Newsdesk Archive

The underwater archaeological team from the National Museum of China will visit Kenya in Africa in November to search for the legendary "sunken ships of Zheng He's fleet." A few days ago, the land-based archaeological team that has already arrived in Kenya sent a piece of news back that they found some Chinese cultural relics, including "Yongle Tongbao," which are ancient Chinese coins used in the Ming Dynasty, in a local village.

A pagan mask made almost one thousand years ago, has been found at 13th Troitsky Pit in the historical center of Veliki Novgorod.According to the head of the pit Victor Singh, the mask with openings for the mouth and eyes, most likely, cut out from the top of a long leather boot, has been found out in the cultural layer of the 12th century. The back part of the mask has holes for small straps or cords, which were fastened at the back of the head.

A recent archaeological dig at Rotary Park has set Columbia Borough's historical clock back a few thousand years, revealing an American Indian community dating to a time when pharaohs ruled Egypt and Stonehenge was under construction."We've found spear points dating back to 3000 B.C. and pottery that goes back to the 1300s," said Meg Schaefer, curator with the Wright's Ferry Mansion in Columbia, said Aug. 10. "We've even found evidence of what Natives were eating, including carbonized nut hulls and fish scales, which we can carbon date."

UK scientists have released draft sequences of the wheat genome, which they think could make a vital contribution to securing global food supplies.The researchers also say their efforts could help British farmers to develop new strains with greater yields.Global wheat production has been under threat in recent years from increasing demand and climate change.

The most expensive science experiment devised for the International Space Station (ISS) has arrived in Florida to make it ready for launch.The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) will be attached to the outside of the orbiting platform to conduct a survey of cosmic rays.Scientists hope the research will reveal new insights into the origin of the Universe and what it is made of.The $1.5bn machine will be taken up to the ISS by space shuttle Endeavour.

Researchers in South Africa have revealed the earliest direct evidence of human-made arrows.The scientists unearthed 64,000 year-old "stone points", which they say were probably arrow heads.Closer inspection of the ancient weapons revealed remnants of blood and bone that provided clues about how they were used.The team reports its findings in the journal Antiquity.The arrow heads were excavated from layers of ancient sediment in Sibudu Cave in South Africa. During the excavation, led by Professor Lyn Wadley from the University of the Witwatersrand, the team dug through layers deposited up to 100,000 years ago.

AMATEUR astronomers are enjoying a cat-and-mouse game with the US military in keeping track of its secret space plane, the X-37B.The X-37B was launched in April amid much publicity, but scant detail about its true use.Built by Boeing's Phantom Works division, the X-37B program was originally headed by NASA.It was later turned over to the Pentagon's research and development arm and then to a secretive Air Force unit.

The study, scheduled to appear in the December print edition of the Journal of Mammalian Evolution and now available online, describes a new species that evolved to half the size of its ancestors during this period of global warming.The hyena-like animal, Palaeonictis wingi, evolved from the size of a bear to the size of a coyote during a 200,000-year period when Earth's average temperature increased about 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Following this global warming event, Earth's temperature cooled and the animal evolved to a larger size."We know that plant-eating mammals got smaller during the earliest Eocene when global warming occurred, possibly associated with elevated levels of carbon dioxide," said lead author Stephen Chester, a Yale University doctoral student who began the research at UF with Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "Surprisingly, this study shows that the same thing happened in some carnivores, suggesting that other factors may have played a critical role in their evolution."

The new study, which looked at temperatures during the early Eocene period 52 to 53 million years ago, also has implications for the impacts of future climate change as Arctic temperatures continue to rise, said University of Colorado at Boulder Associate Professor Jaelyn Eberle of the department of geological sciences, lead author of the study.The team used a combination of oxygen isotope ratios from fossil bone and tooth enamel of mammals, fish and turtles that lived together on Ellesmere Island to estimate the average annual Eocene temperature for the site. They also were able to tease out temperature estimates for the warmest and coldest months of the year, critical data that should help scientists better understand past and future biodiversity in the High Arctic as the climate warms, including the geographical ranges and species richness of animals and plants.

A new analysis of a meteorite shows that an inclusion within the carbonaceous stone is older than any known material in the solar system. The finding pushes back the estimated age of the solar system to 4.568 billion years, older than previous estimates by up to 1.9 million years.A piece of the meteorite, known as Northwest Africa 2364, was purchased in 2004 in Morocco and is now part of a collection at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz. About 150 miles south of Flagstaff, two researchers at the Arizona State University Center for Meteorite Studies in Tempe, Audrey Bouvier and Meenakshi Wadhwa, dated an especially primitive piece of the meteorite known as a calcium-aluminum-rich inclusion, or CAI. Their findings appeared online August 22 in Nature Geoscience.

Surfers, bodyboarders and dolphin-spotters at the English seaside resort of St Ives were mostly unaware of a techno drama being played out about a kilometre beyond the breakers this month. Since 1 August, engineers on the cable ship Nordica have been trying to begin deployment of Wave Hub, an undersea extension cord that could make harnessing wave energy more viable. The first part of the roll-out hasn't gone at all smoothly, however.So just what is Wave Hub? Essentially, it's a four-way socket that will be installed 50 metres down on the seabed 16 kilometres from shore, where the Atlantic swell is deemed perfect for serious energy capture, and connected via a giant 50-megawatt-capacity cable to an electricity substation in Hayle, on St Ives bay.

IT IS a bright spring morning here at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, where I have come to meet my interviewee for this article, Shanwen Tao. Normally when I interview someone, I give them a business card and maybe the latest issue of New Scientist. Today, I give Tao a bottle of my own pee.Chemist Tao doesn't find this odd. Urine, he believes, could help solve the world's energy problems, powering farms and even office buildings. And he has agreed to use my offering to show me how.Urine might not pack the punch of rocket fuel, but what it lacks in energy density it makes up for in sheer quantity. It is one of the most abundant waste materials on Earth, with nearly 7 billion people producing roughly 10 billion litres of it every day. Add animals into the mix and this quantity is multiplied several times over.

Darwin is one of my heroes, but I believe he was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result of the same processes that account for other evolution in the biological world - especially when it comes to the size of our cranium.Darwin had to put large cranial size down to sexual selection, arguing that women found brainy men sexy. But biomechanical factors make this untenable. I call this the smart biped paradox: once you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures should be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That's because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies' head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes.

