Newsdesk Archive

Scientists say they've discovered a new dinosaur species in South Africa that may help explain how the creatures evolved into the largest animals on land.Paleontologist Adam Yates from the University of the Witwatersrand presented an incomplete skeleton of the Aardonyx celestae at a news conference Wednesday.The findings of Yates and his team have been published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.

Asteroid-watchers say a space rock about as big as a garage came within 9,000 miles (14,000 kilometers) of Earth last Friday, just 15 hours after it was detected.Experts quickly determined that the asteroid 2009 VA would miss us - and even if it came directly at us, it wouldn't have caused a catastrophe. Nevertheless, the close encounter serves as a reminder that someday a much bigger rock may well hit us and that it's best to be prepared.

Humans could become extinct, a new study concludes, but no single event, aside from complete destruction of the globe, could do us in, and all extinction scenarios would have to involve some kind of intent, either malicious or not, by people in power.The determinations suggest that the human race itself will ultimately determine its fate."I think the ability to adapt very quickly is singular to humanity," project leader Tobin Lopes told Discovery News. "Species progress and evolve to enhance their chances, but it's done over a very long period of time.".

Pablo Amaringo was born in 1943 in Puerto Libertad, in the Peruvian Amazon. He was ten years old when he first took ayahuasca. A severe heart illness--and the magical treatment of this via ayahuasca--led Pablo toward the life of a shaman, and he eventually became a powerful curandero--learning the icaros, or healing songs, that the ayahuasca brew taught him.Pablo passed away on November 16, 2009, after several weeks of illness. Because of his declining state of health, he was unable to attend the recent opening of a Venice Beach, CA exhibit of his works. The exhibit runs until December 31, 2009 at The 99 High Art Collective.Don Pablo, you are missed!See a gallery of Pablo's art here

The Mithraic Mysteries was a mystery religion that became popular among the military in the Roman Empire, from the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Information on the cult is based mainly on interpretations of monuments, which depict Mithras as born from a rock and sacrificing a bull. His worshippers had a complex system of seven grades of initiation, with ritual meals and they met in underground temples. Little else is known for certain.

Four thousand years ago, a government bureaucrat in Mesopotamia jotted down a tally of slave laborers on a clay tablet.The bureaucrat left behind the count in wedge-shaped symbols that proved hard to fully decipher with the naked eye.Until now.

After a hiatus of almost a decade, Russia is resuming construction of its share in the International Space Station (ISS) with the launch of a new module this week.A Poisk ("Quest") Mini-Research Module-2 (MIM-2 in the Russian abbreviation) launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday at 1422 GMT.The spacecraft is essentially a twin of another Russian module - the Pirs Docking Compartment - added to the outpost in September 2001.

As the only remaining primate built to stride the world on two legs, it would be easy to assume that our extinct relatives were much like us, if perhaps hairier with smaller brains.But fossils reveal evolution could take our relatives in bizarre directions, involving skulls resembling nutcrackers and miniature bodies resembling the hobbits of "Lord of The Rings." .

The brightest lights in the universe often come from the blackest pits of deep space.Black holes, so named because even light cannot escape their gravitational grasp, can only be sensed through their tug on other matter. While black holes themselves are invisible, the regions around them are reigned by powerful magnetic and gravitational forces that create some of the most luminous radiation ever seen.Super-bright anomalies like cosmic rays, plasma jets and gamma-ray bursts pour forth to fly across the universe, and researchers are just beginning to untangle the mysteries of how they arise.

Our human ancestors did not eat much fruit, but instead consumed a lot of root vegetables, nuts, insects and some meat, according to a new study.The findings may help to explain how all humans emerged in the first place, the authors believe.Early hominid ancestors may have left the trees to take advantage of ground-level foods, a behavioral shift that could have resulted in two of the major defining characteristics of humans: unique teeth and walking on two legs, a mode of locomotion known as bipedalism that is extremely rare elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

Aluminum and water is usually a boring combination, but light a mixture of nanoaluminum and ice and the results are explosive.Scientists from Purdue University have created a new, environmentally friendly solid rocket fuel that recently sent a rocket screaming 1300 feet into the air using seven inches of nanoaluminum and ice. The new fuel could power missions to the moon or Mars while dramatically reducing the amount of on-board fuel.

