Newsdesk Archive

A group of wildlife spotters have encountered a massive pod of dolphins on a boat trip off the north coast of Skye.The boat's owner Nick Davies, who operates out of Gairloch on the mainland, estimated there were about 1,000 short-beaked common dolphin.He said he had only seen such a sight once before in 15 years of operating.Last June, a "superpod" of more than 400 short-beaked common dolphin was recorded in the Moray Firth.

People who live to 100 share an array of genes that boost immunity, slow aging and resist disease, a finding that may lead to new, personalized treatments for staying healthier longer.A study comparing about 1,000 centenarians with random individuals showed that genes associated with warding off disease and boosting longevity were key to the senior citizens' staying power, even overriding genetic predispositions for age-related disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and cancer.

Researchers have discovered the fossilised remains of an ancient whale with huge, fearsome teeth.Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists have dubbed the 12 million-year-old creature "Leviathan".

South Korean Suh Se Jun has seen her two younger siblings just once in the past 60 years. On the day the Chinese stormed across the Yalu River on Oct. 19, 1950, the Suh children and their father fled their village south of the Chinese border. Amid the panic of what Suh calls "a mass retreat," the family members were separated. When the armistice came three years later, Suh, now 76, and her brothers found themselves on opposite sides of the North-South divide. None of them saw their father again.

The Russian cargo vehicle Progress has failed to dock with the International Space Station after an apparent electronics failure.There was a failure of "telemetry", effectively the radio contact needed to complete the docking, Nasa said.The spaceship was carrying food, fuel and other supplies, but the station is still currently well stocked.The six astronauts on the space station were never in any danger during the incident, Nasa said.

The final space shuttle flight will now take place in 2011, Nasa has confirmed.The Endeavour orbiter is targeting a 26 February lift-off for a mission that will deliver a particle physics experiment to the space station.

Archaeologists are to start excavations on a suspected ancient burial site to try to understand the significance of a Llangollen landmark.

Behind the rusty iron fence surrounding the archaeological work on Mount Gerizim lies one of Israel's most impressive antiquities sites. But the Civil Administration is keeping the compound closed despite its huge tourism potential. It says planning at the site near Nablus in the West Bank is "too problematic."Over more than two decades, Yitzhak Magen, the administration's chief archaeology officer, dug up a 2,000-year-old city, once home to 10,000 people.

What do people do when confronted with scientific evidence that challenges their pre-existing view? Often they will try to ignore it, intimidate it, buy it off, sue it for libel or reason it away.The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it; murder rates went up or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state.

Introduced in Sweden in 1901, military service had been winding down for several years, with only those expressing a wish to serve picked during for conscription.Sweden remained neutral during the two world wars, but with the Soviet Union nearby, wanted to have the capacity to call in 500,000 soldiers at short notice during the Cold War, out of a population of about eight million at the time.

Members of the public will be given the right to nominate unpopular laws they want scrapped, Nick Clegg has announced the Your Freedom initiative intended to begin a shift of power away from the state to the people.http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/

LONDON: At a time when airports around the globe are planning to install full body scanners to maximise security, the US Congress has been warned that the X-ray imaging could increase the risk of skin cancer in air passengers.The body scanners emit radiation up to 20 times more powerful than previously thought and could be particularly risky for children, said Dr David Brenner, head of Columbia University's centre for radiological research.

TOKYO: There is no room for romance on board the cosy confines of the International Space Station, a Nasa space shuttle commander said on Monday when asked what would happen if astronauts had sex in space."We are a group of professionals," said Space Shuttle Discovery commander Alan Poindexter during a visit to Tokyo, after a reporter asked about the consequences if astronauts boldly went where probably no others have been. In fact, commanders do not allow sexual intercourse on the International Space Station.

PARIS: Dreams of braking global warming by storing carbon emissions from power plants could be undermined by the risk of leakage, according to a study published on Sunday.Rich countries have earmarked tens of billions of dollars of investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is still only at an experimental stage. Under CCS, carbon dioxide (CO2) would be snared at source from plants that are big burners of oil, gas and coal.

Greek inventor Archimedes is said to have used mirrors to burn ships of an attacking Roman fleet. But new research suggests he may have used steam cannons and fiery cannonballs instead.

