Newsdesk Archive

It has taken several hundred years and one radical proposal, but the last Carib natives in the Caribbean, the Kalinago, are taking steps to preserve their culture by redefining what it means to survive as a people.Indigenous peoples are among the most affected by poverty worldwide. And this week the United Nations hosted the Millennium Development Summit to discuss progress on its goal of halving global poverty by 2015.The Kalinago tribe, on the island of Dominica, is under some historic population pressure. The vast majority of the West Indies' Carib and Arawak natives died from disease, murder or suicide during the first few hundred years of colonization.

Feeling a little sluggish and having trouble concentrating? Hormones might be to blame according to new research from Concordia University published in the journal Brain and Cognition. The study shows that high estrogen levels are associated with an inability to pay attention and learn - the first such paper to report how this impediment can be due to a direct effect of the hormone on mature brain structures."Although estrogen is known to play a significant role in learning and memory, there has been no clear consensus on its effect," says senior author Wayne Brake, an associate professor at Concordia's Center for Studies in Behavioural Neurobiology. "Our findings, using a well-established model of learning called latent inhibition, shows conclusively that high estrogen levels inhibit the cognitive ability in female rodents."

The remains of seven children apparently killed in a ritual and buried beneath a 500- to 600-year-old building in Peru's Cuzco Valley have given scientists new glimpses of the sketchily understood Inca practice of sacrificing select children in elaborate ceremonies.The children were buried at the same time, apparently after having been killed in a sacrificial rite that honored Inca deities and promoted political unity across the far-flung empire, say anthropologist Valerie Andrushko of Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven and her colleagues.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The concept of converting renewable raw materials so cleverly that the same process simultaneously produces both energy and industrially desirable chemicals has been high on the wish-list for those who seek environmentally friendly and resource-saving chemistry. The process should also not release any carbon dioxide.In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Hansjorg Grutzmacher, Francesco Vizza, and Claudio Bianchini and their co-workers from the ETH in Zurich (Switzerland) and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Sesto Fiorentino (Italy) have now introduced a new kind of fuel cell: an organometallic fuel cell that efficiently converts alcohols and sugars into carboxylic acids.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers, in addition to discovering extrasolar planets (about 500 of them currently have known orbital parameters), have detected excess, warm infrared dust emission around many stars.This emission, first spotted by the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) in the 1980's, appears to come from small particles in disks around the stars that might be in the early stages of planet formation. In some cases, models of the dust temperature and spatial distribution suggest that the disk has a gap, perhaps excavated by a planet at the appropriate orbital distance.Since planets are made from circumstellar materials, the dust rings in very young systems could be remnants of the planet building process.

A relatively small stretch of swamp between Miami and Naples in south Florida was the only place on Earth where the Florida panther lived 20 years ago. In fact, scientists estimate that only roughly 26 of the animals that once roamed the entire Southeast remained in that swamp, many stunted by genetic defects brought on by inbreeding. In a bid to stave off the same kind of extinction that had wiped out all other mountain lion subspecies (also known as cougars, panthers or pumas) east of the Mississippi, wildlife managers imported eight female cougars from Texas in 1995. It worked. Today, the vigor of the Florida panther is back, according to a new genetic survey published September 23 in Science.

LONDON: Ever wondered why do people hold on tightly the body part when injured? It's because self-touch offers great relief for acute pain, scientists claim.Researchers at the University College London found that the relief comes from a change in the brain's representation of the rest of the body. "Pain is quite an important , but also complicated, experience and can be caused in many different ways," said Patrick Haggard, the lead author of study, published online in Current Biology.

Within the next week at a high-security building in Livermore, Calif., the size of a football stadium, scientists will hunker down to conduct an experiment backed by billions of dollars and promises to change the world's energy supply.The scientists at the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are preparing to meet an end-of-month deadline for the first set of experiments in the final stretch of a national effort to achieve the long-sought goal of fusion -- a reaction in which more energy is released than put into it.Lab officials promised congressional funders that before Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2010, they would start "credible ignition experiments" in the enormous facility, which officially opened in spring 2009.

Neanderthals were keen on innovation and technology and developed tools all on their own, scientists say.A new study challenges the view that our close relatives could advance only through contact with Homo sapiens.The team says climate change was partly responsible for forcing Neanderthals to innovate in order to survive.The research is set to appear in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory in December."Basically, I am rehabilitating Neanderthals," said Julien Riel-Salvatore, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado in Denver, who led the seven-year study.

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Arizona physicists have discovered a new way of harvesting waste heat and turning it into electrical power. Taking advantage of quantum effects, the technology holds great promise for making cars, power plants, factories and solar panels more efficient.What do a car engine, a power plant, a factory and a solar panel have in common? They all generate heat - a lot of which is wasted.University of Arizona physicists have discovered a new way of harvesting waste heat and turning it into electrical power.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A half-billion years ago, vertebrates lacked the ability to chew their food. They did not have jaws. Instead, their heads consisted of a flexible, fused basket of cartilage.This week, an international team of researchers led by a faculty member from the University of Colorado at Boulder published evidence that three genes in jawless vertebrates might have been key to the development of jaws in higher vertebrates.The finding is potentially significant in that it might help explain how vertebrates shifted from a life of passive "filter feeding" to one of active predation.

Scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona, Spain) have published a new study that demonstrates that raltegravir, the drug approved in 2007 for the treatment of AIDS that is sold by Merck under the name Isentress, cancels the function of an essential protein for the replication of one kind of herpes virus. This study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first step towards the development of a drug against the entire herpesvirus family."These results have a clear medical impact for three reasons", explains Miquel Coll, also a CSIC research professor. "First, humans do not have the viral protein that is affected, thus this would allow a highly specific drug that does not show the secondary effects that other drugs may have. Second, the inhibitor is not toxic for humans when administered at therapeutic concentrations because it is already on the market and thus toxicity tests are facilitated; and third, we have data that indicate that all herpes viruses have this protein. Therefore, it could be a valid target against all Herpesviridae."

IT WILL be the longest floating vessel ever to ease its way out of a shipyard - 468 metres long, to be precise.Oil giant Shell wants to exploit the Prelude gas field 475 kilometres north-east of Broome, Western Australia, by building a Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) plant. This "stranded field" is too far from land for a pipeline to connect an extraction rig to a gas liquefaction plant on shore, so Shell plans to combine the two at sea. "In simple terms, the facility can be compared to an island with a liquid natural gas plant on it," says Shell's Neil Gilmour.

A FEW years ago, 17-year-old Christopher Simmons was convicted of breaking into Shirley Crook's house in St Louis, Missouri, tying her up and throwing her off a bridge. The evidence was overwhelming and Simmons confessed to the murder. When the jury recommended a death sentence, Simmons's defence referred to scientific papers that suggested a the brain of a typical 17-year-old was not yet fully mature. Not only did Simmons escape the death penalty, the US Supreme Court changed the law so that only those over 18 can face death row.

The surfaces of the oceans went through a short period of rapid temperature change 40 years ago, scientists have found - but the cause is unknown.Top layers of Northern Hemisphere water cooled by about 0.3C; the south saw roughly the same degree of warming.Writing in the journal Nature, the team suggests that air pollution cannot be responsible for the changes, as has been suggested for mid-century cooling.They do not suggest a cause. It is not clear what could link all the oceans.However, events called Great Salinity Anomalies have been recorded in the last few decades in the North Atlantic Ocean - including one around 1970.

AN ASTEROID that is the source of an annual meteor shower may owe its weird crumbliness to intense cooking by the sun.Most meteor showers are thought to come from comets, whose icy surfaces vaporise easily during close encounters with the sun. Dust that is liberated in the process burns up in Earth's atmosphere, creating "shooting stars".However, the debris stream responsible for the annual Geminid shower in December follows the orbit of a 5-kilometre-wide object called 3200 Phaethon, which appears to be an asteroid.

The Martian moon Phobos may have been blasted off its mother planet by a violent impact, or built from fragments of a much larger moon that was destroyed long ago, according to observations from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft.If confirmed, the result would overturn the prevailing theory that Phobos was once a wandering asteroid that got captured by Mars.

Sept 22 - NASA unveils its latest version of the Mars rover - ''Curiosity'' - which will run on decaying plutonium during its scheduled trip to the Red Planet in 2011. Ben Gruber reports.

First imagine this is a contour map of the cylinder CMS makes around the LHC collisions. It has been cut lengthwise and unrolled. Then for each pair of particles in an event, you put one of them at (0,0), and plot the position of the other. (Thanks to GreyBadger for the comment below correcting the initial over-simplified explanation here).The map is the average distribution of the separation between particle pairs for a very special class of events, with very many particles in them. The big peak is something like a "jet" of particles, what we expect when a quark or gluon in the proton undergoes a collision and is scattered off at an angle.

One touch directs a robotic arm to grab objects in a new computer program designed to give people in wheelchairs more independence.University of Central Florida researchers thought the ease of the using the program's automatic mode would be a huge hit. But they were wrong - many participants in a pilot study didn't like it because it was "too easy."Most participants preferred the manual mode, which requires them to think several steps ahead and either physically type in instructions or verbally direct the arm with a series of precise commands. They favored the manual mode even though they did not perform tasks as well with it.

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University scientists have recreated the tremendous pressures and high temperatures deep in the Earth to resolve a long-standing puzzle: why some seismic waves travel faster than others through the boundary between the solid mantle and fluid outer core.Below the earth's crust stretches an approximately 1,800-mile-thick mantle composed mostly of a mineral called magnesium silicate perovskite (MgSiO3). Below this depth, the pressures are so high that perovskite is compressed into a phase known as post-perovskite, which comprises a layer 125 miles thick at the core-mantle boundary. Below that lies the earth's iron-nickel core.

THE idea that changes in the sun's activity can influence the climate is making a comeback, after years of scientific vilification, thanks to major advances in our understanding of the atmosphere.The findings do not suggest - as climate sceptics frequently do - that we can blame the rise of global temperatures since the early 20th century on the sun. "There are extravagant claims for the effects of the sun on global climate," says Giles Harrison, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Reading, UK. "They are not supported."

One of the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever detected was probably targeting "high value" infrastructure in Iran, experts have told the BBC.Stuxnet's complexity suggests it could only have been written by a "nation state", some researchers have claimed.It is believed to be the first-known worm designed to target real-world infrastructure such as power stations, water plants and industrial units.

