Newsdesk Archive

Oxygen may not be the staple of modern complex life that scientists once thought. Until now, the only life forms known to live exclusively in anoxic conditions were viruses, bacteria and Archaea. But in a new study, scientists have discovered three new multicellular marine species that appear to have never lived in aerobic conditions, and never metabolized oxygen.The discovery of the new species, which live buried in sediment under the Mediterranean seafloor, is significant in that it marks the first observation of multicellular organisms, or metazoans, that spend their entire lifecycle under permanently anoxic conditions. A few metazoans have been known to tolerate anoxic conditions, but only for limited periods of time.

Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, a government researcher said Wednesday.Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, said Dan Fagre said, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He warned many of the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade.

Whether it's music, activism or daily life, the one ideal to which I have always aspired is constant challenge -- taking risks, stepping out of my comfort zone, exploring new ideas.I am writing because I believe the United States must do precisely that -- and so, therefore, must all of us -- in the case of what has been the most unsuccessful, unjust yet untouchable issue in politics: the War on Drugs.

Inspired in part by Graham Hancock, Jose Arguelles, Terrance McKenna and Carl Sagan, the track ("Magnet") was written verse by verse, says Strange, and centers on some heady sci-fi theories that Strange has followed since his first UFO sighting at age nine. This particular cut ties into the 2012 phenomenon as it relates to the cosmic clock.

Ants, wasps, thrips, spiders and other organisms dating to 95 million years ago are preserved with remarkable, life-like detail in Cretaceous amber from Ethiopia, according to a new study.The amber, described in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first from Africa to contain fossils.

After a decade of development, the Air Force this month plans to launch a robotic spacecraft resembling a small space shuttle to conduct technology tests in orbit and then glide home to a California runway.

When a star dies, there are a few different forms the stellar corpse can take. Now researchers have added another variety of 'dead' star to the list: the electroweak star.Although astrophysicists have only speculated about the existence of electroweak stars for a short time (see "Why Are Quark Stars So Strange"), scientists at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, have detailed new predictions about the electroweak star's characteristics in a new paper submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

Belgrade - The mention of Serbia usually brings to mind the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but rarely ever the Roman Empire - despite the fact that 18 Roman rulers, one fifth of all emperors, were born on its territory.With that in mind, archaeologist Miomir Korac has launched The Road of Roman Emperors in Serbia (Itinerarium Romanum Serbiae) - a project meant to combine dozens of antique places across the country into a 600-kilometre-long tourist itinerary.

When Herodotus toured the known world during the fifth century BC to compile his international history, he did not forget his hometown Caria, now Bodrum in Turkey.Caria (the name means "the steep country") stood in the western part of Anatolia, whose coast, according to the ancient world map, stretched from mid-Ionia to Lycia and east to Phrygia. Mountains and valleys were the main features of the country's scenery, and it was poor in agriculture in comparison with its counterparts at the time: Egypt and Babylonia.

Mysterious carvings inside a hidden cavern linked to the Knights Templar are in danger of disappearing before their riddle is solved. Having survived more than 700 years, the religious decorations in the ancient cave at Royston, Hertfordshire, are under attack from an infestation of worms eating the chalk walls behind them.

Imagine you're a Brontosaurus with your face in a prehistoric tree top, munching on fresh leaves. Your relatives have ruled planet Earth for more than 150 million years. Huge and strong, you feel invincible.You're not.

Graham's entire interview with Coast to Coast AM is up on the GrahamHancock.com video page.Subscribe at Coast to Coast AM to access their entire archive and support their fantastic show. When subscribing to C2C's Streamlink, you have access to three full years of shows to download and listen to at your leisure. Plus, you get weekly broadcasts of Somewhere in Time with Art Bell.

Scientists are studying the best ways to compose messages meant for alien eyes in case we ever do get the chance to communicate with extraterrestrials.If mankind ever does receive a signal from extraterrestrials, one of our first decisions may be what to write back.As director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute, psychologist Douglas Vakoch has thought a lot about this question.

When I walked into Pierre Pica's cramped Paris apartment, I was overwhelmed by the stench of mosquito repellent. Pica, a linguist, had just returned from spending five months with a community of Indians in the Amazon rainforest, and he was disinfecting the gifts he had brought back. I asked how the trip had been. "Difficult," he replied.

