged about 4 billion years ago, it was simple by today's standards.For more than a billion years, the planet was dominated by humble clumps of bacteria and other organisms that were more or less the same as today's single-celled bacteria and microorganisms.But then, just over 2 billion years ago, a new form of life emerged from the primordial ooze that would chart a radically different course in evolution. The entire diversity of multicellular life we know today -- every maple, mold, mushroom, mouse, or man that ever graced the earth -- descended from this organism, but scientists still do not know exactly how it came into existence.

Photo of Ayahuasca by Josh Gross. Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.Travel almost anywhere through the Amazon rainforest, or fly above it, and you can't miss the demonic madness that's been let loose here -- flotillas of tugs heading downriver towing immense rafts of precious hardwoods, great fires blazing and crackling under clouds of smoke, vast areas of cleared land given over to cattle and soya-beans, indigenous ways of life disrupted and destroyed ...It's part of a wider syndrome of human behavior that's become increasingly dominant in the past hundred years and seems to be reaching its peak in the early twenty-first century -- an unthinking willingness, coupled with an unprecedented capacity, to squander the greatest treasures stored up for us by nature in exchange for short-term profits and the satisfaction of immediate needs.

By Graham HancockLike a disowned half-brother the Neanderthals keep hammering on our door, forcing us to face inconvenient truths.In the nineteenth century, fossil remains of powerful, thickset, short-necked human-like creatures with massive skulls and protruding brow ridges were found in Europe and recognized as belonging to an extinct species very closely related to us.It turns out these "Neanderthals" (named after the German valley where the first examples were excavated) left the human homeland in Africa about 300,000 years ago. They migrated north into Europe and had sole possession of our continent for 250,000 years until people like you and I first arrived here, also from Africa, less than 50,000 years ago.The two species lived side by side, without conflict, for the next 20,000 years -- an amazing achievement -- until suddenly, around 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals in eastern Europe began to die out. Whatever was killing them spread like a deadly curse. Soon none were left across the whole of Europe east of the Pyrenees. West of the Pyrenees, small populations clung on in isolated refuges in Spain but by 24,000 years ago these last Neanderthals, too, were extinct.

Niels Bleicher, the chief archaeologist, said the ancient poplar wood door is "solid and elegant" with well-preserved hinges and a "remarkable" design for holding the boards together.Using treee rings to determine its age, Bleicher believes the door could have been made in the year 3,063BC, around the time construction on Britain's Stonehenge monument began."The door is very remarkable because of the way the planks were held together," he said.Archeologists working at the dig for what is intended to be a new underground car park have found traces of at least five Neolithic villages believed to have existed at the site between 3,700 and 2,500 years BC.

High-resolution images of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls are to be published on the internet, it was announced today.The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), custodian of the scrolls that shed light on the life of Jews and early Christians at the time of Jesus, said it was collaborating with Google's research and development centre in Israel to upload digitised images of the entire collection.Advanced imaging technology will be installed in the IAA's laboratories early next year and high-resolution images of each of the scrolls' 30,000 fragments will be freely accessible online. The IAA conducted a pilot imaging project of a similar nature in 2008.

It is not much to look at - a small pitted brass coin with a square hole in the centre - but this relatively innocuous piece of metal is revolutionising our understanding of early East African history, and recasting China's more contemporary role in the region.A joint team of Kenyan and Chinese archaeologists found the 15th Century Chinese coin in Mambrui - a tiny, nondescript village just north of Malindi on Kenya's north coast.In barely distinguishable relief, the team leader Professor Qin Dashu from Peking University's archaeology department, read out the inscription: "Yongle Tongbao" - the name of the reign that minted the coin some time between 1403 and 1424.

North America has its 'Bigfoot' and China has its 'Wild Man.'A group of Chinese scientists are on the hunt for the Yeren, the Chinese equivalent of our Bigfoot. Scientists and international researchers refer to the Yeren as "Wild Man" and are on a renewed quest to find him.Thirty years ago, China's Academy of Science sent three teams of researchers looking for the mysterious creature. Those teams turned up surprising results: hair, excrement, footprints, and a possible 'Wild Man' sleeping nest. Alas, those findings weren't conclusive so they are at it again.

Conceptual shelters that will protect us all from the perils of our rapidly changing environment: rising waters, extreme heat, rampant pollution and overpopulationEnvironmental disruptions and technological advances have always influenced where and how people live. Early humans may have left Africa after rapid fluctuations in rainfall destroyed their food supply, and the opening up of the American Southwest occurred roughly in parallel with improvements in air-conditioning technology. In the decades ahead, a warming planet and a booming population will again alter where we live and how we construct our homes.

