Newsdesk Archive

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- Egyptian archaeologists digging in a necropolis at Luxor where the Pharaohs buried their dead have found a tomb dating back 3,500 years ago that belonged to an official known as the Supervisor of Hunters.The tomb of the supervisor, known as Amun-em-Opet in ancient Egyptian, dates back to the so-called 18th dynasty of Egyptian Pharaohs between 1570-1315 B.C., the Cairo-based Culture Ministry said in an e-mailed statement today. The west bank necropolis where it was found is called Dra Abu el-Naga.

Nearly 15 years ago Russell Ciochon shook our family tree when he announced that a fossil found in a Chinese cave was evidence of a new form of early human.But that was then.

WASHINGTON: In a new research, a team of scientists has suggested that humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, not chimpanzees and gorillas.The research, done by scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and the Buffalo Museum of Science, reject as "problematic" the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence.Jeffrey H. Schwartz, professor of anthropology in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences, and John Grehan, director of science at the Buffalo Museum, conducted a detailed analysis of the physical features of living and fossil apes that suggested humans, orangutans, and early apes belong to a group separate from chimpanzees and gorillas.

NEW DELHI: Microbiologists in Maharashtra have found 'magnetic bacteria' in the ancient Lonar lake formed due to meteorite impact, a finding that might open a vista for searching extra-terrestrial life. The magnetotactic bacteria, which are object of interest of scientists from various fields world over, were isolated from the lake in Maharashtra's Buldana district which is the only impact crater formed in basaltic rock.

The ability to learn and to establish new memories is essential to our daily existence and identity; enabling us to navigate through the world. A new study by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), McGill University and University of California, Los Angeles has captured an image for the first time of a mechanism, specifically protein translation, which underlies long-term memory formation.The finding provides the first visual evidence that when a new memory is formed new proteins are made locally at the synapse - the connection between nerve cells - increasing the strength of the synaptic connection and reinforcing the memory. The study published in Science, is important for understanding how memory traces are created and the ability to monitor it in real time will allow a detailed understanding of how memories are formed.

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence.During spacecraft commissioning, the IBEX team turned on the IBEX-Hi instrument, built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which measures atoms with speeds from about half a million to 2.5 million miles per hour. Its companion sensor, IBEX-Lo, built by Lockheed Martin, the University of New Hampshire, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of Bern in Switzerland, measures atoms with speeds from about one hundred thousand to 1.5 million mph.

The events - one, a massive, long-lived drought believed to have dried large portions of Africa and Asia, and the other, a rapid cooling that accelerated the growth of tropical glaciers - left signals in ice cores and other geologic records from around the world.Lonnie Thompson, University Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center there, outlined the puzzle today to colleagues at the Chapman Conference on Abrupt Climate Change. The meeting was sponsored by the American Geophysical Union and the National Science Foundation.

A new method for analysing the interior of fossils has shown that millimetre-long mussel-like crustaceans called ostracods used giant sperm to mate.Sperm of modern ostracods can reach 10 times their body length.The technique, known as holotomography, imaged the large sperm pumps and seminal receptacles of well-preserved ostracod fossils found in Brazil.

COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 17 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have used deep ocean sediment to reconstruct an ancient climate record dating to more than 500,000 years.Ohio State University researchers said the sediment -- trapped within the top 65.6 feet of a 1,312-foot sediment core drilled in 2005 in the North Atlantic Ocean -- has provided new information about the four glacial cycles that occurred during that period.

Rome, 17 June (AKI) - An 2000-year-old marble monument featuring the pagan god Mithras has been found outside Rome by Italian police who believe it was to have been illegally sold abroad. The large marble bas-relief which dates from the 2nd century AD was recovered by authorities in a house north of the capital, according to a report in the Italian daily, Il Messaggero.

