Newsdesk Archive

Forget 2012. As far as many Mexicans are concerned, the ancient Mayas were being generous: the sky's actually going to fall next year. Why? Because it's 2010, Mexico's bicentennial, and Mexican history has an eerie way of repeating itself. Mexico's 1910 centennial, after all, saw the start of the bloody, decade-long Mexican Revolution, which killed more than a million people. And that cataclysm was precisely a century after the start of Mexico's bloody, decade-long War of Independence in 1810.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have snapped the first picture of an ancient monument on the North York Moors near Scarborough which could date back more than 4,500 years to neolithic times.Aerial surveyors from English Heritage recently flew two sorties over moorland near Goathland after a wildfire swept across 62 acres revealing the full extent of a prehistoric stone enclosure and multiple stone cairns.

Archaeologists have unveiled a tomb aged between 2000-2500 years old at an archaeological site in Van Thach commune, Van Ninh district, central province of Khanh Hoa.Between July and November, archaeologists from the Archaeology Institute and the Khanh Hoa Museum excavated this site, collecting more than 2,000 objects including tools and jewelry made of bronze, iron, porcelain, bone and shells.

A massive one ton granite statue of the pharaoh Taharqa has been found in Dangeil, deep inside Sudan. Taharqa was a pharaoh of the 25th dynasty of Egypt. This was a period of Kushite rule, which means that Taharqa and his fellow rulers were from Nubia and drew their power-base from there.

Remember the last scene of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," where the Bible's ark of the covenant is packaged up and lost in a large government warehouse?That actually is happening to untold artifacts and documents, because the Department of Interior largely doesn't know what is in its collections, often doesn't know if items were obtained legally and doesn't properly care for many of them, according to the department's inspector general.

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- An Ohio Historical Society spokesman said an archaeological firm is investigating American Indian artifacts found at sites tabbed for a coke oven facility.

The moon may not be made of Swiss cheese, but it appears to have at least one deep hole, a vertical skylight that could serve as a protective lunar base for future astronauts."We discovered a vertical hole on the moon," an international team of scientists recently announced.The gaping, dark pit on the near side of the moon is as big as a city block and deep as a modest skyscraper. It is thought to be a collapsed lava tube, created perhaps billions of years ago when the moon was warmer and volcanically active. The moon, overall, is more than 4 billion years old.

FIRST it was planes, trains and automobiles that benefited from computer-aided design technology. Now, as synthetic biologists attempt to build artificial life forms, a CAD system has been developed to allow them to redesign the stuff of life much faster and more easily.

Researchers from the Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories at Thomas Jefferson University have identified a way to increase the oil in tobacco plant leaves, which may be the next step in using the plants for biofuel. Their paper was published online in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

Mutations are the raw material of evolution. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tubingen, Germany, and Indiana University in Bloomington have now been able to measure for the first time directly the speed with which new mutations occur in plants. Their findings shed new light on a fundamental evolutionary process. They explain, for example, why resistance to herbicides can appear within just a few years.

NEW YORK - Despite iPods, genetic sequencing, the Internet and Twitter, nearly a third of Americans said they thought there would be more technological advances by the year 2010.Not everyone expected to be living like The Jetsons, the space age television cartoon series of the early 1960s, but the Zogby International survey of more than 3,000 adults in the United States showed many were less than enthusiastic about how far we have come by the dawn of a new decade.

Determined never to repeat the tragic Challenger launch accident, NASA not only is developing a crew escape system for the space shuttles' replacements; the space agency also has a backup system that could fly astronauts to safety in case of an emergency.Significantly improving safety is one of the reasons the United States is retiring its three-ship shuttle fleet after five more missions in 2010 to complete construction of the International Space Station.

Stonewares of the Neolithic Age have been found in Medog County, Nyingchi Prefecture, southeastern Tibet, according to the Nyingchi Prefectural Bureau of Culture, Radio and Television.During the third national cultural relics survey, members of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Survey Team and the Nyingchi Prefectural Survey Team discovered 34 stonewares and collected 28 of them, including axes, adzes and chisels.

