Newsdesk Archive

San Francisco, California (CNN) -- Alcatraz Island was a chilly, unwelcoming place once reserved for infamous criminals. Not even the federal government appeared to want it after the penitentiary closed in the 1960s.Adam Fortunate Eagle remembers "The Rock" a little more warmly: a place where fellow Native Americans took a stand that may have helped end the U.S. policy of tribal assimilation.

An Austrian archaeological mission discovered the remains of a seal made of burnt clay with inscriptions in cuneiform, said Culture Minister Farouq Hosni.

A Vatican scholar claims to have deciphered the "death certificate" imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, or Holy Shroud, a linen cloth revered by Christians and held by many to bear the image of the crucified Jesus.Dr Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican secret archives, said "I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth." She said that she had reconstructed it from fragments of Greek, Hebrew and Latin writing imprinted on the cloth together with the image of the crucified man.The shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral and is to be put in display next spring, is regarded by many scholars as a medieval forgery. A 1988 carbon dating of a fragment of the cloth dated it to the Middle Ages.

Spray-on skin that heals burns in days, not weeks, is set to begin clinical trials as soon as next month.Avita Medical's ReCell technology uses a postage stamp-sized piece of skin from a patient to heal a page's-worth of burned skin. The technology could save the lives of burn victims by reducing the risk of deadly infections as early as next year.

Vampires have been part of cultures for centuries. Find out how this paranormal being maintains its legacy.

Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils were helicoptered out of The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah this week. The bones transported from the site represent a Gryposaurus monumentensis, an ankylosaur, a pterosaur, dinosaur-era turtles and a crocodile, along with other species that lived in Utah 75 million years ago.

A multi-trillion-watt laser at the University of Rochester has simulated a stellar jet -- an outpouring of matter from a fledgling star -- with unprecedented realism.The achievement, which is detailed in the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal, is the latest in a series of experiments in which scientists from around the world have converged on the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) to recreate astronomical events in a laboratory. The team, led by Pat Hartigan at Rice University, used the LLE's Omega laser, one of the most powerful lasers in the world, to reproduce the way a stellar jet behaves when it slams into giant clouds of dust and gas that exist where stars are born.

Not too long ago, it seemed that ethanol production was the wave of the future. The use of trash, wood chips or different types of plants -- usually grass or corn -- to make ethanol was considered a way to help reduce reliance on foreign oil. However, investor interest in the process cooled, especially since it turned out that some materials were not terribly efficient when it came to producing ethanol. However, wood chips are once again being considered in the quest to create an industry based around cellulosic ethanol.

Da Vinci Code fans may thrill to dark conspiracies surrounding the secret history of early Christianity, but how many know about the real scholarly debate surrounding the young church? Even without a sleuthing Harvard "symboligist" involved, scholars have found plenty of intrigue in how early Christianity grew..

A MAN lies comatose on an operating table. The enormous spider that hangs above him has plunged four appendages into his belly. The spider, made of white steel, probes around inside the man's abdomen then withdraws one of its arms. Held in the machine's claw is a neatly sealed bag containing a scrap of bloody tissue.

SO WE won't be going to Mars, not in my lifetime anyway. And not back to the moon either, not for decades. Buzz Lightyear fantasies are dashed. Don't believe the spin - the dream is over.OK, the Augustine panel's review of NASA's human space-flight plans outlines several options. Mars may be out, but the moon is still in with a shout, and plans to go to the Lagrange points and even the asteroids are mooted. Technically, all this is probably doable. But it won't happen, and here's why.

The beleaguered Hayabusa asteroid probe is back on track to return to Earth after a clever workaround coaxed one of its ion engines back to life.The recovery is yet another reversal of fortune for the Japanese spacecraft, which has been plagued with problems since its visit to asteroid Itokawa in 2005.

It's arguably the most scrutinised piece of rock ever. Now an even closer look at a meteorite from Mars suggests it may show signs of life after all.In 1996, David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texax, and colleagues proposed that that a chunk of Mars rock found in Antarctica, called ALH 84001, contained possible signs of past life on the Red Planet, such as complex carbon-based molecules and microscopic objects shaped like bacteria.

Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York have confirmed that Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease. Using statistical analysis on skeletal remains of a well-preserved female specimen, researchers determined the "hobbit" to be a distinct species and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans.Details of the study appear in the December issue of Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society, published by Wiley-Blackwell.

