Newsdesk Archive
The California Chamber of Commerce and other groups representing employers are starting to line up to oppose the initiative to legalize marijuana, charging that Proposition 19 would allow pot smokers to light up on the job and operate dangerous equipment while stoned.Stepping up the campaign on Thursday, the chamber released a five-page analysis that starts: "Imagine a workplace where employees show up to work high on marijuana and there is nothing you can do about it."Allan Zaremberg, the chamber's chief executive, criticized the measure, saying it would set a high bar for employers to act against workers using marijuana by requiring proof that they were actually impaired. "Prop. 19 creates a new protected class of California citizens," he said.
The site of an ancient city called Auza, the earliest African city of the Phoenician civilization that existed 3,500 years ago, may have been in a different spot than experts have thought, archaeologists report.Scholars know Auza existed from written records, but its exact location has never been proven. By studying ancient maps and records, emeritus classics professor Sir John Boardman of the Beazley Archive at Britain's University of Oxford was able to locate a more likely site for the ancient city, he said."This is simply a matter of making a suggestion of where the place is actually to be located on a map," Boardman told LiveScience. "Too many people have wanted to put it much too far away."
Imagine you suddenly discovered part of your umbilical cord was still attached. Scientists just did that for the planet Earth. What's been found is a clear sign that beneath the crust in northern Canada there is a chunk of pristine, undisturbed rock from the time when Earth was nothing but molten rock.The evidence comes in the form of lava rocks that, themselves, are a mere 60 million years old. But these rocks contain an early Earth mixture of helium, lead and neodymium isotopes which suggest the mantle rock beneath the crust that yielded them is a virgin pocket of Earth's original material.
Aug 2 (Reuters) - Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.Tumor cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancer types."These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation," Dr. Anthony Heaney of UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center and colleagues wrote.
Its name in Arabic is Wadi Hitan but it is known as the Valley of the Whales.For years palaeontologists have been unearthing a remarkable collection of whale fossils, all the more surprising because the area is now inland desert in upper Egypt.It is believed that about 40 million years ago the area was submerged in water, part of the Tethys Sea. As the sea retreated north to the Mediterranean it left a series of unique rock formations and also a cornucopia of fossils.One of the most exceptional finds was a 37 million-year-old whale from the species Basilosaurus isis, unearthed by a team led by Prof Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan in the United States.
JUPITER might have secured its position as the solar system's mightiest planet by killing an up-and-coming rival, new simulations suggest. The work could explain why the planet has a relatively small heart, and paints a grisly picture of the early solar system, where massive, rocky "super-Earths" were snuffed out before they could grow into gas giants.Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have begun life as rocky worlds with the mass of at least a few Earths. Their gravity then pulled in gas from their birth nebula, giving them dense atmospheres.
Star-gazers are being urged to stay up late and enjoy one of the best displays of the Perseid meteor showers for some years on the night of 12 August 2010.This is because they coincide with a moon-free night, so the skies are darker than usual.Dr Carolyn Crawford from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge advised the use of one bit of specialist equipment."A reclining chair. You'll get a crick in the back of the neck if you're looking up for long," she pointed out.
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.Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. "Is this the end of antibiotics?" it asked.
A giant sheet of ice measuring 260 sq km (100 sq miles) has broken off a glacier in Greenland, according to researchers at a US university.The block of ice separated from the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland.It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962, said Prof Andreas Muenchow of the University of Delaware.The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada.
The Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the world's largest and oldest monuments, and isn't without its mystery. Theories fly around regularly about whether there are secret tunnels or hidden halls under the Sphinx, which Dr Zahi Hawass, currently starring in the 'Chasing Mummies' series, insists is not the case in this Heritage Key video (Watch the Video). But my question is much more simple - Whatever happened to the nose of the Great Sphinx?In a previous Heritage Key article, "Riddle of the Sphinx", Robert Cook wrote about the legend that Napoleon's troops used the Sphinx's nose as target practice during the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. But did they really have such a disregard for thousands of years of history that they purposefully destroyed the nose of the Great Sphinx
A third case of meat linked to a cloned cow being sold in the UK has emerged, the Food Standards Agency says.The watchdog's statement follows two cases involving Highlands farm bulls grown from embryos of a cow cloned in the US.The latest case involves meat from a male calf slaughtered on 16 June that was sent to a London butcher's shop.
Every summer for the past nine years, water with lethally low concentrations of oxygen has appeared off the Oregon coast. The hypoxia may be a sign of things to come elsewhere, finds Virginia Gewin.The dead fish were one of the first signs. In July 2002, scientists with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife found unusual numbers of bottom-feeding sculpin lying lifeless on the ocean floor, which would normally be teeming with life. Crabs were also dying, and they washed up onto some beaches in large numbers.Officials at the government agency asked Francis Chan, a biogeochemist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, for help in discovering the cause of the disturbance as quickly as possible. Chan was about to set off on a scheduled research cruise along the Oregon coast, so he grabbed all the extra equipment he could think of, including a brand-new oxygen sensor.