The scoop: Mike Brown is a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an expert dwarf planet hunter, accredited with discovering over 100 minor bodies in the Kuiper belt. Dr. Brown is also very well known for his part in the re-classification of Pluto.In this very special IM Interview, Dr. Brown takes some time out with space producer Ian O'Neill to discuss killing Pluto, hate mail and whether there's a massive Planet X hiding near the Kuiper belt ready to strike Earth in 2012 (spoiler: Mike isn't part of a global conspiracy to hide Nibiru).

Researchers have transplanted genetically modified hematopoietic stem cells into mice so that their developing red blood cells produce a critical lysosomal enzyme -preventing or reducing organ and central nervous system damage from the often-fatal genetic disorder Hurler's syndrome.

UConn researchers have developed a tiny wireless device that can be inserted under a patient?s skin to monitor blood glucose levels over a period of several months.A team of researchers in chemistry, pharmaceutics, and engineering is developing a long term implantable biosensor that could dramatically change the way of life for millions of people diagnosed with diabetes.

IF LIFE is to be found beyond our home planet, then our closest encounters with it may come in the dark abyss of some extraterrestrial sea. For Earth is certainly not the only ocean-girdled world in our solar system. As many as five moons of Jupiter and Saturn are now thought to hide seas beneath their icy crusts.To find out more about these worlds and their hidden oceans, two ambitious voyages are now taking shape. About a decade from now, if all goes to plan, the first mission will send a pair of probes to explore Jupiter's satellites. They will concentrate on giant Ganymede and pale Europa, gauging the depths of the oceans that almost certainly lie within them.

Scattered across the beaches of Southeast Alaska, and indeed along the entire Northwest Pacific coast from Kodiak to the Columbia River, are intensely staring eyes, totemic animals and geometric patterns carved into boulders and bedrock. These mysterious petroglyphs, carvings in stone, raise questions that have perplexed archeologists and casual observers for well over a century. Most of those questions remain unanswered and may ultimately be unanswerable. Perhaps because of these mysteries, petroglyphs arouse fascination in anyone fortunate enough to see them, particularly if they are still embedded in their original location.

A US boy is not going back to school - after he was declared the reincarnation of a Buddhist holy man who first died in 1250.Boston-born Jigme Wangchuk, 11, has now moved to India where he has been made the head of a Buddhist sect in the country's eastern Darjeeling city.

When it comes to eluding detection, HIV and cancer cells are at the top of the class. As such, the few treatments currently available to sufferers of HIV or prostate cancer are generally expensive, often hard to manufacture, and come packaged with a smattering of unpleasant side effects. But Yale researchers have now developed synthetic molecules that help the body recognize HIV and prostate cancer cells as threats, tricking the body into initiating an immune response that it normally would not.

Three stone idols of Krishna, Lakshmi and Nandi were unearthed from a road near Kote Anjaneya temple in KR Puram police limits on Saturday morning.The idols were unearthed when BBMP workers were digging the road for laying an underground drainage. The idols were partially damaged. The tahsildar and local MLA visited the spot and collected information about the idols.

It sounds like the plot of an Indiana Jones movie: an archaeology professor with little more to go on than a yellowing photograph discovers part of a 900-year-old statue deep in the Cambodian jungle, rewriting history in the process.Dr Peter Sharrock, a senior teaching fellow in the art and archaeology of Southeast Asia at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, was at a conference in Cambodia in July when he decided to spend a day searching the forest around the ruins of Angko.

On the surface, the line of two-room dwellings on a dusty street in west Delhi appears little different from thousands of other roads in India's crowded capital. The paint flakes off buildings' walls and the grass grows in parks that haven't been mowed in months. Kids play cricket in the street, fruit and vegetable sellers push their wooden carts through narrow lanes and women busy themselves with housework and cooking. What sets this impoverished community apart is one remarkable absence: men.

The 12-year-old girl plucked cold, slimy potato peels out of the garbage containers in a village in eastern Poland. When those trash scraps became scarce, she ate clover.Crumbs and decomposed food sickened Betty Potash Gold and her family members, causing diarrhea and bloody vomiting, as they hid from the Nazis.Although Gold lived through extreme hunger, mental duress and near-death experiences during the Holocaust, she and other survivors face another peril decades after the war.

