Newsdesk Archive

Science fiction writers may have to rethink how their starship crews survive travel near or beyond the speed of light. Even the occasional hydrogen atom floating in the interstellar void would become a lethal radiation beam that would kill human crews in mere seconds and destroy a spacecraft's electronics, New Scientist reports.Just a few stray wisps of hydrogen gas -- fewer than two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average -- would translate into 7 teraelectron volts for a starship crew traveling at 99.999998 percent of the speed of light. That's as much fun for humans as standing in front of the proton beam created by the Large Hadron Collider, according to William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University.

In a dangerous legacy of the world's deadliest conflict, 150,000 World War Two-era sea mines litter the Baltic Sea. The danger these bombs pose to a proposed gas pipeline has prompted Russia to hire the British firm Bactec International to clear the sea of unexploded ordnance. And for Bactec, that means it's time to bring out the robots.Bactec, which previously worked clearing mines from around the Falkland Islands, will use a specially designed robot to scour the ocean floor in search of the 70 bombs blocking the path of the pipeline. When the robot finds a mine, a surface ship releases a high-pitched wail to scare away nearby marine mammals, sets off a small explosive to scare away any fish, and then plants and detonates a small charge on the mine. Altogether, it takes Bactec two days to clear each mine.

Producing a biofuel cheap enough to compete at the pump with oil has remained as elusive as a ghost on the walls of Elsinore castle. But this week, two Danish companies announced they had developed enzymes capable of breaking down cellulose into ethanol cheaply enough to produce $2-a-gallon gas.

COLLINSVILLE -- About 800 years ago, in a large room lit by a wood fire, fierce-looking men bedecked in bright feathers and polished copper ornaments gathered to smoke and talk.

A wispy comet, a bursting star-forming cloud, the Andromeda Galaxy and a faraway cluster of hundreds of galaxies are just a few of the cosmic sights seen in the first processed images from a new NASA all-sky survey.NASA's new Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, began scanning the entire sky in infrared light on Jan. 14. Since then, the space telescope has beamed back more than 250,000 raw, infrared images. Tucked away in that bunch were the four diverse space objects that provide a taste of the survey telescope's capabilities.

Astronomers had their doubts about Pluto from the very start. At first, even its discoverer wasn't sure where the little world fit in the planetary parade. But 80 years after it was found, Pluto has demonstrated that it's a survivor.The dwarf planet first came to Earth's attention on the afternoon of Feb. 18, 1930, when former Midwest farmboy Clyde Tombaugh saw a curious speck on a pair of photographic plates in a contraption called a blink comparator, set up at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.

The trigger that ignites a common type of stellar explosion has finally been uncovered with observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, providing a major advance in the understanding of supernovas.These supernovas, called Type 1a, result from the explosion of a white dwarf star. These types of supernovas are used as cosmic mile markers, and knowing what causes these stellar blow-ups is a critical key to studying the mysterious dark energy that astronomers think pervades the universe.

Furrows preserved in 565-million-year-old rocks are now the first evidence that some of Earth's earliest and mysterious living things had muscles to move themselves -- and so were truly animals.That means muscles may have evolved earlier and been part of a long evolutionary fuse that led to the so-called "Cambrian Explosion," 30 million years later, of the many lineages of marine animals still found in the oceans today.

Humans are no strangers to ravaging the land, but the stars have proven a good deal more elusive. So far, our ethical concerns have remained limited to the contamination of extraterrestrial environments, but what will the future bring?Last night I attended a lecture by Jesuit Brother Guy J. Consolmagno, a U.S. research astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory. He gave a very engaging talk about the ethics of exploration and planetary astronomy, touching on two particularly noteworthy items:

I have to hand it to Anantha Chandrakasan, an electrical engineering professor at MIT. By harnessing small changes in temperature and tiny vibrations to develop battery alternatives, he's making micro-power sound super sexy.Chandrakasan has been a busy guy. One of several energy-harnessing systems he is working on with postdoc Yogesh Ramadass uses the temperature difference between a warm body or object and surrounding air to generate electricity on a small scale. While the basic principal has been in play since the 19th Century, one device they're working on generates slight but usable power from one and two degree differences, which is harnessed using a control circuit.

Energy from a floating nuclear donut? It might just happen if MIT researchers have their way. James Williams and Tracy Staedter dig in to the details.

The equipment is being provided by Coulomb Technologies, via its distributor Carbon Day Automotive. The wind power is actually coming from a local law firm. The law firm has a partnership with MC Squared Energy Services, and is sending some of the power to the charging station. The agreement uses energy from wind farms in Illinois. MC Squared provides clean energy to a number of commercial businesses.Going forward, Coulomb hopes to create an entire network of rapid-charging stations that could serve as places for electric vehicle drivers to get power for their plug-ins.

Imagine you are almost dozing in a lounge chair outside, with a magazine on your lap. Suddenly, a fly lands on your arm. You grab the magazine and swat at the insect. What was going on in your brain after the fly landed? And what was going on just before? Many neuroscientists have long assumed that much of the neural activity inside your head when at rest matches your subdued, somnolent mood. In this view, the activity in the resting brain represents nothing more than random noise, akin to the snowy pattern on the television screen when a station is not broadcasting.

THE first intrepid explorers to brave the 7-metre crawl through a perilously narrow tunnel leading to the Chauvet caves in southern France were rewarded with magnificent artwork to rival any modern composition. Stretching a full 3 metres in height, the paintings depict a troupe of majestic horses in deep colours, above a pair of boisterous rhinos in the midst of a fight. To the left, they found the beautiful rendering of a herd of prehistoric cows. "The horse heads just seem to leap out of the wall towards you," says Jean Clottes, former director of scientific research at the caves and one of the few people to see the paintings with his own eyes.

