Newsdesk Archive

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must close at the end of 2011 for up to a year to address design issues, according to an LHC director.Dr Steve Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years.The atom smasher will reach world record collision energies later this month at 7 trillion electron volts.

Robots are great for going where humans can't, and the cramped confines of municipal water pipes are the perfect example. A new initiative is working on building robots that can access and repair aging water pipes from the inside.Old pipes are a pressing issue for many cities. The American Society of Civil Engineers which rates the quality of city infrastructure, including water works, estimates that 6 billion gallons of clean drinking water disappears each day, mostly due to old, leaky pipes and mains. That's enough water to supply all the residents of California for a year.

Deforestation has revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, scientists say.The 36-46km-wide feature, identified in DR Congo, may be one of the largest such structures discovered in the last decade.Italian researchers considered other origins for the ring, but say these are unlikely.They presented their findings at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, US.The ring shape is clearly visible in the satellite image by TerraMetrics Inc reproduced on this page.

Researchers have found that eggshells of extinct bird species are a rich source of preserved DNA.An international team isolated the delicate DNA molecules of species including the massive "elephant birds" of the genus Aepyorni.The Proceedings of the Royal Society B research demonstrated the approach also on emu, ducks and the extinct moa.The team says that the technique will enable researchers to learn more about ancient birds and why they died out.

Add plumbing to the mysterious arts of the ancient Maya, investigators report. In a Journal of Archaeological Science study, anthropologist Kirk French and civil engineer Christopher Duffy of Penn State report on a conduit designed to deliver pressurized water to Palenque, an urban center in southern Mexico, more than 1,400 years ago."The ancient Maya are renowned as great builders, but are rarely regarded as great engineers. Their constructions, though often big and impressive, are generally considered unsophisticated," say the study authors.

A scientist and a composer are working together to explore a thousand years of human history through soil samples.The pair have built an installation in Dundee which tells the story of Viking settlers in Greenland going back to the year 900.Images of soil samples gathered by Dr Paul Adderley have been set to audio by Dr Michael Young.

Chinese archeologists have identified the route of a 137-km stretch of China's oldest Great Wall in central Henan Province, on which the remnants of 30 km of wall is still standing."The wall structure was built no later than 221 B.C. in the Warring States period," said Sun Yingmin, spokesman of the provincial Cultural Relics Bureau, Tuesday.He said previous to this, only sporadic discoveries of wall remains were found. The actual appearance of the main body of Great Wall of the Chu State was only recorded in historical records.

The primordial soup that gave birth to life on Earth may have had an extra, previously unrecognised ingredient: a "molecular midwife" that played a crucial role in allowing the first large biomolecules to assemble from their building blocks.The earliest life forms are thought by many to have been based not on DNA but on the closely related molecule RNA, because long strands of RNA can act as rudimentary enzymes. This would have allowed a primitive metabolism to develop before life forms made proteins for this purpose.

Scientists may have identified the first specks of interstellar dust in material collected by the US space agency's Stardust spacecraft.A stream of this dust flows through space; the tiny particles are building blocks that go into making stars and planets.The Nasa spacecraft was primarily sent to catch dust streaming from Comet Wild 2 and return it to Earth for analysis.But scientists also set out to capture particles of interstellar dust.

Plzen, West Bohemia, March 5 (CTK) - An expedition of Czech archaeologists has found remains of an about 150,000-year-old prehistoric settlement in Arbil, north Iraq, which has been the so far oldest uncovered in this part of northern Mesopotamia, team head Karel Novacek told reporters Friday.The archaeologists revealed a high number of items, mainly prehistoric stone tools, about nine metres under the ground in Arbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region, said archaeologist Novacek, from the University of West Bohemia in Plzen.

One of the more famous paintings of the medieval Ming dynasty, which ruled China for about three centuries, is that of a court attendant holding a rope around a giraffe. An inscription on the side says the animal dwelled near "the corners of the western sea, in the stagnant waters of a great morass." According to legend, the giraffe was found in Africa, along with zebras and ostriches, and brought back with the grand 15th century expeditions of Zheng He, China's greatest mariner.

(AP) The deep space antenna that relayed Neil Armstrong's famous "one giant leap for mankind" declaration from the moon to a rapt American audience will be offline for eight months for repair.Work begins this week to replace a steel donut-shaped bearing on the aging 230-foot-wide dish at the NASA Deep Space Network site at Goldstone Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert about 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles.The labor-intensive process, which will involve jacking up 9 million pounds, will keep the antenna out of service until at least November.

Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he's ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds. But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for a spaceship that runs into them at near-light speed, according to calculations based on Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The binary system consists of two white dwarfs. These are the burnt- out cinders of stars such as our Sun, and contain a highly condensed form of helium, carbon and oxygen. The two white dwarfs in HM Cancri are so close together that mass is flowing from one star to the other. HM Cancri was first noticed as an X-ray source in 1999 showing a 5.4 minutes periodicity but for a long time it has remained unclear whether this period also indicated the actual orbital period of the system. It was so short that astronomers were reluctant to accept the possibility without solid proof.The team of astronomers, led by Dr Gijs Roelofs of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics, and including Professor Tom Marsh and Dr Danny Steeghs at the University of Warwick in the UK, have now used the world's largest telescope, the Keck telescope on Hawaii, to prove that the 5.4 minute period is indeed the binary period of the system.

In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours.But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones.They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.

"Il Cavallo," the huge equine statue Leonardo Da Vinci never got to make, wasn't plagued by technical problems as was widely believed, a new multidisciplinary research has revealed.On the contrary, Da Vinci's plan for the largest equestrian statue in the world was a perfectly feasible project which, if completed, would have probably been his greatest legacy, more than ''The Last Supper'' or any other work.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Literary critics, cultural scholars and aficionados of the Mayans, the only fully literate people of the pre-Columbian Americas, have lined up to call the first fully illustrated survey of two millennia of Mayan texts assembled by award-winning scholar Dennis Tedlock, "stunning," "astounding," "groundbreaking" and "literally breathtaking."The book is "2000 Years of Mayan Literature," published in January by the University of California Press. Its author, a SUNY Distinguished Professor, James McNulty Chair in English and Research Professor in Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, has long been recognized as one of the world's principle experts in Mayan culture and literature.

Continued work on the site by specialists lead by Luis Sánchez has led to the uncovering of more tombs that will help shed light on post-Moche Sicán (or Lambayeque) civilisation, builders of great pyramids in the Pomac forest and the city of Túcume between 800 and 1400 A.D.In the newly discovered tombs were found gold and copper offerings, as well as ceremonial knifes and other items of the Sicán elite.

KANPUR: The Jajmau mound exposed more chapters of history on Saturday, this time of Pre-Mauryan period. It was done during the excavation work being undertaken there by the UP State Archaeological Department (UPSAD).Saturday uncovered 3,000 years old house complexes, accessories and potteries that were hidden under thousands of layers of mud."The huge structures exposed is believed to be from Pre-Northern Black Polished (NBP) period," said the archaeologists who were amazed to explore such an old human habitat near the Ganga valley.

SUNGAI PETANI, March 6 (Bernama) -- The Sungai Batu archeological site in the Bujang Valley proves that civilisation in this country had started much earlier and was the oldest in South-east Asia.Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim said the site, which was believed to have existed in the year 110, showed the existence of religion, commerce and the economy."The Bujang Valley in Sungai Batu is a determination to estimate the new civilisation which is known to have existed much earlier than the one existing in neighbouring countries either in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia or Thailand.

A vast settlement surrounded by a fortified structure believed to be about 4,500 years old and belonging to the Harappan civilisation has been excavated at Shikarpur village in Kutch district.The team which has been excavating the site in Bhachau taluka of Kutch since last three years, is headed by Kuldeep Bhan and P Ajithprasad of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History of the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara."A huge fortified structure made out of unbaked mud bricks has been excavated by our team. The ratio of height, width and length of the bricks is 1:2:4 which is what we call Harappan ratio," Ajithprasad told PTI.

MEXICO CITY.- The recent finding of a 19th century silver bracelet in Alamo Mocho, in the desert of Baja California, represents the first material evidence of presence of the Mormon Battalion, which camped at the site before integrating to the 1847 Mexico-United States War (Mexican War).The discovery took place after a sandstorm uncovered archaeological material. Specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) began exploration at the site afterwards.The jewel represents a clear testimony for Mexican and American historians that Mormons camped in Alamo Mocho approximately for 3 days, before their integration with the 1847 war, fact only stated in documents until now.

Historical, archaeological and anthropological portrayals of Native American experiences, especially during colonial periods, have focused on the decimation of indigenous populations through rampant disease, cultural extinction and military conquest.But a new book by anthropologist and archaeologist Michael Wilcox argues that we've got the story all wrong.

The four-inch long nail is thought to be one of thousands used in crucifixions across the Roman empire.Archaeologists believe it dates from either the first or second century AD.The nail was found last summer in a decorated box in a fort on the tiny isle of Ilheu de Pontinha, just off the coast of Madeira.Pontinha was thought to have been held by the Knights Templar, the religious order that was part of the Christian forces which occupied Jerusalem during the Crusades in the 12th century.The knights were part of the plot of Dan Brown's best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.