With more than 400 genetically distinct breeds worldwide, the domestic dog is the most diverse land mammal. After 14,000 years of artificial selection for traits such as size, shape and color, the 40-chromosome canine genome holds the secrets to man's best friend's most defining features. And as scientists begin to understand what gives dogs their spots, they're learning a little something about humans, too.

The zebra finch, a chatty little songbird that learns his speech from his father and passes it on to his offspring, has long been a model for scientists studying human speech disorders.Now an international team of researchers has sequenced the zebra finch's entire genome, hoping the secrets of the Australian bird's genes will lead to advances in understanding human speech and learning disorders in problems as varied as autism, strokes, the late stages of Parkinson's disease and even stuttering.

It's not only one of the most important questions for science; it's one of the great unanswered questions in human history.We've been peering into the night sky for thousands of years, wondering if we are alone.

When Matthew Schiefer, a neural engineer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, first managed to stimulate the leg of an unconscious volunteer by wrapping an electrode around a nerve bundle, he knew he was on to something. Now, four years later, Schiefer has created a new kind of nerve-activating electrical interface that could allow people with paralyzed limbs to activate their legs with the push of a button.

While there have been thousands of fossilised fragments from human ancestors unearthed around the world, the story of mankind's progression from simple primates to modern, intelligent humans is far from complete.The fossil record, which spans millions of years, contains large gaps while in some cases entire species have been described from just a few small pieces of bone.

The aging, sand-trapped Mars rover Spirit failed to make a scheduled communication this week and may have gone into a power-saving hibernation to survive the Red Planet's winter, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Wednesday.Spirit had been expected to communicate with the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft on Tuesday."We are checking other less likely possibilities for the missed communication, but this probably means that Spirit tripped a low-power fault sometime between the last downlink on March 22 and yesterday," Mars rovers project manager John Callas said in a statement.

WASHINGTON: Scientists made a huge step towards making the blind see, by using a form of gene therapy that does not involve the use of modified viruses.Scientists said they used a non-viral, synthetic nanoparticle carrier to improve and save the sight of mice with retinitis pigmentosa, which is incurable. It is an inherited disease characterized by progressive vision loss and eventual blindness.

WASHINGTON: An ordinary cotton T-shirt can be converted into body armour, thanks to scientists from South Carolina, Switzerland and China.They combined the carbon in the cotton with boron to create a tough, lightweight fabric of boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks.

LONDON: In what could be called the bionic arm of the law, British police have unveiled a new metal detecting glove that can identify knives and other small weapons hidden under clothing.The £100 electronic glove, which fits inside the palm of the hand, vibrates silently when it passes over anything containing the tiniest trace of metal. After successful trials in different parts of the country, officers from Leicestershire are the first to be given access to the gizmo, the Daily Mail reported.

JERUSALEM - As a boy growing up in Jerusalem, Yacoub Dahdal saw Christians from all over the Middle East converge on the city at Easter time to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.Thousands would be hosted in the homes of the city's residents. Many would depart the city as godparents to newly born Jerusalemites baptized during the pilgrimage season."It was a festival with every meaning of the word," said Dahdal, now aged 72 and a senior member of the Palestinian Christian community in Jerusalem. "The Egyptians would come by train, the Lebanese and Syrians by bus," he said.

RALEIGH, N.C. - For years, Haiti's government has sought out the pamphlets on which the country's founders declared that they had thrown off their colonial masters, ended slavery and created the world's first black republic. Now historians say a graduate student has found what could be the only copy left.The leaders of Haiti's revolution sent their Declaration of Independence to other governments in the days after the island country's 1804 birth. But copies from that original printing have been lost in the centuries since, and the country's national archivist said he's traveled abroad looking for any that might have survived.

MACHU PICCHU, Peru - The famed Inca citadel of Machu Picchu reopened to tourists Thursday after a two-month closure due to floods that washed out the rail link to the mountaintop ruins.Actress Susan Sarandon was on hand for an ancient ceremony asking for the blessing of mother Earth and other rituals, including the sounding of an Incan welcoming trumpet.Sarandon posed for photos with young girls wearing traditional Andean dress, and sipped coca tea that many locals use to ward off the effects of altitude at nearly 8,000 feet (2,440 meters) above sea level.

