Newsdesk Archive

The Big One predicted for the San Andreas fault could end up being bigger than earthquake experts previously thought.New research shows that a section of the fault is long overdue for a major earthquake.Some scientists are saying that the southern portion of the fault is capable of a magnitude 8.1 earthquake that could run 340 miles.That would be significantly stronger and wider than the southern San Andreas' last major rupture, in 1857. Such an earthquake could cause much more damage because its power would be spread over a larger area and the shaking would last longer.

The possibility of using the space station as a launching point to fly a manned mission around the Moon is to be studied by the station partners.Letters discussing the concept have been exchanged between the Russian, European and US space agencies.The Moon flight would be reminiscent of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission which snapped the famous "Earthrise" photograph.The agencies want the station to become more than just a high-flying platform for doing experiments in microgravity.They would like also to see it become a testbed for the technologies and techniques that will be needed by humans when they push out beyond low-Earth orbit to explore destinations such as asteroids and Mars.

Fish were the first to have intimate sex, suggests new research based on well-preserved fossils of extinct armored fishes from the Gogo Formation of Western Australia.Intimate sex by copulation likely first happened in the early Devonian Period around 400 to 410 million years ago, scientists say.This was "not just spawning in water, but sex that was fun," according to project leader John Long, who also thinks that jaws evolved in conjunction with mating.

A group of companies has come up with a radical proposal that it claims will open up thousands of kilometres of coastline to zero-carbon power: floating windmills. Project Deepwater was launched last year by firms including BAE Systems, the defence giant, and the utility EDF Energy to research ways of overcoming the engineering problems that limit offshore turbines to water depths of 40 metres or less.

It may seem an anachronism in the era of the ever-shrinking digital gadget, but Charles Babbage's locomotive-size "Analytical Engine" remains one of the greatest inventions that never was.Babbage's brainchild, first conceived in 1837, never wound into life. But now John Graham-Cumming, an influential programmer and science blogger, is leading a quest to build the Analytical Engine in all its 19th-century glory. He plans to use detailed blueprints which Babbage laid down in a series of notebooks held in the archives of London's Science Museum.

Dentists could soon hang up their drills. A new peptide, embedded in a soft gel or a thin, flexible film and placed next to a cavity, encourages cells inside teeth to regenerate in about a month, according to a new study in the journal ACS Nano. This technology is the first of its kind.The new gel or thin film could eliminate the need to fill painful cavities or drill deep into the root canal of an infected tooth."It's not like toothpaste," which prevent cavities, said Nadia Benkirane-Jessel, a scientist at the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale and a co-author of a recent paper. "Here we are really trying to control cavities (after they develop)."

(Oct. 9) -- Clinton Cragg is a NASA engineer on a troubleshooting safety team set up in the wake of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. He had spent much of his professional life in the Navy, where he served as a submarine captain, accustomed to living in confined space. So when the Chilean rescue authorities settled on a plan for reaching the 33 miners trapped 2,400 feet below a desolate desert, but needed a contraption to bring them to the surface, Cragg would become the perfect man to pitch in.

THE iconic grey wolf of the wild, wild west is the subject of a bitter row in the US. Idaho and Montana both established hunting seasons in 2009, after the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided the states' wolf populations were no longer endangered. But in August a federal judge ruled the decision illegal, halting the 2010 hunts.Both states are now appealing that ruling. Officials argue that hunting has little effect on populations because many wolves die anyway of starvation or disease, and females can compensate by producing more young. These assumptions are wrong, says Scott Creel of Montana State University in Bozeman.

Hundreds of scientists rallied outside Britain's finance ministry on Saturday against planned government cuts they say will harm the country's international reputation as a research hub.Britain's Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government is due on October 20 to announce harsh measures to tackle a record deficit of 154.7 billion pounds (188 billion euros, 242 billion dollars).Demonstrators at the Treasury in central London chanted "Hey Osborne! Leave our geeks alone" to the tune of the Pink Floyd song "The Wall", calling on finance minister George Osborne to ringfence science budgets.

Underground nuclear and conventional bomb tests. Giant volcanic eruptions. The sudden opening of yawning sinkholes that seem to have no bottom.These events all leave strange, circular depressions and holes in Earth's crust. Yet despite the many different things that can trigger the land beneath our feet to give way, collapse structures all look remarkably similar. Why is that? What can we learn about the dangerous processes that cause them? Can studying giant holes in the planet even make us better at finding valuable minerals?Keith Howard of the United States Geological Survey has dedicated his life to peering into the abyss in search of answers.

SKULKING around an ancient floodplain 250 million years ago, the earliest known dinosaur ancestors left footprints just 1 to 2 centimetres long.The prints, recently discovered in the Holy Cross mountains of central Poland by Steve Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, show distinctive toe marks only seen in the dinosaur family. They were made by a four-footed animal no bigger than a domestic cat, that was likely to have been prey to local 8-metre-long crocodiles.

A CANNIBALISTIC collapsed star is growing so fat from the partner it is slowly devouring that it is likely to be the most massive neutron star yet measured. The observation suggests that neutron stars can grow much bigger than previously thought before collapsing to become a black hole.The star in question is a "black widow" pulsar, a type of rotating neutron star that is highly magnetised. It rotates in tandem with a smaller partner, which its gravitational field slowly destroys.

(Oct. 8) -- Enormous mile-high tsunamis of icy particles are moving around one of Saturn's rings, researchers say. The waves are created by one of Saturn's moons, Titan, whose gravitational pull yanks the particles of Saturn's inner C ring upward, creating huge peaks and gaps."It's a little bit like a tsunami propagating away from an earthquake fault," Phillip Nicholson of Cornell University said, according to National Geographic.