Naples, 16 June (AKI) - Archaeologists have unearthed a number of ancient Roman treasures during excavation outside the southern Italian city of Naples. Twelve ancient statues, columns and fragments bearing inscriptions from what appear to be monuments from the Republican and Imperial periods of ancient Roman history have been uncovered.A head of the Roman emperor Tiberius bearing a crown of laurel leaves, two other male heads and a fragment of a painting are among the objects from the late Republican period in the 3rd century BC discovered by a team of archeologists at the site in Rione Terra di Pozzuoli.

Soil and heather samples taken from a Denbighshire beauty spot have helped paint a picture of life there nearly 10,000 years ago.Experts have found the uplands on Moel Famau, the highest peak in the Clwydian range, were used for hunting in the Mesolithic period (8,000 to 4,000BC).Evidence also suggests farming was common by the Iron Age (750BC to 43AD).

Many, if not most, Native people insist that their ancestors have lived on this continent since time immemorial, and some mainstream scientists are beginning to weigh in on their side.Scholars are pushing evidence of human habitation in North America well beyond the non-Native accepted wisdom that places it at a relatively recent 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.

Part of a Neanderthal man's skull has been dredged up from the North Sea, in the first confirmed find of its kind.Scientists in Leiden, in the Netherlands, have unveiled the specimen - a fragment from the front of a skull belonging to a young adult male.Analysis of chemical "isotopes" in the 60,000-year-old fossil suggest a carnivorous diet, matching results from other Neanderthal specimens.

The first analyses of the discoveries in the expedition Antisuyu 2009 open some perspectives. The archaeological area of Mameria is connected by an inca road from Llacta Pata ( happy discovery 2009 ) which would have been able to assure the administrative control according to an inca boss. A press conference will be held in the auditorium of the University of Puerto Maldonado (Universidad Nacional Amazonica de Madre de Dios) to focus at the end of June 2009.End of June, the final report of the expedition Antisuyu 2009 wiil be deliered to the director of the CPSC (the Peruvian José Molero Oswaldo Ruiz ,Ministry of Culture) and to the SERNANP (ex INRENA, Servicio Nacional de Aeras Naturales Protegidas Ministerio de Ambiente), in chargedof the management of the National park of Manu and watches for the respect for the native populations or verifies the coherence and the control of the impact studies. For example the MI 17 helicopter forbidden landing on Pusharo.

All Things Considered, June 16, 2009 · Engineering our climate to stop global warming may seem like science fiction, but at a recent National Academy of Sciences meeting, scientists discussed some potential geoengineering experiments in earnest.Climate researcher Ken Caldeira was skeptical when he first heard about the idea of shading the Earth a decade ago in a talk by nuclear weapons scientist Lowell Wood.

Biomedical researcher Robert Lanza has been on the frontier of cloning and stem cell studies for more than a decade, so he's well-acclimated to controversy. But his book "Biocentrism" is generating controversy on a different plane by arguing that our consciousness plays a central role in creating the cosmos."By treating space and time as physical things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for understanding the world," Lanza declares.

Etched into crops, the outlines of Bronze Age burial mounds surround a roughly 190-foot (57-meter) circular Stone Age temple site about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Stonehenge in southern England in an undated aerial photo.Discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage, the U.K. government's historic-preservation agency, the "crop circles" are the results of buried archaeological structures interfering with plant growth. True crop circles are vast designs created by flattening crops.

A University of Colorado at Boulder team has uncovered an ancient and previously unknown Maya agricultural system -- a large manioc field intensively cultivated as a staple crop that was buried and exquisitely preserved under a blanket of ash by a volcanic eruption in present-day El Salvador 1,400 years ago.Evidence shows the manioc field -- at least one-third the size of a football field -- was harvested just days before the eruption of the Loma Caldera volcano near San Salvador in roughly A.D. 600.

Just outside the Valley of the Kings a set of ancient tombs has created a very modern controversy.Western archaeologists accuse the Egyptian Government of forcibly displacing thousands of people from a unique local community to open up the site as a new tourist attraction, while the authorities say that the villagers have damaged tombs and stolen mummies.

