Newsdesk Archive

THE precursor of life may have learned how to copy itself thanks to simple convection at the bottom of the ocean. Lab experiments reveal how DNA replication could have occurred in tiny pores around undersea vents.One of the initial steps towards life was the first molecule capable of copying itself. In the open ocean of early Earth, strands of DNA and loose nucleotides would have been too diluted for replication to occur. So how did they do it?

It was not necessary to be literate to be able to access rune carvings in the 11th century. At the same time those who could read were able to glean much more information from a rune stone than merely what was written in runes. This is shown in new research from Uppsala University in Sweden.

There's more to decisions about land use than climate change, population growth, migration and prosperous economies. In the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, individual religious beliefs in local Saints are also linked to how the Amazig (Berber) people use their environment and manage local resources.These findings by Dr. Pablo Dominguez from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, and his colleagues, published online in Springer's journal Human Ecology, suggest that the new economic strategy used as belief has weakened is more individualistic and generates shorter term benefits compared with the old Saints' philosophy promoting communal management and long-term benefits.

A new type of stem cell has been discovered in the human brain, one that might have contributed to the evolution of bigger and more complex brains in humans, according to a recent study.The cells help form the neocortex, or the outer layer of the brain. While other animals have a neocortex, the one in humans and non-human primates is more expanded, and is thought to confer unique human abilities, such as language and consciousness.

If you walk out of Jerusalem Old City through its south-eastern gate and on to the perimeter road encircling it, you will most likely see several large coaches with elderly western tourists climbing out of them. You will see them stand at the low wall at the edge of the road and peer down into the lush valley with its pretty houses that nudge and lean against each other. The tourists may notice the woman marking exercise books on her sunny terrace, they may smile to see the bright-haired four-year-old riding her tricycle round the yard. Some of them will think of a favoured grandchild back in Kansas or Ottawa.

Peter Johnston-Saint was an agent for Sir Henry Wellcome, the Wisconsin-born pharmaceutical magnate, who in Paris in 1929 made a peculiar purchase: a collection of more than 300 examples of tattooed skin, dating to 1850. The seller, a shadowy figure called La Valette, seems to have obtained the specimens via his work at Parisian military establishments and prisons; motifs ranged from flowers to female figures, patriotic slogans to inscriptions. Animals featured too: a cheetah and a pig on a bicycle.

A plan to attack Hitler's bunker in 1943 and a 1944 plot involving an assassin who had gained the trust of the Nazi leadership were both cancelled on Stalin's orders, General Anatoly Kulikov told a historical conference in Moscow on Tuesday."A plan to assassinate Hitler in his bunker was developed, but Stalin suddenly cancelled it in 1943 over fears that after Hitler's death his associates would conclude a separate peace treaty with Britain and the United States," Russia's RIA news agency quoted Gen Kulikov as saying.

Every now and again someone raises a stern warning about the amount of space junk orbiting Earth. Those warnings are usually met with general indifference, as very few of us own satellites or travel regularly to low Earth orbit. But the DoD's assessment of the space junk problem finds that perhaps we should be paying attention: space junk has reached a critical tipping point that could result in a cataclysmic chain reaction that brings everyday life on Earth to a grinding halt.

America may have eighty-sixed its moon base ambitions, but the Japanese have no plans to let perfectly good lunar real estate go to waste. An ambitious $2.2 billion project in the works at JAXA, the Japanese space agency, plans to put humanoid robots on the moon by 2015, and now official backing from the Prime Minister's office says the Japanese could have an unmanned lunar base up and running by 2020.Key to all of this, of course, is the robots themselves, and who better than the Japanese to dream up and realize the kind of intelligent, self-repairing, multitasking bots that will be needed to fulfill such a mission.

XI'AN - Archeologists in northwest China's Shaanxi province said Wednesday they had found a primitive "icebox" dating back at least 2,000 years in the ruins of an emperor's residence.The "icebox," unearthed in Qianyang county, contained several clay rings 1.1 meters in diameter and 0.33 meters tall, said Tian Yaqi, a researcher with the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology.

WILLIAMS, Ariz. - On April 28, Kaibab National Forest heritage program employees conducted a petroglyph documentation class for members of the Navajo Nation Archaeology Department. During the hands-on training, Kaibab and NNAD archaeologists documented about 75 percent of the petroglyphs located near a recently-discovered Cohonina village site on the Williams Ranger District.The archaeologists recorded 20 separate panels of petroglyphs with hundreds of individual images representing a variety of distinct design styles. The group, which included Kaibab employees Neil Weintraub, Mike Lyndon, Erin Woodard, and Mae Franklin, also monitored another nearby petroglyph site, which has remained undisturbed for 20-plus years.