This week: a mythical beast, not seen for more than 160 years. A nocturnal animal that feeds on the rotten flesh of large mammals. A species active only during the winter months that reportedly emits a luminous glow from its large, orange head. What new horror is this?It's a fly, the bone skipper Thyreophora cynophila, and it is back from the dead. Considered globally extinct until now, the first fly to be killed off by humans, the bone skipper was first described by an entomologist who found it on the carcass of a dog in 1798. Last seen in the 1840s, it has now been rediscovered by Daniel Martín-Vega and colleagues of the University of Alcalá in Madrid, Spain. The fly turned up in baited traps in woodland around Madrid and in La Rioja province.

Two newly discovered horned dinosaur species from an ancient "lost continent" are some of the most surprising and ornate yet found, paleontologists say.The new dinosaurs are members of the ceratopsids, the group of dinosaurs that includes Triceratops. The animals were generally four-legged herbivores with horns and bony frills rising from the backs of their heads.

FOR some, the end may come slowly, as the seas creep a little higher each year. That was the fate of the ancient cities of Herakleion and Eastern Canopus, which took centuries to be swallowed up. Elsewhere, the land may be eroded by waves and swept away by currents, as happened to the medieval English port of Dunwich. Or disaster could strike almost overnight, when a storm joins forces with the tides to create a surge that overwhelms flood defences, leaving the survivors wondering if there is any point in rebuilding.As the world gets warmer, sea levels are rising. It has been happening at a snail's pace so far, but as it speeds up more and more low-lying coastal land will be lost.

HUMANS may have started out malaria-free then caught the disease from gorillas, an analysis of ape faeces suggests.Malaria is one of our most devastating diseases. Apes carry related malaria-causing parasites, so biologists believed humans were already infected when they split from other great apes, 5 million years ago. Other studies suggest the parasite jumped from chimps to humans at a later date.

FORGET Flatland, the two-dimensional world imagined in the 1884 novella by Edwin Abbott. On tiny scales, 3D space may give way to mere lines.So say researchers working on theories of quantum gravity, which aim to unite quantum mechanics with general relativity. They have recently noticed that several different quantum gravity theories all predict the same strange behaviour at small scales: fields and particles start to behave as if space is one-dimensional.

A Princeton University-led research team has developed the capability to produce realistic movies of earthquakes based on complex computer simulations that can be made available worldwide within hours of a disastrous upheaval.The videos show waves of ground motion spreading out from an epicenter. In making them widely available, the team of computational seismologists and computer scientists aims to aid researchers working to improve understanding of earthquakes and develop better maps of the Earth's interior.

Sept. 22, 2010 -- Archaeologists have uncovered a 400-seat theater complete with a luxury box at King Herod's winter palace.In this photo, we see remnants of the frescoes that originally adorned the complex around 15 B.C. The private box had been richly decorated with paintings and plaster moldings, which were created by Roman artists commissioned by Herod.

LONDON: A discovery of Stone Age tools, mainly either spear heads or scrapers, has revealed that migration from Africa to India and other Southeast Asian countries as well as Australia took place not 60,000 years ago, but 70,000 to 80,000 years ago - and perhaps even earlier. Michael Petraglia, of Oxford University, and colleagues say stone artefacts found in Arabian Peninsula and India indicate humans moved out of Africa much earlier than thought.

Researchers have unveiled the £1.50 test, which takes five minutes and detects other illegal substances.The disposable drugs test analyses a droplet of saliva for any trace of drugs in a person's system.Scientists say it has been proven to highlight the smallest amount of a drug such as a metabolite (small molecules) of cocaine.Suspicious parents can screen their children for the drugs by taking a swab of their saliva and placing it into a machine.

Enigmatic volcanic hot spots around the world might be pulsating together -- like a great planetary heartbeat -- at the rates of five and 10 million years, say researchers from Norway, Hawaii and Australia.The discovery suggests that hot spots are responding to regular fluctuations that come from way down in the Earth's core. It's from the core that pulses of heat are thought to be launched through the mantle, which rise and melt rocks nearer the surface to create hot-spot eruptions.

More than 500 million people live in the shadow of a volcano, but predicting an eruption can be tricky. Forecasts based on periodic gas sampling could be improved with the volcanic equivalent of a breath tester that picks up changes in the composition of gases spewing from its vent.Most instruments would melt if placed inside the mouth of a volcano, but Alton Horsfall and Nick Wright at the Centre for Extreme Environment Technology at Newcastle University, UK, have been using silicon carbide to create electronic components that can venture where no instruments have ever gone before. "Silicon's a wonderful material to about 175 °C and then it goes horribly wrong, whereas silicon carbide runs to around 600 °C on a practical level," explains Horsfall.

The big bang machine may already be living up to its nickname. Researchers on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, have seen hints of what may be the hot, dense state of matter thought to have filled the universe in its first nanoseconds.Quarks are generally trapped in groups of two or three by the gluons that bind them, but in the moments after the big bang, the universe was so hot that they could escape, becoming a fluid of free quarks and gluons.

A summit of 140 world leaders is meeting in New York this week to once again discuss the Millennium Development Goals.This is a bit poetic: New Yorkers are renowned for a certain cynicism, and the MDGs invite cynicism like few other global agreements. They seem to set impossible goals for making the world a much less miserable place by 2015 - a mere five years from now.Yet the news from New York is not entirely bad.