A controversial new theory has been proposed to explain a series of stripes of permanently magnetized minerals containing iron in the Martian crust. The magnetized stripes, which have alternating orientations, have intrigued scientists since their discovery in 1997.

Millions of miles from Earth, two astronauts hover weightlessly next to a giant space rock, selecting pebbles for scientific research. The spaceship where they'll sleep floats just overhead. Beyond it, barely visible in the sky, is a glittering speck. It's Earth.It sounds like a science-fiction movie, but this surreal scene could, if President Barack Obama has his way, become a reality. However, unlike Hollywood depictions in such movies as "Armageddon," it's going to be a lot harder to pull off.

Today the Royal Society will publish the first report based on its Atlas of Islamic-World Science and Innovation Project. The reason we have chosen to undertake this project is the potentially staggering impact that countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others could have on science in the coming decades.

"We've been there" is a common reaction these days to the idea of returning to the moon. Even moonwalkers like Buzz Aldrin say returning is not as important as blazing tracks into deeper parts of space, like Mars or an asteroid. President Barack Obama, while arguing to scuttle the proposed NASA moonshot, takes a similar approach: "I just have to say pretty bluntly here, we've been there before."Maybe Obama and Aldrin are right about the current NASA program. Robots could plumb the secrets of the moon more cheaply than American astronauts, and there is more to be learned in deeper space. But it would be a shame if one byproduct of this debate is a lack of appreciation for the mysteries of our nearest celestial neighbor. How much do we know about the moon, decades after Americans first set foot on it? .

China's national space program has not been invited to join the International Space Station project, despite a news report from Russia suggesting otherwise, NASA officials told SPACE.com.NASA spokesperson John Yembrick said that while NASA is always seeking new partnerships, the agency and its space station partners have not invited China to join the $100 billion space station program.

Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right for every citizen.From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection.Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015.In the UK the government has promised a minimum connection of at least 2Mbps to all homes by 2012 but has stopped short of enshrining this as a right in law.

One of South America's largest historical archives -- 35 million pages that chronicle widespread killing, forced disappearances and torture committed by Brazilian military rulers from 1964 to 1985 -- is rotting away in an obscure government building in Brazil's capital.Carlos Fico, a leading historian of the so-called "lead years" in Brazil, confirmed accounts first reported in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo about deteriorating conditions at the Brazilian national archives building.

An archaeological site in southeastern Europe has shown its metal. This ancient settlement contains the oldest securely dated evidence of copper making, from 7,000 years ago, and suggests that copper smelting may been invented in separate parts of Asia and Europe at that time rather than spreading from a single source.

PREHISTORIC art 3,000 years old was discovered by chance in woodland by a council worker while carrying out routine maintenance work.John Gilpin, a woodlands officer in the Parks and Countryside department, stumbled upon the find in Ecclesall Woods.

A recently excavated tomb in Nanjing has been confirmed to be the grave of Zheng He, a eunuch from the early Ming Dynasty who led historic voyages to Southeast Asia and eastern Africa. The tomb was discovered accidentally on June 18th by workers at a construction site near Zutang Mountain that also holds the tombs of many other Ming Dynasty eunuchs, the Yangtse Evening News reported.

A 4,000 year old necklace is in The National Museum of Ireland after it was found in a dumpster.Worn by early kings the necklace, called a lunala, and discs were worn by the early kings of Ireland. It is thought to day from between 2,300 and 1,800 BC.In March 1945 it was found in Coggalbeg, County Roscommon by farmer Hubert Lannon. He found it in a bog while he was cutting turf and kept it in his home.

arlier this month, inside Paris' majestic Grand Palace, Russia was showcasing its cultural and technological achievements.Portraying a harmonious and progressive society, colourful musical performances and art exhibits were showing alongside impressive displays of Russia's aerospace power, oil industry and other high-tech sectors.At the heart of the Russian space pavilion was an exhibit for the NPO Lavochkin design bureau - the nation's veteran developer of unmanned planetary probes.

Why do kangaroos have such small arms?Scientists now think they know why, helping to explain why the unusually-shaped marsupials have tiny arms yet such long legs.Kangaroos have small forelimbs because short arms are necessary to survive within their mother's pouch soon after they are born, a new analysis confirms.