New DARPA-funded research could revolutionize portable power supplies, leading to lithium-ion batteries that are smaller than a grain of salt.Jane Chang, an engineer at the University of California-Los Angeles, is designing a tiny solid electrolyte that allows charge to flow between two nanoscale electrodes. Eventually, the wee batteries could be used to power a host of micro and nanodevices.The special electrolyte is basically just a series of nanowires coated with conductive material. Chang is using painstakingly slow atomic layer deposition to spray minuscule amounts of lithium aluminosilicate onto the nanowires. The solid compound allows current to flow within a battery. The nanowires are designed to have a high surface-to-volume ratio, making them more efficient.

A tiny faint dot in a Hubble picture has been confirmed as the most distant galaxy ever detected in the Universe.This collection of stars is so far away its light has taken more than 13 billion years to arrive at Earth.Astronomers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to follow up the Hubble observation and make the necessary detailed measurements.They tell the journal Nature that we are seeing the galaxy as it was just 600 million years after the Big Bang.

The key to solving one of the great puzzles in evolutionary biology, the origin of vertebrates -- animals with an internal skeleton made of bone -- has been revealed in new research from Dartmouth College and the University of Bristol.Vertebrates are the most anatomically and genetically complex of all organisms, but explaining how they achieved this complexity has vexed scientists. The study, published today [20 October] in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to have solved this scientific riddle by analysing the genomics of primitive living fishes such as sharks and lampreys, and their spineless relatives such as sea squirts.

Neandertals are looking sharp these days. Many researchers now credit our evolutionary cousins, once regarded as brutish and dumb, with "modern behavior," such as making sophisticated tools and fashioning jewelry, a sign of symbolic expression. But new radiocarbon dating at a site in France could mar this flattering view. The study concludes that the archaeological layers at the site are so mixed up that ornaments and tools once attributed to Neandertals could actually be the work of modern humans, who lived in the same cave at a later date.

It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will - or if it has already.

By Graham HancockTravel almost anywhere through the Amazon rainforest, or fly above it, and you can't miss the demonic madness that's been let loose here -- flotillas of tugs heading downriver towing immense rafts of precious hardwoods, great fires blazing and crackling under clouds of smoke, vast areas of cleared land given over to cattle and soya-beans, indigenous ways of life disrupted and destroyed ...It's part of a wider syndrome of human behavior that's become increasingly dominant in the past hundred years and seems to be reaching its peak in the early twenty-first century -- an unthinking willingness, coupled with an unprecedented capacity, to squander the greatest treasures stored up for us by nature in exchange for short-term profits and the satisfaction of immediate needs. Included in the syndrome are such follies as the contamination and terminal overfishing of the oceans, a thousand different ways to pollute, destabilize and overheat the global environment, all manner of evil and irrational wars, financial markets operating on crazed and ultimately self-destructive principles, extreme nationalistic and religious hatreds, and widespread poverty and waste of human potential.

Egyptian archaeologists discovered a 4400-year-old tomb, south of the cemetery of the pyramid builders at Giza, Egypt.In a statement, Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosny, said the ancient Egyptian tomb was unearthed during routine excavations supervised by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) near the pyramid builder's necropolis.The recently discovered tomb belongs to a priest named Rudj-Ka (or Rwd-Ka), and is dated to the 5th Dynasty - between 2465 and 2323 BC.Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the SCA, said that Rudj-Ka had several titles and would have been an important member of the ancient Egyptian court.

Leading Bulgarian archaeologist Nikolay Ovcharov has presented the latest finds of his team from the Ancient Thrace and Rome fortress of Perperikon in the Rhodope Mountain.One of the finds is a miniature model of a stone grinder dated back to 7000 years ago. Ovcharov believes the model might have been an actual children's toy.Another unique find is a figure of a Thracian warrior from the 3rd-2nd century BC. The Thracian warrior used to hold a spear. The figure is modeled after the Greek god Apollo, who in the Roman Age "replaced" the cult for the "Thracian Horseman", a local deity, among the Thracians.

(CNN) -- Twelve historic sites around the world are "on the verge of vanishing" because of mismanagement and neglect, according to a new report.The report, by San Francisco-based Global Heritage Fund (GHF), identifies nearly 200 heritage sites in developing nations as being at risk, highlighting 12 as being on the verge of irreparable loss and destruction.Three sites in the Middle East, Iraq's Nineveh, Palestine's Hisham's Palace, and Turkey's Ani, are among those most in danger.

(AP) The Nazis stripped hundreds of thousands of artworks from Jews during World War II in one of the biggest cultural raids in history, often photographing their spoils and meticulously cataloguing them on typewritten index cards. Holocaust survivors and their relatives, as well as art collectors and museums, can go online beginning Monday to search a free historical database of more than 20,000 art objects stolen in Germany-occupied France and Belgium from 1940 to 1944, including paintings by Claude Monet and Marc Chagall. The database is a joint project of the New York-based Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The remains of a sunken warship recently found in the Mediterranean Sea may confirm the site of a major ancient battle in which Rome trounced Carthage.The year was 241 B.C. and the players were the ascending Roman republic and the declining Carthaginian Empire, which was centered on the northernmost tip of Africa. The two powers were fighting for dominance in the Mediterranean in a series of conflicts called the Punic Wars.Archaeologists think the newly discovered remnants of the warship date from the final battle of the first Punic War, which allowed Rome to expand farther into the Western Mediterranean.