The Biblical account of the parting of the Red Sea could have been a real phenomenon caused by strong winds, according to new computer simulations.The account in the Book of Exodus describes how the waters of the sea parted, allowing the Israelites to flee their Egyptian pursuers.Simulations by US scientists show how the movement of wind could have opened up a land bridge at one location.

The US government asked Google for user information 4,287 times during the first six months of 2010.During the same timeframe the UK government put in over 1,000 such requests.This is just two snippets from Google's new Transparency Report, a set of tools designed to show censorship levels around the globe.Civil liberty groups welcomed the tool but called on Google to provide even more detail about the requests.Earlier this year, Google released details about how often countries around the world ask it to hand over user data or to censor information.

Scientists say they have uncovered firm evidence that Mars's biggest moon, Phobos, is made from rocks blasted off the Martian surface in a catastrophic event.The origin of Mars's satellites Phobos and Deimos is a long-standing puzzle.It has been suggested that both moons could be asteroids that formed in the main asteroid belt and were then "captured" by Mars's gravity.The latest evidence has been presented at a major conference in Rome.

Impulsive behaviour can be improved with training and the improvement is marked by specific brain changes, according to a new Queen's University study.A research team led by neuroscience PhD student Scott Hayton has pinpointed the area of the brain that controls impulsive behavior and the mechanisms that affect how impulsive behavior is learned. The findings could have a significant impact on the diagnosis and treatment of several disorders and addictions, including ADHD and alcoholism.

Gibbons have become the "forgotten apes" and many species will soon go extinct unless urgent action is taken.So say primate experts who have made a call to action to save the crested gibbons of southeast Asia, which are the most vulnerable group of all apes.For example, just 20 Hainan gibbons survive on one island in China, making it the world's rarest ape species.

What happens in our brain when the mind is considering itself? Until now, it has been unclear what happens during a navel-gazing session. Now a team of neuroscientists has shed light on the process by identifying an area of the brain that is larger in more introspective individuals.Introspection is the act of assessing or thinking about one's own thoughts, decisions and feelings. Stephen Fleming from University College London and his colleagues were interested in how the act of introspection - thought to be a crucial component of consciousness - links to the physiology of the brain.

Ex-military men say unknown intruders have monitored and even tampered with American nuclear missilesWASHINGTON, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby. Six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality.

LEOPARDS can't change their spots - and tigers, zebras and whale sharks can't change their stripes. This just as well since they can be used to identify individual animals from pictures or video instead of conventional identity bands and radio tags.It is more effective to track animals by such "fingerprints" since they don't have to be caught and sedated, which is stressful.To monitor the population and movement of leatherback sea turtles, marine biologists normally use plastic "cattle tags", which contain a unique identity number. These often fall off, says Scott Eckert, a director of the Caribbean sea turtle conservation network Widecast.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Everybody who's ever used a TV, radio or cell phone knows what an antenna does: It captures the aerial signals that make those devices practical. A lab at Rice University has built an antenna that captures light in the same way, at a small scale that has big potential.Condensed matter physicist Doug Natelson and graduate student Dan Ward have found a way to make an optical antenna from two gold tips separated by a nanoscale gap that gathers light from a laser. The tips "grab the light and concentrate it down into a tiny space," Natelson said, leading to a thousand-fold increase in light intensity in the gap.

Nitrous oxide is a particularly vile greenhouse gas and one of the unfortunate consequences of processing sewage. But that's not how a team at Stanford University sees it.In a novel marriage of environmental engineering and rocket science, the nitrous oxide produced at wastewater treatment plants is being used as a propellant for rockets. Rather than blasting off for space though, the idea is to fire up the motors and generate energy to run the plant."We definitely have to think differently now. These wastewater treatment plants need to become resource recovery centers," Craig Criddle, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering, told Discovery News.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Back in the Victorian period, Charles Babbage created a mechanical computer that made use of levers and cogs to get data moving. These days, though, our computers are mostly run using electronic transistors. Nothing too mechanical about those. Unfortunately, when putting together a logic gate for use in computing, the materials used can't withstand some of the heat. Silicon carbide has been used to help fortify regular silicon, which degrades at 250 to 300 degrees Celsius. However, silicon carbide transistors are bulky and slow -- and require high voltages.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Back in the Victorian period, Charles Babbage created a mechanical computer that made use of levers and cogs to get data moving. These days, though, our computers are mostly run using electronic transistors. Nothing too mechanical about those. Unfortunately, when putting together a logic gate for use in computing, the materials used can't withstand some of the heat. Silicon carbide has been used to help fortify regular silicon, which degrades at 250 to 300 degrees Celsius. However, silicon carbide transistors are bulky and slow -- and require high voltages.

(Reuters) - Europe's particle research center CERN unveiled budget cuts Friday that will force it to temporarily close its accelerators for a year in 2012, but said its flagship "Big Bang" machine will mainly be unaffected.Announcing the trimmed-down budget, in which governments will provide 135 million Swiss francs ($133.4 million) less over a five-year period to 2015, CERN said its high-profile drive to study the origins of the cosmos would continue as planned.It said it would delay upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider's beam intensity by one year, achieving this in 2016 instead of 2015, meaning scientists will have to wait longer for experiments to gather data at a faster rate.