The renowned astrophysicist said he fears mankind is in great danger and its future "must be in space" if it is to survive.In an interview he said threats to the existence of the human race such as war, resource depletion and overpopulation meant it was at its greater risk ever.Although a long advocate of colonising space in order to continue man's reign, this is his direst warning to date."It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million," he told the website Big Think."Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space.
Archaeologists are claiming to have discovered the oldest house in Britain.The circular structure, found at a site near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, has been dated as being made in 8,500BC.Described as a "sensational discovery" by archaeologists, this is 500 years earlier than the previous oldest house.The teams from the universities of Manchester and York are also examining a nearby wooden platform, which is being claimed as the oldest example of carpentry in Europe.Nicky Milner, an archaeologist from the University York, says such sites are "incredibly rare" - and that finding such early evidence of settled living gives a new insight into hunter gatherers.
A Sacramento Bee/Field Poll survey released over the weekend found support for legalizing marijuana in California at 51%. The poll was not measuring support for Proposition 19, the Tax and Regulate Cannabis marijuana legalization initiative, but instead asked respondents: "Which action best fits what you feel should be done about marijuana laws?"Legalization got 51%, with 47% saying marijuana should be legalized and controlled like alcohol and another 4% saying marijuana should be legalized -- period. Thirteen percent wanted to keep current laws, but lessen the penalties (which pending decriminalization legislation would accomplish), while 19% wanted tough enforcement of existing laws and a hard-core 14% wanted even tougher pot laws.
(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has some advice for the people of Earth - it's time to get off."I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking said to Big Think , a global forum that includes interviews with experts."It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."The physicist called humankind's survival "a question of touch and go" and referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as one time people narrowly avoided extinction. He also referred to the 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons, including 7,770 still operational, scattered around the planet.
Researchers have found evidence that hominins - early human ancestors - used stone tools to cleave meat from animal bones more than 3.2 million years ago.That pushes back the earliest known tool use and meat-eating in such hominins by more than 800,000 years.
Scientists have found Arctic rocks that may preserve the earliest remnants of Earth.Over billions of years, much of the material that made up the early Earth was modified by processes such as melting and mixing.But the Arctic rocks seem to contain chemical signatures that date from just after the Earth's violent origin.If confirmed, the discovery challenges established theories about the formation of our planet.The results of the study are published today in the leading journal, Nature.The signatures found in Arctic lavas are more than 4.45 billion years old. By comparison, the Earth is 4.54 billion years old, only slightly older.The oldest surviving remnants of our planet's turbulent beginnings were unearthed by Dr Matthew Jackson of Boston University, US, and his international team.
A claim to have solved one of the most difficult riddles in mathematics has been challenged by scientists.Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician based at Hewlett-Packard laboratories in California, US, claims to have solved the problem of P vs NP.This has been described as the biggest problem in computer science; it is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems set out by the Clay Mathematics Institute.But maths experts have weighed in to point out flaws in his proof.Clay has offered one million US dollars in prize money for the solution of each of these problems, which they declared to be the most difficult in maths.
Archaeologists have discovered several large buildings at the fortress of Caerleon in south Wales, one of Britain's best known Roman sites.The major discovery was made by chance by students learning to use geophysical equipment.Cardiff University's Peter Guest said the find was "totally unexpected".It is possible the buildings, which may include baths and temples, are first evidence of Roman plans to develop Caerleon into a major settlement.Caerleon (Isca), which dates from AD 75, is one of three permanent legionary fortresses in the UK, and was used for 200 years. The others at Chester and York - are mostly buried and difficult to excavate.
The Gondwana supercontinent underwent a 60-degree rotation across Earth's surface during the Early Cambrian period, according to new evidence uncovered by a team of Yale University geologists. Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that constituted the Earth's landmass before it broke up into the separate continents we see today.The study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Geology, has implications for the environmental conditions that existed at a crucial period in Earth's evolutionary history called the Cambrian explosion, when most of the major groups of complex animals rapidly appeared.The team studied the paleomagnetic record of the Amadeus Basin in central Australia, which was part of the Gondwana precursor supercontinent. Based on the directions of the ancient rock's magnetization, they discovered that the entire Gondwana landmass underwent a rapid 60-degree rotational shift, with some regions attaining a speed of at least 16 (+12/-8) cm/year, about 525 million years ago. By comparison, the fastest shifts we see today are at speeds of about four cm/year.
JERUSALEM -- Archaeologists say they have uncovered the heaviest and most valuable gold coin ever found in Israel. The 2,200-year-old coin weighs an ounce (28 grams) and was found at the Tel Kedesh site near the Lebanon border on June 22, according to Wednesday's statement from the antiquities authority.It said this coin is six times the weight of most others from that era.Donald Ariel, head of the antiquities authority coin department, said the coin dates back to the rule of the Iraq-based Seleucid Empire, though it was minted by the rival Egyptian Ptolemies.
Syria (Tartous) - A religious cemetery building with carvings dating back to the 6th and 5th centuries BC was unearthed in the Phoenician city of Amrit in Tartous, say Syrian Archaeologists.Director of Archaeological Excavations and Studies Michel Maqdisi said the building consists of a façade that has two entrances engraved on a 2 meter high huge stone surface.The façade to the eastern side is skillfully carved with symbolic decorations similar to what we find on the Phoenician tombstones or those dated to 1000 BC, he added.
