Newsdesk Archive

Five decades after the U.S.S.R.'s Luna 2 moon probe became the first spacecraft to land on another celestial body, we look at the past accomplishments and tantalizing future of unmanned space exploration.

Is space travel a lost cause? I would hope not, but reading the articles about the failures of our efforts to return to the Moon by 2020 makes the future appear very grim. The New York Times reports:Nasa's current plan is to retire the space shuttles by September of next year after completing construction of the International Space Station, then rely on Russian rockets until a next-generation rocket, the Ares I, is ready in March 2015. The agency would then retire and dispose of the space station in 2016 and use the freed-up money to develop the heavy-lift Ares V rocket, a lunar lander and the technology for building a Moon settlement.

Humans and chimpanzees are genetically very similar, yet it is not difficult to identify the many ways in which we are clearly distinct from chimps. In a study published online in Genome Research, scientists have made a crucial discovery of genes that have evolved in humans after branching off from other primates, opening new possibilities for understanding what makes us uniquely human.

Earth's oceans are vast reservoirs of carbon dioxide (CO2) with the potential to control the pace of global warming.It all hinges on the fate of marine "snow" -- a constant sprinkle of carbon-rich bits that flutter down from the sea surface to the cold depths below. And according to a new study, the flurries could suck much more of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere than previously thought.

British police are reviewing the death of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, 40 years after the hard-living rocker was found dead in a swimming pool.Police in Sussex, in southern England, have confirmed they are examining documents given to them by an investigative journalist who has been researching events surrounding Jones' death.Scott Jones, who is not related to the musician, has spent four years reviewing the evidence and speaking to key witnesses in the case.

Jill Coble never skips the Holocaust in her social studies classes, using the event as a gateway to discussions about the dangers of propaganda.

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- A newborn baby boy with a heart protruding from his chest is set to undergo a complex surgery in New Delhi, India doctors said Monday.

In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking gave early humans an advantage over other primates, leading to larger brains and more free time. Wrangham discusses his theory, and why Homo sapiens can't live on raw food alone.

The World Mysteries Conference in Tempe, Arizona (Sept 8-9) will focus on the great changes predicted for the year 2012 according to Mayan prophecies. The event will feature Mayan elder and solar priest Hunbatz Men and Inca medicine man WACHAN. Also, for the first time ever, there will be a meeting of nine ancient crystal skulls and their keepers. The keepers will discuss what the skulls "have been saying" and you can even sign up to have private meetings with the skulls and their caretakers.

It was one of the greatest mysteries of the collapse of the Third Reich. As Russian tanks moved into Berlin and Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, his brutal and feared private secretary, Martin Bormann, simply vanished.Early reports indicated he had been killed by Russian shells, but rumors persisted that he had fled abroad, and files released by the National Archives on Tuesday show Britain's security services carefully tracking possible sightings.

Astronauts hitched a giant chest of drawers to the international space station on Monday that contained a brand new freezer, sleeping compartment and treadmill bearing a TV comedian's name.

Hellisheidi, Iceland -- Steam thunders out of the black volcanic earth, screaming into the chill winter sky from a truck-size metal vent with the intensity of a jet engine at takeoff. A few hundred yards to the west, Iceland is being torn apart as the European and North American plates pull away from one another, drawing magma (molten rock) toward the nation's thin crust, building its mountains, and heating groundwater into steam.

"Plastics" may have been the Baby Boomer watchword, but "synthetic" rules today.That's "synthetic" as in synthetic biology, the hottest biomedical buzzword, promising new drugs, new fuel and someday, new life."If we can make life, then we understand it," says molecular biologist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla. Starting with the building blocks of animal and plant cells, synthetic biologists are reengineering living things today and hope to create synthetic life tomorrow. The ultimate goal, Benner says, is "synthesizing life from scratch.".

Visitors to San Francisco's magical Exploratorium know little about its founder, the remarkable Frank Oppenheimer, who lived four extraordinary lives and survived brilliantly from destruction at the hands of the Cold War's red hunters.Oppenheimer was a distinguished physicist. He caught cosmic rays, built the first machine to extract the deadly form of uranium for America's atom bombs, conducted ground-breaking research at Berkeley and Caltech, won professorships in physics at two other major universities, and revolutionized the art of science teaching at a rural high school.