It sounds like science fiction. And it was.Now, 30 years after "2001" author Arthur C. Clarke wrote about an elevator that rises into outer space, serious research is happening all over the world in an effort to make the far-fetched-sounding idea a reality.The benefits of a fully realized elevator would make carrying people and goods into space cheaper, easier and safer than with rocket launches, proponents say, opening up a host of possibilities.Restaurants and hotels for space tourists. Wind turbines that provide energy by spinning 24 hours a day. A cheaper, easier and more environmentally friendly way to launch rockets.

Antarctica's icy lakes are home to a surprisingly diverse community of viruses, including some that were previously unidentified.At first glance, Antarctica's freshwater lakes don't seem very hospitable to life. They remain frozen for a good nine months out of the year, and they contain very few nutrients. Some of these lakes have little animal life and are dominated by microorganisms, including algae, bacteria, protozoans and viruses.

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- Kuol Dut was six when the swirling chaos of war churned through his village.He recalls playing in a field as neighbors raced toward him, screaming about militias attacking their homes. Even a boy of Kuol's age knew that militias and soldiers slaughtered men, women and children in the vast, flat expanse of southern Sudan. So he ran, too.That attack separated Kuol from his mother and father and cast him into a childhood of desolation. He would see friends starve to death, skin stretched taut over ribs, chests rising and falling with rattling wisps of breath.

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.

Scholars unveiled inscriptions discovered in a sunken Egyptian city on Monday.The Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology released the monograph of a sunken stone stele discovered in the city of Heracleion dating to the reign of the Greek Pharaoh Ptolemy VIII before 116 B.C. The stele, inscribed in Greek and Hieroglyphs, details the religious rules governing the recovery of plundered items and temple asylum offered by priests to penitents.

TEHRAN -- Thirty-three years after the first excavation on the Zebarjad Tepe, an Iranian archaeological team is scheduled to return to the pre-Elamite site in the Izeh region of Khuzestan Province.The new season of excavation will be conducted by Abbas Moaqaddam, Izeh Cultural Heritage Center Jafar Mehrkian told the Persian service of CHN on Monday.No precise date was mentioned for the excavation.

Prague - Czech archaeologists have uncovered four prehistoric rondel enclosures, two of which are the largest in Europe, within an unprecedented extensive research accompanying the construction of a motorway bypass of Kolin, central Bohemia, chief researcher Radka Sumberova told CTK today.After examining 40 hectares on land, the experts gathered hundreds of thousands of finds. The most important ones include the four rondel enclosures.

Recently excavated Mayan murals are giving archaeologists a rare look into the lives of ordinary ancient Maya.The murals were uncovered during the excavation of a pyramid mound structure at the ancient Maya site of Calakmul, Mexico (near the border with Guatemala) and are described in the Nov. 9 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The find "was a total shock," said Simon Martin of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, who studied the paintings and hieroglyphs depicted in the murals.

Tel Kabri is the only site in Israel where wall paintings similar in style to those found in the Aegean 3,600 years ago have been found; researchers say this was a conscious decision made by the city rulers to lean toward Mediterranean culture.

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa.The Sahara would have been a formidable barrier during the Stone Age, making it hard to understand how humans made it to Europe from eastern Africa, where the earliest remains of our hominin ancestors are found.

Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim, of the University of Haifa's Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, reveals that literary Arabic is represented in the brain as a second language and not as a mother tongue.

Is the Large Hadron Collider being sabotaged from the future? Or merely by birds?

On February 12, 1894, a young intellectual anarchist named Emile Henry went out to kill. And, in doing so, he arguably ignited the age of modern terrorism.As he had looked down on Paris from near his miserable lodgings in the plebeian 20th arrondissement on the edge of Paris, he vowed war on the bourgeoisie. His specific goal was to avenge the execution of Auguste Vaillant a week earlier.Unable to feed his family, Vaillant had thrown a small bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, slightly wounding several people. His goal: to call attention to the plight of the poor.