For Darrel Higgins, finding an ancient arrowhead in a creek isn't surprising, it's actually expected. Finding a record-setting artifact that dates back to an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 years? Definitely unexpected.Higgins has been hunting creek beds for artifacts since he began finding them on farmland when he was a child. But nothing he had found compared to the 9 3/4 inch by 2 3/4 inch specimen he recently found in western Kentucky. The item, described as a clovis point made of buffalo river chert, was submerged in a creek bed when Higgins stumbled upon it.

According to a Jan. 1, 2010 BBC news article, by BBC News science reporter, Paul Rincon, "DNA analyzed from early European," scientists have studied and extracted DNA from the remains of a 30,000 year old European cave man who hunted wild mammoths in the region of Kostenki, Russia about five to ten thousand years before the last ice age began, at a time when Russia was warmer than it is today. Also, in another study, scientists found that about 4 percent (from 2% to 5%) of Europeans, East Asians, Papua-New Guineans, but not any Africans, have inherited Neanderthal genes, at least traces of them. The prehistoric man is known as the Markina Gora skeleton.

Cairo, Asharq Al-Awsat- When we talk about the grand history of [Egypt] which extends more than fifty centuries into the past, we find ourselves continually speaking about the ancient Egyptian man, whether this is ancient Egyptian engineers who built temples and pyramids, the ancient Egyptian doctors who carried out the first medical operations in human history, or the ancient Egyptian artists who carved huge statues and inscribed hieroglyphics on the walls of temples and tombs. However we rarely find mention of ancient Egyptian women, as if this great civilization was built by men alone, and as if ancient society was comprised solely of men, which of course is something that is completely untrue.

For decades, archaeologists thought of the Amazonian Indians as lowly hunter-gatherers who inhabited widely scattered villages and barely eked out a living in the harsh landscape.Now that image is collapsing. In a study to be published later this summer, scientists detail an ancient system of monumental public works in a swath of the Amazon in eastern Bolivia. The researchers relied in part on satellite pictures to penetrate the thick jungle, allowing them to inventory vast earthen mounds 25 to 30 feet high and tidy networks of canals and causeways, all built centuries ago.

Berlin - A lost manuscript, one of the earliest by a missionary to detail the ancient Indian language of Old Sanskrit, has been rediscovered in an Italian library, the University of Potsdam in Germany said Monday.

KASHIHARA, Nara Prefecture (Kyodo) Nara-based archaeologists said they have succeeded in drawing three-dimensional maps of the surface of large burials mounds for the first time by flashing them with laser beams at a rate of more than 100,000 times a second from a helicopter.The new method, revealed at an academic conference Saturday in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, is an important advance because archaeologists don't have free access to most of the large ancient mounds, which are managed by the Imperia Household Agency."With this epoch-making technology, we can precisely measure (the mounds) without entering the compounds. It will be very useful for our research," said a researcher from the Archaeological Institute of Kashihara.

The initial peopling of North America from Asia occurred approximately 15,000-18,000 years ago, however estimations of the genetic diversity of the first settlers have remained inaccurate. In a report published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), researchers have found that the diversity of the first Americans has been significantly underestimated, underscoring the importance of comprehensive sampling for accurate analysis of human migrations.

Here's a test for you. Read these two statements: "Life is not a scientific term" and "I don't want to be lost in a world of pure, indulgent imagination". An artist made one, a scientist the other: who do you think said what?Some background might help solve the puzzle. One of the statements was made by Christian Kerrigan, the first digital artist in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He is opening his V&A studio to the public this week to show the fruits of his six months' work there.

About 70,000 years ago a massive volcanic eruption ushered in disastrous climate change and drove our early human ancestors to near extinction. From the few who survived came a population explosion along with the development of sophisticated tools and symbolic thought. Emerging from Africa, these humans became the most advanced species on the planet.What sparked this remarkable turnaround? According to Matt Rossano, it was religion.

A living, breathing lung-on-a-chip has been developed that can mimic the boundary between the lung's air sacs and its capillaries.It's at this boundary that inhaled pathogens and potentially harmful nanoparticles pass into the bloodstream. Reproducing those processes on a chip could one day provide an alternative to animal testing for drug development and toxicity screening.