These images may look like just pretty patterns, but they are visual representations of songs sung by whales and dolphins.

Nine nations in the Amazon region have called on rich countries to provide poorer nations with the funds to preserve forests.The nations, meeting in Manaus, Brazil, also discussed supporting a 40% reduction in global emissions by 2020.The meeting comes shortly before the key global summit on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.The Amazon nations agreed on broad principles rather than concrete steps, correspondents said.

A ruined theatre under the Acropolis, believed to be the birthplace of modern theatre, is to be partially restored.The restoration of the Theatre of Dionysos will include extending and modernising surviving stone seats, but no new performances are planned there.Works by playwrights such as Euripides and Sophocles premiered at the open air theatre more than 2,500 years ago.

Work on deciphering a complex set of symbols sent to them is underway, scientists from the country's Space Research Institute said.They claim aliens are currently answering 30 questions posed to them.Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research.

It took just six months for a warm and sunny Europe to be engulfed in ice, according to new research.Previous studies have suggested the arrival of the last Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago took about a decade - but now scientists believe the process was up to 20 times as fast.In scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere was frozen by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream, which allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.

It's one of evolution's most eccentric creations: a head shaped like a hammer. Now, a study suggests that the hammerhead shark may have evolved its oddly shaped snout to boost the animal's vision and hunting prowess.For over a century, scientists have speculated why hammerheads evolved such an odd shape and whether having eyes so far apart would enhance their vision. In 1942 a leading authority on sharks, Gordon Walls, suggested the position of the shark's eyes prevented it from having binocular vision. But others have argued exactly the opposite, saying the animals must have enhanced eyesight.

Did you know that today is Hitler's birthday?" the attendant said as he handed me Adolf Hitler's personal copy of Mein Kampf, a tattered red-leather volume (a special second edition issued in 1926) with the title and author's name embossed in gold on the spine. The young man, clean-cut and dressed in a sweatshirt bearing the skull and crossbones of the Curry College Rugby Football Club, explained that he knew this fact only because his sister shared a birthday with the Nazi leader. "You remember something like that," he said.

Happy 150th anniversary to the Riemann Hypothesis, one of the most important math problems ever!Proposed by Bernhard Riemann in 1859, the Riemann Hypothesis deals with prime numbers. You may recall that a prime number is a positive whole number that has only two positive whole number divisors: one and itself. The first of them are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, in order.

The Ancient Greeks deliberately built their temples to face the rising Sun, according to research that promises to shed light on their religious practices and to resolve a longstanding archaeological controversy.An investigation into temples built by Greek colonists in Sicily has found strong evidence that they were aligned to the East.The findings, by Alun Salt, of the University of Leicester, suggest that Ancient Greek religion may have included ritual elements inspired by astronomy, as well as illuminating the national culture of settlers who founded communities beyond the mainland. The study could settle a long-running dispute among archaeologists and classicists about temple orientation.

A unique decorated glass rhyton, or ancient drinking vessel, was discovered by archaeologists in a tumulus near the village of Karanovo in south-eastern Bulgaria.The glass vessel is decorated with the image of an unknown animal, Bulgarian media reported today.

Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say.The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.

SHIMOGA: A rare copper plate inscription collected by a numismatic expert and retired lecturer of Shimoga Khandob Rao throws new light on the Alupas who ruled parts of the Malnad and coastal districts of Karnataka for thousand years from 450 AD making Udyavara, Mangalore, Barkur and Mudbidre as their capitals.Mr. Rao is said to have collected the inscription from a copper vessel dealer of Kollegal in Chamrajnagar district.

Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York have confirmed that Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease. Using statistical analysis on skeletal remains of a well-preserved female specimen, researchers determined the "hobbit" to be a distinct species and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans. Details of the study appear in the December issue of Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society, published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Local farmland alleged to be a Native American burial ground was partially bulldozed to make way for a manure storage tank, but work in the area has been halted thanks in part to the work of a Cornell professor.The site, outside of Trumansburg, is owned by Bergen Farms. Much to the chagrin of local residents, on the week of Nov. 2 Bergen Farms began to construct a three million gallon underground manure tank. Such tanks are considered advantageous for large farms, according to The Ithaca Journal, because they maintain nutrients until the manure can be used as fertilizer in the spring.

If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don't tell Intel researchers. Intel's Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020.The scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels. They also predict that people will tire of multi-touch devices such as our precious iPhones, Android smart phones and even Microsoft's wacky Surface Table.