Grosseto, 25 May (AKI) - An ancient Etruscan home dating back more than 2,400 years has been discovered outside Grosseto in central Italy. Hailed as an exceptional find, the luxury home was uncovered at an archeological site at Vetulonia, 200 kilometres north of Rome.

A Greek stone crown, the first of its kind in the region, was discovered by the Syrian-French mission operating in Dura Europos site, Director of Deir Ezzor Antiquities Department Amir al-Haiyou told Syrian local media.A 30 cm statue of a man on top of a camel, and a number of coins and clay pieces were also unearthed in the site, added al-Haiyou.The Syrian-Spanish archaeological mission working in the site of Tell Qaber Abu al-Atiq (hill), 75 km north of Deir Ezzor, found a collection of cuneiforms dating back to the Middle Assyrian period.

It is now growing season across the Corn Belt of the United States. Seeds that have just been sown will, with the right mixture of sunshine and rain, be knee-high plants by the Fourth of July and tall stalks with ears ripe for picking by late August.Corn is much more than great summer picnic food, however. Civilization owes much to this plant, and to the early people who first cultivated it.

Excavations of villas where Roman emperors escaped the office are giving archaeologists new insights into the imperial way of lifeIn A.D. 143 or 144, when he was in his early 20s, the future Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius set out for the country estate of his adoptive father, Emperor Antoninus Pius. The property, Villa Magna (Great Estate), boasted hundreds of acres of wheat, grapes and other crops, a grand mansion, baths and temples, as well as rooms for the emperor and his entourage to retreat from the world or curl up with a good book.

Spanish explorers encountering an advanced civilization in Mesoamerica in the 16th century had plenty of things to be astonished about, but one type of object in particular was unlike anything they had ever seen before: rubber balls. No such stretchy, bouncy material existed in the Old World, and they had to struggle to find words to describe it.New research from MIT indicates that not only did these pre-Columbian peoples know how to process the sap of the local rubber trees along with juice from a vine to make rubber, but they had perfected a system of chemical processing that could fine-tune the properties of the rubber depending on its intended use. For the soles of their sandals, they made a strong, wear-resistant version. For the rubber balls used in the games that were a central part of their religious ceremonies, they processed it for maximum bounciness. And for rubber bands and adhesives used for ornamental wear and for attaching blades to shafts, they produced rubber optimized for resilience and strength.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Archaeologists are studying prehistoric rock drawings discovered in a remote cave in 2002, including dancing figures and strange headless beasts, as they seek new clues about the rise of Egyptian civilisation.Amateur explorers stumbled across the cave, which includes 5,000 images painted or engraved into stone, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt's southwest border with Libya and Sudan.

In a review published in the March 5 issue of the journal Science, the research group reaffirmed the recently challenged theory that an asteroid ended the age of the dinosaurs.

Spending time outdoors has always offered health benefits for the body and the mind: fresh air, clean water, awe-inspiring vistas, peaceful quietude. Now, it turns out, even the dirt is good for you.Scientists at the Sage Colleges of Troy, N.Y., have discovered that exposure to certain kinds of soil bacteria can reduce anxiety and increase learning capabilities when ingested or inhaled, reports Physorg.com. Hippies everywhere can rejoice: dirt may actually make you smarter.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Archaeologists are studying prehistoric rock drawings discovered in a remote cave in 2002, including dancing figures and strange headless beasts, as they seek new clues about the rise of Egyptian civilisation.Amateur explorers stumbled across the cave, which includes 5,000 images painted or engraved into stone, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt's southwest border with Libya and Sudan.

NASA declared the Phoenix Mars lander program officially dead Monday after repeatedly failing to regain contact with the spacecraft.A recent image taken by an orbiting spacecraft appeared to show that one of Phoenix's solar panels had collapsed from ice buildup.

The ancestors of modern squid may have existed half a billion years ago - a lot earlier than previously thought.In a new study, Canadian researchers identified a previously unclassifiable fossil that was long believed to belong perhaps to the shrimp family.They called it Nectocaris pteryx - a small soft-bodied cephalopod with two tentacles rather than the eight or 10 seen in today's octopuses.

A top UK scientist who helped sequence the human genome has said efforts to patent the first synthetic life form would give its creator a monopoly on a range of genetic engineering.Professor John Sulston said it would inhibit important research.US-based Dr Craig Venter led the artificial life form research, details of which were published last week.

BILOXI, Miss. -- The remains of four soldiers found during an archaeological dig in Jackson County will be reburied on May 31 during a ceremony at Biloxi National Cemetery.

