Newsdesk Archive

What happens after the world hits peak oil and prices skyrocket? Or when coal pushes the carbon count in the atmosphere into the danger zone? Soylent Green might turn out to be more prophetic than you thought. But, luckily, entrepreneurs are devising new ways to produce energy even beyond solar and wind. Here are some of the more intriguing and far out ones.1.Nuclear Goes Mod(ular):

Like America itself, the jolly figure we call Santa Claus is a melting pot of cultures, blending elements of folklore with the fantastical.Santa Claus the man is actually loosely rooted in fact, though he hasn't always looked the way he does today, having evolved from a gift-giving Catholic saint who lived during the third century.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas from the team at GrahamHancock.com. May your holidays be filled with love, light, joy and happiness.

If a suggestion to be made to NASA comes to fruition, vast lakes thought to be filled with liquid hydrocarbons near the north pole of Saturn's moon Titan, may one day be explored by boat.A scientific team led by Dr Ellen Stofan from Proxemy Research in Washington DC in the US, has been studying the concept for around two years, and is now ready to submit a proposal to NASA.

A ban on several drugs known as "legal highs" has come into force.The substances, including GBL and BZP, become Class C drugs, with a possible two-year jail sentence for possession.Ministers moved to classify them after a recommendation from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and fears they are a threat to user health.

German officials have ruled out returning an ancient bust of Queen Nefertiti to Egypt - saying it is too fragile to be transported.And they have insisted that the bust was acquired legally by the Prussian state nearly a century ago.Egypt first requested the return of the antiquity in 1930, but successive German governments have refused.

Do we have a little Neanderthal in us? That's not a reference to your behaviour at the end-of-year office party, but to the genes of our extinct cousins. With the imminent publication of the genome sequence of Homo neanderthalis, that question may finally be answered.So far no one has uncovered evidence of any cross-species romps - at least none that left a trace in our DNA. The 3-billion-nucleotide Neanderthal genome is our best chance yet of finding out.

Yogyakarta (ANTARA News) - The Archeological Heritage Preservation Board (BP3) of Yogyakarta has confirmed that a site discovered at the Indonesian Islamic University (UII), Yogyakarta, used to be a shrine, not a bathing facility (petirtaan).The leader of the excavation team, Budhy Sancoyo, said, however, to which religion the shrine belonged and when it was built could not yet be determined because no important leads had been found so far.

Evidence of sophisticated, human behavior has been discovered by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers as early as 750,000 years ago -- some half a million years earlier than has previously been estimated by archaeologists.The discovery was made in the course of excavations at the prehistoric Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site, located along the Dead Sea rift in the southern Hula Valley of northern Israel, by a team from the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Analysis of the spatial distribution of the findings there reveals a pattern of specific areas in which various activities were carried out. This kind of designation indicates a formalized conceptualization of living space, requiring social organization and communication between group members. Such organizational skills are thought to be unique to modern humans.

The fearsome northern woman of legend and cliche, broadchested and with a frying pan poised to whack sense into her man, has proved to have genuine historic origins.Analysis of bones from Britain's biggest medieval excavation has unearthed a race of real-life Nora Battys, ruling a Yorkshire roost nearly 1,000 years ago.

DNA taken from the shrouded remains of a man discovered in a tomb next to the Old City of Jerusalem shows him to be the first human proven to have suffered from leprosy, according to Hebrew University researchers and North American and British collaborators. They published their findings in the December 16 issue of the PLoS One - the US Public Library of Science journal.Prof. Mark Spigelman and Prof. Charles Greenblatt of the Sanford F. Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at HU in Jerusalem, along with Prof. Carney Matheson and Kim Vernon of Lakehead University in Canada, Prof. Azriel Gorski of New Haven University and Dr. Helen Donoghue of University College London performed the molecular investigation. The archeological excavation was led by Prof. Shimon Gibson, Dr. Boaz Zissu and Prof. James Tabor on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library's most enigmatic possessions is a forgery. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books.Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature.