If bones could scream, a bloodcurdling din would be reverberating through a 500-year-old cemetery in Peru. Human skeletons unearthed there have yielded the first direct evidence of Inca fatalities caused by Spanish conquerors.European newcomers killed some Inca individuals with guns, steel lances or hammers, and possibly light cannons, scientists report online in the March 23 American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

LUXOR, Egypt (Reuters) - In the dusty streets behind the pasha's grand villa, bulldozers and forklifts are tearing into the city where Agatha Christie found inspiration and Howard Carter unearthed Tutankhamun.Egypt has already cleared out Luxor's old bazaar, demolished thousands of homes and dozens of Belle Epoque buildings in a push to transform the site of the ancient capital Thebes into a huge open-air museum.

New information about early Native Americans' horticultural practices comes not from hieroglyphs or other artifacts, but from a suite of four gene duplicates found in wild and domesticated sunflowers.In an upcoming issue of Current Biology, Indiana University Bloomington biologists present the first concrete evidence for how gene duplications can lead to functional diversity in organisms. In this case, the scientists learned how duplications of a gene called FLOWERING LOCUS T, or FT, could have evolved and interacted to prolong a flower's time to grow. A longer flower growth period means a bigger sunflower -- presumably an attribute of great value to the plant's first breeders.

The hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant. This has been shown by a new study carried out by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University. The study, which has been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, supports the researchers' earlier conclusion that today's Scandinavians are not descended from the Stone Age people in question but from a group that arrived later.

A thousand years after the last ice age ended, the Northern Hemisphere was plunged back into glacial conditions. For 20 years, scientists have blamed a vast flood of meltwater for causing this 'Younger Dryas' cooling, 13,000 years ago. Picking through evidence from Canada's Mackenzie River, geologists now believe they have found traces of this flood, revealing that cold water from North America's dwindling ice sheet poured into the Arctic Ocean, from where it ultimately disrupted climate-warming currents in the Atlantic.

Andean mummies reveal arsenic poisoning afflicted people in northern Chile for thousands of years, a hair analysis shows.In the current Journal of Archaeological Science, a team led by Bernardo Arriaza of Chile's Universidad de Tarapaca analyzed hair from 45 Andean mummies taken from ten sites some 7,000 to 600 years old. The mummies dried in Chile's Atacama desert region, one of the most parched regions on Earth. They were deliberately mummified with sticks, reeds and clay, given wigs and distinctive caps.

Was the great Florentine artist and scientist who painted the Last Supper, designed the legendary Sforza horse and did the first great studies of human anatomy also a sinister military genius whose inventions caused horrible deaths in the wars of sixteenth century Europe?This was a question I came up against in researching my book The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Artistic Duel that Defined the Renaissance.

The eruption of a volcano on the island nation of Iceland on Saturday is a result of the tectonic processes that have continuously shaped and re-shaped the Earth's surface for billions of years. These processes are responsible for some of the biggest, deadliest eruptions in history.

The desert is making a comeback in the Middle East, with fertile lands turning into barren wastes that could further destabilize the region, experts said at a water conference on Thursday."Desertification spreads like cancer; it can't be noticed immediately," said Wadid Erian, a soil expert with the Arab League, at a conference on Thursday in the Egyptian coastal town of Alexandria.

In the 1950s and '60s, artificial-intelligence researchers saw themselves as trying to uncover the rules of thought. But those rules turned out to be way more complicated than anyone had imagined. Since then, artificial-intelligence (AI) research has come to rely, instead, on probabilities -- statistical patterns that computers can learn from large sets of training data.

BEST-SELLING author Graham Hancock has revealed the astonishing drug-fuelled inspiration behind his first novel.The writer had a vision of the plot for Entangled while in the Amazonian rain forest under the influence of a powerful hallucinogenic.He took ayahuasca - also known as Vine of the Dead - during a ceremony led by a shaman.The substance contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and would be a Class A drug in Britain.Graham, 59, said: "Ayahuasca makes you vomit and gives you diarrhoea. Don't imagine anybody would do this for kicks. You have to brace yourself to drink it."You will face revelations about your own personality and relive episodes from your past life when you were unkind to people."You will see the truth and that gives you an opportunity to fix your behaviour. You may also encounter terrifying visions. It's not an easy thing to do.".