Cleopatra's curse hung over the ancient city of Taposiris Magna, 50km west of Alexandria, where excavators combed the sand last Saturday looking for her resting place with her beloved Mark Anthony. Nevine El-Aref witnessed the searchLast Saturday was a very strange day. At Taposiris Magna, where the ruins of the Osiris Temple and few Graeco-Roman tombs emerge from the sand, a dozen journalists, photographers and TV cameramen gathered to witness the revelations of the latest search there carried by an Egyptian-Dominican team.

NICOSIA, Cyprus -- Locals say it could be the final resting place of Ajax's niece, contain a golden chariot and will unleash a horrible curse.But whether a tomb recently uncovered on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus contains the bones and booty of a close relative of a Trojan war hero straight from the pages of Homer, or will just yield better evidence for understanding the rituals and lives of ancient Greeks, is yet to be revealed.

Students at a Hull college have literally seen history dug up before their eyes.Archaeological finds have been unearthed on the site of Wilberforce College in east Hull.And experts reckon the artefacts help fill in missing gaps about the city's ancient settlements.A dig was prompted after planning permission was sought for a £800,000 building on the site.

Norway hopes to boost aid to fight tropical deforestation at a conference tomorrow, and to set in motion a partnership to unlock cash pledged at the Copenhagen summit to help slow climate change.Norway says developed nations have promised $500m (£347m) to fight deforestation by 2012 on top of $3.5bn agreed at Copenhagen, and new pledges at the conference may bring the total aid closer to $5bn.

LONDON - A second, much larger volcano in Iceland is showing signs that it may be about to erupt, scientists have warned.Since the start of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, which caused cancellations of thousands of flights in Europe because of a giant ash cloud, there has been much speculation about neighboring Katla.

A British scientist claims to be the first human to have been infected with a computer virus after he contaminated an electronic chip which was inserted into his hand.

An extraordinary crop circle based on the 'world's most beautiful maths theorem' has appeared in a field next to a windmill in Wiltshire.The complex disc, which measures 300ft across, appeared to the east of Wilton Windmill near Marlborough in a blazing yellow rape seed field.It appeared on Saturday just 25miles from another circle that popped up a fortnight ago by the Iron Age hill fort of Old Sarum.

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New research is showing that whales and dolphins possess intelligence and culture more complex that we had previously assumed, says Margi Prideaux. And, she argues, this raises anew the question of how we should relate to them - including whether it is ever right to hunt them.Despite long held preconceptions of human pre-eminence, scientists are discovering sophisticated intelligence beyond the boundaries of our own species.

In open water, there is often no place to hide. Some sharks have overcome this problem by making themselves invisible to both prey and predators, according to a new study.Light trickery permits the optical illusion, described in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. The findings represent the first experimental tests of shark luminescenc.

In the film Avatar, the blue-skinned Na'vi inhabit the lush moon of a gas-giant planet. What would life be like if Earth were such a moon?Neil Comins investigates this possibility, along with nine other tweaks that might make our cosmic neighbourhood subtly - or fundamentally - different. What if the moon orbited Earth backwards? What if our solar system were located in the centre of our galaxy, rather than in the suburbs?.

Albert Einstein said it couldn't be done, but now the velocity of a microscopic particle as it zigzags through air has been directly measured.The same technology used to make the measurement may eventually be used to force such beads to exhibit quantum mechanical behaviour that is normally seen in subatomic objects.

DID the big bang boil? The birth of our universe could have seethed with hot bubbles and, perhaps, a second period of rapid expansion. Such an episode may have left an imprint on the universe that persists to this day and might mean we're on the wrong track in our hunt for dark matter.Just 10-37 seconds or so after its birth, a period of inflation is thought to have caused the universe to balloon in size. This process is thought to have amplified tiny quantum fluctuations in the vacuum, giving rise to the megastructures we see all around us in the universe today.

A joint Japan-United States research team has identified the origin of the white light emission in solar flares.The team, led by Dr. Kyoko Watanabe, an aerospace project research associate at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, made its discovery by quantitatively analyzing an X-class solar flare, which was observed by two successive, solar-observing satellites: Hinode and the NASA SMEX mission RHESSI. The origin of the white light emission had not been clarified since its first discovery about 150 years ago.

For years, this genus enjoyed primo dinosaur status. For example, the Natural History Museum still has Azendohsaurus in its dinosaur directory. But paleontologists have just determined that it's not a dinosaur at all.A new paper published in the journal Paleontology instead places the 230-million-year-old animal on a different and very early branch of the reptile evolutionary tree. Recent analysis of its remains shows that the animal- now classified as a reptile- was far more primitive than had been previously assumed, evolving its plant-eating ways independent of dinosaur.