We do our best to maintain high standards on Newsdesk, and although we are happy to include links to unorthodox, non-mainstream sources where the material is reliable it is inevitably the case, from time to time, that an item from an unreliable source slips through. Some days ago a newslink to a story about Tutankhamen's DNA was posted on Newsdesk by a new member of our volunteer staff who, unfortunately, did not follow the proper vetting procedures. It appears that this link came from a source promoting a particular political agenda which raises questions over the reliability of the story itself. We therefore deleted the news item as soon as the nature of the source was drawn to our attention. It is important to put on record that this link did not come to us through Steve Detwiler, our regular source of high-quality news and the co-editor of our Newsdesk, but was posted by grahamhancock.com volunteer staff without reference to Steve. We apologise to readers and will continue to do our very best in future to vet all news sources for reliability before postingGraham Hancock
Early-warning systems and infrared cameras have been installed in the ancient Mediterranean city of Rhodiapolis to protect the site and local historical artifacts from earthquakes, floods and fires, the Anatolia news agency reported Sunday.The European Union has granted 2 million euros to the project, which is being developed in the Kumluca district of Antalya in conjunction with Bilkent University.
Earth's solid inner core may be continually inching eastward relative to its liquid outer core, renewing itself by shedding its front while solidifying its back, a team of French scientists suggests."Within less than 100 million years, everything that has been crystallized on the west will have melted on the east," said lead researcher Thierry Alboussiere of Universite Joseph Fourier in Grenoble.
TIMBUCTOO, N.J. -- In Timbuctoo lies a hill. Underneath that hill lies a house, or what archaeologists think might have been a house once upon a time. The silver clasp of a woman's handbag, piles of Mason jars, chips of dinner plates and an empty jar of Dixie Peach Pomade lie among the bricks that have broken away from the foundation.These are crushed fragments of a past life when free black people lived in this New Jersey community almost 200 years ago -- free even then, 45 years before Emancipation. "Most of the history of this country is in that house," says David Orr, a classical archaeologist and professor of anthropology at Temple University. Orr is standing at the site down a gray road in Timbuctoo. A hot wind is blowing.
CORNING, N.Y. (AP) -- An ultra-strong glass that has been looking for a purpose since its invention in 1962 is poised to become a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Corning Inc.The 159-year-old glass pioneer is ramping up production of what it calls Gorilla glass, expecting it to be the hot new face of touch-screen tablets and high-end TVs.
KWIDZYN, Poland -- They were medieval warriors who spread Catholicism by the sword and seized Polish lands with great cruelty. But that's not stopping the Polish city of Kwidzyn from capitalizing on the aura surrounding the Teutonic Knights.The city - dominated by a massive red brick fortress that was once a base for their notorious raids - is consecrating a church crypt and displaying the newly discovered skeletons of three of the order's 14th- and 15th-century military leaders - or "grand masters." The aim is to stimulate tourism in a region still struggling with high unemployment, old roads and other legacies of communism.
The M. Star, a Japanese oil tanker, suffered ... something in the early-morning hours Wednesday as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Crew members heard a blast and saw a flash, windows were blasted out, ceiling panels in a dining room were shaken loose, and one crew member suffered minor injuries. And most significant, an enormous dent appeared on the tanker's starboard side, extending from the waterline more than halfway up the hull. But what caused it? the New York Times asks. Who knows?Officials with Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, the firm that owns the tanker, think a blast of some kind struck the ship, but they don't know what, AFP reports.
Bringing the do-it-yourself market to a whole new level, a California firm is selling kits to build a personal satellite -- and get it into space -- for $8,000.The program, called TubeSat, is the brainchild of Randa and Roderick Milliron, a Mojave, Calif.-based couple who've been developing a bare-bones, low-cost rocket system for the past 14 years. Selling flights as a package deal with satellite-building kits is proving to be a winning combination, with more than a dozen customers signed up to fly on the debut launch early next year.
The letter is marked "personal and private" and is addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary, Grace Tully, who was with the ailing chief executive in Warm Springs, Ga., that Thursday in 1945.The writer was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who decades before had been FDR's mistress and who now was making arrangements for what would be their last fateful meeting at the president's rural retreat.
Its name in Arabic is Wadi Hitan but it is known as the Valley of the Whales.For years palaeontologists have been unearthing a remarkable collection of whale fossils, all the more surprising because the area is now inland desert in upper Egypt.It is believed that about 40 million years ago the area was submerged in water, part of the Tethys Sea. As the sea retreated north to the Mediterranean it left a series of unique rock formations and also a cornucopia of fossils.
Two research reports published Friday offer novel approaches to the age-old dream of regenerating the body from its own cells.Animals like newts and zebra fish can regenerate limbs, fins, even part of the heart. If only people could do the same, amputees might grow new limbs and stricken hearts be coaxed to repair themselves.But humans have very little regenerative capacity, probably because of an evolutionary trade-off: suppressing cell growth reduced the risk of cancer, enabling humans to live longer. A person can renew his liver to some extent, and regrow a fingertip while very young, but not much more.
