Newsdesk Archive
For the first time, scientists have discovered evidence of water ice, as well as organic compounds, on an asteroid - findings that bolster a leading theory for the origins of life on Earth."Up until now there was no sign that asteroids had any abundant organics or ice on them," said Joshua Emery, a planetary astronomer at the University of Tennessee and an author of one of two studies on the discoveries. The new evidence supports the possibility that the essential building blocks for life came from asteroids.
"Standard orbit, Mr. Sulu." Captain Kirk barks out the order with such confidence. He knows the USS Enterprise can slip in and out of planetary orbits with ease. But it's only easy in the realm of science fiction. In the real world, such maneuvers have been impossible -- until now.Enter Dawn, NASA's cutting edge mission to the asteroid belt.
Travel from the tropics to the poles, and you'll notice that the diversity of mammals declines with distance from the equator. Move from lowland to mountains, and you'll see diversity increase as the landscape becomes more varied. Ecologists have proposed various explanations for these well-known "biodiversity gradients," invoking ecological, evolutionary and historical processes.
Scientists working on the Big Bang project probing the secrets of the cosmos said on Wednesday their giant particle collider is on course to make unexpected discoveries about the origins and makeup of the universe.Reporting on the progress of the experiment two months into its initial high-power phase, scientists at the CERN research centre said the $10 billion machine was rapidly proving its capacity to advance the frontiers of physics.
This week, the huge asteroid Pallas reaches opposition, being opposite to the sun in Earth's sky, making it a prime target for avid skywatchers with telescopes.Asteroids are not as well behaved as planets, and their orbits are often far from the plane of the ecliptic. This is clearly the case with Pallas, because it reaches opposition in the unlikely constellation of Serpens Caput, very close to Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown. This is a pretty circlet of stars just to the left of Arcturus in northern hemisphere skies.
Unlike certain corners of the UK tabloid press, I'm not about to proclaim that NASA has found life on Mars, because that's just silly (and completely false). However, NASA has spotted signs of life on Earth. I realize that might sound just as wacky, but bear with me.Using their Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on the EO-1 satellite, NASA has managed to identify a region of the Arctic where bacteria is staining the ice. Borup Fiord Pass on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic is unique in that it is the only known location on the planet where sulfur is being pumped to the surface via a natural spring over ice. The result is a dirty yellow stain with contrasting white surroundings.
KYOTO -- Remains of a sauna have been discovered at the site of famous feudal warlord Nobunaga Oda's 16th century residence, a local research body has announced.The steam bath was found at the ruins of Nijo-Goshinzo residence in Kyoto's Nakagyo Ward, which belonged to Oda, one of the most powerful figures of Japan's warring states period.
Archeologists have found seven towers of silence and ossuaries, which they believe date back to the Sassanid era, in the southern Fars Province.A collection of unadorned ossuaries of different sizes were discovered in the southwestern city of Mohr.Built 2.5 meters above a mountain slope, the ossuaries are hewn in a line and lack specific patterns.
Scientists have managed to push back the date for the earliest known presence of a magnetic field on Earth by about 250 million years.The evidence is seen in tiny iron minerals that are aligned inside ancient dacite rocks from the Barberton mountains in South Africa.Analysis of the 3.45-billion-year-old minerals indicates the strength the field was much weaker than today.
About 17,000 years ago, one of the largest megafloods in Earth's history inundated a large area of Alaska, releasing millions of gallons of water every second and forever changing the area's landscape.One of at least four megafloods from ancient Glacial Lake Atna, the deluge breached ice dams and covered more than 3,500 square miles (9,065 square kilometers) of land of what is today the Copper River Basin northeast of Anchorage. (The lake would've covered Rhode Island three times.) .
A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.
Astronomers have taken what they say are the first-ever direct images of planets outside of our solar system, including a visible-light snapshot of a single-planet system and an infrared picture of a multiple-planet system.Earth-like worlds might also exist in the three-planet system, but if so they are too dim to photograph. The other newfound planet orbits a star called Fomalhaut, which is visible without the aid of a telescope. It is the 18th brightest star in the sky.