In a plastic container inside the storerooms at St. Augustine's Government House is a slender wooden stick with a carved knob on one end. Think of it as an electric mixer without the electricity.That humble whisk -- known as a molinillo -- is a big deal to archaeologists because it proves that chocolate dates back at least to the 1500s in St. Augustine.

When archaeologist Ruth Iren Øien noticed a cluster of tiny iron beads in the ground, she knew she was onto something. She did not know, however, that her team had stumbled upon Scandinavia's oldest and most complex group of iron forges.And not only that, it would be months before Øien, with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Museum of Natural History and Archaeology, would discover the actual significance of her find.

Somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, a granite terrace the size of a football field holds hundreds of mysterious stone basins representing what geologists believe is one of the earliest known "factories" created and used by ancient Miwok Indians to make tons of salt to trade with tribes up and down California.

Native American artifacts believed to date back thousands of years have been recovered from the planned site of a new industrial plant in southwest Ohio.SunCoke Energy Inc. found some items as it prepared to build a plant to help supply coke for AK Steel's Middletown Works. The Knoxville, Tenn.-based company hired an archaeological firm to excavate two sites near a creek.

C. Leonard Woolley's first excavations at Ur, in southern Iraq, coincided with Howard Carter's 1922 discovery, in Egypt, of King Tutankhamen's tomb. This grand-scale archaeology captured the popular imagination: Its practitioners were hailed as heroes, their theories were trumpeted in the mass media, and their finds influenced fashion.The British-born Woolley's expedition involved 12 seasons of digging with hundreds of workers, until the Depression closed the funding tap in 1934. Its focus was the Royal Cemetery, whose tombs were filled with exquisitely crafted artifacts from Mesopotamia's Early Dynastic period, about 4,500 years ago. The venture would inspire Agatha Christie's 1936 mystery "Murder in Mesopotamia," in which expedition members, thinly disguised, pop up as characters.

That they processed aboard the enormous floating wildlife collection two-by-two is well known. Less familiar, however, is the possibility that the animals Noah shepherded on to his ark then went round and round inside.According to newly translated instructions inscribed in ancient Babylonian on a clay tablet telling the story of the ark, the vessel that saved one virtuous man, his family and the animals from god's watery wrath was not the pointy-prowed craft of popular imagination but rather a giant circular reed raft.

Scientists have analysed DNA extracted from the remains of a 30,000-year-old European hunter-gatherer.Studying the DNA of long-dead humans can open up a window into the evolution of our species (Homo sapiens).But previous studies of this kind have been hampered by scientists' inability to distinguish between the ancient human DNA and modern contamination.In Current Biology journal, a German-Russian team details how it was possible to overcome this hurdle.

As deforestation clears away more and more of the Amazon Jungle, archaeologists are discovering some surprising things hidden beneath the thick green canopy. Researchers have found a number of ancient geometric shapes, known as geoglyphs, that are believed to have been carved into the earth more than 700 years ago by indigenous tribes living in the region.According to this story from Treehugger.com, researchers are using Google Earth to examine recently cleared sections of the Amazon Rainforest. So far, they've been able to identify more than 300 geoglyphs, most of which had previously gone unseen due to being covered by the jungle and in some cases, the enormous size of the carvings. As of yet, scientists are unsure as to the purpose of the geoglyphs, as they are often completely undetectable from the ground and seem to serve little practical purpose.

For nearly 20 years, a government laboratory built a living, respiring library of carefully collected organisms in search of something that could grow quickly while producing something precious: oil.But now that collection has largely been lost.National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists found and isolated around 3,000 species algae from construction ditches, seasonal desert ponds and briny mashes across the country in a major bioprospecting effort to find the best organisms to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuel for cars.

It was the decade that launched a new age of science, and it came as no surprise. Researchers had foreseen the rise of biology in the 1990s and expected nothing less than a transformation of modern medicine and giant leaps in our knowledge of life on Earth.