Some of the cutest little critters of the early Earth may have been roving packs of cannibals, according to new evidence on trilobites.Teeth marks, attack positions, shredded relatives and other signs of cannibalism have been found in the fossilized remains of tiny agnostid trilobites, affectionately called "bugs" by paleontologists and fossil hunters."I was always very puzzled by these tiny trilobites," said paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. "It was never very clear what their role in the Cambrian ecosystem was."

IN 1856, geologist Charles Lyell wrote to Charles Darwin with a question about fossils. Puzzled by types of mollusc that abruptly disappeared from the British fossil record, apparently in response to a glaciation, only to reappear 2 million years later completely unchanged, he asked of Darwin: "Be so good as to explain all this in your next letter." Darwin never did.To this day Lyell's question has never received an adequate answer. I believe that is because there isn't one. Because of the way evolution works, it is impossible to predict how a given species will respond to environmental change.

Long before the Guinness Book of Records. the pterosaurs, a an ungainly-looking prehistoric flying reptile about the size of a modern-day giraffe was setting non-stop flying records. It would take another 70 million years before the aforesaid creature would get its due, but that day has arrived.Researcher Michael Habib, a biomechanist at Chatham University says that the Pterosaur, as it is called, was capable of flying 10,000 miles or more without needing to make a pitstop - or whatever they might have called it way back then. According to Habib, the Pterosaur likely flapped its wings for a period, followed by long periods of loafing. During the rest intervals between flapping, Habib believes the Pterosaurs probably glided on air updrafts and wind currents until their muscles had a chance to recover.

Will the first explorers to visit Mars come back to Earth? Or does it actually make more sense to leave them there? The idea of sending the Red Planet's first settlers on one-way trips has been kicking around for years, and now two researchers have published a paper in the Journal of Cosmology laying out how such missions could play out between now and 2035."It is important to realize that this is not a 'suicide mission,'" Washington State University's Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Arizona State University's Paul Davies write. "The astronauts would go to Mars with the intention of staying for the rest of their lives, as trailblazers of a permanent human Mars colony."

Graham Hancock is the author of the bestsellers The Sign and The Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, and Heaven's Mirror. His books have sold more than five million copies worldwide and have been translated into 27 languages. His latest book is a novel titled Entangled, published by Disinformation.After decades consigned to research limbo, scientific studies of the very interesting effects of psychedelics on human consciousness are back in vogue.On 19 July 2010 the prestigious Journal of Psychopharmacology reported the results of the first randomized controlled trial into the therapeutic potential of the "party drug" Ecstasy for victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. The trial showed the drug to be remarkably effective in treating PTSD. Soon afterwards, on 31 August, 2010, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies was granted a license by the US Drug Enforcement Administration to conduct a new and extended study in which Ecstasy will be given to war veterans with PTSD. Also around the end of August 2010, Charles Grob MD, a professor of psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, reported the results of administering psilocybin -- the active ingredient in magic mushrooms -- to patients suffering from terminal cancers. Grob found that the drug induced a "peaceful and blissful" state of oneness with oneself and the cosmos and notes: "these spiritually oriented altered states ... potentially allow patients to have an abrupt shift of consciousness from being scared about dying and feeling their life is over ... It was quite remarkable to me to see changes in these people who were very anxious and in distress and to see how they got better."

A 2nd century map of Germania by the scholar Ptolemy has always stumped scholars, who were unable to relate the places depicted to known settlements. Now a team of researchers have cracked the code, revealing that half of Germany's cities are 1,000 years older than previously thought.The founding of Rome has been pinpointed to the year 753. For the city of St. Petersburg, records even indicate the precise day the first foundation stone was laid.Historians don't have access to this kind of precision when it comes to German cities like Hanover, Kiel or Bad Driburg. The early histories of nearly all the German cities east of the Rhine are obscure, and the places themselves are not mentioned in documents until the Middle Ages. So far, no one has been able to date the founding of these cities.

Most geologists and archaeologists now believe an asteroid caused the climate change that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.Debate rages, however, about whether a comet abruptly killed the mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and other large animals - "megafauna" - that roamed North America much more recently.One thing is clear, say two prominent archaeologists: The mammoth hunters known as the Clovis people weren't wiped out along with the giant mammals they hunted in a fiery comet crash 12,900 years ago.

It was the gun that helped England secure its first foothold in the future Canada four centuries ago.Now, archeologists in Newfoundland have unearthed the 400-year-old remains of a cannon site built to defend Cupids, the 17th-century colony recently celebrated as Canada's earliest English settlement.The stone base of the gun battery, discovered last month as part of a continuing excavation in the historic Conception Bay village, is the most vivid reminder yet of the threats posed to England's fragile New World outpost by pirates and potential rivals from France.

