Newsdesk Archive

On July 17, 1959 paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered a fossilized skull from a previously unknown species of hominid that she and husband Louis Leakey named Zinjanthropus boisei. The 1.75-million-year-old fossil from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, turned the Leakey's into household names, and firmly established that the roots of the human family tree extended deep into antiquity. The name of the genus "Zinjanthropus" has since been dropped. Whether the fossil belongs to the genus Australopithecus along with its smaller cousins, Australopithecus afarensis and A. africanus, or deserves to be part of a separate genus called Paranthropus along with other large hominid species like Paranthropus robustus has been the subject of debate.

The use of geo-engineering to slow global warming may increase the risk of drought, according to a paper in Science journal.Methods put forward include reflecting solar radiation back into space using giant mirrors or aerosol particles.But the authors warn that such attempts to control the climate could also cause major changes in precipitation.They want the effect on rainfall to be assessed before any action is taken.

Although past research has suggested Tyrannosaurus rex was related to chickens, now findings hint this giant predator might have acted chicken too.Instead of picking on dinosaurs its own size, researchers now suggest T. rex was a baby killer that liked to swallow defenseless prey whole.

Modern humans may impatiently look forward to their robot servants and flying cars of the future, but true lessons about innovation come from the past. And history suggests that making a great leaps forward in science and technology requires much more than lone genius. Cooperation, financing and hard work are at the core of progress.The question facing the United States right now: Is the country up to the task?

Long left in the dust by their peers in climate research, a small group of soil scientists is spearheading an effort to apply rigorous computer analysis to the ground beneath our feet.Their goal: to produce a digital soil map of the entire world.It is a daunting task. In many parts of the world, such as Africa and South Asia, knowledge of soil is sketchy at best, relying on fading paper maps. And without accurate soil information, it is difficult for planners to know where crops are best grown, or for climate modelers to predict how much carbon might be released from soil into the atmosphere.

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft is in good shape to begin discovering Earthlike planets, according to its first science results, released on Thursday.The space telescope, launched in March 2009, detected the giant extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b within its first 10 days of taking data. Although this planet was previously discovered by ground-based telescopes, the fact that Kepler found it and measured it in such great detail bodes well.

A stone tablet found in a cave in Abauntz in the Navarra region of northern Spain is believed to contain the earliest known representation of a landscape.Engravings on the stone, which measures less than seven inches by five inches, and is less than an inch thick, appear to depict mountains, meandering rivers and areas of good foraging and hunting.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? An unidentified flying object is spotted by a BBC Look North webcam.

The summer villa of Roman Emperor Vespasian has been found in the Sabine hill country northeast of Rome, Italian archaeologists announced today.Titus Flavius Vespasianus is known for rebuilding the Roman Empire following the tumultuous reign of Emporer Nero. Vespasian changed the face of Rome by launching a major public works program, which included the construction of the Colosseum, the structure that arguably defines the glory of ancient Rome.

SYDNEY: In the wacky, unfamiliar world that is quantum computing, a study has found that these curious devices can continue to work perfectly even if half their components, or qubits, are missing.Quantum computers harness the power of quantum physics where, "strange things can happen," said lead author of the study, Tom Stace at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia.

The discovery that compounds known as iron pnictides can superconduct at 50 degrees above absolute zero has reignited physicists' quest for better high-temperature superconductors, and may offer clues to unlocking a 20-year mystery.

This mosaic of image swaths from Cassini's Titan Radar Mapper, taken with the synthetic-aperture radar (SAR), features a large dark region several hundred kilometers across that differs in several significant ways from other potential lakes observed on Titan. It is not as dark to the radar as many lakes (including the lakes seen here), and the nature of the margin is unusual. It has many characteristics in common with lakes, including its channels and interior, yet its differences distinguish it from other similar features. At the top (north), the feature has characteristics of a shoreline, with round bay-like margins and channels that drain into it; at left (west) and right (east) it is rimmed by bright, feathery, branching channel-like structures, some of which extend for tens of kilometres.

A barrage of comets may have delivered Earth's oceans around 3.85 billion years ago, a new study suggests.Scientists have long suspected that Earth and its near neighbors were walloped by tens of thousands of impactors during an ancient event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.

A process that cleans wastewater and generates electricity can also remove 90 percent of salt from brackish water or seawater, according to an international team of researchers from China and the U.S.Clean water for drinking, washing and industrial uses is a scarce resource in some parts of the world. Its availability in the future will be even more problematic. Many locations already desalinate water using either a reverse osmosis process -- one that pushes water under high pressure through membranes that allow water to pass but not salt -- or an electrodialysis process that uses electricity to draw salt ions out of water through a membrane. Both methods require large amounts of energy.

Researchers have largely put to rest a long debate on the underlying mechanism that has caused periodic ice ages on Earth for the past 2.5 million years - they are ultimately linked to slight shifts in solar radiation caused by predictable changes in Earth's rotation and axis.In a publication to be released Friday in the journal Science, researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions conclude that the known wobbles in Earth's rotation caused global ice levels to reach their peak about 26,000 years ago, stabilize for 7,000 years and then begin melting 19,000 years ago, eventually bringing to an end the last ice age.