Nobody said the Universe was a peaceful place, especially for exoplanets orbiting a tad too close to their host stars. And in a violent new Hubble observation announced today, a gas giant about 40 percent more massive than Jupiter is slowly being eaten alive, having its outer layers ripped away through extreme tidal forces, stretching its body into the shape of a football.This is an unprecedented discovery, never has this kind of planetary torture been seen before.

Humans have hardy prehistoric fish ancestors to thank for paving the way to their eventual evolution, a new study suggests.About 360 million years ago a mass extinction event hit the reset button on Earth's life, wiping out most of the fish that existed then near the time when the first vertebrates (all animals with backbones) crawled from water towards land. The species fortunate enough to survive set the stage for modern vertebrate biodiversity.

WASHINGTON - They live in us and on us, helping digest food and keeping acne at bay, and researchers said on Thursday that most of these germs are turning out to be new to science.The first look at 178 different microbes that live in or on the human body shows that more than 90 percent of their genetic sequences were unknown. That raises questions about how scientists classify microbial species.

NASA's long-lived twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have set a new endurance record on Mars, with Opportunity hot on the heels of its sister robot for the title of longest-running mission on the Martian surface.Opportunity on Thursday matched the Mars mission lifespan of NASA's iconic Viking 1 lander, which spent six years and 116 days (for a total of 2,245 days) working on the Red Planet in the mid-1970s and early 80s.

SAANEN (Switzerland): In a secret bunker deep in the Swiss Alps, European researchers have deposited a "digital genome" that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology.Accompanied by burly security guards in black uniforms, scientists carried a time capsule through a labyrinth of tunnels and five security zones to a vault near the slopes of chic ski resort Gstaad.

WASHINGTON: The US air force is making a prototype reusable rocket that can fly itself back to the launch site.For this ambitious vision, the Air Force Research Laboratory is rolling out a $33 million pathfinder programme to develop a prototype booster that can glide or fly itself back to the launch site, the Discovery News reported. If things will go as planned, the prototype would be ready by 2013, giving the air force a round-trip ticket to space, the report said.

The implants of the future will be powered by the energy sources already inside your body. Last week we saw scientists take a step toward this vision by developing a transistor that used the fuel from our cells (a molecule called ATP). And now, a French team has announced the development of a fuel cell that can use the glucose (sugar) inside an animal to produce electricity. Their paper is available free at the journal PLoS One.

SPACE agencies may one day have Charles Darwin to thank for the longevity of their spacecraft. The life expectancy of a popular type of ion engineMovie Camera has been almost doubled using software that mimics the way natural selection evolves ever fitter designs.Electrostatic ion engines are becoming popular in space missions. Instead of relying on burning large amounts of heavy liquid propellant for thrust, they use solar power to ionise a small supply of xenon gas. A high voltage applied across a pair of gridded electrodes sends the positively charged ions rushing at high speed towards the negative electrode. Most ions pass through the grid, generating thrust.

NASA officially ended its Phoenix Mars Lander operation today after a new image of the machine showed severe ice damage to its solar panels and repeated attempts to contact the spacecraft had failed.The space agency had flown its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) satellite over the lander at least 210 times since January listening for signs of life from the machine. The attempts were made in the off-chance that Phoenix survived a Martian arctic winter the spacecraft was never designed to withstand, NASA stated.

The secret astronomical meaning of the 'Lost Symbol', featured in Dan Brown's novel of the same name, has been discovered by a scientist from Glasgow, Scotland.David Cumming's discovery unveils a hidden storehouse of astronomical information that relates to what Einstein called, 'the greatest coincidence in the Universe.' The discovery sheds new light on the origin of our Sun, Earth, and Moon and supports recent scientific speculation about the nature of our Universe.

Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment, already believed to have antidepressant qualities, could increase learning behavior according to research presented today at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego."Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature," says Dorothy Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, who conducted the research with her colleague Susan Jenks

Over one month after the initial explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, crude oil continues to flow into the Gulf of Mexico, and oil slicks have slowly reached as far as 12 miles into Louisiana's marshes. According to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, more than 65 miles of Louisiana's shoreline has now been oiled. BP said it will be at least Wednesday before they will try using heavy mud and cement to plug the leak, a maneuver called a "top kill" that represents their best hope of stopping the oil after several failed attempts. Based on low estimates, at least 6 million gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf so far - though some scientists have said they believe the spill already surpasses the 11 million-gallon 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska as the worst in U.S. history.

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.

The period of global warming linked to the extinction of animal giants such as the woolly mammoth also made its mark on smaller mammals who survived the event.Adaptable deer mice came to dominate the small furry communities of northern California as the climate warmed at the end of the last ice age, around 11,700 years ago, an excavation of one ancient woodrat nest shows. Overall, the number of small mammalian species in the area declined by about one-third, say Jessica Blois, currently at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her colleagues.