A TOTALLY new genetic code has been devised, along with machinery that could make it a biological reality. It's an advance that means living cells could be persuaded to make proteins with properties that have never been seen in the natural world.More extraordinary still, it could eventually lead to the creation of new or "improved" life forms that incorporate these materials in their tissue - possibly even organisms with bulletproof bodies.

Lesch-Nyhan syndrome causes compulsive self-mutilation. Children eat their lips or fingers, and stab their faces with sharp objects. They feel the pain, but they cannot stop themselves. Why would a loving, all-powerful creator allow anyone to be born with such an awful disease?Lesch-Nyhan is just one of the tens of thousands of genetic disorders discovered so far. At least a tenth of people have some kind of debilitating genetic disease, and most of us will become sick at some point during our lifetime as a result of mutations that cause diseases such as cancer.

Traditional and modern Hinduism have an extensive monotheistic (belief in one God) branch that in many ways can be compared with the Christian notion of the person and a personal relationship to God. This inspite the fact that Hinduism is often portrayed as being characterised by spiritual non-dualism and polytheism, or the belief in multiple gods.This is the result of new research in religious studies at the University of Gothenburg.The research focuses on the Indian religious reformer Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (1874-1937), who was a key figure for a number of modern religious institutions such as the Hare Krishna movement.

YOU started life as a single cell. Now you are made of many trillions. There are more cells in your body than there are stars in the galaxy. Every day billions of these cells are replaced. And if you hurt yourself, billions more cells spring up to repair broken blood vessels and make new skin, muscle or even bone.Even more amazing than the staggering number of cells, though, is the fact that, by and large, they all know what to do - whether to become skin or bone and so on. The question is, how?

The British government has received thousands of UFO reports over the decades, and Thursday it released the largest amount of documents ever concerning UFO sightings.The documents, made available online via PDF by the Ministry of Defence and The National Archives, included 6,000 pages from 1994 to 2000.The tales found within cover several elaborate sorts of tales, including a woman's telepathic encounter with bizarre lights, as well as one man's detailed report of a "spherical" object captured on video.With each report received, the Ministry of Defence often had the same response.

A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or "improved" life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.In all existing life forms, the four "letters" of the genetic code, called nucleotides, are read in triplets, so that every three nucleotides encode a single amino acid.Not any more. Jason Chin at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have now redesigned the cell's machinery so that it reads the genetic code in quadruplets.In the genetic code that life has used up to now, there are 64 possible triplet combinations of the four nucleotide letters; these genetic "words" are called codons. Each codon either codes for an amino acid or tells the cell to stop making a protein chain. Now Chin's team have created 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids that don't even exist yet.

Using magnetic induction to send electricity to devices is more efficient when more than one machine is involved.The notion of transmitting power over the air is at least 100 years old, with methods from high-powered microwaves to focused beams of infrared being tested.But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), led by physicist Marin Soljacic, think using magnetic fields to induce a current in a distant device is the most promising approach. They tune the transmitter and receiver to magnetically resonate at the same frequency to maximise efficiency. Waves carry energy most effectively between objects that resonate at the same frequency, an effect at work when a singer smashes a nearby glass with the right note.

LET'S face it: power cables are unsightly dust-traps. PCs, TVs and music players are becoming slicker every year, but the nest of vipers in the corner of every room remains an ugly impediment to true minimalism.Then there is the inconvenience of charging phones, MP3 players and PDAs. A minor hassle, admittedly, but it is easy to forget to top up the batteries and before you know it you have left the house with a dead gadget. Wouldn't life be simpler if power was invisibly beamed to your devices whenever you walked into a building with an electricity supply? Wireless communication is ubiquitous, after all, so why can't we permanently unshackle our electronics from power cables too?

Mercury was too close to the sun to see, Mars showed only a thin crescent of sunlight, and Pluto was too dim, but Voyager was able to capture cameos of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus from its unique vantage point. These images, later arranged in a large-scale mosaic, make up the only family portrait of our planets arrayed about the sun.The Apollo missions in the 1960s and 70s had already altered our perspective of Earth by returning images of our home planet from the moon, but Voyager was providing a completely new perspective, said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena."It captured the Earth as a speck of light in the vastness of the solar system, which is our local neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy, in a universe replete with galaxies," Stone said.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Inserting a human protein important in cancer development was able to revive dying plants, showing an evolutionary link between plants and humans and possibly making it easier to study the protein's function in cancer development, a Purdue University study has shown.The aminopeptidase M1 protein, or APM1, is critical for root development in plants. Arabidopsis plants lacking the protein will die, but can be rescued if the protein is restored.During experiments, Wendy Peer, a research assistant professor of horticulture, found that inserting a similar protein found in humans, called insulin responsive aminopeptidase, or IRAP, also rescued the plants.

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station are enjoying a view of the Earth on Wednesday they've never seen before.The third spacewalk of Endeavour's mission left them with a window to the world in the new Tranquility node."Wow, what a spacewalk, and what a view we got today. Truly a window of opportunity was opened on the world today," said ISS Flight Director Bob Dempsey.

Silicon may represent one of Earth's more common elements, but it transformed Silicon Valley into a high-tech corridor and helped usher the world into the Information Age.Now rare earth elements with exotic names such as europium and tantalum hold the key to hybrid cars, wind turbines and crystal-clear TV displays - that is, if a looming supply shortage doesn't stop innovation in its tracks.

PALEMBANG, South Sumatra: A megalithic settlement has recently been unearthed at Skendal village, 10 kilometers from the town of Pagaralam in South Sumatra.Irfan Wintarto, an official at the Lahat Culture and Tourism Agency's Historical and Archeological Preservation Department, said local residents had discovered around 36 types of rocks on a 150-by-300-meter plot in the middle of a 2-hectare coffee plantation. The site is currently being investigated by the Archeological Region Conservation and Heritage Center (BPPP)."The findings are believed to date back to around 5,000 B.C.," Irfan said.