Project Paphlagonia is the first fully published multi-period archaeological and historical survey of the little explored region of north-central Turkey. Today this region includes the provinces of Çankiri and parts of Karabük.Directed by Professor Roger Matthews (UCL Institute of Archaeology), the project surveyed an area of almost 8,500km2 over three years and located and recorded more than 330 historically significant archaeological sites.

A unique discovery of submerged man-made structures on the seabed off Orkney could help find solutions to rising sea levels, experts have said.They said the well preserved stone pieces near the island of Damsay are the only such examples around the UK.It is thought some of the structures may date back thousands of years.

If you were following Cosmic Variance yesterday, you saw its live blogging of one of the most anticipated recent announcements in physics: the team from Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) telling the world whether a Minnesota detector spotted evidence of dark matter. The answer? MaybeCDMS scientists use super-cooled detectors made of germanium and silicon to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), one of the leading suspects for what could make up dark matter. The detector is deep underground in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, which scientists also use to hunt for neutrinos. WIMPs streaming in from space would very rarely jostle the germanium nuclei, some 800 meters underground in the Soudan mine, generating a tiny amount of heat and slightly altering the charge on the detectors in a characteristic pattern.

Science magazine is reporting tonight that President Obama has made his decision about the future of the U.S. human space flight program, with a plan to turn over space taxi services to the International Space Station to commercial companies and to direct NASA to spend its money and resources developing a heavy-lift booster for human missions to the moon, asteroids and the moons of Mars.

During the Late Cretaceous, Mongolia's Gobi Desert was home to numerous dinosaurs, mammals and lizards. One of the most eye-catching, and possibly ear-splitting, residents was a newly identified bird.The new species, which lived 71 to 75 million years ago, has been named Hollanda luceria, after the punk/country band Lucero and the Holland family, whose donations helped to support the research.

In 1996, when scientists examined a meteorite from Mars previously uncovered in Antarctica, they were intrigued by what looked like microscopic fossils of ancient Martian life forms. Now, using new technology that wasn't available 13 years ago, NASA scientists have found further evidence that the materials and structures in the meteorite are likely signs of ancient life, rather than the results of inorganic processes.

A new study of thousands of species of plants and animals suggests new species may arise from rare events instead of through an accumulation of small changes made in response to changes in the environment.The traditionally accepted idea of species evolving through gradual changes is the Red Queen hypothesis, named after a character in Alice in Wonderland, who explains to Alice that "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." The hypothesis, that species continually change and adapt to compete with co-evolving species and retain their ecological niche, was proposed in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen.

With talks in Copenhagen descending into chaos, the prospects for stabilising temperatures below 'dangerous' levels look increasingly slim. Here are five possible scenarios for our future climate.

NASA's MESSENGER mission team and cartographic experts from the U. S. Geological Survey have created a critical tool for planning the first orbital observations of the planet Mercury - a global mosaic of the planet that will help scientists pinpoint craters, faults and other features for observation. The map was created from images taken during the MESSENGER spacecraft's three flybys of the planet and those of Mariner 10 in the 1970s. A presentation on the new global mosaic is being given today at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The first paper on proton collisions in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - designed to provide the highest energy ever explored with particle accelerators - is published online this week in the European Physical Journal C.

Lead levels that are "off the scale" have been confirmed after tests were done this morning on the lid of a soup can dating back more than 150 years. The findings reopen the mystery surrounding the cause of death of Sir John Franklin and his doomed crew as they searched for the Northwest Passage.

The analysis of microfossils found in ocean sediment cores is illuminating the environmental conditions that prevailed at high latitudes during a critical period of Earth history.Around 55 million years ago at the beginning of the Eocene epoch, the Earth's poles are believed to have been free of ice. But by the early Oligocene around 25 million years later, ice sheets covered Antarctica and continental ice had developed on Greenland.

A PAIR of German computer experts are hoping to decode part of South Shields's history by setting their sights on a mysterious Roman altar.Bjorn Brecht and Bruno Kessler, who are both studying for their masters in geo-computer programming at the University of Applied Science in Mainz, Germany, were invited to Arbeia Roman Fort and Museum in South Shields to help make sense of a now-invisible inscription on a third century AD column.