Global calamities like the one that doomed most dinosaurs forever alter the varieties of life found on Earth, but new research shows that it doesn't take a catastrophe to end entire lineages. An analysis of 200 million years of history for marine clams found that vulnerability to extinction runs in evolutionary families, even when the losses result form ongoing, background rates of extinction.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed 3D holograms that can be touched with bare hands. Generally, holograms can't be felt because they're made only of light. But the new technology adds tactile feedback to holograms hovering in 3D space.Called the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, the hologram projector uses an ultrasound phenomenon called acoustic radiation pressure to create a pressure sensation on a user's hands, which are tracked with two Nintendo Wiimotes. As the researchers explain, the method doesn't use any direct contact and so doesn't dilute the quality of the hologram. The researchers, led by Hiroyuki Shinoda, currently have the technology on display at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans.

Scientists are improving their technique for bending DNA into origami shapes. The latest twist uses custom-made chemicals to turn bunches of molecules into smoothly curving circlets and gears - a trick that eventually could set the stage for practical nanomachines.DNA origami is a technique for folding the double helixes into programmed patterns. Some of the experiments have produced whimsical demonstrations such as a microscopic "happy face" or a map of the Americas. But the purpose behind all this is not mere child's play."Instead of just programming abstract software, we're programming matter," Harvard biochemist William Shih, one of the researchers behind the latest yoga tricks, told me today.

A computer with DNA as its information carrier can solve classic logic conundrums, researchers say.DNA has been used to do simple number crunching before, but a system developed by Israeli scientists can effectively answer yes or no questions.Strands of DNA are designed to give off a green light corresponding to "yes".In Nature Nanotechnology, the team also describes a program which bridges the gap between a computer programming language and DNA computing code.

One of Aesop's fables may have been based on fact, scientists report.In the tale, written more than 2,000 years ago, a crow uses stones to raise the water level in a pitcher so it can reach the liquid to quench its thirst.Now a study published in Current Biology reveals that rooks, a relative of crows, do just the same when presented with a similar situation.

FROM cave paintings to Roman mosaics, our perception of archaeological artefacts is affected by how they are lit - which is usually by bright modern lights. As a result, the way we see them may bear little resemblance to how they would have looked to the people who created them.Alan Chalmers of the Digital Laboratory at the University of Warwick, UK, wants to fix that. He is working with computer scientists and archaeologists at the Roman site of Conimbriga in Portugal to come up with computer reconstructions that take account of the lighting conditions of the time. "We want a research tool, not just a pretty picture," he says.

A letter scratched into a clay tablet reveals a desperate plea for reinforcements that came just too late. Alone, petrified and facing almost certain death, the ancient Assyrian leader Mannu-ki-Libbali scrawled a call for help to his commander, but his cry for extra troops came too late.Soon after it was sent, the ancient city of Tushan was overrun by Babylonian invaders, its temples and palaces pillaged, then torn down or set aflame.

MODERN humans have got it easy. Anyone with a computer can look up just about any location and within seconds bring up a map complete with step-by-step directions from A to B.The internet and centuries of map-making mean getting to, say, the prehistoric painted caves of France and Spain is child's play. "But imagine a group of hunter-gatherers, returning to an area they had not been to for a long time. How do you find a particular cave, especially if the vegetation has changed and its entrance may be masked?" asks independent archaeologist Paul Bahn.

A new variety of rice being tested in the fields of India's eastern Jharkhand state has the potential to change the face of Indian agriculture.Sahbhagi dhan is drought-tolerant and can survive even if there are no rains for 12 days.Rice is known to be a "thirsty crop" and a "water guzzler" and scientists have been working for years to develop a strain which will withstand a dry spell.

CHONGQING, China (CNN) -- At the Chongqing Children's Palace, experts are hoping to revolutionize child-rearing with the help of science. About 30 children aged 3 to 12 years old and their parents are participating in a new program that uses DNA testing to identify genetic gifts and predict the future.When Director Zhao Mingyou first heard about the technology earlier this year, he instantly knew it could be a success in China."Nowadays, competition in the world is about who has the most talent," said Zhao. "We can give Chinese children an effective, scientific plan at an early age."

City leaders in Oxford, Ala. have approved the destruction of a 1,500-year-old Native American ceremonial mound and are using the dirt as fill for a new Sam's Club, a retail warehouse store operated by Wal-Mart.A University of Alabama archaeology report commissioned by the city found that the site was historically significant as the largest of several ancient stone and earthen mounds throughout the Choccolocco Valley. But Oxford Mayor Leon Smith -- whose campaign has financial connections to firms involved in the $2.6 million no-bid project -- insists the mound is not man-made and was used only to "send smoke signals.".

TEHRAN -- An archaeologist lamented the four-year hiatus in the excavations at the Achaemenid palace of Bardak Siah, urging new studies be undertaken on the ancient site in southern Iran.Additional studies on the palace located near the city of Borazajan in Bushehr Province can shed light on the history of the Achaemenids before Cyrus the Great seized power, Ehsan Yaghmaii told the Persian service of CHN on Monday.

Methane on Mars is being produced and destroyed far faster than on Earth, according to analysis of recent data.Scientists in Paris used a computer climate model for the Red Planet to simulate observations made from Earth.It shows the gas is unevenly distributed in the Martian atmosphere and changes with the seasons.The presence of methane on Mars is intriguing because its origin could either be life or geological activity - including volcanism.