A recent discovery of a shark tooth at an archaeological site near Cambridge has indicated that sharks may have once roamed the prehistoric seas of Cambridgeshire; predominantly in the area where the fens now lie.The tooth that was discovered is thought to have belonged to a member of the Orthadocus family, an extinct type of shark. A precursor to the modern-day shark, the Orthadocus is reckoned to have been smaller than sharks are today, and lived in the Cretaceous period approximately 100 million years ago.

Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

The importance of the Royal Palace of Ebla, in north Syria, lies in that it includes a room for cuneiform manuscripts, known as 'Ebla Archive' which stressed its importance as a political and economic metropolis in Bilad al-Cham besides that the Palace dates back to the Early Bronze Age 2400 BC.An archaeologist and Supervisor of the Excavation and Restoration Works at the Site Wisam Habib said that the site consists of three sections: the first one is the central, the other is the administrative one, in addition to the services section.

Varun Pyke has come to the edge of the Indian island where he has spent all 50 years of his life, to recount the story of the riches that he has now lost.He gloomily jabs a finger out toward the water, pointing well beyond the gray waves lapping on the shores of the long, wide beach on which he is standing.

Scientists say the tiny bubbles of plasma they've created in a "big bang machine" are the hottest dollops of soup ever seen in the universe, reaching temperatures of several trillion degrees.What's more, the weird properties of that soup may help scientists create a new breed of electronic devices - and figure out why the universe didn't blow itself up as soon as it came into being.The proton-sized soup bubbles, known more formally as quark-gluon plasma, were created about a billion times in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Like the larger, more recently constructed Large Hadron Collider, RHIC is capable of creating the conditions that existed in the universe a millionth of a second after the big bang.

With so many smart meters being installed and smart appliances in development, how are they going to talk? A handy new wireless controller could help them speak the same language, and tell you what they're thinking.BuLogics, a Philadelphia-based company started by two Drexel University electrical engineering grads, recently introduced their Smart Grid Home Controller. The controller is particularly cool, especially to smart grid geeks, because it pulls a whole bunch of tech together seamlessly. The device uses Z-Wave communication technology and works with any wireless standard, including the two-way wireless standard ZigBee, created by Philips Semiconductors and popular with utilities.Let's imagine it's summer (hard, I know) and everyone has the AC set to arctic at a peak time. Your smart meter gets a signal saying something to the effect of "hey, please go easy on the juice to help avert a blackout." BuLogics' controller gets the meter's message, automatically starts shutting off non-critical appliances according to your preset preferences, and sends your phone a message letting you know what's going on.

Reconstructions of four of the most unusual animals to have ever existed were publicly unveiled this week at Stony Brook University, according to a press release issued by the university. The animals include a carnivorous dinosaur named after Dire Straits lead singer Mark Knopfler, "devil frog"- the largest frog that ever lived, a 2.5-foot-long, pug-nosed vegetarian crocodile, and fossils from another dinosaur that had short, powerful hind-legs yet minuscule front legs.The animals are featured in an exhibit that honors paleontologist and lead discoverer of the fossils, David Krause, Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook.

Future guys and gals looking for a sweet-smelling bouquet for Valentine's Day might consider the root-beer-scented variety. Or they could opt for a fouler odor, if they want to send a different message. That's all in the coming future, according to Discovery News.Following centuries of humans breeding for bigger and prettier varieties, scientists at the University of Florida in Gainesville accidentally discovered the genes to make flowers smell nicer. They found the 12 or 13 unknown genes after sequencing the genome for petunias.

Someone at Google apparently took pity on the poor users who can only explore Google Earth on their laptops. Jason Holt used his 20 percent project time to create a wraparound view of a modified Google Earth engine, and splashed it across 8 LCD screens in an immersive viewing booth. The result provides a view not unlike that from a starship's bridge, and allows users to seamlessly explore a virtual environment of the Earth, moon, and Mars -- an experience that Google has dubbed "Liquid Galaxy."

A new generation of scientists hope to become genome hackers who redesign organisms to become living tools, capable of creating diesel fuel or producing anti-malarial drugs. That synthetic biology revolution has led to a can-do spirit of innovation that has fueled MIT's International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition, known as iGEM for short. The New York Times has traced the route to iGEM by following a community-college team from the City College of San Francisco, as the group tries to build a bacteria-based battery powered entirely by the sun for iGEM. It's a great overview of one of the more exciting scientific fields today.

Locksmiths and car thieves can both get excited over a new handheld device that electronically maps the inside of car locks and then provides the key code within seconds via USB cable connection to a computer. The key code, matched to the make of the car, allows key-cutting machines to churn out a replacement key. Popular Mechanics reports that the key replication only works for Ford vehicles so far -- news that may leave bemused expressions on the faces of Ford owners.

The tiger may be more ancient and distinct than we thought.Tigers are less closely related to lions, leopards and jaguars than these other big cats are to each other, according to a new comprehensive study.The genetic analysis also reveals the tiger began evolving 3.2 million years ago, and its closest living relative is the equally endangered snow leopard.The discovery comes as the BBC launches a collection of intimate videos of wild tigers and the threats they face.