KITTED out with the latest scuba gear, Garry Momber peers through the murky water to the seabed below. It's dark - Momber is 11 metres below the water's surface and the black peat of the seabed absorbs what little light reaches the bottom. Then the tide turns, and as clearer water flows in from the open seas, the decaying remains of an ancient forest emerge from the gloom. Working quickly, he records details of the exposed material before the strengthening current forces him away from the site.

It was a curious little book. When a few copies began resurfacing, in the 18th century, nobody knew what to make of it. One hundred and three pages long and written in Latin, it announced itself on its title page as follows:INTRODUCTION TO COSMOGRAPHY WITH CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GEOMETRY AND ASTRONOMY NECESSARY FOR THIS MATTERADDITIONALLY, THE FOUR VOYAGES OF AMERIGO VESPUCCIA DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN.

From a crocodile sporting a boar-like snout to a peculiar pal with buckteeth for digging up grub, an odd-looking bunch of such reptiles dashed and swam across what is now the Sahara Desert some 100 million years ago when dinosaurs ruled.That's the picture created by remains of three newly identified species of ancient crocs plus fossils from two species previously named.A team led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago unearthed remains of the bizarre crocodiles during a series of expeditions beginning in 2000 in the Sahara.

A new study of Antarctica's past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought. The latest analysis of ice core records suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day.

Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.

Boeing has just announced it successfully tracked and shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle with a laser weapon. Actually, it shot down five UAVs at various ranges with the trailer-mounted Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX).Developed at the request of the Air Force Research Laboratory, MATRIX integrates with standard test-range radar, focusing a single energy beam on moving aerial vehicles and blasting them out of the sky. It's the future of aerial seek and destroy, defending against always-orbiting unmanned craft.

Starfish, salamanders, and planarian flatworms share a seemingly magical trait: the ability to regenerate body parts they've lost. While humans may never boast quite the same ability, scientists are perfecting ways to create different types of replacement tissue using stem cells or techniques that kick-start regrowth and development. Thanks to their efforts, the fabled "human spare-parts kit" may become a reality sooner than you think.

Many of the changes made under Hitler, put in place to remove the influence of the Jewish-born baby Jesus, are still in use today, much to the alarm of modern Germans.The swastika-shaped baking trays and wrapping paper adorned with Nazi symbols have long gone, but traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favourite carols.The discoveries have been highlighted by a new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.

The past of human evolution is more and more coming to light as scientists uncover a trove of fossils and genetic knowledge. But where might the future of human evolution go?There are plenty of signs that humans are still evolving. However, whether humans develop along the lines portrayed by hackneyed science fiction is doubtful.An old cliché has the highly evolved humans of the future sporting large heads to hold their advanced enlarged brains, "but that's nonsense, whole nonsense," said paleontologist Peter Ward at the University of Washington at Seattle, author of "Future Evolution." .

IT IS humanity's oldest enemy. Despite all our science, a sixth of people in the developing world are chronically hungry. At a summit in Rome this week, world leaders reaffirmed a pledge to end hunger "at the earliest possible date".The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) wanted them to promise to end hunger by 2025, but the delegates declined. They said instead that they would keep trying to meet their previous goal: to halve chronic hunger from 20 per cent of people in developing countries to 10 per cent by 2015 (see graph). But can they? Based on their performance so far, the FAO considers it "unlikely".

A giant scientific instrument that was designed to recreate the big bang but blew itself up in the process will be back in business on Friday.Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the nuclear research organisation near Geneva, aim to have beams of subatomic particles whizzing around the machine on Friday evening, and will begin smashing them together soon after.

NEW YORK: Some 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was so faint that the oceans should've been ice. They weren't, and now a new study suggests the answer to the puzzle lies with greenhouse effect and an extra helping of nitrogen.Previous modelling efforts to resolve the paradox by loading the early atmosphere with greenhouse gases assumed that it has always had the same concentration of nitrogen.

Science delegations to the European Space Agency (Esa) have approved a much more expensive mission to Mercury.BepiColombo, due for launch in 2014, was supposed to have cost Esa about 665m euros (£595m; $995m).The challenge, though, of building a probe able to survive the torrid heat and radiation at the innermost world has pushed this price up to 970m euros.Many researchers feared Bepi might be cancelled, but Esa's Science Programme Committee has passed the bigger budget.

