Newsdesk Archive

Fossil land snail shells found in ancient soils on the subtropical eastern Canary Islands show that the Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa has become progressively drier over the past 50,000 years.Isotopic measurements performed on fossil land snail shells resulted in oxygen isotope ratios that suggest the relative humidity on the islands was higher 50,000 years ago, then experienced a long-term decrease to the time of maximum global cooling and glaciation about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, according to new research by Yurena Yanes, a post-doctoral researcher, and Crayton J. Yapp, a geochemistry professor, both in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species 150 years ago, he deliberately avoided the subject of the origin of life. This, coupled with the mention of the 'Creator' in the last paragraph of the book, led us to believe he was not willing to commit on the matter. An international team, led by Juli Peretó of the Cavanilles Institute in Valencia, now refutes that idea and shows that the British naturalist did explain in other documents how our first ancestors could have come into being.

Most schoolchildren learn that everything in the universe is a solid, a liquid or a gas. But those lessons miss the fourth and by far most common state of matter: plasma.Plasma is like a gas, but many of its atoms have been stripped of an electron or two. These positively charged atoms swim about in a crackling-hot sea of negatively charged loose electrons, making plasmas great electrical conductors.

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.

The Web-only article below is a special rich-media presentation of the feature, "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030", which appears in the November 2009 issue of Scientific American. It was created by FlypMedia.com. Use the arrow in the lower corner to navigate.

On 30 October 2009 the Home Secretary sacked the Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.Professor Nutt has expressed politically unpopular opinions such as -"Alcohol ranks as the fifth most harmful drug after heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone. Tobacco is ranked ninth"and"Cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, while harmful, are ranked lower at 11, 14 and 18 respectively.".

Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and Breaking Open the Head will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout November to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

Dixon, Illinois (CNN) -- William Heirens, the "Lipstick Killer," is believed to be the longest-serving inmate in the United States. He turns 81 on November 15.Diabetes has ravaged his body, but his mind is sharp."Bill's never allowed himself to be institutionalized," said Dolores Kennedy, his long-time friend and advocate. "He's kept himself focused on the positives.".

Throw a stone anywhere in Great Britain and you'll hit a haunted house. But there are plenty in every corner of the U.S., too. That's why for the 24th of our 31 specials for the 31 days of Halloween we're hitting the road to visit houses in our own backyards that have ghost stories attached to them. The tours and the official Web sites may not say too much about the specters seen in the houses, but the legends persist.

Mexico saw the first public protests this weekend over the government's decision to allow cultivation of the first genetically modified corn, which environmentalists and others say could ruin the nation's native crop.About 45 Greenpeace activists hung a black banner and protest signs Sunday at the Angel of Independence, a victory column in a busy traffic circle on one of Mexico City's major thoroughfares. It is one of Mexico City's most recognized monuments.

A new study coauthored by Ian Kuijt, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, describes recent excavations in Jordan that reveal evidence of the world's oldest know granaries. The appearance of the granaries represents a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods.Anthropologists consider food storage to be a vital component in the economic and social package that comprises the Neolithic period, contributing to plant domestication, increasingly sedentary lifestyles and new social organizations. It has traditionally been assumed that people only started to store significant amounts of food when plants were domesticated.

Syria, the land of civilizations and history, is rife with ancient monuments that tell the stories of the many peoples and civilizations that lived in it, whose stories endured in the face of time to tell humanity about their greatness."Beneath every footstep in Syria is an ancient civilization," says Archaeologist Markus Gschwind, head of the Syrian-German Archaeology Expedition working at al-Rafina in Hama. He notes that this saying is repeated around Germany, as most Germans consider Syria the most historically deep-rooted country in the Mediterranean.

The prospects of saving the world's coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough regulations on greenhouse gases are put in place.Scientists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen.

A new book claims even modern athletes could not run as fast, jump as high, or have been nearly as strong as our predecessors.The book, Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister, describes many examples of the inadequacy of the modern male, calling them as a class, "the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet." .

A fleet of 17 buses near Shanghai has been running on ultracapacitors for the past three years, and today that technology is coming to the Washington, DC, for a one-day demonstration. Chinese company Shanghai Aowei Technology Development Company, along with its US partner Sinautec Automobile Technologies, predict that this approach will provide an inexpensive and energy efficient way to power city buses in the near future.