THE widely used painkiller codeine doesn't work in some people and can be fatal in others, so its use should be halted, say researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.Codeine works by being metabolised to morphine in the body, but the extent of that metabolism depends on a person's genetic make-up, so the amount of morphine produced varies.In an editorial published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal this week, Stuart MacLeod and Noni MacDonald say the problem is especially relevant for infants, citing examples of two children who died after being given codeine following a tonsillectomy, and two studies that show non-fatal toxicity to infants being breastfed by mothers taking codeine.

Mysterious circle tattoos on a Peruvian mummy have been identified as containing burned plant material. The finding sheds light on a possible ancient healing practice that may have been based on similar principles to acupuncture.The 1000-year-old female mummy was found unwrapped in the sand of the desert at Chiribaya Alta in southern Peru in the early 1990s. She bears two distinct types of tattoos: emblems representing birds, apes, reptiles and other symbols cover her hands, arm and lower left leg, while an asymmetric pattern of overlapping circles is present on her neck.

Just 2 minutes ago, a sperm whale swam by about 4 kilometres south of Cassis on the French Mediterranean coast. From my desk in London, I heard its whistle. Thanks to a new website, so can you.The LIDO (Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment) site offers a live feed to 10 hydrophones sprinkled around European waters, and one in Canada. Several more are scheduled to come soon in Canada and in Asia.The network's primary aim is to record and archive long-term subsea noise so that researchers can study the effects of human activity on whales and dolphins.

A new study suggests the universe and everything in it could end within the Earth's lifespan -- less than 3.7 billion years from now -- and we won't know it when it happens.But one expert says the result isn't valid because the researchers chose an arbitrary end point.The universe began in a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding at an ever accelerating rate ever since.According to standard cosmology models the most likely outcome for the universe is that it will expand forever.But a team of physicists led by Raphael Bousso from the University of California, Berkeley, claim their calculations show the universe will end.

Melas Chasma, a huge canyon forming part of the 4000 km Valles Marineris rift valley on Mars, plunges 9 km below the surrounding plains in this image, which was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, making it one of the deepest depressions on the planet.

Animals (not just people) likely have spiritual experiences, according to a prominent neurologist who has analyzed the processes of spiritual sensation for over three decades.Research suggests that spiritual experiences originate deep within primitive areas of the human brain -- areas shared by other animals with brain structures like our own.The trick, of course, lies in proving animals' experiences.

Facebook is a company with some very personal--if public--quirks.While allowing ads that support pot legalization, the company forbids pictures of the evil, coma-inducing plant.Many will be delighted, then, to discover that two of Facebook's co-founders have not foundered when it comes to their own personal views about marijuana.According to Proposition 19 campaign filings, reported by ABC News, Sean Parker, he of the nasal infractions in "The Social Network," has donated $100,000 to this California ballot measure that seeks to legalize pot in the state.

Reality Sandwich and 2012TFC are partnering to bring you a series of videos, 2012 Time for Change presents. Directed by Joao Amorim, these videos feature celebrities and Luminaries on Conscious Evolution and Practical Solutions. In this video, the pharmacologist and chemist Sasha Shulgin talks to Daniel Pinchbeck about the power psychedelics have to "open doors that have been closed." He discusses his pioneering work, including the re-synthesization of MDMA in the late 60's and the discovery of nearly 300 new psychedelic substances.Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, Ph.D., is a pharmacologist and chemist known for his creation of new psychoactive chemicals. In 1960, Sasha tried mescaline for the first time.

MOSQUITOES infected with bacteria that stop them transmitting the dengue virus will be released into the wild next year.Some 100 million people in the tropics get dengue fever each year, and 40,000 are killed by it. The virus's range is expanding, and last week France reported its first locally acquired cases.Scott O'Neill of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and colleagues have found a fruit-fly bacterium called Wolbachia that infects Aedes mosquitoes, and makes them less able to carry the dengue virus. It also halves their lifespan - which is crucial, as only elderly insects transmit disease.

A handful of US scientists have made names for themselves by casting doubt on global warming research. In the past, the same people have also downplayed the dangers of passive smoking, acid rain and the ozone hole. In all cases, the tactics are the same: Spread doubt and claim it's too soon to take action.With his sonorous voice, Fred Singer, 86, sounded like a grandfather explaining the obvious to a dim-witted child. "Nature, not human activity, rules the climate," the American physicist told a discussion attended by members of the German parliament for the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) three weeks ago.

Scientists are investigating ways of dealing with the millions of tonnes of floating plastic rubbish that is accumulating in our oceans.They are a quirk of ocean currents - a naturally created vortex known as a gyre - where floating rubbish tends to accumulate.The largest is in the North Pacific and covers an area twice the size of France. Others have since been discovered in the North Atlantic and most recently the South Atlantic.

Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The mysterious deaths of billions of honeybees since 2006 that have harmed the U.S. agricultural industry may be caused by a common fungus and a previously unknown virus, University of Montana researchers say.The virus, Invertebrate Iridescent Virus, or IIV6, seems to work together with the Nosema fungus to kill the bees, said the researchers, Colin Henderson and Jerry Bromenshenk, in findings published in the online science journal PLoS ONE. The bee disease known as Colony Collapse Disorder first appeared in 2006 and causes entire hives to die off without explanation.

SO CLOSE, yet so far. Gliese 581 g is the first planet discovered that is the right mass and distance from its star for the surface to be awash with liquid water and perhaps life. Chances are we'll never know for sure without an armada of space telescopes, and their future looks uncertain. But a 2014 mission could tell us whether any habitable worlds with better viewing angles have signs of life.Gliese 581 g is 20 light years from our solar system and three to four times as massive as Earth. The planet is likely to be rocky and lies squarely in the habitable zone around its star, where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist on its surface.