Bacteria and other germs latch on to clumps of decaying matter floating in the ocean, creating "germ islands" that could spread disease, a new study reveals.When plants and animals near the surface of the ocean die, they decay and gradually fall to the seafloor. This dead matter can clump together with sand, soot, fecal matter and other material to form what is called "marine snow," so named because it looks like tiny bits of white fluff. Marine snow continuously rains down on the deep ocean, feeding many of the creatures that dwell there.
If powerful new quantum computers are to reach their enormous potential, they will need amplifiers capable of transmitting signals so weak they consist of a single photon. In the May 6 edition of the journal Nature, a team of Yale scientists report creating an amplifier almost as efficient as the laws of quantum physics allow.
Flowers pollinated by bats have a reputation for producing copious amounts of pollen from oversized male reproductive organs, and until now most scientists believed this was to compensate for poor pollen distribution by the bats. Now Canadian researchers have suggested the reason is the opposite, and bats select for greater pollen production because they can efficiently transport large amounts of pollen on their fur.
When people become infected by HIV, it's usually only a matter of time, barring drug intervention, until they develop full-blown AIDS. However, a small number of people exposed to the virus progress very slowly to AIDS -- and some never develop the disease at all.
New images from more than 750 recent observations of Mars by an orbiting telescopic camera testify to the diversity of landscapes there.The images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are now available on NASA's Planetary Data System and on the camera team's website.
A water feature found in the Maya city of Palenque, Mexico, is the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world, according to a collaboration between two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist and a hydrologist. How the Maya used the pressurized water is, however, still unknown.
It took the three Achuar tribal leaders nine days to journey from their homes in the Peruvian Amazon to San Francisco, most of the time spent traveling by river in a small motorboat. They flew in a plane for the first time and marveled that the airliner that brought them from Lima could stay aloft for eight hours.The Achuar live deep in the Amazon rain forest, and their villages have had minimal contact with the modern world and its energy-hungry machines. But once again, the elders believe, the global demand for oil threatens their way of life. Talisman Energy, a Canadian oil company, is the latest to begin drilling exploratory wells in their traditional territory.
Bonobos have been filmed appearing to 'say no' by shaking their heads, report scientists.On a number of occasions, bonobos were filmed using side to side head movements to prevent others from doing something they did not want them to do.In one film a mother is seen shaking her head to stop her infant playing with its food.
A common mineral widely believed to be a poor vessel for fossils actually contains a treasure trove of ancient life, a discovery that may lead scientists searching for life on Mars to the planet's sweet spot.Both Earth and Mars have the mineral gypsum, though it hasn't been of much interest to scientists studying ancient life forms because no one believed tiny fossils could last in the soft, water-soluble mineral, also known as calcium sulfate.
Nearly all of Anne Frank's diary went on display Wednesday for the first time at the house where she wrote it during the two years the Jewish teenager was in hiding from the Nazis.The notebooks and pages that comprise the World War II diary have been moved into the Anne Frank House museum to mark 50 years since it opened its doors to the public.
The weeds that children smash to stain their cheeks purple-red and that Civil War soldiers used to write letters home - could be the key to spreading solar power across the globe, according to researchers at Wake Forest University's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.
A new study from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.
Getting less than six hours sleep a night can lead to an early grave, UK and Italian researchers have warned.They said people regularly having such little sleep were 12% more likely to die over a 25-year period than those who got an "ideal" six to eight hours.They also found an association between sleeping for more than nine hours and early death, although that much sleep may merely be a marker of ill health.
NASA's Mars Meteorite Research Team reopened a 14-year-old controversy on extraterrestrial life last week, reaffirming and offering support for its widely challenged assertion that a 4-billion-year-old meteorite that landed thousands of years ago on Antarctica shows evidence of microscopic life on Mars.In addition to presenting research that they said disproved some of their critics, the scientists reported that additional Martian meteorites appear to house distinct and identifiable microbial fossils that point even more strongly to the existence of life.
Nature and software engineers face similar design challenges in creating control systems. The different solutions they employ help explain why living organisms tend to malfunction less than computers, a Yale study has found.The Yale team compared the evolution of organisms and computer operating systems by analyzing the control networks in both a bacterium Escherichia coli and the Linux operating system. They report their findings online in the May 3 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Just five minutes of exercise in a "green space" such as a park can boost mental health, researchers claim.There is growing evidence that combining activities such as walking or cycling with nature boosts well-being.In the latest analysis, UK researchers looked at evidence from 1,250 people in 10 studies and found fast improvements in mood and self-esteem.The study in the Environmental Science and Technology journal suggested the strongest impact was on young people.