Lucky for us, the Space Age coincided with the Television Age.The space race between the United States and the USSR was only partially about the pursuit of knowledge. It was also a realm to fight the Cold War, a theater of scientific and technological superiority. And the two nations took full advantage of the sublime visual appeal of their missions to promote their agendas to the world.

Why did Barack Obama win the US election and did the fact he is over six feet tall influence the voters? In a synthesis of research, published in Current Biology this month, the authors of the paper 'The Origins and Evolution of Leadership' argue that due to 'a hangover from our evolutionary past' factors like age, sex, height and weight play a major part in the determining our choice of leaders.

EVERY year, 25 languages die out, on average. The world has perhaps 5000 living languages - though estimates vary - so by the end of this century there will be only half this number. In North America alone, there were between 600 and 700 languages when Columbus landed in 1492. This number had fallen to 213 by 1962, of which only 89 languages had speakers ranging from children to the elderly. Since then at least 50 more have gone extinct. For example, the last native speaker of Cupeño died in 1987 in Pala, California, aged 94.

Show me your teeth and I'll tell you where you're from: archaeologists analysing tooth enamel from cattle buried at two Bronze Age barrows have found that at least some of the animals originated from elsewhere, revealing long-distance trading networks in ancient Britain.The 4,000-year-old barrows at Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire and Gayhurst, Buckinghamshire are famous among Bronze Age archaeological sites for the unusual amounts of cattle remains associated with their central human burials. Archaeologists have been puzzled about their meaning since the sites were first excavated in the 1980s and 1990s.

What appears to be the carved top of a sarcophagus was unearthed when builders were excavating and reinforcing a wall alongside the old ruined church in Temple, Midlothian.But the inscriptions, which include symbols similar to those found in Viking monuments, in medieval graves and in West Highland Celtic carvings, have baffled archaeologists.

While many Soldiers head home in the late hours of the second shift, Sgt. Ronald Peters sits at his desk scanning over imagery, maps and the Internet, sometimes as late as 5 a.m., looking for answers.Peters, a geospatial analyst from Fort Lewis, Wash., with Multi-National Corps-Iraq C-7, is undertaking the largest mapping projects of his career. His work is helping to resolve a concern shared by both the U.S. military and the Iraqi government as troops have pulled out of cities and continue the drawdown.

It has been claimed on numerous occasions that Thatcham in Berkshire is the oldest 'continuously inhabited' place in Britain.It even has a place in the 1990 Guinness Book of Records as being the strongest claimant.Whether this is true or not is still a hotly debated subject and is covered in a new history book on the town.However, there is evidence of human occupation within and around Thatcham covering the past 13,000 years or more.

It's often said that a soldier's greatest weapon is his head; now, the U.S. Army plans to sharpen that weapon, installing radar in troops' combat helmets, upgrading one of the oldest pieces of infantry armor into an effective tactical device.The Helmet Mounted Radar Program aims to provide a near-360-degree field for Moving Target Indicator (MTI) radar sensors that is low-power and can detect a moving threat as far out as 25 meters. The sensor should be integrated into the combat helmet and weigh less than two-and-a-half pounds, with less than a pound mounted on the helmet itself.

Autopsies, for all the useful information they provide, have significant downsides. They are often upsetting to the deceased's family, they prevent people from receiving certain kinds of religious burials, and they leave a bit of a mess. To correct for those problems and more, a team at the University of Bern, Switzerland, has developed a robot that can perform virtual autopsies.

Anthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London talks about Neandertals. And Scientific American's Kate Wong, co-author with Donald Johanson of Lucy's Legacy, talks about the discovery and impact of the famous Lucy fossil. Plus, we test your knowledge of some recent science in the news.

It's not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: "What keeps you awake at night?"The discussion was part of "Quantum to Cosmos", a 10-day physics extravaganza, which ends on Sunday.

PORTLAND, OREGON: A shift in Jupiter's orbit early in the life of the Solar System dislodged thousands of rocks from the Asteroid Belt, causing them to hit the inner planets, including Earth.Evidence for this cataclysmic bombardment comes from a reanalysis of lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts and a careful study of lunar craters, said David Kring, a planetary geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock.

In 1954, this pyramid was discovered at Saqqara by the Egyptian archaeologist, Zakaria Goneim. It is called the Unfinished Pyramid because it was never completed by its builder, the last king of the 3rd Dynasty, Sekhemkhet.