Saturn's rings may have formed when a large moon with an icy mantle and rocky core spiralled into the nascent planet.A US scientist has suggested that the tidal forces ripped off some of the moon's mantle before the actual impact.The theory could shed light on the rings' mainly water-ice composition that has puzzled researchers for decades.The scientist announced her idea at a conference in Pasadena, US.

Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, an animal smaller than a house cat walked across fine mud in what is now Poland. This fossilized trackway places the very closest relatives of dinosaurs on Earth about 250 million years ago -- 5 to 9 million years earlier than previously described fossilized skeletal material has indicated. The paper also described the 246-million-year-old Sphingopus footprints, the oldest evidence of a bipedal and large-bodied dinosaur."We see the closest dinosaur cousins immediately after the worst mass extinction," says Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student affiliated with the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. "The biggest crisis in the history of life also created one of the greatest opportunities in the history of life by emptying the landscape and making it possible for dinosaurs to evolve."

No one would begrudge NASA's Mars rover Spirit -- six years into a mission pegged for 90 days, stuck in sand and lacking power to phone home -- retirement.Instead, in the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, scientists are preparing a new round of studies uniquely suited for a stuck Mars lander."I don't think anyone should have the expectation that this rover is going to go sprinting across the countryside again," lead rover scientist Steve Squyres with Cornell University, said at a Mars exploration strategy session in California last week.

Hungary has declared a state of emergency in three counties following a toxic red mud spill when a reservoir burst at an alumina plant in Ajka, 160 kilometres south-west of the capital Budapest. Four people died and 120 were injured in the floods, which were 2 metres deep in places flooding hundreds of houses over an area of 40 square kilometres.The sludge is a mixture of water and mining waste containing heavy metals. Hungary says it will take at least a year and millions of dollars to clean up the damage. In 2000, Hungary suffered large-scale pollution when a gold mine flooded.

Brightly coloured frogs, spiny ants and a katydid with pink eyes were among the finds when Conservation International's Rapid Assessment Programme explored the remote rainforests of the Nakanai and Muller ranges.

STANDING knee-deep in the waters of Bay Jimmy in south-eastern Louisiana, Daniel Deocampo pours a bucket of clay mixed with seawater into the marsh. Oil swirls around our legs and the air reeks of burnt petroleum. With oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon spill sitting in the bay, the burning question is - remove the oil or wait for nature to take its course?R. Eugene Turner, a coastal ecologist at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, says that interfering with nature could backfire. Even just wiping oil off leaves, he says, spreads the toxic residue around. But Deocampo, a sedimentary geochemist at Georgia State University, Atlanta, and his colleague Kuk-Jeong Chin say leaving the oil will doom the marsh, and are testing ways to give oil-munching bacteria a turboboost. "If we do nothing, all the plants will die," Chin says. "Nature will take too long."

In recent decades documented biological changes in the far Northern Hemisphere have been attributed to global warming, changes from species extinctions to shifting geographic ranges. Such changes were expected because warming has been fastest in the northern temperate zone and the Arctic.But new research published in the Oct. 7 edition of Nature adds to growing evidence that, even though the temperature increase has been smaller in the tropics, the impact of warming on life could be much greater there than in colder climates.The study focused on ectothermic, or cold-blooded, organisms (those whose body temperature approximates the temperature of their surroundings). Researchers used nearly 500 million temperature readings from more than 3,000 stations around the world to chart temperature increases from 1961 through 2009, then examined the effect of those increases on metabolism.

Scientists knew that the microbe Shewanella oneidensis transformed the electronic structure of the iron oxide it touched in the ground as well as without direct contact. Scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have now developed a model system that allows the study of this indirect transformation. They also discovered previously unseen iron(II) phosphate rosettes precipitated during bioreduction process. These blooms grew on the surface and within the grains of sand and were intensely colonized by the microbes.This research provides a greater understanding of redox transformations of iron(III) hydroxides, which influence the fate of pollutants and nutrients in certain soils, sediments, and subsurface materials. "These findings were both fascinating and unexpected," said Dr. Tanya Peretyazhko, who led the PNNL team.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new species of dinosaur discovered in Arizona suggests dinosaurs did not spread throughout the world by overpowering other species, but by taking advantage of a natural catastrophe that wiped out their competitors.Tim Rowe, professor of paleontology at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, led the effort to describe the new dinosaur along with co-authors Hans-Dieter Sues, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC and Robert R. Reisz, professor and chair of biology at the University of Toronto. The description appears in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Oct. 6.

(Reuters Life!) - Experts in Cyprus are trying to unravel the identity of one of the island's older inhabitants, after a skeleton was discovered protruding from a cliff in one of the island's richest archaeological sites.The intact skeleton was found at Curium in the southwest of the Mediterranean island renowned for its links to the ancient world. The earliest settlements here can be dated as far back as the Neolithic age, about 4,500 BC.

At first glance it looks like a squashed ostrich, strutting proudly across the Spanish plain with its head held high. Then it takes off.The great bustard is probably the heaviest living animal that can fly. The males normally weigh between 10 and 16 kilograms, but some can reach 21 kg. For comparison, the wandering albatross has a larger wingspan, but only the biggest reach even 16 kg.Female great bustards are much more petite creatures, normally weighing no more than 5 kg. This is the largest size disparity of any bird species, and it can mean only one thing: females prefer chunky males. But the females aren't just picking the males for their weight. They have an eye for their necks and whiskers too.