In a cosmic version of the old needle-in-a-haystack finding, astronomers have spotted an object less than a mile wide that is 4.2 billion miles away, in the outer solar system.The object is part of the Kuiper Belt, an ring of icy rocks beyond Neptune.

The idea of restoring sight to people with damaged or degenerating photoreceptors in their eyes is simple enough in concept -- place a photoreceptor implant in the eye and beam video from a camera to the implant, bypassing the faulty photoreceptors. However, powering a device implanted in the back of a person's eye indefinitely is a serious obstacle. But Stanford researchers have worked around the problem by beaming images to the implant by pulsing near-infrared light that delivers both data and power to the implanted chip.

For just an extra few thousand dollars, women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) could one day choose to have a baby boy with perfect vision, an aptitude for sports and a virtual lock on avoiding colon cancer. Fertility clinics in the U.S. currently offer not only to screen for diseases, but also to choose gender. They are not yet offering any further customization, but that could change as genetic mapping gets faster and easier.

Nearly 200 years after their invention, and decades after first being proposed as a method of harnessing solar energy, 60 sun-powered Stirling engines are about to begin generating electricity outside Phoenix, Ariz., for the first time. Such engines, which harness heat to expand a gas and drive pistons, are not used widely today other than in pacemakers and long-distance robotic spacecraft.

Scientists have just found insect parts stuck between the teeth of two Paleozoic reptiles. This strongly suggests that the pre-Dinosaur Era equivalent of today's lizards feasted on insects, and it's the first known evidence for this behavior among vertebrates.The prehistoric reptiles represent a new, as of yet unnamed, species that lived 280 million years ago.

The holy grail for finding worlds beyond Earth that are hospitable to life has been planets just the right distance from their mother stars where liquid water can exist on the surface -- the so-called "Goldilocks" zone.But scientists now say this elusive zone where conditions are not too hot and not too cold for life to exist is far bigger than originally thought.

Did our Neolithic ancestors turn to agriculture so that they could be sure of a tipple? US Archaeologist Patrick McGovern thinks so. The expert on identifying traces of alcohol in prehistoric sites reckons the thirst for a brew was enough of an incentive to start growing crops.

There was more activity than usual in Alexandria's Eastern Harbour last week as a team working offshore made preparations to ready the dock for the unloading of a giant piece of history. An enormous yellow crane stood ready to lift a pylon, or ceremonial entrance tower, belonging to the Ptolemaic temple of Isis Lochias which has been under the sea for 14 centuries.

In the mountains and valleys of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, palace ruins and crumbling Buddhist monasteries dot the hills above war-torn locations such as Mingora, Peshawar and the Swat Valley. These magnificent ruins are all that's left of the Gandhara kingdom, which flourished from the 6th century B.C. to the 11th century A.D. It vanished under the pressure of war and conquest, re-emerging only in 1848 when relics and ruins were re-discovered by the British archaeologist, Sir Alexander Cunningham.

Studies of two supernova remnants using the Japan-U.S. Suzaku observatory have revealed never-before-seen embers of the high-temperature fireballs that immediately followed the explosions. Even after thousands of years, gas within these stellar wrecks retain the imprint of temperatures 10,000 times hotter than the sun's surface."This is the first evidence of a new type of supernova remnant -- one that was heated right after the explosion," said Hiroya Yamaguchi at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan.

Russian scientists will soon meet in secret to work on a plan for saving Earth from a possible catastrophic collision with a giant asteroid in 26 years, the head of Russia's space agency said Wednesday."We will soon hold a closed meeting of our collegium, the science-technical council to look at what can be done" to prevent the asteroid Apophis from slamming into the planet in 2036, Anatoly Perminov told Voice of Russia radio.

Two mysteries surround a huge herd of sea lions that were hanging out on a pier in San Francisco Bay: Why did so many show up, and why did so many leave at once?Just last month, Pier 39, famous in San Francisco for its sea lions and the throngs of tourists they attract, was groaning under the weight of more than 1,500 of the animals. The record number delighted tourists and baffled experts.

The planet is totally lopsided. Why? Astonishing evidence of past cataclysms explains why Earth seems not to have living neighbors.