Researchers have demonstrated a tiny chip based on silicon that could be used to diagnose dozens of diseases.A tiny drop of blood is drawn through the chip, where disease markers are caught and show up under light.The device uses the tendency of a fluid to travel through small channels under its own force, instead of using pumps.The design is simpler, requires less blood be taken, and works more quickly than existing "lab on a chip" designs, the team report in Lab on a Chip.

Although algae is currently the most energy-dense biofuel source, the cost of producing algae oil is prohibitively expensive.The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the biofuel would cost around $8 per gallon at the pump. Other experts have even projected prices of more than $50 per gallon because of inefficient production and harvesting methods.

The world's fastest supercomputer is devoted to solving scientific questions that may save the planet -- climate change, renewable energy, new medicines -- rather than advances in nuclear weapons, at least for the moment.The Oak Ridge National Laboratory's high-performance Jaguar XT5 computer, built by Seattle-based Cray Inc., was declared the fastest on the planet in the latest semiannual TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, announced on Monday.

The Dinosaur National Monument Quarry Visitor Center remains closed due to safety concerns, preventing paleontologists and other interested individuals from seeing one of the United State's largest and best quarry of dinosaur bones from the Jurassic period.Around 1,500 dinosaur bones are at the site, along with reconstructions of a juvenile allosaurus and a sauropod.

While the ageing Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, proves fossils are still very much in demand, many real-life archaeologists in Victoria are undergoing a popularity surge of their own.The tightening of state legislation in 2007, affecting developers or government agencies working on land deemed culturally significant, has seen the amount of work skyrocket, providing a huge workload for those such as Melbourne archaeologist Dr Vincent Clark.

A study is underway in American Samoa to assess damage to archaeological sites on the main island of Tutuila exposed by the September tsunami.The project is under the leadership of Dr. David Addison, a research archaeologist at the Samoan Studies Institute at the American Samoa Community College.

An armada of robots may one day fly above the mountain tops of Saturn's moon Titan, cross its vast dunes and sail in its liquid lakes.Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today."The way we explore tomorrow will be unlike any cup of tea we've ever tasted," said Fink, who was recently appointed as the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time.".

A satellite dispatched to scout out high-energy gamma rays streaming from the cosmos found that not only were flashes of gamma rays oddly close to home, but they were also powerful enough to annihilate matter.The radiation stemmed from lightning storms on Earth. Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope recorded 17 gamma ray flashes coming from Earth that matched up with lightning tracked by the World Wide Lightning Location Network, operated out of the University of Washington in Seattle.

BRUSSELS (AP) - A man who emerged from what doctors thought was a vegetative state says he was fully conscious for 23 years but could not respond because he was paralyzed, his mother said Monday.Rom Houben, 46, had a car crash in 1983 and doctors thought he had sunk into a coma. His family continued to believe their son was conscious and sought further medical advice.

The age of dinosaurs may have been dominated by dinosaurs, but they certainly weren't the only fearsome creatures around. A series of remarkable discoveries from a team led by Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, has made it clear that another, less celebrated group of animals lived alongside the dinos, and sometimes even dined on those better-known cousins.

Scientists have zeroed in on one apparent key to long life: an inherited cellular repair mechanism that thwarts aging and perhaps helps prevent disease. Researches say the finding could lead to anti-aging drugs.The study involves telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that have been likened to the plastic tips that prevent shoelaces from unraveling. Telomeres were already known to play a key role in aging, and their discovery led to this year's Nobel Prize in medicine.

Barbara Cherish is a child of the SS, and the burden lies heavily upon her.She knew early in her life that her German father, Arthur Liebehenschel, was involved in something terrible, something the family did not discuss.Only later, as an adult, did she discover he had run part of the Auschwitz concentration camp for five months during World War II.

Berlin, Germany (CNN) -- A 90-year-old man from northern Germany has been charged with 58 counts of murder for the killings of Jewish forced laborers in the final days of World War Two.The man, who was not named, was a member of the feared SS serving in what is now Austria when he allegedly carried out the crimes, the state court in Duisburg, western Germany, said Tuesday.A state office responsible for the prosecution of Nazi war crimes filed the charges.

You can make major discoveries by walking across a field and picking up every loose item you find. Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering - based on 100,000 finds - that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities.

In a strange case of science imitating art, one hobbit has again become the center of a heated and ongoing conflict.Since its 2003 discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores, the Homo floresiensis (nicknamed hobbit because it only grew to be about three feet tall) has caused scientists across the world to debate whether the find is a new species or simply a variation of the modern human. The difference could signal a major paradigm shift in the study of primitive humans.