IF NEW satellite data can be trusted, changes in solar activity warmed the Earth when they should have cooled it.Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London studied satellite measurements of solar radiation between 2004 and 2007, when overall solar activity was in decline. The sun puts out less energy when its activity is low, but different types of radiation vary to different degrees. Until now, this had been poorly studied.Haigh's measurements showed that visible radiation increased between 2004 and 2007, when it was expected to decrease, and ultraviolet radiation dropped four times as much as predicted.

A Vatican official has said the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to British IVF pioneer Robert Edwards is "completely out of order".Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said the award ignored the ethical questions raised by the fertility treatment.He said IVF had led to the destruction of large numbers of human embryos.Nearly four million babies have been born using IVF fertility treatment since 1978.Monsignor Carrasco, the Vatican's spokesman on bio-ethics, said in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) had been "a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction".

In 2001, Pat Gelsinger, then the chief technology officer of Intel, made a striking prediction about the future of microchips. If current design trends continue, he said, microchips will be running at 30 gigahertz by the end of the decade. However, he added, at this speed they will be generating more heat per cubic centimetre than a nuclear reactor.Sure enough, by 2003, Intel and other chip-makers had found that their plans for faster processors were running into trouble. For a chip to speed up, its transistors need to be shrunk, but smaller transistors must consume less power or they overheat. With chip-makers unable to keep to the reduced heat budget, the race for faster chips hit a wall (see diagram).

Scripps Research Institute scientists have shown for the first time that the neurotransmitter serotonin uses a specialized signaling pathway to mediate biological functions that are distinct from the signaling pathways used by hallucinogenic substances. The new findings could have a profound effect on the development of new therapies for a number of disorders, including schizophrenia and depression.The study was published in the October 6, 2010 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.Serotonin has tremendous influence over several brain functions, including the control of perception, cognition, sleep, appetite, pain, and mood and mediates these effects through interactions with receptors located throughout the central and peripheral nervous systems.

US President Barack Obama is to install solar panels on the White House roof, a move lauded by climate activists as symbolic of the nation's energy future.The panels will heat the Obamas' water and provide some electric power.In 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels later removed by Ronald Reagan. George W Bush put panels elsewhere on the White House grounds.Mr Obama is a supporter of renewable energy but legislation aimed at cutting carbon emissions died in the Senate.

Neanderthals are often depicted as brutish club wielders, but a new book suggests Neanderthals had a sensitive side, displaying "a deep seated sense of compassion."The findings, also published in the journal Time & Mind, are part of a larger study charting how empathy and other related feelings evolved in early humans.Researchers Penny Spikins, Andy Needham and Holly Rutherford from the University of York Archaeology Department examined archaeological evidence for the way emotions began to emerge in our ancestors six million years ago and then developed through more recent times.

WASHINGTON: Scientists have located what they claim is an " inner compas" at the back of the human brain that informs people about the direction they are heading, a key finding that may pave the way for tests to detect dementia. An international team, led by Queensland University, has discovered that a person's ability to find their way is learned gradually and that the brain eventually becomes tuned to key landmarks in the new environment. Dr Oliver Baumann, who led the team, had volunteers learn to navigate to landmarks around a computer-generated maze over several days. He then measured the volunteers' brain activity as they viewed each of the landmarks in isolation.

Everything in our three-dimensional world has a width, length and height. That was what we thought, at least. But this picture overlooks a whole class of materials: crystals one atom or molecule thick, essentially two-dimensional planes of atoms shaved from conventional crystals.These are turning out to be wonder materials. Take graphene, the single layers of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice that my colleagues and I first isolated in 2004. Graphene is stronger and stiffer than diamond, yet can be stretched by a quarter of its length, like rubber. Its surface area is the largest known for its weight.

Remember Recorded Future, the future-predicting information analysis company that made a splash earlier this year when it scored investments from both Google and the CIA? The company has recently revealed a bit more about how its technology works and just how well the firm has done recording events before they happen. And, presumably, how well it will continue to do in coming days.Speaking to Technology Review, company founder Christopher Ahlberg described how its software goes deeper than search engines like Google that simply rank the relevance of results by links. Rather, it analyzes the more nuanced, invisible connections between events and people that shape the future.

A "hidden" language spoken by only about 1,000 people has been discovered in the remote northeast corner of India by researchers who at first thought they were documenting a dialect of the Aka culture, a tribal community that subsists on farming and hunting.They found an entirely different vocabulary and linguistic structure.Even the speakers of the tongue, called Koro, did not realize they had a distinct language, linguist K. David Harrison said Tuesday.

This is the world's first total artificial heart.Surgeons Domingo Liotta and Denton Cooley placed it into Haskell Carp's chest on April 4, 1969 in Houston. They removed it 64 hours later when a donor heart became available. But the heart did what it was supposed to do, explained Judy Chelnick, an associate curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The patient did not live long, but not because the manmade heart malfunctioned. It worked just fine, laying the stage for many later variations.