(CNN) -- A piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan island has broken away from an ice shelf in Greenland, according to scientists in the U.S.The 260 square-kilometer (100 square miles) ice island separated from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland early on Thursday, researchers based at the University of Delaware said.The ice island, which is about half the height of the Empire State Building, is the biggest piece of ice to break away from the Arctic icecap since 1962 and amounts to a quarter of the Petermann 70-kilometer floating ice shelf, according to research leader Andreas Muenchow.
US researchers have for the first time encouraged substantial regrowth in nerves controlling voluntary movement after spinal cord injury.By manipulating an enzyme involved in cell growth, researchers were able to regenerate spinal cord nerves in mice, Nature Neuroscience reports.It follows similar work on repairing the optic nerve to restore sight.
A manned mission to Mars may still be more science fiction than science fact, but that hasn't stopped a team of scientists from developing the perfect space suit for the first astronauts to set for on the Red Planet's dusty surface.Martian temperatures can plummet to 113 degrees below freezing, so the first men (or women) on Mars will need to wrap up warm.The Austrian Airspace Forum, who are developing the suit, luckily have a suitably frosty testing environment right on their doorstep: ice tunnels beneath the Kaunertaler Glacier.
Researchers in the US have found new evidence that genetically modified crop plants can survive and thrive in the wild, possibly for decades.A University of Arkansas team surveyed countryside in North Dakota for canola. Transgenes were present in 80% of the wild canola plants they found.They suggest GM traits may help the plants survive weedkillers in the wild.
Contrary to recent reports about water content in lunar rocks, the Moon may be quite dry, say scientists.A study by US researchers, published in Science, analysed chlorine isotopes of the much-studied samples, brought to Earth by the Apollo space missions.They added that there was no or very little hydrogen in the magma ocean during the Moon's formation.
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. --- A decade after the raising of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley off the South Carolina coast, the cause of the sinking of the first sub in history to sink an enemy warship remains a mystery. But scientists are edging closer.On Friday, scientists announced one of the final steps that should help explain what happened after the hand-cranked sub and its eight-man crew rammed a spar with a powder charge into the Union blockade ship Housatonic off Charleston in February 1864.
LOS ANGELES -- Armenian-American lawyers filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the Turkish government and two banks seeking compensation for the heirs of Armenians whose property was allegedly seized nearly a century ago as they were driven from the Turkish Ottoman Empire.Lawyers were seeking class-action status for the suit, a process that attorney Brian Kabateck said could take as long as three years.
Genetic investigators say the partnership between people and the ancestors of today's donkeys was sealed not by monarchs trying to establish kingdoms, but by mobile, pastoral people who had to recruit animals to help them survive the harsh Saharan landscape in northern Africa more than 5,000 years ago.The findings, reported today by an international research team in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paint a surprising picture of what small, isolated groups of people were able to accomplish when confronted with unpredictable storms and expanding desert.
Internationally-renowned dinosaur hunter Phil Manning, from the University of Manchester, and his team are hoping to bag a Triceratops skeleton from a 'secret location' they've found in the South Dakota Badlands, according to Manning.He and his colleagues believe at least three skeletons of this iconic dinosaur are gently weathering in 65-million-year-old rocks at the undisclosed site.At present, Manning and his colleagues are trying to figure out how they can excavate one of the Triceratops skeletons from its rocky Hell Creek Formation tomb.
The next time you feel angry at a friend who has let you down, or grateful toward one whose generosity has surprised you, consider this: you may really be bargaining for better treatment from that person in the future. According to a controversial new theory, our emotions have evolved as tools to manipulate others into cooperating with us.Until now, most psychologists have viewed anger as a way to signal your displeasure when another person does you harm. Similarly, gratitude has been seen as a signal of pleasure when someone does you a favour. In both cases, emotions are seen as short-term reactions to an immediate benefit or cost.
Recently discovered tracks indicate animal about 8 inches long.A tiny reptile scampering along an Outback-like environment snagging insects some 318 million years ago left behind footprints that are now the oldest evidence of reptiles to date.From the size of the tracks, the researchers suggest the animal was about the size of a gecko, nearly 8 inches from snout to tail tip. "This is the earliest evidence we've got for reptiles," said Howard Falcon-Lang of Royal Holloway, University of London.
Internationally-renowned dinosaur hunter Phil Manning, from the University of Manchester, and his team are hoping to bag a Triceratops skeleton from a 'secret location' they've found in the South Dakota Badlands, according to Manning.He and his colleagues believe at least three skeletons of this iconic dinosaur are gently weathering in 65-million-year-old rocks at the undisclosed site.
A new technique blasts holes in cells to deliver vaccines or drugs to fight cancer at light-speed.Drugs and vaccines could one day make their way into your body at the speed of light. Scientists from Georgia Tech can now blast a hole in a cell, place a molecule inside and seal it back up a split second later using a laser pulse.The new technique could deliver drugs, vaccines and other molecules that otherwise wouldn't be able to get past a cell's defences.
It takes a twisted engineering mind to come up with something this brilliant: a biomimetic mold constructed from fly eyes. One particular type of fly eye has just the right shape that could be perfect for manufacturing efficient solar cells.Lakhtakia and a team of Penn State researchers came up with a promising solution. First they picked corneas from blowflies because this common type of fly has ideal eyes for solar cell applications. According to a description from PSU, "Blowflies have compound eyes that are roughly hemispherical; but within that half sphere, the surface is covered by macroscale hexagonal eyes with nanoscale features."