Our genome won't win any design awards and doesn't speak well of the intelligence of its 'designer', as Philip Ball explains.
Researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) have found that a compound derived from broccoli may help prevent or treat breast cancer by targeting breast cancer stem cells - those cells that fuel a tumor's growth.Members of U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center and the College of Pharmacy studied the effects of on breast cancer stem cells in mice. Having established the number of cancer stem cells in the the individual tumors, the scientists first experimented by injecting varying amount of sulforaphane into the mice tumors.
Stephen Hawking has claimed that humans might one day be able to use time travel to skip generations into the future.The famous astrophysicist, speaking in a new documentary, said spaceships could one day be capable of such high speeds that time slowed down for those on board.He admitted he had avoided talking about time travel previously ' for fear of being labelled a crank', saying the subject had once been 'scientific heresy'. 'These days I'm not so cautious,' he said.
A pair of rare medium-sized black holes was spotted near the center of a nearby galaxy, but for some reason they haven't been swallowed up by the supermassive black hole lurking there.Scientists aren't sure how long these black holes will escape their larger cousin's clutches of death. For now, the dark duo provides more support to the controversial idea of goldilocks-like black holes that are neither very small nor very large.
Archives recently made public by the Scottish government included some curious correspondence from a police chief expressing concern for the safety of the Loch Ness monster.William Fraser, the chief constable of Inverness-shire in the 1930s, wrote a letter to a government official noting that a man from London, Peter Kent, "stated that he was having a special harpoon gun made and that he was to return [to Loch Ness] with some 20 experienced men on August 22 for the purpose of hunting the monster down." Fraser added that he warned Kent not to hunt for the creature, and suggested that some official government protection might be established. Still, he was not optimistic: "That there is some strange creature in Loch Ness seems now beyond doubt, but that the police have any power to protect it is very doubtful.
A massive eruption on the surface of the sun that sent tons of plasma raining down our nearest star has been caught on camera by NASA's new solar observatory.The huge solar eruption was recorded by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and announced less than a week after the space agency released the space telescope's first images.
In November 1970, a Soviet probe landed on the surface of the moon and released two ramps. A rover, named Lunokhod 1, descended to the surface to take pictures and conduct experiments. It carried with it a French-made light reflector, which could be used by scientists on Earth to compute distances and better understand lunar geology.
From wings to low-density bones to echolocation, the evolution of flight in bats required many radical changes. But the most important change may have been metabolic.A genetic comparison of dozens of mammal species shows that bats possess highly modified versions of genes responsible for turning food into energy. Improved energy efficiency would have encouraged their ancestors to move from treetop gliding, like modern flying squirrels, to actively flapping their arms.
Fountains on the moon may answer a few astronaut wishes. Dust plumes lofted from craters could aid the future search for water and other resources.The idea of flying dust goes back to astronaut Gene Cernan on the Apollo 17 mission, who sketched an extended glow above the moon's surface that scientists thought might be due to light scattering off dust. And an experiment deployed by the same mission detected a flurry of high-speed dust particles around sunrise and sunset.
The creation of a human outpost on Mars is still some way off, but that hasn't stopped us planning the garden. At Kennedy Space Center on April 15, President Barack Obama announced the intention to send humans to Mars by the mid-2030s. If all goes to plan, NASA will kick off an era of space exploration not seen since the Apollo moon programme in the 1960s.If getting to Mars is a big step, ultimately staying there will be a giant leap. But already, experiments conducted in space and in simulated Martian conditions on Earth have yielded micro-organisms that will eventually help turn Martian rocks into soil, generate oxygen for us to breathe, purify water and recycle waste. Think of these microbial colonies as the first gardens on Mars.
CAN'T find a mate? Try parthenogenesis. The type of asexual reproduction may be part of an extreme survival strategy for sharks.In parthenogenesis, females' eggs start dividing without being fertilised. This produces daughters that are genetically similar to the mother. It was first observed in a captive hammerhead shark in 2001, but this was an isolated incident, and the shark pup died after three days, making it difficult to say much about its evolutionary significance.