Scientists say they have decoded the entire genetic structure of HIV-1 - the main cause of Aids in humans.They hope this will pave the way to a greater understanding of how the virus operates, and potentially accelerate the development of drug treatments.HIV carries its genetic information in more complicated structures than some other viruses.The US research, published in Nature, may allow scientists the chance to look at the information buried inside.HIV, like the viruses which cause influenza, hepatitis C and polio, carries its genetic information as single-stranded RNA rather than double-stranded DNA.

NASA plans to award $50 million in stimulus funds in November to support private-sector development of new spaceships capable of carrying crew members to the international space station. Details about the program, known as Commercial Crew Development or CCDev, came out on Tuesday via the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

A well-preserved pterosaur with soft tissues reveals this dinosaur-age flying reptile had hair, claws and wings that were unlike anything seen on today's living animals, suggests a new paper.Analysis of the remains, which date to around 140 to 130 million years ago, indicate pterosaurs were warm-blooded insect eaters that may have lived in trees and possessed sophisticated flying skills.

People often talk about greenhouse gases and their effect on the earth's climate as if those effects were new. But greenhouse gases have been around for hundreds of millennia, playing a key role in the start of the ice ages in the Northern Hemisphere 2.72 million years ago.Yair Rosenthal, a professor of marine science in the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, and Sindia Sosdian, Rosenthal's former student and now a postdoctoral scholar at The Australian National University, have established a 3.2 million-year temperature record from the deep ocean that makes that influence clear.

Archaeologists are putting some flesh on the bones of the David and Goliath myth by shifting through layers of earth at the site in the Holy Land.While little physical evidence has ever been found to support the 3,000-year-old biblical story of David and Goliath, a team from Israel and Australia has been excavating 50 kilometres from Jerusalem in the city of Tell es-Safi, where Goliath was supposedly born.According to the bible, Goliath stood around three metres tall and lived in the 10th century BC in the ancient city of Gath, which is now modern day Tell es-Safi.

Three Japanese cyborg look-alikes turned heads on busy Tokyo streets and subway trains Monday as they made their way to a robotics conference on a hot summer's day -- without breaking a sweat.Two men and a woman, wearing what looked like white plastic exoskeletons over black outfits, were testing -- at a pace of 1.8 kilometres (1.1 miles) an hour -- robotic suits designed to give mobility to the injured and disabled.

Pity the science students who can't just learn about Newtonian laws of physics and falling objects. No, there's also the small-scale world of quantum physics where atoms can exist in two states at once, or remain connected across millions of light years. But researchers may have found relief in a potentially groundbreaking experiment that could demonstrate quantum mechanics in large objects. It's not just for atoms!Quantum mechanics operates in a bizarro world that includes superposition, where atoms can maintain more than one state at a time. Matter can also become entangled so that it remains connected across vast distances -- a ghostly phenomenon dubbed "spooky action at a distance" by Albert Einstein.

Arachnophobes, look away now. These ancient early relatives of spiders may have lived 300 million years ago. But rendered in 3D, they are still likely to leave you with that nervous, skin-prickling feeling.The models of the two fossilised creatures, Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestvicii, were created by scientists from Imperial College after taking 3000 X-ray images of each fossil and compiling them into a 3D model, much in the same way as in medical imaging. The models reveal ferocious physical traits that helped the creatures to hunt and kill prey as well as some of the creatures' defenses against predators.

Flasks, beakers and hot plates may soon be a thing of the past in chemistry labs. Instead of handling a few experiments on a bench top, scientists may simply pop a microchip into a computer and instantly run thousands of chemical reactions, with results -- literally shrinking the lab down to the size of a thumbnail.Toward that end, UCLA researchers have developed technology to perform more than a thousand chemical reactions at once on a stamp-size, PC-controlled microchip, which could accelerate the identification of potential drug candidates for treating diseases like cancer.

It's the question at the heart of an age-old murder mystery: Who or what killed off the mammoths?A new study has found that overhunting by our ancestors, coupled with a sharp cooling event around 12,900 years ago, may have led to the mammoth's demise.Four years ago, a group of scientists proposed that a comet or asteroid may have killed off mammoths, smacking into a thick ice sheet that was receding across Canada or breaking up in a rain of fire that scorched North America.Hints of an impact have been documented in the geological record, but no smoking gun -- in the form of a crater -- has emerged.

Astronomers have long been curious how red supergiants stars, like the bright star, Betelgeuse, manage to shed so much matter into space.Now, thanks to a collaborative effort which gave scientists a detailed view of the distant star's surface, they have an answer -- it's boiling.Observations with a trio of 1.8-meter radio telescopes show giant bubble-like structures bobbing on the surface of Betelgeuse, a massive star located 640 light-years away in the constellation Orion.Emitting about 100,000 times more light than our sun, Betelgeuse is the bright orange star on the shoulder of Orion, also known as The Hunter.