A team of British scientists and engineers is developing plans for a spacecraft that could stop large asteroids from hitting the Earth.The 10-tonne "gravity tractor" would deflect any orbiting rocks years before any potential collision could happen.The device, which would rely on the force of gravity, is being developed by Stevenage space company EADS Astrium.However, the idea is still in its early stages and the company says a prototype is some way off from being built.

There are new tribal concerns that American Indian ancestral bones could be under Lake Pontchartrain where dredging would occur during proposed floodwall construction beneath Causeway Boulevard.It is the second cultural red flag raised in the past two months as the Army Corps of Engineers evaluates how, if approved, the floodwall work would affect people and their environments.

As scientists attempt to learn more about how galaxies evolve, an open question has been whether collisions with our dwarf galactic neighbors will one day tear apart the disk of the Milky Way.That grisly fate is unlikely, a new study now suggests.While astronomers know that such collisions have probably occurred in the past, the new computer simulations show that instead of destroying a galaxy, these collisions "puff up" a galactic disk, particularly around the edges, and produce structures called stellar rings.

Author of 'Uncommon Sense, the State is Out of Date', health food pioneer and cultural change agent, Gregory Sams will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout September to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

A treasured piece at the Dutch national museum - a supposed moon rock from the first manned lunar landing - is nothing more than petrified wood, curators say.It was given to former Prime Minister Willem Drees during a goodwill tour by the three Apollo-11 astronauts shortly after their moon mission in 1969.When Mr Drees died, the rock went on display at the Amsterdam museum.At one point it was insured for around $500,000 (£308,000), but tests have proved it was not the genuine article.The Rijksmuseum, which is perhaps better known for paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, says it will keep the piece as a curiosity.

"THE best thing you could do for the Amazon is to bomb all the roads." That might sound like an eco-terrorist's threat, but they're actually the words of Eneas Salati, one of Brazil's most respected scientists. Thomas Lovejoy, a leading American biologist, is equally emphatic: "Roads are the seeds of tropical forest destruction."They are quite right. Roads are rainforest killers. Without rampant road expansion, tropical forests around the world would not be vanishing at a rate of 50 football fields a minute, an assault that imperils myriad species and spews billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. We will never devise effective strategies to slow rainforest destruction unless we confront this reality.

X-RAYS and CT scans expose a minority of Americans to radiation levels comparable to working in a nuclear power plant. Are such scans worth it?Reza Fazel of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues looked at health insurance records for over 650,000 people who had at least one imaging procedure in a three-year period. Most received low doses of radiation, but around 2 per cent got doses equal to or above the suggested yearly exposure for someone working in a nuclear power plant (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 361, p 849). Fazel says further studies are needed to work out if such medical scans benefit or damage health overall.

The U.S. Geological Survey has released the results of a long-term study of key glaciers in western North America, reporting this month that glacial shrinkage is rapid and accelerating and a result of climate change.University of Illinois geologist William Shilts spent nearly two decades studying glaciers on Bylot Island, an uninhabited island about 300 miles southwest of Thule, Greenland. He, his students and other geologists who followed in his footsteps have chronicled the decline of several Bylot Island glaciers. Photos of the island from the 1940s to the present offer a vivid picture of the changing glaciers and the forces that shape their retreat.

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have demonstrated that prairie voles may be a useful model in understanding the neurochemistry of social behavior. By influencing early social experience in prairie voles, researchers hope to gain greater insight into what aspects of early social experience drive diversity in adult social behavior. The study is currently available online in a special edition of Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience that is focused on the long-term impact of early life experiences.

Health care as we know it didn't exist 3,000 years ago. But along the Georgia coast, the Pacific Northwest, and coastal Brazil, people grew tall and strong and lived relatively free of disease. They ate game, fish, shellfish, and wild plants.But as corn farming spread through various regions of the Americas, people got shorter. Many became prone to anemia and began dying of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.The planet is known as a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light-years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its "year") in less than an Earth day, according to the research, which was published in the journal Nature.