WITH Earth's orbit cluttered with dead satellites, discarded rocket boosters and other space junk, ways to prevent the accumulation of such debris are desperately needed.How about using a tractor beam to simply steer future junk aside, says space-flight engineer John Sinko of Nagoya University, Japan.Sinko's idea is based on an experimental type of spacecraft engine called a laser thruster. Inside these motors, laser pulses fired into a mass of solid propellant cause a jet of material to be released, pushing the craft in the opposite direction.
A new catalyst has been developed to generate hydrogen from water cheaply, but the research was originally intended to make molecules that behaved like magnets. Hydrogen is a clean power source currently produced from natural gas, with carbon dioxide as a by-product. Producing hydrogen from water produces oxygen as a by-product instead.
New evidence in embryonic stem cells shows that mammalian genes may all have a layer of control that acts essentially like the pause button on your DVR. The researchers say the results show that the pausing phenomenon, previously thought to be a peculiarity of particular genes, is actually a much more general feature of the genome.
Scientists have discovered a cluster of underwater asphalt volcanoes rising from the sea floor just off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif.The seven volcanoes, about 65 feet tall, probably last disgorged petroleum and natural gas into the seas 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, during the most recent ice age, according to geochemist David Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Positronium is a short-lived system in which an electron and its anti-particle are bound together. In 2007, physicists at the University of California, Riverside created molecular positronium, a brand-new substance, in the laboratory. Now they have succeeded in isolating for the first time a sample of spin polarized positronium atoms.Study results appear this week in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The cameras are coming. They're getting smaller and nothing will stop them. The only question is: who watches whom?This is a tale of two cities. Cities of the near future, say, 20 years from now.Barring something unforeseen, you are apt to live in one of these two places. Your only choice may be which.
The massive oil spill from a BP offshore drilling rig threatens marine ecosystems and fisheries as it makes its way to the shoreline. Here's how it looks from above.The Macondo well is spilling 5,000 barrels of oil per day into the gulf, about five times more than well owner British Petroleum initially reported. Efforts to stem the leak using controlled burning and even undersea robots have been unsuccessful so far.The spill started after an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig last week, in which 11 workers are believed to have been killed.As of this afternoon, the AP reports that two Air Force planes are awaiting orders to start dumping chemicals on the oil spill.
Mammoths had a form of "anti-freeze" blood to keep their bodies supplied with oxygen at freezing temperatures.Nature Genetics reports that scientists "resurrected" a woolly mammoth blood protein to come to their finding.This protein, known as haemoglobin, is found in red blood cells, where it binds to and carries oxygen.The team found that mammoths possessed a genetic adaptation allowing their haemoglobin to release oxygen into the body even at low temperatures.
All great apes apart from man have 24 pairs of chromosomes. There is therefore a hypothesis that the common ancestor of all great apes had 24 pairs of chromosomes and that the fusion of two of the ancestor's chromosomes created chromosome 2 in humans. The evidence for this hypothesis is very strong.
The once mighty Jordan River, where Christians believe Jesus was baptised, is now little more than a polluted stream that could die next year unless the decay is halted, environmentalists said on Monday.The famed river "has been reduced to a trickle south of the Sea of Galilee, devastated by overexploitation, pollution and lack of regional management," Friends of the Earth, Middle East (FoEME) said in a report.More than 98 percent of the river's flow has been diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan over the years.
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
In an isolated mountain valley on the southern edge of the former Soviet Union stands a cliff honey-combed with caves.This is Vardzia -- a cave monastery built in the 12th century by Georgian kings and queens.In the 800 years since its construction, Vardzia has been destroyed by an earthquake and further damaged by invading armies. In the final days of winter, when snow coats the surrounding peaks, the caves look all but deserted.
Evidence found at the Roman site of Silchester could mean it was the site of one of Boudicca's battles.Professor Michael Fulford said that 13 years of excavations at Calleva had revealed evidence of the first gridded Iron Age town in Britain.The site also bears the scars of possible early Roman military occupation, and evidence of later, widespread burning and destruction.
