Newsdesk Archive

Genetic information from an extinct species of bison preserved in permafrost for thousands of years could help improve modern agricultural livestock and breeding programs, according to University of Adelaide researchers.Researchers from the University's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) worked with an international team of genomics researchers to analyse the genetic mutations of an ancient bison, many modern cattle breeds and members of the larger ruminant family tree, including deer, antelopes, and giraffes.

Almost 30 years into the AIDS epidemic, scientists have yet to find an effective vaccine against HIV, the virus that destroys the immune system and causes AIDS. HIV is perhaps the most adaptive virus ever seen, not only evading the immune system, but also antiviral medicines.Because this genetic slipperiness also makes the virus a difficult target for vaccine makers, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist is embarking on a brand-new effort to sidestep this evasive behavior.

A Cambridge physicist who pioneered the idea that everything in the universe is made up of tiny vibrating strings of energy is to succeed Stephen Hawking in the most prestigious academic post in the world.Professor Michael Green, a fellow of the Royal Society and co-founder of the fiendishly complex idea of string theory, was offered the position of Lucasian professor of mathematics following a meeting at the university this month.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Gallup's October Crime poll finds 44% of Americans in favor of making marijuana legal and 54% opposed. U.S. public support for legalizing marijuana was fixed in the 25% range from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but acceptance jumped to 31% in 2000 and has continued to grow throughout this decade.Public opinion is virtually the same on a question that relates to a public policy debate brewing in California -- whether marijuana should be legalized and taxed as a way of raising revenue for state governments. Just over 4 in 10 Americans (42%) say they would favor this in their own state; 56% are opposed. Support is markedly higher among residents of the West -- where an outright majority favor the proposal -- than in the South and Midwest. The views of Eastern residents fall about in the middle.

A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Engineers have found a way to communicate continuously with Mars in a research project to help manned space missions.

Security staff at Manchester Airport have been banned from using new "see-through" security scanners on passengers aged under 18.The full-body scans, unveiled earlier this month in Terminal 2, are aimed at revealing hidden weapons or explosives, but also show people's bodies.A civil rights group believes the scans could breach laws protecting childrenThe scans have been temporarily stopped for young people while legal advice is sought, said the airport.

Astronomers announced today the discovery of 32 extrasolar planets, some just five times the mass of Earth and others five times heftier than giant Jupiter.The findings significantly boost the number of planets closer to Earth in size and help astronomers better understand what types of stars birth what kinds of planets.

Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, was certain that humankind's knack for monetary exchange belonged to humankind alone. ''Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog,'' he wrote. ''Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.'' But in a clean and spacious laboratory at Yale-New Haven Hospital, seven capuchin monkeys have been taught to use money, and a comparison of capuchin behavior and human behavior will either surprise you very much or not at all, depending on your view of humans.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Archaeologists have unearthed the site of a pharaonic-era sacred lake in a temple to the Egyptian goddess Mut in the ruins of ancient Tanis, the Culture Ministry said on Thursday.The ministry said the lake, found 12 meters below ground at the San al-Hagar archaeological site in Egypt's eastern Nile Delta, was 15 meters long and 12 meters wide and built out of limestone blocks. It was in a good condition.

A Maui resort community is slated for a new smart grid, courtesy of General Electric. The power grid will cut back energy costs by automatically turning off household appliances when electricity prices soar, and aims for the 2012 goal of reducing peak electricity consumption by 15 percent.The community of Wailea will see new power meters in homes that help monitor electricity usage among different appliances, according to AP. Part of the project also involves upgrading utility computers so that they can better integrate renewable energy from more unpredictable sources such as solar and wind.

The basis of a human body's cells' ability to communicate with one another is the vesicle. That little ball packed with biological material is the medium through which all of our billions of cells coordinate with each other to keep our conscious stable and our bodies responsive. However, despite that importance, high resolution live imagery of cell and vesicle interaction has remained elusive.Now, scientists from the University of Copenhagen have succeeded producing the first hi-res live recording of the interaction. In the nearer term, this development could greatly assist the study of diseases, like schizophrenia and Huntington's, that result from vesicle-cell interaction failure.

Thousands of ancient Cyprian artifacts, images and documents will soon be available to view and search online, thanks to a research partnership between Penn State and the Cyprus Institute.

Could astronomers accidentally blind Earth-observing satellites? That seems to be the worry of the US air force, which restricts the use of lasers pointed at the sky to help focus telescopes. But some astronomers warn they will miss key observations under the rules, which have tightened in recent years.Many of the world's largest observatories, including Lick, Gemini North, Palomar and Keck in the US, shine lasers into the sky to measure atmospheric turbulence, which distorts images.