A MULTI-COLOURED serpent wraps itself around Graham Hancock's body, resting its enormous head on his shoulders while staring into his green eyes. Graham is immediately comforted."I know how crazy it sounds," laughs the Edinburgh-born author. "You would think that the sense of being wrapped up in the body of a 70-foot serpent would be terrifying, but it was far from it."I was at a low point in my life and the message seemed to be 'love yourself'. It was a very healing message for me."The best-selling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, whose latest book Entangled is published today, is describing his first out-of-body experience after ingesting a sacred plant drug known as ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle, where he spent five weeks living with indigenous Indian shamans in Peru.

Actually, they probably did not float on water like house boats, but were anchored to timber pilings that had been driven into the bed of freshwater ponds, swamps and coastal marshes. The coastal platform villages were possibly able to move up and down in response to the tides. These sophisticated wooden communities represent a unique form of architecture for the United States. There were probably many other villages like them in Florida and along the coastal rivers of Georgia, but they have not been discovered.

Making U.S. Navy carrier groups and Army bases more self-sufficient and energy-efficient could mean turning to mobile nuclear reactors. The Pentagon's DARPA scientists have put forth the modest proposal of deploying miniature reactors to convert hydrogen and carbon into military jet fuel, as well as providing power, The Register reports.That plan could fit well with the U.S. Navy's "Green Strike Group" concept for biofuel and nuclear-powered vessels. The Register points out that nuclear-powered aircraft carriers could make use of seawater to make JP-8 jet fuel from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, courtesy of work by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

The journal Nature today released a massive retrospective on the tenth anniversary of the Human Genome Project (officially celebrated June 26 of this year), which included two important pieces from genomics pioneers J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins. While retrospectives generally look backward, Venter and Collins are already looking to the next decade, one filled with free-flowing information, reams of phenotype data and multiple genomes per person. But the biggest developments in genomics won't be a genomics development at all; it will be the biggest, baddest computing systems the world has ever seen.

Adorable buckyballs can act as soccer-ball-shaped molecular cages to deliver designer drugs or even radioactive particles to attack diseases such as cancer. Now scientists have found that a certain buckyball configuration can put human skin cells into a sort of suspended animation where they don't die, divide, or grow -- a toxic condition for the human body that might also lead to possible treatments.

Glaucoma is a tricky ailment to manage; rather than being a single disease, it's actually a cluster of diseases with various manifestations that, taken as a whole, are the second leading cause of blindness. But medical microtechnology firm Sensimed has engineered a sensor-laden contact lens that glaucoma sufferers can wear around-the-clock, helping doctors not only manage the potentially debilitating disease, but also learn more about how the mysterious condition works.

Since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sky 400 years ago, a myriad of technological advances have allowed astronomers to look at very faint objects, very distant objects, and even light that's invisible to the human eye. Yet, one aspect usually remains out of reach - the benefit of a 3-D perspective.Our telescopes show the Milky Way galaxy only as it appears from one vantage point: our solar system. Now, using a simple but powerful technique, a group of astronomers led by Armin Rest of Harvard University has seen an exploding star or supernova from several angles.

During the Early Jurassic Period, a sand dune collapsed at Utah's red rocks with such force that it might have buried alive a plant-eating dinosaur, entombing and preserving the dinosaur upside-down for 185 million years, according to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE.The buried remains represent Utah's oldest most complete dinosaur. It has been named Seitaad ruessi, with the first word referring to a Navajo creation legend sand-desert monster that swallowed individuals in the dunes. The second honors artist and explorer Everett Ruess, who mysteriously disappeared at age 20 in the same region during the 1930s.

The last known population of woolly mammoths, roaming a remote Arctic island long after humans invented writing, were wiped out quickly, reports a study released Wednesday.The culprit might have been disease, humans or a catastrophic weather event, but was almost certainly not climate change, suggests the study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Our young sun didn't cast off enough heat to keep baby Earth's water from freezing. Yet, the geologic record clearly shows a planet bathed in liquid water.How it happened is again up for debate after new research challenges a long-held theory that greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere helped keep things warm.New analysis of 3.8 billion-year-old sediments from West Greenland shows it contains minerals that couldn't have formed had there been high levels of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, says University of Copenhagen geologist Minik Rosing.