This month, the state of Texas granted its first-ever offshore lease for a wave-powered energy system to Renew Blue's Seadog Pump. The system, which will be used to power a desalination plant for ocean water, is more than halfway constructed; its executives expect it to be up and running by the winter. PM sat down with Mark Thomas, founder and CEO of Renew Blue, to talk about how this technology works, whether wave power will ever be competitive with wind and solar and why it has failed to be successful so far.

Super-cements similar to the ancient concrete used to build the pyramids might defeat even the U.S. Air Force's largest non-nuclear bunker buster to date.Wired's Danger Room has a rundown on how French researcher Joseph Davidovits uncovered the chemistry of geopolymers, or super-cements. Davidovits also put forth the theory that the Egyptian pyramids were built using a similar type of geopolymer limestone concrete -- an idea supported by X-ray and microscopic study samples.

Bolivia is primarily known for two things: being the poorest country in South America, and having a president with a terrible haircut. However, it might soon be known for a third thing: lithium. Turns out Bolivia has the world's largest reserves of the light metal, and according to Foreign Policy, that positions Bolivia as the Saudi Arabia of our carbon-less, battery-powered future.Lithium already pervades our technology-obsessed society, powering everything from laptops to cell phones to, increasingly, cars. As more and more cars switch from gas to batteries, the demand for lithium will only increase. In fact, consumption of the metal is expected to rise three fold in the next 15 years.

Even before a single ounce of natural gas gets burned in a home or power plant, massive amounts of CO2 have already been released. The process of extracting natural gas releases carbon dioxide pent up in the same wells as the gas, thus adding to the climate-changing impact of the fuel.To help lower the global warming impact of one of the world's largest natural gas fields, General Electric has supplied Chevron, Exxon Mobile and Shell with enough compression "trains"--the pumps and turbines that do the sequestering--to create the world's largest carbon sequestration project. The trains will pump 3.3 million tons of CO2 released from natural gas mining back into the ground every year. That's the equivalent of taking 630,000 cars off the road.

PYONGYANG, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has unearthed more than 14,000 historical relics and remains dated back to the Old Stone Age, the official KCNA news agency said Saturday.Two layers of culture were found in the natural limestone Chongphadae Cavern, Huangju County, North Hwanghae Province.

A comet impact didn't set off a 1,300-year cold snap that wiped out most life in North America about 12,900 years ago, scientists say.Though no one disputes the occurrence of the frigid period, known as the Younger Dryas, more and more researchers have been unable to confirm a 2007 finding that says a collision triggered the change.

Professor David Nutt, the government's chief drug adviser, has been sacked a day after claiming that ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol.Nutt incurred the wrath of the government when he claimed in a paper that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis.

Alexander the Great has long been credited with being the first to settle the area along Egypt's coast that became the great port city of Alexandria. But in recent years, evidence has been mounting that other groups of people were there first.The latest clues that settlements existed in the area for several hundred years before Alexander the Great come from microscopic bits of pollen and charcoal in ancient sediment layers.

The Batavians, who lived in the Netherlands at the start of the Christian era were far more Roman than was previously thought. After just a few decades of Roman occupation, the Batavians had become so integrated that they cooked, built and bathed in a Roman manner. Dutch researcher Stijn Heeren discovered this during archaeological research.

The discovery of 17 wooden statues at Chan Chan are enough to change our understanding of the Chan Chan urban centre. Embedded in the walls of the later Ñain An complex, also known as Bandelier, the figures are thought to have bid farewell to the deceased leaders.Discovered four months ago, but revealed to the public just yesterday, archaeologist Cristóbal Campana explains that the wooden figures were intended to lead the transition from worldly to divine. This would give the complex, Ñain Am, one of many large urban administrative centres that were closed off once the ruler that built them had died, another function not yet realised.

Humans were living and thriving on open grassland in Africa as early as 2 million years ago, making stone tools and using them to butcher zebra and other animals. That's according to powerful evidence from artefacts found at Kanjera South, an archaeological site in south-west Kenya."There is no clear evidence of any hominin being associated with or foraging in open grassland prior to this 2-million-year-old site," says Thomas Plummer of Queens College at the City University of New York.