For a quarter century, Greek excavation director Nicholas Stampolidis and his dedicated team have been unearthing the untold stories of the people buried some 2,800 years ago in the necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete. Until now, the site has perhaps been best known for the tomb its excavators dubbed "A1K1," an assemblage of 141 cremated individuals, all but two of whom were aristocratic men who likely fell in battle in foreign lands.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Did women and men contribute equally to the lineage of contemporary populations? Did our ancestors, Homo sapiens, lean more toward polygamy or monogamy? To answer these questions, Dr. Damian Labuda, an investigator at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center and a professor at the Department of Pediatrics of the Université de Montréal, headed a team that analyzed genomic data from three population samples of African, Asian and European origin. The study's findings are published in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

WHEN cosmologist George Ellis turned 70 last year, his friends held a party to celebrate. There were speeches and drinks and canapés aplenty to honour the theorist from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on general relativity. But there the similarity to most parties ends.For a start, Ellis's celebration at the University of Oxford lasted for three days and the guest list was made up entirely of physicists, astronomers and philosophers of science.

PAIN intensity, the most personal of experiences, can now be measured from the outside, say researchers who scanned the brains of young men who were fresh out of the operating theatre.Their claim reopens the debate over whether pain can be measured objectively. It might even be possible to gauge the pain felt by newborn babies, fetuses, "locked-in" patients, who can't communicate with the outside world, and animals.

Reporting from Moscow - The beasts had long lain extinct and forgotten, embedded deep in the frozen turf, bodies swaddled in Earth's layers for thousands of years before Christ.Now, the Russian permafrost is offering up the bones and tusks of the woolly mammoths that once lumbered over the tundra. They are shaped into picture frames, chess sets, pendants. They are gathered and piled, carved and whittled, bought and sold on the Internet.

Mohamed Ali Samantar, whose name will be brought before the Supreme Court this week as that of a war criminal in his native Somalia, has a hard time getting up from the couch in his tidy split-level home in Fairfax City.Dressed in a pressed charcoal-colored suit for his first interview in many years, Samantar, 74, stiffly hauls himself halfway up from the threadbare brocade sofa. Some of his 13 sons and daughters rush in to help. He stays them with a single gruff word. Slowly, the man who was defense minister and prime minister of the last functioning regime in Somalia stands up on his own.

A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.Details of the work were presented at a major science conference in Texas.

The human gut holds microbes containing millions of genes, say scientists.In fact, there are more genes in the flora in the intestinal system than the rest of our bodies. So many that they are being dubbed our "second genome".A study published in the journal Nature details the analysis of the genes, carried out to better understand how the gut flora is affected by disease.

Scientists have discovered a dinosaur-like creature 10 million years older than the earliest known dinosaurs.Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period - about 245 million years ago.The scientists say that its age suggests that dinosaurs were also on the Earth earlier than previously thought.They described their findings in the journal Nature.The study was led by Dr Sterling Nesbitt from the University of Texas at Austin in the US.

Inscribed ostrich shell fragments found in South Africa are among the earliest examples of the use of symbolism by modern humans, scientists say.The etched shells from Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape have been dated to about 60,000 years ago.Details are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The researchers, who have investigated the material since 1999, argue that the markings are almost certainly a form of messaging - of graphic communication.

A radar experiment aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole.The US space agency's (Nasa) Mini-Sar experiment found more than 40 small craters containing water-ice.But other compounds - such as hydrocarbons - are mixed up in lunar ice, according to new results from another Moon mission called LCROSS.The findings were presented at a major planetary science conference in Texas.

There is not a tourist in sight as the sun sets over sand-swept pyramids at Meroe, but archaeologists say the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan holds mysteries to rival ancient Egypt."There is a magic beauty about these sites that is heightened by the privilege of being able to admire them alone, with the pyramids, the dunes and the sun," says Guillemette Andreu, head of antiquities at Paris' Louvre museum."It really sets them apart from the Egyptian pyramids, whose beauty is slightly overshadowed by the tourist crowds."

Archaeologist Julie Schablitsky digs for the truth behind historic sites, even if that means debunking a few myths along the way. Jorge Ribas gets the facts about one location.

The team observed viruses as they evolved over hundreds of generations to infect bacteria. They found that when the bacteria could evolve defences, the viruses evolved at a quicker rate and generated greater diversity, compared to situations where the bacteria were unable to adapt to the viral infection.The study shows, for the first time, that the American evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen was correct in his 'Red Queen Hypothesis'. The theory, first put forward in the 1970s, was named after a passage in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen tells Alice, 'It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place'. This suggested that species were in a constant race for survival and have to continue to evolve new ways of defending themselves throughout time.

THE US military is asking inventors to come up with designs for a robot that can trundle onto a battlefield and rescue injured troops, with little or no help from outside.Retrieving casualties while under fire is a major cause of combat losses, says a posting on the Pentagon's small business technology transfer website (bit.ly/aRXXQU). So the army wants a robot with strong, dexterous arms and grippers that can cope with "the large number of body positions and types of locations in which casualties can be found".