The Xinjiang archaeological team from the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences launched archaeological excavations at the Tianfo Site in Damagou Town of Cele County in the city of Hetian, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region on Aug. 22.According to sources, there are more than 20 important sites of Buddhist architecture distributed in the range of nearly 100 kilometers from south to north along the Damagou river system. The Xinjiang archaeological team has excavated four temple sites in the Damagou Town beginning from 2002 to August 2010.

Several archaeological materials excavated from various sites in Thailand have been found to be "stunningly" similar to ones found in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh throwing light on trade with south east Asian countries centuries ago,a senior Archaeologist said.Many materials including seals used by Kings, beads, and pottery with brahmi inscriptions were of Indian origin and these could be assigned to second-third century AD, D.Dayalan, superintending archaeologist, Temple Research Project, New Delhi, told PTI."Quite interesting among the findings is a gold plaque with brahmi letters.The letter found on the plaque like "ti" (in looped form) is found only in (excavated materials) Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh," he said.

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.Experts from the Courtauld Institute in London have now removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose "exceptional" artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art.Virtually no Hellenistic paintings survive today, and fragments only hint at antiquity's lost masterpieces, while revealing little about their colours and composition, so the revelation of these wall paintings in Jordan is all the more significant. They were created by the Nabataeans, who traded extensively with the Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires and whose dominion once stretched from Damascus to the Red Sea, and from Sinai to the Arabian desert.

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets that orbit a star called HD 10180, which is much like our own Sun.The star is 127 light years away, in the southern constellation of Hydrus.The researchers used the European Southern Observatory (Eso) to monitor light emitted from the system and identify and characterise the planets.They say this is the "richest" system of exoplanets - planets outside our own Solar System - ever found.

Even the most extreme geoengineering approaches will not stop sea levels from rising due to climate change, a study suggests.New research proposes that as many as 150 million people could be affected as ocean levels increases by 30cm to 70cm by the end of this century.This could result in flooding of low-lying coastal areas, including some of the world's largest cities.The team published the study in the journal PNAS.

Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force of evolution.He imagined a world in which organisms battled for supremacy and only the fittest survived.But new research identifies the availability of "living space", rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution.Findings question the old adage of "nature red in tooth and claw".The study conducted by PhD student Sarda Sahney and colleagues at the University of Bristol is published in Biology Letters.

Batteries, built by viruses, could someday be sprayed onto military uniforms as wearable power sources.Teams of researchers, one from MIT, one from the University of Maryland, have used two different viruses to create the cathode and anode for a lithium ion battery.If the Maryland research pans out, the parts for lithium ion batteries could be grown in and harvested from tobacco plants. The MIT research, meanwhile, could produce lithium ion batteries that could be woven into clothing to power a wide range of electronic devices, from unmanned aerial vehicles to cell phones.

The hyperdrive, a firm sci-fi favorite mode of transportation for zipping around the galaxy, is a propulsion technology that NASA should be researching, according to hardcore sci-fi fans who attended the Star Wars Celebration V convention in Florida last week.To put it bluntly, current space travel technologies can appear boring. When we're used to seeing spaceships on TV carrying our space exploring heroes from one star system to another (or even one galaxy to another), the fact that 21st Century humans can't even leave low-Earth orbit seems terribly pedestrian.

Dr Shostak said current experiments aiming to locate extraterrestrial intelligence all assume it is most likely to be found on "habitable worlds" with liquid surface water and light gaseous atmospheres, in other words, worlds that could support life similar biochemically to that on Earth.The problem with this assumption is that the development of artificial intelligence may come soon after the invention of communication technologies, as it has for us, which means SETI's targeted searches may be "chasing a very short-lived prey," Dr Shostak said. We have a chance of detecting extraterrestrial intelligences once they invent radio and go on the air, but within a few hundred years they are likely to invent their thinking machine successors.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said Wednesday that he would turn over thousands of pages on the slaying of former Times columnist and KMEX-TV News Director Ruben Salazar to the civilian watchdog agency that monitors the Sheriff's Department so a report can be prepared on the 40-year-old case.Baca's move comes in response to a California Public Records Act request filed by The Times in March seeking records that might shed light on Salazar's killing by a deputy after rioting exploded in East Los Angeles during the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War. Questions and controversy continue to cloud the Aug. 29, 1970, slaying.

NEW DELHI -- When tribal artist Durgabai Vyam was asked by a publisher to draw for a graphic book about caste untouchability in India, she leafed through the celebrated titles laid out in front of her -- books by Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, Osamu Tezuka and Marjane Satrapi.She was aghast."The books were full of boxes. I did not want to do a book that cages art in little boxes," said Vyam, 35, recalling her first brush with the literary genre that is slowly taking off in India. "I like to draw in open spaces, where they can breathe."

Alan Boyle writes: Millions of years ago, the most fearsome predator in South America wasn't Tyrannosaurus rex or a raging mammoth - but a flightless bird with an enormous beak. The creatures known as "terror birds" held sway starting about 60 million years ago, and dominated the continent until only about 2 million years ago. But it wasn't clear exactly how the terror birds killed their prey. Until now.

Kentucky's Creation Museum, a facility devoted to the belief that Earth and the universe are only 6,000 years old, is usually viewed in one of two ways: As a fun place where fundamentalist Christians can go to reaffirm their beliefs, or as the epicenter of a worldview ripe for mockery by scientists.Now, a new analysis argues that for people already alienated by religious fundamentalism, the museum can be a painful reminder of discrimination and isolation.The study, presented Sunday at the American Sociological Association meeting in Atlanta, took place over three in-depth visits to the museum over a year and a half. Bernadette Barton, a professor of sociology at Morehead State University in Kentucky, toured exhibits, attended museum lectures, observed museum guests and led a student field trip to the museum.

A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien "sentient machines".Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than "biological" life.Many involved in Seti have long argued that nature may have solved the problem of life using different designs or chemicals, suggesting extraterrestrials would not only not look like us, but that they would not at a biological level even work like us.

Jerusalem (CNN) -- At one o'clock on the dot, dozens of children burst through the door of Khasiki Sultan soup kitchen, clutching their pots and pans.Sent by their families, they jostle for position in front of steaming vats of chicken and soup, waiting for their pots to be filled with food for iftar -- the breaking of the fast at sunset.This is a daily ritual in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City, and for hundreds of families it's not just for Ramadan. The al Aqsa Waqf has been filling the bowls of needy families for 450 years, aided by private donations.