Honeybee numbers in the UK dropped again over the winter, though the rate of decline appears to have slowed slightly despite the harsh weather.In an encouraging note, the number of hives has doubled in three years to an estimated 80,000, according to the British Beekeepers Association, which released the survey of winter honeybee losses.On average, beekeepers lost 17% of their colonies in 2009-10, compared to 19% the previous year and 30% during the winter of 2007-08. There are now an estimated 48 billion bees in the UK.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Lab wanted to model and simulate the next generation of nuclear power facilities. While software that models a partial nuclear core or radiation transport exists in spades, the ORNL team wanted to model entire facilities at once. So they did what anyone would do: They started from scratch, merging a decade of research with the world's fastest supercomputer to build Denovo, the most sophisticated modeling software in the industry, to simulate entire nuclear facilities in one comprehensive snapshot.The Nuclear Science and Technology Division at ORNL has long been charged with integrating nuclear energy models with national security simulations and other data to solve specific problems in the nuke energy field. But though their previous efforts were state-of-the art from a computer-modeling standpoint, the models were still disjointed -- one software package might examine the reactor core, another model would simulate security fail-safes or the disposal of spent fuel.

The sun gives the Earth life, but it also poses a planetary threat. X-ray bursts and magnetically driven explosions of solar material can wreak havoc by knocking out satellites, causing power failures and emitting radiation surges that require airline flights to be rerouted. To keep an eye on our local star, this year NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite. "Imagine a weather system where instead of the water cycle, with rain and snow, it has magnetic fields," SDO project scientist Dean Pesnell says. The five-year, $850 million mission continually beams data to Earth at 150 megabits per second. The information will be used as a warning system and to better predict damages.

The recent 'discovery' of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat, Turkey has taken the archaeological world by storm, and it's no surprise that some are less inclined to believe the audacious claims of Noah's Ark Ministries International (NIMA).At the same time the team released a computer-generated image of the site, right, American Biblical historian Randall Price has already refuted the team's claims, stating he went to the ark's purported location and saw nothing. Price has since been met with Orwellian media backlash on NIMA's website, but another leading expert has added his concerns to the debate.

Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking. Physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

The Mediterranean is the birthplace of ancient peoples and cultures, but has it acted as a bridge or a barrier in the genetic history of northern and southern populations? Gene flow and population structure on the north and south shores of the Mediterranean form the basis of the work published recently by the Human Population Genetics research group, directed by Pedro Moral of the Department of Animal Biology at the University of Barcelona.The research, published in two separate articles in BMC Evolutionary Biology and the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, covers one of the widest geographical areas and most diverse population samples studied to date in the Mediterranean region and reveals differences in the genetic structure of the populations inhabiting the north and south shores.

A U.S. immigration judge has ordered the deportation of a Pennsylvania man who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II, the Department of Justice said.

One type of turtle possesses an extraordinary organ that allows it to breathe underwater and stay submerged for many months.The common musk turtle has a tiny tongue lined with specialised buds, scientists have discovered.Rather than use this tongue for eating, the turtles use it to exchange oxygen, solving a mystery of how these reptiles can remain submerged for so long.Details are published in journal The Anatomical Record.

Astronomers have put forward opposing explanations for what could be a new type of exploding star or supernova.Supernova 2005E was initially picked up by telescopes back in 2005 and has been carefully examined by scientists.They now report, in the journal Nature, that the explosion does not match known types of supernova.

Trapped air in the shells of rare octopuses is the key to their survival in the deep sea, say scientists.Females of the argonaut family (Argonautidae) release trapped air from their shells to control very precisely their movement through the water.This ability has puzzled naturalists for over 2,000 years, dating back to observations made by Aristotle in 300 BC.Research published in the Royal Society journal, Proceedings B, finally explains why it may have evolved.

Japan has sent a sophisticated probe to Venus to study its atmosphere in unprecedented detail.The Akatsuki orbiter was put on a path to the inner-world by an H-IIA rocket launched from the Tanegashima spaceport in the south of the country.The vehicle left its pad at precisely 2158 GMT (0658 local time Friday).Akatsuki will arrive at Venus in December. Key goals include finding definitive evidence for lightning and for active volcanoes.

A final-year archaeology student at the University of Leicester is developing a pioneering project in the Palestinian West Bank that will train young archaeologists from the region during the summer months.The project has attracted the interest of UN agencies in Palestine and New York.Following an archaeology placement in Israel in 2009, Emma Shaw visited the West Bank, where she felt more could be done for the rich archaeological heritage there. The lack of interest among young people was something she found particularly shocking.