New research indicates that one of the largest fresh-water floods in Earth's history happened about 17,000 years ago and inundated a large area of Alaska that is now occupied in part by the city of Wasilla, widely known because of the 2008 presidential campaign.The event was one of at least four "megafloods" as Glacial Lake Atna breached ice dams and discharged water. The lake covered more than 3,500 square miles in the Copper River Basin northeast of Anchorage and Wasilla.
The notion that Polynesian seafarers reached the American continents has been kicking around archaeological circles for a very long time. Popularized by Thor Heyerdahl's raft KonTiki, the idea of trans-pacific migrations faded into obscurity in the 1970s, primarily because (well, my opinion anyway) that the emphasis was on Polynesian colonization of South America. Those hyper-diffusionist theories were outmoded and there is plenty of evidence that the American cultural groups got along very well indeed without the Polynesians.
Archaeologists have confirmed an Aboriginal site in the path of a major Tasmanian highway contains the oldest evidence of human habitation in the southern hemisphere.About 3 million Indigenous artefacts were discovered at the Jordan River levee north of Hobart.The State Government commissioned archaeologists to examine the site after the Aboriginal community raised concerns that construction of the Brighton bypass could damage it.
There are millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but yesterday attention focused on just one. According to a couple of studies in Nature, a large asteroid called 24 Themis is rife with water ice and organic molecules, and the researchers say that it could be more evidence that the water so precious to life on Earth came to our planet on board such rocks.
Paul Schaefer, a former Nazi who fled Germany in 1961 and founded a cult-like commune in Chile, died Saturday in a prison hospital.He was 88.Schaefer was serving a 20-year sentence at the national penitentiary in Santiago for sexually abusing children at the notorious commune known as Colonia Dignidad (The Dignity Colony).
Indonesia is hosting what is being called the world's biggest geothermal energy conference.The congress in Bali is an attempt to look at how to better develop geothermal power as an environmentally friendly fuel for the future.Geothermal power is energy extracted from the heat stored in the Earth, and environmentalists say it could be the key to using cleaner forms of fuel.Representatives from 80 countries are attending the talks.
Archaeological discoveries - Head of Antiquities of Lower Egypt Department of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud said that archaeological missions working in North Sinai have unearthed Tharu , an ancient fortified city, a move which stressed the importance of this area as the eastern gate of Egypt.Abdel-Maqsoud was speaking at a symposium held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. He said that the discovery reveals the features of Horus military route between Egypt and the Palestinian lands.
More ancient graves have been discovered at Iran's Burnt City as archeologists were conducting the 13th phase of excavation works at the prehistoric site.The unearthed tombs at the Burnt City site located in southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan province date back to about 3,000 BC, Rouhollah Shirazi, an official with Iran's Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization told IRNA on Thursday.
People bivouacked at Fort Jackson before the U.S. Army took over the property.Long before.The most extensive archaeological dig ever at the fort has uncovered evidence of human camps up to 9,000 years old.
An American space tourism company that arranges multimillion-dollar treks to the International Space Station for the ultra-wealthy has struck a new deal to offer suborbital spaceflights for nearly half the going cost. The price is still steep, though: $102,000 for the works.Virginia-based firm Space Adventures has signed an exclusive deal with Armadillo Aerospace, a Texas-based company founded by computer game entrepreneur John Carmack, to sell space tourist seats on new suborbital rocket ships that are currently in development at Armadillo.
Researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington have found the first solid evidence of horizontal DNA transfer, the movement of genetic material among non-mating species, between parasitic invertebrates and some of their vertebrate hosts.The findings are published in the April 28 issue of the journal Nature, one of the world's foremost scientific journals.
What's the difference between a frog, a chicken, a mouse and a human? Not as much as you'd think, according to an analysis of the first sequenced amphibian genome.The genome of the western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis, has now been analysed by an international consortium of scientists from 24 institutions, and joins a list of sequenced model organisms including the mouse, zebrafish, nematode and fruit fly. What's most surprising, researchers say, is how closely the amphibian's genome resembles that of the mouse and the human, with large swathes of frog DNA on several chromosomes having genes arranged in the same order as in these mammals. The results of the analysis are published in Science this week.