All communication links with the only Indian satellite orbiting the Moon have been lost, India's space agency says.Radio contact with the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was lost abruptly early on Saturday, said India's Bangalore-based Space Research Organization (Isro).The unmanned craft was launched last October in what was billed as a two-year mission of exploration.The launch was regarded as a major step for India as it seeks to keep pace with other space-faring nations in Asia.

Renowned physicist Dr Michio Kaku says that the world of science fiction may be closer to reality than fantasy.So if you thought that invisibility cloaks, time travel and teleportation were for the silver screen only, think again.Dr Kaku is a theoretical physicist and the co-founder of string field theory, a branch of string theory, often referred to as "the theory of everything".

With doubts brewing about the feasibility of returning to the moon or aiming straight for Mars, another option has emerged for our next steps into space: gravitational "sweet spots" called Lagrange points that lie at least 1 million kilometres away.A White House-commissioned task force charged with reviewing NASA's spaceflight plans is considering recommending this as part of a "deep space" option in a report expected soon. But why send humans to empty space?

After years spent hunting for the buried remains of prehistoric animals, a Canadian paleontologist now plans to manipulate chicken embryos to show he can create a dinosaur.Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.

Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale.

The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology. The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe. Previously, it was thought that natural selection favoured milk drinkers only in more northern regions because of their greater need for vitamin D in their diet. People living in most parts of the world make vitamin D when sunlight hits the skin, but in northern latitudes there isn't enough sunlight to do this for most of the year.

Swedish archaeologists have announced the find of a 7th century burial ship, the oldest of its kind to be discovered in Scandinavia.The ship, thought to be from the Vendel era (550-793) of Swedish prehistory, was found in Sunnerby on the island of Kållandsö in Lake Vänern in central Sweden and, according to Lake Vänern Museum, is the only known ship burial to be uncovered in Sweden.Archaeologists from Lake Vänern Museum and Gothenburg University are busy excavating the find which includes equipment, gifts and animal sacrifices.

The National Museum of Korea said yesterday it has unearthed a 2,000-year-old skeleton of a Mongolian nomad at the Xiongnu Tombs of Duurlignars, about 500 kilometers northeast of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.The skeleton of a man was identified as mortal remains of the Xiongnu, a confederation of nomadic tribes in Central Asia, a finding that archeologists and historians could use to advance the studies about the ancient tribe. The Xiongnu tribe is often linked with the Huns, a tribe which is better known in Europe, but identification of the two tribes has yet to be confirmed.

The largest "ondol" heating system dating from the Balhae Kingdom has been unearthed in a nearly intact state in Russia's Maritime Province, confirming the kingdom to have been a Korean settlement.Ondol, literally "warm stone", is an under-floor heating system where flues carry hot gases below the living space. They were a distinct feature of Korean dwellings and are not found in the remains of Chinese, Khitan or Jurchen homes.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - An iron ball and chain found on the banks of London's River Thames is causing a stir amongst archaeologists who say the 300 year-old artifact used to restrain convicts on ships may have a gruesome story to tell.The leg irons, believed to date from the 17th or 18th century, were pulled from the mud with the lock fastened, suggesting a convict could have drowned while trying to escape.The prospect conjures up a tantalizing tale reminiscent of the work of 19th century Victorian author Charles Dickens, said Museum of London archaeologist Kate Sumnall who examined the find.

Once upon a time in the long evolution of Homo sapiens, a band of our African ancestors learned to use fire for more than cooking meat, lighting the dark or warding off attacking animals.Those Stone Age people became the world's first engineers - they discovered that the intense heat of a fire's embers could make chunks of stone much easier to flake for making tools, and to make them much sharper too.

JERUSALEM, Aug. 26 (UPI) -- Israeli archaeologists say they have found a miniature precious stone carved with the image of Alexander the Great.The stone, dating to the Hellenistic period, was found at the Tel Dor excavation site south of Haifa, the Israeli news Web site Arutz Sheva reported Wednesday.

Known for their wide variety of vibrant plumage, birds have evolved various chemical and physical mechanisms to produce these beautiful colors over millions of years.A team of paleontologists and ornithologists has now discovered evidence of vivid iridescent colors in fossil feathers more than 40 million years old.The finding, published online August 26 in the journal Biology Letters, signifies the first evidence of a preserved color-producing nanostructure in a fossilized feather.Iridescence is the quality of changing color depending on the angle of observation, such as the rainbow of colors seen in an oil slick.