Cassini Imaging Team Leader Carolyn Porco writes: "imagine yourself a Saturnian companion gliding among these distant worlds. Someday...Earthlings will be there, in person, to witness these marvels first hand.".

Alaska's marine animals have an unexpected nutrient in their diets: ancient carbon from glacier melt, a new study says.Glaciers that naturally melt each summer along the Gulf of Alaska flush out huge amounts of organic material, made up mostly of dead microbes.

Tourists feed tigers at the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park, a private zoo in Guillin, China, in an undated photograph.Many such tourist attractions secretly operate as fronts for illegal tiger farming, butchering captive tigers for their parts, National Geographic magazine reports in the January 2010 story "Asia's Wildlife Trade."On the eve of 2010--the Year of the Tiger in Chinese astrology--the big cats remain highly coveted. A dead adult male can sell for U.S. $10,000 or more on the black market. Tiger bones and penises are often used in traditional medicines, and some restaurants serve tiger meat, including, a recent DNA test suggests, the restaurant at Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park.

Vaccines being made to protect people from swine flu may not be so healthy for threatened species of sharks.That's because millions of doses of the pandemic H1N1/09 vaccine contain a substance called squalene, which is extracted from shark livers.

Trained dolphins perform tricks in Taiji, a small Japanese fishing town, in this undated photo.But it's Taiji's dead dolphins that have made it infamous among animal rights activists: Every year 2,000 dolphins are corralled into a local cove and stabbed to death with harpoons. Most are sold for food, but about a hundred are taken alive and exported to aquariums in Japan, South Korea, Iran, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

China built its famous Great Wall to keep out marauders. Now, millennia later, a "Great Green Wall" may rise in Africa to deter another, equally relentless invader: sand.The proposed wall of trees would stretch from Senegal to Djibouti as part of a plan to thwart the southward spread of the Sahara, Senegalese officials said earlier this month at the UN's Copenhagen climate conference.

Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says.The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field. But researchers can infer the field's movements by tracking how Earth's magnetic field has been changing at the surface and in space.

Individually designed music therapy may help reduce the noise levels experienced by people who suffer from tinnitus, say German researchers.They altered participants' favourite music to remove notes which matched the frequency of the ringing in their ears.After a year of listening to the modified music, individuals reported a drop in the loudness of their tinnitus.

A flash of sunlight reflecting off a hydrocarbon lake on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan has been spotted by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, confirming the presence of liquid on a part of the surface of the hazy satellite with many lake-shaped basins.The image taken by Cassini is the first that shows such a glint of light off liquid from another world.

NEW YORK: Ever literally felt somebody else's pain? You're not alone, with new research showing some people do have a physical reaction to others' injuries.British experts used brain-imaging technology to show that people who say they feel the pain of others have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions when they see someone else being hurt. The researchers exposed 108 college students to images of painful situations, ranging from athletes suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection.

WASHINGTON: A new research has determined that Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core.The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field. But experts can infer the field's movements by tracking chnages in Earth's magnetic field.

Japanese researchers said Monday they had developed a "hummingbird robot" that can flutter around freely in mid-air with rapid wing movements.The robot, a similar size to a real hummingbird, is equipped with a micro motor and four wings that can flap 30 times per second, said Hiroshi Liu, the researcher at Chiba University east of Tokyo.It is controlled with an infrared sensor and can turn up, down, right or left.

US researchers have found an antibody that hunts down prostate cancer cells in mice and can destroy the killer disease even in an advanced stage, a study showed Monday.The antibody, called F77, was found to bond more readily with cancerous prostate tissues and cells than with benign tissue and cells, and to promote the death of cancerous tissue, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

The timing of molar emergence and its relation to growth and reproduction in apes is being reported by two scientists at Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins in the Dec. 28 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Getting the snub from friends can feel like a slap in the face. Now researchers say treating such social pain may be as easy as popping a pain pill. They warn, however, that more research is needed before anyone tries the approach.The finding builds on research showing that psychological blows not only feel like they hurt us, they actually do. For instance, scientists have found a gene linked with both physical pain and a person's sensitivity to rejection. And some of the same brain regions are linked with both pain types.