IN SPACE, no one can hear you scream. That's according to physics textbooks and the tagline of the movie Alien. But it seems that in some circumstances, sound can jump between objects in a vacuum after all.Sound waves are travelling vibrations of particles in media such as air, water or metal. So it stands to reason that they cannot travel through empty space, where there are no atoms or molecules to vibrate.Now a theoretical analysis by Mika Prunnila and Johanna Meltaus, both of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in Espoo, suggests that sound may be able to leap across a vacuum separating two objects made of piezoelectric crystals. These crystals generate an electric field when squeezed or stretched by sound waves or other forces, and deform in an electric field.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The frigid ice of Jupiter's moon Europa may be hiding more than a presumed ocean: it is likely the scene of some unexpectedly fast chemistry between water and sulfur dioxide at extremely cold temperatures. Although these molecules react easily as liquids-they are well-known ingredients of acid rain-Mark Loeffler and Reggie Hudson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now report that they react as ices with surprising speed and high yield at temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing. Because the reaction occurs without the aid of radiation, it could take place throughout Europa's thick coating of ice-an outcome that would revamp current thinking about the chemistry and geology of this moon and perhaps others."When people talk about chemistry on Europa, they typically talk about reactions that are driven by radiation," says Goddard scientist Mark Loeffler, who is first author on the paper being published in Geophysical Research Letters. That's because the moon's temperature hovers around 86 to 130 Kelvin (minus 300 to minus 225 degrees Fahrenheit). In this extreme cold, most chemical reactions require an infusion of energy from radiation or light. On Europa, the energy comes from particles from Jupiter's radiation belts. Because most of those particles penetrate just fractions of an inch into the surface, models of Europa's chemistry typically stop there.

Lutetia, the giant asteroid visited by Europe's Rosetta probe in July, is covered in a thick blanket of dusty debris at least 600m (2,000ft) deep.Aeons of impacts have pulverised the space rock to produce a shattered surface that in terms of texture is much like Earth's Moon, scientists say.The finding is one of the first to emerge from the wealth of data gathered by Rosetta during its close flyby.The details are being discussed this week at a conference in Pasadena, US.Rosetta science team-members will tell the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) that many of their discoveries will need further investigation and discussion before firm conclusions can be drawn.

The nascent industry of quantum communications could suffer a fatal blow if the U.S. enacts sweeping new regulations to provide wiretapping access to law enforcement.The weirdness of quantum mechanics makes it possible for two parties to share an encryption key and be sure that no one else can copy it. Any attempt to eavesdrop on the communication of the quantum key would irreversibly disturb its quantum state, thus revealing that the channel is being wiretapped. In recent decades, the development of quantum communication and encryption has motivated significant advances in basic research in mathematics, physics and engineering.

Twenty of the spiral-shaped settlements, believed to be the original home of the Aryan people, have been identified, and there are about 50 more suspected sites. They all lie buried in a region more than 640km long near Russia's border with Kazakhstan.The cities are thought to have been built 3500-4000 years ago, soon after the Great Pyramid in Egypt. They are about the same size as several of the city states of ancient Greece, which started to come into being in Crete at about the same time.If archeologists confirm the cities as Aryan, they could be the remnants of a civilisation that spread through Europe and much of Asia. Their language has been identified as the precursor of modern Indo-European tongues, including English. Words such as brother, guest and oxen have been traced back to this prototype.

Ancient Mars once had surprisingly frigid primeval oceans complete with their own icebergs, new evidence suggests.There are currently two leading ideas for what the climate of ancient Mars might have been like.One is that it was cold and dry, contending that valley networks and other geological features suggestive of liquid water in Mars' past were essentially results of bursts of heat confined in space and time, suggesting that Mars could not have sustained oceans. The other is that Mars was once warm and wet, implying that it could once have supported lakes, seas and rainfall for long periods.

The first global picture of life in the oceans is released today, with the completion of the decade-long Census of Marine Life.But despite its 2700 scientists spending over 9000 days at sea, the Census has only scratched the surface of the ocean's biodiversity. In all, some 250,000 marine plant and animal species have now been formally described, out of the 1 million thought to exist. "There are three to four unknown species for every known," says Paul Snelgrove of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John's, Canada.

You can't make a planet or a person out of light. You need matter - heavy, stable particles such as protons and neutrons. And yet it seems an extraordinary accident that matter exists at all. Standard theories say that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts after the big bang. Since the two annihilate each other on contact, generating pairs of high-energy photons, all there should be in today's cosmos is a sea of restless and rather bland radiation.This is not the case. Something seems to have favoured the creation of matter at a crucial moment within the first instants after the big bang.

"Third-generation" solar cells that could shatter the efficiency limit of conventional cells have come a step closer. A proof-of-concept device is the first to generate twice the standard current produced from the most energetic photons in sunlight.A photon arriving at a solar cell needs a certain amount of energy to break an electron free from its atom and generate current. However, photons with energy above that threshold still generally release only a single electron, generating no additional current even if they arrive with more than enough energy to free two electrons.

HAWAII should prepare for an increasing number of cyclones as a result of global warming, a modelling study predicts.About 85 tropical cyclones form each year, mostly over the western and eastern Pacific, including the Philippines, southern China and Mexico. Only one or two hit Hawaii every decade.Tim Li of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu used two climate models to forecast cyclone formation.

The announcement of the winners of the next Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday morning will bring to an end the very private deliberations within the Swedish Academy, which selects the winner. It will also end the rampant public speculation about who will win the prize -- at least until next year.In anticipation of that announcement, generally recognized as the highest achievement in the field of physics, the American Institute of Physics conducted a poll last week to tap into some of the speculation about who ought to win.Posted to several websites frequented by physicists, the anonymous poll asked respondents to choose which noteworthy discovery in physics was likely to win the next prize. The list included 15 Nobel-worthy topics, along with the names of scientists associated with those topics. Respondents were also able to write in a discovery that was not on the list.

Virgin Galactic's satellite launching rocket LauncherOne that once attracted $110m in investment is now in doubt.LauncherOne's manager has departed and the space tourism company's chief executive is talking only about future possibilities for the rocket.The rocket would take satellites weighing up to 200kg (440lbs) into low-Earth orbit for $1-2m.LauncherOne was to be air-launched from Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo aircraft.