The Naval Research Laboratory's Ion Tiger, a hydrogen-powered fuel cell unmanned air vehicle (UAV), has flown 23 hours and 17 minutes, setting an unofficial flight endurance record for a fuel-cell powered flight.The test flight took place on October 9th through 10th at Aberdeen Proving Ground. The Ion Tiger fuel cell development system team is led by NRL and includes Protonex Technology Corporation, the University of Hawaii, and HyperComp Engineering. The program is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

It may seem as unlikely as a jackalope, but this newfound pterosaur "hodgepodge" is the real deal, paleontologists say.Scientists at the U.K.'s University of Leicester initially saw images of the flying reptile fossils earlier this year, and "our first thought was, Oh dear, it looks like a fake," said study co-author David Unwin.

To help save energy on warships, the navy might one day deploy underwater robots that help vessels conserve fuel by scrubbing their hulls clean to make them cut through the water better.As harmless as barnacles on hulls might seem to landlubbers, these crustaceans generate "increased drag as these ships move from port to port across the world's oceans," explained Office of Naval Research program officer Steve McElvany.

SALT LAKE CITY - Paleontologists say analysis of a vast collection of broken dinosaur bones unearthed in southeast Utah indicates that they were trampled by other dinosaurs shortly after they died.Brigham Young University scientists have spent years analyzing more than 4,000 bones from a quarry just west of Arches National Park.

An independent study has cast more doubt on a controversial theory that a comet exploded over icy North America nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out the Clovis people and many of the continent's large animals.

Cairo: Early this month, rescue teams spent four days desperately trying to save six Egyptians, who had been trapped in a large hole beneath a house near the Pyramid of Giza while hunting for a centuries-old treasure. The rescuers eventually hauled them up as dead bodies.The six people were allegedly fooled by a charlatan into believing that there was an antique treasure lying hidden beneath the house owned by one of them, said Abdul Majuid Mahmoud, a resident in the area of Nazlat Al Samman, where the tragedy occurred.

Patrick McGovern had just emerged from the ancient burial chamber in one of the most extensively excavated archaeological sites in China when a local scientist presented him with what he calls "the real treasure."It was a sealed bronze drinking vessel that resembled a teapot from 1200 B.C.With liquid still inside.

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) - An Indian tribe says plans to build a commercial wind farm in western Ohio pose a threat to an ancient burial mound and the state should put a barrier around it to keep it from being disturbed.

XI'AN: Beardless warriors had been discovered among China's terracotta army, providing evidence of the youthful ages of some soldiers when the army was created more than 2,000 years ago.

"We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals."John Hawks -University of Wisconsin anthropologistIn a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.

Scan highway billboards, flick on your TV or listen very long to the radio and you'll probably come across an ad from a hospital touting robot-assisted surgery as the way to go for treating prostate cancer.The main selling point boils down to a promise of precision. An unflappable robot allows a surgeon to operate through tiny incisions and make such careful work of prostate removal that dreaded side effects--impotence and incontinence--are vastly reduced compared with a surgeon operating alone. Right? Wrong, say researchers who analyzed years of data on experience with the gee-whiz technology.

Silicon wafers. Quantum computing. Light-based processors. Any way you slice it, scientists say that processor speeds will absolutely max out at a certain point, regardless of how hardware or software are implemented.Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli, two researchers at the University of Boston, devised an equation which sets a fundamental limit for quantum computing speeds. According to their studies, a perfect quantum computer can generate 10 quadrillion more operations per second than fastest current processors. They estimate that the maximum speed will be reached in 75 years.

Well, here it is. National Geographic has plotted the route of every space mission carried out over the last 50 years onto a map of the solar system, giving a nice visual look at the history of space travel.Each line represents a different space mission, highlighting notable missions, including those from different countries, those of historical significance, and those which have failed.

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee is nearing the end of its role in spaceflogjht history. The committee, which is commonly referred to as the Augustine Commission after its leader Norman Augustine, concluded that even NASA's current plans to return to the Moon would require significantly more funds, some $3 billion more per year, bringing the agency's annual budget to more than $20 billion. One of the most talked-about aspects of the report is its so-called Flexible Option, which provides an increase in funding to NASA, without constructing an ironclad schedule or set of destinations. As the committee's work winds down, it's now up to NASA to consider the findings, and offer specific recommendations to the Obama administration. Some of the leading experts weighed in.