SALT LAKE CITY - Looters who plundered one of Utah's newest troves of dinosaur bones got away with ribs, vertebrae and part of an ancient legbone they had to bust apart to remove. They also stole hidden scientific clues about the life of a young diplodocus dinosaur that roamed the area some 150 million years ago."It's like pieces of a puzzle that are now gone," said Scott Williams, collections and exhibits manager at the Burpee Museum of Natural History, the Rockford, Ill.-based institution that has been digging at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management-owned site.

Welcome to the last day on Earth. Humanity's descendants have long since died or fled, oceans have long since vaporized, and the life-giving sun has ballooned into a swollen giant filling the sky.Scientists have debated for years what will happen to our planet when the sun's fusion furnace begins to run out of fuel and swell into a red giant a few billion years from now. The most recent simulations suggest that Earth will end up being swallowed by the dying sun.

Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script.The team led by a University of Washington researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows distinct patterns in the symbols' placement in sequences and creates a statistical model for the unknown language.

An international debate is needed on the use of autonomous military robots, a leading academic has said.Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield said that a push toward more robotic technology used in warfare would put civilian life at grave risk.Technology capable of distinguishing friend from foe reliably was at least 50 years away, he added.

MEXICO CITY.- The 25 Late Post Classic Prehispanic burials and associated offerings found in Cholula Historical Center, in Puebla, are result of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) archaeological salvage that ended on July 27th 2009.During civil works conducted by Cholula City Hall in May 2009, archaeological vestiges were discovered. INAH was notified immediately and began salvage, which required temporal suspension of municipal work for over 40 days.During that time, 20 complete human skeletons with their offerings were rescued and registered, as well as 5 bone concentrations, one of them accompanied with wind musical instruments.

ANKARA - An 8,000-year-old human skeleton was found during excavations in one of the oldest residential areas in southern Turkey, a media report said.The skeleton was discovered inside a Neolithic-age tomb unearthed in Yumuktepe Hoyuk of the southern Mersin province by archeologists from the Italian Lecce University and Turkish Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported.

Human fossils have been found from the Ethiopian highlands to the Indonesian island of Java. However, the single site with the biggest deposits is located in northern Spain.About 150 miles north of Madrid, a jeep pulls up to a clump of trees in the Sierra de Atapuerca, a collection of hills that are rich with caves.A man with a helmet and a miner's headlamp gets out. He looks more like a mountain guide than a scientist. He's Juan Luis Arsuaga, Spain's best-known paleontologist.

They were just one metre tall with very long arms, no chins, wrist bones like gorillas and extremely long feet.In 2003, archaeologists excavating in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores made a discovery that forced scientists to completely rethink conventional theories of human evolution.They reported the discovery of a new species of human, one that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, at the same time as modern humans.But others disagreed, arguing the one-metre-high skeleton was a modern human that suffered from a deformity known as microcephaly.

It is one of the best preserved Stone Age villages in Europe, but Skara Brae in Orkney is just a few metres from the sea and it is a constant battle to save it from coastal erosion.Experts warn as many as 10,000 historic sites around Scotland are at risk of being swept away, many of them unexcavated and unprotected.

Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and the author of the Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout August to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

Rare Buddhist treasures, not seen for more than 70 years, have been unearthed in the Gobi Desert.The historic artefacts were buried in the 1930s during Mongolia's Communist purge, when hundreds of monasteries were looted and destroyed.The relics include statues, art work, manuscripts and personal belongings of a famous 19th Century Buddhist master.

Part of the ruins of a historically significant castle abandoned about 400 years ago has been uncovered in Hikone, Shiga Prefecture.Sawayama Castle was abandoned shortly after its master, feudal lord Ishida Mitsunari (1560-1600), lost the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, which was the death knell of the Sengoku (Warring States) period and paved the way to the beginning of the long and stable Edo period (1603-1867).Mistunari, who loyally served the then dominant Toyotomi family, led the losing force against one led by Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), who founded the Tokugawa shogunate.

For the forthcoming couple of months the Egyptian Museum is hosting an exhibition of five dozen ancient Egyptian artefacts unearthed at three archaeological sites by the mission from Waseda University over the past 40 years.These unique objects have never before been exhibited. They derive from Abusir, the site of 11 pyramids south of Giza; Dahshour, the site of King Senefru's pyramids; and Malkata on Luxor's west bank, where the grandfather of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, Amenhotep III, dug a lake and built a palace for his beautiful and powerful wife, Queen Tiye.

Srinagar, August 01(Vijay Kumar) - In Indian Kashmir, J & K Police department discovered an ancient and magnificent stone sculpture of Goddess Lakshmi from an ancient spring at Village Nagabal Lesser in Kokernag area of South Kashmir. The sculpture is brilliantly carved in limestone (slightly brownish in colour) measuring 9-inches in height and 5-inches in width. The deity is seated on a lotus throne placed in between two lions. The main sculpture is enclosed in a stone frame and the top of which projects in the shape of elephant motifs, towards the head of the deity. However, the right top of the right side is missing. The deity is holding lotus stuck in her right hand, cornucopia in her left hand and shown with smiling face and wearing a very impressive dress.