Russia's most mysterious archaeological site dominates a small island in the center of a remote lake high in the mountains of southern Siberia. Here, just 20 miles from the Mongolian border, the outer walls of the medieval ruins of Por-Bajin still rise 40 feet high, enclosing an area of about seven acres criss-crossed with the labyrinthine remains of more than 30 buildings.Por-Bajin ("Clay House" in the Tuvan language) was long thought to be a fortress built by the Uighurs, a nomadic Turkic-speaking people who once ruled an empire that spanned Mongolia and southern Siberia, and whose modern descendants now live mainly in western China.

New research has revealed that agriculture came to Europe amid a wave of immigration from the Middle East during the Neolithic period. The newcomers won out over the locals because of their sophisticated culture, mastery of agriculture -- and their miracle food, milk.Wedged in between dump trucks and excavators, archeologist Birgit Srock is drawing the outline of a 7,200-year-old posthole. A concrete mixing plant is visible on the horizon. She is here because, during the construction of a high-speed rail line between the German cities of Nuremberg and Berlin, workers happened upon a large Neolithic settlement in the Upper Franconia region of northern Bavaria.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Harvard University neurobiologists have created mice that can "smell" light, providing a potent new tool that could help researchers better understand the neural basis of olfaction.The work, described this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience, has implications for the future study of smell and of complex perception systems that do not lend themselves to easy study with traditional methods."It makes intuitive sense to use odors to study smell," says Venkatesh N. Murthy, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. "However, odors are so chemically complex that it is extremely difficult to isolate the neural circuits underlying smell that way."

Yale University researchers have found a gene that seems to be a key contributor to the onset of depression and is a promising target for a new class of antidepressants, they report Oct. 17 in the journal Nature Medicine."This could be a primary cause, or at least a major contributing factor, to the signaling abnormalities that lead to depression," said Ronald S. Duman, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale and senior author of the study.Scientists have had a difficult time pinning down the cause of depression, which afflicts almost 16 percent of Americans in any given year and carries an annual economic burden of $100 billion.

EARTH is starting to crumble under the strain of climate change.Over the last decade, rock avalanches and landslides have become more common in high mountain ranges, apparently coinciding with the increase in exceptionally warm periods (see "Early signs"). The collapses are triggered by melting glaciers and permafrost, which remove the glue that holds steep mountain slopes together.Worse may be to come. Thinning glaciers on volcanoes could destabilise vast chunks of their summit cones, triggering mega-landslides capable of flattening cities such as Seattle and devastating local infrastructure.

Imagine a bionic arm that plugs directly into the nervous system, so that the brain can control its motion, and the owner can feel pressure and heat through their robotic hand. This prospect has come a step closer with the development of photonic sensors that could improve connections between nerves and prosthetic limbs.Existing neural interfaces are electronic, using metal components that may be rejected by the body. Now Marc Christensen at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and colleagues are building sensors to pick up nerve signals using light instead. They employ optical fibres and polymers that are less likely than metal to trigger an immune response, and which will not corrode.

Gregory Benford, his brother James and his nephew Dominic decided to combine their knowledge of astrophysics, space, microwaves and economics to look at the search for extraterrestrial life from a money perspective. They posed a simple question: What would beacon transmitters be like if built by civilizations that cared about cost?Imagining and pricing out how much it would cost for aliens to create a beacon to send a signal deep into space, they concluded that sending messages between life forms could be very pricey and that our current searches for alien life may thus be looking for the wrong things. Instead of blasting continuous signals widely into space, money-minded aliens would design transmitters that send signals in short, narrowly targeted pulses -- the "Benford beacon" concept.

The UK is going to develop a satellite to trial innovative space technologies.It is hoped the components and instruments flying on TechDemoSat (TDS) can prove their worth and go on to win substantial international business.Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) will lead the project.Payload participants are likely to include a novel instrument to measure the state of the sea, another to track ships from orbit, and even one to destroy TDS at the end of its life.

The UN biodiversity convention meeting has opened with warnings that the ongoing loss of nature is hurting human societies as well as the natural world.The two-week gathering aims to set new targets for conserving life on Earth.Japan's Environment Minister Ryo Matsumoto said biodiversity loss would become irreversible unless curbed soon.Much hope is being pinned on economic analyses showing the loss of species and ecosystems is costing the global economy trillions of dollars each year.

Alan Boyle writes: Google and the Slooh virtual-telescope company have announced a deal to integrate tens of thousands of pictures captured by Slooh's members automatically into Google Earth's astronomical database. The arrangement could bring scientific crowdsourcing to a whole new level.Millions of Internet users have already been participating in space-themed projects such as SETI @ Home, Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo, but those projects mostly involve sifting through data collected by the professionals. The collaboration announced today immediately puts images of more than 35,000 celestial objects into a Google Sky layer within the free Google Earth standalone program. New Slooh pictures will be added as soon as they're taken.