Scientists who mapped one of the most enigmatic mountain ranges on Earth have given a first glimpse of their data.An international team spent two months in 2008/9 surveying the Gamburtsevs in Antarctica - a series of peaks totally buried under the ice cap.The group has told a major conference in the US that the hidden mountains are more jagged than previously thought.

The consumption of wild cereals among prehistoric hunters and gatherers appears to be far more ancient than previously thought, according to a University of Calgary archaeologist who has found the oldest example of extensive reliance on cereal and root staples in the diet of early Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago.

Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures were not always plain white marble. And now Italian researchers are giving the Trajan Column a fresh coat of paint - with light. Rossella Lorenzi reports.

Today I'd like to introduce you to "Antonio," a remarkable dinosaur that represents a new species, Tethyshodros insularis, described in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.According to Fabio M. Dalla Vecchia, who led the project, Antonio is noteworthy on many counts. Dalla Vecchia, a researcher at both the Institut Català de Paleontologia and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, told Discovery News that this dinosaur:* is only the second ever dinosaur species named in Italy* is the most complete medium to large sized dinosaur ever found in Europe* could be one of the most complete dinosaur skeletons in the world* shows for the first time what close relatives to duck-billed dinosaurs looked like in detail.

A discovery by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity.Published today by the leading scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers have demonstrated for the first time the mechanism by which some bacteria survive by 'breathing rocks'.

'What does the world look like' and 'where am I' are two questions robots must solve if they are to act autonomously in an unknown environment. Work by European researchers will help future robot generations provide smarter answers.

It's the stuff of a Hollywood disaster epic: A comet plunges from outer space into the Earth's atmosphere, splitting the sky with a devastating shock wave that flattens forests and shakes the countryside.But this isn't a disaster movie plotline.

In the minutes after a strong earthquake struck offshore of the Indonesian city of Padang on Sept. 30, fears of a tsunami prompted hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate the coastal city. Or try to.The traffic jam resulting from the mass exodus kept most of them squarely in the danger zone, had a tsunami followed the magnitude 7.6 temblor. Stanford researchers who've studied the city have concluded that fleeing residents would have a better chance of surviving a tsunami if instead of all attempting an evacuation, some could run to the nearest tall building to ride out the wave.

There are an estimated 6,500 languages in the world, with around fifty percent of them endangered and likely to cease to exist by 2100, but efforts are now being made to save them from extinction.Languages are dying out around the globe through globalisation, social change, a shift in populations from rural areas to cities, and often well-intentioned education in national languages and national cultures rather than local indigenous languages and traditions. Of the 6,500 languages estimated by UNESCO to be still in use, only 11 are spoken by half the world's population, and 95 percent of the languages are spoken by five percent of the global population.

Earlier this year, Russian scientists carried out perhaps the first true geoengineering trial that could help combat rising global temperatures. But their efforts received little attention until a recent Mother Jones story by Chris Mooney, a science journalist who also blogs for Discover.Scientists have long known that aerosols in the atmosphere can reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth, and so some geoengineering schemes had proposed cutting global temperatures by deploying aerosols. The Russian scientists put that plan into action by placing aerosol generators on a helicopter and a car chassis, so that they could spew sulfates at heights of up to 656 feet (200 meters) and see how much that cut back on sunlight.

Staring out over the rolling pastures of Brazil's deep south, 65-year-old twin Cecilia Kunkel placed the blame squarely with her parents. "It's hereditary, isn't it," she said. "It's like an illness."Across the valley, on the porch of his wooden farmhouse, Jose Ignacio Lunkes, 63, the father of identical twins, said it was all about nature."It's the water," he beamed, before adding: "Or perhaps it is a message from God.".

KUNMING, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists have found through genetic studies that modern humans had successfully colonized the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the Late Paleolithic Age, at least 21,000 years ago.

Proof that pre-historic people placed bunches of flowers in the grave when they buried their dead has been found for the first time, experts have said.Archaeologists have discovered a bunch of meadowsweet blossoms in a Bronze Age grave at Forteviot, south of Perth.The find is reported in the journal "British Archaeology", out this week.Pollen found in earlier digs had been thought to have come from honey, or the alcoholic drink mead but this find may finally rule that theory out.