A cave dating back to the Roman Era was unearthed in Mantif town in Ariha, Idleb, northern Syria.The almost 3.000 square meter cave dates back to the third century A.D., located in a rocky area in al-Zawiya Mountain, said Head of Idleb Antiquities Department Nicola Kabbad.One can enter the cave through a 2 m long and 1 m wide hole. Temperature in the cave varies between 35 to 40 degrees.Assistant Head of Archaeological Excavation Department Mr Mustafa Qaddour said different sized stalactites and stalagmites make about 80 % of the cave, adding that the vaults and tunnels inside the cave show signs of a collapse of the cave's ceiling and walls. (SANA)

Cave formations along the coast of an island in the Mediterranean Sea hold evidence that sea level can rise and fall abruptly during an ice age, a finding that casts some doubt on current notions about how those lengthy cold spells develop and progress.At the height of an ice age, immense volumes of water are locked up in land-based ice sheets, and ocean levels can be as much as 130 meters below where they are today. By contrast, when that ice melts during warm periods, sea level can be a few meters higher than the modern-day standard, says Jeffrey Dorale, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Cats and dogs trot around on their toes, as do many other mammals. So why do humans and other great apes walk flat-footed? It is surprisingly energy efficient, a new study suggests.It takes 53 percent more energy for humans to walk on the balls of their feet, and 83 percent more energy to toe-walk.However, the energy savings don't apply to running. There's no difference, energy-wise, between landing on our heels and landing on the balls of our feet when we run, the scientists say.They speculate that humans may have retained this heel-first gait because of the walking benefits."Our ancestors were hunter gatherers, so anything that improved walking would make a lot of sense to hang on to," said study-author David Carrier of the University of Utah.

LOS ANGELES - A high-powered laser destroyed a target missile in flight off the Central California coast in a milestone test of a futuristic but troubled national defense system, the Air Force announced Friday.A laser weapon mounted on a Boeing jumbo jet tracked the missile as it accelerated over the ocean off the Point Mugu Naval Warfare Center Thursday night, then fired an energy beam that heated the missile until it cracked and broke up, according to statements from the Air Force and two aerospace companies involved in the program.

Tudor theatergoers snacked on seafood while enjoying plays by Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, according to new evidence unearthed at two theaters in London.The research, whose details are published by the Museum of London Archaeology in a book called "The Rose and the Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare's Bankside, Southwark," began in 1988 and focused on two 16th-century famous playhouses: The Globe, home to many of Shakespeare's plays, and The Rose, where many of Christopher Marlowe's plays were first performed.Julian Bowsher, the Museum of London archaeologist who excavated the sites, told Discovery News about his findings."For the first time in 400 years we know exactly what these playhouses looked like, how big they were, how they developed over the years, what the stages were like. Most importantly, we have found evidence for 'life' inside," Bowsher said.

Peter Bromirski of Scripps Oceanography is the lead scientist in a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that describes how storms over the North Pacific Ocean may be transferring enough wave energy to destabilize Antarctic ice shelves. The California Department of Boating and Waterways and the National Science Foundation supported the study.According to Bromirski, storm-driven ocean swells travel across the Pacific Ocean and break along the coastlines of North and South America, where they are transformed into very long-period ocean waves called "infragravity waves" that travel vast distances to Antarctica.Bromirski, along with coauthors Olga Sergienko of Princeton University and Douglas MacAyeal of the University of Chicago, propose that the southbound travelling infragravity waves "may be a key mechanical agent that contributes to the production and/or expansion of the pre-existing crevasse fields on ice shelves," and that the infragravity waves also may provide the trigger necessary to initiate the collapse process.

"Many scientists are looking for the warning signs that herald sudden changes in natural systems, in hopes of forestalling those changes, or improving our preparations for them," said UC Davis theoretical ecologist Alan Hastings. "Our new study found, unfortunately, that regime shifts with potentially large consequences can happen without warning -- systems can 'tip' precipitously."This means that some effects of global climate change on ecosystems can be seen only once the effects are dramatic. By that point returning the system to a desirable state will be difficult, if not impossible."The current study focuses on models from ecology, but its findings may be applicable to other complex systems, especially ones involving human dynamics such as harvesting of fish stocks or financial markets.

"How much energy you can put into a particle per meter corresponds directly to how big the machine is," says Steven Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Professor in Chemistry and the James Franck Institute at UChicago. This means that future accelerators must either grow to inconceivable sizes, at great costs, or they must somehow pump far more energy into each particle per meter of acceleration than modern technology will allow.Sibener and Lance Cooley, AB'86, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, are working on the latter option with $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. They aim to improve the efficiency of superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities made of niobium to accelerate beams of subatomic particles in the next generation of high-energy physics experiments.The result could be accelerators powerful enough to open new frontiers in physics without the need for a massive increase in size.

WHEN NASA's Viking landers touched down on Mars, they were looking for signs of life. Instead, all their cameras showed was a dry, dusty - and entirely barren - landscape.Or so it seemed. But what the 1976 Viking mission, and every subsequent one, saw was a scene littered with rocks coated with a dark, highly reflective sheen. That coating looks a lot like a substance known on Earth as "rock varnish", found in arid regions similar to those on Mars. The latest evidence hints that rock varnish is formed by bacteria. Could there be microbes on Mars making such material too?

MOSS BLUFF - Ongoing discoveries at a 17th-century archaeological dig near the Ocklawaha River are providing new insights into the culture of the Acuera, a Timucuan tribe that was living in the region where Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led an expedition in 1539.Through luck, hard work and the study of records collated by one of his mentors, University of Florida doctoral candidate Willet Boyer III tracked down what he believes to be Santa Lucia de Acuera, a lost site that was at one point the most remote Franciscan mission in all of Florida.

Cairo, Asharq Al-Awsat- Like any other football fan, I watched the African Cup of Nations semi-final between Algeria and Egypt which ended in a victory for the Egyptian team that scored four clean goals.As for the final, I watched that with my actor friend Omar Sharif who also loves football and talks about it like an expert, as he played side-by-side at one time with [former] Egyptian football player and manager Saleh Selim. After the Egyptian national team and Al Ahly football team, Omar Sharif supports Arsenal.Unfortunately, even though the descendants of the Pharaohs entertained us with their football skills and scored beautiful goals in the Algeria-Egypt match, we were really affected by the spirit with which the opposing team entered the stadium, as if it were entering a war and not a football match.