Malvern, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- "This is a mass grave," Bill Watson said as he led the way through the thick Pennsylvania woods in a suburb about 30 miles from Philadelphia."Duffy's Cut," as it's now called, is a short walk from a suburban cul-de-sac in Malvern, an affluent town off the fabled Main Line. Twin brothers Bill and Frank Watson believe 57 Irish immigrants met violent deaths there after a cholera epidemic struck in 1832.They suspect foul play."This is a murder mystery from 178 years ago, and it's finally coming to the light of day," Frank Watson said.

If you had a dinner invitation in Utah's Escalante Valley almost 10,000 years ago, you would have come just in time to try a new menu item: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.After five summers of meticulous excavation, Brigham Young University archaeologists are beginning to publish what they've learned from the "North Creek Shelter." It's the oldest known site occupied by humans in the southern half of Utah and one of only three such archaeological sites state-wide that date so far back in time.

Tuesday marks the 1,600th anniversary of one of the turning points of European history - the first sack of Imperial Rome by an army of Visigoths, northern European barbarian tribesmen, led by a general called Alaric.It was the first time in 800 years that Rome had been successfully invaded. The event had reverberations around the Mediterranean.Jerome, an early Christian Church Father, in a letter to a friend from Bethlehem - where he happened to be living - wrote that he burst into tears upon hearing the news."My voice sticks in my throat, and, as I dictate, sobs choke me. The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken," he said.

New inscriptions were unearthed during excavations in Pompeipolis ancient city in Taskopru in the northern province of Kastamonu.Prof. Dr. Christian Marek, who has been examining inscriptions uncovered in Pompeipolis, told the AA correspondent that inscriptions were about festivals of Roman era.Marek said that according to inscriptions, Roman emperors also participated in these festivals, most of which were religious. Marek said several competitions, shows and plays had been held within the scope of these festivals which had been started by Roman Emperor Alexander Severus.

Nearly 60 years ago, a French town was hit by a sudden outbreak of hallucinations, which left five people dead and many seriously ill. For years it was blamed on bread contaminated with a psychedelic fungus - but that theory is now being challenged.On 16 August 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations."It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms," he remembers.

The moon has shrunk in the past billion years, and may still be shrinking today, triggering moonquakes and making the moon a more active body than previously thought.The shrinkage has wrinkled parts of the moon's surface like a raisin, creating pinched formations called lobate scarps.Apollo astronauts imaged some of these wrinkles near the moon's equator 40 years ago. Now, new images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have revealed 14 more. Some of these lie near the poles, showing that the scarps occur all over the moon's surface.Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and colleagues say the wrinkles likely formed as the moon cooled and contracted.

An ancient Chinese remedy for gastrointestinal problems may spare cancer patients the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy drugs, and boost the effectiveness of treatment, new research suggests.The 1800 year-old recipe, called Huang Qin Tang, consists of a mix of flowers from the Chinese skullcap plant, extract of peonies, liquorice, and the fruit of the buckthorn tree.The remedy has been used for years to treat stomach upsets and nausea. Now, researchers at start-up pharmaceutical company PhytoCeutica and Yale University School of Medicine, both in Connecticut, have shown that the blend can also aid cancer treatment, reducing diarrhoea and gut damage caused by chemotherapy in colon and rectal cancer patients.

We owe a lot to our wheeled rovers. Opportunity has contributed reams of data concerning the geology of Mars, while Spirit has found possible evidence of past water there. But Spirit is stuck in the sand while Opportunity lumbers slowly toward Endeavor crater at a top speed of 2 inches per second. A team of MIT researchers thinks we can do better, and to prove it they are developing a new kind of planetary explorer that hops, rather that rolls, across a planet's surface.The Terrestrial Lunar and Reduced Gravity Simulator, or Talaris, is a collaborative effort between students and professors at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Charles Stark Draper Lab as part of MIT's effort to win the Google Lunar X Prize. One of the requirements for that $20 million prize is a 500-meter journey across the lunar surface by a robotic rover. If Talaris is successful, a hopping rover based on its design should be able to cover that distance, and then some, with ease.

For a typical college student, if it didn't happen on Facebook, it didn't happen. That gives the social networking behemoth an out-sized influence on the confines of political debate, if that debate falls outside what Facebook deems acceptable discourse.Proponents of marijuana legalization, which is on the California ballot in 2010, have hit a Facebook wall in their effort to grow an online campaign to rethink the nation's pot laws. Facebook initially accepted ads from the group Just Say Now, running them from August 7 to August 16, generating 38 million impressions and helping the group's fan page grow to over 6,000 members. But then they were abruptly removed.

A 4,000-year-old skeleton, known as the Queen of the Inch, is to be re-interred in the tiny island of Inchmarnock in the Firth of Clyde.The grave was found by a farmer in the 1950s as he ploughed a field.Preserved in an ancient cist, the remains included a necklace and dagger.Despite being examined by archaeologists and reburied in the 1960s, the skeleton was recently exhumed and studied using modern research techniques.Scientists have since been able to determine that the woman lived on Inchmarnock and came from the Clyde Estuary and that she did not eat seafood, despite the fact she lived on an island.

(Reuters) - Archeologists have uncovered more than 500-year-old remains of about 50 Aztec children, some of them stuffed into ceramic jars for burial, during excavations for a new subway line in Mexico City.The team from Mexico's National Institute for Anthropology and History also found the foundations of Aztec homes, hundreds of small figurines, and pots and plates dating from 1100 to 1500 AD, on the eve of the Spanish conquest, along the 15-mile (24-km) subway line, due to open in 2012 in southern Mexico City, home to about 20 million people."In total there are 60 graves, 10 adults and around 50 children of different ages, some two or three years old," archeologist Maria de Jesus Sanchez told Reuters.

TAMPA - In the pitch-black depths of an isolated North Port spring sits a silt-covered ledge that is revealing secrets about a prehistoric nomadic people, secrets held in murky silence for 100 centuries.Now, with diving gear and artifact-collecting bags, archaeologists with the University of Miami and The Florida Aquarium are sweeping away the muck and uncovering that distant past.This stuff could be as old as 13,000 years old, when wandering tribes traversed Florida. Their travels included stopovers at what is now known as Little Salt Spring, 90 minutes south of Tampa.