University grads everywhere may feel pressure to succeed, but the stakes ramp up when your school's co-founders include AI visionary Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation. Now recent grads of Singularity U have announced their strategies for using emerging technologies to help one billion people over the next 10 years.Four teams of grads proposed ideas ranging from a disaster response network to an intelligent transportation grid. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the 40 students of the Silicon Valley school include recent college grads and company CEOs, and that many have advanced degrees from the likes of Harvard, MIT and Stanford.

Geoengineering is a popular idea, for Bill Gates and just about everyone else these days. Now the Institute of Mechanical Engineers proposes that the UK adopt technologies such as carbon-capturing artificial trees, biofuel algae tanks on rooftops, and coating surfaces in reflective materials to cut down on heating from the sun's rays.Those technologies may sound familiar, because PopSci has examined similar concepts in the past. Reflective rooftops represent perhaps one of the less expensive geoengineering proposals for controlling climate change, but researchers have also pressed forward with prototypes for artificial trees that capture carbon dioxide through plastic leaves and store it for carbon sequestration.

The Department of Energy just gave $100,000 to upstart company Solar Roadways, to develop 12-by-12-foot solar panels, dubbed "Solar Roads," that can be embedded into roads, pumping power into the grid. The panels may also feature LED road warnings and built-in heating elements that could prevent roads from freezing.Each Solar Road panel can develop around 7.6 kwh of power each day, and each costs around $7,000. If widely adopted, they could realistically wean the US off fossil fuels: a mile-long stretch of four-lane highway could take 500 homes off the grid. If the entire US Interstate system made use of the panels, energy would no longer be a concern for the country.

A 1996 claim of fossilised microbes in a meteorite from Mars has yet to be confirmed, but a new analysis does suggest the rock's Martian environment had the conditions conducive to life.Researchers led by David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, caused a sensation 13 years ago when they proposed that a chunk of Mars rock found in Antarctica, called ALH 84001, contained possible signs of past life on the Red Planet, including complex carbon-based molecules and some microscopic objects shaped like bacteria.

Chasing thunderstorms just got easier. A new system for predicting where they will go next will soon be in use in Australia, after outperforming existing methods. It will help forecasters decide whether to give public warnings of impending storms.The technique, called Thunderstorm Environment Strike Probability Algorithm (THESPA), produces "nowcasts" for up to 1 hour ahead. It was developed by a team led by Sandy Dance at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research.

Researchers hope tests on Stumpy could unveil secrets about genetic mutations in humans.Stumpy was born at the Warrawee Duck Farm, in the New Forest, Hampshire, in 2007 with four legs, with the extra two tucked behind the two he walks on.Now scientists from the University of Chicago are studying blood taken from the two and half year old duck.

Deer mice have pulled off the opposite trick to the famous peppered moth, evolving a light coat to disguise themselves from predators. What's more, they did it even though their ancestors had no genes for light coats.Most deer mice have dark fur, which would stand out vividly against the pale-coloured Sand Hills of Nebraska. The hills formed around 10,000 years ago, but genetic analysis performed by Catherine Linnen of Harvard University and colleagues found that back then the deer mouse genome didn't contain the genes for light fur. That means the trait arose from a new mutation which rapidly spread through the local deer mouse population.

A man's spit may indicate what kind of father and husband he is. In polygamous societies, men with high levels of testosterone in their saliva are more likely to take several wives and give their children less attention, compared to those with less of the sex hormone coursing through their bodies.The new study of rural Senegalese villagers adds to previous work underscoring testosterone's critical role in a mating and parenting.

WHAT child's imagination has not been captivated by the near-magical transformation that caterpillars undergo to become butterflies? This is the result of an ancient hybridisation between an insect and a worm-like animal, according to zoologist Donald Williamson, and now he says there is enough genetic information to test the theory.Unfortunately for Williamson, now retired from the University of Liverpool, UK, the early returns are not encouraging.

Tamil Nadu Government is in the process of documenting about 25,000 Tamil inscriptions found in different temples across the state under an ambitious programme to preserve and protect heritage sites and documents."There are about 25,000 inscriptions across various temples in the state. We have already documented about 23,000 inscriptions and the remaining would be done by next year", State Archaeological Commissioner T S Sridhar said.