New fossils from the Middle Jurassic period show what at least one species of spider, Eoplectreurys gertschi, looked like when dinosaurs dominated the planet.Check out the incredible detail on this fossil. Credit for all images goes to Paul Selden of the University of Kansas.The findings, published in the journal Naturwissenschaften, extend the fossil record for this particular family of spiders by at least 120 million years, and suggest that these spiders plummeted in numbers, losing much of their original range.Selden and co-author Diying Huang write, "This small family is restricted to southwestern USA, Mexico and the adjacent Caribbean area today." The fossils, however, were excavated at Inner Mongolia, China.

Standing at the gates of a prison, South Africans celebrated how far they have come since Nelson Mandela took his walk to freedom 20 years ago Thursday. Now 91 and frail, Mandela is rarely seen in public but aides say he may mark the occasion by attending a state of the nation address Thursday evening in parliament by President Jacob ZumaThousands of admirers flocked to the former Victor Verster Prison in Drakenstein near Cape Town where Mandela was last held and where a 10-foot (3-meter) high bronze statue depicting Mandela's first steps as a free man after 27 years behind bars now stands. On this day 20 years ago, Mandela walked out of Victor Verster hand-in-hand with his then-wife Winnie, fist raised, smiling but resolute.

The history told by this tall parfait of layers inside Gale Crater matches what has been proposed in recent years as the dominant planet-wide pattern for early Mars, according to a new report by geologists using instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter."Looking at the layers from the bottom to the top, from the oldest to the youngest, you see a sequence of changing rocks that resulted from changes in environmental conditions through time," said Ralph Milliken of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This thick sequence of rocks appears to be showing different steps in the drying-out of Mars."Using geological layers to understand stages in the evolution of a planet's climate has a precedent on Earth. A change about 1.8 billion years ago in the types of rock layers formed on Earth became a key to understanding a dramatic change in Earth's ancient atmosphere.

ASTRONAUTS digging into an asteroid for samples to send back to Earth. Experimental robots on the moon, paving the way for extraterrestrial refuelling stations and for astronauts "living off the land". Commercial space taxis ferrying crew members to and from the International Space Station, while a "plasma thruster" - a precursor to engines that will eventually send astronauts to Mars - undergoes tests in space.All this could be happening a decade from now, following a change of direction for NASA signalled by the White House last week.

You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. And no, that doesn't mean you should head to Kansas and lie in a cornfield awaiting the mothership to scoop you up. All you have to do is log on to SETIQuest.org, which went live on Wednesday. The site's launch was announced at the TED 2010 conference currently underway in Long Beach, California.SETIQuest is the product of astronomer Jill Tarter's TED Prize wish. After being awarded the TED Prize last year, Tarter was given the opportunity to make a single wish before an auditorium full of the top names in technology and design. Tarter wished that they would "empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company".

Religion evolved as a byproduct of pre-existing mental capacities, and not be cause it fulfilled a specific function of its own though it can facilitate cooperation in society, a study concludes.Why religion emerged among early humans remains a source of contention among scholars. Many scientists believe religion is ultimately based in the brain, but that still leaves un­clear how and why these behaviors originated and how they may have been shaped during evolution. Some archaeologists think religion came about partly as a strategy by some people to grab power, simply by claiming some sort of secret know ledge.

Washington -- Good night, Loran.In a series of small ceremonies, the U.S. Coast Guard on Monday shut down Loran-C, a navigation and timing system that has guided mariners and aviators since World War II.The death blow came last May when President Obama called the system obsolete, saying it is no longer needed in an age in which Global Positioning System devices are nearly ubiquitous in cars, planes and boats.

Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick.The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied.A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the "Quantum Tunnelling Composite".The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.

The discovery of a new "missing link" species of bull dating to a million years ago in Eritrea pushes back the beef steak dinner to the very dawn of humans and cattle.Although there is no evidence that early humans were actually herding early cattle 2.5 million years ago, the early humans and early cattle certainly shared the same landscape and beef was definitely on the menu all along, say researchers.The telltale fossil is a skull with enormous horns that belongs to the cattle genus Bos. It has been reassembled from over a hundred shards found at a dig that also contains early human remains, said paleontologist Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. Martinez is the lead author of a paper reporting the discovery in the February issue of the journal Quaternary International.

Though local lore held that the so-called "scorpion tree" had been the work of cowboys, paleontologist Rex Saint Onge immediately knew that the tree was carved by Indians when he stumbled upon it in the fall of 2006. Located in a shady grove atop the Santa Lucia Mountains in San Luis Obispo County, the centuries-old gnarled oak had the image of a six-legged, lizard-like being meticulously scrawled into its trunk, the nearly three-foot-tall beast topped with a rectangular crown and two large spheres. "I was really the first one to come across it who understood that it was a Chumash motif," says Saint Onge, referring to the native people who painted similar designs on rock formations from San Luis Obispo south through Santa Barbara and into Malibu.

Saudi Arabia has announced the discovery of a 7th century village, which has been unearthed in the Raaka district, Dammam, near the shores of the Arabian Gulf. The site contains a compound village, which contains more than 20 houses, containing rooms and accommodation units, in which coins, fractures of pottery, limestone (steatite), and glass pieces dating back to the 1st and 2nd centuries AH (7th & 8th century AD) were found.

Researchers at Queen's University have helped produce a new archaeological tool which could answer key questions in human evolution.The new calibration curve, which extends back 50,000 years is a major landmark in radiocarbon dating-- the method used by archaeologists and geoscientists to establish the age of carbon-based materials.

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative.The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert food to energy within cells. In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia's Vindija cave 30,000 years ago.

The recent discoveries of the archaeological expeditions working in Damascus (Syria) and its countryside helped shed light on the role of the city in human civilization during various historical periods.The annual report of the department of excavations and archaeological studies at the General Department of Archaeology and Museums said that the national, foreign and joint expeditions uncovered new discoveries that show the depth and diversity of civilizations that once lived in the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world.