If the United States is at a loss over what to do about nuclear waste, it may be time to check out the Swedish model.A symposium at the annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in San Diego last week highlighted the Swedish power industry in gaining public support for a geological repository for high-level radioactive waste.The Scandinavian success comes in stark contrast to efforts in the U.S., where spent nuclear fuel rods have remained for decades in temporary storage at power plants around the country. Meanwhile, Congress has debated where to bury them, decided on a repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and then changed its mind.

Daniel Shenton should be the most irrational man in the world. As the new president of the Flat Earth Society, you'd imagine he would also think that evolution is a scam and global warming a myth. He should ­argue that smoking does not cause cancer and HIV does not lead to Aids.Yes, that Flat Earth Society, a group that has become a living metaphor for backward thinking and a refusal to face scientific facts. Yes, it is still going, and no, this isn't an early April fool.

Ever since the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, almost a quarter of a century ago, the watchword above all others at NASA has been "safety." Unfortunately, watchwords don't necessarily create actual safety, as we learned a little over seven years ago, with the loss of her sister ship Columbia.Despite NASA's own checkered safety record, the last refuge of those defending Ares I, which the Obama administration has proposed canceling in the new budget request, is that it will somehow be safer than the commercial vehicles proposed to replace it, despite the fact that it is years from flight and NASA is proposing to fly crew aboard the new vehicle on its second flight.

Back in the Lunar exploration days, scientists had to tell astronauts what to do up there, and how to identify interesting things during the limited time they had. For Apollo 15, the first mission that carried the Lunar Rover, astronauts were trained in field work by Caltech geologist Leon Silver.That helped them to move faster and look at the ground with a critical science eye, knowing what they were looking for. The result: Their findings and samples were a lot more valuable to scientist back on Earth, confirming theories that weren't confirmed till then.

With cuts in the manned space program and the impending retirement of the Space Shuttle, NASA will soon face the need to repair satellites without the ability to send any astronauts to do it. Fortunately, they're already working on the solution: robots.Over the next seven months, NASA will finish installing the Dextre robot on the International Space Station (ISS). Once fully affixed to the ISS, Dextre, which previously helped astronauts repair the Hubble Space Telescope, will practice refueling satellites.

Earth lacks a living neural network that connects all living things, as seen in Avatar's Pandora. But apparently some bacteria at least grow their own tendrils or nanowires to form a giant natural battery, Danish researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.Scientists have known that bacteria can create electricity when mixed with mud and seawater, and have even built microbial fuel cells around the little buggers.

Pentagon mad scientists at DARPA have continued on their quest to create killer robots by announcing a new plan for "robotic autonomous manipulators" that can emulate human hands. And by killer, we of course mean awesome. National Defense reports that the DARPA program aims to create inexpensive robotic hands that can perhaps also replace existing prosthetics for amputees.

Honda's EV-N concept may have the visage of a throwback car from the 1960s, but the car company's new 3R-C looks like nothing less than a futuristic trike. The sleek three-wheeled, single-person vehicle is set to debut at the Geneva Motor Show next week as a zero-emission concept with a lithium-ion battery, Autoblog Green reports.The 3R-C seems designed to address the single urban commuter, and unsurprisingly comes from Honda's Research and Design facility in Milan, Italy.

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Chile on Feb. 27 was so powerful it may have tipped Earth's axis and shortened the length of a day, scientists at NASA say.According to NASA, a complex computer model's preliminary calculation shows that Earth's days should have shortened by 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).A large quake shifts enough rock to redistribute the mass of the planet, which can speed its rotation.

Visitors to Pompeii will be able to experience a live dig next month in the ancient Roman town that was buried in Mount Vesuvius' catastrophic eruption in 79 A.D.The site of the open-door excavation is the so-called House of the Chaste Lovers, a building that came to light in 1987 but which has always been closed to the public.

KOLAR: An inscription in Tamil was found at the Kurudumale Vinayaka temple in Mulbagal taluk of Kolar district on Saturday.The four or five lines of inscription in Tamil was found during an excavation work at the temple, K.R. Narasimhan, Joint Director of Collegiate Education, Dharwad, told The Hindu. Mr. Narasimhan has made extensive study of ancient temples in Kolar district and published many works.

(AP) Britain's defense ministry says it will shred records of UFO sightings after a huge rise in the number of reports submitted by the public.The Ministry of Defense said Sunday that new reports will be thrown out after 30 days, rather than kept on file.It means details of the sightings will be exempt from freedom of information laws that have allowed campaigners to force Britain's government to disclose details of apparent UFO encounters.

Despite NASA's manned space exploration being in a state of flux, there's still a lot of innovative ideas for future manned expeditions to Mars. From new concepts for interplanetary rockets to the next generation of unmanned reconnaissance robots, we are certainly well on our way to acquiring the technologies necessary to land an astronaut on Mars.