THE balmy south of France has always been a magnet for sun worshippers. So it is perhaps fitting that here, not far from the Côte d'Azur, an international team of researchers is building a machine to recreate the sun. It will take tens of thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete, plus a whole host of more unusual materials: beryllium, niobium, titanium and tungsten; frigid liquid nitrogen and helium. Oh, and a supply of burnt coconuts.

Named for a Dutch physicist, the Casimir effect governs interactions of matter with the energy that is present in a vacuum. Success in harnessing this force could someday help researchers develop low-friction ballistics and even levitating objects that defy gravity. For now, the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a two-year, $10-million project encouraging scientists to work on ways to manipulate this quirk of quantum electrodynamics.

Britney E. Schmidt, a UCLA doctoral student in the department of Earth and space sciences, wasn't sure what she'd glean from images of the asteroid Pallas taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But she hoped to settle at least one burning question: Was Pallas, the second-largest asteroid, actually in that gray area between an asteroid and a small planet?The answer, she found, was yes. Pallas, like its sister asteroids Ceres and Vesta, was that rare thing: an intact protoplanet.

The orbiting sister spacecraft to two NASA probes that slammed into the moon last week has beamed home images and temperature maps of the two intentional crashes.The Diviner instrument aboard NASA's powerful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took infrared observations of the impact, flying over the moon crash site of the agency's LCROSS probe and its Centaur rocket stage about 90 seconds after impact at a height of about 50 miles up.

At times, it seems like NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity will last forever on the red planet.Since 2004, the twin rovers have explored different parts of Mars with amazing longevity that has astounded scientists almost as much as the data the robots have beamed back to Earth. Spirit and Opportunity have shed light on the history of water on Mars in the distant past, explored Martian hills and meteorites, and even rolled inside craters to probe ever-deeper into the planet's geologic history.

Archaeological discoveries: Two mural paintings portraying Heaven and Hell were discovered at al-Marqab Citadel in Tartous, Director-General of Ruins and Museums Bassam Jamous said to Syrian al-Thawra Daily on Saturday.Jamous indicated that the paintings reveal the sophisticated capabilities of the Syrian artists and highlight social and religious rituals.NOTE: Follow Link button will not work for this. Click HERE

A dusty red planet and an icy moon of Jupiter may hold the best hopes for scientists trying to track down extraterrestrial life, at least in this solar system.Mars and Europa each hold the promise of liquid water and possibly life. Mars has a history that suggests water once flowed in rivers and lakes, and it may still harbor liquid water deep underground. The more distant Europa could hide a churning ocean filled with life forms beneath its icy surface, as the moon gets gravitationally squeezed by Jupiter.

France decided on Friday to return to Egypt five relics stolen from Luxor's Valley of the Kings and sold to the Louvre, two days after Cairo severed ties with the Paris museum in protest.A special commission of the French museums agency decided unanimously to hand over the five painted wall fragments after ruling that they were indeed stolen in the 1980s before ending up at the Louvre in 2000 and 2003."Restitution is now just a matter of weeks," said a culture ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity..

A trial of a scanner that produces "naked" images of passengers has begun at Manchester Airport.The authorities say it will speed up security checks by quickly revealing any concealed weapons or explosives.But the full body scans will also show up breast enlargements, body piercings and a clear black-and-white outline of passengers' genitals.The airport has stressed that the images are not pornographic and will be destroyed straight away.

The scientists found that lying is more obvious in a drawing than in a spoken description.Volunteers who were asked to lie about a cloak-and-dagger mission were less likely to include a picture of a person they met on their trip in a drawing, compared to 80 per cent of test subjects who were instructed to tell the truth.Lead researcher Professor Aldert Vrij said: "A drawing creates several unique problems for liars, not least because a request to sketch a drawing comes as a surprise. This means the liar is unprepared and must do it without planning, and research indicates that people lie better when they have had time to plan their deception."

Built by the Pueblo people more than a thousand years ago, the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico (pictured) is one of nine U.S. landmarks on the 2010 World Monuments Watch List, released October 9 by the World Monuments Fund.Development in heavily touristed Taos is encroaching on the adobe ensemble of ceremonial sites and individual homes, also a United Nations World Heritage site. For instance, a new cell tower blocks a view that is vital to the Pueblo people's sun rituals, said Erica Avrami, director of research and education for WMF.

An electromagnetic "black holeMovie Camera" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time.The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.