WASHINGTON: Vestigial organs like appendix, spleen, tonsils and various redundant veins, which have long been considered useless, are not really expendable as previously believed, according to researchers.The researchers have found that, more often than not, some of these "junk parts" are actually hard at work.Jeffrey Laitman, director of anatomy and functional morphology at New York City's Mount Sinai School of Medicine, says that history is littered with body parts that were called "useless" simply because medical science had yet to understand them.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have debated how many mass extinction events in Earth's history were triggered by a space body crashing into the planet's surface. Most agree that an asteroid collision 65 million years ago brought an end to the age of dinosaurs, but there is uncertainty about how many other extinctions might have resulted from asteroid or comet collisions with Earth.In fact, astronomers know the inner solar system has been protected at least to some degree by Saturn and Jupiter, whose gravitational fields can eject comets into interstellar space or sometimes send them crashing into the giant planets. That point was reinforced last week (July 20) when a huge scar appeared on Jupiter's surface, likely evidence of a comet impact.

Max Edelman, a sprightly gentleman with a potent laugh, huge social network and vast array of interests, surges through life. At 86, he figures he's got too much to do to slow down. Blind for decades, he receives a little help from Tobin, a placid black Lab.Like each of the thousands of service dogs, Tobin has been bred and trained to help keep his owner safe and independent. And like the thousands of people who are paired without charge with a dog, Edelman has undergone training to make the most of the union.

From the ground, a 100-hectare site just north of Italy's Venice airport looks like nothing more than rolling fields of corn and soybeans. But it's actually home to a buried Roman metropolis called Altinum, considered the precursor of ancient Venice. Now, using sophisticated aerial imagery, researchers have brought this city to life once again.Archaeologists have known for decades that Altinum, a Roman trading center that thrived between the 1st and 5th centuries C.E., lay below these farm fields. Raised 2 to 3 meters above the surrounding marshy lagoon by centuries of human habitation, the city was approximately the size of Pompeii. Its history could stretch back to the Bronze Age, and it dominated the region for at least 600 years before it became a part of the Roman Empire.But all traces of Altinum's buildings have long since disappeared, either stolen as building material or swamped by rising water levels in the surrounding lagoon. So how to map a city with no visible ruins? In July 2007, during a severe drought, Paolo Mozzi, a geomorphologist at the University of Padua in Italy, and his team took aerial photos of the site in several wavelengths of visible light and in near-infrared, with a resolution of half a meter.

BERLIN. A group of 30 monumental sculptures from Tell Halaf, in Syria, have been reconstructed after being pulverised into 25,000 fragments in a bombing raid in World War II. Dating from soon after 1000 BC, the basalt statues were on display in Berlin until a combination of fire and water caused devastating damage.Following the war, there were legal and political problems in even considering restoration. Although the reunification of Germany in 1990 eased the difficulties, conservators initially feared that reconstruction of the sculptures would be impossible. However, the painstaking work eventually began in 2002 and is finally nearing completion.

You might be familiar with the heartbreak and frustration of a failed hard disk - fretting over the loss of precious pictures, irreplaceable files squirreled away over years, often lost forever.These are depressingly regular losses often visited on those who do not make regular back-ups. According to one report by Swedish data salvaging service Kabooza that is the majority of us.A massive 82% of home computer users hardly bother with back-ups, says its worldwide report.But no matter how much you back up, all that precious data could be easily wiped out or rendered unreadable in the future anyway because of out-of-date or redundant technology.

Jellyfish and other related creatures may be helping to reduce the effects of climate change by stirring up the oceans, according to a new study in this week's issue of the journal Nature.The finding is the latest in a decades-old debate over whether swimming animals can contribute significantly to ocean mixing, the process by which warm water on the surface combines with the cold water far below. Mixing plays a role in global climate change because carbon dioxide in the air above oceans dissolves in the surface water. Through mixing, it can get pulled into the depths and stored there for long periods.

(AP) -- Material from volcanoes where the Earth's plates squeeze together is more oxidized than in regions where the seafloor splits apart, a finding that helps shed light on some of the basic processes in the planet's mantle.Using highly sensitive X-ray techniques researchers were able to measure the amount of reaction with oxygen that had occurred in minerals in various situations.Oxidation, best known as rust when it affects metals, was low in materials erupting from mid-ocean ridges where the seafloor spreads apart, Katherine A. Kelley of the University of Rhode Island and Elizabeth Cottrell of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Archaeologists have uncovered the ancient remains of a young man in northern Vietnam who could be the oldest known paraplegic in the world.The discovery has astounded researchers, showing the long-term survival of a man with a severe disability in a community where almost 50 per cent of people died before they turned five.

Who has not heard of the Phoenicians, the great seafarers? Their blood flows today in the Lebanese, Syrians, Cypriots, Maltese, Italians, North Africans, Spanish and Portuguese.Their legendary voyages brought them from Lebanon and Syria to Britain, West Africa and possibly even to the New World. Here were the true pioneers of seaborne and intercontinental trade, the role models for Venice, Genoa, Portugal, Spain and maybe even Holland, Britain and Japan.The Phoenicians were not the first ancient people to sponsor long-distance seaborne trade, but they and their Carthaginian children were the first to perfect it. They are the real pioneers of what we will call maritime capitalism.

The answer to easing the energy crunch in one of the nation's most populous states could lie underwater.Imagine if your utility company could harness the ocean's current to power your house, cool your office, even charge your car.Researchers at Florida Atlantic University are in the early stages of turning that idea into reality in the powerful Gulf Stream off the state's eastern shore.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factors drove animals to evolve in the first place.For some 3 billion years, single-celled life forms such as bacteria dominated the planet. Then, roughly 600 million years ago, the first multi-cellular animals appeared on the scene, diversifying rapidly.