There are many international telescopes in Chile making use of the low humidity conditions in the Chilean mountains and high-altitude deserts. But as one of the most seismically active countries in the world, many of these observatories are built on shaky ground.In the wake of the deadly 8.8 magnitude Chilean earthquake that hit the South American nation on Saturday, causing a tsunami to rush across the Pacific, how are these sensitive observatories protected from damage? The quake was reported as far away as 1,800 km from the epicenter, so there's little doubt that the Chile-based observatories would have felt it.

I'm seeing news everywhere about Bloom Energy's announcement today of its Energy Server, a new kind of fuel cell that can generate clean energy. So I did a little poking around and here's what I found.First, just a refresher: You may have heard about hydrogen fuel cells, which use hydrogen as fuel. (California has a whole Hydrogen Highway project to develop this energy for transportation.) When the hydrogen mixes with oxygen, it produces a chemical reaction that generates a charged particle. That charged particle is captured in a battery and can be used to power a car.

Small dogs may all originate from the Middle East, according to research from the University of California.A study published in the journal BioMed Central found a gene found in small dogs, IGF1, is closely related to one found in Middle Eastern wolves.Archaeologists have found the remains of small dogs dating back 12,000 years in the region.In Europe, older remains have been uncovered, dating from 31,000 years ago, but these are from larger dogs.

Scientists in the US are using an underwater vehicle that can "plan its own experiments" on the seafloor.The "Gulper AUV" is programmed to look for the information that scientists want and plan its own route, avoiding hazardous currents and obstacles.The research team described this advance at the Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon.The group explained how it could "train" the robot to bring the best science back to the surface.

Physicists have applied the same laser techniques commonly used for tattoo removal to clean several famous works of art, including wall paintings.Laser cleaning is well established for stone and metal artefacts already.It has now been successfully applied to the wall paintings of the Sagrestia Vecchia and the Cappella del Manto in Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy.The results are described in the journal of the American Chemical Society.

A journey from Earth to Mars could soon take just 39 days, cutting current travel time nearly six times, a rocket scientist who has the ear of the US space agency NASA has said.Former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says reaching the Red Planet could be dramatically quicker using his high-tech VASIMR rocket -- now on track for lift-off after decades of development.The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket -- to give its full name -- is quick becoming a centerpiece of NASA's future strategy as it looks to private firms to help meet the astronomical costs of space exploration.

The remains of what might have been the residence of the Etruscan prince Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last legendary king of Rome Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), have been found on the slopes of an extinct volcanic crater about 12 miles from Rome, Italian archaeologists have announced.The palace was discovered on the site of the ancient acropolis of Gabii, where, according to legend, Rome's mythical founders, Romulus and Remus, were educated. The building dates to the sixth century B.C and boasts the highest intact walls from the period ever found in Italy, standing at around 6.56 feet high.

This is a unique feeling to see in front of me today a boat which I so often dreamed about," said Raphael Domjan as the covers came off the $24-million-dollar boat, the world's biggest solar-powered vessel.PlanetSolar, a 100-foot-by-50-foot white catamaran, has been designed to reach a top speed of around 15 knots, equivalent to 15 miles per hour, and can hold up to 50 passengers.It is topped by 5,380 square feet of black solar panels, with a bright white cockpit sticking up in the center.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Water is regarded as a key ingredient for life - and water exists plenty in the universe. Now scientists have found the precious element in a disk around a young star, similar to our Sun. This disk, supposedly the birth place for future planets, contains a hundred times more water than all oceans on Earth. The astronomical observations obtained with the IRAM interferometer appear very promising with regard to solving the mystery around the origin of water in our solar system (The Astrophysical Journal, February 10, 2010).

For all the government conspiracy militia nuts out there, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there is no such thing as silent, stealth black helicopters. The bad news is that, thanks to Eurocopter's noise-canceling Blue Edge rotor blades, there soon will be.The extremely loud noise made by helicopter blades results primarily from the blades chopping through eddies in their own wakes, a phenomenon known as blade-vortex interaction. By changing the shape of the rotor blades, Eurocopter manages to pair down the blade-vortex interaction so thoroughly that the sound only reaches the whisper volume of 3 or 4 decibels.

London, England (CNN) -- A hovering Toblerone and a silky-white residue join near-misses and strange lights in the British government's latest release of its files on UFO sightings.Made public Thursday, the files are the fifth collection of records about unidentified flying objects to be released by the Ministry of Defence and The National Archives as part of a project to open the files up to a wider audience.Thursday's release is the largest so far, totaling more than 6,000 pages of material from 1994 to 2000.

Oblivious to the mud-covered construction machinery rumbling in the background, dirt-smeared archeologists and Songhees Nation members have been chipping away at a 2,850-year-old aboriginal site, one of the oldest to be found on Vancouver Island, experts say."This find is quite rare," said Shane Bond, a senior archeologist with Victoria-based I. R. Wilson Consultants, the company leading the archeological work. "I was terribly excited; my adrenalin was jumping."