These works have recovered more than twenty burials, mostly groups, which are dated the first century BC and show clear Iberian cremation rites.Iberian necropolis dated 100 BC in Arjona (Jaén) Heavy rain in Arjona uncovers the further remainsThe accidental finding in Arjona (Jaén) was discovered in the remains of an Iberian necropolis of the first century BC, some of the archaeological work is to be presented in June at an international meeting.

Pottery fragments found from the sites in Kundla village are nearly 2,000 years oldTwo fresh sites belonging to the Late Harappan Period have been found along the two ends of the Vasal River in Chuda taluka of Surendranagar district, a state archaeology department team from Rajkot has claimed. The sites are located at Kundla village.Pottery fragments found here are believed to be nearly 2,000 years old. Although no structure has been found at any of the sites, there are indications that an old Harappan settlement existed in the area, which is now an agricultural land.

An Anglo-Saxon settlement has been discovered on the site of the new All Saints' Academy in Cheltenham.Two skeletons, pottery and a large timber hall, all thought to date back to between the 6th to 8th Century, have been uncovered.Steve Sheldon, of Cotswold Archaeology, said it was previously thought the area did not succumb to Saxon control during that period.

Rebecca Shepherd, a volunteer archaeologist at Charles Towne Landing, thought her co-workers were joking in the fall when they claimed to find a tabby floor.In fact, they did, and it's the oldest surviving architectural remains unearthed at the historic site so far."We were just in shock," Shepherd said. "You just don't find stuff like that."The floor, made of lime and crushed oyster shells, is about 3 inches thick and measures roughly 12 feet by 15 feet.

King Tutankhamun's mummy was wrapped in custom-made bandages similar to modern first aid gauzes, an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals.Running in length from 4.70 meters to 39 cm (15.4 feet to 15.3 inches), the narrow bandages consist of 50 linen pieces especially woven for the boy king.For a century, the narrow linen bandages were contained in a rather overlooked cache of large ceramic jars at the museum's Department of Egyptian Art. The collection was recovered from the Valley of the Kings between 1907-08, more than a decade before Howard Carter discovered King Tut's treasure-packed tomb.

Archaeologists in southern Mexico have discovered the 2,700-year-old tomb of a dignitary inside a pyramid that may be the oldest such burial documented in Mesoamerica.The tomb held a man aged about 50, who was buried with jade collars, pyrite and obsidian artefacts and ceramic vessels. Archaeologist Emiliano Gallaga said the tomb dates to between 500 and 700BC."We think this is one of the earliest discoveries of the use of a pyramid as a tomb, not only as a religious site or temple," Gallaga said.

Against the awesome backdrop of the sun, they are at first little more than specks.Look a little closer, however, and you can make out the outline of solar panels, and next to it a dart-shaped silhouette.This extraordinary image shows the Space Shuttle Atlantis docking with the International Space Station in front of the sun.It was taken by astro-photographer Thierry Legault who, had he blinked at the crucial moment, would have missed it.

Scientists have created the world's first synthetic life form in a landmark experiment that paves the way for designer organisms that are built rather than evolved.The controversial feat, which has occupied 20 scientists for more than 10 years at an estimated cost of $40m, was described by one researcher as "a defining moment in biology".

I first met the Great Sphinx face-to-face on 17 June 1990. She (yes, I consider the Great Sphinx a female) has influenced and in many ways defined my life ever since. It has been apparent to me that many a person knows me, or believes they know me, or more accurately knows of me, due to the controversy over the age of the Sphinx that my research has engendered.For those not familiar with my research on the Great Sphinx, I will summarize it very briefly. For more extended discussions, I refer the reader to my books (listed in the notes to this article)).

Brazilian paleontologists have found the near complete fossil of a fearsome predator that roamed the Earth before the dinosaurs.The 22ft long creature, called Prestosuchus chiniquensis, lived some 238million years ago. It belonged to a family of reptiles called thecodonts and had a large, deep skull with serrated teeth and a long tailWeighing 900lbs, the carnivores romated Earth during the Triassic Period 250 to 205 million years ago. Dinosaurs came to dominate from 230million years ago up to their extinction 65million years ago.

How much did the Catholic Church hierarchy know about Hitler's oppression of the Jews as it was happening? And why didn't it speak up? With the opening of the Vatican archives from the pre-World War II years, we can finally explore these heated questions -- and German historian Hubert Wolf has dug through the files to find damning evidence that Pope Pius XII, known to critics as "Hitler's pope," made a conscious decision to pass on the issue, leaving it up to his bishops in Germany to protect the Jews and Catholics who were being persecuted. Even when directly confronted with the growing enormity of the situation, as in this story of a German bishop who did stand up for his morals, the pope avoided public action.