People who think more about whether they are right have more cells in an area of the brain known as the frontal lobes.UK scientists, writing in Science, looked at how brain size varied depending on how much people thought about decisions.But a nationwide survey recently found that some people think too much about life.These people have poorer memories, and they may also be depressed.Stephen Fleming, a member of the University College London (UCL) team that carried out the research, said: "Imagine you're on a game show such as 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' and you're uncertain of your answer. You can use that knowledge to ask the audience, ask for help."

The inventory of plants known to science worldwide has been cut by more than 600,000 species.Many plants have been named more than once, so for the past two years, scientists have been developing an accurate record of the world's plants.The ongoing study involves UK and US researchers, who expect the final number of recorded species appearing on the Plant List to be closer to 400,000.The list, to help plant conservation, will be published later this year.

A "lost" population of tigers has been filmed living in the Himalayas.The discovery has stunned experts, as the tigers are living at a higher altitude than any others known and appear to be successfully breeding.Their presence in the Bhutan highlands has been confirmed by footage taken by a BBC natural history camera crew.Creating a nature reserve around the tigers could connect up fragmented populations across Asia, preventing the extinction of the world's biggest cat.

A research team reports new findings of stone age tools that suggest humans came "out of Africa" by land earlier than has been thought.Geneticists estimate that migration from Africa to South-East Asia and Australia took place as recently as 60,000 years ago.But Dr Michael Petraglia, of Oxford University, and colleagues say stone artefacts found in the Arabian Peninsula and India point to an exodus starting about 70,000 to 80,000 years ago - and perhaps even earlier.

ANTIBIOTICS can cause long-lasting changes in the bacteria living in the human gut. As changes in gut flora could increase the risk of some chronic diseases, such as inflammatory bowel syndrome, each course of antibiotics may represent a trade-off between short-term benefit and long-term risk.Les Dethlefsen and David Relman of Stanford University in California collected more than 50 stool samples from three people over a 10-month period that included two courses of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. They used gene sequencing to identify the microbial strains present in each sample. They found that each person had a unique set of microbial flora, the composition of which fluctuated around an equilibrium which was disrupted by each course of drugs.

DOLPHINS in California aren't happy. Some 90 per cent of bottlenose dolphins in Monterey Bay are suffering from an outbreak of skin lesions - and nobody knows why.Between 2006 and 2008, a team led by Daniela Maldini of Californian research organisation Okeanis found that of 147 identifiable adult dolphins and 42 calves living in the area, 133 adults and 30 calves had skin lesions (AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, DOI: 10.1007/s13280-010-0066-8).

PICTURE an Australian landscape and the scene you conjure up will almost certainly be one graced by gum trees. Eucalyptus has colonised just about every corner of the country, from the forests that fringe the sandy beaches of Australia's southern shores, to the baking heat of the outback.Which makes it all the more alarming that across the country, swathes of gum trees are dying without obvious cause. In forests from Western Australia to the island state of Tasmania, trees that should be living for more than 400 years are mysteriously dying before reaching their 100th birthday.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars, are among the most momentous events in the cosmos because they disburse into space all of the chemical elements that were produced inside their progenitor stars, elements essential for making planets and life. One class of supernovae (type Ia) provide yet another benefit: they are thought to be "standard distance candles," and are used by astronomers to estimate the distances to remote galaxies whose supernovae appear faint because they are far away; thus they can calibrate the cosmic distance scale.If an old star which has finished burning its nuclear fuel is less massive than about 1.4 solar masses, its gravity is not strong enough to collapse it against the pressure of its atomic ashes, and it lingers on, gradually cooling down over billions of years.

For the first time in more than ten years, there has been a confirmed sighting of one of the rarest and most mysterious animals in the world, the saola of Laos and Vietnam. The Government of the Lao People's Democratic Republic (also known as Laos) announced on September15 that in late August villagers in the central province of Bolikhamxay captured a saola and brought it back to their village. The animal died several days later, but was photographed while still alive.This is the first confirmed record of the species since two photographs of wild saola were taken in Laos in by automatic camera traps in 1999.

Deleting a certain gene in mice can make them smarter by unlocking a mysterious region of the brain considered to be relatively inflexible, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found.Mice with a disabled RGS14 gene are able to remember objects they'd explored and learn to navigate mazes better than regular mice, suggesting that RGS14's presence limits some forms of learning and memory.The results were published online this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

URANUS may have been batted back and forth between Jupiter and Saturn before being flung out to its present location, new simulations suggest.Previous modelling has shown that Jupiter and Saturn moved out of their initial orbits in the early solar system, scattering nearby objects.In some simulations, this led to Uranus crossing the path of Saturn, which could then have flung it towards Jupiter, which lobbed it back to Saturn.

A newfound alien solar system with planets the size of Saturn circling close to their star is helping astronomers learn how some giant worlds snuggle up to their stellar parents like moths to a flame.NASA's Kepler space observatory recently confirmed the presence of the two Saturn-sized planets that orbit a star about 2,300 light-years away from Earth. A third, much smaller planet may also orbit the star, circling so close that one year on the alien world would last just 1.6 Earth days.

LONDON: In a breakthrough compared to the discovery of penicillin, British scientists claimed to have developed a new gene targeting drug that they say could herald a new era in cancer treatment.The pill, which rapidly shrinks the most deadly of skin tumours and has produced "spectacular" trial results, is the first cancer drug to harness knowledge from the full decoding of human DNA.Known as PLX4032, the drug dramatically cut tumour size in 24 of the 32 men and women taking part in a trial. In two other cases it made the tumour completely disappear.