The discovery of a rare magnetic star - or magnetar - is challenging theories about the origin of black holes.Magnetars are a special type of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field.They are formed by gravitational collapse after the original, or progenitor star, dies and forms a catastrophic supernova.For this newly discovered magnetar, astronomers calculated that the mass of the progenitor must have been at least 40 times greater than that of our Sun.

Archaeologists unearthed a Roman bust from the 2nd century AD hailed as the most important archaeological find of the last 50 years in Albania, experts said Friday."It is an exceptional discovery, the most important in the last 50 years in Albania because the bust is still intact," French professor Jean-Luc Lamboley, who led the dig at Apollonia with Albanian archaeologists, told AFP.Experts say the bust of an unknown athlete found at the Apollonia site, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Tirana, was of a remarkable quality.Apollonia is one of the biggest archaeological sites in Albania and the fact that no modern town was built on its ruins makes for excellent excavating conditions.

MEXICO CITY.- Nearly 6,000 fragments of Teotihuacan-style ceramics, more than 1,400 years old, were found recently in Costa Grande Region, in Guerrero, by specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).The finding reveals that Prehispanic groups such as Tepoztecas, Cuitlatecas and Tomiles that dwelled the area had relations with Teotihuacan, and not only Mezcala groups as thought before.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A 20-day expedition aiming to create a virtual 3-D map of the R.M.S. Titanic wreck site is about to leave St. Johns in Newfoundland carrying the latest technologies and dozens of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Waitt Institute, and other scientific institutions. The expected result of the project, named "Expedition Titanic" will be the most precise 3-D images ever recorded of the Titanic site, and a virtual model that everyone will be able to explore.The group will use advanced sonar, robotics, 3-D high resolution/high definition cameras and acoustic imaging technologies to build a three-dimensional map that will eventually be made available online on the already amazing Expedition Titanic website, allowing anyone to explore the wreck from the comfort of home.

A picture of a large-scale catastrophe from ancient history and a cultural relic, "Shiwangutian", refers to an ancient farming and settlement site, in Chengbu County in Hunan were shown on an archeology forum on Aug. 18.As Pompeii in Italy which was destroyed by the volcanic eruption, the Chengbu Shiwangutian was destroyed by a plague of locusts during the Qing Dynasty.According to Zeng Xiaoguang, Deputy Director of Cultural Heritage Bureau in Shaoyang City in Hunan, after the locusts' plague, the site was turned into an uninhabited area and a large amount of cultural relics were preserved. The site has become a cultural relic in China.

Virtual reality is allowing scientists to ask difficult questions about human behaviour that were previously not possible or were thought too unethical.A Spanish team has designed a trial that allows men to step inside the body of a woman subjected to violence.Meanwhile scientists in London are simulating a controversial experiment from the 1960s in which people were persuaded to inflict pain on others.The original experiments were condemned as immoral and too traumatic.

Paul Reber, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, answers:Although scientists have not pinpointed exactly what goes on in the brain when a person experiences déjà vu, they can make good guesses based on models of memory. All theories of memory acknowledge that remembering requires two cooperating processes: familiarity and recollection. Familiarity occurs quickly, before the brain can recall the source of the feeling. Conscious recollection depends on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, whereas familiarity depends on regions of the medial temporal cortex.When these cooperating processes get out of sync, we can experience déjà vu, the intense and often disconcerting feeling that a situation is familiar even though it has never happened before. This feeling can occur when a brand-new situation is very similar to other events stored in our memory.

The cloning of animals may have come from agriculture, but its real promise may be in the lucrative field of medicine rather than as food.Genetically modified cows and goats can produce proteins in their milk that can be extracted as a drug component. Cloning animals to create living drug factories could lower the costs of medicines used to save lives.Examples include cows that pump pharmaceutical proteins and antibodies in their milk and blood; chickens that lay drug-producing eggs; and pigs that grow human-ready organs. Making perfect copies of these animals, through cloning, could speed up the drug-making process, according to scientists.

Solar energy is an environmentally-friendly way of producing electricity and is considered to be one of the most appealing options for the future.The basis for solar energy is absorbing light and then effectively disassociating electrical charges. As Yana Vaynzof, a University of Cambridge researcher, reports in the American Institute of Physics' Applied Physics Letters, conjugated polymers are excellent materials for such a system, thanks to their light absorption and conduction properties. Unfortunately, poor charge disassociation in these materials tends to inhibit their performance. Photo-induced charges remain closely bound and recombine before they can be collected for electricity.

Wave energy is surging ahead as a viable source of renewable energy to generate electricity -- with Australia's southern margin identified by the World Energy Council as one of the world's most promising sites for wave-energy generation.One problem for wave-energy developers, however, is that previous estimates of wave-energy potential are based on information in deep ocean water, while "wave-energy generation systems are typically positioned near to shore," says physical oceanographer Mark Hemer of Australia's CSIRO Wealth for Oceans National research flagship.

These words you are reading are really just a collection of arbitrary symbols. Yet, after some decoding by your brain, these symbols convey meaning. That's because humans have evolved a brain with an extraordinary knack for language. And language has given us a major advantage over other species.Yet scientists still don't know when and how we began using language.

If nuclear war, the Great Recession or some other calamity turns the economy back to the Stone Age, what kind of jobs and industries will pay the bills? Archaeologists, for reasons more to do with academic curiosity than preparing for doomsday, have been hard at work looking for an answer. Click ahead to check out seven jobs and industries their research has revealed.Factory work, apparently, was available 58,000 years ago in South Africa for people who were willing to produce everything from colorful pigments for leather clothing to glue that helped attach spearheads onto wooden shafts, based on excavations at the Sibudu rock shelter, shown here, in KwaZulu-Natal.There, archaeologist Lyn Wadley from the University of Witwatersrand has discovered evidence of an ochre powder production factory. The work was carried out on the first-known cemented hearths.

(CNN) -- A DNA test on the remains of chess legend Bobby Fischer has determined that he is not the father of a Filipino girl, the girl's lawyer told CNN on Wednesday.Results of the test "excluded" the possibility that Fischer, who died in January 2008, was the father of Jinky Young, lawyer Thordur Bogason said."This brings about the end of this paternity case," he said.In June, Iceland's supreme court ruled in favor of a request by Young to exhume Fischer's remains in order to settle the question of paternity.

(CBS) If you thought working out on Earth was tough, try it on Mars.Turns out astronauts on a Mars mission might lose about 40 percent of their muscle strength during the long voyage, leaving them as weak as 80-year-olds, according to a study published in the Journal of Physiology.That could make it hard to perform even simple tasks, let alone move around on the Martian surface in bulky spacesuits, MSNBC reports.And forget about palates or spin class.Returning to Earth could be even more perilous, as the astronauts might be too weak to evacuate their spacecraft in the event of an emergency.