Chinese dyslexia may be much more complex than the English variety, according to a new paper published online today in Current Biology. English speakers who have developmental dyslexia usually don't have trouble recognizing letters visually, but rather just have a hard time connecting them to their sounds.What about languages based on full-word characters rather than sound-carrying letters? Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception.

THE young man woke feeling dizzy. He got up and turned around, only to see himself still lying in bed. He shouted at his sleeping body, shook it, and jumped on it. The next thing he knew he was lying down again, but now seeing himself standing by the bed and shaking his sleeping body. Stricken with fear, he jumped out of the window. His room was on the third floor. He was found later, badly injured.What this 21-year-old had just experienced was an out-of-body experience, one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. It was probably triggered by his epilepsy (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, vol 57, p 838). "He didn't want to commit suicide," says Peter Brugger, the young man's neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. "He jumped to find a match between body and self. He must have been having a seizure.".

A Pentagon-sponsored project to control flying insects remotely has sent ripples of excitement across the scientific pond.Part insect, part machine, the "cyborg beetle" has been tested successfully by its developers at the University of California, Berkeley.Video footage shows a beetle being "flown" around a room by a man using a laptop.At one point it is tethered to a transparent plastic plate, and its tiny limbs can be seen twitching in response to the operator's joy stick.

A group of civilly-disobedient hemp farmers and business leaders were arrested Tuesday morning while digging up the lawn to plant industrial hemp seeds at the headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration.David Bronner, the president of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, a more than 60-year-old company that does tens of millions of dollars of business annually, was among those arrested.Bronner buys the hemp used in his soaps from Canadian farmers. He was arrested outside the DEA museum, which shares space with the headquarters.

Studies are underway on two tombs believed to be 5000 years old, which have been discovered in an excavation site in Kercem, Gozo.The tombs were unearthed during extension works at the parish priest's house, which lies adjacent to the parish church. Pottery recovered so far place the origins of tombs in the Tarxien phase of Maltese prehistory, currently dated to about 3000-2500 BC. The excavations are being carried out by the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage under the direction of Anthony Pace.

The strikingly banded rocks scattered across the upper Midwest and elsewhere throughout the world are actually ambassadors from the past, offering clues to the environment of the early Earth more than 2 billion years ago.Called banded iron formations or BIFs, these ancient rocks formed between 3.8 and 1.7 billion years ago at what was then the bottom of the ocean. The stripes represent alternating layers of silica-rich chert and iron-rich minerals like hematite and magnetite.

Densely clouded in acid-laden mist, Venus used to be the Soviet Union's favourite target for planetary exploration.Now, after a lull of almost three decades, Russia is making plans for a new mission to the "morning star" and has invited Western scientists to participate.Last week, Moscow-based space research institute IKI hosted an international conference aimed at luring scientists from Europe and possibly other countries such as the US into the ambitious project, officially scheduled for launch in 2016.

The Hubble telescope has provided new insight on 2 Pallas, one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System.The nearly 600km-wide rock is an example of an object that started out on the process of becoming a planet but never grew up into the real thing.Researchers have published a 3D model of the grapefruit-shaped mini-world in Science magazine.Hubble's data makes it possible to discern surface features, including what appears to be a big impact crater.

Since archaeologists first began to suit up in scuba gear in the 1960s, the excavation of underwater sites has transformed how we understand our past. We recently highlighted some of the most intriguing ongoing underwater projects, which got us thinking about all the amazing underwater sites that have come to light in the past half-century. With thousands of sites to choose from, we no doubt missed a favorite of yours, but for our doubloons, these 12 are the most exciting and surprising discoveries made during the age of underwater archaeology.

In the early 1970s, Freeman Dyson wrote an essay comparing space travel to the colonization of the New World and the settlement of the American West. The subject was fanciful, but that didn't keep Dyson, an eminent physicist and writer for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, from making a meticulous effort to quantify and compare the costs of these vastly different ventures. From letters of Gov. William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony, Dyson calculated that the Mayflower's voyage in 1620 from England to Massachusetts cost the average family about 7.5 years in wages. The westward trek of the Mormons in the 1840s cost each family about 2.5 years, according to records left behind by Brigham Young, the Mormon leader. Even a modest space voyage, Dyson calculated, would set the average family back 1,500 years in wages. The difference reflected the relative difficulty of space travel, but also the limitations of big government programs to do things on the cheap.

A robot has taught itself to smile, frown, and make other human facial expressions using machine learning.To get the incredibly realistic Einstein robot to make facial expressions, researchers used to have to program each of its 31 artificial muscles individually through trial and error. Now, computer scientists from the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego have used machine learning to enable the robot to learn expressions on its own.