Imagine if the shape of your head changed with the foods that you ate. That's what a team of paleontologists now thinks happened to the long-necked sauropod dinosaur, Diplodocus, which also was one of the least intelligent dinosaurs. Its head might have been interesting, in terms of shape, but previous studies suggest there wasn't a lot of brain power in it. But, as for all animals, it evolved what it needed for survival.Diplodocus was a huge, hefty dinosaur that lived towards the end of the Jurassic Period around 150 million years ago in North America.

One the most agile dinosaurs so far discovered has been unearthed in China.The tiny dinosaur, dubbed a "roadrunner" by the scientists who found it, is also one of the smallest dinosaurs known.Measuring just half a metre long, the fleet-footed theropod named Xixianykus zhangi was likely to have used a huge claw to dig for termites and ants.

Serbia's parliament has passed a landmark resolution apologising for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre - Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.The motion, approved by a narrow majority, says Serbia should have done more to prevent the tragedy.It stopped short of calling the Bosnian war killings a genocide.

An ancient chapel has revealed a new mystery with the discovery of a 600-year-old hive built into the stones.Builders renovating Rosslyn Chapel, which was made famous in The Da Vinci Code, found the "unprecedented" hive while dismantling a rooftop pinnacle.The bees entered the hive through a hole in a carved flower crafted by the chapel's master stone masons.The 15th Century Midlothian building is undergoing a £13m conservation and site improvement project.

Ancient graves were found in the Urbnisi village of the Kareli region during the construction of a highway. About 20 sarcophaguses were discovered dating back to the 4th and 5th centuries.Road department representatives invited a group of archaeologists from the Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University to the area to examine the findings. The relevant activities are being implemented by the group chaired by Vakhtang Licheli.

The missing pyramid of an obscure pharaoh that ruled Egypt some 4,300 years ago could lie at the intersection of a series of invisible lines in South Saqqara, according to new astronomical and topographical research.Connecting the funerary complexes raised by the kings of the 6th Dynasty between 2,322 B.C. and 2,151 B.C., these lines would have governed the sacred space of the Saqqara area, in accordance with a number of criteria such as dynastic lineage, religion and astronomical alignment.

NASA is gearing up Global Hawk, a remote-controlled airplane, for its first scientific flights in coming weeks. With its capacity for long-distance, high-altitude flights that can last over a day, Global Hawk presents a new chapter in Earth science for NASA."It's a very exciting time," said Chris Naftel, project manager for Global Hawk. "This is the very first time that Global Hawk will be used for science.".

Archaeologists working at the Salapunku site near Machu Picchu in Cusco have discovered a new ceremonial platform or huaca.The semi-circular area constructed in Inca times is located on the right-hand side of the Vilcanota river when going towards Machu Picchu, while Salapunku as a whole is located along one of the Inca trail networks in the area.

Think sharks are scary? They're downright cuddly compared to the Bathynomus giganteus, a very terrifying (and very real) sea creature that recently surfaced from the deep.So, what the heck is it? According to an article from Fox News, the Bathynomus giganteus (henceforth known as "Bart") is a type of giant isopod, "a large crustacean that dwells in deep Atlantic and Pacific waters." It passes the time by feeding on "dead whales, fish, and squid."

NASA has released new images of Saturn's moon Mimas, which looks strikingly like a certain planet-killing battle station from a galaxy far, far away.And when the image is filtered to reveal a temperature map of the icy moon, it looks like nothing so much as a moon-sized Pac-Man about to devour a big cherry.Who knew the cosmos was so full of cultural references? Click on the image below for a full-sized version.

Researchers believe they have found evidence of real natural disasters on which the ten plagues of Egypt, which led to Moses freeing the Israelites from slavery in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, were based.But rather than explaining them as the wrathful act of a vengeful God, the scientists claim the plagues can be attributed to a chain of natural phenomena triggered by changes in the climate and environmental disasters that happened hundreds of miles away.They have compiled compelling evidence that offers new explanations for the Biblical plagues, which will be outlined in a new series to be broadcast on the National Geographical Channel on Easter Sunday.

Kolkata, India (CNN) -- At 65, Ian Zachariah is one of the youngest ones left."Can you believe it?" he says, adjusting a borrowed yarmulke in a now-empty synagogue.His eyes scan the glittering stained glass, the blue-domed ceiling and the rows of dark wood and wicker benches, still arranged the way they were when, decades ago on the Sabbath, Maghen David was teeming.