Nearly 1 million children may have been misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, not because they have real behavior problems, but because they're the youngest kids in their kindergarten class, researchers say.Kids who are the youngest in their grades are 60% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest children, according to a study out today from Michigan State University, given exclusively to USA TODAY. A second study, by researchers at North Carolina State University and elsewhere, came to similar conclusions. Both are scheduled for publication in the Journal of Health Economics.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Much like quiet, middle-aged baby boomers peacefully residing in some of the world's largest cities, families of some galaxies also have a hidden wild youth that they only now are revealing for the first time, according to research by astronomers at Texas A&M University.In ongoing observations of one of the universe's earliest, most distant cluster of galaxies using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of researchers led by Texas A&M's Dr. Kim-Vy Tran has discovered that a significant fraction of those ancient galaxies are still actively forming stars.Tran, an assistant professor in the Texas A&M Department of Physics and Astronomy and member of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, and her team have spent the past four months analyzing images taken from the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS), essentially looking back in time nearly 10 billion years at a high red-shift cluster known as CLG J02182-05102.

Certain trees are able to clone themselves, which raises the tantalising possibility that they could effectively "live forever".But a study published in the journal PLoS Biology has dashed that hope.Dr Dilara Ally and her team at the University of British Columbia, Canada, found that the fertility of clones declines with age.This means that a tree cannot clone itself indefinitely; it must eventually sexually reproduce, or it will die.The secret of eternal life has been sought by human alchemists for centuries, but certain trees were thought to have evolved the knack, through cloning.

On a recent summer afternoon, Alaskan and American flags fluttered together above the Begich, Boggs Visitor Center, a low-slung gray building on the banks of Portage Lake. Inside, tourists perused a chart on sockeye salmon and maps of the surrounding Chugach Mountains. Few people paid any attention to a black-and-white memorial to the center's namesakes."On October 16, 1972, United States House of Representatives Majority Leader Thomas Hale Boggs and United States Representative Nicholas J. Begich boarded an airplane in Anchorage en route to Juneau," read a few short paragraphs alongside photos of the congressmen. "The aircraft disappeared amidst turbulent conditions, and no trace of the men or the airplane was found."

Four years ago, Yael Hersonski was struck by an unthinkable concept: In the foreseeable future, there would be no Holocaust survivors left to bear witness to the atrocities they once experienced. So the Israeli filmmaker set out to find the kind of unforgettable footage she might cinematically use to help keep this horrific chapter of history alive. What Hersonski uncovered, with an assist from producer Noemi Schory, was a 62-minute, 35-millimeter rough cut of a never-released 1942 Nazi propaganda film simply labeled "Das Ghetto."

Fossils of what could be the oldest animal bodies have been discovered in Australia, pushing back the clock on when animal life first appeared on Earth to at least 70 million years earlier than previously thought.The results suggest that primitive sponge-like creatures lived in ocean reefs about 650 million years ago. Digital images of the fossils suggest the animals were about a centimeter in size (the width of your small fingertip) and had irregularly shaped bodies with a network of internal canals.The shelly fossils, found beneath a 635 million-year-old glacial deposit in South Australia, represent the earliest evidence of animal body forms in the current fossil record. Previously, the oldest known fossils of hard-bodied animals were from two reef-dwelling organisms that lived around 550 million years ago.

(CNN) -- With his head bowed and a barely detectable quiver in his voice, the baseball player known as the "Iron Horse" devastated the crowd at Yankee Stadium, not by hitting a home run, but by announcing that he was dying.It was July 4, 1939, and Lou Gehrig, a first baseman for the New York Yankees, had reached the end of a storied career."Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got," said Gehrig, who during his career played 2,130 consecutive games and still holds the record for the most grand slams. "Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."Gehrig's words were chilling considering his diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS is a rare, incurable neurodegenerative disease (eventually named after him) that first manifests as muscle weakness and quickly descends to paralysis, an inability to breathe and death.

Woolly mammoths died out because of dwindling grasslands - rather than being hunted to extinction by humans, according to a Durham University study.After the coldest phase of the last ice age 21,000 years ago, the research revealed, there was a dramatic decline in pasture on which the mammoths fed.The woolly mammoth was once commonplace across many parts of Europe.It retreated to northern Siberia about 14,000 years ago, where it finally died out approximately 4,000 years ago.The reasons for its extinction are unclear and have been a matter of heated scientific debate.Some scientists have argued that it was principally the result of climate change while others say that it was driven by pressures of a growing human population, or even a cataclysmic meteor strike.

Humans helped drive a species of giant turtle to extinction almost 3,000 years ago, according to a study in PNAS.It is one of the first cases that clearly shows that humans played a role in the demise of the giant, extinct animals known as "megafauna".An Australian research team discovered turtle leg bones - but not shells or skulls - on an island of Vanuatu.The bones date to just 200 years after humans' arrival, suggesting they were hunted to extinction for their meat.However, the turtles lived far longer than other megafauna - which included the famed woolly mammoth; while Australian megafauna is thought to have died out almost 50,000 years ago, it appears that these turtles survived for far longer - until the arrival of a people known as the Lapita.

Archaeologists in Afghanistan, where Taliban Islamists are fighting the Western-backed government, have uncovered Buddhist-era remains in an area south of Kabul, an official said on Tuesday."There is a temple, stupas, beautiful rooms, big and small statues, two with the length of seven and nine meters, colorful frescos ornamented with gold and some coins," said Mohammad Nader Rasouli, head of the Afghan Archaeological Department."Some of the relics date back to the fifth century (AD). We have come across signs that there are items maybe going back to the era before Christ or prehistory," he said."We need foreign assistance to preserve these and their expertise to help us with further excavations."

Rice University researchers have conducted what they describe as the most "robust" statistical comparison of 10 human genetic models to confirm the age of the maternal ancestor of all living humans."Mitochondrial Eve," as she is called, lived about 200,000 years ago - probably somewhere in Africa, according to Marek Kimmel, professor of statistics at Rice and co-author of a study in the journal Theoretical Population Biology. The existence of a common maternal ancestor was first discovered in 1987.