A new article in press of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Lettersunveils groundbreaking research on the hydrothermal formation of Clay-Carbonate rocks in the Nili Fossae region of Mars. The findings may provide a link to evidence of living organisms on Mars, roughly 4 billion years ago in the Noachian period.The paper "Hydrothermal formation of Clay-Carbonate alteration assemblages in the Nili Fossae region of Mars", by Adrian J. Brown et al, suggests that carbonate bearing rocks found in the Nili Fossae region of Mars are made up of hydrothermally altered ultramafic (perhaps komatiitic) rocks.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star. The discovery is expected to shed light on the early stages of solar system formation.Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star.An international team led by University of Hawaii astronomers Beth Biller and Michael Liu with help from University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and UA graduate students Eric Nielsen, Jared Males and Andy Skemer made the rare find using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, or NICI, on the international 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile.
(PhysOrg.com) -- By suggesting that mass, time, and length can be converted into one another as the universe evolves, Wun-Yi Shu has proposed a new class of cosmological models that may fit observations of the universe better than the current big bang model. What this means specifically is that the new models might explain the increasing acceleration of the universe without relying on a cosmological constant such as dark energy, as well as solve or eliminate other cosmological dilemmas such as the flatness problem and the horizon problem.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Challenges of the future include energy use and continued population growth. And, while there are millions of square miles of land available in the world, not all of it is considered fit for human habitation. Shimizu Corporation, the company contemplating the Luna Ring, has another interesting project in the "just coming up with an idea" stage: The Desert Aqua-Net.The Desert Aqua-Net is an idea that involves the building of interconnected lakes in the desert. These 18-mile-diameter lakes would be connected by canals fed from the ocean. The lakes would include built islands that could serve as homes for cities teeming with people. Supposedly, this would work because water from the lake would cool the cities, making them livable. There would also be arable land, theoretically, after this cooling above the desert lake islands. The cities would be powered by satellite power stations, and by the sun.
A pair of Earth-orbiting satellites designed to study the auroras are making a detour to visit the moon.The two spacecraft are part of a fleet of five launched into Earth orbit by NASA in 2007 on a mission called THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). They have been studying the space storms that trigger the northern and southern lights, or auroras, on Earth.But two of the satellites were set to go on death row earlier this year. If they had been left in their original orbits, the solar-powered craft would have made lengthy passages through Earth's shadow in March 2010, fatally draining their batteries, according to a Discovery News story.
It is every backyard inventor's dream to develop a new power source that will provide unlimited energy to the world. More often than not, the dream is a mirage which leads its inventor ever farther from physics and deeper into fantasy. Then again, some out-there ideas could offer real hope for the future. Here are a handful of cutting-edge technologies that, their inventors hope, could lead to cheap, plentiful energy.
A new, implantable sensor that wirelessly transmits blood-glucose data has the potential to completely change the way most diabetics control their disease.The round device is just a bit smaller than a Double-Stuf Oreo -- about 1.5 inches wide and half an inch thick -- and would be implanted in a person's torso. It's hermetically sealed, with an integrated antenna that wirelessly transmits data, a long-lived battery, and a pair of sensors. One sensor detects only oxygen, the other a reaction that involves both oxygen and glucose. No matter how dense the scar tissue surrounding the implant, the two-sensor combination compensates, allowing the device to correctly calculate glucose levels in the blood.
Stone tools, flakes and the remains of a final feast at the site in Wiltshire hint that the huge sarsens that now stand at Stonehenge were brought to Marden Henge first.The last revellers seem to have cleared up scrupulously after the final party at Marden Henge some 4,500 years ago.They scoured the rectangular building and the smart white chalk platform on top of the earth bank, with its spectacular view towards the river Avon in one direction, and the hills from which the giant sarsen stones were brought to Stonehenge in the other.
LONDON, (CAIS) -- An ancient network of secret tunnels and dwellings has been discovered in Hamedan Province.The Iranian province lies in an elevated region, with the 'Alvand' mountains, running from the north west to the south west.The discovered complex is located near the village of Arzanfud, 25 kilometres southeast of the provincial capital-city of Hamedan, the Hamedan Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Department (HCHTHD) announced Saturday in a press release.
For the first time in Israel, a document has been uncovered containing a law code that parallels portions of the famous Code of Hammurabi. The code is written on fragments of a cuneiform tablet, dating from the 18th-17th centuries B.C.E in the Middle Bronze Age, that were found in Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeological excavations this summer at Hazor, south of Kiryat Shmonah, in northern Israel.The Hazor excavations, known as the Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin, are under the direction of Prof. Amnon Ben-Tor and Dr. Sharon Zuckerman of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Previous excavations were directed at the site by the late Prof. Yigael Yadin in the 1950s and 1960s.