British oceanography boffins are celebrating successful trials of their latest robot submarine, which has now autonomously navigated itself about at a depth of three-and-a-half miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic.The Reg has reported before on earlier iterations of the National Oceanography Centre's "Autosub" underwater droids, which have previous carried out lengthy missions beneath Antarctic ice shelves running on enormous numbers of ordinary D-cell batteries. The latest Autosub 6000, however, has moved on to lithium polymer rechargeable batteries.

The DNA of innocent people arrested in England and Wales should be held for no longer than six years, ministers are expected to say.Last year the European Court of Human Rights ruled it was unlawful to keep indefinitely the profiles of innocent people.The United Kingdom has the world's biggest DNA database.Police say retaining samples has helped solve crimes. Human rights groups say the proposed change is not enough.

IF THERE is one thing that politicians can and should do to limit the damage caused by illegal drugs, it is to take careful note of the evidence and develop a rational drug policy. Some politicians find it easier to ignore the evidence, and pander to public prejudice instead.I can trace the beginning of the end of my role as chairman of the UK's official advisory body on drugs to the moment I quoted a New Scientist editorial (14 February, p 5). Entitled, fittingly enough, "Drugs drive politicians out of their minds", the editorial asked the reader to imagine being seated at a table with two bowls, one containing peanuts, the other the illegal drug MDMA (ecstasy). Which is safer to give to a stranger? Why, the ecstasy of course.

Three more government drug advisers resign over the home secretary's sacking of Professor David Nutt as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD).The three all resigned after a face-to-face meeting with Alan Johnson, the home secretary, which was called in an attempt to heal the rift between the scientists and the government over Nutt's sacking.

Nasa's experiment last month to find water on the Moon was a major success, US scientists have announced.The space agency smashed a rocket and a probe into a large crater at the lunar south pole, hoping to kick up ice.Scientists who have studied the data now say instruments trained on the impact plume saw copious quantities of water-ice and water vapour.One researcher described this as the equivalent of "a dozen two-gallon buckets" of water.

PARIS: Scientists reported on Thursday that nanoparticles used in medical applications can indirectly damage DNA inside cells by transmitting signals through a protective barrier of human tissue.The stunning discovery by researchers of Southmead Hospital in Bristol, Britain, adds to a growing body of research highlighting proven and potential health hazards from the rapidly expanding universe of engineered objects measured in billionths of a metre.

TORONTO: In a discovery that may prove alien worlds are not only science fiction, a Canadian scientist has claimed to have found evidence of new stars and solar systems outside the Milky Way.Erin Mentuch from the University of Toronto, who analysed 88 remote galaxies using their light output data from the Gemini Deep Deep Survey, discovered alien worlds beyond our own galaxy for the first time.

A small chunk of space trash made an uncomfortably close pass by the International Space Station late Friday, but not close enough to force the astronauts aboard to take shelter in their Russian lifeboats.

Drugs sometimes have beneficial side effects. A glaucoma treatment causes luscious eyelashes. A blood pressure drug also aids those with a rare genetic disease. The newest surprise discovered by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is a gonorrhea medication that might help battle cancer."Often times we are surprised that a drug known to do something else has another hidden property," says Jun Liu, Ph.D., a professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences at Johns Hopkins and author on the study published Oct. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The first stars in the universe may have been very different from the stars we see today, yet they may hold clues to understanding some of the mysterious features of the universe. These "dark stars," first theorized in 2007, could grow to be much larger than modern stars, and would be powered by dark matter particles that annihilate inside them, rather than by nuclear fusion. In the early universe, dark stars would have emitted visible light like the Sun, but today their light would be redshifted into the infrared range by the time it reaches us, and so dark stars would be invisible to the naked eye.

A spinoff company from Arizona State University plans to build a new battery with an energy density 11 times greater than that of lithium-ion batteries for just one-third the cost. With a $5.13 million research grant from the US Department of Energy awarded last week, Fluidic Energy hopes to turn its ultra-dense energy storage technology into a reality.

A Californian company, SolarReserve, is developing a solar power system that can store seven hours' worth of solar energy by focusing mirrors onto millions of gallons of molten salt, allowing the plant to provide electricity 24 hours a day.The company has applied to regulators in California for permission to build the 150-megawatt Rice Solar Energy Project solar farm near the abandoned town of Rice in San Bernadino County, California.