Experts on prehistoric man are rethinking their dates after a find in a southern French valley suggested our ancestors may have reached Europe 1.57 million years ago: 200,000 years earlier than we thought.What provoked the recount was a pile of fossilised bones and teeth uncovered 15 years ago by local man Jean Rouvier in a basalt quarry at Lezignan la Cebe, in the Herault valley, Languedoc.

The explorers who yesterday announced the discovery of a previously unknown submerged city in the Caribbean have today released the first detailed images of some of the structural evidence they have uncovered. These images are very grainy, but considering they were shot from an orbiting satellite, are pretty amazing.The first image shows a rounded structure with spider-like buttressing.

A bad bottle of wine could drop your electrical and gas bills.Using widely available microbes, scientists in the United States and India are turning the unused sugar and unwanted vinegar resulting from improper fermentation into electricity and hydrogen.The technology could provide a new and cost effective way to clean wastewater from wineries and get some value out of a bad bottle of wine.

France has handed over to Egypt five fragments of an ancient wall painting that were kept in storage at the Louvre museum in Paris.President Nicolas Sarkozy presented today one of the slabs to his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak, ending a year-long feud over their ownership.

An experimental device that uses the tongue instead of the eyes to "see" could be on the market next year, and a blind Fresno, Calif., teen hopes to be among the first to take one home.Researchers say their BrainPort device does not replace the sense of sight, but lets the blind perceive images, making it easier for them to navigate their surroundings.

Next year will mark the 50th birthday of the laser, one of the most productive and widely used mega-inventions of the last century. Scientists hope that 2010 also will see the launch of laser technology's greatest challenge: creating an inexhaustible supply of clean, carbon-free energy.

Undersea archaeologists have found the ruins of an ancient city on the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, and researchers claim that it is the fabled and lost city of Atlantis. The satellite photos do show something that could be a city, and the researchers believe that what they've found would predate the pyramids of Egypt. Indeed they claim to be able to make out a pyramid and other city-like structures from the satellite photos.

From a long-sealed cave tomb, archaeologists have excavated the only known Jesus-era burial shroud in Jerusalem, a new study says.The discovery adds to evidence that the controversial Shroud of Turin did not wrap the body of Christ, researchers say.

A giant pyramid which appears to be a UFO hovering over the Kremlin has caused frenzied speculation in Russia that it is an alien spacecraft.

Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers - skin and lung - a move they say could revolutionise cancer care.

Himalayan glaciers, which supply drinking water to more than a billion people, may be threatened not only by warming from greenhouse gases, but also by soot generated far below on the plains of India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.Researchers believe that high levels of soot over the vast plains to the south and west of the Himalayas may be speeding the melting of glaciers in two ways.

Tells why northern Europeans are so oddly de-pigmented compared to everyone else on the globe. Session E1 of a series of topics discussed by the Second Life "The Study of Racialism" group. It is part of our molecular anthropology series. The prior session, E5 discussed the migrations that carried our species around the globe in prehistoric times. This topic looks at later regional adaptations.

Archaeologists on Thursday hoisted a 9-ton temple pylon from the waters of the Mediterranean that was part of the palace complex of the fabled Cleopatra before it became submerged for centuries in the harbor of Alexandria.The pylon, which once stood at the entrance to a temple of Isis, is to be the centerpiece of an ambitious underwater museum planned by Egypt to showcase the sunken city, believed to have been toppled into the sea by earthquakes in the 4th century.

Smokers experience one mutation to their DNA for every 15 cigarettes they smoker, according to a study that mapped out the genetic blueprint of a lung cancer patient.British researchers led the massive international project, which identified 23,000 mutations that bore the expected signs of damage caused by chemicals in tobacco smoke.All cancers are caused by mistakes in the genetic code - mutations in DNA that can be triggered by environmental agents.

NASA launched a new telescope into space on Monday to scan the cosmos for undiscovered objects, including asteroids and comets that might threaten Earth.The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, spacecraft will employ an infrared camera to detect light- and heat-emitting objects that other orbiting telescopes, such as the Hubble, might miss.