Two U.S. scientists have published a radical new theory about when, where and how humans migrated to the New World, arguing that the peopling of the Americas may have begun via Canada's High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage -- much farther north and at least 10,000 years earlier than generally believed.The hypothesis -- described as "speculative" but "plausible" by the researchers themselves -- appears in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, which features a special series of new studies tracing humanity's proliferation out of Africa and around the world beginning about 70,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have revealed the remains of what they say was a "high status" woman of African origin who lived in York during Roman times.Academics say the discovery goes against the common assumption that all Africans in Roman Britain were low status male slaves.Remains of the Ivory Bangle Lady, as she has been named, were studied in Reading using forensic techniques.

Human remains have been found in the deep sea wreck of one of the mightiest and most advanced fighting ships to have served in the Royal Navy.A skull and rib bones were discovered under a cannon by marine archaeologists investigating the wreck of HMS Victory - the direct predecessor of Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar - which went down during violent storms in 1744.

Geophysical studies at Kefala Hill in the Knossos archaeological site on Crete island, have revealed findings of the most ancient farm houses in Greece, and perhaps in all of Europe, dating back between 7,000- 6,400 BC.The important finds were presented on Wednesday in Athens by the head of the British School in Athens and university professor Catherine Morgan at the school's open annual meeting held at the Archaeological Society building.

THE government is being asked to help fund tests that could solve a 600-year-old mystery surrounding the disappearance and death of an English king.Remains have been found near the high altar at a former Dominican friary in Stirling that could be those of King Richard II.Yesterday Central Croydon Conservative MP Andrew Pelling appealed for government help to verify the remains.

IDENTIFYING telltale brain patterns promises to usher in a new era in which all manner of objects can be controlled by thought. But telling brain patterns apart is devilishly difficult. Now cybernetics researchers think a mild buzz from the gadgets that make phones vibrate will focus the mind.Controlling electric wheelchairs using the power of the mind is emerging as a realistic option for some people with neurodegenerative conditions such as Lou Gehrig's disease.

A modern-day Stone Age subculture is developing in the United States, where wannabe cavemen mimic their distant ancestors. They eat lots of meat, bathe in icy water and run around barefoot. Some researchers say people led healthier lives in pre-historic times.John Durant greets the hunter-gatherers of New York once a month in his apartment on the Upper East Side. They eat homemade beef jerky, huddle around the hearth and swap recipes for carpaccio with vegetables or roasted wild boar.

New breeds of winged beasts are lurking in the skies. Bearing names like Reaper, Vulture and Demon, they look nothing like their feathered brethren. Better known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, these strange and wily birds are quietly infiltrating vast swaths of airspace, from battlefields to backyards.With hundreds of different species, from spy craft to airborne sheepherders, UAVs have in the past decade morphed into a full-blown kingdom of creatures deserving of its own taxonomy. Here is our complete guide.

Jerusalem (CNN) -- The murder in a Dubai hotel room of a Hamas leader has grabbed headlines around the world as rumors and speculation swirl about the team that allegedly assassinated him.Fingers -- in the media and the intelligence community -- point toward Israel's spy agency Mossad as responsible. The agency is keeping quiet but has a history of operations in the Middle East, South America and Europe.Dubai's police chief told the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper, The National, he was confident that a Mossad hit squad was behind the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhouh.

A temple built on a circular base, possibly consecrated to the Aztec wind god, has been found in the historical centre of Mexico City.Archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma told the German Press Agency Matos Moctezuma, Mexico's most respected archaeologist and coordinator since 1978 of excavations on the remnants of the former Aztec capital, said the building was found behind Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral.Experts believe it was consecrated to the Aztec wind god, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, because "such temples had as their characteristic the presence of a circular base and of a square base."

LONDON, Feb 23 (Bernama) -- Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago, according to Press Trust of India (PTI) on Tuesday.The international and multidisciplinary research team, led by Oxford University in collaboration with Indian institutions, has uncovered what it calls 'Pompeii-like excavations' beneath the Toba ash.The seven-year project examines the environment that humans lived in, their stone tools, as well as the plants and animal bones of the time.

British Columbia, Canada: DNA recovered from ancient caribou bones reveals a possible link between several small unique caribou herds and a massive volcanic eruption that blanketed much of the Alaskan Yukon territory in a thick layer of ash 1,000 years ago, reports research published today in Molecular Ecology.It's just part of the story being read from ancient caribou remains by an international team of scientists from the U.S., U.K. and Canada who have been studying the history of this iconic and fragile Canadian species.Tyler Kuhn, a Whitehorse native and Simon Fraser University graduate researcher, were able to coax short bits of ancient DNA from caribou bones found in 6,000-yr-old ice patches scattered across an area just north of the British Columbia border.