Long before you even feel sick, a new Darpa-funded bio-sensor will know what ails you. Researchers at Duke University are developing a device that can betray exposure to a virus even before a person's first sneeze, Wired's DangerRoom blog reports.The sensor detects changes in gene expression that occur in people exposed to viruses like the common cold, flu, or the respiratory syncytial virus.

The astronauts launching on space shuttle Atlantis this afternoon will experience fatigue, muscle and bone-density loss, and a host of other space ills during the next couple of weeks. But their counterparts who will one day travel to Mars face greater problems -- their immune systems will be compromised, thanks to genes that behave differently in space.Spaceflight changes the activity of genes that control immune and stress response, according to a new study of space-flown mice at the University of Arizona.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is currently the biggest science experiment in operation, but it may have to pass that mantle on soon enough. A collaboration between NASA and the ESA plans to launch three spacecraft into orbit around the sun 3 million miles apart, then have them shoot lasers at each other, all in the name of proving the existence of gravitational waves, the last piece of Einstein's relativity theory that is as yet unproved.

Silicon chips are on the way out, at least if Duke University engineer Chris Dwyer has his way. The professor of electrical and computer engineering says a single grad student using the unique properties of DNA to coax circuits into assembling themselves could produce more logic circuits in a single day than the entire global silicon chip industry could produce in a month.Indeed, DNA is perfectly suited to such pre-programming and self-assembly. Dwyer's recent research has shown that by creating and mixing customized snippets of DNA and other molecules, he can create billions of identical, waffle-like structures that can be turned into logic circuits using light rather than electricity as a signaling medium.

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, blasted NASA's new plans for future space exploration Wednesday, adding that President Barack Obama was poorly advised when he canceled the space agency's previous course for U.S. human spaceflight earlier this year.Armstrong, who commanded the historic Apollo 11 moon landing mission in July 1969, criticized what he billed as an air of secrecy that preceded Obama's February announcement which cancelled NASA's Constellation program aiming for the moon. That plan, he told a Senate subcommittee, was a surprise to many among NASA, academia and the military.

The HIV-like virus that infects monkeys is at least 100,000 if not millions of years old, scientists reported this week at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. The vast age of the monkey virus, which does not cause illness in most of its hosts, suggests that it may take a long time for HIV to become equally benign in humans."Don't expect human evolution to unfold in a timeframe that will do anything good for us," Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told meeting attendees. "We're not going to evolve adaptations that will mitigate this virus in any acceptable timescale, so we need other solutions.

The early bird -- didn't fly very well.Recent fossil discoveries that showed feathers on some of the early flying animals, like the well-known Archaeopteryx, created a bit of a flap in the archaeological world.And now comes a report that those feathers may have been too weak for use in flapping flight -- helpful only for gliding.

A few months ago we told you about a toothy new dinosaur that gulped down its food whole without chewing. Now new details about this ultimate dinosaur fast food lifestyle are coming in. They help to explain why some dinosaurs grew to become so tall, long and fat.Research in the journal Biological Reviews presents a common sense bit of truth: The larger an animal is, the more time it spends eating. Elephants, for example, spend 18 hours per day satisfying their voracious appetites."This led us to one of the many riddles that gigantism of dinosaurs puts before us," said the University of Bonn's Martin Sander, who worked on the new dinosaur research. "(The dinosaurs) were just so large that a day would have had to have 30 hours so that they were able to meet their energy demands.".

Physicists have found new evidence that supports the theory of quantum Darwinism, the idea that the transition from the quantum to the classical world occurs due to a quantum form of natural selection. By explaining how the classical world emerges from the quantum world, quantum Darwinism could shed light on one of the most challenging questions in physics of the past century.

Imagine that you're a science-fiction writer on a tight schedule. You'd like to play in the vast expanses of the universe, but you have too much scientific integrity to conjure up a warp drive or a DeLorean out of thin air. You're also concerned that your audience would get bored in the thousands of years that it would take for a spaceship to realistically travel the distances between stars. What you really need is a wormhole -- a shortcut through time and space. Best of all, unlike most science-fiction tropes, wormholes might very well be real.

Russia and Italy have entered into an agreement to build a new fusion reactor outside Moscow that could become the first such reactor to achieve ignition, the point where a fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining instead of requiring a constant input of energy. The design for the reactor, called Ignitor, originated with MIT physics professor Bruno Coppi, who will be the project's principal investigator.