Scientists may have solved the mystery of how human hands became nimble enough to make and manipulate stone tools.The team reports in the journal Evolution that changes in our hands and fingers were a side-effect of changes in the shape of our feet.This, they say, shows that the capacity to stand and walk on two feet is intrinsically linked to the emergence of stone tool technology.The scientists used a mathematical model to simulate the changes.Other researchers, though, have questioned this approach.

A team of researchers from Spain's Higher Council for Scientific Study (CSIC) are examining a marshy area of Andalusian parkland to find evidence of a 3,000-year-old settlement.They believe that Tartessos, a wealthy civilization in southern Iberia that predates the Phoenicians, may have had its capital in the heart of what is now the Donana national park.

A new model for primate origins is presented in Zoologica Scripta, published by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The paper argues that the distributions of the major primate groups are correlated with Mesozoic tectonic features and that their respective ranges are congruent with each evolving locally from a widespread ancestor on the supercontinent of Pangea about 185 million years ago.Michael Heads, a Research Associate of the Buffalo Museum of Science, arrived at these conclusions by incorporating, for the first time, spatial patterns of primate diversity and distribution as historical evidence for primate evolution. Models had previously been limited to interpretations of the fossil record and molecular clocks.

But despite their having gone the way of the dodo and the woolly mammoth, there are plans to bring the giant animals back to life.The huge cattle with sweeping horns which once roamed the forests of Europe have not been seen for nearly 400 years.Now Italian scientists are hoping to use genetic expertise and selective breeding of modern-day wild cattle to recreate the fearsome beasts which weighed around 2,200lb and stood 6.5 feet at the shoulder.Breeds of large cattle which most closely resemble Bos primigenius, such as Highland cattle and the white Maremma breed from Italy, are being bred with each other in a technique known as "back-breeding".

One of the world's oldest dialects, which traces its origins to tens of thousands of years ago, has become extinct after the last person to speak it died on a remote Indian island.Boa Sr, the 85-year-old last speaker of "Bo," was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese tribe, R.C. Kar, deputy director of Tribal Health in Andaman, told Reuters on Friday.She died last week in Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which were hit by a devastating tsunami in 2004."With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory," said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, an organization that supports tribes worldwide.

XI'AN, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archeologists have restored a dainty headgear unearthed from the tomb of a princess who lived about 1,200 years ago in today's northwestern Shaanxi Province."We found through lab work that the headgear consisted nearly 400 tiny pieces of turquoise, amber, carnelian, pearl, ruby, gold, silver and several other types of precious metal," said Yang Junchang, chief engineer of Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology.Yang led a team of Chinese and German specialists to restore the headgear, a project that last for 18 months and was concluded early this year.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Iran said it will cut ties with the British Museum on Monday because of the museum's failure to lend Tehran an ancient Babylonian artifact described as the world's earliest bill of rights.The spat over the loan has long festered between London and Tehran, and comes against the backdrop of increasingly tense Iranian-British relations.Tehran is under heavy pressure from the West over its nuclear program, and has accused Britain and other foreign governments of interference in domestic policies and of stoking the country's postelection street protests.The artifact is a 6th century B.C. clay tablet with an account in cuneiform of the conquest of Babylon by Persian King Cyrus the Great. It describes how Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 B.C. and restored many of the people held captive by the Babylonians to their homelands.

A team of paleontologists at Yale University say they've been able to determine the actual colors of an extinct species of dinosaur.While many of the illustrations of dinosaurs we see in movies and books are striking, the truth is that much of the way we depict our jurassic friends is based on educated guesswork. But a few teams of scientists now say they have been able to determine a dinosaur's coloring with more precision. And one dino, in particular, has been color-mapped from head plume to toe.

In a recent study, scientists from UC Berkeley led by Matt Francis have demonstrated how to program tobacco plants to take advantage of the efficient way that they collect sunlight. Rather than attempt to reprogram all the cells of a mature tobacco plant, the scientists genetically engineered a virus called the tobacco mosaic virus to do the job for them. The researchers sprayed the modified virus on a crop of tobacco plants, and the virus caused the plant cells to produce lots of artificial chromophores, which turn photons from sunlight into electrons.

The vessels, dubbed Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessels or ACTUVs, are designed to be unmanned, with only intermittent communication from operators on shore or on a ship, and to require no maintenance for months. They will also obey navigational rules and be able to avoid collisions at sea.

OXYGEN is life. That's true not just for us: all animals and plants need oxygen to unleash the energy they scavenge from their environment. Take away oxygen and organisms cannot produce enough energy to support an active lifestyle, or even make them worth eating. Predation, an essential driver of evolutionary change, becomes impossible.It is easy to picture a planet without oxygen. It looks like Mars. Our nearest planetary neighbour was probably once a water world too, primed for life to evolve.

More like a slug-trail than footsteps, the tracks smear through the 565-million-year-old rock overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. They were left by what may have been the first mobile organism to live on Earth.Alex Liu of the University of Oxford, UK and his colleagues discovered them etched in the rock at Mistaken Point in Newfoundland, Canada.The site is famous among palaeontologists for harbouring the remains of the first large complex life forms to evolve, known as Ediacarans."This is the earliest evidence for controlled locomotion by animals in the fossil record," says Liu.

A SWARM of "smart dust" spacecraft, positioned at a sweet spot between the Earth and the sun, could alert us to the approach of dangerous space storms well before a conventional craft can. The first prototypes are due for launch into low-Earth orbit this year, perhaps as early as May.Mason Peck, a mechanical engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his colleague Justin Atchison have designed a 1-centimetre-square spacecraft that is 25 micrometres thick and weighs under 7.5 milligrams. The craft is modelled on the dust particles that orbit the sun and are propelled by the photons streaming out from the sun. This solar radiation pressure would have a negligible effect on normal-sized spacecraft but is significant at the millimetre scale. The grooved edges of the "spacecraft-on-a chip" deflect incoming photons in such a way as to ensure it always faces the sun.