Tabby ruins on the banks of the May River are not unusual, so archaeologists at Palmetto Bluff thought little of the weathered remnants they found near one of the upscale inn's cottages.But when they began to unearth the structure last fall, they discovered it formed an unusual -- and possibly historically significant -- shape.An octagon.

For years it has been assumed that sites exist that could shed light on the lives of the Giza pyramid builders. Now that assumption is backed up by proof.Since 1990, an Egyptian archeological team headed by Dr. Zahi Hawass has been excavating the remains of the town where the permanent workforce of pyramid artisans and their supervisors lived, In addition, the team also excavated a section where temporary workmen were housed and fed, and a vast cemetery in which all of the pyramid builders were buried.

Scientists have been keeping watch for alien signals for 50 years, but haven't heard anything. Why? Maybe we haven't been looking long enough ... maybe the aliens aren't out there ... or just maybe we're totally missing signals that are being transmitted in a way we didn't expect.One thing's for sure: The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, touches upon one of the deepest questions of human existence. Here's how the late Lee DuBridge, science adviser to presidents, put it in a famous quote: "Either mankind is the most advanced intelligence in the galaxy; or not. Either alternative is mind-boggling."

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. - The already untidy mass of orbital debris that litters low Earth orbit nearly got nastier last month.A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft.Space junk tracking information supplied by the U.S. military, as well as confirming German radar data, showed that the two space objects would speed by each other at a nail-biting distance of roughly 160 feet (50 meters).

Just by reading at that title you might have disregarded this article as pure fantasy. And to be honest, I had to read the MIT article twice before I took it seriously.Although it's pure speculation, there's something appealing about considering multiple universes (a scenario known as the "multiverse") where anything -- and I mean anything -- is possible. But just because an alternate universe is possible, it doesn't mean life can exist there.Now scientists from MIT -- obviously not content with searching for life within our own cosmos -- have shown that alternate universes could nurture life even if the fundamental nature of these universes is totally different from our own.

Future Mars prospectors will likely find mineral riches in some unusual settings, say planetary scientists studying the different ways valuable metals might have been concentrated on the red planet.On Earth, surface waters, ground waters and even chemicals left by living things play major roles in leaching, concentrating and depositing valuable metals and minerals like iron, gold, silver, nickel, copper and many more.But on Mars there are no oceans or surface waters; no microorganisms either. What's more, the planet is so cold that even groundwater is frozen as permafrost and functions as little more than another mineral in the ground.

U.S. authorities will return a beautifully painted 3,000-year-old coffin to Egypt, Egyptian Culture Minister Faruq Hosni said on Monday.Decorated with colorful religious scenes, the ornamented coffin contains the remains of a man called Imesy.Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) had said last year that the coffin likely belongs to pharaoh Ames of the 21st Dynasty, which ruled over Egypt from 1070-945 B.C.The nearly 5-foot-long wooden coffin was confiscated by U.S. customs officials at Miami International Airport from a Spanish merchant in 2008.

For the first time in decades, NASA has no specific space destination for its next stop, although it has lots of places it wants to go. Future space flight, NASA officials say, now depends on new rocket science and where it can take us.That uncertainty may not sit well with Congress, which will be grilling NASA chief Charles Bolden on Wednesday and Thursday in the first hearings since the George W. Bush moon mission was shelved.

A new collaborative study between Idaho National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) will investigate whether such roasting can create a more valuable product for the nascent biofuels industry. Initial studies show that driving moisture and volatile compounds from wood or straw could make the biomass more stable, compactable and energy dense."This could cut a lot of costs by providing a less expensive and higher-value product," said INL biofuels researcher Christopher Wright. "This technology has the ability to overcome biomass's moisture, mass and energy density problems, which make up a huge proportion of the cost barriers."

Astronauts may one day orbit the Earth in roomy balloons instead of cramped tin cans, now that NASA has made inflatable space habitats a priority.The White House announced a change in direction for NASA on 1 February. Instead of the planned crewed missions to the moon, the agency intends to pour money into research and development (New Scientist, 13 February 2010, p 8).The outline listed technologies on NASA's wish list but provided few details. Now NASA has fleshed out its plans in a detailed budget proposal posted on its website on 22 February.

University of Central Florida professor Henry Daniell has developed a groundbreaking way to produce ethanol from waste products such as orange peels and newspapers. His approach is greener and less expensive than the current methods available to run vehicles on cleaner fuel - and his goal is to relegate gasoline to a secondary fuel.Daniell's breakthrough can be applied to several non-food products throughout the United States, including sugarcane, switchgrass and straw."This could be a turning point where vehicles could use this fuel as the norm for protecting our air and environment for future generations," he said.

It remains one of the greatest human fossil discoveries of all time. The bones of a race of tiny primitive people, who used stone tools to hunt pony-sized elephants and battle huge Komodo dragons, were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004.