Students from Hacienda Heights, California have built a vehicle with a hydrogen internal combustion engine (HICE) using a four-stroke engine from Honda. The three-wheeled vehicle runs entirely on hydrogen and uses absolutely no gasoline.After a successful test drive, the car is now ready for a public showing. "The bugs have been fixed, but there were a couple of safety issues we have to consider before we run the car up at our open house," said project manager and student John Weng.
Pentagon-backed scientists aim to create a human-like machine, at some point. But they are starting out with the goal of crafting artificial intelligence on the level of a cat's brain. Still there are vast challenges.
The oil slick that resulted from the rig explosion on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico is heading toward the Mississippi Delta and nearby coastline. Some experts are predicting the impact of the oil reaching the marshlands in the area could be bigger than that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound. As hard as it is to clean oil-covered rocks, oily marshland would be far more difficult to deal with.Experts recently told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that as much as 210,000 gallons of oil a day could be leaking from the well for two months.
Imagine seeing better by thinking differently. That's a vision with a future, according to Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer.Eyesight markedly improved when people were experimentally induced to believe that they could see especially well, Langer and her colleagues report in the April Psychological Science. Such expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply making volunteers more alert or motivated to focus on objects, they assert.
If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative.The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert food to energy within cells. In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia's Vindija cave 30,000 years ago. As the Neanderthal genome is painstakingly sequenced, the archaeologists and biologists who study it will be faced with an opportunity that seemed like science fiction just 10 years ago. They will be able to look at the genetic blueprint of humankind's nearest relative and understand its biology as intimately as our own.
Harry Sivertsen & Steve Redman will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout May to discuss their latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article
Thomas Hagan, the only man who admitted his role in the 1965 assassination of iconic black leader Malcolm X, was paroled Tuesday.Hagan was freed a day earlier than planned because his paperwork was processed more quickly than anticipated, according to the New York State Department of Correctional Services.
Was one of America's most revered popular historians fabricating his own material? That's the explosive charge now levied at Stephen Ambrose, author of numerous bestselling military and presidential histories. The author of "D-Day" and "Band of Brothers" died in 2002, but several authorities have recently questioned the writer's accounts of his research for "Supreme Commander," a massive two-volume biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower. At a minimum, Ambrose's critics say, he had vastly exaggerated the amount of time he spent interviewing the former president; and at worst, they suggest, he simply made up long stretches of the book.
Elusive dark matter around clusters of galaxies often clumps into cigar shapes, new observations show.The discovery could help scientists finally understand what makes up dark matter, which is the mystifying stuff thought to exist invisibly all around us. Dark matter, which could be more than five times more abundant than visible matter, is only detectable through its gravitational pull on regular material.According to the new observations, the dark matter around many galaxy clusters is a flattened, cigarlike shape, rather than a rounded sphere.
To most people, the literary debate over who wrote the works of William Shakespeare would appear to be much ado about nothing. After all, the play's the thing, right? What does it matter who wrote it?To James Shapiro, however, it matters a great deal.
After a rough ride through narrow desert washes, Alfredo Figueroa came to a clearing and ordered the vehicles to halt.The giants were waiting.Figueroa strode briskly across the plain.Before him, clear lines in the stony sand formed a 200-foot-long image of the flute-playing Native American god Kokopelli. Beside him was Cicimitl, an Aztec spirit said to guide souls to the afterlife."No one has a clue that this stuff is out here," Figueroa said, picking his way around a massive foot.
NUKU'ALOFA, Tonga - Four adventurers set sail in an open boat from Tonga in a bid to re-enact the epic 4,400-mile (7,040 kilometer) survival voyage of Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty fame when he was cast adrift by mutineers in 1789.Bligh, widely acknowledged as an expert seaman, sailed a 45-foot (14 meter) open longboat with 18 crew from near Tonga to West Timor in 48 days, surviving partly by catching fish and seabirds and drinking rain water.