An amateur historian has uncovered an ancient cold spring in Bath.Councillor Bryan Chalker has been pondering over maps and photographs of the Larkhall area of the city for several months."It's a little bit of jigsaw falling into place. It's wonderful to be able to say to the people of Larkhall, 'yes you did have your own spa'," he said.The spring was originally discovered in 1832 but had since been lost, Mr Chalker added.

Scientists at Pennsylvania State University resurrected glacial bacteria that had been buried for 120,000 years, raising hopes that if there was ever life on Mars, we might be able to re-animate it, too.The scientists found the bacteria, named Herminiimonas glaciei, buried under nearly 2 miles worth of ice in Greenland. Scientists think that, since it's small even for bacteria, it survives on nutrients trapped in veins of ice and uses its flagella to move within veins to seek food.It took the scientists almost a year to revive the bacteria and coax it to grow; once it did, it yielded small colonies of purple-brown bacteria.

The people of Liep Tuyet commune in Quoc Oai District in the former province of Ha Tay (now part of Hanoi) are set to keep an ancient vow to preserve their traditional folk songs (Hat Do), which have almost fallen into oblivion.Hat Do is a kind of medieval Vietnamese folk songs from the ancient land of Phong Chau (Quoc Oai today), where the first Vietnamese kings, the Hung Kings, built their capital.Legend has it that while touring the country, Tan Vien (one of the four immortal Vietnamese gods) once stopped in Liep Ha (Liep Tuyet commune today) and taught local residents how to grow rice and corn in the sandy fields, build dykes and irrigate the land.

BEIJING - THE city wall that has defended the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an for 1,400 years is being breached from the inside by tiny mites, state media reported on Monday.Experts involved in preservation work told Xinhua news agency they had discovered significant interior damage to the wall, considered one of the best preserved ancient city fortifications in the country.'The mites had lived and built their dens in the wall for a thousand years, and had eaten it away from the inside,' it quoted Mr Li Yuhu, an archaeologist working on the wall, as saying.

A breakthrough could lead to drugs to alleviate the pain experienced by cancer patients.The biology of cancer pain is different to other types of pain, often rendering analgesic drugs ineffective.Work by a German team, published in Nature Medicine, shows that blocking a specific type of hormone-like molecule produced by tumours could help. The team showed that the molecules make nerve endings grow in nearby tissue, causing an acute sensation of pain.

Sharjah: An archeological team from the Royal Holloway University of London has arrived in Sharjah to carry out research to identify the archaeological layers of Al Faya Mountain in Sharjah using gamma rays.The studies on the mountain started last season, when an archaeological layer dating back over 100,000 years was found.This is the same period as early Homo sapiens - "wise man" which has the same anatomic features of modern people - left East Africa for the northern shores of the Indian Ocean and South Asia, during periods when the sea level was low.

As the battle between creationism and evolution heats up, some atheists, like Jerry Coyne, have been insisting that it is really a battle between religion and science. Coyne resists any accommodation between religious and non-religious scientists to defend Darwinism. He doesn't want to see them joining forces against the creationist common enemy in case that legitimises religion. In order for his position to make sense, he needs to show that there is some sort of existential conflict between religion and science. So it is unfortunate for him that the historical record clearly shows that accommodation and even cooperation have been the default positions in the relationship.

UFO watchers believe that in 1947 a flying saucer with aliens on board landed outside the New Mexico town of Roswell and that an elaborate cover-up by the authorities followed. The BBC's Kevin Connolly went to Roswell in pursuit of the truth about the Roswell incident.There is a lunar quality to the landscape of New Mexico which seems somehow appropriate for a state which is our portal to the heavens.

Europe's new billion-euro Herschel space observatory, launched in May, has achieved a critical milestone.The telescope has opened the hatch that has been protecting its sensitive instruments from contamination.The procedure allowed light collected by Herschel's giant 3.5m mirror to flood its supercold instrument chamber, or cryostat, for the first time.The observatory's quest is to study how stars and galaxies form, and how they evolve through cosmic time.The command sent on Sunday to fire two pyrotechnic bolts holding down the hatch was arguably the key moment in the European Space Agency (Esa) mission since the 14 May launch from Earth.