While it's still hotly debated among scientists whether climate change causes a shift from the traditional form of El Nino to one known as El Nino Modoki, online in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists now say that El Nino Modoki affects long-term changes in currents in the North Pacific Ocean.El Nino is a periodic warming in the eastern tropical Pacific that occurs along the coast of South America. Recently, scientists have noticed that El Nino warming is stronger in the Central Pacific rather than the Eastern Pacific, a phenomenon known as El Nino Modoki (Modoki is a Japanese term for "similar, but different").

A SMALL, poorly studied population of non-migrating grey whales may hold the key to how these ocean giants survived the last ice age.Grey whales feed on the seafloor at depths of up to 50 metres, and rely heavily on the shallow regions in Alaska's Bering Sea for food. But when Nick Pyenson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC modelled Pacific feeding grounds during peak glaciation, he found that very little of the north Pacific was shallow enough for feeding: sea levels were up to 120 metres lower than today and the Bering Sea was a land bridge. Northern feeding grounds might have supported only a few hundred whales, he told the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting on Monday. Yet genetic studies show no sign of a bottleneck at the time.

An Italian researcher may have discovered a huge network of earthworks representing birds, snakes and other animals in Peru, according to a study published on the Cornell University physics website arXiv.Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, assistant professor at the department of physics of Turin's Polytechnic University, used Google satellite maps and AstroFracTool, an astronomical image-processing program which she developed, to investigate over 463 square miles of land around Peru's Titicaca Lake.She says she has identified shapes that were built by Andean communities centuries ago.

How do astronomers weigh a star that's trillions of miles away and way too big to fit on a bathroom scale? In most cases they can't, although they can get a best estimate using computer models of stellar structure.New work by astrophysicist David Kipping says that in special cases, we can weigh a star directly. If the star has a planet, and that planet has a moon, and both of them cross in front of their star, then we can measure their sizes and orbits to learn about the star."I often get asked how astronomers weigh stars. We've just added a new technique to our toolbox for that purpose," said Kipping, a predoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

An article published in the October issue of the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden describes a new genus of tree of the Aptandraceae family, a group that is related to the sandalwoods (order Sanatalales). The genus, which has been given the name Hondurodendron, is endemic to Honduras and means "tree of Honduras."In the article, "Hondurodendron, a New Monotypic Genus of Aptandraceae from Honduras," lead author Dr. Carmen Ulloa, associate curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and co-authors Dr. Daniel L. Nickrent, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Dr. Caroline Whitefoord, The Natural History Museum in London, and Dr. Daniel L. Kelly, Trinity College in Dublin, describe the genus as a tree about 40-feet-tall, with minute male and female flowers less than 2 mm (1/8 inch) wide, borne respectively on separate plants.

Providing information that policymakers can use is key to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as work begins on its next global assessment.The report, known as AR5, will focus on factors that materially affect people's lives, such as the Asian monsoon.It will also look at what aspects of climate change might be irreversible.Leaders of the IPCC's scientific assessment were speaking to BBC News during a conference in South Korea aimed at modernising the organisation.They indicated that procedures used in compiling AR5 will reflect some criticisms made in the wake of errors uncovered in its previous assessment, in 2007.

Was Tyrannosaurus rex a cowardly scavenger or the fearsome predator portrayed in Jurassic Park? It's hotly contested in palaeobiology circles. Now one thing seems certain: the most famous dinosaur of all was a cannibal.Nicholas Longrich of Yale University was examining T. Rex bones for signs that mammals had gnawed on them when he found that four bones bore large tooth marks that could only have been made by another big predatory dinosaur.

It is a remarkable acrobatic display.Two German radar satellites are now flying in tight formation as they prepare to make the most detailed ever 3D map of the Earth's entire surface.TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X have moved to within 350m of each other as they sweep around the planet at 7km/s.The pair will soon begin an intense observation campaign that will pin down the variation in height across the globe to an accuracy of better than two metres.This digital elevation model (DEM) will be put to myriad uses - everything from improving the safety of aircraft navigation to understanding better which areas of ground are most at risk during a flood.

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.His death was caused by pancreatic cancer, his wife, Aliette, said. He had lived in Cambridge.

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Arizona astronomers have developed a way to see faint planets previously hidden in their star's glare. The new mode enables scientists to search for planets closer to the star than has been previously possible.Using new optics technology developed at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, an international team of astronomers has obtained images of a planet on a much closer orbit around its parent star than any other extrasolar planet previously found.The discovery, published online in Astrophysical Journal Letters, is a result of an international collaboration among the Steward Observatory, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the European Southern Observatory, Leiden University in the Netherlands and Germany's Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Water vapor and clouds are the major contributors to Earth's greenhouse effect, but a new atmosphere-ocean climate modeling study shows that the planet's temperature ultimately depends on the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide.The study, conducted by Andrew Lacis and colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, examined the nature of Earth's greenhouse effect and clarified the role that greenhouse gases and clouds play in absorbing outgoing infrared radiation. Notably, the team identified non-condensing greenhouse gases -- such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons -- as providing the core support for the terrestrial greenhouse effect.