Archaeologists in a remote region of Switzerland have excavated the ruins of the oldest hut in the Alps, a prehistoric discovery that dates back nearly 3,000 years.The find in the Silvretta mountains near the Austrian border gives scientists the oldest architectural proof that early Iron Age shepherds spent summers living among the rich alpine grasses, tending to herds and using milk to make cheese, in a way much like farmers today."It is perhaps a bit of a cliché for Switzerland, but what is interesting is just how old it is," said Thomas Reitmaier, an archaeologist from Zurich University who led the team. "There are lots of interesting spots around here."

Archaeologists have uncovered remarkable evidence that stone age man lived in the centre of Birmingham more than 10,000 years ago.The settlers used basic flint knives to hunt and cut meat and used fire to clear areas of woodland for grazing and growing food.Two flint tools, a layer of charcoal and pollens were found buried in the earth off Curzon Street, Eastside, where the new Birmingham City University campus is to be built.Until now, the earliest known settlements in the city centre are medieval, dating back to the 12th century, less than 1,000 years ago.

ROME (Reuters) - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's private conversations with an escort, which have riveted Italians all week, may wind up getting him into trouble with Italy's archaeological authorities. In one of the transcripts of his purported conversations with Patrizia D'Addario posted on an Italian website, Berlusconi boasts to her about his sprawling villa in Sardinia -- complete with an ice cream parlour and artificial lakes.

ANKARA, Turkey - Restoration workers have uncovered a well-preserved, long-hidden mosaic face of an angel at the former Byzantine cathedral of Haghia Sophia in Istanbul, an official said Friday.The seraphim figure - one of two located on the side of a dome - had been covered up along with the building's other Christian mosaics shortly after Constantinople - the former name for Istanbul - fell to the Ottomans in 1453 and the cathedral was turned into a mosque.The mosaics were plastered over according to Muslim custom that prohibits the representation of humans.

(ANSA) - Squillace, July 24 - An amateur scuba diver has discovered what may be the ruins of an ancient city off the coast of Calabria, a local town council said Friday.Alessandro Ciliberto, an architect with a passion for scuba diving, discovered a group of stone blocks around 3-4 metres under water while he was diving 15 metres from the shore near the town of Squillace on Calabria's east coast.''Standing out against the sandy seabed there's a dark-coloured form of around two metres in length and a metre and a half wide which seems to be man-made,'' Ciliberto said.''Continuing to explore the zone a few metres away, I found a white-coloured plinth half a metre high. Further on, there are a pair of stone blocks, one rectangular and of modest dimensions and the other an undefined shape,'' he added.

A fishing boat trawling for mussels off the Dutch coast has instead landed a 40,000 year-old human bone, German scientists said on Sunday after examining the find.Anthropologists from the University of Leipzig in eastern Germany confirmed that the forehead bone was "at least 40,000 years old and therefore the oldest ever found underwater," according to August's edition of GEO magazine.The fishermen also found the caveman's "tool kit", consisting of a hand-axe and flints.However, despite the fact the bone was found under the sea, the man dwelt on land and primarily ate meat, the scientists said.

Algae use carbon dioxide to generate a number of oil molecules, via photosynthesis, as a way of storing energy. People have been trying to make them overproduce the oil and store it. We're changing the algae's gene structure to get them to produce hydrocarbons similar to those that come out of the ground and to trick them into pumping these hydrocarbons out instead of accumulating them. As other groups get CO2 sequestration techniques going, we'd like to take that CO2 and get the algae to convert it back into oil. The aim is to prevent it from further increasing carbon in the atmosphere.

If humans want to persuade microbes to produce vast quantities of fuels or pharmaceuticals, we may need to give evolution a helping hand. A new genome engineering machine that tweaks dozens of genes to create billions of unique strains in a few days does just that."This technique allows us to do some amount of rapid evolution," says Harris Wang, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, who led the project along with colleagues Farren Isaacs and George Church.

A WORLDWIDE network of radar stations could tackle the ever-growing problem of space debris - the remains of old rockets and satellites that pose an increasing threat to spacecraft.The US government is launching a competition, which will run until the end of 2010, to find the best way of tracking pieces of junk down to the size of a pool ball. Three aerospace companies - Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon - have each been awarded $30 million by US Air Force Space Command to design a "space fence" that will constantly report the motion of all objects 5 centimetres wide and larger in medium and low-Earth orbits.

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.

WASHINGTON - Two teams of Chinese scientists have made a major advance in mice in the development of a new kind of stem cell that doesn't involve destroying embryos.Those cells are derived from ordinary skin cells, and when they were created two years ago from human skin and genetically reprogrammed, it was hailed as a breakthrough. But questions remained whether they could act as chameleon-like as embryonic stem cells and morph into any cell type in the body.One way to show that versatility is if the new reprogrammed stem cells could be used to produce an entire new life.