Gravestones may hold secrets of how the Earth's atmosphere has changed over the centuries, and scientists are now asking for the public's help to read these stones.

In finding answers to the mystery of the origin of life, scientists may not have to dig too deep. New research is shedding light on shallower waters as a possible location for where life on Earth began.

The purpose of archaeology is to reimagine how people lived in the distant past. A site is excavated, crumbling foundations unearthed, potsherds analyzed, all towards the goal of conveying the fullest, most vivid image possible of how a place looked once upon a time. Well, the archaeology department at UC Berkeley has brought a whole new meaning to this objective, using the online virtual-reality game Second Life.

Chinese archaeologists have found what could be the tomb of Cao Cao, a skilful general and ruler in the third century who was later depicted in popular folklore as the archetypal cunning politician.Archaeological officials say Cao's 8,000 sq ft tomb complex, with a 130ft passage leading to an underground chamber, was found in Xigaoxue, a village near the ancient capital of Anyang in central Henan province.

Sea urchins may use the whole surface of their bodies as compound eyes, scientists now suggest.Although sea urchins don't have any problems avoiding predators or finding comfortable dark corners to hide in, they don't have eyes. The question then is how they see.

The wide dishes, 20 feet across and raised high on their pedestals, creaked and groaned as the winds from an approaching snowstorm pushed into this highland valley. Forty-two in all, the radio telescopes laid out in view of some of California's tallest mountains look otherworldly, and now their sounds conjured up visions of deep-space denizens as well.

In Africa and in the tropics, armies of tiny creatures make the twisting stems of acacia plants their homes.Aggressive, stinging ants feed on the sugary nectar the plant provides and live in nests protected by its thick bark.This is the world of "ant guards".The acacias might appear overrun by them, but the plants have the ants wrapped around their little stems.These same plants that provide shelter and produce nourishing nectar to feed the insects also make chemicals that send them into a defensive frenzy, forcing them into retreat.

Disinfectants could effectively train bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics, research suggests.Scientists know bacteria can become inured to disinfectant, but research increasingly shows the same process may make them resistant to certain drugs.This can occur even with an antibiotic the bacteria have not been exposed to.

Europe's Goce satellite is returning remarkable new data on the way the pull of gravity varies across the Earth.Scientists say its first maps clearly show details not seen in previous space and ground measurements.Goce was launched by the European Space Agency (Esa) in March from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in north-west Russia.

For the first time, chimpanzees have been seen using tools to chop up and reduce food into smaller bite-sized portions.Chimps in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, use both stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits.The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise unobtainable food, say researchers.

In the 40 years since U.S. President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs," the supply and use of drugs has not changed in any fundamental way. The only difference: a taxpayer bill of more than $1 trillion.A senior Mexican official who has spent more than two decades helping fight the government's war on drugs summed up recently what he's learned from his long career: "This war is not winnable.".

Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.

The mystery of why Amazonian manatees migrate has been solved.Only in recent years did scientists find that the secretive aquatic mammal migrates from shallow to deep water.Now researchers can reveal that the manatees make this perilous journey to avoid being exposed to attack by predators during the low-water season.

Here's something cooler than a canary in a coal mine: Tadpoles genetically engineered to glow when they encounter water pollution.African clawed frog tadpoles modified with jellyfish genes show promise as a faster and less expensive way to detect pollution than traditional methods, say a University of Wyoming professor and researchers in France.

Kudos where it's due: not many design houses use tanks in their illustrations of a new road safety concept. Transparentius, as with most good ideas, is remarkably simple -- you jack a camera onto the front of a truck, or lorry as they're known in some places, and then project that image onto the back of your hulking transporter. The effect of this is to render the truck figuratively transparent for the driver behind, who is enriched with a lot more information about what lies on the road ahead.