It's been a long time since a Pentagon project from the DARPA labs truly evoked a "WTF DARPA?!" response, but our collective jaw dropped when we saw the details on a project known as BioDesign. DARPA hopes to dispense with evolutionary randomness and assemble biological creatures, genetically programmed to live indefinitely and presumably do whatever their human masters want. And, Wired's Danger Room reports, when there's the inevitable problem of said creatures going haywire or realizing that they're intelligent and have feelings, there's a planned self-destruct genetic code that could be triggered.

A tribal language thought to have existed for 65,000 years has disappeared forever in India's Andaman Islands, taken to the grave with its last speaker.According to the indigenous advocacy group Survival International, Boa Senior, the last member of the Bo tribe, died last week at the age of 85."With the death of Boa Sr. and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory," said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International."Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands," he added.

Low cloud at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has prevented the shuttle Endeavour from launching on its latest mission to the space station.Nasa officials stood the orbiter down with under 10 minutes left on the countdown clock.Endeavour encountered no technical issues as it prepared to lift off and will try again on Monday morning.It will be delivering a connecting unit and a large bay window to the international orbiting platform.The shuttle mission is the first since President Barack Obama announced a new vision for US human space exploration.

HULU TERENGGANU: Archaeologists have stumbled upon human skeletal remains believed to be from the Mesolithic Age in the Bewah Cave in the Kenyir Lake area, according to a university professor.The remains, believed to be those of a youth, are estimated to be between 8,000 and 11,000 years old, said Prof Datuk Dr Nik Hasan Shuhaimi Nik Abdul Rahman, deputy director of the Institute of the Malay World and Civilisation (ATMA) of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM).The remains were uncovered by archaeologists from UKM, the Museums Department and the Terengganu Museum Board at a depth of 65 to 70 centimetres, he told reporters after a visit by Terengganu Menteri Besar Datuk Ahmad Said and reporters to the cave on Saturday.

According to Syrian media, archaeological expeditions working at North-eastern Syria (Hasaka Province) have discovered several collective tombs and parts of seals with different shapes in addition to 27 cuneiform tablets dating back to 2500 BCDirector of Hasska Antiquities Department Abdul-Masih Baghdo said that the British expedition working at the site of Tal Barak had studied many clay jars discovered at the site.

The Monty Python knights who craved a shrubbery were not so far off the historical mark: archaeologists have uncovered startling evidence of The Great Stonehenge Hedge.Inevitably dubbed Stonehedge, the evidence from a new survey of the Stonehenge landscape suggests that 4,000 years ago the world's most famous prehistoric monument was surrounded by two circular hedges, planted on low concentric banks. The best guess of the archaeologists from English Heritage, who carried out the first detailed survey of the landscape of the monument since the Ordnance Survey maps of 1919, is that the hedges could have served as screens keeping even more secret from the crowd the ceremonies carried out by the elite allowed inside the stone circle.

The primary reactions in photosynthesis-the first steps in plants? conversion of sunlight energy into energy stored in carbohydrates-are incredibly efficient. And in a new study in Nature, chemists reveal that they may have found part of the reason why: quantum mechanics.A couple years ago, scientists first showed in bacteria proteins that the electrons were moving according to a quantum mechanical phenomenon called coherence, rather than abiding by the classical laws of physics. But where those early experiments had been cooled to 77 kelvins (-196 degrees Celsius)-this experiment was the first conducted at room temperature, 294 K, to replicate such effects.

Blue whales have changed their songs.It's the same old tune, but the pitch of the blues is mysteriously lower -- especially off the coast of California where, local researchers say, the whales' voices have dropped by more than half an octave since the 1960s.No one knows why. But one conjecture is that more baritone whales indicate healthier populations: The whales may be less shrill because they're less scarce and don't have to pipe up to be heard by neighbors.The discovery was accidental. Whale acoustics researcher Mark McDonald was trying to track blue whales' movements using data from Navy submarine detectors. He had created a program to filter out the blues' songs from a din of ocean noise captured by these instruments.But he kept having to rewrite the code. Each year, it seemed, the whales sang at a lower pitch.

It soon becomes clear that the giant salamander has hit Claude Gascon's enthusiasm button smack on the nose."This is a dinosaur, this is amazing," he enthuses."We're talking about salamanders that usually fit in the palm of your hand. This one will chop your hand off."As a leader of Conservation International's (CI) scientific programmes, and co-chair of the Amphibian Specialist Group with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Dr Gascon has seen a fair few frogs and salamanders in his life; but little, he says, to compare with this.

Astronomers have used a new ground-based technique to study the atmosphere of a planet outside our Solar System.The work could assist the search for Earth-like planets with traces of organic, or carbon-rich, molecules.Gases have previously been discerned on exoplanets before, but only by using space-based telescopes.Astronomers reporting in Nature say their method of spotting methane gas on exoplanets could be extended to many other, ground-based telescopes.Methane was first spotted on an exoplanet named HD 189733b in 2008 by a group led by Mark Swain of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US.

The US space agency Nasa has extended the international Cassini-Huygens mission once again.The unmanned Cassini-Huygens probe arrived at Saturn in 2004 on a mission that was meant to come to end in 2008.Its mission had already been extended up to 2010. Nasa now says the spacecraft will explore the Saturn system until 2017.Dr Jim Green, director of Nasa's planetary science division, announced the extension on Wednesday."We have now an approved Cassini extended extended mission," he said during a meeting of Nasa's planetary science sub-committee.

Two aviation archaeologists are to come to Northern Ireland to search for a lost WWII Spitfire.Gareth Jones and Steve Vizard have been keen to unravel the mystery of the missing aircraft.They believe it's buried underground on the site of City of Derry Airport, the former RAF Eglinton air base.In 1941 the air base was established to defend Londonderry from German attack.On 18 May, 1942, two fighter planes went up to practise dog-fights but one crashed and buried itself in the soft ground.