REASSURING news for would-be lunar astronauts: a scouting probe due to launch next week will make upcoming trips to the moon that little bit safer.Killer space radiation and meteorite impacts are just a few of the pleasures that await astronauts venturing onto the lunar surface as part of NASA's return to the moon, planned for the 2020s.To map out these deadly delights and pinpoint resources like water-ice and metals in lunar rock and soil, NASA plans to launch its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on 17 June. It will hit orbit four days later.

Berlin - Zahi Hawass, the flamboyant head of Egypt's antiquities authority, says he will offer documentary proof that the fabled bust of Queen Nefertiti does not belong to Germany, a Berlin newspaper was set to report on Sunday. Hawass, whose media savvy has put Egypt's archaeological treasures on front pages round the world, has vocally called in the past for the return of the bust, found in a tomb nearly a century ago and then claimed by a Berlin millionaire who financed the excavation.The newspaper, Tagesspiegel am Sonntag, quoted him as saying, "I believe we have good arguments for her return."

Pinned prominently on Orion's shoulder, the bright red star Betelgeuse hardly seems like a wallflower. But a new study suggests the giant star has been shrinking for more than a decade.Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its life as a red supergiant. The bright, bloated star is 15 to 20 times more massive than the sun. If it were placed at the centre of the solar system, the star would extend out to the orbit of Jupiter.

A self-assembling molecule synthesized in a laboratory may resemble the earliest form of information-carrying biological material, a transitional stage between lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life.Called tPNA, short for thioester peptide nucleic acids, the molecules spontaneously mimic the shape of DNA and RNA when mixed together. Left on their own, they gather in shape-shifting strands that morph into stable configurations.

June 11, 2009 -- "Star Trek" makes faster-than-light travel look easy, but according to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into a black hole."Warp drives are so far the best case scenario to attain faster-than-light travel," said Stefano Finazzi of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies. This paper "makes it much harder to realize, if not almost impossible, warp drives."In normal physics, nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Einstein's theory of relativity forbids it. In normal space any object approaching the speed of light will increase in mass exponentially, and require an exponential increase in the amount of power needed to propel it forward.

After years of preparation and testing, the SETI Institute has released the first results from a search for alien signals that uses the $50 million, 42-dish Allen Telescope Array. You didn't hear about it? Maybe that's because none of the thousands of signals picked up so far has rung an alarm bell.Nevertheless, the fully functioning system represents the latest, greatest leap in the nearly 50-year-long search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

RIALTO, California (Reuters) - Fifty miles east of Los Angeles, a small and inconspicuous facility is using something most of us would rather not think about -- household sewage -- to create a resource we can't live without -- fuel.EnerTech Environmental, an Atlanta startup, on Thursday unveiled the United States' first commercial biosolids-to-energy facility in California's Inland Empire. "Biosolids" is the nice term for processed sewage sludge.The sludge is 80 percent water when it arrives at EnerTech's plant, where it is turned into fuel simply by removing most of that liquid.

We could find planets in other galaxies using today's technology, according to a new simulation. The study gives credence to a tentative detection of a planet in Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbour.The idea is to use gravitational microlensing, in which a distant source star is briefly magnified by the gravity of an object passing in front of it. This technique has already found several planets in our galaxy, out to distances of thousands of light years.

Since 1998, archaeologists at a site in Allendale County have been making discoveries that have the potential to rewrite the history - or more precisely, the prehistory - of our state.The Topper site, named for a local resident who first found ancient artifacts at this location that borders the eastern shore of the Savannah River, has been the subject of major media attention because of the unearthing of evidence that human habitation in North America predates traditional estimates.One of the staple beliefs of paleoamerican research - the term "paleo" is derived from the Greek word for "ancient" - holds that the first Americans appeared no earlier than 13,000 years ago; these early humans, it is thought, originated in Northeast Asia and crossed over to our continent after the last Ice Age.