FRANK DRAKE, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), wants to take the search for aliens further: about 82 billion kilometres away, in fact.At this point in space, electromagnetic signals from planets orbiting distant stars would be focused by the gravitational lensing effect of our sun, making them, in theory, more easily detected. Drake wants to send spacecraft there in a bid to overhear alien communications, which would be too faint for telescopes on Earth to detect.

FRANK DRAKE, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), wants to take the search for aliens further: about 82 billion kilometres away, in fact.At this point in space, electromagnetic signals from planets orbiting distant stars would be focused by the gravitational lensing effect of our sun, making them, in theory, more easily detected. Drake wants to send spacecraft there in a bid to overhear alien communications, which would be too faint for telescopes on Earth to detect.

Anti-retroviral treatments (ARVs) and universal testing could stop the spread of Aids in South Africa within five years, a top scientist says.Dr Brian Williams says the cost of giving the drugs to almost six million HIV-positive patients in the country would be $2-3bn per year.Only about 30% get the life-saving drugs, he said, but early detection and treatment would prevent transmission.

A study in dolphins has revealed genetic clues that could help medical researchers to treat type 2 diabetes.Scientists from the US National Marine Mammal Foundation said that bottlenose dolphins are resistant to insulin - just like people with diabetes.But in dolphins, they say, this resistance is switched on and off.The researchers presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego.They hope to collaborate with diabetes researchers to see if they can find and possibly even control an equivalent human "off switch".

Bricks dating back 5,000 to 7,000 years have been unearthed in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, adding between 1,000 to 2,000 years onto Chinese brick-making history, archaeologists claimed Saturday."The five calcined bricks were unearthed from a site of the Yangshao Culture Period dating 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. Previously, the oldest known bricks in the country were more than 4,000 years old," Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology researcher Yang Yachang said.The bricks, including three red ones and two gray ones, all uncompleted, Yang said. The site under excavation is located at Liaoyuan Village of Baqiao District, and Huaxu Town, Lantian County of Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi Province.

Crete has seduced archaeologists for more than a century, luring them to its rocky shores with fantastic tales of legendary kings, cunning deities, and mythical creatures. The largest of the Greek islands, Crete was the land of the Minoans (3100-1050 B.C.), a Bronze Age civilization named after its first ruler, King Minos, the "master of the seas" who is said to have rid the waters of pirates. According to Thucydides, he also established the first thalassocracy, or maritime empire.

A well-built aqueduct from time of King Herod was unearthed last week near the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem during work on infrastructure in the area.The site of the discovery is not far from the place where a Byzantine street was recently unearthed.srael Antiquities Authority archaeologists say they found about 40 meters of the ancient waterway, which was part of the sophisticated aqueduct that brought water to Jerusalem from springs in the Hebron hills to the south to the Mamilla pool, which still exists today, and from there through the aqueduct to Hezekiah's Pool within the walled city. Archaeologists say the aqueduct was first built in the first century BCE, and was in use in the second century. Within it were discovered roof tiles from the Roman Tenth Legion, which controlled the city at that time.

With the country ravaged by war and strife since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Baghdad's struggling government has had greater priorities than funding large-scale digs at Ur - the birth place of Abraham and one of the cradles of civilisation - where only small teams have been working since 2005."When the (large-scale) excavations restart, tons of antiquities will see the light of day, filling entire museum wings," enthused Dhaif Moussin, who is in charge of protecting a site that has been prone to looting.

In Roman mythology, the bough was a tree branch with golden leaves that enabled the Trojan hero Aeneas to travel through the underworld safely.They discovered the remains while excavating religious sanctuary built in honour of the goddess Diana near an ancient volcanic lake in the Alban Hills, 20 miles south of Rome.They believe the enclosure protected a huge Cypress or oak tree which was sacred to the Latins, a powerful tribe which ruled the region before the rise of the Roman Empire.

It's very easy to say that something is "impossible" when talking about technologies that appear to be more at home in science fiction storylines. And when it comes to warp drives -- the staple of Star Trek propulsion systems -- there's no shortage of critics.Being critical of advanced concepts is no bad thing, however. Indeed, it is a very healthy part of the scientific process, but singling out the impracticalities of faster than light-speed travel could be considered to be a little premature to say the least.

Physicians usually rely on surgery or drugs to bust blood clots in the brain that might otherwise cause a stroke, but sound waves might provide a third noninvasive choice. U.S. researchers have begun testing an Israeli ultrasound device to see whether it may prove accurate enough to break up a clot without causing collateral damage in the brain, Technology Review reports.

Prosthetic users typically spend more energy walking on their artificial feet than most people, because the devices cannot replicate the force of a living ankle pushing off the ground. Now researchers have created a new prosthetic foot that recaptures the mechanical energy between steps.Test subjects who used a conventional prosthetic foot spent 23 percent more metabolic energy, as opposed to when they walked on two normal feet. One engineer likened the experience to walking with an extra 30 pounds weighing him down.