By putting sensors in the brains of mice as they ran through a Quake-derived virtual reality, scientists have found a way to study neurological activity in moving animals.The setup allows for real-time, almost-real-motion tracking of single neurons. That feat has eluded researchers who have a fuzzy, general understanding of brain systems, but little knowledge of how individual cells actually work. They hope that cell-level details will make sense of motion, cognition and other complex mental functions.

Oscar Wrigley, a two-year-old with the same IQ as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, has become the youngest boy in Britain to be accepted into Mensa.

The eldest member of the tribe, Ururu, who was considered the matriarch of the last six survivors, died earlier this month.Her death has drawn attention to the plight of the tribe, whose members are all aged between 25 and 50.Once living in obscurity in the rainforests of the western Bazilian state of Rondonia, they have faced the familiar perils of indigenous peoples across the world.

Michelle Mack has turned medical thinking upside down.The right side of Michelle Mack's brain rewired itself to take over functions controlled by the left.Born with only half a brain, Mack can speak normally, graduated from high school and has an uncanny knack for dates.At 27, doctors determined that the right side of her brain had essentially rewired itself to make up for function that was likely lost during a pre-birth stroke. But her childhood and young adult years were fraught with frustration.

Earlier this year Dawa Steven Sherpa was resting at Everest base camp when he and his companions heard something buzzing. "What the heck is that?" asked the young Nepali climber. They searched and found a big black house fly, something unimaginable just a few years ago when no insect could have survived at 5,360 metres."It's happened twice this year - the Himalayas are warming up and changing fast," says Dawa, who only took up climbing seriously in 2006, but in a few years has climbed Everest twice as well as two 8,000m peaks in Tibet.

Submariners should brace for some crazy science to match those Crazy Ivan maneuvers. A physicist says that ghost-like neutrinos that pass easily through just about everything could provide a future method of communication with deep sea submarines.Neutrinos represent the ghost particles of the physics world that typically pass through about every form of matter without a trace. That solves one half of the problem in communicating underwater, where radio waves travel poorly and even very low frequency (VLF) waves can only go so far. But it leaves open the other half of the issue in that submarines have no way of receiving communications via neutrinos.

Understanding the evolution and domestication of maize has been a holy grail for many researchers. As one of the most important crops worldwide and as a crop that appears very different from its wild relatives as a result of domestication, understanding exactly how maize has evolved has many practical benefits and may help to improve crop yields.In the October issue of the American Journal of Botany, Dr. Marina Dermastia and colleagues published their research comparing corn kernel development to its closest wild relative: teosinte. This research overturns some commonly held beliefs on the domestication of maize because, unexpectedly, many traits seen in the cellular development of maize kernels that were previously attributed to the process of domestication were observed in the development of the teosinte kernels by Dermastia and her colleagues. "Although the teosinte kernels are morphologically so different from that of maize, their inside is not, Dermastia said. "Although we did not expect fundamental differences between maize and teosinte, the similarities were striking.".

KANAZAWA (JAPAN): Fossils discovered in Ishikawa prefecture in a layer of earth dating from the early Cretaceous period around 130 million years ago have turned out to be those of a new species of plant-eating dinosaur, the local municipality said here.The fossils are the fourth set of a new dinosaur species to be unearthed in Japan and are believed to be among the oldest. The fossils are expected to help experts figure out the evolution of herbivorous dinosaurs.

LONDON: An experiment that fires powerful radio waves into the sky has created a patch of 'artificial ionosphere', mimicking the uppermost portion of Earth's atmosphere.According to a report in Nature News, the experiment is called the 'High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program' (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska.

SYDNEY: The discovery of a piece of fossilized amber that came from a plant living more than 300 million years ago, has led scientists to suggest that flowering plants may have started to appear a lot earlier than previously believed.It is believed that flowering plants only started to show up in the fossil record at the beginning of the Cretaceous period, around 120 million years ago.

THE Department of Antiquities has just released the findings of its survey of a Roman shipwreck near Cape Greco on the Island's southeast coast.The shipwreck dates from the 2nd century AD and contains over 130 ceramic jars, likely to have been carrying wine or oil."Its location in shallow waters, suggest that either the vessel was nearing an intended port-of-call, or else was engaged in a coasting trade, moving products to market over short distances up and down the coast," said a press release from the Department of Antiquities.

French researchers on Tuesday said they had uncovered the biggest dinosaur footprints in the world, left by giant sauropods that may have weighed 40 tons or more.An extraordinary track of footprints was found in April this year in the Jura plateau at Plagne, near the southeastern city of Lyon, by a pair of amateur fossil-hunters, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) said in a press release.