One group that really doesn't want the legalization of marijuana is big alcohol.California Beer and Beverage Distributors, a group which includes Anheuser-Busch InBev, donated $10,000 last week to the campaign against Prop. 19 (via HuffPo).Would marijuana legalization really cut into alcohol consumption?

Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.Dr Philip Laing, a member of the research team tracking the craft, said: "We have examined every mechanism and theory we can think of and so far nothing works.

One of Britain's most senior police officers favours decriminalising the personal use of drugs such as cannabis to allow more resources to be dedicated to tackling high-level dealers, The Observer newspaper reported.Tim Hollis, chief constable of Humberside police, said the criminal justice system can offer only a "limited" solution to the UK's drug problem, according to the Sunday newspaper.It said Hollis's dramatic intervention comes as the government is reviewing its 10-year drug strategy amid growing warnings from experts that prohibition does not deter drug use and that decriminalisation would liberate precious police resources and cut crime.

There are trillions upon trillions of microbes living on and in the human body.To put this in perspective, Jeffrey Gordon, a professor at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, who studies the microbes that live on and in us, offers this factoid: "We think that there are 10 times more microbial cells on and in our bodies than there are human cells. That means that we're 90 percent microbial and 10 percent human. There's also an estimated 100 times more microbial genes than the genes in our human genome. So we're really a compendium [and] an amalgamation of human and microbial parts."

What you see above isn't a rural gravel road. It's a Louisiana waterway, its surface completely covered with dead sea life -- a mishmash of species of fish, crabs, stingray and eel. New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL-TV reports that even a whale was found dead in the area, a stretch of coastal Louisiana hit hard this summer by oil from BP's busted Gulf well.Fish kills are fairly common along the Gulf Coast, particularly during the summer in the area near the mouth of the Mississippi, the site of this kill. The area is rife with dead zones -- stretches where sudden oxygen depletion can cause widespread death. But those kills tend to be limited to a single species of fish, rather than the broad sort of die-off involved in this kill.

A new map of lunar craters by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is stoking a long-smouldering debate about whether the moon was hit by a sudden barrage of impactors early in its life.The moon is thought to have formed about 4.5 billion years ago, from the debris of a collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body. Its pockmarked surface records a lifetime of impacts, the rate of which, researchers agree, has fallen over time.

LIGHT, which in everyday experience travels in straight beams, has been trapped on complex curved surfaces. The feat is not just a parlour trick - it could help people visualise how light travels in the curved fabric of space.According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity is the result of an object's mass deforming space itself, like a bowling ball on a trampoline. To model how light's path would change in space curved by gravity, Ulf Peschel of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and colleagues constructed smooth 3D objects and sent laser beams shooting along their surfaces (Physical Review Letters, in press).

Finding ways to control matter at the level of single atoms and electrons fascinates many scientists and engineers because the ability to manipulate single charges and single magnetic moments (spins) may help researchers penetrate deep into the mysteries of quantum mechanics and modern solid-state physics. It may also allow development of new, highly sensitive magnetometers with nanometer resolution, single-spin transistors for coherent spintronics, and solid-state devices for quantum information processing.Recently, a collaboration of experimentalists from the Kavli Institute of Nanosciences at Delft University of Technology and theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory made a breakthrough in the area of controlling single quantum spins. The results were published in Science Express on Sept. 9

GENEVA: The protective ozone layer in the Earth's upper atmosphere has stopped thinning and should largely be restored by mid century thanks to a ban on harmful chemicals, U.N. scientists said.The "Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2010" report said a 1987 international treaty that phased out chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) - substances used in refrigerators, aerosol sprays and some packing foams - had been successful.Ozone provides a natural protective filter against harmful ultra-violet rays from the sun, which can cause sunburn, cataracts and skin cancer as well as damage vegetation.

Pieces of an ancient Egyptian necropolis which were pillaged from Egypt in 1999 have been discovered in an antiques shop in Spain.A Middle Eastern expert spotted the eight fragments of limestone after recognising the inscriptions, Barcelona police said.The pieces are inscribed with hieroglyphics dating from the 3rd Century BC.They will now be returned to the Egyptian government.

Set a beam of electrons twisting, and the resulting vortex could be just the tool to manipulate atoms."This is a fundamentally new state that we can bring electrons into," says Jo Verbeeck from the University of Antwerp, Belgium.Optical vortices, made of twisting beams of light, have been used to spin or move micrometre-sized particles like cells. But electron vortices could potentially trap much smaller particles, says Verbeeck.

CLIMATE change is expected to bring more extreme weather, but at least one region may benefit from fewer storms: the Arctic.Polar lows, also known as Arctic hurricanes, are weaker than Atlantic hurricanes but are still a hazard for ships and oil platforms. Dozens occur each winter, when the temperature difference between the cold air and warmer sea stirs up convection currents in the lower atmosphere.

Ice floating on the Arctic Ocean melted unusually quickly this year, but did not shrink down to the record minimum area seen in 2007.That is the preliminary finding of US scientists who say the summer minimum seems to have passed and the ice has entered its winter growth phase.2010's summer Arctic ice minimum is the third smallest in the satellite era.Researchers say projections of summer ice disappearing entirely within the next few years increasingly look wrong.