The world's oldest known submerged town has been revealed through the discovery of late Neolithic pottery. The finds were made during an archaeological survey of Pavlopetri, off the southern Laconia coast of Greece.Marine geo-archaeologist Dr Nic Flemming of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton said: "The discovery of Neolithic pottery is incredible! It means that we are looking at a port city which may be 5000-6000 years old, with trade goods and wrecks nearby showing some of the very earliest days of seafaring trade in the Mediterranean.".

A team of Spanish and Portuguese researchers has carried out molecular genetic analysis of the Y chromosome (transmitted only by males) of the aboriginal population of the Canary Islands to determine their origin and the extent to which they have survived in the current population. The results suggest a North African origin for these paternal lineages which, unlike maternal lineages, have declined to the point of being practically replaced today by European lineages.

BEIJING, Oct. 20 (Xinhua) -- Some 300 paleoanthropologists gathered in Beijing Tuesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the discovery of the first complete skull of Peking Man, the homo erectus that lived near Beijing 700,000 years ago.

When Spanish conquistadors seized the Inka emperor Atawalpa in 1532, they demanded an enormous ransom of silver and gold. For weeks, llama trains carried tons of gold and silver statues, cups, and other objects to the Europeans, who then ordered them melted down to ingots for transport back to Spain. Such an enormous stash suggests that the Andean people knew sophisticated metallurgy, but there has been little evidence to support this. Now a team of geologists and archaeologists have found clues that these indigenous people refined gold with mercury amalgamation, an important metallurgical technique that is still in use today.

Remember the "fossil that will change everything"? When Darwinius masillae, nicknamed Ida, was revealed to the world back in May, an avalanche of PR hype claimed it as a "missing link" in human evolution. This lemur-like creature, the promotional campaign had it, was an ancestor of us all.Plenty of doubts were raised about this at the time -- including here on this blog -- both about Ida's claim to a place on the human branch of the primate family tree, and the wisdom of producing popular films and books about scientific discoveries that have yet to be published and peer-reviewed. Today has brought a fresh twist.

Legislators from 16 major economies will meet on Saturday to seek consensus on a raft of climate-related policies ahead of December talks in Copenhagen.The 120 delegates believe that the policies could address 70% of the emissions cuts necessary before 2020.A consensus, if reached, could ensure the policies are put into practice regardless of the outcome of the landmark climate talks in December.

Experts asked to review the US human spaceflight programme have given strong support to the use of commercial services to launch astronauts.The Augustine panel published its final report on Thursday and said America could find cheaper, faster successors to the shuttle in the private sector.The US space agency is developing two new rockets and a crew capsule.But the committee has told President Barack Obama that these systems no longer meet the US's immediate needs.

A wind turbine blade that absorbs radar signals has been demonstrated at a wind farm in eastern England.Wind turbines confuse aviation radar signals, making aircraft in wind farms' vicinities difficult to track.Defence firm Qinetiq and turbine manufacturing firm Vestas are developing "stealth turbines", with radar-absorbing materials and coatings.The five-year effort may help many wind farm projects that are on hold because of so-called "radar clutter" concerns.

With a growing budget deficit, there's not much appetite in Washington to increase NASA's funding. So some of what the agency does now, such as shipping cargo to the space station, will almost certainly be picked up by private companies.Bretton Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, tells NPR's Guy Raz that companies are already preparing to take over low-Earth orbital services such as space trucking.

Oct. 23, 2009 -- Legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart most likely died on an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).Tall, slender, blonde and brave, Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Her final resting place has long been a mystery.

Despite the sheer enormity of our planet, we humans are far more closely related than we should be.The evidence is all around us: Biologists, for example, have long known that measurements of skulls yield far more similarities among Asians, Europeans and Native Americans than among indigenous African populations. As humans migrated out of Africa, humanity lost much of its genetic diversity.But exactly how this happened has become a matter of intense debate.

Behemoth beavers that lived in North America during the last ice age ate little if any material from trees, a new analysis suggests.The extinct giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, was just one species of large animals, or megafauna, stalking the North American landscape near the end of the last ice age. Fossils indicate that the creature was about twice the size of its modern-day cousin and therefore weighed between 60 and 100 kilograms, says Catherine Yansa, a paleoecologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Even as a rocket designed to help carry astronauts back to the Moon awaits take-off in Florida this week, asteroids have been singled out as the favoured destination for man's return to outer space.An expert panel appointed by President Barack Obama to assess America's future spaceflight programme last week recommended bypassing the Moon in favour of a mission that sounds as if it is straight out of science-fiction.The target would be an as yet-unidentified asteroid - one of the countless ancient pieces of debris from the dawn of the solar system that still circle the sun. It might measure just 500 yards across, with a surface area no greater than the Vatican City.