The ancient Mayans may have had enough engineering know-how to master running water, creating fountains and even toilets by controlling water pressure, scientists now suggest.Perhaps the earliest known example of the intentional creation of water pressure was found on the island of Crete in a Minoan palace dating back to roughly 1400 BC. In the New World, the ability to generate water pressure was previously thought to have begun only with the arrival of the Spanish.

Earth Pilgrims, the documentary film with Graham will be screening in Sydney on (SUN) 7th February, 2010.The film explores how we can navigate through global problems towards our own inner solutions. Director Echan Deravy takes us on a journey through 4 continents arriving in the high Andes of Peru at a shamanic ceremony of gratitude with 60,000 Quechua Indians. The film leaves us with thoughtful ideas about how we may improve our lives even as the world collapses around us, with thoughts from guests Satish Kumar, Graham Hancock, Nassim Haramein, Wade Davis, and Peace Pilgrim. Narrated by Coleman Barks with poetry by Rumi.

An ancient "dwarf" whale appears to have fed by sucking small animals out of the seafloor mud with its short snout and tongue, experts say.Researchers say the 25 million-year-old fossil is related to today's blue whales - the largest animals on Earth.The ancient animal's mud slurping may have been a precursor to the filter feeding seen in modern baleen whales. .

AN ABORIGINAL Dreaming story about a star crashing to earth with a noise like thunder has led to the discovery of an ancient meteorite crater in central Australia.A Sydney astronomer, Duane Hamacher, found the bowl-shaped crater in Palm Valley, about 130 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs, by searching on Google Earth.He was inspired to look there after learning of traditional stories told by the local Arrernte people about a star that had fallen into a waterhole called Puka in the valley.

The early-morning sun burnishes the stone temples in Copan to a golden sheen, while on their facades, serpents writhe, jaguars crouch, birds preen and gods grimace in a pantomime that has been going on for nearly 2,000 years. The silence is shattered only by the screech of a howler monkey living in the surrounding jungle of Honduras.In a few hours, the chiseling of archaeological teams combined with the chattering of tourists will imbue this primeval scene with a sort of 21st-century immediacy, but now, just after dawn, when it's nearly deserted, it's easy to imagine the ghosts of ancient Mayans treading the sacred ground.

Dinosaur hunters and anyone with an interest in prehistoric creatures great and small were not disappointed in 2009.Holes found in T. rex jawbones were found to be the result of parasitic infections rather than battle scars.The publication of the near-complete genome of the long-extinct woolly mammoth led to speculation about which extinct creatures could theoretically be coaxed back to life.

The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

Ben W. Strowbridge, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience and physiology/biophysics, and Phillip Larimer, PhD, a MD/PhD student in the neurosciences graduate program at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, are the first to create stimulus-specific sustained activity patterns in brain circuits maintained in vitro.Neuroscientists often classify human memory into three types: declarative memory, such as storing facts or remembering specific events; procedural memory, such as learning how to play the piano or shoot basketballs; and working memory, a type of short-term storage like remembering a phone number. With this particular study, Strowbridge and Larimer, were interested in identifying the specific circuits that could be responsible for working memory.

Researchers studying a period of high carbon dioxide levels and warm climate several million years ago have concluded that slow changes such as melting ice sheets amplified the initial warming caused by greenhouse gases.The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that a relatively small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was associated with substantial global warming about 4.5 million years ago during the early Pliocene.

Boston University biomedical engineers have devised a method for making future genome sequencing faster and cheaper by dramatically reducing the amount of DNA required, thus eliminating the expensive, time-consuming and error-prone step of DNA amplification.

Glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are enriching stream and near shore marine ecosystems from a surprising source - ancient carbon contained in glacial runoff, researchers from four universities and the U.S. Forest Service report in the December 24, 2009, issue of the journal Nature.

Frederic Scheer is biding his time, convinced that by 2013 the price of oil will be so high that his bio-plastics, made from vegetables and plants, will be highly marketable.Scheer, 55, is the owner of Cereplast, a company that designs and makes sustainable plastics from starches found in tapioca, corn, wheat and potatoes.He has believed for the past 20 years that the price of oil will eventually make petroleum-based plastics obsolete and clear the way for his alternative.