A settlement dating back about 7000 years has been discovered by a hill near the village of Ivanovo, in Shoumen municipality, in eastern Bulgaria, Bulgarian National Television (BNT) reported on July 26 2010.The settlement, 900 sq m in area, lies between two rivers on the south face of the hill. In spite of its natural defences, the settlement was fortified with a defensive wall of "unusual shape", BNT said."The shape of the fortification was not circular or oval-like, which was typical for the time but an irregular pattern resembling an octagon," archaeologist Svetlana Venelinova said in a television interview for BNT.
What's a Stone Age axe doing in an Iron Age tomb? The archaeologists Olle Hemdorff at the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology and Eva Thäte are researching older objects in younger graves. They have found a pattern."If one finds something once, it's accidental. If it is found twice, it's puzzling. If found thrice, there is a pattern", the archaeologists Olle Hemdorff and Eva Thäte say.
Robotic devices equipped with electronic sensors, laser detection and ranging.Snakes can creep and they can crawl, but they're not very good at defusing bombs or going on search-and-rescue missions. Snake robots, however, might be a different story.In a project called the Robotic Tentacle Manipulator, engineers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory are developing snake-like autonomous robots that can go into dangerous situations in place of live soldiers to aid in search and rescue missions and to inspect potential threats from Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs.
RICHMOND, Va. -- A team of scientists will launch an expedition to the Titanic next month to assess the deteriorating condition of the world's most famous shipwreck and create a detailed three-dimensional map that will "virtually raise the Titanic" for the public.The expedition to the site 2 1/2 miles beneath the North Atlantic is billed as the most advanced scientific mission to the Titanic wreck since its discovery 25 years ago.
A UN panel has voted to remove the Galapagos Islands from its list of precious sites endangered by environmental threats or overuse.Unesco's World Heritage Committee backed a Brazilian recommendation to withdraw the islands from the list, saying the Ecuadorian government had made significant progress addressing threats to its island.
Bar Ilan University archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of a Philistine temple in the ancient city of Gath, home of the Biblical Goliath, buried in one of the largest tels (ancient ruin mounds) in Israel.The temple and a number of ritual items dating back to the 10th century BCE were discovered at Tel Tsafit (Tell es-Safit/Gath) by Professor Aren Maeir of BIU's Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology and his international team. The tel is located about halfway between Ashkelon and Jerusalem, near Kiryat Gat along the southern coastal plain.
Tim Gent and his team have discovered two roman forts on the site of the old St Loyes School Topsham Road Exeter.EXETER archaeologists believe they have found a second Roman fort on a development site in the city.As the Echo has already reported, a team of city archaeologists has unearthed a previously unknown fort on the site of the former St Loye's campus off Topsham Road.
For August 2010 Author of the Month we are very pleased to welcome writer, seeker and teacher Evan Pritchard. Evan is a descendant of the Micmac people and is the founder of The Center for Algonquin Culture. He will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout August to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article
Between now and 2012 it's up to you and your friends, communities, governments, newspapers, to advocate for evidence based drug policy and strengthen the call for policies driven by evidence. Join the movement to end the failed war on drugs, sign the declaration and share it with your networks today.The Vienna Declaration is a statement seeking to improve community health and safety by calling for the incorporation of scientific evidence into illicit drug policies. We are inviting scientists, health practitioners and the public to endorse this document in order to bring these issues to the attention of governments and international agencies, and to illustrate that drug policy reform is a matter of urgent international significance. We also welcome organizational endorsements. For a brief listing of high profile endorsements to date, please click here.
Lost in the Canadian Arctic, two British polar exploration ships more than 150 years old are frozen in some icy nook and cranny.Despite more than 30 search and rescue missions for Captain Sir John Franklin and his crew, only scraps of evidence -- forks and spoons, shoes, a letter -- have been found of the 1845 expedition.Now a team of Canadian archaeologists is setting off with modern sonar sea-floor mapping instruments, along with historical records to locate HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, reports a BBC News article. The researchers hope to finally piece together what happened to the shipwrecked crew.
Chinese archaeologists are due to begin searching for the remains of a Chinese ship believed to have sunk off the Kenyan coast 600 years ago.The shipwreck could provide evidence of the first contact between China and east Africa.The three-year project will search in northern Kenyan coastal waters off Lamu island and Malindi.
The last humans on Earth may have survived an ice age by retreating to a small patch of land nicknamed 'the garden of Eden'.The strip of land on Africa's southern coast - around 240 miles east of Cape Town - became the only place that remained habitable during the devastating ice age, scientists claimThe sudden change in temperature wiped out many species elsewhere around 195,000 years ago.
A giant asteroid called 1999 RQ36 may crash into Earth on September 24 2182, scientists believe.A team of experts, including some working for NASA, believes the 612-yards-wide object has a one-in-a-thousand chance of an impact 172 years from now.The odds of a crash are considerably shorter than those given for the asteroid Apophis, which has a 1 in 250,000 chance of striking Earth in 2036.
It has been more than 150 years since Capt Sir John Franklin and his 128 men perished in the Canadian Arctic, their ships lost in one of the greatest disasters of British polar exploration.Now, a Canadian archaeological team is en route to the Arctic in a fresh hunt for Franklin's ships.