As NASA's space shuttle fleet draws close to retirement, aerospace juggernaut Boeing is hard at work developing a new capsule-based spaceship to fly people to and from the International Space Station.

If a massive asteroid is hurtling toward Earth and threatening to sterilize the entire planet, blasting it to pieces with nuclear bombs might seem fit for a Hollywood movie. But, it could, in fact, be a viable solution to the potentially apocalyptic event, according to scientists who have studied asteroids and possible solutions to prevent Earth impacts.

The California branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will release a report that it says reveals how criminalization of marijuana disproportionately harms people of color today.The release of the report comes as part of the NAACP's endorsement of the Tax Cannabis Act, a ballot proposition slated for November which would essentially decriminalize marijuana across the state.According to the NAACP, African Americans are disproportionately arrested for marijuana possession -- up to four times as often as whites, even though the latter is statistically more likely to be a user.

Making folded aeroplanes and boats is an activity more usually associated with bored schoolchildren than with cutting-edge engineering. But what distinguishes the products of rudimentary origami made by Robert Wood and his team is that they fold themselves.Wood and colleagues at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have equipped a thin sheet with programmable joints that flex in response to electrical warming.

Tempering curiosity with caution, Japanese planetary scientists and their US colleagues are carefully preparing to open the recovery capsule from the Hayabusa spacecraft, which returned to Earth on 13 June following a spectacular high-speed re-entry over the Australian outback. If they're lucky, they may find a speck or two of material from asteroid 25143 Itokawa that could hold clues to the early days of the Solar System. But even if Hayabusa has returned empty, it will have given a boost to future asteroid missions.

Male molly fish in Mexico wear a moustache that makes them appear more sexy to females.Scientists were unsure why male Mexican mollies wear an extravagant moustache-like structure on their top lip.Now a study has revealed that female fish find the moustache sexually attractive, and it is likely to be a sexually selected trait.

A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings.Plato was the Einstein of Greece's Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy's findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.

Quantum theory is our most successful theory of physics. There is not one shred of experimental evidence that doesn't fit with its predictions. So why, if it ain't broke, is a growing number of researchers expressing a desire to fix it?"Everything depends on whether you believe quantum mechanics is going to go on describing the physical world perfectly to whatever level you push it," says Nobel laureate Anthony Leggett, who studies the quantum world at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Earth-friendly perennial grain crops, which grow with less fertilizer, herbicide, fuel, and erosion than grains planted annually, could be available in two decades, according to researchers writing in the current issue of the journal Science.

WASHINGTON: In a breakthrough which could pave the way for regenerating human lungs, scientists claim to have successfully implanted laboratory-cultivated cells into a rat's lungs.Lung tissue is difficult to regenerate as it does not generally repair or regenerate beyond the microscopic level. The only current way to replace damaged adult lung tissue is to perform lung transplantation, which is highly susceptible to organ rejection and infection.

You've heard about the Pacific garbage patch and the Atlantic garbage patch, each a sobering sign of how when we throw things away, they don't go "away" -- they often go into the sea, where they remain for a long, long time.Much of the global ocean remains uncharted in terms of pollution, but unfortunately the more we look, the more we find. And now even the most remote, pristine waters on the planet -- the coastal seas of Antarctica -- are being invaded by plastic debris.

Rather than languishing in landfills or littering roadsides, plastic bags could make their way into useful products like toner, lubricants, or rechargeable cell phone or laptop batteries, if new research becomes commercialized.Plastic recycling is limited by the fact that different types of plastic cannot be mixed. The quality of the resulting recycled plastic may also be poor. "That's why recycling is not very successful," said study author Vilas Pol of Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill."I was thinking why not go beyond this," he said. "Take it and degrade it. You can take the different kinds of plastics together.

A dwarf-ed, human-like skeleton was discovered in 2004 deep inside Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Was it a diseased human? A child?Further examination of the bones revealed that they were not recent, nor human exactly. Archaeologists famously declared the skeleton a new human ancestor, Homo floresiensis, whose striking similarities to Frodo Baggins earned it the nickname the "hobbit."But researchers continue to disagree over where exactly this new species fits on the human family tree. A new study in the Journal of Biogeography led by Hanneke Meijer of the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity Naturalis, provides an answer.