Last month an experiment at the LHC observed for the first time a peculiar correlation among particles. The effect might have several explanations, including (at low probability, in my opinion) the formation of a hot, dense state of matter, possibly even the quark-gluon plasma which is thought to have filled the universe in its first nanoseconds. More work is needed to test these different ideas, but nonetheless it shows the remarkable sensitivity of the LHC experiments to new phenomena.

(PhysOrg.com) -- It has been a contentious issue for some time among historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists whether societies and cultures arise slowly or in sudden bursts and if they collapse in the same way. Now researchers using the tools of evolutionary biology instead of anthropology have created an evolutionary tree of political forms in the Pacific Islands and concluded that cultures evolve towards higher complexity by a slow process of incremental steps, but may take larger steps towards lower complexity.Researchers from University College, London, Thomas Currie and Ruth Mace, said the debate about how complex societies evolve has continued "largely in the absence of rigorous, quantitative tests," and their study aimed to fill this gap.

Scientists working for the UN say that they have eradicated a virus which can be deadly to cattle.If confirmed, rinderpest would become only the second viral disease - after smallpox - to have been eliminated by humans.Rinderpest was once prevalent in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said that it will now suspend its efforts to track and eliminate the virus.The FAO said it was "confident" the virus has been eradicated from those parts of the world where it is prevalent.When the disease arrived in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century between 80% and 90% of cattle and buffalo on the continent were killed.

The distinct genetic characteristics of salmon populations in Spain are being lost as a result of climate change and human interference, a study has warned.A team of UK and Spanish researchers say disrupting the species' migratory behaviour and strong homing instinct could have long-term consequences.They added that they were working on ways to "disentangle" the individual threats affecting salmon populations.The findings appear in the journal Global Change Biology.The team's study focused on the changes recorded over a 20-year period to Atlantic salmon populations in Asturias, Spain - considered to be the "vulnerable" southern limit of the species' natural range.

The animal kingdom has a new long distance champion. The winner is a female humpback whale who traveled more than 6,000 miles (9,800 kilometers).The record for longest mammal migration was previously held by another humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae). But the new champ smashed the record by traveling nearly 250 miles (400 km) further than the longest distance previously recorded. Her trek was twice the normal distance humpbacks migrate.Researchers with the Antarctic Humpback Whale Catalogue photographed the female while she swam in the Abrolhos Bank, a breeding area off the coast of Brazil. She was given the catchy name, AHWC#1363.

Dramatic flares and bursts of energy - activity previously thought reserved for only the strongest magnetized pulsars - has been observed emanating from a weakly magnetised, slowly rotating pulsar. The international team of astrophysicists who made the discovery believe that the source of the pulsar's power may be hidden deep within its surface.Pulsars, or neutron stars, are the collapsed remains of massive stars. Although they are on average only about 30km in diameter, they have hugely powerful surface magnetic fields, billions of times that of our Sun.The most extreme kind of pulsars have a surface magnetic field 50-1000 times stronger than normal and emit powerful flares of gamma rays and X-rays. Named magnetars (which stands for "magnetic stars") by astronomers, their huge magnetic fields are thought to be the ultimate source of power for the bursts of gamma rays.

WHAT do earthquakes, spinning stellar remnants, bright space objects and a host of other natural phenomena have in common? Some of their properties conform to a curious and little known mathematical law, which could now find new uses.A subject of fascination to mathematicians, Benford's law states that for many sets of numbers, the first or "leading" digit of each number is not random. Instead, there is a 30.1 per cent chance that a number's leading digit is a 1. Progressively higher leading digits get increasingly unlikely, and a number has just a 4.6 per cent chance of beginning with a 9 (see diagram).

Biologists have discovered a new species of fish in one of the world's deepest ocean trenches, previously thought to be entirely devoid of fish.They captured images of the creature, a type of snailfish, in the Peru-Chile trench in the south-east Pacific Ocean.The trench is more than 8,000m deep; the fish were found at 7,000m.This is the fifth deep trench the team has investigated and they found it to harbour the greatest diversity of species of any they have explored.

What Sir Isaac Newton was doing late at night may surprise you. No, no unearthed scandals involving women or drugs, but instead, a shinier vice: gold.Isaac Newton was a passionate practitioner of alchemy for over three decades, according to Indiana University professor William Newman and a speech he gave recently at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.Newton invented calculus, described the law of universal gravitation and built the first reflecting telescope. Just a few resume highlights for someone considered to be the most influential scientist in history.