If and when extraterrestrials try to contact humanity, they might want to stop by the United Nations headquarters. But despite earlier reports, it looks like there won't be a designated ambassador-to-the-aliens waiting for them there after all.According to numerous reports, 58-year-old Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman, head of the U.N.'s Office for Outer Space Affairs--which is charged with "promoting international cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space"--had been tapped for the role. Word was that she was waiting only for U.N. scientific advisory committees and the General Assembly to give the thumbs-up.

Children can more easily identify obscure cartoon characters than the native plants and animals that live outside their front door. And this lack of connection to the natural world can have a profound impact on their health and well-being.ichard Louv, the author who coined the phrase, "nature-deficit disorder," will address this issue in a plenary address at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference & Exhibition Saturday, Oct. 2.In his talk, Louv will speak about the transformation in the relationship between children and nature, and how society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That unintended message is delivered by schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many local communities.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers in Taiwan have developed a new imaging contrast agent that will enable cancer patients to undergo CT and MRI scans on the same day, cutting diagnosis time in half.When cancer patients undergo computerized tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, they are injected with an imaging contrast agent, and they must wait at least 24 hours for the previous contrast agent to clear before having the next scan. Now, for the first time, a research team in Taiwan has developed a contrast agent that can be used for both scans.

WASHINGTON: US researchers have found a new, "remarkably efficient" way to generate human stem cells that could provide an alternative to using embryonic stem cells in treating disease, a study published on Thursday said. The new method does not require risky genetic modification and holds huge therapeutic promise, said the lead author of the study, Derrick Rossi of Harvard Medical School. The researchers did not go the usual route of permanently altering the genome to obtain protein factors that reprogram adult cells into human-induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs.

Smoking cannabis has long been associated with poor short-term memory, but a study now suggests that the strain of cannabis makes all the difference. In a test of short-term memory skills, only users of "skunk"-type strains exhibited impaired recall when intoxicated, whereas people who smoked hashish or herbal cannabis blends performed equally well whether they were stoned or sober.The findings suggest that an ingredient more plentiful in some types of marijuana than in others may help to reduce the memory loss that some users suffer.The key difference between the types of cannabis is the ratio of two chemicals found in all strains. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the primary active ingredient, and is responsible for the effects associated with the classic "high," including euphoria and giddiness but also anxiety and paranoia. The second chemical, cannabidiol, has more calming effects, and brain-imaging studies have shown that it can block the psychosis-inducing effects of THC2. Skunk-type strains of cannabis contain a higher ratio of THC to cannabidiol than do hashish or herbal types.

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.

A Chinese rocket carrying a probe destined for the Moon has blasted into space.What's driving China space efforts?A Long March 3C rocket with the Chang'e-2 probe took off from Xichang launch centre at about 1100 GMT.The rocket will shoot the craft into the trans-lunar orbit, after which the satellite is expected to reach the Moon in about five days.Chang'e-2 will be used to test key technologies and collect data for future landings.The latest launch, to test key technologies and gather data, is China's second lunar mission China says it will send a rover on its next mission, and it also has ambitions to put humans on the surface of the lunar body at some future date.

Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed part a 3,000-year-old statue of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, believed to be the grandfather of the young King Tutankhamun, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Saturday."The statue was found near the northern entrance of Amenhotep III's temple and depicts the king sitting down on a throne with Amun," the chief deity, Hawass said.The red-granite top half of the statue was discovered at the site of the Amenhotep III's funerary temple in the southern city of Luxor, Hawass said.

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative.The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert food to energy within cells. In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia's Vindija cave 30,000 years ago.

Within two years, cocaine addicts desperate to kick the habit could take part in a pioneering trial of a gene therapy that gives them extra copies of a gene primed to mop up the drug. The therapy will be combined with a new vaccine that stops cocaine affecting the brain. The idea is that if you get no kick from the drug, you'll be less likely to get hooked again if you relapse.The gene in question makes a fast-acting version of butyrylcholinesterase, a natural human enzyme which destroys cocaine. Giving multiple copies of it to addicts would prevent them getting a high from the drug while they try to quit.

Australian scientists in Antarctica will use a giant laser to measure climate change in the atmosphere. The device will gauge the temperature of clouds almost 100 kilometers above the Earth. Researchers at the Australian Antarctic Division are testing a theory that a warming climate on Earth is linked with a phenomenon called global cooling up in the mesosphere. That is the atmospheric level that starts 50 kilometers above the planet.

A good breeze is just what a fungus needs to spread its seed, but what if the weather doesn't oblige? It turns out some species generate their own jets of air, increasing how far their spores travel more than 30-fold.Apothecial fungi have cup-shaped fruiting bodies lined with spore-bearing cells called asci. The microscopic size of their spores means they might only travel a few millimetres if ejected individually. To overcome this limitation, the fungi synchronise spore ejections, creating a small, localised air stream.

"We just finished building SpaceShipTwo. We are 18 months away from taking people into space," Richard Branson, founder of the space tourism company Virgin Galactic, told delegates in Kuala Lumpur on Monday.At the Malaysian business conference, Branson also discussed his company's intention to launch small satellites for schools and universities. He's also looking into space hotels and the possibility of sending tourists to the moon.

DOOM and gloom are the order of the day across most of the western world. Economies are faltering, the cost of living is going up and many people's real income is falling. For some, unemployment is a reality now or in the near future. If the pursuit of happiness is supposed to be one of our goals, prospects appear bleak.Take a closer look, and it isn't that simple. In fact, economic hard times have little impact on how happy most people feel. Indeed, it would appear that we humans are built to experience happiness, and understanding why is helping us work out what enhances our feelings of well-being. It even points to ways we can adapt to cope with the hardships the recession may bring, and keep smiling whatever happens.