FRANKFURT - Scientists say a Roman horse head made from bronze and plated in gold has been discovered at an archaeological site in Germany.Hesse state archaeologist Egon Schallmeyer says the head is part of a horse and rider statue and "qualitatively one of the best (pieces) created at that time."The ornamented, well preserved head was found earlier this month at the Waldgirmes excavation site in central Germany and displayed Thursday at the German Archaeological Institute in Frankfurt.

Subtle connections between the 11-year solar cycle, the stratosphere, and the tropical Pacific Ocean work in sync to generate periodic weather patterns that affect much of the globe, according to research appearing this week in the journal Science. The study can help scientists get an edge on eventually predicting the intensity of certain climate phenomena, such as the Indian monsoon and tropical Pacific rainfall, years in advance.

Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal - but the process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding paradox in physics.

Scientists have just completed an unprecedented journey into the vast and little-explored "Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch."On the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX), researchers got the first detailed view of plastic debris floating in a remote ocean region.It wasn't a pretty sight.The Scripps research vessel (R/V) New Horizon left its San Diego homeport on August 2, 2009, for the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, located some 1,000 miles off California's coast, and returned on August 21, 2009.Scientists surveyed plastic distribution and abundance, taking samples for analysis in the lab and assessing the impacts of debris on marine life.

An international team of 16 scientists today reports the first direct measurement of the general rate of genetic mutation at individual DNA letters in humans. The team sequenced the same piece of DNA - 10,000,000 or so letters or 'nucleotides' from the Y chromosome - from two men separated by 13 generations, and counted the number of differences. Among all these nucleotides, they found only four mutations.

Eye cells that are sensitive to light have been produced from skin in a breakthrough that could eventually lead to treatments for blindness.

Call them the wrong-way planets. Several giant, extrasolar planets, all residing within sizzling distance of their parent stars, have orbits so tilted that the planets travel backward relative to their parent stars' rotation, a flurry of new studies reveals. The misalignments attest to rough-and-tumble histories and may suggest that life flourished on Earth because the solar system avoided the brunt of close gravitational encounters between planets.

Eco-thinkers have come up with an amazing new way to create drinking water - by putting plants in the bottom of a shower.Designers Jun Yasumoto, Vincent Vandenbrouk, Olivier Pigasse, and Alban Le Henry came up with the concept when looking for new ways to recycle precious H2O.After you have washed in the special eco-shower the water passes down into a series of physical filters and is treated by plants such as reeds and rushes growing around your feet.

A Cambridge University project to safeguard the world's 6,000 spoken languages has been launched after it emerged half could die out within a generation.

Does an exciting but controversial new model of quantum gravity reproduce Einstein's theory of general relativity? Scientists at Texas A&M University in the US explore this question in a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters and highlighted with a Viewpoint in the August 24th issue of Physics.

As the world's oil supply continues to dry out every day, the question of what will replace oil and other fossil fuels is becoming more and more urgent. According to the World Coal Institute, at the present rate of consumption, coal will run out in 130 years, natural gas in 60 years, and oil in 42 years. Around the world, researchers are investigating alternative energy technologies with encouraging progress - but the question still remains: which source(s) will prove to be most efficient and sustainable in 30, 50, or 100 years from now?.

TWO ancient skeletons with a rare genetic bone disease unearthed from a medieval Irish graveyard may hold key insights for medical experts.An archaeologist believes the discovery of the remains -- afflicted by massive bone growths -- could help modern-day clinicians glean more information about that unusual debilitating condition.

Archaeologists at the University of Bradford will be leading an exploration into how prehistoric people made their living in Italy at the end of the Ice Age.The research aims to find out how hunter-gatherers in Mediterranean Europe survived before farming became widespread and why the transition to agriculture was a smooth one.

Angola is best known for oil and diamonds, but dinosaur hunters say the country holds a "museum in the ground" of rare fossils waiting to be discovered."Angola is the final frontier for palaeontology," says Professor Louis Jacobs, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, part of the PaleoAngola project which is hunting for dinosaur fossils."Due to the war, there's been little research carried out so far, but now we're getting in finally and there's so much to find," says Jacobs.