Professor Paabo, who is director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institution for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the claim at a conference in the Cold Springs Laboratory in New York.But Prof Paabo said he was unclear if the couplings had led to children, of if they were capable of producing offspring."What I'm really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?" he said in an article in The Sunday Times.

The rationale behind torture is that pain will make the guilty confess, but a new study by researchers at Harvard University finds that the pain of torture can make even the innocent seem guilty.Participants in the study met a woman suspected of cheating to win money. The woman was then "tortured" by having her hand immersed in ice water while study participants listened to the session over an intercom. She never confessed to anything, but the more she suffered during the torture, the guiltier she was perceived to be.

NASA's first flight test of its Ares I-X booster is only slated to last two minutes, but it represents the culmination of years of work by the rocket-minded ATK Space Systems in Utah and almost 1,000 other NASA workers and private contractors across 17 states.To ensure that they see the fruits of their labor, technicians have installed more than 700 sensors on the $445 million Ares I-X test vehicle. That electronic swarm should provide engineers with a smorgasbord of flight data, and has led to a few jokes regarding the sensor-studded rocket.

Art experts think they may have found the world's oldest painting to feature an image of a watch.The Science Museum is investigating the 450-year-old portrait, thought to be of Cosimo I de Medici, Duke of Florence, holding a golden timepiece.Curators have sent their findings to renaissance experts at the Uffizi gallery in Florence, and are awaiting their comments.The painting is being shown as part of the museum's Measuring Time gallery.

Tiny crystals could hold the key to creating computers with massive storage capacity, scientists believe.The crystals could be used as storage devices for desktop computers capable of holding 100-times more data than current systems.Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have been using low-energy lasers to make salt crystals in gel.

A review of a trial of a HIV vaccine in Thailand has concluded that it does show real signs of a protective effect.Scientists announced last month that a combination of vaccines gave a 31% level of protection in trials among 16,000 heterosexuals aged 18-30.Doubts had been raised about whether the finding was significant.

Centenarians with the bodies of 50-year-olds will one day be a realistic possibility, say scientists.

Without it international travel would be in turmoil and calling friends in faraway places at the right time impossible. Exactly 125 years after the Greenwich Meridian line was drawn, how and why did Britain become the centre of time?At longitude 0° 0' 00", the arbitrary stroke on our maps that passes from pole to pole and bisects the UK, France, Spain, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana divides the Earth into east and west, just as the Equator splits it into north and south.This imaginary line now known as the Greenwich Prime Meridian not only allows us to navigate the globe but also keeps the world ticking to the same symbolic 24-hour clock.But it has not always been so.

Over the last few months I have been on an extraordinary journey to find out what makes me "me".I have had my brain scanned, tricked, electrocuted, drugged in a plethora of different experiments in my attempt to find out what it is that gives me the feeling that there is someone inside my head.Science calls it the search for consciousness. I call it the search for "me".I was not always aware of myself as a human being separate from those around me.But at what point does this self-awareness kick-in? .

The UK should plough £2bn ($3.3bn) into crop research to help stave off world hunger, says the Royal Society.It says the world's growing population means food production will have to rise by about 50% in 40 years and the UK can lead the research needed.Approaches it endorses include genetic modification, improved irrigation and systems of growing crops together that reduce the impact of diseases.

Archaeologists have discovered a Staffordshire Knot symbol among the treasures of the Staffordshire Hoard, making the county sign 500 years older than previously thought.The discovery comes as it emerged a National Lottery bid is being put together to keep the Hoard in the region.Images of the knot were found on a gold artefact, not previously displayed, that was dug up from a field near Brownhills this summer.

A disused stone quarry on the Greek island of Crete which is riddled with an elaborate network of underground tunnels could be the original site of the ancient Labyrinth, the mythical maze that housed the half-bull, half-man Minotaur of Greek legend.An Anglo-Greek team of scholars who undertook an expedition to the quarry this summer believes that the site, near the town of Gortyn in the south of the island, has just as much claim to be the place of the Labyrinth as the Minoan palace at Knossos 20 miles away, which has been synonymous with the Minotaur myth since its excavation a century ago.