Physicists are building a levitation chamber to suspend a drop of liquid in mid-air and watch its atoms as it cools into glass.The machine should help clarify the mystery of glass, which is a puzzling state where matter is more like a liquid than a solid. Physicists want to better understand what happens to the atoms in a material when it transitions from a liquid to a glass.

Mass death among baby right whales has experts scrambling to figure out the puzzle behind the largest great whale die-off on record.Observers have found 308 dead whales in the waters around Peninsula Valdes along Argentina's Patagonian Coast since 2005. Almost 90 percent of those deaths represent whale calves less than 3 months old, and the calf deaths make up almost a third of all right whale calf sightings in the last five years.

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Nature likes some symmetries, but dislikes others. Ordered solids often display a so-called 6-fold rotation symmetry. To achieve this kind of symmetry, the atoms in a plane surround themselves with six neighbours in an arrangement similar to that found in honeycombs. As opposed to this, ordered materials with 7-fold, 9-fold or 11-fold symmetries are never observed in nature.

The last known population of woolly mammoths, roaming a remote Arctic island long after humans invented writing, were wiped out quickly, reports a study released Wednesday.The culprit might have been disease, humans or a catastrophic weather event, but was almost certainly not climate change, suggests the study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"Blindsnakes are not very pretty, are rarely noticed, and are often mistaken for earthworms," admits Blair Hedges, professor of biology at Penn State University. "Nonetheless, they tell a very interesting evolutionary story." Hedges and Nicolas Vidal, of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, are co-leaders of the team that discovered that blindsnakes are one of the few groups of organisms that inhabited Madagascar when it broke from India about 100 million years ago and are still living today. The results of their study will be published in the 31 March 2010 issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

In the 1950s and '60s, artificial-intelligence researchers saw themselves as trying to uncover the rules of thought. But those rules turned out to be way more complicated than anyone had imagined. Since then, artificial-intelligence (AI) research has come to rely, instead, on probabilities -- statistical patterns that computers can learn from large sets of training data.

Archaelogists in Egypt have uncovered a 3,500-year-old 'door to the afterlife' belonging to the tomb of a high-ranking royal advisor.The 175cm red granite false door, the likes of which were found in most ancient Egyptian tombs, was built to take the spirits of the dead to and from the afterworld.The door is covered in religious texts and heiroglyphics and came from the tomb of User, the chief minister of 15th century ruler Queen Hatsheput, and his wife Toy.

The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.

Scientists exploring the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have made another disturbing discovery, according to a published report.The UCSD scientists returned from their trip to the Northern Pacific in August, bringing back tales, pictures and more than 100 samples from a blob of degraded plastic that is reportedly the size of Texas or bigger.

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month (.pdf) analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France -- in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it -- so much for all the recent veneration of "consent of the governed" -- and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters," proclaims the title of one section.

One step forward: California voters will get a chance in November to decide if the state should legalize marijuana. Two steps backward: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told authorities in Mexico that the United States was looking at anything that worked to fight the drug cartels killing Mexicans daily -- but responded "no" when asked if anything included legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana.The California vote, however it turns out, constitutes a recognition that millions of Americans see lighting up a joint as no different than sipping a martini. Clinton's rejection of easing U.S. law on recreational weed use reflects a wide opposing belief that allowing marijuana use would violate moral norms and inflict onerous social costs on our society.

Charter boat captain Erik Rue, 42, photographed the animal, which is actually an albino, when he began studying it after the mammal first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern USA.Capt Rue originally saw the dolphin, which also has reddish eyes, swimming with a pod of four other dolphins, with one appearing to be its mother which never left its side.

Mike Jay is currently writing High Society, an illustrated global history of drugs, forthcoming in the UK from Thames & Hudson in October and in the US from Inner Traditions/Park Street Press in November. His most recent book is The Atmosphere of Heaven.

Astronomers have detected an extraterrestrial cyclone at Neptune's south pole, which may improve our understanding of the violent weather conditions that rage across the distant planet.It could also help us better understand Neptune's internal structure.The team of astronomers made the discovery while studying clouds on other planets using the giant 10-meter (33-foot) Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

A potential new energy source so controversial that people once regarded it as junk science is moving closer to acceptance by the mainstream scientific community. That's the conclusion of the organizer of one of the largest scientific sessions on the topic -- "cold fusion" -- being held in San Francisco for the next two days in the Moscone Center during the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.