A memorial cruise is scheduled to set sail 100 years after the sinking of the Titanic, following the same trans-Atlantic route as the ill-fated ship, according to organizers.The Titanic Memorial Cruise is to set sail in April 2012, departing from Southampton, England, on April 8, just as the Titanic did.On April 15, the ship -- the Balmoral -- will arrive at the spot in the North Atlantic where the Titanic sank after it collided with an iceberg.

A system that generates energy from rubbish is being sent by defence firm Qinetiq to the US army.The PyTEC system heats mixed waste, releasing a gas that can be burned to produce five times more energy than is required to drive the system.Qinetiq say that the system, already in use on British navy ship HMS Ocean, has been "containerised" for US army use.The approach could see use in urban areas, reducing municipal waste volume by 95% while producing energy.

WHETHER it's showering spacecraft with lethal radiation, filling the sky with ghostly light, or causing electrical surges that black-out entire cities, space weather is a force to be reckoned with.Thankfully, all is calm in space on the day that I speak to Bill Murtagh at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. "Last week we saw a moderate storm, and that was about the most interesting event in months," he reassures me. "It's pretty quiet today.".

Filling rooftops with plants and dirt can help pull a modest amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, found a new study.While green roofs certainly won't solve the global warming problem, their ability to sop up greenhouse gases -- even just a little bit -- bolsters the case for planting them on city buildings, despite extra costs on the front end, said lead researcher Kristin Getter, of Michigan State University in East Lansing.

This year serves as a double anniversary for Charles Darwin: It's been 200 years since the birth of the naturalist, as was noted widely back in February.Now there's a second wave of books and broadcasts that serve to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin's masterwork, "On the Origin of Species."The tangled genesis of that work is the focus of "Darwin's Darkest Hour," a two-hour docudrama premiering tonight on PBS.

A study of seven terminally ill patients found identical surges in brain activity moments before death, providing what may be physiological evidence of "out of body" experiences reported by people who survive near-death ordeals.Doctors at George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates recorded brain activity of people dying from critical illnesses, such as cancer or heart attacks.Moments before death, the patients experienced a burst in brain wave activity, with the spikes occurring at the same time before death and at comparable intensity and duration.

Last Wednesday, the Ad Astra Rocket Company tested what is currently the most powerful plasma rocket in the world. As the Webster, Texas, company announced, the VASIMR VX-200 engine ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. The test also marks the first time that a small-scale prototype of the company's VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) rocket engine has been demonstrated at full power.

The concept of the multiverse is not new. In 55 BC, Lucretius speculated that the motion of atoms might be energetic enough to propel them into parallel worlds. During the Renaissance, Giordano Bruno raised a similar possibility, his speculations causing him tragic trouble with the church. The poet, Thomas Traherne, raised the thought again in the 17th century: God's love is infinite, he mused, so maybe there are an infinite number of worlds over which that love moves.The history of the idea is worth bearing in mind since it suggests something: the multiverse proposal appears when the cosmology of the day reaches a limit of understanding.

There's a lot more to green technology than renewable energy. From more efficient aircraft to thread made from chicken feathers, the world is awash with ingenious ideas. So we have scoured research labs and start-ups, and made some hard choices. Here you will find our pick of the best ideas to make our planet a more energy-efficient place.

A frieze that would have been sculpted 5,000 years ago, was found at Vichama archaeological complex, some 120km to the north of Lima, according to archaeologists of the Caral-Supe project.According to a press release, the most notable part of the frieze is one that represents a human hand holding an object like a knife or a spindle.

Researchers have demonstrated a penny-sized "nuclear battery" that produces energy from the decay of radioisotopes.As radioactive substances decay, they release charged particles that when properly harvested can create an electrical current.Nuclear batteries have been in use for military and aerospace applications, but are typically far larger.The University of Missouri team says that the batteries hold a million times as much charge as standard batteries.

A group of archaeologists working in the Astigarraga cave in Deba have uncovered the oldest cave paintings discovered in Gipuzkoa to date. Dating back between 20,000 and 22,000 years, the markings represent a group of 16 "paired fragments" in red.Doctor of History and expert in cave paintings, Marcos García Díez, speaking during a conference with press, stressed that this was one of the most important discoveries made in the Basque Country since the discovery of the Altxerri cave in Aia and Ekain in Deba, and highlighted the archeological "potential" of the site.