LEIPZIG, Germany, June 9 (UPI) -- Scientists who mapped fruit trees and tracked chimpanzees in Ivory Coast say the animals can remember the locations of thousands of trees.Emmanuelle Normand of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who headed the study, told the BBC she and her colleagues mapped 12,499 fruit trees in Tai National Park, using GPS to get exact locations."We were amazed by the apparent easiness by which chimpanzees discover highly productive fruit trees," she said. "Or how after being separated from other group members for hours or days, they could join each other silently at a large fruit tree, like if they would have had an appointment at this place."

The woolly mammoth died out several thousand years ago, but the genetic material they left behind is yielding new clues about the evolution of mammals. In a study published online in Genome Research (www.genome.org), scientists have analysed the mammoth genome looking for mobile DNA elements, revealing new insights into how some of these elements arose in mammals and shaped the genome of an animal headed for extinction.

Thailand returned seven treasures from Cambodia's Golden Age to its neighbor Friday as the countries pledged to prevent further smuggling of antiquities.The statues from the 12th century Angkorian era, including six heads of the Hindu god Shiva, were handed to Cambodian officials during an official one-day visit by Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Thai authorities seized them from smugglers in 1999.Widespread looting of Cambodia's ancient temples has occurred in recent decades, with many items smuggled into Thailand for sale on the international antiques markets or to private collectors.

Creatures roaming the balmy swamps and forests of the prehistoric Arctic survived the long dark season by switching diets, according to a new study.Instead of migrating south or hibernating for the winter like most animals today, they endured, foraging in dormant forests through the long polar gloaming.The research, which was led by Jaelyn Eberle, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, appears in the latest edition of the journal Geology.

The Iron Age victims are thought to have been slaughtered by the invading Romans in about 43AD.The ancient burial pit was discovered on Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth, Dorset, close to Maiden Castle, Europe's largest Iron Age hill fort.The site is being dug to make way for the so-called Olympic Highway, an £87m relief road for the 2012 Olympics.

NEW DELHI: Geologists have recovered about 10 million (one crore) year old fossils of an Ostrich-like bird's egg shell suggesting that valleys of Himachal Pradesh were inhabited by some large birds. A team of researchers led by experts from Panjab University, Chandigarh has recovered fossils of an egg shell, from Haritalyangar area near Dharmshala in Himachal Pradesh.

New Haven (WTNH) - A psychedelic drug that hasn't been seen by law enforcement for decades appears to be making a comeback. One man was arrested Thursday on charges he was making DMT, or Dimethyltryptamine, inside his New Haven home.Ryan Canfield, 32, was arraigned in New Haven Superior Court Friday morning following the massive drug bust at his Woodward Avenue home. Detectives found three kilos of DMT with a street value of about $3 million in the basement of the home. The drug is a hallucinogenic, similar to LSD, and comes in crystallized powder which can be smoked, or in liquid form which can be drunk. It's called the 'businessman's trip' because the high only lasts about 45 minutes.

A bill that would outlaw the psychoactive herb Salvia divinorum has passed the state Senate, prompting consumers to rush to buy it legally.Senate Bill 138, sponsored by Sen. Bill Purcell, D-Laurinburg, would prohibit the "manufacture, sale, delivery, or possession" of Salvia divinorum. The law calls for a fine for the first two offenses and misdemeanor charges for subsequent offenses. Purcell stressed that North Carolina's law would not be as strict as those of 13 states, which made Salvia divinorum a drug on par with heroin."We're not out to terrorize people and put people in jail," Senator Purcell said, "but we do want to make a statement that the state does care about this."

Hamburg - Early man 'genetically modified' wild horses to create tamer animals which became the domesticated horse which helped spread human civilisation around the globe, according to new findings by a team of German scientists.Until now, it was not known whether horses had always been 'user-friendly' or whether humans had interceded in their genetic makeup through selective breeding - as early humans demonstrably did with wolves and wildcats to 'create' modern dogs and cats.