An experiment led by a University of Alberta researcher, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, could dramatically change our concepts of basic physics, revolutionize our understanding of the Universe and could eventually lead to technologies in future generations that right now only exist in science fiction.

THE US navy approved designs last week for a shipboard laser that it hopes will focus a 100-kilowatt beam through the ocean mist.The system will be based on the free-electron laser, invented in the 1970s by John Madey, which generates light from a powerful beam of electrons.

After a breathless race through the '80s and '90s, desktop computer clock speeds have spent the last decade languishing around the 3 gigahertz mark. That stagnation in processing speeds has prompted scientists to debate whether it's time to move beyond semiconductors -- and what better place to debate than in the journal Science? Ars Technica gives a top-down overview of several future paths laid out in the journal's latest issue by researchers such as Thomas Theis and Paul Solomon of IBM.

Lost CivilizationsHost: George NooryGuests: Graham HancockAuthor and investigator Graham Hancock will discuss his research of lost civilizations and the implications of 2012, as well as evidence of time travel and other dimensions.Graham will be on from 31st March 10pm Pacific Time to 1st April 1am Pacific Time, or UK that's 6am to 9am on the morning of 1 April.Listen live now here or here.

Visit www.rbooks.co.uk to get 40% off the hardback (using the promotional code ENTANGLED) and 20% off the ebook (using the promotional code ENTANGLEDEBOOK)To celebrate the release we have five signed copies to win. Just answer this easy question:Who are Leoni and Ria fighting against in Graham Hancock's Entangled?OxygenIronSulpaCompetition ends on 05 April 2010.

The Biblical plagues that devastated Ancient Egypt in the Old Testament were the result of global warming and a volcanic eruption, scientists have claimed.

A coalition of residents and celebrities determined to stop the 2012 Olympic Games equestrian events being held in Greenwich's royal park have received a much-needed boost to their campaign: archaeologists have unearthed what are thought to be Tudor remains, just yards from the planned site of the events.

I first encountered this idea as I was researching my new book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife. I was having lunch with my friend and colleague Christopher Dickey, who told me that his father, the writer James Dickey, had a fantasy of heaven in which all of his closest friends were sitting around a swimming pool, chatting. "There was nothing special about the pool itself," wrote Chris in Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son. "Nobody walked on the water. And he never told me who the friends were ... But what he took away from the dream was a sense of contentment, of being at ease with himself and the world, as if he had gotten a preview of heaven. He called that place 'The Happy Swimming Pool.' " Chris believes that everything we think we know about heaven happens in the moments before death. After that, there's nothing.

UK researchers have developed a device to drag space debris out of orbit.They plan to launch a demonstration of their "CubeSail" next year. It is a small satellite cube that deploys a thin, 25-sq-m plastic sheet.

A piece of Liverpool's buried past is to go on show to the public for the first time.As these pictures show the historic Old Dock at Liverpool - now below the Liverpool One - will become the city's latest visitor attraction.It has been hidden underground for nearly 200 years but property developer Grosvenor has partnered with the museum's service to put part of the remains on display.

Loggers made a rare find last week when they came upon a World War II-era U.S. Navy Aircraft in a heavily wooded area near Rockaway Beach.Now, Navy investigators are focusing their efforts on determining if human remains might also be at the scene."If this is one of our shipmates we would treat that like we would treat one who died today with respect to our fallen comrade and respect to the family," said Sean Hughes, Navy Region Northwest Public Affairs Officer.

LOOK at an ancient coin under ordinary light and the chances are that its features, worn down by its passage from hand to hand, will be hard to make out. Point a spotlight at it, though, so that the face of the coin is illuminated from an acute angle, and the resulting shadows will emphasise any minor details.This is the basic principle behind a novel technique that is helping archaeologists reveal previously invisible clues hidden in the worn or damaged surfaces of any objects they uncover. From wall paintings in Herculaneum to Scandinavian stone tools to rock art in Libya, polynomial texture mapping, as the process is known, is proving an invaluable way to illuminate the past.