Standing proudly on a hillside in West Dorset, the chalk outline of the Cerne Abbas Giant has perplexed visitors for centuries.To the frustration of archaeologists there is no written record of the anatomically detailed chalk figure before the late 17th century, but clues that the giant was created earlier than that have emerged in the form of suggestive earthworks built nearby.

Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones; they afflicted ancient people, too.Study results are appearing in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are being presented Nov. 17 at the Scientific Session of the American Heart Association at Orlando, Fla.

Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones; they afflicted ancient people, too.Study results are appearing in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are being presented Nov. 17 at the Scientific Session of the American Heart Association at Orlando, Fla.

With a solemn ceremony in Stockholm's antiquities museum, Sweden marked the return of 22 skulls looted from a native Hawaiian community more than a century ago.

National Geographic has published a beautiful gallery of aerial photos of the Sahara, shot by George Steinmetz. Steinmetz shoots his pictures while soaring above the Earth on a gasoline-powered paraglider he built himself.The motorized flyer packs into a compact package that can fit easily into an SUV or an airline's luggage compartment, and reassemble quickly. The ten-liter gas tank keeps Steinmetz aloft for 2 to 3 hours.Visit Georgesteinmetz.com for more remarkable photography and details about the man and his craft.

Berliners may soon get more to see on the horizon than just construction cranes, if a German architect realizes his massive vision. The world's largest artificial mountain could sit on the spot currently occupied by Tempelhof airport, and provide a natural getaway for Berliners and tourists alike. Did we also mention the fine skiing opportunities from September through March?Architect Jakob Tigges has named his 1,000-meter-tall mountain "The Berg," which may conjure up images of some bygone World War II-era redoubt. But the idea supposedly has many supporters among Berlin residents, and we have to admit that it's a novel way of one-upping all those other cities focused on having the tallest buildings.

Evidence of the first ever pub in Lincolnshire has been found at a village near Lincoln.The discovery has been documented in a new book called Exchange And Ritual At The Riverside.The book has been published following an excavation of the Lower Witham Valley in 2004, and looks at life at Washingborough during the end of the Bronze Age.

When it comes to carbon nanotubes, the majority of research so far has focused on small-scale applications. But now, a team of researchers from Rice University has created carbon nanotubes that are hundreds of meters long, yet just 50 micrometers thick. The researchers say there is no limit to how long the nanotubes can be made, which opens the doors to large-scale applications including using nanotubes as electrical transmission lines and as the basis of structural materials.

The key to preserving the old, degrading paper of treasured, ageing books is contained in the smell of their pages, say scientists.Researchers report in the journal Analytical Chemistry that a new "sniff test" can measure degradation of old books and historical documents.The test picks up and identifies the chemicals that the pages release as they degrade.This could help libraries and museums preserve a range of precious books.

There is a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that prevents cells from ageing, researchers say.Scientists from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the US say centenarian Ashkenazi Jews have this mutant gene.They found that 86 very old people and their children had higher levels of telomerase which protects the DNA.They say it may be possible to produce drugs that stimulate the enzyme.

During Ohio's vast prehistory, there were two magnificent cultures that produced monumental earthworks.The Adena culture came first, followed by the Hopewell. One culture probably melted into the other. The Hopewell period ended about A.D. 400.

It was perhaps fitting, and more than a little fortuitous, that this weekend's conference on Darwin's legacy coincided with Egypt's crucial World Cup qualifier against Algeria. The British Council's chief executive Martin Davidson joked about natural selection and survival of the fittest, the audience tittered along. It was against a febrile backdrop of flag waving, horn honking and patriotism that more than 150 scientific minds attempted to unpack the issues around evolution and religion, a major theme of the event..

Millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide could be prevented from entering the atmosphere following the discovery of a way to turn coal, grass or municipal waste more efficiently into clean fuels.Scientists have adapted a process called "gasification" which is already used to clean up dirty materials before they are used to generate electricity or to make renewable fuels. The technique involves heating organic matter to produce a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called syngas.

The same day they rejected a gay marriage ballot measure, residents of Maine voted overwhelmingly to allow the sale of medical marijuana over the counter at state-licensed dispensaries.Later in the month, the American Medical Association reversed a longtime position and urged the federal government to remove marijuana from Schedule One of the Controlled Substances Act, which equates it with heroin.