A sudden change in the Atlantic Gulf Stream, which new research has linked to the mass extinction of dinosaurs, may happen again, many scientists fear. The shift could be abrupt, and climate experts advise that we must continue to monitor the present warning signs, such as influxes of fresh water into the North Atlantic, and slowdowns of the Atlantic Gulf Stream.A popular theory concerning the extinction of dinosaurs is that a sudden, external event, such as an asteroid hit or volcano eruption, led to the dino demise. But new research, published in Nature Geoscience and the journal Geology, argues climate was more to blame. The research determined that the greenhouse climate of the Cretaceous period experienced a sudden drop in global temperatures.
An Italian inventor, Enrico Dini, chairman of the company Monolite UK Ltd, has developed a huge three-dimensional printer called D-Shape that can print entire buildings out of sand and an inorganic binder. The printer works by spraying a thin layer of sand followed by a layer of magnesium-based binder from hundreds of nozzles on its underside. The glue turns the sand to solid stone, which is built up layer by layer from the bottom up to form a sculpture, or a sandstone building.
Aydogan Ozcan, whose invention of a novel lensless imaging technology for use in telemedicine could radically transform global health care, has now taken his work a step further -- or tinier: The UCLA engineer has created a miniature microscope, the world's smallest and lightest for telemedicine applications.
WHY are supermassive black holes so, well, supermassive? It has long been a mystery how enough matter can reach these cosmic gluttons to swell them to such large sizes. Now it seems the answer could be connected to a starry disc at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. Although they may be hard to see, such discs may be common.Black holes millions or billions times as massive as the sun reside at the heart of most galaxies, including our own. These black holes have been fattened up by huge amounts of gas. But astronomers don't know how that gas makes it through a final hurdle, migrating the last dozens or hundreds of light years to be eaten.
EAT your heart out, Duracell bunny: NASA has unveiled an ocean-going robot that really can go on forever. It is the first of its kind to be fuelled entirely by renewable energy.This month the agency revealed that SOLO-TREC, a wax-filled buoy powered only by the temperature differences in the water around it, has been tirelessly diving to depths of 500 metres off the Hawaiian coast three times a day since November 2009. The float gathers data on temperature and salinity to improve studies of ocean currents.
UBC researchers have proffered a new mathematical model that seeks to unravel a key evolutionary riddle--namely what factors underlie the generation of biological diversity both within and between species.Evolutionary biologists have long recognized that the emergence of rare traits within a population can spur diversity. For example, being one of a few under-sized predators in a population dominated by larger-sized predators can offer advantages--access to an abundance of small prey--and increase the likelihood of that trait prospering in the population.
There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before."We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.
No risky surgery, no invasive implant, no painful rehabilitation and certainly not "no treatment at all." When we go to the doctor's office, what we want to hear is, "There's a pill for that." Over the past year, a series of medical breakthroughs have brought five such magic-bullet pills one step closer to reality, aimed at diseases such as osteoporosis and type 2 diabetes. Once they're developed, these pills won't be cure-alls: A pill that builds bone mass won't provide the heart and muscle benefits of exercise, for instance, and a calorie-burning pill is no replacement for a healthy diet. But these pills could provide a novel remedy for certain conditions that remain difficult to treat.
The Arctic is locked into a destructive cycle that could see its icy cover rapidly disappear, scientists have confirmed. A new analysis shows that dwindling levels of sea ice are responsible for unusual levels of global warming in the region. The findings reinforce suggestions that a positive feedback between ice loss and temperature rise has emerged in the Arctic, which increases the chances of further rapid ice loss and warming.
In the fall of 2009, University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno and colleagues published an article in Science detailing the discovery of Raptorex kriegsteini, a new species of dinosaur that has characteristics remarkably similar to Tyrannosaurus rex, but is about 90 times smaller and roughly 60 million years older than its gigantic counterpart. The tiny Tyrannosauridae, like T. rex, has puny forearms, enhanced jaw muscles and olfactory bulbs, and other biological tools needed to be a voracious carnivore. Raptorex, in many ways, is a missing link in the evolutionary story of T. rex.Unlike so many of his previous finds, Sereno did not discover Raptorex in the field. Instead, the specimen was smuggled out of China, shipped around the world and eventually sold to a private collector.
The US Coast Guard says five times as much oil as previously thought could be leaking from a well beneath where a rig sank in the Gulf of Mexico last week.Rear Admiral Mary Landry said 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) a day were now thought to be gushing into the sea 50 miles (80km) off Louisiana's coast.A third leak had also been discovered at the site, Adm Landry said.One fire-fighting expert told the BBC the disaster might become the "biggest oil spill in the world".