Can a manufacturing industry purr along without a class system of managers and workers? That's part of a longtime mystery that may soon be solved: How did a prehistoric, egalitarian people called the Hohokam produce large quantities of decorated ceramic vessels without a "manager" hierarchy?Archaeologists from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the Cultural Resource Management Program of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona have launched a unique research partnership to decipher the mechanics of the large-scale industry.
A University of Southampton researcher is part of a team which has just secured funding from Google to make the classics and other ancient texts easy to discover and access online.Leif Isaksen at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is working together with Dr Elton Barker at The Open University and Dr Eric Kansa of the University of California-Berkeley on the Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus project, which is one of 12 projects worldwide to receive funding as part of a new Digital Humanities Research Programme funded by Google.
Amman - A joint Jordanian-German archaeological team has discovered a statue in Jordan's eastern desert that dates back 6,000 years, media reports said Wednesday.The discovery shed new light on a little-known ancient Bedouin civilization that once thrived in the desert connecting Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the Department of Antiquities was quoted as saying.
An 800-year-old, pre-Columbian burial ground with baskets full of human remains was unearthed at a building site outside San Jose, National Museum archaeologists said Tuesday."It's a funeral complex made from river stones and slabs," Maritza Gutierrez, who heads the digs at the Tres Rios district 10 kilometers (six miles) from the capital, told reporters.
Researchers who probed tiny fragments of a Dead Sea Scroll with protons found its chemistry matches that of the water in the area where the ancient document was found.Proton beams have shed new light on the origin of the longest of the Dead Sea scrolls, suggesting its parchment was manufactured locallyAccording to a study carried out at the labs of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Catania, Sicily, the 28-foot-long Temple Scroll was made in Qumran, in what is now Israel, in the same area on the Dead Sea coast where the faded parchments were found hidden in caves half a century ago.
An American brewery has recreated a 9000-year-old beer after analysing the insides of neolithic pottery found at a burial site in Henan province, in central China.Chateau Jiahu, from the Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware, is brewed from wildflower honey, muscat grapes, barley malt, hawthorn fruit and chrysanthemums, and will go on sale in the US next month at $US13 ($A15) a bottle.
(July 22) -- Archaeologists digging in a cave in Israel have found what looks to be the world's first cutlery: tiny stone knives dating back at least 200,000 years that would have been used to cut meat during a meal.Made of flint, the ancient knives are about the size and shape of a quarter. But these puny bits of stone have two razor-sharp edges and two dull edges. That made them easy to hold between two fingers and safe to wield close to the mouth, says Tel-Aviv University's Ran Barkai, leader of the team that made the finding.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers have discovered evidence of Southeast Asian sailing vessels visiting Australia in the mid-1600s -- the oldest contact rock art in Australia.The discovery was made by the team taking part in the Picturing Change fieldwork project in the Wellington Range, Arnhem Land. The rock shelter the researchers are studying at Djulirri has nearly 1200 individual paintings and beeswax figures. It was documented by Professor Paul Taçon (Griffith University), Mr. Ronald Lamilami (Senior Traditional Owner) and Dr Sally K. May (ANU).
An archaeological dig is producing finds on the site of a historic 9th Century monument in Llangollen.Within days of opening trenches on the site of the Pillar of Eliseg, diggers have found pieces of Roman pottery as well as shards of post medieval pottery.
A dog jaw bone fossil found in a Swiss cave may be the oldest evidence of human-canine companionship.Every dog has its day, but that day took more than 14,000 years to dawn for one canine. A jaw fragment found in a Swiss cave comes from the earliest known dog, according to scientists who analyzed and radiocarbon-dated the fossil.
New wooden henge, a circular ditch that aligns with world-famous monument, deemed site's most exciting find in a lifetime.Without a sod of earth being dug up, a new henge, a circular ditch which probably enclosed a ring of timber posts and may have been used for feasting, has been discovered within sight of Stonehenge.
Out in the Kenyan desert, a trail of extremely old footprints are etched into sedimentary rock -- a memory of early humans and how they moved.Created around 1.5 million years ago, these are the oldest footprints that look like those made by modern humans. A team of scientists, including Brian Richmond from George Washington University, discovered these precious fossilized prints in dried mud in 2009.
Bulgarian archaeologists have uncovered a unique residence of the rulers of the Odrysian Kingdom, the state of the most powerful tribe of Ancient Thrace.The residence is located on the Kozi Gramadi mount in the Sredna Gora mountain, close to the resort town of Hissar in central Bulgaria, at about 1 200 m above sea level.
Zecharia Sitchin, now in his 90th year, is an internationally acclaimed researcher and author of 14 books that retell the history and prehistory of mankind and planet Earth by combining archaeology, the Bible, and ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts with the latest scientific discoveries ranging from space exploration to biology. Able to read millennia-old Sumerian cuneiform tablets, his writings treat ancient sources not as myth, but as records of actual events. The result is a saga of flesh and blood, astronauts, gods and Earthlings, and a chain of events from the past that leads to a prophetic future. See http://www.innertraditions.com/sitchin/, and http://www.sitchin.com/.