LONDON: Planetary scientists have discovered two Earth-sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres -- however, they are not planets but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars.The two white dwarf stars SDSS 0922+2928 and SDSS 1102+2054 are 400 and 220 light years from Earth are both the remnants of massive stars that are at the end of their stellar evolution having consumed all the material they had available for nuclear fusion.

The British government has brought down its long-awaited Digital Economy Bill, and it's perfectly useless and terrible. It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry (including the "three-strikes" rule that allows your entire family to be cut off from the net if anyone who lives in your house is accused of copyright infringement, without proof or evidence or trial), as well as a plan to beat the hell out of the video-game industry with a new, even dumber rating system (why is it acceptable for the government to declare that some forms of artwork have to be mandatorily labelled as to their suitability for kids? And why is it only some media? Why not paintings? Why not novels? Why not modern dance or ballet or opera?).So it's bad. £50,000 fines if someone in your house is accused of filesharing. A duty on ISPs to spy on all their customers in case they find something that would help the record or film industry sue them (ISPs who refuse to cooperate can be fined £250,000).But that's just for starters.

NASA said Friday it had discovered water on the moon, opening "a new chapter" that could allow for the development of a lunar space station.

Eight hundred to 900 years ago the first corn farmers dwelled in the northern Loess Hills.Evidence of the prehistoric Mill Creek native people, as archaeologists have deemed them, and their villages and cemetery sites have been found in parts of Plymouth County and northwest Iowa.

Parts of a remote central Utah canyon decorated with ancient Indian art are being nominated for the National Register of Historic Places.The Bureau of Land Management this week nominated 63 sites along Nine Mile Canyon, which some call the world's longest art gallery. It contains more than 10,000 prehistoric rock carvings and paintings of bighorn sheep, owls, a two-headed snake, spear-wielding hunters and warriors engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating.Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution."We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The scoop: Conspiracy theorists are convinced a rogue planet will destroy the Earth in 2012, and just as we are about to see the release of a Hollywood movie on the topic, the hype is set to increase. David Morrison, a NASA astrobiologist and expert scientist for NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist website, calls for a reality check and in 2008 he contributed this article to Discovery News.Unbeknownst to most of us, a small but vocal group of conspiracy theorists is convinced that a rogue planet is about to enter the inner solar system and doom the Earth.

A Harvard theoretical physicist has discussed with scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland the possibility that they may discover a theorized "stau" particle, with a lifetime of a minute or so, that could provide the first experimental confirmation of string theory.

A ground-breaking census of 500 stars, 70 of which are known to host planets, has successfully linked the long-standing "lithium mystery" observed in the Sun to the presence of planetary systems. Using ESO's successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that Sun-like stars that host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than "planet-free" stars. This finding does not only shed light on the lack of lithium in our star, but also provides astronomers with a very efficient way of finding stars with planetary systems.

JERUSALEM - Israel displayed for the first time Wednesday a collection of rare coins charred and burned from the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple nearly 2,000 years ago.About 70 coins were found in an excavation at the foot of a key Jerusalem holy site. They give a rare glimpse into the period of the Jewish revolt that eventually led to the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, said Hava Katz, curator of the exhibition.The Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire and took over Jerusalem in A.D. 66. After laying siege to Jerusalem, the Romans breached the city walls and wiped out the rebellion, demolishing the Jewish Temple, the holiest site in Judaism.

Think of a dinosaur and what may come to mind is a large, lumbering animal with four legs, a long neck, a tiny head and tail.Now a new species helps to explain how this iconic dino body shape evolved.The new dinosaur, Aardonyx celestae, belongs to the Sauropodomorpha, a group that includes the ancestors of sauropods -- gigantic, four-legged herbivores -- but not the sauropods themselves. The largest animals that ever walked the earth were sauropodomorphs.

This Veterans Day, Discovery News honors American military service personnel with a look back at some of the great battles throughout our nation's history.In the painting, General George Washington leads the Continental Army on Christmas Day across the Delaware River to confront Hessian forces.

The Earth's climate was far cooler -- perhaps more than 50 degrees -- billions of years ago, which could mean conditions for life all over the planet were more conducive than previously believed, according to a research team that includes a Texas A&M University expert who specializes in geobiology.

Sunspots, which rotate around the sun's surface, tell us a great deal about our own planet. Scientists rely on them, for instance, to measure the sun's rotation or to prepare long-range forecasts of the Earth's health.