A man who was partially blinded when ammonia was squirted in his eye during an attack 15 years ago has regained his sight after receiving a pioneering stem cell treatment.Russell Turnbull, 38, suffered massive damage to his right eye when he was caught in a scuffle after a night out in Newcastle in 1994. On the bus home, Turnbull had tried to intervene in a fight between two men but was injured when one of them began squirting passengers with ammonia.

HOW DO YOU predict whether a given patient is likely to die from a heart attack? Conventional medical wisdom would base a risk assessment on factors such as the person's age, whether they were smokers and/or diabetic plus the results of cardiac ultrasound and various blood tests. It may be that a better predictor is a computer program that analyses the patient's electrocardiogram looking for subtle features within the data provided by the instrument.

Attention cyborg wonks and lazy people: Japanese scientists at Tsukuba University have created a motorized knee that you can attach to your leg to increase your muscle power and running speed. The 11-pound kit's weight is shared by an exoskeleton-like attachment for your leg and a power source that's carried in a small backpack. But here's the best part: the device is not designed with any kind of rehabilitation or handicap-assisting function in mind; it's simply to make it easier for regular folks to run faster!.

It turns out the Air Force's next-gen bomber really isn't much of a bomber at all. While the next iteration of stealth bombers is still but a sketch on the drawing board, the DoD and top Air Force command know what the wars of the next century will call for: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as the ability to deploy non-kinetic weapons to disrupt enemy operations, all while reserving the ability to drop the occasional ordinance -- and do it all at the same time with a single, stealthy super-weapon.

As bacteria continue to grow more resistant to a wide range of antibiotics, doctors are searching furiously for better ways to kill infectious microbes. Enter hydroxyurea. Researchers at MIT and Boston University have discovered that hydroxyurea, normally a drug prescribed for sickle-cell anemia or psoriasis, also causes bacteria to create their own poisons and kill themselves.In all cases, hydroxyurea prevents DNA transcription. When used to treat psoriasis or sickle-cell anemia, hydroxyurea simply slows down the production of sick cells. But when used against a bacterium, the cessation of DNA transcription begins a chain reaction that ends with the bacterium producing hydroxyl free radicals. Those free radical are like molecular buzz saws, and they quickly chop the bacterium apart from the inside out.

In a major step toward understanding cancer, one of the biggest problems bedeviling modern medicine, scientists have now cracked the genetic code for two of the most common cancers. This marks just the beginning of an international effort to catalog all the genes that go wrong among the many types of human cancer, the BBC reports.Too much time spent under the sun apparently leads to most of the 30,000 mutations contained within the DNA code for melanoma, or skin cancer. Outside experts told the BBC that no previous study has managed to link specific mutations to their causes.

Cloud science? Solar-power primacy? Affordable clean-energy cars? Space colonies? Super-centenarians galore? These are some of the visions put forward for the next 50 years in science and technology.The past 50 years have set a precedent of sorts for the next half-century: Back in 1960, folks may have assumed their children would be riding rockets to other planets, finding signs of alien life and interacting with intelligent machines - all of which are featured in Arthur C. Clarke's "2010: Odyssey Two" as well as the film based on the book.

While floating in a liquid, common bacteria can turn a variety of tiny gears. Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory say their finding could open up the possibility of microscopic swimmers -- whether natural such as bacteria or artificial such as nanorobots -- that power tiny devices.

Did Leonardo DaVinci use his own shadow to create the outline of Jesus in The Last Supper? James Williams speaks with a researcher who has found evidence in Leonardo's manuscripts suggesting that's the case.

Parts of our Christmas celebrations have roots in Pagan Roman festivals. Discovery News' James Williams unwraps the details.

From their humble beginnings as offshoots of the ordinary electric light bulb, particle accelerators have evolved in surprising directions. Among the most productive and promising developments have been light sources, first in the form of electron storage rings -- of which the Advanced Light Source is the world's premier source of soft x-rays -- and increasingly as versatile and sophisticated free electron lasers, the next generation of light sources now being studied at Berkeley Lab.