They call him the Pharaoh, the keeper of the pyramids. He rules Egyptology with an iron fist and a censorious tongue. Nobody crosses Zahi Hawass and gets away with it. As the fabulous treasures of Tutankhamun begin a world tour, Richard Girling excavates the conspiracies, conflicts and fears that curse the world of archeology."Nobody of any standing in Egyptology will come out to help you," said one well-known Egyptologist of his colleagues, "because they'd lose their jobs. Sadly, people are cowering round his ankles." He is right. The hugged ankles belong to the most powerful man in archeology, Dr Zahi Hawass, aka Big Zee, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). It is Hawass who holds the keys to the pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, the Sphinx, Abu Simbel, everything. No Egyptologist gets in without his permission, and few will chance his anger.
What lies below the Bahamas in the Caribbean? A veiled world of fossils, blind creatures and scientific riddles.In next month's issue of National Geographic magazine, an international team of cave divers led by anthropologist Kenny Broad of the University of Miami reveals the mysteries hidden from vacationers' view.
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have seen several candidates for the heaviest elementary particle known to science.If the observations are confirmed, it would be a first for Europe; so far, the top quark particle has only been generated by one lab in the US.Dr Arnaud Lucotte said the discovery could assist physicists in the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle".Details of the top quark candidates were presented at a major particle physics conference in Paris.
Archaeologists have made two major tomb discoveries at the ancient city of Petra in southern Jordan.They discovered a rock-cut tomb that contained the skeletal remains of 61 individuals, along with a wealth of wooden artefacts, animal bones and ceramics.The second discovery was made at a place called tomb 676. While excavating it archaeologists found a gold medallion with an Islamic inscription on it. The find dates to long after the tomb was abandoned.
The Indus civilization encompassed more than 680,000 square kilometers, from western India to northern Afghanistan, double the area of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. Although the civilization had some of the earliest writing, several factors have kept clues about the ancient Indus people buried underground and under the Indus River.The ancient cities of Harappa and Moenjodaro, hours south of Islamabad by land, were the two largest centers of the Indus civilisation.
We've already tried to generate power from ocean waves and tides. Now engineers are trying to tap energy from another of the sea's abundant resources: salt.Efforts to generate power from the salinity difference between seawater and fresh water from rivers and lakes are already well advanced in Europe, where two alternative approaches are being tried out.
If you're really desperate to escape the heat that's blanketing North America, you might consider visiting Gusev Crater on Mars. It's winter there, no problem with heat at all.If you go, you'll find a robot from Earth already there. The NASA rover called Spirit landed in Gusev Crater more than six years ago. Since then it has been snapping pictures and exploring the Red Planet's watery past. Until recently, that is. Now the rover is silent. It's in a kind of hibernation mode in order to survive the Martian winter. Almost every instrument, including the communication radio, is shut down./td>
The sun's erratic and sometimes volatile behavior has the potential to cause real problems here on Earth, and protecting our planet will require an international effort, according to scientists who gathered recently for a meeting about the effects of solar activity.Streams of charged particles that fly off the sun can interfere with electronics on Earth and satellites orbiting our planet. For example, during a particularly intense solar storm in 1989, power to an entire Canadian province was knocked out. Since then, other storms have knocked a handful of satellites out of service./td>
The government's chief drugs adviser says the UK is "floundering" in its attempts to control the online mephedrone market.A BBC investigation has found that the illegal drug is still widely sold through websites despite the ban.The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs also said many new legal highs had flooded the market since mephedrone and naphyrone were banned this year.
US President Barack Obama may have to reconsider his decision to abandon plans to return to the Moon - it seems our closest galactic neighbour is still throwing up surprises.A BBC investigation has found that the illegal drug is still widely sold through websites despite the ban.Last year, NASA'a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) dipped into a low orbit around the Moon and almost immediately returned results.
A way to create children's picture puzzles could be used to improve online authentication, as it involves spotting images within images.There are four animals hidden in the accompanying picture (and you can find the solution here). To obscure them, Hung-Kuo Chu of National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan, developed a tool that first simplifies the animal image, creating a pattern of lighter and darker regions. The image is then overlaid on the base picture so that the background texture shows through. Any gaps are filled with texture that approximates the background. "Our model can generate camouflage images at different difficulty levels," Chu says.
THE past two decades have seen an increase in mass violence around the world, including wars, armed conflicts, human rights abuses and terrorism. Effectively dealing with these problems requires an understanding of the motivations that drive people to violence - sometimes to the point of self-sacrifice, as in the case of suicide bombers.Unfortunately, attempts to develop such an understanding rarely go beyond value judgements, ideological beliefs and vacuous labels such as "fanatic" or "religious extremist". What we need instead is a scientific analysis.
(CNN) -- An upper layer of Earth's atmosphere recently shrank so much that researchers are at a loss to adequately explain it, NASA said on Thursday.The thermosphere, which blocks harmful ultraviolet rays, expands and contracts regularly due to the sun's activities. As carbon dioxide increases, it has a cooling effect at such high altitudes, which also contributes to the contraction.
Plants are able to "remember" and "react" to information contained in light, according to researchers.Plants, scientists say, transmit information about light intensity and quality from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems.These "electro-chemical signals" are carried by cells that act as "nerves" of the plants.In their experiment, the scientists showed that light shone on to one leaf caused the whole plant to respond.