A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi - and a few digits either side of it.Nicholas Sze, of technology firm Yahoo, determined that the digit - when expressed in binary - is 0.Mr Sze used Yahoo's Hadoop cloud computing technology to more than double the previous record.The computation took 23 days on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers, racking up the equivalent of more than 500 years of a single computer's efforts.

This is a cautionary tale about a few porch lights. Once upon a time, porch lights had incandescent bulbs. Eventually, many residents subbed them out with those swirly compact fluorescent bulbs, which use a quarter of the energy.The funny thing -- and yes, they laughed about this -- was that once they made the switch, some residents were so delighted with the energy savings that they dispensed with the hassle of turning the lights off at dawn, then back on at dusk.They left the porch lights lit round the clock.This is one of the beautiful things about technological advances: They often make life simpler and easier.

Just under a year ago, startup Joule Biotechnologies announced it had engineered microbes that require only sunlight and CO2 to squirt out ethanol, diesel, or other hydrocarbons. On Tuesday, Joule revealed the details of that secretive microbe in the first patent for an organism that generates hydrocarbon fuel directly from sunlight.According to the patent, Joule's secret sauce is an engineered cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae) containing "a recombinant acyl ACP reductase (AAR) enzyme and a recombinant alkanal decarboxylative monooxygenase (ADM) enzyme." That witches' brew of cyanobacteria and enzymes allows for hydrocarbon production in a single step. The organisms just capture sunlight to produce "Joule liquid energy", a biofuel-like substance. Joule liquid energy can be an ethanol or diesel fuel replacement.

Antibiotics can work miracles, knocking out common infections like bronchitis and tonsillitis. But according to the Center for Disease Control, each year 90,000 people in the U.S. die of drug-resistant "superbugs" -- bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a deadly form of staph infection resistant to normal antibiotics. Although hospital patients are particularly susceptible as a result of open wounds and weakened immune systems, the bacteria can infect anyone.Dr. Micha Fridman of Tel Aviv University's Department of Chemistry is now developing the next generation of antibiotics designed to overcome this kind of bacteria. And the key, he says, is in the bacteria itself.

Animal flocks, be it honeybees, fish, ants or birds, often move in surprising synchronicity and seemingly make unanimous decisions at a moment's notice, a phenomenon which has remained puzzling to many researchers.New research published today, Wednesday 15 September, in New Journal of Physics, uses a particle model to explain the collective decision making process of flocks of birds landing on foraging flights.Using a simple self-propelled particle (SPP) system, which sees the birds represented by particles with such parameters as position and velocity, the researchers from Budapest, Hungary, find that the collective switching from the flying to the landing state overrides the individual landing intentions of each bird.

LOUIS BRENNAN was an Irish-Australian engineer who devised a deeply unlikely form of transport: the gyro car whose two wheels were one in front of the other, like a bicycle (see photo, below). It proved to be a dead end, but it blazed a trail for a transport revolution.Gyroscopes exploit the principle that a rotating object tends to conserve its angular momentum: once it starts spinning, the wheel of a gyroscope resists any force that tries to change its spin axis.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers continue to search for cancer treatments that effectively destroy tumor cells while protecting surrounding healthy tissue and the body. One intriguing approach involves photoactivated drugs: an inactive precursor would be administered, then the diseased tissue could be irradiated to convert the drug into its cytotoxic form locally.Peter J. Sadler and his co-workers at the Universities of Warwick and Edinburgh, as well as the Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, have developed a new platinum complex that is suitable for this approach. As the British researchers report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, this new drug was demonstrably superior to conventional cisplatin.

Scientists have reconstructed the face of an 11 year-old girl from Athens who died around 430 BC.Her skeletal remains were used along with 3D techniques to help create an accurate model.She's now been placed on display in the Greek capital and the United Nations hope she'll help raise awareness of child health issues.Malcolm Brabant reports.

The Large Hadron Collider is flexing its muscles. A team at the collider in CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, is set to publish the first result that surpasses the abilities of rival particle smashers.The result concerns the search for an elusive "excited" quark. Quarks are not thought to be composed of anything smaller, but if one was found in an excited state, it would show this to be wrong. This is because an excited state only arises when there is a change in the way the smaller particles within are bound together.

Predicted by theory but never glimpsed, magnetic monopoles may be so rare that hunting them is futile: the upper limit on the number of these lone magnetic poles that can exist in our patch of the universe has been slashed.Unlike electric charges, which abound as individual positives and negatives, magnets seem always to have both a north and south end. Yet monopoles pop up in descriptions of the early universe and also help to explain why electric charges come in discrete "quanta". If monopoles actually exist, will we ever spot one?

An endangered New Zealand kiwi that survived a buffeting in its egg during this month's 7.0-magnitude earthquake has hatched safely.Richter, named after the now-defunct scale used to measure earthquakes, hatched on Sunday at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch."Our first egg hatch this year is one breakage that is a welcome relief after the recent quakes," conservation minister Kate Wilkinson said.

"You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it's waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye," wrote gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, no stranger himself to the compelling nature of addiction.