Scientists still puzzle over how Earth emerged from its last ice age, an event that ushered in a warmer climate and the birth of human civilization. In the geological blink of an eye, ice sheets in the northern hemisphere began to collapse and warming spread quickly to the south. Most scientists say that the trigger, at least initially, was an orbital shift that caused more sunlight to fall across Earth's northern half. But how did the south catch up so fast?.

Researchers have proposed a new design for an invisibility cloak - a device that could make objects invisible by guiding light around anything placed inside the cloak.In the study, Elena Semouchkina from Michigan Technological University and Pennsylvania State University and her coauthors designed an invisibility cloak made of glass for the infrared range. Currently, most metamaterial cloak designs require that the metamaterial response be homogeneous. However, the new design relies on simulations of a true multi-element cloak structure and takes into account the inhomogeneity of a real metamaterial response.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are encouraging U.S. policymakers to consider the nation's growing supply of natural gas as a short-term substitute for aging coal-fired power plants.In the results of a two-year study, released today, the researchers said electric utilities and other sectors of the American economy will use more gas through 2050. Under a scenario that envisions a federal policy aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, researchers found a substantial role for natural gas.

Doctors are a step closer to accurately predicting the age at which a woman will hit the menopause.A 12-year Iranian study of 266 women found it was possible to pinpoint the age of menopause by measuring levels of a hormone called AMH.If proven in further studies, it potentially means women could have more control over when to start a family.

After the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) settled into orbit around the red planet in 1997, a magnetometer on board began sending back measurements that have puzzled planetary scientists ever since. A section of the martian crust appeared to consist of long 'stripes' of iron-bearing minerals permanently magnetized with alternating orientations. Clearly, an ancient dynamo imprinted its field in the rock during the planet's early history. But why the stripes? .

A hundred years ago when German explorer Leo Frobenius visited West Africa and came across some sculpted bronze heads and terracotta figures, he was sure he had discovered remains of the mythical lost city of Atlantis.

A new map of uranium on the moon has revealed the lunar surface to be a poor source of the radioactive stuff, but it could help solve mysteries as to how the moon formed.This new moon uranium map dampens hopes of a nuclear power industry on the lunar surface, researchers said.

Africa is witnessing the birth of a new ocean, according to scientists at the Royal Society.Geologists working in the remote Afar region of Ethiopia say the ocean will eventually split the African continent in two, though it will take about 10 million years.Lead researcher Tim Wright who is presenting the research at the Royal Society's Summer Exhibition, described the events as "truly incredible".

A study has shed light on a key genetic step in the evolution of animals' limbs from the fins of fish, scientists say.A team of researchers identified two new genes that are important in fin development.They report in the journal Nature that the loss of these genes could have been an "important step" in the evolutionary transformation of fins into limbs.Marie-Andree Akimenko, from the University of Ottawa in Canada, led the research.

Astronomers have measured high-speed winds in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star.Data on carbon monoxide gas in the atmosphere show that it is streaming at fierce speeds from the planet's hot day side to its cool night side.Writing in Nature, a team detected longitudinal winds of roughly 2km/s (7,000km/h) in the atmosphere of a "hot Jupiter" planet.Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit very close to their parent stars.

The separation of Neardenthal and Homo sapiens might have occurred at least one million years ago, more than 500.000 years earlier than previously believed after DNA-based analyses. A doctoral thesis conducted at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana) -associated with the University of Granada-, analysed the teeth of almost all species of hominids that have existed during the past 4 million years. Quantitative methods were employed and they managed to identify Neanderthal features in ancient European populations.

A site at Marden, near Devizes, rivalled Stonehenge and Avebury in its day, says English Heritage.The group is about to undertake a six-week dig at the site close to the village, starting on June 28.Unlike Stonehenge and Avebury, Marden Henge no longer has any surviving standing stones, but its sheer size is astounding.

There's no clear path to Hire Benakal in the hills north of the Tungabhadra River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. If you have to double back only two or three times on the way, you've done well. University of Chicago anthropology graduate student Andrew Bauer leads me through the thorns and boulders until we emerge on a high plain surrounded by ridges. He points out knee-high aligned stones and propped-up slabs that mark the edges of the site. As we navigate through it, we walk around a pile of house-sized boulders, and the massive scale of Hire Benakal, like a city skyline in the distance, becomes apparent.