Woolly mammoths and prehistoric horses grazed on the North American plains for several thousand years longer than hitherto assumed. This is shown by samples of ancient DNA, analysed by an international team of research scientists under the leadership of Professor Eske Willerslev from Copenhagen University.

In the not too distant future, testing for certain cancers may be completed in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Scrubs. A new portable device, expected to be about the size of a paperback book, works by detecting biomarkers in the blood, substances that suggest that a patient is diseased. The sensor, which uses nanotechnology, is so accurate that it could pick up a grain of salt in a swimming pool, claim the researchers.

Dreams that major geothermal energy plants could power our future took a major hit last week, as worries over earthquakes and technical failures killed two ambitious projects in consecutive days. The two projects both hoped to harvest the heat of deeply buried bedrock by drilling down, fracturing the rock, and then circulating water through the fissures to produce steam that could drive turbines.

The race to find Earth-like planets around stars similar to our sun edged closer to a finish with the announcement on Monday that up to six "super-Earths" have been found orbiting sun-like neighbor stars.The smallest of the bunch weighs in at about five times the mass of Earth and orbits a star known as 61 Virginis, which is visible with the naked eye in the constellation Virgo. The star is 28 light-years from Earth and closely resembles the sun in size, age and other attributes.

Archaeologists working in Akron, Ohio, claim to have found the world's oldest three-dimensional representation of Santa Claus.Known as the "Blue Santa," the object was made circa 1884 by The American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company, which burned to the ground in 1904. The figurine is 2.5 inches tall.Project leader Brian Graham said, "It's a wishing Santa. You hold it in your hand and wish for the present you want for Christmas."

Moscow, Russia (CNN) -- The remains of Adolf Hitler were burned in 1970 by Soviet KGB agents and thrown into a river in Germany on direct orders from the spy agency's chief, a top Russian security official said this week.

Ancient Greeks living in Sicily built their sacred temples to face the rising sun, new research suggests.Almost all of the temples constructed on the island of Sicily during its Greek period over 2,500 years ago are oriented toward the eastern horizon, according to a new study by Alun Salt, an archaeoastronomer with the University of Leicester, in England.

In an early scene from Invictus, a group of beefy white Afrikaner men crowd around Nelson Mandela's security detail. It's Mandela's first day as South Africa's first black president, and his jittery guards leap up to confront the intruders. "Are you coming to arrest us?" asks the lead officer with an uneasy smile. But no, the old order truly has collapsed. Racial tensions may have pushed the nation to the brink of civil war, but Mandela trusts his erstwhile Afrikaner enemies enough to assign these white security police to protect him.

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.

Acidification of the oceans is a major threat to marine life and humanity's food supply, Hilary Benn has warned as the UN climate summit resumes.The UK environment secretary said that acidification provided a "powerful incentive" to cut carbon emissions.Ocean chemistry is changing because water absorbs extra CO2 from the air.Some believe this impact of rising CO2 levels could be as significant as climatic change, though it is rarely discussed at the UN climate convention.

Without a man named Thucydides, the chances are slim that we'd know anything about the Peloponnesian War. A new book about the man attempts to correct what we know.For more than a quarter of a century, starting in 431 B.C., two Greek cities faced off. Sometimes they confronted each other directly, and sometimes through proxies and allies. Thucydides recorded the details of the conflict throughout the war and, Yale professor Donald Kagan tells NPR's Guy Raz, "invented the modern understanding of history.".

A hundred objects and documents reunited for the first time in Puebla, related to the participation of this Mexican entity in the Independence movement, among them, an original print of Plan of Iguala, integrate the exhibition Memorias de libertad: imagenes y palabras de nuestra Independencia (Memoirs of Liberty: Images and Words of our Independence), open at the Regional Museum of Puebla.

NEW YORK (JTA) -- In 165 BCE, a group of warriors led by Judah Maccabee and his band of brothers ushered in a new era in Jewish history when they routed the soldiers of the Greek-Syrian empire and rededicated the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.That victory, and the miracle of the menorah that followed, is celebrated every year by Jews around the world at Chanukah.