Apologies for those watching the David Wilcock & Graham Hancock dialogue on YouTube, which has been temporarily made private pending changes and updates, and will be back online as soon as possible.
A treasure trove of ancient weapons has emerged from melting ice patches in the Canadian Arctic, revealing hunting strategies thousands of years old.The weapons, which include a 2,400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years, have been found high in the remote Mackenzie Mountains, a region where Mountain Boreal caribou abound in the summer months.
New research has confirmed that mice have the biochemical pathways required to manufacture morphine from intermediates. Morphine is a powerful drug usually derived from the opium poppy, but scientists have long speculated animals may be able to synthesize it, especially as they have brain receptors responding specifically to morphine. Tetrahydropapaveroline (THP) and other alkaloid precursors of morphine have been discovered in brain tissue and urine, but until now animal studies were largely inconclusive because of the difficulty of excluding environmental contaminants. The new research gives more conclusive evidence that excludes the possibility of contamination.
A European-built spacecraft has used its solar wings as sails to skim through the sweltering atmosphere of Venus at the planet's outermost border with space.The European Space Agency's (ESA) Venus Express spacecraft conducted five "aerodrag" maneuvers last week, which used the orbiter as a sensor capable of very accurately measuring the atmospheric density just 111 miles (180 km) above the cloud-enshrouded planet.
Netizens without access to cable broadband speeds might someday get fiber optic speeds over their old copper lines. Alcatel-Lucent combined several old networking tricks to boost DSL speeds over copper telephone lines to 100 megabits per second (Mbps) at distances spanning almost two-thirds of a mile, Technology Review reports.
Japan's insatiable love for robots and mind-reading technology has converged in the form of a new government-industry partnership. That means Japanese consumers can look forward to robots and electronics controllable by thought alone within a decade, according to Agence France-Presse.
Archaeologists have uncovered bronze coins bearing the image of ancient Egyptian ruler King Ptolemy III in an oasis south of the capital, the culture ministry announced on Thursday.Also found by the Egyptian team were necklaces made of ostrich eggshell, it said.
The dungeon believed to have housed Robin Hood when he was caught by the Sheriff of Nottingham is to be surveyed using a laser.It is part of a major project to explore every cave in Nottingham.Robin Hood is believed to have been held captive in an oubliette (underground dungeon) located at what is now the Galleries of Justice.The Nottingham Caves Survey is being conducted by archaeologists based at the University of Nottingham.
Roman altar stones dating back almost 2000 years have been found at a cricket pavilion in Musselburgh, East Lothian.The stones have been described as the most significant find of their kind in the past 100 years.Renovations were planned at the pavilion but archaeologists had to survey the protected building before work could begin.Their unearthing of the stones and other artefacts has postponed the planned developments on the pavilion.
When and where did the cognitive abilities of modern humans arise? It's a big question -- one debated by anthropologists for decades. It's an even bigger question for an undergraduate thesis, but senior Logan Bartram has a leg up on this ambitious project: he helped unearth artifacts that are playing a critical role in shaping our knowledge about human origins.
The high, arid plateau that includes parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Texas and Arizona created special demands on the indigenous peoples of the region. In order to survive they learned to cultivate plants and build architecture that adapted to the climate Although the earliest evidence of maize (Indian corn) pollen is about 1200 BC in the Southeast and 1000 BC in the Southwest, the indigenous peoples of the arid Colorado Plateau region of the Southwest apparently were more receptive to growing Mexican plants as a supplement to wild foods. Domestication of indigenous plants had begun 2500 years earlier in the Southeast. The combination of a wide variety of indigenous crops, plus the vastly greater supply of wild foods provided little incentive for Southeastern peoples to experiment with imported food sources.
The Mojave Desert in southeastern California is the mother lode of renewable energy. The sun shines about 360 days a year, making it hugely valuable territory for developers of solar power.But the Mojave is also valuable to rare plants and animals and the people who want to protect them. That's why Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has proposed a national monument to keep some Mojave lands off-limits to energy development.
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