Using observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, astronomers have announced a robust detection of a vast reservoir of intergalactic gas about 400 million light years from Earth. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the "missing matter" in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking set off chatter in late April when he posited the existence of intelligent aliens on his new TV series, "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking" -- adding that it would be best for human beings to avoid contact with them.Hawking speculated that such aliens would likely be nomads, living in ships after sucking their own planet dry of resources, and hopping from one interstellar refueling station to the next.

Researchers at the University of St Andrews' School of Physics and Astronomy have developed a new laser imaging technique that overcomes visual distortions and promises advances in deep tissue imaging and even nanosurgery.Since the advent of the laser, the last 50 years have seen amazing advances in our use and understanding of light. However, light scatters quickly when passing through a turbulent object or medium - rendering any imaging or light focusing difficult. A good example is peering through mist or a typical bathroom window, which randomly scatters the incident light making it difficult to see what is on the other side.

Can we get bugs to do our bidding? Emory chemist Justin Gallivan has moved science another step closer to that possibility. His lab reprogrammed an innocuous strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli to "seek and destroy" the molecules of an herbicide called atrazine."Rather than just altering a single gene and getting a cell to do one task, we can start thinking of a cell almost like a computer that we can reprogram to do a series of things," says Gallivan.

Talk about flying close to the wind. A Japanese interplanetary spacecraft will begin its travels to Venus next week, to get the clearest ever view of massive gusts in the planet's atmosphere.The Venus Climate Orbiter, called AKATSUKI, aims to find out why blistering winds zip around the planet at speeds of up to 400 kilometres per hour. The upper clouds can circle the planet in four days or even less, and no one knows why. The effect is called "super-rotation", because the bulk of the atmosphere is rotating much faster than the planet itself. Venus takes 243 Earth days to make one rotation.

IT'S still a long way from the replicants in Blade Runner, but artificial skin containing sweat glands has been produced for the first time - and tested in mice. The hope is that, unlike conventional skin substitutes, the new skin will allow patients with large grafts to sweat to keep their bodies cool."This system promises to restore normal sweating activity," says Xiaobing Fu of the Burns Institute of the General Hospital of the People's Liberation Army in Beijing, China. Whether that promise has been fulfilled remains to be seen.

Researchers may have found a clue to age-related memory loss among the coiled strands of DNA in the brain cells of elderly mice. If the process they unraveled also occurs in humans, the discovery could lead to new ways of helping older people remember.In the new study, researchers found that older mice have less of a kind of genetic packing material that helps strands of DNA involved in the memory formation process spring into action.

A "power revolution" in Britain will be promised by Nick Clegg today as he tries to put his personal stamp on the Government in his first major statement as Deputy Prime Minister.The Liberal Democrat leader will hail his programme of political reform as the most ambitious and radical since the Great Reform Act of 1832. He has told aides that the coalition government has given him the opportunity to implement the changes that he came into politics to pursue.In a speech in London Mr Clegg will promise a "wholesale, big bang" rather than piecemeal approach, including:* scrapping the identity card scheme and second generation biometric passports;* removing limits on the rights to peaceful protest;* a bonfire of unnecessary laws;* a block on pointless new criminal offences;* internet and email records not to be held without reason;* closed-circuit television to be properly regulated;* new controls over the DNA database, such as on the storage of innocent people's DNA;* axeing the ContactPoint children's database;* schools will not take children's fingerprints without asking for parental consent;* reviewing the libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

"A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.

"This study was just routine," said Russian biologist Alexey V. Surov, in what could end up as the understatement of this century. Surov and his colleagues set out to discover if Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) soy, grown on 91% of US soybean fields, leads to problems in growth or reproduction. What he discovered may uproot a multi-billion dollar industry.

LED data transmission used to be all the rage -- we fondly remember beaming Palm Pilot contacts via IrDA. Then we got omni-directional Bluetooth and building-penetrating WiFi, and put all that caveman stuff behind us. But now, scientists the world over are looking to bring back line-of-sight networking, and the latest demonstration has Chinese researchers streaming video to a laptop with naught but ceiling-mounted blue LEDs. The Chinese Academy of Sciences claims to have realized a 2Mbit per second internet connection that transmits data simply by modulating the flicker of the little diodes, and imperceptibly enough to have them serve as room lighting as well.

Cynthia Dunbar does not have a high regard for her local schools. She has called them unconstitutional, tyrannical and tools of perversion. The conservative Texas lawyer has even likened sending children to her state's schools to "throwing them in to the enemy's flames". Her hostility runs so deep that she educated her own offspring at home and at private Christian establishments.

People who take vitamin E supplements regularly for years -- whether they are smokers or nonsmokers -- may lower their risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the lung condition that is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.COPD includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis and is often, but not always, caused by smoking.