KUWAIT: People in the Gulf region must learn to live with historical monuments and incorporate them into the tissue of modern culture as a reminder of the past, said the head of the Polish archeological mission Professor Piotr Bielinski. The mission, which was invited to Kuwait two years ago after the signing of a five-year excavation agreement with the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL), came to the country to conduct an archeological survey prior to the construction of Silk City in Subiya. Since then, the mission has excavated numerous graves, as well as a strongly-constructed desert well, and a settlement dating back to the fifth millennium and built in a style common to the Obeid era.

Evidence of what could be Australia's earliest human occupation has been found on the fringe of desert in the country's remote northwest, according to archaeologists.Peter Veth, of the Australian National University, said an artefact dated at between 45,000 and 50,000 years old found near the shores of Lake Gregory could be the start of a 25-year study into Australia's first humans.

When physicist Vitaly Efimov heard his theory had finally been proven, he ran up to the younger scientist who had verified it and gave him a high five.Efimov had predicted a quantum-mechanical version of Borromean rings, a symbol that first showed up in Afghan Buddhist art from around the second century. The symbol depicts three rings linked together; if any ring were removed, they would all come apart.

I was attacked by red ants. Sat on a cactus. Almost stepped on a rattlesnake.And given the chance, I'd take the same vacation again.For five days last May, I worked as a volunteer archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Southern California's Cleveland National Forest. Through the service's Passport in Time (PIT) program, I located and photographed sites where the native peoples of 12,000 years ago, the Diegueños, carved stone tools and weapons, where 7,500 years ago their descendants ground seeds and nuts on rocks and where more-recent descendants produced pottery.

Thirteen stones sit hidden in the dense jungles of the range of mountains that make up Nakauvadra in Ra. Caves with drawings sit below them. They remain a mystery for the people of Narara Village.Deep in the jungles above the village of Narara in Ra stand 12 stones of similar size and shape. The thirteenth is a little longer then the rest.They stand as monolithic reminders of an era the people of Narara are struggling to understand.

A new poll shows that most Americans are ready to legalize marijuana, but not drugs like cocaine or heroin. A 34-year police vet says it's time to legalize them all.

From mountaintop observatories on Earth to the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are eagerly tracking the evolution of a collision that appeared on Jupiter last weekend.For planetary scientists who chronicled a comet's collision with Jupiter 15 years ago, the latest impact is an unexpected gift."It's an exciting time," says University of California at Berkeley astronomer Michael Wong. Dr. Wong and his colleagues pulled an all-nighter to capture and process images of the scar using the Hubble Space Telescope.

A GEOTHERMAL power plant in California will soon be producing more than just electricity. The valuable metal lithium could be extracted from its hot waste water.The technique, developed by California-based Simbol Mining, could bolster lithium supplies at a time when they are being squeezed by our growing reliance on high-density batteries. Global lithium consumption is projected to increase threefold by 2020 as electric cars and energy storage in the electrical grid become more common.

Rumors are swirling around the blogosphere that a team of physicists may have finally detected particles of dark matter, the mysterious stuff whose gravity appears to hold galaxies together. If those rumors are true, the discovery would surely be one of the most important of all time. But don't book tickets to Stockholm just yet. Given the same team's previously published negative results and the relatively modest increase in the size of their data set since then, experts say, it's all but certain that the new find is of marginal statistical significance.

When you write for Popular Science, it's easy to become desensitized to wild and crazy future tech. To wit: When I first heard that Darpa wanted to develop cyborg insects to carry surveillance equipment, I thought "ok, cyborg insect spies are pretty cool, but not blowing me away."Then today, Cornell researchers working on the program unveiled a prototype transmitter for the cyborg bugs that runs on radioactive isotopes. Nuclear powered cyborg insect spies? Ok, now you have my attention.

An Israeli scientist has proposed a way to build a quantum propulsion machine by pushing on the electromagnetic fields within a quantum vacuum, generating a force that, theoretically, could be harnessed. Sounds simple enough, right? But leaving the complex jargon of quantum mechanics aside, the implications are pretty amazing.