The most probable place to find intelligent life in the galaxy is around stars very similar to our sun, a new study has found.When scientists search the heavens for habitable worlds beyond Earth, they don't necessarily know what to look for. A new study has found that the most probable place to find intelligent life in the galaxy is around stars with roughly the mass of the sun, and surface temperatures between 5,300 and 6,000 Kelvin (9,100 and 10,300 degrees Fahrenheit) - in fact, stars very similar to our own sun.

Scientists have extracted organically preserved muscle tissue from an 18 million years old salamander fossil. The discovery by researchers from University College Dublin, the UK and Spain, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that soft tissue can be preserved under a broader set of fossil conditions than previously known.

Key members of an Austrian Holocaust research center have quit in a dispute with the city's Jewish community.The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies began provisional operations in January after being bogged down for years with funding problems. Its aim, among other things, is to give scholars from around the world unique access to roughly 8,000 files of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and to parts of a vast archive belonging to the Jewish Community Vienna. But reluctance by the Jewish community to provide full access to its trove of historic information had crippled the center over the past 10 months.

One of the oldest archaeological sites not on a heritage list, this Pacific state, like Easter Island, is an engineering marvelWe zigzag slowly in our skiff around the shallow coral heads surrounding Pohnpei. The island, a little smaller than New York City, is part of the Federated States of Micronesia. It is nestled in a vast tapestry of coral reefs. Beyond the breakers, the Pacific stretches 5,578 miles to California. A stingray dashes in front of us, flying underwater like a butterfly alongside our bow.

A team of Bulgarian archaeologists have discovered a new tomb of an aristocrat from Ancient Thrace near the southern town of Nova Zagora.The team led by archaeologist Veselin Ignatov found a burial tomb of 12 square meters date back to the end of 1st century and beginning of 2nd century AD. It is located outside of the village of Karanovo.The burial site of the Thracian aristocrat contains a number of interesting items including a silver treasure of vessels and artifacts that were place there to be used by the aristocrat in his afterlife.

The discovery of an early human fossil in southern China may challenge the commonly held idea that modern humans originated out of Africa.Jin Changzhu and colleagues of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, announced to Chinese media last week that they have uncovered a 110,000-year-old putative Homo sapiens jawbone from a cave in southern China's Guangxi province.

Workers uncovered a young Irishman's grave in New York's Greenwich Village more than 200 years after he died.Now authorities are determined to solve the mystery of the life and death of the Co Kildare man.New York City Dept of Parks and Recreation workers expected to find unidentified bones when they dug below the city's Washington Square Park -- more than 20,000 people are believed to be buried in the former graveyard. But they discovered the 210-year-old 3ft-high sandstone gravestone of a Co Kildare man who died in 1799.

The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century [1,2,3]. Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible [3,4,5]. Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture [6]. Intriguingly, these late hunter-gatherers existed in parallel to early farmers for more than a millennium before they vanished some 4,000 years ago [7,8]. The prolonged coexistence of the two cultures in Scandinavia has been cited as an argument against population replacement between the Mesolithic and the present.

Jim Krehbiel was up past midnight making a piece of art by layering maps and field notes onto photos he had taken of an ancient ritual site high on a cliff ledge in the desert Southwest.He looked at the image of the kiva and remembered how the ruins were nearly inaccessible. Krehbiel had to lower himself on a rope to reach them.

Michael Le Quesne, 16, was swimming off a popular beach in Montenegro with his parents and his ten-year-old sister Teodora when he spotted an odd looking 'stone' at a depth of around two metres.It turned out to be a large, submerged building which may have been the centrepiece of an important Greek or Roman trading post, swallowed up by the sea during a massive earthquake.

An ancient civilisation brought about its own demise by destroying forests which kept its delicate ecosystem in balance, according to researchers who claim the discovery has important implications for the modern world.

When the famous explorer Giovanni Battista Belzoni discovered the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I in 1817, he knew that it represented a very developed example of a New Kingdom royal tomb. Not only was it the longest, deepest and most completed tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings, but its walls were painted with fine scenes in full colour featuring the great pharaoh in various positions before the gods and with his family. Inside the burial chamber Belzoni found a calcite anthropoid sarcophagus and a fragment of a canopic chest that used to hold the internal organs, and is now on display at Sir John Soane's Museum in London.