Easy digging in Egypt's ancient Valley of the Kings might mean tough problems today for conservation efforts, suggests a mapping study.Of the 63 tombs in the Valley of the Kings, so far 30 have been identified by Katarin and Richard Parizek of Penn State as lying on rock fractures prone to flooding, damaging the ancient tombs."It seems that tomb builders may have intentionally exploited these avenues of less resistant limestone when creating tombs," says Katarin Parizek, in a statement.

For the first time, researchers have made a clinical diagnosis by sequencing the entire protein-coding parts of a person's genome."We have shown that one can use whole genome sequencing to make clinically meaningful diagnoses- it is technically feasible . . . and can provide new clinical insight that directs treatment," Richard Lifton, a geneticist at Yale who spearheaded the research, told Popsci.com.Protein-coding DNA only makes up about one percent of the human genome, but is responsible for about a large portion of diseases with a genetic component.

For some time, physicists have theorized about the existence of alternate universes. In fact, some models of physics require multiple universes, to explain some rarely observed phenomena. But, other than obvious ones like The Man In The High Castle Universe where the Nazis won WWII, the Earth-295 Age of Apocalypse Universe, and the Terran Empire "Mirror Mirror" Universe, just how many alternate universes are there? Well, some Stanford University physicists have answered that question, and the magic number is: 10^10^16 other realities.

During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn't believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

History books tell us that the first Chinese settlers to Canada arrived in Victoria about 150 years ago, but a U.S. researcher says she has solid evidence that they came earlier. Some 4,000 years earlier.That would be 3,500 years before 1492, when European explorer Christopher "Columbus sailed the ocean blue.".

Jerusalem's geology has been crucial in molding it into one of the most religiously important cities on the planet, according to a new study.It started in the year 1000 BCE, when the Jebusite city's water system proved to be its undoing. The Spring of Gihon sat just outside the city walls, a vital resource in the otherwise parched region. But King David, in tent on taking the city, sent an elite group of his soldiers into a karst limestone tunnel that fed the spring. His men climbed up through a cave system hollowed out by flowing water, infiltrated beneath the city walls, and attacked from the inside. David made the city the capital of his new kingdom, and Israel was born.

A University of Michigan professor is developing an electric rocket thruster, NanoFET, that uses nanoparticle electric propulsion and enables spacecraft to travel faster and with less propellant than previous technology allowed.The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding Professor Alec D. Gallimore's research because particle electric propulsion, with its half-inch thruster, increases velocity by several hundred or thousand miles an hour and is expected to have a dramatic impact on nanosatellites and larger spacecraft. These electric fields help to create thrust when the particles are charged, accelerated and propelled into space.

Most of the technology needed to shift the world from fossil fuel to clean, renewable energy already exists. Implementing that technology requires overcoming obstacles in planning and politics, but doing so could result in a 30 percent decrease in global power demand, say Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California-Davis researcher Mark Delucchi.

Cancer cells fueled by the mutant KRAS oncogene, which makes them notoriously difficult to treat, can be killed by blocking a more vulnerable genetic partner of KRAS, report scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is once again colder than deep space as it is prepared for experiments to resume in late November.The LHC's eight sectors have all been cooled to 1.9 kelvin (-271 C, or -456 F) using cryogenic lines containing liquid helium. This operating temperature is colder than conditions in deep space, which is estimated to be 2.7 K. Zero K is the lowest temperature possible.

LOS ANGELES - Scientists say fossil bones housed at a Los Angeles museum belong to the smallest dinosaur discovered in North America.Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, said Tuesday the newly identified creature weighed less than two pounds and stood about 2 feet tall.It likely ate plants and hunted bugs during the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago.

Stem cells and electronics can help restore vision to people who've been blinded by retinal diseases, scientists reported in Chicago at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.Diseases of the retina cause blindness by damaging the cells that line the back of the eye, where images of the world are normally transformed into nerve impulses that go to the brain.