AN ENGLISH cleric pondering balls on a billiard table is the improbable origin of one of the most powerful techniques in modern science. At its root is a simple question. Yet the answer, first outlined almost 250 years ago, provokes debate even now.In 1764, the Royal Society in London published a paper by Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician, which addressed a tricky problem in the theory of probability. Till then, mathematicians had focused on the familiar problem of working out what to expect from, say, a tossed die, when one knows the chance of seeing a particular face is 1 in 6. Bayes was interested in the flip side: how to turn observations of an event into an estimate of the chances of the event occurring again.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using carbon nanotubes (hollow tubes of carbon atoms), MIT chemical engineers have found a way to concentrate solar energy 100 times more than a regular photovoltaic cell. Such nanotubes could form antennas that capture and focus light energy, potentially allowing much smaller and more powerful solar arrays."Instead of having your whole roof be a photovoltaic cell, you could have little spots that were tiny photovoltaic cells, with antennas that would drive photons into them," says Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and leader of the research team.

Beyond the orbit of Neptune reside countless icy rocks known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). One of the biggest, Pluto, is classified as a dwarf planet. The region also supplies us with comets such as famous Comet Halley. Most TNOs are small and receive little sunlight, making them faint and difficult to spot.Now, astronomers using clever techniques to cull the data archives of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have added 14 new TNOs to the catalog. Their method promises to turn up hundreds more.

A metal detector enthusiast in Cumbria has discovered a rare Roman bronze helmet complete with face-mask.It is believed to be one of only three of its kind to be found in Britain.The helmet would have been worn, possibly with colourful streamers attached, as a mark of excellence by Roman soldiers at sport parades.Described as a "hugely important discovery", it is now expected to fetch £300,000 at Christie's Antiquities auction in London on 7 October.

The Vatican's Apostolic Library is reopening to scholars following a three-year renovation. Improvements have been made to how volumes and manuscripts are catalogued and to security measures. The library re-opens to scholars and academics September 20.Scholars have not been able to access the wealth of books and manuscripts or the coin and medal collection that belong to the Vatican's Apostolic Library. It has been closed for renovation since 2007. But on September 20th it will be reopened, sparkling clean, with modern technology.

One of the most mind-blowing revelations to come from astronomy is that, as Carl Sagan so succinctly put it, "We are star stuff."Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were made in the cores of stars or in supernovae, blasted into space to seed the next generation of stars and, eventually, planets. So although you can see the results of supernovae everywhere, some scientists are extracting the remnants of specific explosions in tiny particles in ancient asteroids.

LOOK out wildebeest, here come the cars. Tanzania's government plans to build a commercial road in the north of Serengeti National Park, cutting through the migratory route of 2 million wildebeest and zebra.The road would cut the animals off from their dry-season watering holes, causing the wildebeest population to dwindle to just a quarter of current levels, says the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Germany. It could also be a collision zone for humans and animals, leading to casualties on both sides, and there is a risk that transported livestock would spread disease, the society adds.

Policymakers should consider allowing the licensed sale of cannabis for recreational use, says one of the UK's leading researchers of the drug.Professor Roger Pertwee is to make the call in a speech at the British Science Association festival in Birmingham.He is expected to say radical solutions have to be considered because he believes the current policy of criminalising cannabis is ineffective.But the government insists decriminalisation would not work.

(Reuters) - New artificial "skin" fashioned out of flexible semiconductor materials can sense touch, making it possible to create robots with a grip delicate enough to hold an egg, yet strong enough to grasp the frying pan, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.Scientists have long struggled with a way to make robotic devices capable of adjusting the amount of force needed to hold and use different objects. The pressure-sensitive materials are designed to overcome that challenge."Humans generally know how to hold a fragile egg without breaking it," said Ali Javey, an electrical engineer at the University of California Berkeley, who led one of two teams reporting on artificial skin discoveries in the journal Nature Materials.

Do nanodiamonds prove an asteroid impact killed off North America's massive mammals 13,000 years ago? It depends on which scientist you ask.A pair of studies published in the last month offer competing theories about whether an extraterrestrial object killed megafauna like woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats, along with the Clovis culture of North American human settlers.

Futuristic ideas for the use of superconductors, materials that allow electric current to flow without resistance, are myriad: long-distance, low-voltage electric grids with no transmission loss; fast, magnetically levitated trains; ultra-high-speed supercomputers; superefficient motors and generators; inexhaustible fusion energy - and many others, some in the experimental or demonstration stages.But superconductors, especially superconducting electromagnets, have been around for a long time. Indeed the first large-scale application of superconductivity was in particle-physics accelerators, where strong magnetic fields steer beams of charged particles toward high-energy collision points.

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region.The female Australopithecus afarensis bones are from the same species as an adult skeleton found in 1974 which was nicknamed "Lucy".Scientists are thrilled with the find, reported in the journal Nature.They believe the near-complete remains offer a remarkable opportunity to study growth and development in an important extinct human ancestor.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As NASA studies possibilities for the next launcher to the stars, a team of engineers from Kennedy Space Center and several other field centers are looking for a system that turns a host of existing cutting-edge technologies into the next giant leap spaceward.An early proposal has emerged that calls for a wedge-shaped aircraft with scramjets to be launched horizontally on an electrified track or gas-powered sled. The aircraft would fly up to Mach 10, using the scramjets and wings to lift it to the upper reaches of the atmosphere where a small payload canister or capsule similar to a rocket's second stage would fire off the back of the aircraft and into orbit. The aircraft would come back and land on a runway by the launch site.