While DNA evidence suggests humans and Neanderthals mated way back when, the two groups did represent distinct species at the time. The question is: when did they last share a common ancestor?A new study on dental fossils indicates Neanderthals and our own species, Homo sapiens, shared a common ancestor at least one million years ago, which is more than 500,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The legend of his execution is based on the traditions of the Christian church and artistic illustrations rather than antique texts, according to theologian Gunnar Samuelsson.He claims the Bible has been misinterpreted as there are no explicit references the use of nails or to crucifixion - only that Jesus bore a "staurus" towards Calvary which is not necessarily a cross but can also mean a "pole".Mr Samuelsson, who has written a 400-page thesis after studying the original texts, said: "The problem is descriptions of crucifixions are remarkably absent in the antique literature.

The human foetus cannot feel pain before 24 weeks, according to an official review of scientific evidence, contradicting one argument that anti-abortion campaigners have used for reducing the termination limit.

JAKARTA - A tribe of hunter gatherers living in trees in the remote forests of Indonesia's easternmost Papua region has been discovered for the first time by the country's census, an official said on Thursday.

New forum article on the cosmology of North Aftican aleovolcanism, by R. Avry WilsonOur planet is a pretty big place. It would take many lifetimes to travel the globe just to visit every square mile of it, and many more to take the time to sit and contemplate the things we see along the way. There are places of such extreme beauty so as to boggle poets into fervent scripting, but are evidently balanced by spots and specks of some of the most dangerous and fear-inspiring formations and events we can imagine. Of these are majestic volcanic peaks occurring the world over, and for the most part they rest silent, towering above us like massive stone gods commanding us to live in peaceful harmony under their slopes.

For July 2010 Author of the Month we are very pleased to welcome researcher, author and editor Frank Joseph. Frank Joseph is the former editor in chief of Ancient American magazine and the author of Atlantis and 2012, The Destruction of Atlantis, The Lost Civilization of Lemuria, Survivors of Atlantis, and The Lost Treasure of King Juba. He will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout July to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

A limited preview of the film Earth Pilgrims is now available online, with the trailer and a 30min excerpt of part 5 of the film. Enjoy!

Sunspots come and go, but recently they have mostly gone. For centuries, astronomers have recorded when these dark blemishes on the solar surface emerge, only to fade away after a few days, weeks or months. Thanks to their efforts, we know that sunspot numbers ebb and flow in cycles lasting about 11 years.But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged in nearly 100 years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. "This is solar behavior we haven't seen in living memory," says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Millions of miles from Earth, two astronauts hover weightlessly next to a giant space rock, selecting pebbles for scientific research. The spaceship where they'll sleep floats just overhead. Beyond it, barely visible in the sky, is a glittering speck. It's Earth.It sounds like a science-fiction movie, but this surreal scene could, if President Obama has his way, become a reality. However, unlike Hollywood depictions in such movies as Armageddon, it's going to be a lot harder to pull off.

An Englishman who has never visited the iconic Mount Rushmore is the new owner of a hand-drawn image representing the artist's early concept of the South Dakota monument.Paul Fraser placed the winning bid of $5,826 last week and now owns the sketch made by Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum, according to Bobby Livingston of RR Auction of Amherst, N.H., which handled the auction.

By emulating nature's design principles, a team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has created nanodevices made of DNA that self-assemble and can be programmed to move and change shape on demand. In contrast to existing nanotechnologies, these programmable nanodevices are highly suitable for medical applications because DNA is both biocompatible and biodegradable.

Tiny balls of fungus and feces may disprove the theory that a huge space rock exploded over North America about 12,900 years ago, triggering a thousand-year cold snap, according to a new study.The ancient temperature drop, called the Younger Dryas, has been well documented in the geologic record, including soil and ice core samples.The cool-down also coincides with the extinction of mammoths and other Ice Age mammals in North America, and it's thought to have spurred our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Middle East to adopt an agricultural lifestyle.

The world's largest dinosaur graveyard has been discovered in Alberta, Canada, according to David Eberth of the Royal Tyrrell Museum and other scientists working on the project.The Vancouver Sun reports that the massive dinosaur bonebed is 1.43-square miles in size. Eberth says it contains thousands of bones belonging to the dinosaur Centrosaurus, which once lived near what is now the Saskatchewan border.