BEIJING: China has finished the first module of a planned space station and is testing its electronics and other systems before launching it into orbit next year.The official Xinhua news agency reported on the module's schedule on Tuesday. It also said changes were being made on a two-stage Long March 2F rocket that will carry the 8.5ton Tiangong 1 module into a set orbit.The Shenzhou 8 spacecraft will dock with it in the second half of 2011, with the Shenzhou 9 and 10 to follow in 2012, Xinhua said.That spacecraft is part of China's manned space program, but no dates were given on when the space station would be finished or manned.

Scientists have found hundreds of Jupiter-class planets circling stars beyond the solar system, yet none of them share our Jupiter's proclivity for moons. The problem may not just be that extrasolar moons are hard to find.New research shows they're unlikely to exist -- at least around the vast majority of extrasolar planets discovered so far.A study by astronomer Fathi Namouni, with the Université de Nice in France, shows that as a giant Jupiter migrates inward toward its solar system, any moons in tow would be stripped away or destroyed by the gravitational tug-of-war between the planet and the mother star.

One of the issues associated with shifting from using fossil fuels to alternative energy sources is the cost. While adherents of alternative energy tout its benefits, many are skeptical, pointing out that such alternatives are just too expensive. Advocates of nuclear power point out that it is less polluting (if you don't count storage of spent fuel) than fossil fuels, and that it costs less than alternatives like solar power.A new study out of Duke University, though, casts doubt on the idea that nuclear power is cheaper than solar power. Using information from North Carolina, the study shows that solar power may be more cost efficient than nuclear power. With costs dropping on the production of photovoltaic cells, and with solar cells becoming increasingly efficient, it appears that -- in North Carolina at least -- solar installations offer a viable alternative to nuclear power, which is the source for about 20% of the electricity in the U.S.

Just 65 years ago, David Livermore's paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn't go well, but it was not the surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future.The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.

How common were the giant dinosaurs? Were house-sized plant-eating sauropods and stegosaurs rare beasts, or did they swarm over the Jurassic landscape?The fossil record is far too patchy to answer this question merely by counting bones. Instead, palaeontologist James Farlow of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and colleagues have worked out the food needs and resources of a dino population preserved in a deposit called the Morrison formation, which stretches across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Dating from around 150 million years ago, near the end of the Jurassic period, the Morrison formation holds many of the long-necked giants called sauropods.

When it works, and if it works, the James Webb Space Telescope could revolutionize astronomy by peering so deep into space that scientists soon could study the dawn of time.But construction of NASA's next big telescope has been so hurt by delays and cost overruns that even its staunchest champion in Congress reached a breaking point.In a letter dated June 29, U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., all but ordered NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden to assemble a panel of outside experts to ensure the Webb project doesn't break its latest promise: a 2014 launch on a $5 billion budget."We like the concept of the Webb, but I tell you, we're not in the overrun business," said Mikulski, who chairs the Senate subcommittee with oversight of NASA's budget.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a method for predicting the ways nanoparticles will interact with biological systems - including the human body. Their work could have implications for improved human and environmental safety in the handling of nanomaterials, as well as applications for drug delivery.NC State researchers Dr. Jim Riviere, Burroughs Wellcome Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology and director of the university's Center for Chemical Toxicology Research and Pharmacokinetics, Dr. Nancy Monteiro-Riviere, professor of investigative dermatology and toxicology, and Dr. Xin-Rui Xia, research assistant professor of pharmacology, wanted to create a method for the biological characterization of nanoparticles - a screening tool that would allow other scientists to see how various nanoparticles might react when inside the body."We wanted to find a good, biologically relevant way to determine how nanomaterials react with cells," Riviere says. "When a nanomaterial enters the human body, it immediately binds to various proteins and amino acids. The molecules a particle binds with will determine where it will go."

More evidence that The Flintstones didn't tell us the whole story about cavemen. Our prehuman ancestors cannibalized one another for the "nutritional value" starting about a million years ago, finds an analysis of bones left in a Spanish cave.In the journal Current Anthropology, a team led by archaeologist Eudald Carbonell of Spain's University of Rovira and Virgili, report fossil evidence of continuous cannibalism - cut marks and butchering remains - as a way of life among the Homo antecessor inhabitants of the Atapuerca Mountains archeological site.From a sample of some 1,039 bones that included mammoths, buffalo, cats and other butchered species found in the cave level deposited more than 800,000 years ago, there also emerged 159 bones from 11 H. antecessor individuals, they report:

Western Europe's massive prehistoric tombs were built in a burst of activity over a few centuries around 4000 BC, suggests dating evidence, rather than continuously throughout the Stone Age.In the current European Journal of Archaeology, archaeologist Chris Scarre of the United Kingdom's Durham University, looks at the latest dating of "megalithic" prehistoric tombs stretching from Sweden to Spain. The mound-shaped burial sites are better known as "barrows" in Great Britain, or "passage tombs" for their intersecting halls of corbel stones."It trivializes the tombs to call it a fad, but building such structures seems to have become a fashion where great numbers were built and then there was a cessation for centuries," Scarre says, in an interview. Improved dating of materials such as birch bark, bone and stone left in the tombs now reveals the clustered construction times of the mounds, he says.

Archaeologists believe a set of stones found 114 years ago in a sleepy Yorkshire Dales village may have been used as a furnace in a mass Medieval bakery.The Hartlington Stones, which were discovered in 1896 on a village green near Burnsall, were thought to have been used as part of a corn drying kiln, an important agricultural device used in the Medieval and post-Medieval periods to ripen corn for harvesting or dry crops before they were ground into flour.Investigators were forced to revisit the stones after experts from the National Park Authority found clear differences between their appearance and the formation of another kiln in nearby Kilnsey.

When Soviet engineer Yuri Artsutanov came up with his concept for an "electric train to the cosmos" in 1960, he thought it'd take 200 years to turn it into a reality. Fifty years later, the 81-year-old is more optimistic: Now he thinks the first space elevator will rise into the heavens 30 years from now."It's happening very quickly," he told me through an interpreter today.Artsutanov is among the optimists who have come to the Microsoft corporate campus in Redmond, Wash., for the 2010 Space Elevator Conference this weekend.

Dogs, cats, cows and other domesticated animals played a key role in human evolution, according to a theory being published by paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University.The uniquely human habit of taking in and employing animals -- even competitors like wolves -- spurred on human tool-making and language, which have both driven humanity's success, Shipman says."Wherever you go in the world, whatever ecosystem, whatever culture, people live with animals," Shipman told Discovery News.For early humans, taking in and caring for animals would seem like a poor strategy for survival. "On the face of it, you are wasting your resources. So this is a very weird behavior," Shipman said.