MICROSCOPES revolutionised the study of life on Earth. Now a rugged, easy-to-use instrument is aiming to be equally influential in the search for alien life in locations such as the oceans beneath the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa.The hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life usually focuses on detecting molecules associated with living organisms. Direct observation through optical imaging would be more conclusive, so Hans Kreuzer and Manfred Jericho at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and their colleagues have taken a different approach. They have built a robust microscope that can be dunked into water to detect any microscopic life forms that may be swimming or floating there.

PETER MITCHELL was an eccentric figure. For much of his career he worked in his own lab in a restored manor house in Cornwall in the UK, his research funded in part by a herd of dairy cows. His ideas about the most basic process of life - how it gets energy - seemed ridiculous to his fellow biologists."I remember thinking to myself that I would bet anything that [it] didn't work that way," biochemist Leslie Orgel wrote of his meeting with Mitchell half a century ago. "Not since Darwin and Wallace has biology come up with an idea as counter-intuitive as those of, say, Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger.

Is 2012 the end of the world?If you scan the Internet or believe the marketing campaign behind the movie "2012," scheduled for release in November, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Dozens of books and fake science websites are prophesying the arrival of doomsday that year, by means of a rogue planet colliding with the Earth or some other cataclysmic event.

The graves are located just outside the city of Oechlitz, on the railroad track connecting the major eastern city of Leipzig with its neighbor to the southwest, Erfurt.They were first discovered after construction had begun on an ICE express train line. Scientists have ascertained that a number of skeletons are from the Bronze Age, as the corpses were stacked on top of one another, suggesting that they were buried in what is known as a "layered grave." .

The answer to one of Spain's great historical mysteries is believed to lie in an area of olive-clad mountainside, the size of half a football pitch.The site has been fenced off and placed under 24-hour guard, such is the sensitivity of what is about to take place.This remote spot, between the Andalucian villages of Viznar and Alfacar, is where the poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered before daybreak on 18 August 1936 - by gunmen loyal to General Francisco Franco.

Vellore, Oct 19 (PTI A four-and-a-half feet tall stone slab with inscriptions in Sanskrit and Tamil, believed to be dating back to the Pallava dynasty, has been unearthed by labourers at a village in Tamil Nadu.Archaeologist and researcher at Vellore Fort Museum, Kamalanathan, said the stone slab might be as old as the Pallava period.

Scientists have extracted a tooth from the head of a 4,000-year-old mummy to obtain valuable DNA information in the hope of identifying the ancient Egyptian.Scientists started their identification project with an unsuccessful attempt to extract DNA from a small patch of skin from the neck of the mummy and a finger that had been recovered from the tomb.They rooted the way to where the genetic material was most likely to be intact - deep in the pulp of a tooth. After a three-hour operation scientists yielded a tooth that might reveal the identity of the ancient Egyptian.

They didn't leave many signs that they had been here, those who lived here before us near the mouth of the St. Johns River, along the Beaches, on the barrier islands to the north.There was no local rock to mold, no metals to work. There were just piles of shells from the oysters they ate and burial mounds where people were laid to rest after often elaborate ceremonies.Among those mounds, archaeologists have found a few scattered treasures: tiny cobs of corn, shell arrowheads and decorations, shards of pottery. They also discovered pieces of copper and rock that provide tantalizing clues that these people were hardly isolated here at the salty edge of the continent.

Urbanisation has long been at odds with wildlife.However, scientists have found a turtle that does better in a suburban habitat than it does in nature reserves.Eastern long-necked turtles living in the suburbs of Australia have larger home ranges and cope better with periods of drought.The reptiles also appear to grow and survive better, suggesting suburban environments may sometimes be superior places to live than natural ones.

Remember Ida, the fossil discovery announced last May with its own book and TV documentary? A publicity blitz called it "the link" that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans.Experts protested that Ida wasn't even a close relative. And now a new analysis supports their reaction.

Thirty-two planets have been discovered outside Earth's solar system through the use of a high-precision instrument installed at a Chilean telescope, an international team announced Monday.The existence of the so-called exoplanets -- planets outside our solar system -- was announced at the European Southern Observatory/Center for Astrophysics, University of Porto conference in Porto, Portugal, according to a statement issued by the observatory.

THE birth of the US Appalachian mountain chain may have been behind a major ice age and a mass extinction.The extinction event at the end of the Ordovician 450 million years ago was the second largest Earth has ever seen. It has long been believed that an ice age caused it, but no one knew what triggered the freeze.