A new kind of fossil dinosaur skin discovered in South Korea may help sort out the real dino hides from skin-like features in rocks which are nothing of the sort.Two specimens of fossil dinosaur skin from Cretaceous Haman Formation in South Korea have been found in a pile of rocks blasted to construct a road. The find includes an entirely new type of skin texture.At the same time, several types of sedimentary accidents that have nothing to do with dinosaurs, but which look very much like skin fossils, were discovered.

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown has yet to write a book on the hidden pictures in Michelangelo's artwork, but maybe he can start working on a thriller that takes Robert Langdon on a journey through the Renaissance master's alleged diagrams of human anatomy. Hidden in plain sight, in Sistine Chapel frescoes, assert some medical personnel, are pictures of human anatomy. The latest assertion appears in the journal Neurosurgery, where Ian Suk and Dr. Rafael J. Tamargo claim that Michelangelo included a rendering of the human brain stem in the fresco titled "The Separation of Light from Darkness".

Pelicans that closely resembled those living today were scooping fish from the water while our ancestors were still swinging from the trees, a fossil discovery suggests.The identification of an extremely well preserved 30-million-year old fossilised beak raises interesting questions over why evolution has left the birds so little changed over such a long period.

Preeminent author and researcher of Mayan culture and the 2012 phenomenon, John Major Jenkins joins us to discuss the origin of the 2012 idea, how it has developed, what it means, and how we can work with it today.Jenkins shows us how the Mayan 2012 prophecy is a misnomer, and is actually an astronomical science of great galactic cycles that appear to coincide with periods of transformation. We are in this cycle right now....

SALEM, Ore. - The State of Oregon has re-classified how it views marijuana.The State Board of Pharmacy voted Wednesday to recognize pot as a drug that has medical use.The move came because of a law passed last year that ordered marijuana to be removed from a list of drugs that have "high abuse potential and no acceptable medical use."Marijuana will now be what is known as a "Schedule II controlled substance." That's a drug that has medical use but still has "high abuse potential."Oregon becomes the first state in the nation to make marijuana anything less serious than a Schedule I drug.

Scientists have simulated the sounds set to be made by sub-atomic particles such as the Higgs boson when they are produced at the Large Hadron Collider.Their aim is to develop a means for physicists at Cern to "listen to the data" and pick out the Higgs particle if and when they finally detect it.Dr Lily Asquith modelled data from the giant Atlas experiment at the LHC.She worked with sound engineers to convert data expected from collisions at the LHC into sounds.

The adapted virus that immunized hundreds of millions of people against smallpox has now been enlisted in the war on cancer. Vaccinia poxvirus joins a herpesvirus and a host of other pathogens on a growing list of engineered viruses entering late-stage human testing against cancer.After a decade of development of so-called oncolytic viruses, the newest strains hold the most promise yet, researchers say. This new generation of viruses has been genetically "targeted and armed," says Winald Gerritsen of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, who is involved in an early human trial of an engineered adeno-associated virus that attacks glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

A recent study of an ancient language provides new insights into the nature of linguistic evolution, with potential applications for today's world. The study, "Dvandvas, Blocking, and the Associative: The Bumpy Ride from Phrase to Word," to be published in the June 2010 issue of the scholarly journal Language, is authored by Paul Kiparsky of Stanford University.

For a class of California 7th graders, their summer vacations might pale in comparison to the class trip they recently took Mars.At least, that's what astronomers might say after the class's discovery of an opening into a cave on the Red Planet.The science class from Evergreen Middle School of Cottonwood, Calif., found the opening while working on a research project with the Mars Space Flight Facility run out of Arizona State University.

The body was found in a small, graffiti-stained tunnel. Robbery was likely not the motive, as his possessions and cash were found with him.

A Roman fort which has been discovered in Cornwall is challenging previous historical views about the South West.Pottery and pieces of slag have been found at the undisclosed location near St Austell, suggesting an ironworks.Experts said the discovery challenges previous thinking about the region's history as it had been thought Romans did not settle much beyond Exeter.John Smith, from Cornwall Historic Environment Service, said: "This is a major discovery, no question about it.