It is currently estimated that natural gas resources will be exhausted in 130 years; however, those reserves where extraction is cost-effective will only flow for another 60 years or so.

Tyrannosaurus rex was an athletic, warm-blooded animal that jogged rather than lumbered around its territory, according to a new study.Researchers led by Herman Pontzer at Washington University in St Louis examined the anatomical details of 14 dinosaurs of different sizes to work out how much energy the animals might have needed to move around. He found that, for dinosaurs weighing from a few kilograms to tonnes, the power their muscles needed was far too high for the animals to have been cold-blooded.

NASA's twin Mars rovers have outlasted their planned three-month missions for so long that they seem indestructible. Nearly six years on, their presence on the Red Planet is taken for granted, as if they are immutable parts of the Martian landscape.But we may soon have to confront a new reality. Spirit, which has always suffered more hardships than Opportunity, is facing its toughest challenge yet. When New Scientist went to press, the rover was set to begin a risky push to free itself from a sand trap it has been mired in for six months. Mission engineers say it may not survive the attempt. "She's in a very precarious situation, and we don't know for sure if we're going to get her out," says rover driver Scott Maxwell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

JUST months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.

A secret report on the chequered history of priceless Aramaic bowls loaned to a leading university has exposed an apparent attempt to cover up UK academic connections to a potentially deadly trade in stolen Iraqi antiquities.The findings of the study, which was suppressed by a controversial legal agreement in 2007, have at last solved a long-standing archaeological mystery.

Hundreds of soccer-ball-sized robot drones could soon ply the friendly waves to help scientists track ocean currents and harmful algae blooms, or even swarm to disaster sites such as oil spills and airplane crashes. That's no mere flight of fancy, now that the National Science Foundation has provided almost $1 million in funding to researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

Just last week, the Chinese air force chief officer called military competition in space "inevitable." For those who thought this was just idle saber-rattling, take a look at what the American Air Force is cooking up this morning: a $50 million bid for better interplanetary weather forecasts, "battlespace surveillance" in space environments and inertial sensors for navigation, presumably in situations where the standard compass isn't effective.

A senior official at the International Energy Agency turned whistleblower just prior to the release of a major IEA report, and claimed that the international organization has downplayed a looming oil shortage to appease the U.S. and prevent panic buying.The anonymous whistleblower apparently told his story to The Guardian on the eve of the new World Energy Outlook report that went public Tuesday. He alleged that the international watchdog has bowed to U.S. pressure to underplay the decline of existing oil fields and overplay the possibility of tapping new fields.

Insects may have tiny brains, but they can perform some seriously impressive feats of mental gymnastics.According to a growing number of studies, some insects can count, categorize objects, even recognize human faces -- all with brains the size of pinheads.

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology's biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

VATICAN CITY - E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church."The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.

What's causing spacecraft to mysteriously accelerate? The Rosetta comet chaser's fly-by of Earth on 13 November is a perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of it.The anomaly emerged in 1990, when NASA's Galileo spacecraft whizzed by Earth to get a boost from our planet's gravity and gained 3.9 millimetres per second more than expected. And the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft had an unexpected increase of about 1.8 millimetres per second during a previous fly-by of Earth in 2005.

MADRID - They have renamed it the city recovered from the Euphrates and it is found in the Syrian enclave of Tall Qabr on the banks of the river that, with the Tigris, was the centre of the birth of civilisation in Mesopotamia. It is a circularly planned city, dating back to 2,600 years before Christ. Galician archaeologists from an expedition from the University of Coruna made the discovery, led by Jean Luis Montero, who identified two layers dating back to from the IV to first millennium before Christ.

PRESCOTT - Images pecked in stone hundreds to thousands of years ago could be for religious reasons, to mark territories or simple doodles such as those still made today by children and adults.That is according to Dr. Ekkehart Malotki, a preeminent researcher into the history of rock art."Creating art is a distinct piece of our biological make-up," he told about 50 people Saturday during his lecture at Deer Valley Rock Art Center. "It is an instinct.".

The US and European space agencies have signed the "letter of intent" that ties together their Mars programmes.The agreement, which was penned in Washington DC, gives the green light to scientists and engineers to begin the joint planning of Red Planet missions.The union will start with a European-led orbiter in 2016, and continue with surface rovers in 2018, and then perhaps a network of landers in 2018.The ultimate aim is a mission to return Mars rock and soils to Earth labs.