Besides being favored by geektastic chefs who want to make instant ice cream, liquid nitrogen has some other sweet potential. A team of researchers from the University of Leeds and the Chinese Academy of Sciences came up with system using this inert, colorless, odorless gas that could cut slice power plants' fuel consumption in half.Power plants dealing with peak loads are like elementary school teachers returning from a short vacation to face a classroom full of students who have all just eaten a ton of sugar. In other words, it's a big strain. Specifically, it forces power plants to resort to expensive, inefficient generators. More gas-firing, more coal burning, more pollution.

In January of 2009, a hellish storm packing 125-mile per hour winds raked the Gironde estuary in western France, whipped the sea into a frenzy, leveled trees on land, and killed 26 people.And in its wake, a strange new island was born.Storms often pile sand and sediment high enough to form small protrusions from the waves -- but they are usually swept away by tides or the next squall. But this island is something else; its 11 acres (250 at low tide) are still intact after weathering another fierce storm, cyclone Xynthia, earlier this year. Locals call it "l'ile mysterieuse" -- "the mysterious island," after the Jules Verne novel -- but it remains officially unnamed, and does not appear on any maps.

Old College, Edinburgh University. An Archaeological dig is underway in the quadrangle which is under development. Archaeologists are hoping to find remains of Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots' second husband. Picture: Jayne EmsleyArchaeologists carrying out excavations on the 16th century site in Edinburgh where Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was killed expect to uncover the crime scene within the next few weeks.

A British anthropologist is setting out on a year-long stay with a small community in Greenland in an ambitious attempt to document its dying language and traditions.Stephen Pax Leonard will live with the Inughuit in northwest Greenland, the world's most northernmost people, and record their conversations and storytelling traditions to try and preserve their language.The Inughuit, who speak Inuktun, a "pure" Inuit dialect, are under increasing political and climatic pressure to move south, says Leonard.

A pair of Japanese and US computer whizzes claim to have calculated pi to five trillion decimal places -- a number which if verified eclipses the previous record set by a French software engineer."We believe our achievement sets a new record," Japanese system engineer Shigeru Kondo said, adding that the French man's calculation to nearly 2.7 trillion places was believed to be the previous record.The 54-year-old from central Japan, teamed up with Alexander Yee, a US computer science student, to set about calculating the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.

Following in the footsteps of Howard Carter and Abbot and Costello, a specialized robot will penetrate deeper into the Great Pyramid of Giza than ever before. The robot, part of a years long exploration called the Djedi Project, will explore a shaft inaccessible to a previous robot, unlocking a room that has remain sealed for 4,500 years.The robot explorer, built by researchers at the Leeds University, England, in collaboration with French aviation company Dessault and British robotics company Scoutek, will incorporate a small fiber optic camera for looking around corners, an ultrasonic probe for testing the quality of the rock and a releasable mini-robot that can fit through spaces as small as 0.7 inches in diameter. Additionally, the robot uses special nylon and carbon fiber wheels that won't deface the pyramid's sensitive rock.

July 20, 2010 -- The street drug known as ecstasy may play a role in treating severe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when used in conjunction with intensive therapy in a very controlled setting, according to preliminary new research in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.When used in this manner, MDMA, also known as ecstasy, was so effective that 80% of participants had resolution of their PTSD symptoms after the end of the trial. And some participants who had been unable to work because of their symptoms were able to rejoin the workforce. The new work was funded by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit group based in Santa Cruz, Calif., that studies the use of psychedelic drugs and marijuana in difficult-to-treat conditions.

Archaeologists from North America and the UK have been excavating an early Medieval site in the Isle of Man.The team, along with local volunteers, is investigating Port y Candas, near the Ballacraine crossroads.Archaeologist Harold Mytum said the site was of "international importance" as it is one of the few pre-Viking settlements known on the island.So far, they have found fragments of hearths, pieces of burnt animal bone, iron slag and charcoal.

Between 15 million and 55 million years ago, India and Asia collided, starting a series of geological events that raised the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. Now, a group of well-muscled frogs is revealing how the continents moved."Geologists know a lot about that area, but what they haven't been able to do is give a sequence to the timing of the rise of particular mountain masses and particular ridges and pieces," David Wake, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author of a new paper detailing the findings, said in a UC Berkeley statement. "We use these frogs as a surrogate for a time machine."

The brain has been mapped to the smallest fold for at least a century, but still no one knows how all the parts talk to each other.A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences answers that question for a small area of the rat brain and in so doing takes a big step toward revealing the brain's wiring.The network of brain connections was thought too complex to describe, but molecular biology and computing methods have improved to the point that the National Institutes of Health have announced a $30 million plan to map the human "connectome."The study shows the power of a new method for tracing brain circuits.USC College neuroscientists Richard H. Thompson and Larry W. Swanson used the method to trace circuits running through a "hedonic hot spot" related to food enjoyment.The circuits showed up as patterns of circular loops, suggesting that at least in this part of the rat brain, the wiring diagram looks like a distributed network.

ELEPHANTS are not fazed by dynamite explosions, but change their behaviour significantly to avoid humans. That is the finding of a major study of how forest elephants deal with oil exploration in central Africa.Peter Wrege and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, used listening devices similar to those designed to eavesdrop on whales to monitor the sounds and seismic activity of oil prospecting in the Loango National Park in Gabon. After collecting 27,000 hours of recordings, the team analysed how dynamite blasts and other human activity, such as driving and setting up equipment, affected the number of elephant calls.

Alan Boyle writes: Three regular folks from Iowa and Germany are being credited with the discovery of a radio pulsar, spinning in space 17,000 light-years away, thanks to an unassuming screensaver program called Einstein @ Home.The program, which has been downloaded to 500,000 computers around the world over the past five years, almost literally turns volunteers into Einsteins at home. It's designed to download astronomical data, 2 megabytes at a time, and look for signs of gravity-wave bursts or radio pulsar flashes during times when the computer is otherwise idle.The pulsar discovery, announced today on the journal Science's website, marks the first time Einstein @ Home has had a hit. But it won't be the last. And it gives hope that even more ambitious distributed-computing projects such as SETI @ Home could eventually hit paydirt as well.