A team of Columbia scientists have discovered two genes that, when simultaneously activated, are responsible for the most aggressive forms of human brain cancer.This finding was made possible by the assembly of the first comprehensive network of molecular interactions that determine the behavior of these cancer cells, a map so complex and elusive that, until now, it could not be constructed. The discovery may lead to completely novel strategies to diagnose and treat these incurable tumors.

It has long been known that heat is an effective weapon against tumor cells. However, it's difficult to heat patients' tumors without damaging nearby tissues.Now, MIT researchers have developed tiny gold particles that can home in on tumors, and then, by absorbing energy from near-infrared light and emitting it as heat, destroy tumors with minimal side effects.

THRIFTY microbes entombed in a salt crystal have survived for 30,000 years by feeding off the remains of algae that were trapped along with them. This is the most convincing example to date of long-term survival.Brian Schubert, a microbiologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and colleagues studied salt crystals in a sediment core taken from Death Valley in California. The crystals contained tiny pockets of liquid, and the team found that they could grow live colonies of archaeans from samples of it. The team dated the liquid at between 22,000 and 34,000 years old.

A group of scientists has succeeded in creating the first transistor made from a single molecule. The team, which includes researchers from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, published their findings in the December 24 issue of the journal Nature.The team, including Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Engineering & Applied Science at Yale, showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor.

The Cancer Prevention Coalition is pleased to announce that the Governing Council of the American Public Health Association has voted to oppose the continued sale and use of genetically engineered hormonal rBGH milk, and also meat adulterated with sex hormones. This decision is based on long-standing scientific and public policy information developed and published by the Cancer Prevention Coalition over the last two decades, as summarized below.rBGH MILKThis hormone is injected in about 20 percent of U.S. dairy cows to increase milk production. While the industry claims that the hormone is safe for cows, and that the milk is safe for consumers, this is blatantly false.

When it comes to sex, some female ducks have taken "no" to a new level. They have evolved vaginas with clockwise spirals that keep out the oppositely spiraled penises of undesirable males, scientists have discovered.

The first Earthling to reach Mars may be a Russian monkey, according to scientists at an ex-Soviet facility. The director of an institute that supplied monkeys to the Soviet space program in the '80s says the facility is in talks with Russia's Cosmonautics Academy over supplying animals for a simulated Mars mission. A real mission could follow with a robot on board to look after the monkey, he says.

The Ottoman-era railway bridge stood over Tavor Stream for more than a century, but recently it was nearly brought down by rumors about a trove of gold hidden in its foundations.The bridge was built in 1904-1905, as part of the Jezreel Valley railway between Haifa and Damascus. It was designed by the German-American architect, archaeologist and civil engineer Gottlieb Schumacher, a member of the Templer community. He designed it as an exact copy of a neighboring bridge over the Jordan River, but using white limestone rather than the black basalt of the Jordan River bridge.

When a team of archaeologists began excavating an old coral reef in Vanuatu in 2008 and 2009, they soon discovered it had served as a cemetery in ancient times. So far, 71 buried individuals have been recorded, giving new information on the islands' inhabitants and their funeral rites."This is a groundbreaking discovery, as it is the oldest and biggest skeleton find ever in the Pacific Ocean; bigger cemeteries found further east are much younger," says Mads Ravn, head of research at the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology in Norwa.

Member-states of the European Space Agency (Esa) have given final approval to revised plans to explore Mars.There have been protracted discussions on what Europe could do at the Red Planet and how much it might cost.The Council of Esa has given the green light to a two-mission endeavour that would see the launch of an orbiter in 2016 and a rover in 2018.

Scientists say they have made a synthetic blood-clotting agent that could help wounded troops and patients.In the lab, the fake platelets cut bleeding in half compared with having no treatment.They could offer doctors a limitless supply with a longer shelf life than fresh donor platelets, the journal Science Translational Medicine reports.The Case Western Reserve University team in the US hopes the product could become available in coming years.