Offshore wind power may soon cross national boundaries more easily than ever, based on news from the Copenhagen climate summit. Nine European nations announced plans for a "supergrid" in the North Sea that would allow them to connect Irish wind farms to continental Europe, or vice versa.No funding figures have emerged just yet, but the project could help Europe reach its goal of getting 20 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2020. Green, Inc. reports that offshore wind power currently makes up just 0.3 percent of Europe's electricity use, compared to Denmark's 4.5 percent of electricity from offshore wind farms.

SOME people are more violent and exhibit ``werewolf'' tendencies during a full moon, a study published in the respected Australia Medical Journal reveals.The findings of the 11-month research at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital could force police and other emergency services to shake-up how and when they deploy staff.Many in the industry have already claimed for years there is a direct link between a full moon and more violent episodes, however, many police have disregarded anecdotal evidence as only a coincidence.

In the black depths of the frigid Arctic Ocean, scientists on a 2005 expedition found a splash of color: The brilliant, blood-red Crossota norvegica jellyfish (pictured).The creature was spotted by a remotely operated vehicle 8,530 feet (2,600 meters) underwater during a two-month National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expedition to the Canada Basin, the deepest and least explored part of the Arctic waters.

There is a holocaust happening. Right now. And it's not confined to one nation or even one region. It is a global crisis.Species are going extinct en masse.Every 20 minutes we lose an animal species. If this rate continues, by century's end, 50% of all living species will be gone. It is a phenomenon known as the sixth extinction. The fifth extinction took place 65 million years ago when a meteor smashed into the Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and many other species and opening the door for the rise of mammals. Currently, the sixth extinction is on track to dwarf the fifth.

See here for a playlist of Graham Hancock reading chapter 1 of Supernatural.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK7JcEA11gc&feature=PlayList&p=69F72B370043B6E3&index=0&playnext=1Less than fifty thousand years ago mankind had no art, no religion, no sophisticated symbolism, no innovative thinking. Then, in a dramatic and electrifying change, described by scientists as "the greatest riddle in human history," all the skills and qualities that we value most highly in ourselves appeared already fully formed, as though bestowed on us by hidden powers. In Supernatural Graham Hancock sets out to investigate this mysterious "before-and-after moment" and to discover the truth about the influences that gave birth to the modern human mind.

An official Graham Hancock twitter page has been set up. Though Graham himself is not currently using or running it, it is linked in with the Official Facebook and YouTube profiles to share content and links, videos, stories and articles relating to Graham and his work.

An international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have found no evidence supporting an extraterrestrial impact event at the onset of the Younger Dryas ~13000 years ago.

Meticulous ancient notetakers have given archaeologists a glimpse of what life was like 3,000 years ago in the Assyrian Empire, which controlled much of the region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.Clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform, an ancient script once common in the Middle East, were unearthed in summer 2009 in an ancient palace in present-day southeastern Turkey.

Why are we asking this now?Dr Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and the high priest of all matters archaeological in the Land of the Pharaohs, arrived in London yesterday to further his demand for the return of the Rosetta Stone from the display rooms of the British Museum, where it has been on show since 1802. Dr Hawass has embarked on an international campaign to secure the return of a host of renowned artefacts which he claims were plundered by colonial oppressors and assorted brigands from Egypt's ancient tombs and palaces before ending up in some of the world's most famous museums.

A crofter has uncovered what is believed to be a Viking anchor while digging a drain on the Isle of Skye.Graeme Mackenzie, 47, made the find after hiring an excavator to open the drain on rough pastureland 50yds (48m) from his home near Sleat.Rain had partly washed away the bottom of the drain and exposed a corroded 4in (10cm) iron spike.Mr Mackenzie levered it out and was "stunned" as the ancient anchor gradually emerged.

Edward Low knew he wasn't supposed to play there, high up on a sandy hill in Parkersburg, W.Va., overlooking the silver ribbon of the Ohio River.But the 12-year-old and two friends, armed with boyish curiosity and a World War II trench shovel, had sneaked away from home to explore.