The ancient history of Iran, like many other countries, is believed to be based upon the archeological findings and a mixture of documented myths and information recorded by historians or religious entities of the time. Archaeology, which is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of cultural and environmental data, has been carried out in Iran since quite a long time.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, often the harbinger of bad news about e. coli outbreaks and swine flu, recently had some good news: The life expectancy of Americans is higher than ever, at almost 78.

Sometimes history reaches over and slaps you like a Zen master, thereby rearranging your perceptions.Consciously or not, Alston Thoms pulled off such a feat with his lecture "Native Plant Foods in the Post Oak Savannahs," which he presented Thursday night at the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History in connection with its current exhibit, "The Caddo: Traditions and Heritage."Thoms, an associate professor of anthropology at Texas A&M University, painted a myth-shattering picture of life in the Brazos Valley before and after Europeans arrived.

YOU may have more in common with this robot than any other - it was designed using your anatomy as a blueprint.Conventional humanoid robots may look human, but the workings under their synthetic skins are radically different from our anatomy. A team with members across five European countries says this makes it difficult to build robots able to move like we do.

A RIGOROUS analysis of the jagged terrain of Jupiter's moon Europa is helping to identify safe landing strips for future missions.Europa is thought to have an ocean of water beneath its icy shell. The latest study is the first to use images from the Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, to generate measurements of Europa's slopes. "This is the first quantitative sampling that gives hard numbers, real numbers that you can believe," says Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

As the U.S. Navy minimizes its dependence on foreign oil, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) is a front runner in supporting and bringing forth innovative solutions to fuel consumption challenges."One of the avoidable costs in fuel for the Navy is related to marine fouling such as barnacles that accumulate on ships," says ONR Program Officer Steve McElvany. "They create increased drag as these ships move from port to port across the world's oceans." .

A new discovery at an island abbey in the Firth of Forth has revealed the Augustinian canons who once lived there measured time using a mass dial.Conservationists working at Inchcolm Island found the remnants of a special sundial which they believe may have been carved into a wall.Until now mystery has surrounded the method used by the order to tell time.While well-known in England, the British Sundial Society said there were relatively few dials in Scotland.

WASHINGTON: NASA has launched a small rocket using a clean, green and safe propellant comprising aluminium powder and water ice."This collaboration (with US Air Force) has been an opportunity for graduate students to work on an environment-friendly propellant that can be used for flight on earth and used in long distance space missions," said NASA chief engineer Mike Ryschkewitsch.

A team of Israeli scientists has developed a potential way to fix the damage from heart attacks.A "patch" has been made from heart muscle that can be used to fix scarring left over from a heart attack.Writing in the journal PNAS, the scientists describe how the technique strengthened the hearts of rats that had suffered heart attacks.The "patch" was grown in abdominal tissue first, then transplanted to damaged areas of the heart.This experiment is the first to show that such patches can actually improve the health of a heart after it has been damaged.

Lightning bolts could help create artificial organs, according to new research by scientists at Texas A&M University.An electrically charged block of plastic gives way to a series of tunnel-carving lightning bolts when a nail is driven into it. Adding human blood vessel cells to the tunnels could create a template upon which an artificial organ could grow."One of the biggest problems in tissue engineering is how to create a vascular network to feed the growing tissue," said Arul Jayaraman, a professor at Texas A&M who, along with his colleague Victor Ugaz, co-authored the study that appears in the journal Advanced Materials. "The structure of these networks closely resembles the human vasculature." .

A Norwegian team has embarked on an expedition to find the submerged wreck of a plane which carried Norway's great polar explorer Roald Amundsen.

MEXICO CITY.- Nearly 300 engraved stones will be studied in the laboratory that will be operating at Monte Alban Archaeological Zone in Oaxaca to advance in Zapoteca writing deciphering.The creation of this scientific research center is possible thanks to contributions of World Monuments Fund (WMF)(90,000 USD), Alfredo Harp Helu Foundation (750,000 MXP) and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), to construct and habilitate the space.