Loving couples always wish to die on the same day, and a couple who lived 4,200 years ago in the Sanxing Village of Mimou Township, Qingbaijiang District, fulfilled such a wish.The Chengdu Municipal Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology recently discovered an ancient grave during an excavation on a large prehistoric cultural site, in which a couple was found laying and hugging each other. The bones of the "oldest" couple are clearly visible. Excavation work also discovered numerous exquisite stone vessels, porcelains, housing ruins as well as graves dating form China's ancient Shang Dynasty.

People may well have been roaming the land we now call the Netherlands for far longer than was assumed until recently. There is evidence to suggest that the country was home to the forebears of the Neanderthals. Amateur archaeologist Pieter Stoel found materials used by the oldest inhabitants in the central town of Woerden. These artefacts were shown to be at least 370,000 years old, which takes us back to long before the time of the Neanderthals.

Why spend the time and expense necessary to harvest energy when you can simply steal it?For the first time, scientists from California and Korea have successfully stolen an electric current from algae. The research could eventually create a new and environmentally friendly way to generate electricity."We have shown that we can steal an electrical current from algae," said Fritz Prinz, a scientist from Stanford University and co-author of the ACS Nano Letters article.

This statement isn't new, but for years anthropologists, archaeologists and historians of art understood these artistic manifestations as purely aesthetic and decorative motives. Eduardo Palacio-Pérez, researcher at the University of Cantabria (UC), now reveals the origins of a theory that remains nowadays/lasts into our days."This theory is does not originate with the prehistorians, in other words, those who started to develop the idea that the art of primitive peoples was linked with beliefs of a symbolic-religious nature were the anthropologists", Eduardo Palacio-Pérez, author of the study and researcher at UC, explains to SINC.

Dozens of asteroids that have been lurking undetected in our solar system are being discovered every day by NASA's newest space telescope, scientists say.The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope was designed to search for "dark" objects in space, such as brown dwarf stars, vast dust clouds, and yes, asteroids.Many of the asteroids WISE is spotting are darker asteroids that were likely missed by past surveys conducted by visible light telescopes.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Lockheed Martin and ATK are teaming up to build and sell a booster rocket known as the Athena, a decade after the brand was put into mothballs.The joint venture said on Thursday that it would make next-generation versions of the Athena launch vehicle available for launch starting in 2012.

A U.S. replica of the 19th-century Cuban slave ship "Amistad" glided through the millpond-calm waters of Havana Bay on Thursday, a reminder of the countries' intertwined past and a gesture toward a brighter shared future.Built in Connecticut, the black-hulled, two-masted re-creation of the schooner, whose name means "Friendship," flew the American and Cuban flags -- as well as the blue flag of the United Nations. It was one of the few times a ship under the Stars and Stripes has called on the island in 51 years of estrangement since Fidel Castro took power. As it neared shore, the crew of 19 Americans lowered the U.S. flag and ran Cuba's up the main mast.

A small but intrepid team of Exeter staff and students have returned from a six-week archaeological research expedition to a remote region of rural Andhra Pradesh in India.

Guam - Thousands of years ago, the Arote Peninsula was home to ancient Chamorro people, and remnants of that time long ago are being uncovered.Gab Gab Beach is a popular spot for military personnel and their families, but very few are aware of the history that lies beneath.Just recently ancient remains were discovered. Archaeologist Sandy Yee says what was dug up, were the remains of a young boy or girl.And while dating these artifacts would be difficult, she believes they are precontact, anywhere between 800 and 1500 ad.

The Shroud of Turin, the controversial piece of linen that some believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, could finally be dated accurately. A new method "stands to revolutionize radiocarbon dating," according to research presented on Tuesday at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Francisco.Called "non-destructive carbon dating," the method basically prevents the removal of a sample of the object.

BEIJING: Archaeologists in China have found the ruins of a 2,000-year-old city dating back to the Eastern Han Dynasty, a report said Wednesday.The site, located near Fujiacun village in Fengcheng city in Jiangxi province, covers about 18,000 square metres and is surrounded by a moat, Xinhua news agency reported.

In 2008, a team of archaeologists discovered a fossilized fragment of a pinkie finger in the secluded Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The finger was buried with bracelets and other artifacts typical of early human sites dating back about 35,000 years. It was sent to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for routine genetic analysis. When the results came back, Johannes Krause, a researcher at the institute, called his colleague Svante Pääbo on his cell phone. "You'd better sit down," he said. "The finger is not human."