Shweeb first surfaced last summer as a gimmicky but eye-catching tourist attraction. It's a monorail system in which the "cars" are clear plastic pedal-powered bubbles, hanging under the monorail. The cars, equipped with seven gears, supposedly travel very quickly, nearing 30 mph over short distances, as tracked on a 218-yard test track built at the company's New Zealand headquarters.Shweeb seemed destined to be a novelty, but, as the project just secured $1.05 million from Google, it might actually expand to a city near you.

In May 2009 an ancient, dead lava field in northwest Saudi Arabia woke up and triggered 30,000 small earthquakes, creating a jagged five-mile-long crack in the ground.Despite being far from any currently active volcanic areas, the Harrat Lunayyir lava field shows all the signs of being charged up from below with a fresh supply of magma in preparation for a new eruption.The Harrat Lunayyir reawakening is a reminder to people all over the world that just about any volcanic field could come back to life, said U.S. Geological Survey geologist John Pallister.

Taking advantage of a global ban on the trade in elephant ivory, Russia is gambling that ivory lovers around the world will pay a premium for ethically friendly mammoth ivory instead.Michelle Obama, the US First Lady, has been spotted wearing jewellery crafted from the mammoth ivory.It is exporting 60 tons of mammoth ivory to China, the world's biggest ivory market, per year, and scientists estimate there is plenty more where that came from.In fact, they believe there may be as many as 150 million dead mammoths frozen beneath the Siberian tundra just waiting to be dug up.

Astronomers have spotted a large and 'potentially hazardous' asteroid heading towards Earth and it is only less than a month away from passing within four million miles.The object is 150 metres in diameter and has been named '2010 ST3'. It was discovered using the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope in images taken on Sept 16 reports Mail Online, when it was about twenty million miles away.The Pan-STARRS survey based at Haleakala, Maui uses a new telescope designed to scan the skies for asteroids likely to pass close to Earth. It is the first time it has detected a potentially hazardous object. 2010 ST3 is expected to be at its closest to Earth in mid-October.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opposes Proposition 19, which would legalize the recreational use of marijuana, but he offered a consolation Thursday by signing a bill that would downgrade possession of an ounce or less from a misdemeanor to an infraction.SB 1449 was written by state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), who said it will keep marijuana-related cases from going to court-clogging jury trials, although the penalty would remain a fine of up to $100 but no jail time.

A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It's called Gliese 581g, and the 'g' may very well stand for Goldilocks.Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that's the right size and location for life."Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it," Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In 1974, Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes emit thermal radiation due to quantum effects, which causes the black holes to lose mass and perhaps ultimately vanish. But despite numerous attempts to observe Hawking radiation, astronomers have so far detected no sign of it. Now, however, a team of scientists from Italy claims to have observed something that looks very much like Hawking radiation from an event hole horizon they created in the lab.Franco Belgiorno at the University of Milan and his coauthors will publish their study in a future issue of Physical Review Letters, and the paper is currently available on arXiv.org.

COULD stegosaurus go the way of its beleaguered cousin, brontosaurus? Early last century, the big friendly giant of the Jurassic was stripped of its iconic name due to the obscure protocols of nomenclature. Now stegosaurs are in for a grilling.Peter Galton, a curatorial affiliate at Yale University's Peabody Museum, says the first stegosaur to be named, known as the "type" specimen, is too incomplete to compare with other fossils (Swiss Journal of Geosciences, DOI: 10.1007/s00015-010-0022-4). According to the rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), that invalidates the genus name.

High estrogen levels in women while they are ovulating may be directly responsible for sluggishness or problems concentrating, a Canadian study released Friday has found.Researchers at Concordia University's Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology in Montreal linked high estrogen levels in laboratory rats to an inability to pay attention and learn.These high levels have also been shown to interfere with women's ability to pay attention, but the study, to be published in the journal Brain and Cognition, is the first to show "how this impediment can be due to a direct effect of the hormone on mature brain structures," said a statement.

A giant bird living in Germany has settled debate over the existence of a huge, dark species of sea eagle.For over a century, experts questioned whether two Steller's sea eagle species exist: one with white feathers and a darker one.But a dark, captive Steller's sea eagle in a Berlin zoo, the only living bird of its kind, has solved the mystery.

A decline in pollinating insects in India is resulting in reduced vegetable yields and could limit people's access to a nutritional diet, a study warns.Indian researchers said there was a "clear indication" that pollinator abundance was linked to productivity.They added that the loss of the natural service could have a long-term impact on the farming sector, which accounts for almost a fifth of the nation's GDP.

It began with a bang. What cosmic coincidences preceded our universe's birth are in the realms of speculation. Suffice it to say that some 13.75 billion years ago - give or take a yoctosecond - the cosmos was deciding what to be when it grew up."Much bigger", if the most popular model of the universe's beginnings is to be believed. According to the theory of inflation, the newly born universe was suffused with something called the inflaton field, which drove an exponential expansion of the cosmos for a period of about 10-32 seconds, stretching it flat and uniform in the process.

Brazilian federal police have used chemical profiling to determine that cocaine is being trafficked into the country via new routes.They are now compiling the most comprehensive database of the chemical fingerprints of illicit drugs in South America, which will be used to pinpoint where the cocaine is originally made.While the chemical profiling of illicit drugs is not new, the machinery required for chemical analysis had been prohibitively expensive for most South American forensic laboratories, says Claude Roux, professor of chemistry and forensic science at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.