MEXICO CITY.- Maya ceremonial altar recently found at the highway that communicates Merida, Yucatan with Campeche is in custody of Uman municipal authorities, waiting to be relocated where it can be appreciated by the public.Archaeologist Eunice Uc Gonzalez, researcher at Yucatan INAH Center, commented that the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and the Ministry of Communications and Transportation are structuring agreements to will determine the place that guarantees its best conservation state.

A LARGE number of prehistoric archaeological sites in the Valencia Region do not have adequate protection and are open to acts of vandalism and stealing, a report warned this week.The oldest of the country's heritage in the form of caves dating back to the Palaeolithic period and in some cases to the Iron Age located in La Safor district have no protection at all.

Archaeologists who study early hunter-gatherer societies are discovering that even the simplest cultures altered their environments, whether they meant to or not.

China's founding dynasty may just be a myth, say archaeologists.

PALO ALTO, Calif.---- Scientists trying to unwrap the mysteries of a more than 2,500-year-old mummy believed to be an ancient Egyptian priest conducted computer scans Thursday to help determine how the man died, what was buried with him and what he looked like.In a basement lab at Stanford University Medical School, Iret-net Hor-irw's mummy lay tightly wrapped in tattered linen as a handful of scientists looked on. Starting with his feet, the scanner rotated around the mummy, snapping X-ray type images that appeared on nearby computer screens.

IT IS not a nice way to die. As the virus spreads through your lungs, your immune system goes into overdrive. Your lungs become leaky and fill with fluid. Your lips and nails, then your skin, turn blue as you struggle to get enough oxygen. Basically, you drown.Flu can kill in other ways, too, from rendering you vulnerable to bacterial infections to triggering heart attacks. Of course, most flu strains, including (so far) the 2009 pandemic virus, cause only mild symptoms in the vast majority of people. But with 10 to 20 per cent of people worldwide getting flu every year, that still adds up to a huge burden of illness - and even in a good year some half a million die.

Some 2,500 years ago, a mysterious culture emerged in Nigeria. The Nok people left behind bizarre terracotta statues -- and little else. German archaeologists are now looking for more clues to explain this obscure culture.Half a ton of pottery shards is piled on the tables in Peter Breunig's workroom on the sixth floor of the University of Frankfurt am Main. There are broken pots, other storage vessels, a clay lizard and fragments of clay faces with immense nostrils.

Sitting in a classroom, listening to students explain their approach to an assignment to develop an initiative to impact the lives of a billion people over ten years, one could be forgiven for taking it all with a grain of salt.After all, student projects like this are usually peppered with holes, naive assumptions, and unrealistic goals.But here at Singularity University, things are a little different. This group project, which aims to flip the car sharing movement on its head and bring affordable transportation to the masses, started less than two weeks ago but has already won a prize and attracted venture capital interest.

The serenely beautiful likeness of Queen Nefertiti -- whose name literally means "a beautiful woman has arrived" -- has been the most celebrated exhibit in Berlin's Altes Museum. Half a million visitors a year marvel at her delicate features, long graceful neck, and the vibrant colours of her necklace and tall, flat-top crown, which contrast with the sepia tone of her smooth skin. Her face is sculpted to perfection, the eyelids and brows outlined in black. She is beautiful, striking, stunning. No adjectives are suffice to describe Nefertiti's sublime countenance. And what is more the bust, which dates to the 14th century BC, is in pristine condition -- apart, that is, from two flaws. A piece of her left ear is broken, and the inlay in her left eye is missing.

After beer is made, the waste from breweries could help generate power, researchers now suggest.

Regrowing skin, bones and even organs might seem like something out of a mad scientist's lab, but the reality isn't so crazy. Jorge Ribas finds out how tissue engineering could help the sick and injured.

Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.The topic is a delicate one that has already generated controversy, even though a formal draft of the proposed recommendations, due out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the end of the year, has yet to be released.

Despite their popularity in the science fiction genre, there is much to be learned about black holes, the mysterious regions in space once thought to be absent of light. In a paper published in the August 20 issue of Physical Review Letters Dartmouth researchers propose a new way of creating a reproduction black hole in the laboratory on a much-tinier scale than their celestial counterparts.

Researchers at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford University, have produced a hydrogen-rich alloy that could provide insight into the properties of metallic hydrogen, according to a study published in the August 17 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work is a step toward materials with revolutionary implications for energy science, enabling lossless power transmission, next-generation particle accelerators and even magnetic levitation.