The volcanic explosion that obliterated much of the island that might have inspired the legend of Atlantis apparently triggered a tsunami that traveled hundreds of miles to reach as far as present-day Israel, scientists now suggest.The new findings about this past tsunami could shed light on the destructive potential of future disasters, researchers added.

The Newark Earthworks were constructed between 100 B.C. and A.D. 500 by a people we know today as the Hopewell Culture. Part temple, part astronomical observatory, and part cemetery, this is the largest set of geometric earthworks built anywhere in the world. They include Great Circle Earthworks, Octagon Earthworks (joined by parallel walls to another circle), and Wright Earthworks, a large, nearly perfect square enclosure.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Wearing a red clown nose, the Canadian founder of Cirque du Soleil hosted an out-of-this-world performance event on Friday, saying he wanted to use his trip as a space tourist to highlight the scarcity of water on Earth.Guy Laliberte's two-hour performance event called "Moving Stars and Earth for Water" linked the International Space Station with singers, dancers and celebrity campaigners in 14 world cities in what organizers called the first event of its kind to be hosted from space.

Refined calculations of the asteroid Apophis's path show it is far less likely smash into Earth in 2036 than was previously thought.Earlier calculations put the probability of a collision at one in 45,000; the revised estimate puts the odds at one in 250,000.Researchers from the US space agency Nasa showed that in 2029, Apophis will pass within just 30,000km of Earth.The work will be presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

WASHINGTON: A researcher has found evidence dating back 70 million years to suggest that a dinosaur preyed on and ate other dinosaurs.The jawbone of what appears to be a Gorgosaurus was found in 1996 in southern Alberta. A technician at the Royal Tyrell Museum found something unusual embedded in the jaw. It was the tip of a tooth from another meat-eating dinosaur.

Gigantic megaships that rival anything afloat could help energy giant Shell drink the proverbial milkshake by tapping undersea gas fields worldwide. They can also safely ignore nature's wrath and weather typhoons while continuing gas sucking operations.The Floating Liquid Natural Gas (FLNG) ships would weigh in at 600,000 metric tons and extend 480 meters long, the largest ships ever built. The Register reports that only the decommissioned French Batillus-class tankers could claim being a tad larger by an alternative gross tonnage method, but adds that the FLNG ships still win out by most measures.

When I was 16 years old I attended the Faculty of Art's Greek and Roman Department at the University of Alexandria. During my first year I asked Fawzi El-Fakharoni, professor of Greek and Roman archaeology, about the tomb of Cleopatra. Laughing, he asked me why I had not enquired about the tomb of Alexander the Great since he knew of its location. He then speculated that Cleopatra might have been buried inside her palace, now submerged under the Mediterranean Sea. And so, while standing on the shore at Al-Shatbi one day, I stared longingly at the water and imagined Cleopatra and her lover, Mark Antony, resting peacefully under the sea. Back then, I was captivated by Cleopatra, often dreaming of her, and I appreciated her great love story.

While Robert Frost famously said that he prefers the world to end in fire, physicists have long predicted the universe will end with an icy sputter known as "heat death." Heat death occurs when the universe finally uses up all its energy, with all motion stopping and all the atoms in creation grinding to a halt. And, based on new calculations from a team of Australian physicists, it looks like heat death is far closer than previously thought.

Water levels in the lowest and saltiest body of water on the planet are falling by more than four feet a year, giving rise to quips that the Dead Sea is dying.The government in Amman has said it is planning to extract more than 10 billion cubic feet a year from the Red Sea 110 miles to the south, feed most of it into a desalination plant to create drinking water, and send the salty waste-water left over to the Dead Sea by tunnel.

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

"Lyuba" was sucked to her death in a muddy river bed. She was so well preserved that traces of her mother's milk remained in her belly when she was discovered three years ago by nomadic reindeer herders.Lyuba is to be the star of a mammoths-and-mastodons exhibition at Chicago's Field Museum, due to open in March.

Living barefoot in the woods and hiding himself in the trees, 18-year-old fugitive Colton Harris-Moore, a.k.a. the "Barefoot Burglar," is making life miserable for the inhabitants of the islands north of Seattle, allegedly burglarizing homes, jacking boats, even stealing small airplanes and crash-landing them.The teen has managed to elude police in Washington state for the past year and half."He's almost like a feral child," detective Ed Wallace, a spokesman for the Island County Sheriff's Office, told reporters.

A proposal to send astronauts to visit asteroids and orbit Mars has scored highly in ratings by the White House panel reviewing the future of NASA's human space flight programme.Since 2005, NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. But in May, the Obama administration ordered a review of the agency's human space flight plan, leaving a question mark over the lunar return.