So far this hurricane season, the Atlantic has been quiet. That's good news for Gulf oil spill cleanup efforts, but a team of NASA and NOAA scientists are hoping things will get just a little nastier.This weekend, NASA is launching a six-week mission to study the formation and intensification of hurricanes, hoping to inform forecast models and improve hurricane prediction abilities. The GRIP experiment (for Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes) involves more than a dozen satellite-quality scientific instruments onboard a Global Hawk unmanned drone, a converted WB-57 cold-war bomber and a modified DC-8.

To watch over the care and feeding of Britons, Winston Churchill recruited a trusted old friend, the physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann. Known as the Prof to admirers (because of his academic credentials and his brilliance) and as Baron Berlin to detractors (thanks to his German accent and aristocratic tastes), Lindeman was responsible for the government's scientific decisions. He also headed a Statistics Division, or S branch, with whose help he scrutinized the performance of the regular ministries and prioritized the logistical machinery of warfare. Lindemann attended meetings of the War Cabinet, accompanied the prime minister on conferences abroad, and sent him an average of one missive a day. He saw Churchill almost daily for the duration of the war and wielded more influence than any other civilian adviser.

Scientists from Boston University's Center for Space Physics (CSP) announced that they have sub-visual evidence of the onset of a new cycle of solar-terrestrial activity. The key results being reported deal with the fact that recent auroral displays at high latitudes (ones visible to the naked eye) were accompanied by far less luminous glows in the atmosphere at lower latitudes."It's exciting to see the return of aurora to mid-latitudes," Dr. Steve Smith said, referring to the periodic occurrence of emissions in the Earth's atmosphere that have intrigued observers from ancient to modern times.What has fascinated space scientists in recent years is the delayed onset of such effects. Typically, the Sun has an activity cycle of about 11 years, with flares and ejections of electrically charged particles (called the solar wind) that cause changes in the Earth's magnetic field that produce, as a side product, luminous emissions in the atmosphere.

A change in the color of ocean waters could have a drastic effect on the prevalence of hurricanes, new research indicates. In a simulation of such a change in one region of the North Pacific, the study finds that hurricane formation decreases by 70 percent. That would be a big drop for a region that accounts for more than half the world's reported hurricane-force winds.It turns out that the formation of typhoons - as hurricanes are known in the region - is heavily mediated by the presence of chlorophyll, a green pigment that helps the tiny single-celled organisms known as phytoplankton convert sunlight into food for the rest of the marine ecosystem. Chlorophyll contributes to the ocean's color."We think of the oceans as blue, but the oceans aren't really blue, they're actually a sort of greenish color," said Anand Gnanadesikan, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. "The fact that [the oceans] are not blue has a [direct] impact on the distribution of tropical cyclones."

"Herpes and herpes-like viruses are known to infect a wide range of bivalve mollusk species throughout the world," according to co-author Tristan Renault and his colleagues. Renault is director of the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea.He and his team note that "abnormal summer mortalities" associated with the new herpes virus Ostreid herpesvirus 1 (OsHV-1) have been reported among the Pacific cupped Crassostrea gigas, an oyster important to commercial harvests worldwide. It is the number one shellfish resource in Washington State, for example.The scientists, in a prior study, demonstrated how quickly this new particular strain of herpes reproduces within oysters. It attacks young oysters at times when their immune systems are compromised.

(AP) -- A crate of Scotch whisky that was trapped in Antarctic ice for a century was finally opened Friday - but the heritage dram won't be tasted by whisky lovers because it's being preserved for its historical significance.

A heated debate is under way among senior officials in Mexico over whether the government should legalise the use and sale of marijuana.The discussion comes as violence from competing drug cartels in the country continues to spiral out of control, claiming thousands of lives every year.Felipe Calderon, Mexico's president, has said he is firmly against the legalisation, arguing that it would only create "millions" of more drug addicts.But Vicente Fox, the country's former president and a member of Calderon's conservative National Action Party, has urged the government to legalise drugs in order to "break the economic structure that allows gangs to generate huge profits in their trade, which feeds corruption and increases their areas of power".

FINDING it difficult to revise for an exam? Help could be on its way in the form of the first non-invasive way of stimulating the brain that can boost visual memory.The technique uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which weak electrical currents are applied to the scalp using electrodes. The method can temporarily increase or decrease activity in a specific brain region and has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills in volunteers.Richard Chi, a PhD student at the Centre for the Mind, University of Sydney, and colleagues wanted to follow up on previous research showing that lesions in the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), an area near the temple, can lead to improvements in visual memory and perceptual skills similar to the abilities exhibited by some people with autism.

To many conservatives, almost everything is a secret liberal plot: from fluoride in the water to medicare reimbursements for end-of-life planning with your doctor to efforts to teach evolution in schools. But Conservapedia founder and Eagle Forum University instructor Andy Schlafly -- Phyllis Schlafly's son -- has found one more liberal plot: the theory of relativity.If you're behind on your physics, the Theory of Relativity was Albert Einstein's formulation in the early 20th century that gave rise to the famous theorum that E=mc2, otherwise stated as energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light. Why does Andy Schlafly hate the theory of relativity? We're pretty sure it's because he's decided it doesn't square with the Bible.

On Aug. 5, 2010, an enormous chunk of ice, about 251 square kilometers (97 square miles) in size, or roughly four times the size of Manhattan, broke off the Petermann Glacier along the northwestern coast of Greenland. The Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70-kilometer-long (40-miles) floating ice shelf, according to researchers at the University of Delaware, Newark, Dela. The recently calved iceberg is the largest to form in the Arctic in 50 years.Icebergs calving off the Petermann Glacier are not unusual. Petermann Glacier's floating ice tongue is the Northern Hemisphere's largest, and it has occasionally calved large icebergs.

A team of marine archeologists using sonar scanners has discovered new underwater treasures in the Italian seas. Trading vessels dating from the first century BC to the 5th through 7th centuries AD were found in the waters of the Pontine Islands. Their cargoes were found to be intact.Italian culture authorities and the Aurora Trust, a U.S. foundation which promotes underwater exploration in the Mediterranean, discovered four shipwrecks resting on the seabed. The discovery was made in a beautiful stretch of sea off the tiny rock of Zannone, part of the Pontine Islands in central Italy.After the discovery, the team of marine archaeologists used sonar scanners for the exploration and filmed the targets lying on the seabed. The remains of the ships, up to 18 meters long, were found and documented at a depth of between 100-150 meters.