Some large-scale computer simulations may be overestimating the impact of climate change on biodiversity in some regions, researchers have suggested.They said models that analyse vast areas often failed to take into account local variations, such as topography and microclimates.Local-scale simulations, which did include these factors, often delivered a more optimistic outlook, they added.The findings have been published in the journal, Science.

Solar power could be produced cheaply in specially designed optical fibres, say researchers.The work, published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, makes use of nanometre-scale wires built around optical fibres like bristles.Those wires give the light much more surface area to interact with, leading to higher overall efficiencies.However, only the ends of the fibres must be exposed - they funnel the light elsewhere for power generation.

Mercury is even more of an "iron planet" than scientists had previously supposed.Richer concentrations of iron and titanium have been seen on Mercury's surface by Nasa's Messenger probe.Previous Earth and spacecraft-based observations had detected only very low amounts of iron in the silicate minerals covering the innermost world.Because of its immense density, scientists have already assumed much of Mercury's interior contains iron.Messenger sees the surface iron bound up in oxides with titanium.

Bears in a zoo in eastern Germany have lost their fur, but international experts cannot work out why.Three spectacled bears in Leipzig Zoo are in various states of baldness, with the worst being hairless all over.Zoo curator Gerd Noetzhold said he had discovered that zoos throughout Europe and further afield had encountered the same problem, but no-one knew why.One expert suggested it could be caused by climate and the diet of the bears, whose native habitat is South America.

Scientists have identified the most ancient fossil relative of the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex.The new addition to T. rex's clan is known from a 30cm-long skull uncovered during excavations in Gloucestershire in the 1900s.

Japan used weapons-grade plutonium to fuel a nuclear power plant Thursday for the first time as part of efforts to boost its atomic energy program.Kyushu Electric Power Co. said workers fired up the No. 3 reactor at its Genkai plant in the southern prefecture of Saga using MOX fuel - a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide.

Ever since the Falklands wolf was described by Darwin himself, the origin of this now-extinct canid found only on the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina has remained a mystery.

Relaxing on an idyllic beach on Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean, Anthony Aguirre vividly describes the worst natural disaster he can imagine. It is, in fact, probably the worst natural disaster that anyone could imagine. An asteroid impact would be small potatoes compared with this kind of event: a catastrophic encounter with an entire other universe.

A NASA DC-8 plane equipped with lasers, ice-penetrating radar, and a gravity meter is revealing a dynamic and complex world beneath the massive ice sheet that covers Antarctica.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Europe's new Earth observation satellite was some kind of "space helicopter".

Engineers working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have successfully injected beams of particles into two sections of the vast machine.An LHC spokesperson said this was the first time particle beams had been inside the LHC since it was shut down late in September 2008.Scientists working on the giant particle accelerator described the success as "a milestone".

CBS - Scientists at Stanford University claim they've found a way to make human embryonic stem cells turn into the types of cells that ultimately form sperm and eggs.The study, which appears in the journal Nature, may shed light on human reproduction, development and infertility.

Nanoparticles of metal can damage the DNA inside cells even if there is no direct contact between them, scientists have found. The discovery provides an insight into how the particles might exert their influence inside the body and points to possible new ways to deliver medical treatments.

Prosecutors at the genocide and war crimes trial of ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have branded him the leader of an ethnic cleansing campaign.

Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today... and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun.Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought - and indeed in the larger history of ideas.

TEHRAN, Oct. 28 (Mehr News Agency) -- Part of a Sassanid tepe was destroyed last week near Ahvaz, the provincial capital of Khuzestan. The destruction was carried out by the Mehrab Housing Company for construction of a high-rise apartment complex, Khuzestan Cultural Heritage Lovers Society (Taryana) announced on Monday.No permission had been granted by the Khuzestan Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Department (KCHTHD) for the housing company at the site, Taryana spokesman Mojtaba Gahestuni said.

A few snippets of copper may be a vital clue towards solving one of Arctic exploration's most haunting mysteries: what happened to Sir John Franklin's two superbly equipped ships when he and all 150 members of his expedition died in the search for the North-West Passage more than 160 years ago?The fate of the 1845 expedition haunted Victorian imagination, and accounts suggesting some of his starving men prolonged their lives by cannibalism destroyed the reputation of those sent to find them.