The Home Office has started sharing fingerprint data with Canada and Australia for the purpose of checking deeper into the backgrounds of migrants under suspicion.

The word 'algae' is a generic term which can cover anything from seaweed to microscopic organisms.The type of seaweed causing problems along the Breton coast of France is called "Ulva", often known as sea lettuce.Along the south coast of the UK there are build ups of another algae called "Enteromorpha". This is composed of thin filaments which mat together. It looks a bit like pond weed.

Paleontologists discovered the remains of the creature, called a Belemnotheutis antiquus, during a dig at a Victorian excavation in Trowbridge, Wilts.They cracked open what appeared to be an ordinary looking rock only to find the one-inch-long black ink sac inside.After realising what they had stumbled across, they took out a small sample of the black substance and ground it up with an ammonia solution.

Prehistoric artwork has been discovered by an amateur archaeologist at a Perthshire mountain range.The ancient carvings were discovered by rock art enthusiast George Currie at Ben Lawers, near Loch Tay.Mr Currie discovered a piece of rock which has more than 90 cup marks, which are circular depressions in the stone.

A new discovery at an island abbey in the Firth of Forth has revealed the Augustinian canons who once lived there measured time using a mass dial.Conservationists working at Inchcolm Island found the remnants of a special sundial which they believe may have been carved into a wall.Until now mystery has surrounded the method used by the order to tell time.While well-known in England, the British Sundial Society said there were relatively few dials in Scotland.

SEXUAL orientation seems to be wired into the brains of nematode worms, and tweaking this sexual wiring can result in worms attracted to members of the same sex."The conclusion is that sexual attraction is wired into brain circuits common to both sexes of worms," said researcher Erik Jorgensen, scientific director of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Poor farmers in the heart of Bolivia's Amazon are being encouraged to embrace the annual floods - by using a centuries-old irrigation system for their crops.They are experimenting with a sustainable way of growing food crops that their ancestors used.It could provide them with better protection against the extremes of climate change, reduce deforestation, improve food security and even promise a better diet.

As we pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we're doing more than warming the planet and scrambling the climate. We're also conducting what climatologist James Hansen has called a "vast uncontrolled experiment." In effect, we're on our way to engineering a world very different from the one we were handed. Belatedly, we're trying to turn off the carbon spigot, hoping that by incrementally reducing the emissions we've spent a couple of centuries pouring into the air we can stop the climate slide before it's too late.

They're ready to sting, and they know where they're going.They're called "nanobees," and they're not insects -- they're tiny particles designed to destroy cancer cells by delivering a synthesized version of a toxin called melittin that is found in bees."Melittin, which would otherwise result in substantial destruction of your red blood cells and other normal tissues if it were delivered intravenously alone, is completely safe when it's on a nanoparticle," said Dr. Samuel Wickline, director of the Siteman Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Oliver Stone is making his most ambitious stab at American history yet.The controversial director is creating a 10-part documentary series for Showtime titled "Secret History of America."Narrated by Stone, the series promises to focus on events that "at the time went under-reported, but crucially shaped America's unique and complex history of the last 60 years," according to Showtime.

An archaeological excavation has started near Lake Küçükçekmece in Avcılar to uncover the ancient city of Bathonea, which is estimated to be 1,600 years old.Dr. Sengül Aydıngün from Kocaeli University explained that an ancient city had been found after they had conducted surface research in Yarimburgaz, the oldest settlement area in the Kucukçekmece basin. Speaking to the press, Aydıngün, head of the İstanbul Prehistoric Research (İTA) Project, said they had found out about the ancient port, located 20 kilometers away from Byzantium (old İstanbul), during research conducted last year into historic documents and compositions written by geographers several centuries ago.

Remains of an ancient cult to the goddess of love have come to light in the southern Golan Heights site of SusitaAt the site, on a 350 meter-high-plateau overlooking the eastern shore of Lake Kinneret, archaeologists found a cache of three figurines of Aphrodite (whom the Romans called Venus), dating back about 1,500 years. The figurines, made of clay, are about 30 centimeters tall. They depict the nude goddess standing, with her right hand covering her private parts - a type of statue scholars call "modest Venus."