Do you believe that love conquers all? If you do, you probably won't be surprised by the following study. It turns out that being in love can actually dull pain perception. What's more, it works in a different way that painkillers do.Dr. Sean Mackey, chair of the pain management division at Stanford University, has been studying pain for his entire career. He has become an expert at analyzing how the brain reacts to pain, by relying on functional MRI (fMRI), which are sophisticated brain scans that can show which areas of the brain are active while subjects are given specific tasks, such as looking at pictures or feeling mild bursts of pain.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers using the South Pole Telescope report that they have discovered the most massive galaxy cluster yet seen at a distance of 7 billion light-years. The cluster (designated SPT-CL J0546-5345) weighs in at around 800 trillion Suns, and holds hundreds of galaxies."This galaxy cluster wins the heavyweight title. It's among the most massive clusters ever found at this distance," said Mark Brodwin, a Smithsonian astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Brodwin is first author on the paper announcing the discovery, which appeared in the Astrophysical Journal.Redshift measures how light from a distant object has been stretched by the universe's expansion. Located in the southern constellation Pictor (the Painter), the cluster has a redshift of z=1.07. This puts it at a distance of about 7 billion light-years, meaning we see it as it appeared 7 billion years ago, when the universe was half as old as now and our solar system didn't exist yet.

IS OUR universe a recycled version of an earlier cosmos? The idea, which replaces the big bang with a "big bounce", has received a boost: this vision of the birth of the universe can explain why a subsequent process, called inflation, occurred."The result puts the idea of inflation on firmer ground, and at the same time makes the bounce scenario much more credible," says Carlo Rovelli, who was not involved in the work but studies quantum gravity at the University of Marseille in France.

If a medium-sized asteroid lands in the ocean, tsunamis won't be the only worry. A new computer simulation suggests that the water vapour and sea salt thrown up by the impact could damage the Earth's protective ozone layer, leading to record levels of ultraviolet radiation that could threaten human civilisation."This suggests new issues you could have with ocean impacts that people hadn't thought of before," says Brian Toon of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was not involved in the work.

New research on ammonites, a group of previously common marine invertebrates that went extinct after the Chicxuluxb impact 65 million years ago, is filling in details about the biology of these organisms.Although ammonites have been extinct for 65 million years, newly published data based on 35 years of field work and analysis is providing invaluable insights into their paleobiology. Ammonites, shelled mollusks closely related to modern day nautilus and squids, inhabited the oceans for nearly 350 million years. Specimens found in the rock record of the ancient seaway that covered North America during the Cretaceous Period demonstrate that these animals thrived at cold methane seeps at the bottom of the sea, consumed small prey, and often survived predation attempts.

The Uffington White Horse has been caught up in an identity battle after it was suggested it could be a dog.Retired vet Olaf Swarbrick has said the ancient carving in the Oxfordshire hillside is not anatomically correct and has more canine-like features.But the National Trust, which said soil samples indicated that the figure dated back 3,000 years to the Bronze Age, has rejected Mr Swarbrick's ideas.However it admitted there were many theories about the carving.Written records date back to the 12th Century but do not give proof of its exact age or why it was created.

Last January astronomers thought they had witnessed a fresh collision between two asteroids when images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope revealed a bizarre X-shaped object at the head of a comet-like trail of material."When I saw the Hubble image I knew it was something special," says astronomer Jessica Agarwal, who works for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. "The nucleus seemed almost detached from the dust cloud and there were intricate structures within the dust."After using Hubble to track the oddball body for five months, astronomers were surprised to find that they had missed the suspected smash-up by a year.

Last month, a team of astronomers announced the discovery of the first alien world that could host life on its surface. Now a second team can find no evidence of the planet, casting doubt on its existence.The planet, dubbed Gliese 581 g, was found to orbit a dim, red dwarf star every 37 days, according to an analysis by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in DC, and their colleagues.Unlike the four previously known planets in the same system and hundreds of others found throughout the Milky Way galaxy, Gliese 581 g sits in the middle of its host star's habitable zone, where temperatures are in the right range for liquid water to exist.

The earliest plants to have colonised land have been found in Argentina.The discovery puts back by 10 million years the colonisation of land by plants, and suggests that a diversity of land plants had evolved by 472 million years ago.The newly found plants are liverworts, very simple plants that lack stems or roots, scientists report in the journal the New Phytologist.That confirms liverworts are likely to be the ancestors of all land plants.

A computer has beaten a human at shogi, otherwise known as Japanese chess, for the first time. No big deal, you might think. After all, computers have been beating humans at western chess for years, and when IBM's Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997, it was greeted in some quarters as if computers were about to overthrow humanity.That hasn't happened yet, but after all, western chess is a relatively simple game, with only about 10123 possible games existing that can be played out. Shogi is a bit more complex, though, offering about 10224 possible games.

The human brain is among the most complex structures in the universe -- and researchers will try to map it in just five years.A consortium led by scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine and the University of Minnesota has launched a project, dubbed the Human Connectome, that will diagram all the major circuits in a healthy human brain. The effort is the first of its kind and will lay the groundwork for understanding how the human brain functions -- and eventually, how it doesn't."This will give us a vastly better understanding of brain connectivity that is sorely lacking," said David Van Essen, head of the department of anatomy and neurobiology at Washington University. "This is the first effort to create a wiring diagram of the brain in a comprehensive way."