In the cool, buggy shade of a huge royal poinciana, archaeologist Michael Wylde dragged his trowel 1,200 years into the past.Wylde, manager of the Randell Research Center at Pineland, was renewing an excavation begun last winter of a Calusa Indian site known as Mound 5 of Brown's Mound Complex."The first day you open a dig is like Christmas," Wylde said. "It's like, whew, here we go. What am I going to get?"Excavation will begin in earnest Saturday, and Wylde hopes to have the work done by spring 2010.

A PREHISTORIC burial ground has been discovered on Skye.Six slab-lined graves and six cremation pits have been unearthed on the excavation site close to Armadale pier on the Sleat peninsula. Experts say it is one of the most significant archaeological finds yet made in the Highlands.Flint tools and urns were found inside the graves, although skeletal remains had been damaged due to the tide.The contents of the burial site are being removed by a team of archaeologists from Inverness and Skye. They could be reconstructed and relocated to a new site at Armadale.

Archaeologists have found the Iron Age burial mound of a wealthy man in Noord Brabant, the second major find within a cluster of earthworks and other remains near the town of Oss.The first mound was identified in 1933 and is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in the country.

Archeologists have unearthed an 8,000-year-old weapons factory.The find, near Melton, is the biggest ever mid-Stone Age discovery in Leicestershire, with fingernail-sized flint pieces, burned animal bones and evidence of tents.The bonus for the University of Leicester team is the site has not been churned up by ploughs, like most county land has.

The National Research Institute of Maritime Cultural Heritage under the Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea announces yesterday that it found bamboo poles with shipment records, including types and amount of loads, departure dates, destinations and recipients. The poles were found inside the Mado ship, an ancient cargo ship that sailed about 800 years ago during the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392), that was discovered under the sea near Taean, South Chungcheong, last June. The institute said the poles will serve as a valuable reference to determine precise dates when shipments were made and shipping conditions at that time.

On November 12th 1955, as Albert Miller took a walk through his Pennsylvania property, named Meadowcroft, he noticed a freshly dug groundhog hole. Upon seeing the disturbed earth, the amateur archaeologist saw a chance to confirm his theory that Native Americans once lived on his land. He expanded the hole until he found evidence to support his theory. Eighteen years passed before archaeologists took a closer look at the site, but when they did, they discovered the oldest evidence of human habitation in North America.

Stained glass windows overlooking the tomb of Edward, Prince of Wales, were destroyed by Puritan iconoclasts in the 1640s, allowing damaging UV rays to enter the cathedral unfiltered. Since then, clear replacements have been installed and the deterioration of the paintwork on the 14th century canopy surrounding the prince's resting place has continued.The brilliant colours of the artworks that look down on the bronze figure of the prince are fading rapidly and the red pigment used by the original artists is turning black.

A new study suggests that algae may have been responsible for wiping entire species off the face of the Earth on at least five occasions.In the past 540 million years, five massive extinctions are thought to have killed off, in each case, some 50% to 90% of animal species. The study suggests that toxins from algae played a major role in all five extinctions, including the most recent and most well-known - the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

NEW DELHI: An Indian doctor working in 600 BC might have been the world's first plastic surgeon, according to a new exhibition that challenges Western domination of the history of science and technology.The Science and Technology Heritage Exhibition opened last week at New Delhi's National Science Centre, showcasing the advances and discoveries with which the country says it should be credited.

The so-called "silver spoon" effect -- in which wealth is passed down from one generation to another -- is well established in some of the world's most ancient economies, according to an international study coordinated by a UC Davis anthropologist.

A hint that quantum fluctuations in the fabric of the universe slow the speed of light has not been borne out in observations by NASA's Fermi telescope. The measurements contradict a 2005 result that supported the idea that space and time are not smooth.Einstein's theory of special relativity says that all electromagnetic radiation travels through a vacuum at the speed of light. This speed is predicted to be constant, regardless of the energy of the radiation.