2002: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is officially dedicated in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. It is a conscious attempt, even down to its Latin name, to recreate the Royal Library of Alexandria, the largest library in the ancient world.The library, which sits facing the Mediterranean Sea not far from the site of its illustrious ancestor, is actually a vast complex of scientific and cultural repositories. Besides the library itself, which boasts shelf space for roughly 8 million books, there are three museums (Antiquities, Manuscripts and the History of Science), a planetarium, a conference center, gallery space for art exhibitions, and a number of academic research centers.

Almost a decade after the human genome project laid bare the building blocks of life, scientists have figured out how they work together to create a living person.The genome project identified about 25,000 genes that are needed to make a healthy human being, but said nothing about how they combine to produce everything from hearts and minds to legs and livers.

How do you fly on a world with no atmosphere? Wings won't work and neither do propellers. And don't even try that parachute!NASA engineer Brian Mulac has the answer. "All it takes is practice, practice, practice," he says. "And of course, thrusters."The space agency is perfecting the art using a prototype lunar lander at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Scientists have identified an unexpected metabolic ability in a symbiotic community of deep-sea microorganisms. It may help solve a lingering mystery about the world's nitrogen cycle.The element nitrogen is a critical part of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and therefore essential to all life. Although nitrogen is plentiful on Earth--it represents 78 percent of the atmosphere, by volume--the element is usually found strongly bonded to itself.To be biologically useful, a nitrogen atom must be released from this coupling and converted to a reduced, or "fixed," state; reduced nitrogen atoms gain an electron, which makes them chemically reactive.

Contestants on TV shows like Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen know that their meat-cutting skills will be scrutinized by a panel of unforgiving judges. Now, new archaeological evidence is getting the same scrutiny by scientists at Tel Aviv University and the University of Arizona.Their research is providing new clues about how, where and when our communal habits of butchering meat developed, and they're changing the way anthropologists, zoologists and archaeologists think about our evolutionary development, economics and social behaviors through the millennia.

KIMMIRUT - An archeologist from the Canadian Museum of Civilization was in Kimmirut in September, studying ancient sites and sharing what she has learned with the people who inherited the land.Patricia Sutherland, the museum's curator of Arctic archeology, has been in and out of Kimmirut for years, following up on local discoveries which have interested researchers since the 1960s.

The first results from Nasa's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (Ibex) spacecraft have shown unexpected features at our Solar System's edge.Ibex was launched nearly one year ago to map the heliosphere, the region of space defined by the extent of our Sun's solar wind.Ibex's first glimpses show that the heliosphere is not shaped as many astronomers have believed.A series of papers in the journal Science outlines the results.

When I hear the phrase "knock-off Chinese products", I usually think of either the bootleg DVDs I get on the subway or the cheap electronics I get in Midtown. But a new report in Defense Professionals notes that the Chinese military has channeled that same skill for replication towards closing their UAV technology gap. By simply copying US technology, China has created a stock of advanced drones, and gained the technical knowledge to create some interesting native UAVs as well.

Emergency medical care for soldiers wounded on the battlefield has come a long way since Hawkeye and Hot Lips. But for Special Forces troopers operating deep behind enemy lines, that care often remains out of reach. Blood loss in particular makes seconds count, and imperils commandos operating far away from friendly bases.To help with the problem of blood loss from traumatic wounds, the military has started field-testing a device more Mandalorian than M.A.S.H.: a plasma knife.

Checking in with NASA's Cassini spacecraft, our current emissary to Saturn, some 1.5 billion kilometers (932 million miles) distant from Earth, we find it recently gathering images of the Saturnian system at equinox. During the equinox, the sunlight casts long shadows across Saturn's rings, highlighting previously known phenomena and revealing a few never-before seen images. Cassini continues to orbit Saturn, part of its extended Equinox Mission, funded through through September 2010. A proposal for a further extension is under consideration, one that would keep Cassini in orbit until 2017, ending with a spectacular series of orbits inside the rings followed by a suicide plunge into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017.

Brazil's indigenous Akuntsu tribe has been whittled to only five members after the group's oldest, Urur, died.The ancient Amazonian tribe a generation ago boasted several hundred members, but has effectively been destroyed by a tragic mixture of hostility and neglect.The survivors represent all that is left of a once-vibrant civilisation which had its own religion and language, and only made contact with modern Brazil towards the end of last century.