The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), could be used to test the principles behind hyperdrive, a possible future form of spacecraft propulsion that could drive spacecraft at a good fraction of the speed of light.The idea of a hyperdrive propulsion system arises from the work of an influential German mathematician, David Hilbert, in the 1920s. Hilbert studied the interactions between a stationary mass and a relativistic particle moving away from it. He calculated that if the particle was moving faster than around half the speed of lightm an inertial, distant observer would see the particle as being repelled by the mass.

The collapse of Greek democracy 2,400 years ago occurred in circumstances so similar to our own it could be read as a dark and often ignored lesson from the past, a new study suggests.In a new history of the 4th century BC, Cambridge University Classicist Dr. Michael Scott reveals how the implosion of Ancient Athens occurred amid a crippling economic downturn, while politicians committed financial misdemeanours, sent its army to fight unpopular foreign wars and struggled to cope with a surge in immigration.

An international team of astronomers have found an unexpected link between mysterious 'dark matter' and the visible stars and gas in galaxies that could revolutionise our current understanding of gravity.One of the astronomers, Dr Hongsheng Zhao of the SUPA Centre of Gravity, University of St Andrews, suggests that an unknown force is acting on dark matter. The findings are published this week in the scientific journal Nature.

Nasa scientists have been outlining their preliminary results after crashing two unmanned spacecraft into the Moon in a bid to detect water-ice.

Queen Victoria's male descendants were cursed with poor health. The 19th century British monarch's son Leopold, Duke of Albany, died from blood loss after he slipped and fell. Her grandson Friedrich bled out at age 2; her grandsons Leopold and Maurice, at ages 32 and 23, respectively. The affliction, commonly known as the "Royal disease," spread as Victoria's heirs married into royal families across Europe, decimating the thrones of Britain, Germany, Russia, and Spain. Based on the symptoms, modern researchers concluded that the royals suffered from hemophilia--a genetic disease that prevents blood from clotting--but there was never any concrete evidence. Now, new DNA analysis on the bones of the last Russian royal family, the Romanovs, indicates the Royal disease was indeed hemophilia, a rare subtype known as hemophilia B.

Born without sight, 7-year-old Lucas Murray used to be so afraid of walking he wouldn't take a step without his parents by his side."He would walk, but he would hold our hands. Always," said his mother, Sarah Murray of Dorset, England. "When he was younger, he wouldn't even walk on a bumpy surface."But now Lucas has become more mobile than his parents ever imagined, running with friends, playing basketball and jumping on a trampoline -- all on his own.

Ever since astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the Moon, there has been an adamant group of conspiracy theorists who claim the whole event was concocted in a film studio.In 2002, a frustrated Mr Aldrin even punched a documentary maker who claimed the Moon missions were faked.Now new photos taken by Nasa's Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO) camera may settle the matter once and for all.

Jupiter's moon Europa should have enough oxygen-rich water to support not only simple micro-organisms but also complex life, according to a University of Arizona researcher who studies ice flows on the frozen moon.Judging by how quickly Europa's surface ice is replenished, Richard Greenberg estimates that enough oxygen reaches the subterranean ocean to sustain "macrofauna" -- more complex, animal-like organisms.

The temperature difference between equatorial and polar sea waters was minimal during the extremely warm 'Greenhouse world' 60 to 50 million years ago. This is the main conclusion drawn by a team of scientists from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The team of scientists, headed by Peter Bijl, show that circum-Antarctic sea water exceeded 30ºC at that time. The results were published in Nature this week.The conclusions are based on analyses on sediments retrieved from the ocean floor east of Tasmania. This area bordered to Antarctica during the early Paleogene (60-35 milion years ago). Much global warming research is focused on polar areas, because these are particularly sensitive to climate change.

Stepping off the plane, tourists are welcomed to Easter Island with a garland of flowers. They find themselves on a tiny dot in the Pacific Ocean, 3,700 kilometres west of Chile, to which the island belongs, and 2,000 kilometres east of Pitcairn Island. All around are the white-flecked waves of the Pacific. "What perfect peace," exclaimed Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian explorer when he arrived in the mid-1950s.

A new online exhibit showcases the compelling stories of Prince William Forest Park, a 15,000-acre woodland where nature and history unite.Over the centuries, people worked and lived off this forested landscape and called it home. From the 1880s, for 40 years, men and young children toiled in Cabin Branch Pyrite Mine and worked their small farms for sustenance.

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.