One approach to an HIV vaccine is to teach the immune system to recognize certain protein structures on the viral surface and produce antibodies that bind to those structures and neutralize HIV. A strategy for designing such a vaccine involves identifying the key viral surface structures, snipping them off and developing a method to present these fragments to the immune system. When some parts of the surface of HIV are removed, however, they change shape such that antibodies no longer recognize and bind to them. A research team led by investigators at the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has developed a strategy to overcome this problem. The strategy has implications for scientists designing vaccines for HIV/AIDS as well as for other viral diseases.

A £100m project has been announced to launch three new British spacecraft to image the surface of the Earth.The satellites, to be orbited in 2013, will be able to see details down to one metre at their best resolution.It is a commercial venture between the spacecraft manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology Limited and its data processing subsidiary, DMCii.Nations that would not necessarily need their own dedicated satellites will be able to buy time on the spacecraft.

I HAVE devoted my life to scientific pursuit. After all, if we want to crack the mysteries of our existence, there may be no better approach than to directly study the blueprints. And science over the past 400 years has been tremendously successful. We have reached the moon, eradicated smallpox, built the internet, tripled lifespans, and increasingly tapped into those mind-blowing truths around us. We've found them to be deeper and more beautiful than anyone could have guessed.But when we reach the end of the pier of everything we know, we find that it only takes us part of the way.

Long-lost footage of Neil Armstrong descending the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar module will be screened in public for the first time in Sydney next week, a prominent astronomer told AFP.The footage runs for a few minutes and is considered to be some of the best footage of the historic 1969 moonwalk, but the film was lost in archives for many years and was badly damaged when found, said John Sarkissian.It depicts the first few minutes of Armstrong's descent which was recorded in Australia as NASA was still scrambling for a signal, showing a far clearer image than was initially screened worldwide.

Brooklyn, New York (VBS.TV) -- In 1998, Kevin Warwick became what some people call "the world's first cyborg." To be exact, Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University, had a radio frequency ID chip implanted in his arm. Years before RFID chips became common, this small implant allowed him to turn on lights by snapping his fingers, or open doors without touching them.Once, after connecting his nerves to an array of electrodes in 2002, he let his wife use her brain waves to take control of his body. It was the first time the nervous systems of two humans had communicated electronically. "It was quite an intimate feeling," he says.

IN CHRISTIAN art, a halo symbolises holiness. In particle physics, a ring of positive charge around the proton has become the focus of a devilish row.The dispute concerns an attempt to square a recent suggestion that the radius of the proton is smaller than we thought with the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), which has successfully explained quantum phenomena since the 1940s.A proton's radius cannot be measured directly, but has to be deduced by measuring the energies of different electron "shells" in a hydrogen atom. Through QED, these energies combine with a model of how the proton's charge is distributed to give the proton's radius.

Think your last flight was long? The Defense Department's research arm wants a plane ride that lasts five years.DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is paying The Boeing Co., $89 million to build a huge, solar-powered, robotic aircraft that can carry 1,000 pounds of sensors and other payloads for five years at a stretch."It's challenging," Boeing project manager Pat O'Neil told Discovery News. "It presents opportunities to do things in the atmosphere that normally we'd associate with satellites. It's quite compelling."

(PhysOrg.com) -- Individuals within a networked system coordinate their activities by communicating to each other information such as their position, speed, or intention. At first glance, it seems that more of this communication will increase the harmony and efficiency of the network. However, scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that this is only true if the communication and its subsequent action are immediate.Using statistical physics and network science, the researchers were able to find something very fundamental about synchronization and coordination: if there are sustained delays in communication between just two or three parts of a system, performance of the entire system will eventually collapse.

AGGRESSIVE tree-felling on mount Kilimanjaro could be partly to blame for its vanishing ice cap.The ice on Kilimanjaro's summit has shrunk to just 15 per cent of its extent in 1912, leading campaigners to hold it up as a symbol of climate change. But other factors are also at play. For instance, the air at the summit is getting drier, reducing the snowfall that replenishes the ice and reflects solar radiation.Now Nicholas Pepin from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues say deforestation could be an important part of the puzzle.

Birds embarking on long distance migrations are more vulnerable to shifts in the climate than ones making shorter journeys, a study suggests.Scientists say the increasingly early arrival of spring at breeding sites in Europe makes it harder for the birds to attract a mate or find food.The researchers warn that the "increasing ecological mismatch" can lead to a decline in bird populations.The findings appear in the journal Proceedings B of the Royal Society."The study was based on a very large dataset of 117 migratory bird species that migrate from Africa or southern Europe to northern Europe, covering about 50 years," explained co-author Nicola Saino, from the University of Milan.

Stress has become one of the major disease states in the developed world. But what is stress? It depends on from where you look. You may experience stress as something that affects your entire body and mind, the causes of which are plentiful. But if we zoom in on the building bricks of the body, our cells, stress and its causes are defined somewhat differently. Stress can arise at the cellular level after exposure to pollution, tobacco smoke, bacterial toxins etc, where stressed cells have to react to survive and maintain their normal function. In worst case scenario, cellular stress can lead to development of disease.

Saturn was already the solar system's undisputed lord of the rings. Now newly processed images from the Cassini spacecraft are revealing previously unseen halos of infrared auroral light above the planet's poles.Auroras on Saturn form like those on Earth, when charged particles in the solar wind stream down the planet's magnetic field towards its poles, where they excite gas in the upper atmosphere to glow.

A Russian Soyuz capsule with three crew landed safely back on Earth from the International Space Station on Saturday after unprecedented problems undocking kept astronauts an extra day in orbit."The landing was without incident. The crew feels normal," a spokesman for the Russian mission control outside Moscow said.Russia's space agency Roskosmos said the craft carrying US astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Kornienko had landed on time at 9:23 am (0523 GMT) in the Kazakh steppes.