The world's largest mountain gorilla group has embraced power-sharing to secure its future.Modern day politics might seem a long way from the forested slopes of the Virunga volcanoes in Rwanda.But on these slopes the largest group of mountain gorillas in the world is now ruled by a coalition government.The 46 strong group was featured in the BBC Two series Mountain Gorilla, and since filming the BBC team has been following the animals' progress via regular updates from the field.

The US space agency (Nasa) has been given a new direction, one that will seek to put astronauts in orbit using privately run launch services.The change comes into effect with the signing by President Barack Obama of the Nasa Authorization Act 2010.The legislation, passed by Congress last week, mandates the agency to fly the space station until 2020 and to launch one extra shuttle next year.It also instructs Nasa to start work on a rocket for deep-space exploration.The president's signature on the act brings to an end eight months of fractious debate on Capitol Hill about the future course of the agency.

US doctors have begun the first official trial of using human embryonic stem cells in patients after getting the green light from regulators.The Food and Drug Administration has given a license to Geron to use the controversial cells to treat people with spinal injuries.The cells have the potential to become many of the different cell types found in the body, including nerve cells.The trials at a hospital in Atlanta will check if the treatment is safe.

Traces of a previously unknown Bronze Age civilisation have been discovered in the peaks of Russia's Caucasus Mountains thanks to aerial photographs taken 40 years ago, researchers said Monday."We have discovered a civilisation dating from the 16th to the 14th centuries BC, high in the mountains south of Kislovodsk," in Russia's North Caucasus region, Andrei Belinsky, the head of a joint Russian-German expedition that has been investigating the region for five years, told AFP.He said researchers had discovered stone foundations, some up to a metre (3.3 feet) high, at nearly 200 sites, all "visibly constructed according to the same architectural plan, with an oval courtyard in the centre, and connected by roads."

He was too old to hunt, a hunchback probably needing a cane for support, and suffered terrible lower back pain. But a member of the human family who lived 500,000 years ago is the most elderly ancient human ever found. The individual of the species Homo heidelbergensis has been named "Elvis" after his pelvis and lower backbone were uncovered in Atapuerca, northern Spain. The hunter-gatherer was about 45 years old when he died."His spine was bent forward so, to keep an upright posture, he possibly used a cane, just like elderly people today," says Alejandro Bonmatí of the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain.

Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, became the first researchers to observe the motion of an atom's valence or outermost electrons in real-time by investigating the ejection of an electron from an atom by an intense laser pulse.In the experiments, an electron in a krypton atom is removed by a laser pulse that lasts less than four femtoseconds (one femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second). This process leaves behind an atom with a pulsating positively charged hole in the valence shell, which originates from electronic wave functions of the atom.

Tiny tubes thought to have been etched into South African rocks by microbes are at least 3.3 billion years old, scientists can confirm.A new analysis of the material filling the structures shows they were created not long after the volcanic rock itself was spewed on to the seafloor.The tubules could therefore represent the earliest "trace" evidence of activity by life on Earth.The dating work is reported in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

A neutrino telescope that makes use of thick Antarctic ice and a giant balloon is unexpectedly detecting mysterious, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is a radio wave detector mounted on a giant balloon at an altitude of 38 kilometres. It is designed to detect the radio waves produced when a high-energy cosmic neutrino smashes into the thick ice below.But although ANITA has yet to capture this signature, it has found another kind of particle: ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. These are protons and other charged nuclei that zoom in from space with mysteriously high energies.

IF TODAY'S cities were living things, they would be monsters, guilty of guzzling 75 per cent of the world's natural resources consumed each year.Now a more benign urban creature is set to emerge. The planned city of PlanIT Valley, on the outskirts of Paredes in northern Portugal (see map), is aiming to be an environmentally sustainable city. And, just like an organism, it will have a brain: a central computer that regulates everything from its water use to energy consumption.Various eco-cities are in the pipeline, but this could be the first to be fully built - by 2015 - and could open its doors as early as next year. While Masdar City in Abu Dhabi welcomed its first inhabitants this month, it will not be completed until at least 2020. And the development of Dongtan near Shanghai in China has not even got off the ground yet, following financial and political difficulties.

Physicists are hot on the trail of one of strangest theorized structures in the universe. A team of researchers have announced what they think are the first indirect observations of ancient cosmic strings, bizarre objects thought to have contributed to the arrangement of objects throughout the universe.First predicted back in the 1970s, cosmic strings are thought to be enormous fault lines that once existed in space. Not to be confused with the subatomic strings of string theory, cosmic strings are widely believed by astrophysicists to have formed billions of years ago, just moments after the Big Bang when the universe was still a soupy mass of extremely hot matter. As the universe cooled, defects formed between different regions of space that cooled in different ways, much like cracks forming in the ice on a frozen pond. These defects in space were the cosmic strings.