Remnants that are believed to be from Korea's ancient Goguryeo Kingdom (37 BC-668) have been discovered for the first time in the far eastern part of Russia, from the excavation site of Kraskino fortress near the Posiet Bay close to Tumen River.While records in various old documents show that some parts of Russia's far eastern region including the Primorsky Territory had been under Goguryeo rule, there has never been an archeological discovery proving it.The 20-day excavation was conducted jointly by the Northeast Asian History Foundation and Pukyong National University of Korea with the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Biofuel research should focus on planes and not cars, the think tank Policy Exchange has said.A crop area the size of the USA would be needed to biofuel all the world's cars and alternatives, such as electricity, exist for them, it added.Instead, it said the EU should fund research into using plant-based fuel for aviation to help cut emissions.Sceptics say some biofuels create more carbon than they save and push up the price of food for the poor.

Leading thinkers in technology, design and science are gathering in Oxford to share their ideas about the future.TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is the European cousin of an already established top US event.The invitation-only conferences are dedicated to "ideas worth spreading" and have seen talks by former US presidents and Nobel Laureates.This year's event will explore questions in neuroscience, astrophysics and economics.

Genetic research indicates that Australian Aborigines initially arrived via south Asia. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology have found telltale mutations in modern-day Indian populations that are exclusively shared by Aborigines.Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian 'relic populations'. He said, "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests that the Aborigine population migrated to Australia via the so-called 'Southern Route'".

July 21, 2009 -- The surface of Mars was molten for more than 100 million years after it formed, preventing any early life evolving on the planet, said researchers.Their findings, based on analysis of rare Martian meteorites at NASA's Johnson Space Center in the U.S., are published in Nature Geoscience.Co-author Craig O'Neill, of Macquarie University's Department of Earth and Planetary Science, says the study overturns previous thought that the surface of Mars cooled within a few thousand years.

OAKLAND, California (CNN) -- Oakland's bid to become the first U.S. city to tax proceeds on medical marijuana passed Tuesday by a landslide vote. About 80 percent of voters chose to impose the tax on Oakland's medical marijuana facilities, according to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters.Some celebrated the news at Oaksterdam University by hand-rolling large marijuana cigarettes or stuffing cannabis into pipes. The school trains students for work in the medical marijuana industry.

Scientists have found evidence that another object has bombarded Jupiter, exactly 15 years after the first impacts by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.Following up on a tip by an amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley of Australia, that a new dark "scar" had suddenly appeared on Jupiter, this morning between 3 and 9 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. and noon EDT) scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, gathered evidence indicating an impact.

When explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark completed a trailblazing expedition across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean in 1806, they were revered as American heroes and their journals as literary classics.But Lewis's death three years later, at the age of 35, is now turning into a historical whodunnit as academics, scientists and generations of his descendants question whether he really committed suicide, as was accepted at the time, or whether he may have been felled by an assassin's bullets.Now, as the 200th anniversary of his death approaches, his descendants have mounted a fresh push to have his body exhumed and the cold case reopened, believing that modern forensic procedures could settle the mystery.

Huron County- The first clue that something unusual lay hidden beneath the old bean field didn't come from digging in the hard-packed dirt. Archaeology is still fundamentally about digging, but that would come later.No, the earliest suggestion of something worth uncovering on this plateau above the Huron River was some dark electronic smudges on a piece of graph paper. To an untrained eye, they looked like random squiggles - a few dots, two stripes running roughly parallel to each other, and an oval outline shaped like a chicken egg.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have recovered significant DNA information from a lost form of ancient barley that triumphed for over 3000 years seeing off: 5 changes in civilisation, water shortages and a much more popular form of barley that produces more grains. This discovery offers a real insight into the couture of ancient farming and could assist the development of new varieties of crops to face today's climate change challenges.The researchers, led by Dr Robin Allaby from the University of Warwick's plant research arm Warwick HRI, examined Archaeobotanical remains of ancient barley at Qasr Ibrim in Egypt's Upper Nile. This is a site that was occupied for over 3000 years by 5 successive cultures: Napatan, Roman, Meoitic, Christian and Islamic.

A 17-member team has found what may be the smoking gun of a much-debated proposal that a cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago ripped through North America and drove multiple species into extinction.In a paper appearing online ahead of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Oregon archaeologist Douglas J. Kennett and colleagues from nine institutions and three private research companies report the presence of shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in 12,900-year-old sediments on the Northern Channel Islands off the southern California coast.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google on Monday marked the 40th anniversary of the first human footsteps on the moon by adding virtual lunar exploration to its free online Earth map and imagery service.The moon joins Earth, Mars, and Sky in an options list in an upper tool bar on the main Web page at earth.google.com. Aspiring lunar explorers will need Google Earth 5.0 software, which can be downloaded free.Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin joined Google, X Prize Foundation, and NASA officials in Washington, DC, for the launch of Moon in Google Earth.

Earth's molten mantle is a potentially inexhaustible source of energy that could meet 10 percent of our nation's energy needs, but cost and safety concerns have hampered the growth of geothermal energy. Now, researchers have announced plans to test a more efficient way to tap into safer, low-temperature geothermal stores using nanotechnology.President Barack Obama has promoted geothermal energy as a component for kicking the nation's fossil fuel habit and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management auctioned geothermal energy rights on nearly 1,000 square kilometers of public land in the Southwest and expects 111 new geothermal plants by 2015.