Archaeologists and art restorers using new laser technology have discovered what they believe are the oldest paintings of the faces of Jesus Christ's apostles.The images in a branch of the catacombs of St Tecla near St Paul's Basilica, just outside the walls of ancient Rome, were painted at the end of the 4th century or the start of the 5th century.

It's the iconic image that grabbed the world's attention and helped change the course of South African history.Thirty-four years ago Wednesday, on June 16, 1976, thousands of black school children in Soweto, South Africa, took to the streets to protest the apartheid education system that obliged them to be taught in Afrikaans.

How did the world's largest living reptile, the saltwater crocodile, reach so many South Pacific islands separated by huge stretches of water despite being a poor swimmer?Apparently, like a surfer catching a wave, these goliaths can ride currents on the ocean surface to cross large areas of open sea, researchers now reveal.

Leonardo da Vinci has so long been sanctified that it's easy to forget he was human. Fortunately, Stefan Klein paints a fresh portrait rather than further gilding an already blinding lily.Leonardo the artist and inventor are here, of course, but Klein devotes his most enthusiastic attention to Leonardo the naturalist. He wants to know how his subject saw the world with such a new vision. Klein analyzes how a Renaissance painter could have invented the "exploded view" of body parts and machines, his translucent outer structures revealing inner connections. He explores how Leonardo's gift for analogy in his voluminous writings parallels his comparison of organs and tendons to machine parts.

NARA--Bureaucrats in the eighth-century Heijokyo capital here likely broke with Buddhist edicts banning meat and ate beef, pork and other animal flesh, according to archeological research.Officials at the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties said Thursday that remains of parasitic insect eggs, usually associated with livestock and wild animals, had been found in pits apparently used to dump human excrement centuries ago.

Companies in Norway, Japan and Iceland are betting heavily on the lifting of a commercial whaling moratorium, and are working to develop new whale-based products ranging from golf balls to hair dye, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).As members of the 88-nation International Whaling Commission (IWC) prepare for a meeting next week in Agadir, Morocco, debate on the use of hunted whales has focused on meat consumption, particularly in Japan.

Member governments of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) should seriously consider proposals to end two decades of deadlock, says IWC chairman Cristian Maquieira. By giving some ground, he argues, anti-whaling nations might secure a better deal for conservation.In the acceptance speech I gave a year ago when I was elected to chair the International Whaling Commission (IWC), I reminded IWC commissioners that they represented not only their governments but also the hopes and aspirations of their respective populations regarding whale conservation.

The Wall Street Journal just reported that the Federal Communications Commission is holding "closed-door meetings" with industry to broker a deal on Net Neutrality -- the rule that lets users determine their own Internet experience.Given that the corporations at the table all profit from gaining control over information, the outcome won't be pretty.

Do we really need to spend £10m on researching why our pollinators are dying out?There is no doubt that honeybees, hoverflies, wasps, bumblebees, moths and butterflies are all under threat. Since the 1970s, there has been a 75% decline in butterfly species in the UK, three species of bumblebees are now extinct, and honeybees have been having a pretty hard time for the last few years.But is research into a variety of possible causes from land use, disease, environmental change and pesticides what is needed to save them?

Millions of years ago, volcanic eruptions in North America were more explosive and may have significantly affected the environment and the global climate. So scientists report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.The researchers found the remains--deposited in layers of rocks--of eruptions of volcanoes located on North America's northern high plains that spewed massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere 40 million years ago. The scientists conducted their research at Scotts Bluff National Monument, Neb., and in surrounding areas.

Knife-scarred bones found in a prehistoric cave site show that cave lion was on the menu for Europe's early humans, according to a new study.The cut marks show that the animals were gutted, just like the many deer, horses, bison, and other common prey animals found at the site, according to study leader Ruth Blasco of Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain.The gutted remains also show that the early humans might have had first crack at the corpse by killing it themselves, Blasco said. If other animals had killed the lion, she said, the tasty viscera would have been long gone by the time the early humans arrived.

The Middle Awash area of Ethiopia is the most persistently occupied place on Earth. Members of our lineage have lived, died, and been buried there for almost six million years. Now their bones are eroding out of the ground. Step by step they record how a primitive, small-brained primate evolved to conquer a planet. Where better to learn how we became human?