The first full moon of December, which came on Wednesday this year, is known as the Cold Moon.Luckily, it occurred while the Guernsey County Fine Arts and Crappie Fishing Society was holding its late-fall rendezvous on the shore of Seneca Lake. Each night during the rendezvous, we sat around a huge wood fire telling lies and gazing at the silvery moon.

Hungary's leaning towards Egyptian history was sparked by a dawning interest in all things antiquarian that came with the opening up of foreign travel, and reached full maturity in the wake of the decipherment of hieroglyphs and the unfolding of the science of Egyptology. During the last decades of the 19th century, displays of artefacts brought home by Fejérvàry and his fellow contemporary amateurs developed from collections of curiosities into aesthetically appreciated exhibitions of the culture that, they deduced, sprang from the "cradle of civilisation".

PUKALANI, Hawaii - The National Science Foundation has picked Maui's Haleakala mountaintop as the site for the world's largest solar optical telescope.

The surface of Mars is littered with channels that appear to be the work of ancient water flows. Indeed, some of these channels meander back and forth like slow-moving streams on our planet. Channels can be carved by lava, wind and glaciers, but these processes can't explain all the features on Mars."We've gotten over the hump and can now agree that water flowed on the Martian surface in the past," says Alan Howard of the University of Virginia.But how much and when is still unclear. Howard believes the meandering channels on Mars may tell us a lot about the wet history of our planetary neighbor.

The physics blogs are abuzz with rumours that a particle of dark matter has finally been found.If it is true, it is huge news. Dark matter is thought to make up 90 per cent of the universe's mass and what evidence there is for it remains highly controversial. That's why any news of a sighting is seized upon.

Pete Limon remembers munching on an apple on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when he looked up and saw funny-looking planes flying overhead.Suddenly the bombs started falling."You can't imagine that the [Japanese] would do this; we're not at war," recalled Limon, who was 17 at the time and served as a radioman on the seaplane tender Swan at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

A treadmill developed at NASA Ames Research Center more than a decade ago for exercising in space has seen more athletes than astronauts lately.AlterG, a Fremont startup, has sold more than 200 of the "anti-gravity" physical therapy and training treadmills, which are based on the NASA prototype, at $75,000 each. The buyers have mainly been sports teams, college athletic departments and hospitals, but the maker hopes to eventually push prices down to where individuals could own one.

Discovery of a primitive precursor to Tyrannosaurus Rex, some 215 million years old, points to a South American origin for dinosaurs, paleontologists reported Thursday.In the journal Science, a team led by Sterling Nesbitt of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, unveils Tawa hallae, found in a fossil bone bed near New Mexico's Ghost Ranch, made famous by the artist Georgia O'Keefe. Nesbitt's team named the creature, a 6.5-foot-long meat-eating precursor to T. Rex, after a Pueblo sun god and the fossil collector Ruth Hall.

One might think that after centuries of scanning the night skies, mankind would have a pretty clear idea of who our galactic neighbors are, and whether they mean us harm.That's not the case. Vast landscapes of the cosmos remain hidden to us because most of our telescopes plumb the heavens for light that can be seen by the human eye -- and that constitutes only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Washington (CNN) -- Thousands of American Indians would receive as much as $1,000 each if they accept a proposed $1.4 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit over government mismanagement of tribal lands.The suit, filed in 1996, accused the U.S. Department of the Interior of failing to account for and provide revenue from a trust fund representing the value of Indian assets managed by the government.

Bangalore: Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) are on the brink of a path-breaking discovery. They may have found signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon. They believe so because scientific instruments on India's first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon's surface.

His flamboyant and confrontational style has already secured the return of some 5,000 treasures.Now, Zahi Hawass, the 'Indiana Jones' of Egyptian archaeology, has his sights set on the most glittering prize of all - the Rosetta Stone.Dr Hawass has demanded that Britain return the 2,200-year-old stone tablet to its homeland.Arriving in Britain to publicise his quest, he declared that a loan would not be good enough. Instead, the Rosetta Stone, which has resided in the British Museum since 1802, must be handed over on a permanent basis.The Museum, however, is standing its ground, declaring its collections should not be broken up and it is the legal owner of the stone.