LAS CRUCES, N.M. -- Few would connect when Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon to archeology -- it isn't the stuff of Roman ruins and Egyptian pyramids."I'm pretty far from Indiana Jones," said NMSU associate professor Dr. Beth O'Leary. "What's on the moon is a bunch of archeological sites. Now, they're not very ancient, but they represent human technology at a certain stage."O'Leary has spent the last few years of her life documenting the artifacts of the lunar missions. From stuff brought back like a camera, to stuff left behind, like a three by five American flag, or even a footprint."Unless you plan for how you're going to preserve stuff for the future, things can get lost," O'Leary told KFOX.

Sifting through layers of sediment in Vietnam's Song Hong Delta, researchers weren't surprised to find charred evidence of ancient fires after several cultures migrated there about 5,000 years ago. Cycles of early blazes are tied to changes in the climate, when the area dried out, as well as to agriculture, as a means to clear land for planting. But what could explain a surge in singed land throughout the past 1,500 years?War, it seems.A collaborative effort between Vietnamese and Chinese researchers has linked data from the dirt to fashion a new understanding of fire in the area over the past 5,000 years, as humans became a more powerful force in the landscape.

XI'AN, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Archeologists have found up to 100 terracotta warriors and an army officer at the world heritage site in Xi'an, northwest China's Shanxi Province, a month after they began a third excavation of the site."Our most exciting discovery so far is the army officer," said chief archeologist Xu Weihong.He said the life-sized figure was found lying on its stomach behind four chariots. "We can't see its face yet, but the leather gallus on its back is distinct."Xu said the gallus was typical of army officers in the Qin Dynasty (221 B.C.- 207 B.C.). "We need extra care to bring it out of the pit and restore its original color, which may take a few months."

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The 15th century Vinland Map, the first known map to show part of America before explorer Christopher Columbus landed on the continent, is almost certainly genuine, a Danish expert said Friday.Controversy has swirled around the map since it came to light in the 1950s, many scholars suspecting it was a hoax meant to prove that Vikings were the first Europeans to land in North America -- a claim confirmed by a 1960 archaeological find.Doubts about the map lingered even after the use of carbon dating as a way of establishing the age of an object.

Housed in a small gallery off the Brooklyn Museum's Egyptian wing is "Magic in Ancient Egypt: Image, Word, and Reality," an exhibition on view until October 8, 2009. Highlighting 20 objects from the museum's collection, it emphasizes how magic and religion, magic and science, even magic and health care, were inseparable in ancient Egypt. Despite its small stature and lack of videos or interactive computer displays, which sometimes overwhelm artifacts in exhibitions nowadays, "Magic" was an enjoyable presentation of a fascinating subject.

A US spacecraft has captured images of Apollo landing sites on the Moon, revealing hardware and a trail of footprints left on the lunar surface.The release of the images coincides with the 40th anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the Moon.The descent stages from the lunar modules which carried astronauts to and from the Moon can clearly be seen.The image of the Apollo 14 landing site shows scientific instruments and an astronaut footpath in the lunar dust.

WASHINGTON: There are still many secrets waiting to be gleaned from moon rocks collected by Apollo 11 astronauts on their historic moonwalk 40 years ago.Randy L Korotev, research professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences Washington University-St Louis (WUSTL), has studied lunar samples and their chemical compositions since he was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin.He "was in the right place at the right time" in 1969 to be a part of a team to study some of the first lunar samples. "We know even more now and can ask smarter questions as we research these samples," says Korotev.He is mainly interested in studying the impact history of the moon, how the moon's surface has been affected by meteorite impacts and the nature of the early lunar crust.

NEW YORK: A German company has come up with a brand new technique to mass produce artificial skin that may offer life-changing hope to burn victims, cancer patients and those recovering from surgery.According to PopSci.com, Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft science institute developed the technique to make the artificial skin, which is more affordable than similar ones in use now.It relies on computers that control the solution in which the skin grows.These computers also check the vats for infection, guide the blade that cuts the little swatches of skin, and tests the final product to make sure it meets standards.

Neanderthals are of course extinct. But there never were very many of them, new research concludes.In fact, new genetic evidence from the remains of six Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) suggests the population hovered at an average of 1,500 females of reproductive age in Europe between 38,000 and 70,000 years ago, with the maximum estimate of 3,500 such female Neanderthals."It seems they never really took off in Eurasia in the way modern humans did later," said study researcher Adrian Briggs of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The Cheddar Gorge in Somerset was one of the first sites inhabited by humans when they returned to Britain towards the end of the last Ice Age.New radiocarbon dates on bones from Gough's Cave show people were living there some 14,700 years ago.The results confirm the site's great antiquity and suggest human hunters re-colonised Britain at a time of rapid climate warming.From 24,000 years ago, an ice sheet extended over much of Britain.Beyond that ice sheet, in southern Britain and much of northern France, the environment resembled a polar desert. Evidence suggests these inhospitable conditions kept people out of north-west Europe for more than 9,000 years.

Discovered 13 years ago, and officially added to the periodic table just weeks ago, element 112 finally has a name.It will be called "copernicium", with the symbol Cp, in honour of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.Copernicus deduced that the planets revolved around the Sun, and finally refuted the belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.