Even after the costumes are worn, the candy collected and the ghoulish jack-o'-lantern turned back into a pumpkin, Halloween doesn't have to be over -- if you are willing to be entertained by a good ghost story.Almost anywhere you look in Southern California, from private houses to public places, tales abound about the shades of the living walking among us. The spirits are benign for the most part, said Laurie Jacobson, a TV producer, historian and writer who specializes in the haunted side of Hollywood.

AS MEDIEVAL CASTLE bedrooms go, this one looks the part. Disturbing Flemish tapestries share the walls with stern portraits. On close inspection, the ornate fireplace's iron firedogs turn out to have devils' heads. This place is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Tom Skelton, a 16th-century jester said to have committed murder. The malevolent face of "Tom Fool" stares from a dimly lit oil painting just outside the bedroom.

NASA is stepping up its space radiation studies with a round of experiments that for the first time in decades will use monkeys as subjects.The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth's protective magnetic shield.

GUATEMALA CITY - Scuba divers are exploring the depths of a volcanic lake in Guatemala to find clues about an ancient sacred island where Mayan pilgrims flocked to worship before it was submerged by rising waters.Samabaj, the first underwater archaeological ruins excavated in Guatemala, were discovered accidentally 12 years ago by a diver exploring picturesque Lake Atitlan, ringed by Mayan villages and popular with foreign tourists.

A team of chemists from the U.S. and France has found compelling evidence of a previously undocumented large volcanic eruption that occurred exactly 200 years ago, in 1809.The discovery, published online this week in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, offers an explanation as to why the decade from 1810 to 1819 is regarded by scientists as the coldest on record for the past 500 years.

Cairo, Asharq Al-Awsat- In my opinion, the Israelite Exodus from Egypt will remain a point of controversy amongst scientists and researchers until the Day of Judgment or until new archaeological evidence is unearthed that is able to settle this issue. However in light of the information currently available to historians and archaeologists, we can do no more than practice moderation and caution.

According to Greek mythology Odysseus, during his 10-year journey home from the 10-year Trojan War, arrived in the Kingdom of the Kikonians, the land of the Thracian people who lived between present-day Lake Vistonida and the estuary of the Evros River, where he tied up his ship. The hero took 12 men and set out to find supplies. Along the way they found a large cave, which turns out to be the home of the fierce Cyclops Polyphemus, the one-eyed (Cyclops) son of Poseidon and Thoosa, who traps them in the cave and devours two of the men for his meal. The next day when Polyphemus returns to the cave with his flock of sheep, Odysseus inebriates him with a strong wine given to him by King Maron. When Polyphemus passes out, Odysseus and his men drive a stake into the Cyclops' eye, blinding him, and escape the cave by tying themselves to the undersides of the sheep.

Spider webs encased in amber which were discovered on an East Sussex beach have been confirmed by scientists as being the world's oldest on record.The amber, which was found in Bexhill by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks and his brother Jonathan, dates back 140 million years to the Cretaceous period.Professor Martin Brasier said they were the earliest webs to be incorporated into the fossil record.He has published his findings in the Journal of the Geological Society.

"There is a likely chance of tsunami waves reaching the shores of Israel," says Dr. Beverly Goodman of the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa following an encompassing geo-archaeological study at the port of Caesarea. "Tsunami events in the Mediterranean do occur less frequently than in the Pacific Ocean, but our findings reveal a moderate rate of recurrence," she says.Dr. Goodman, an expert geo-archaeologist, exposed geological evidence of this by chance. Her original intentions in Caesarea were to assist in research at the ancient port and at offshore shipwrecks.

Australians may have to leave coastal areas as rising sea levels threaten homes, according to a new report.The parliamentary committee report says urgent action is needed, as seas are expected to rise by 80cm (31 inches).About 80% of Australians live in coastal areas, and the report recommends new laws banning further development in coastal regions.Correspondents say the authorities are divided over whether to retreat from rising seas or defend the coastline.

The fossilised skull of a colossal "sea monster" has been unearthed along the UK's Jurassic Coast.

Twice in the Earth's history, living creatures underwent astonishing growth spurts, and each time, new organisms emerged that were a million times larger than anything that had existed before.Scientists say that's the way life on our planet expanded from tiny single-celled microbes billions of years ago to the ponderous whales and lofty sequoia trees that are today's biggest living things.