Scientists have detected glimmers of awareness in some vegetative brain-injury patients and have even communicated with one of them -- findings that push the boundaries of how to assess and care for such people.The new research suggests that standard tests may overlook patients who have some consciousness, and that someday some kind of communication may be possible.In the strongest example, a 29-year-old patient was able to answer yes-or-no questions by visualizing specific scenes the doctors asked him to imagine. The two visualizations sparked different brain activity viewed through a scanning machine."We were stunned when this happened," said one study author, Martin Monti of Medical Research Council Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. "I find it literally amazing. This was a patient who was believed to be vegetative for five years."

Celastrol, derived from trees and shrubs called celastracaea, has been used for centuries in China to treat symptoms such as fever, chills, joint pain and inflammation. The MCG researchers think it may also play a role in cancer treatment by inactivating a protein required for cancer growth.That protein, P23, is one of many proteins helping the heat shock protein 90.Scientists are just beginning to realize the potential of controlling inflammation-related diseases, including cancer, by inhibiting HSP90."Cancer cells need HSP90 more than normal cells because cancer cells have thousands of mutations," said Dr. Ahmed Chadli, biochemist in the MCG Center for Molecular Chaperones/Radiobiology and Cancer Virology. "They need chaperones all the time to keep their mutated proteins active. By taking heat shock proteins away from cells, the stabilization is taken away and cell death occurs."But most HSP90 inhibitors lack selectivity, disabling the functions of all proteins activated by HSP90 rather than only the ones implicated in a specific tumor. Those proteins vary from one tumor to another.

The Chinese space agency could land its first astronauts on the moon within a decade in a move that would mark the beginning of a new age of lunar exploration, experts said today.The decision by the Obama administration to scrap Nasa's plans to return to the moon leave China well placed to become the second nation to land humans on the lunar surface. "The moon is an obvious target for China and they could be there in 2020," said Ken Pounds, professor of space science at Leicester University.The US president's budget proposal, unveiled on Monday, lacked the funds to sustain Nasa's $81bn Constellation programme, the spaceships and rockets designed to put humans back on the moon by 2020. But the decision to scrap Nasa's plans for a permanent return has left the door open for other countries.

In February 2007 the Alzheimer's Society estimated that there were 700,000 sufferers of "late onset dementia", representing a cost to the nation of £17bn per year. Now the Alzheimer's Research Trust has found that there are 820,000 sufferers, costing the UK £23bn a year. This represents a 15% rise in the number of sufferers, and a 17 rise in the costs per person. Assisted suicide may be the answer for Terry Pratchett, but is unlikely to make a significant impact on dementia's grim demographics, nor reduce the agony of affected families.

READERS in search of literature about Darwin or Darwinism will have no trouble finding it. Recent milestone anniversaries of Darwin's birth and of the publication of On the Origin of Species have prompted a plethora of material, so authors thinking of adding another volume had better have a good excuse for it. We have written another book about Darwinism, and we urge you to take it to heart. Our excuse is in the title: What Darwin Got Wrong.Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical. The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin's account of evolution is hardly considered.

New evidence from astrobiology overwhelmingly" supports the view that life was seeded from outside Earth, a scientist has claimed.Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University says the first microbes were deposited on Earth 3,800m years ago.The astrobiologist has helped developed the panspermia theory which suggests an extra-terrestrial origin for life.

AFP - Parliament amended Egypt's antiquities law on Monday to bring in stiffer punishments for the theft and smuggling of relics while granting patent rights to the country's antiquities council.The amendment requires Egyptians who have antiquities to report their possessions to the Supreme Council of Antiquities, headed by Zahi Hawass, in six months. The sale of antiquities is still banned."Parliament agreed on article eight that forbids trade in antiquities but allows possession of antiquities with some individuals, on condition that they cannot use them to benefit others, or to damage and neglect them," Hawass said.These relics, he said, can in future only be given as a gift with the council's authorisation. They may also be passed on as part of an inheritance.

By watching fish as they rot, scientists have discovered "patterns" that could help interpret some of the oldest and most important fossils.The "very smelly" study revealed how primitive marine creatures changed as they decayed.The researchers identified particular patterns of deterioration that should help scientists more accurately identify very early marine fossils.They published their findings in the journal Nature.Dr Rob Sansom from the University of Leicester, UK, who led the study, said that examining fossils was very similar to forensic analysis - putting together a scientific reconstruction of something that happened in the past."Unlike forensics, however, we are dealing with life from millions of years ago," he said.

A fragment of a painting more than 3,500 years old shows a white arc on a bright blue background. It might be a bird, a griffin, a ship or something else entirely. And there are many more fragments that have been lying underground in Israel for three millennia, waiting for archaeologists to find them and art conservators to fit them together like puzzle pieces.While it is not yet evident what the fragment depicts, what is clear is that it was painted in a distinctly Greek style, a first for the region and time period.

If you were looking to make tomatoes last longer in your kitchen, then researchers in India might have the answer. Scientists at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) in New Delhi have found that by suppressing two enzymes (alpha-Man and beta-Hex) associated with ripening, they could push tomatoes to last close to 45 days before they turned mushy. Their research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal.The tomatoes in which the alpha-Man enzyme was suppressed were 2.5 times firmer than conventional tomatoes, while those lacking in beta-Hex were two times firmer [Moneycontrol].

The predominant theory of the origin of life would make a terrific setting for a space horror movie, or a particularly tense episode of Star Trek: picture early Earth, a noxious place devoid of oxygen, its young oceans choked with some kind of indiscernible ooze.Depending on how you like your origin stories, a thunderstorm passes overhead, and lightning crackles into the broth, pouring forth ever bigger organic molecules until -- presto! -- virus-sized strands of RNA and the first replicating life is formed.Only one problem with that, according to a new paper: where do you get the energy for early life to do anything, like, I don't know, replicate? Certainly not hanging out in a shallow sea, waiting around for some lightning to strike and cook you up some soupy dinner.