Research of ruins on seabeds and in lakes or rivers is increasing in Japan, where many sites are yet to be fully explored.In Kushimoto in Wakayama Prefecture, the U.S.-based Institute of Nautical Archaeology held an excavation survey January and February of the Ertugrul, a Turkish warship that went down off the coast during the Meiji Era (1868-1912).The 2,344-ton wooden battleship of the Ottoman Empire's navy was on its return voyage after paying a courtesy call on Emperor Meiji in 1890 when the ship was caught in a storm, run aground and went down. All but 69 of the 650 souls on board perished in the disaster.

Latest research by the University of Cambridge suggests that millet may have been the world's first Chinese takeaway 7,000 years ago.In a paper published this week, archaeologists from the University of Cambridge reveal that the cultivation of broomcorn millet may have spread to the West after beginning in early Chinese farms.

LIFE on Earth is unlikely to have come from space, says a new study on viruses. If life is ever found on another planet, however, the findings could help us judge whether it arrived from space or not.Panspermia is the idea that life was seeded by extraterrestrial microbes in the form of hardy bacterial spores that hitched a ride on a space rock and landed on Earth. Jaana Bamford of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and her colleagues say the key to testing this theory lies with viruses, which are thought to be tied to key steps in the evolution of complex life on Earth.

XI'AN, June 10 (Xinhua) -- More than two tonnes of ancient coins dating back to as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907) have been unearthed on a playground of a primary school in Shaanxi Province, northwest China.Zhao Aiguo, director of the cultural relics protection and tourism bureau in Liquan County, Shaanxi, told Xinhua Wednesday that the coins were found when workers were excavating the grounds Tuesday for construction of another building.

A GIANT inflatable tower could carry people to the edge of space without the need for a rocket, and could be completed much sooner than a cable-based space elevator, its proponents claim.Inflatable pneumatic modules already used in some spacecraft could be assembled into a 15-kilometre-high tower, say Brendan Quine, Raj Seth and George Zhu at York University in Toronto, Canada, writing in Acta Astronautica (DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2009.02.018). If built from a suitable mountain top it could reach an altitude of around 20 kilometres, where it could be used for atmospheric research, tourism, telecoms or launching spacecraft.The team envisages assembling the structure from a series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as helium. To test the idea, they built a 7-metre scale model made up of six modules (see image). Each module was built out of three laminated polyethylene tubes 8 centimetres in diameter, mounted around circular spacers and inflated with air.

What's the proper conversation starter when greeting an alien?How about, "This is Earth speaking. We would like to know you. Please reply."Less graciously but perhaps more honestly, you might offer, "Down here we are all confused."And by the way, if you do come for a visit, please "don't kidnap us and poke us. We hate that."

About midway through construction of the replica of Onrust, a 17th-century Dutch ship, volunteer Lance LaTant of Queensbury, New York, paused and peered through a thicket of curved, bent white oak ribs towering over him and fellow workers. "It looked like a beached whale with bleached bones," he recalled. It was clear that finishing and launching the 52-foot, 29-ton boat in a year would be a challenge for the volunteer builders.

According to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer, America's third leading type of cancer, is also one of the most preventable. One-third of all colorectal cancer deaths could be avoided by simple screening, they say. But colonoscopies, though highly effective, can also be painful, and current diagnostic techniques are time-consuming and sometimes inaccurate.Sefi Vernick, a doctoral student of the Department of Physical Electronics at Tel Aviv University, believes he has an answer that may lead to earlier diagnosis - and to saving lives.Sefi Vernick, a doctoral student of the Department of Physical Electronics at Tel Aviv University, believes he has an answer that may lead to earlier diagnosis - and to saving lives.

June 9, 2009 -- Escherichia coli bacteria may be simple organisms, but scientists have now created ones that can count to three.The advance by scientists from Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could lead to environmental or biological sensors that measure toxins and then self-destruct once their job is done."We didn't teach the bacteria to count, we programmed them to count," said James Collins, a professor at Boston University and a co-author on the study, which appeared in a recent issue of the journal Science.

The famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed in California is loaded with shark teeth as big as a hand and each weighing a pound, from giant prehistoric killers called megalodon.Intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals, whales and fish, as well as turtle shells three times the size of today's leatherbacks, all these relics seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old disaster.But scientists now suggest this vast graveyard might not have resulted from a sudden catastrophe. Instead, they suggest it formed slowly over a long span of time, potentially serving as a window into thousands of years of ancient history.

Archaeologists in Jamestown, Virginia, have discovered a rare inscribed slate tablet dating back some 400 years, to the early days of America's first permanent English settlement.Both sides of the slate are covered with words, numbers, and etchings of people, plants, and birds that its owner likely encountered in the New World in the early 1600s.

(ANSA) - Rome, June 9 - The treasures of Baghdad's National Museum went online for the first time Tuesday as Italy inaugurated the Virtual Museum of Iraq as part of an ongoing cultural collaboration between the two countries.Looted during the United States-led invasion in 2003, the Baghdad Museum partially reopened in February after six years but the website is designed to make its most important artefacts accessible to everyone.The site (www.virtualmuseumiraq.cnr.it), in Arabic, English and Italian, offers visitors the chance to walk through eight virtual halls and admire works from the prehistoric to the Islamic period, while videoclips reconstruct the history of the country's main cities.

A massive bombardment of meteorites billions of years ago could have brought in enough water and carbon dioxide to jump-start the chemistry that let the Earth develop into the garden spot of our solar system.By studying meteorites and other evidence from this bombardment, a team of researchers at Imperial College in England has calculated that the meteorites could have carried in as much as 10 billion tons of water vapor and carbon dioxide to the young Earth every year for millions of years.

Dexter Rigsby wrote an article last week in the Guardian of June 3 with the headline, "Surviving the 2012 threat to humanity''. His article began: "Most people are becoming aware of a possible doomsday anomaly said to occur on or around December 21, 2012, when, according to scholars, two-thirds of mankind can be eliminated."Were I to own a newspaper it would have been on the front page because I truly believe that his article will soon be proven to have no parallel in importance at this time. In fact, my new book, The End of this Era. A linkage between Science and Religion, predictably the last of the eight which I have authored, is by far the most important of all I have ever written. It is largely based on the great Mayan prophecy.

The case of one of the most notorious murderers in British history, Hawley Crippen, is to be referred to the Court of Appeal, where the infamous doctor may secure a posthumous pardon 99 years after he was hanged.The Criminal Cases Review Commission has been secretly examining the safety of Dr Crippen's conviction and officials believe that senior judges should now decide whether he is innocent of the murder of his wife in 1910. Cases are referred to the appeal court if the commission feels there is a "real possibility" that the conviction will be ruled unsafe and quashed. At the centre of the case is DNA evidence that may establish the innocence of the American-born Crippen.

A new technique has been helping scientists piece together how the Earth's continents were arranged 2.5 billion years ago.The novel method allows scientists to recover rare minerals from rocks.By analysing the composition of these minerals, researchers can precisely date ancient volcanic rocks for the first time.By aligning rocks that have a similar age and orientation, the early landmasses can be pieced together.This will aid the discovery of rocks rich in ore and oil deposits, say the scientists. The approach has already shown that Canada once bordered Zimbabwe, helping the mining industry identify new areas for exploration.

HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) -- Decorated D-Day veteran Lenny Lisovicz says the whispers are true.For 65 years my family had heard whispers that he and 220 men stormed Omaha Beach and that he and his captain later went AWOL in Paris, France.They heard he returned to combat and fought all the way to Germany and his courage was rewarded with the prestigious Silver Star.Then -- after that sacrifice and loss -- he was committed to a hospital.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is in safe mode and in communications with Earth after an unexpected rebooting of its computer Wednesday evening, June 3.The spontaneous reboot resembles a Feb. 23 event on the spacecraft. Engineers concluded the most likely cause for that event was a cosmic ray or solar particle hitting electronics and causing an erroneous voltage reading.Jim Erickson, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said, "The spacecraft is sending down high-rate engineering data, power positive, batteries fully charged, sun pointed and thermally safe. The flight team is cautiously bringing the orbiter back to normal operations. We should be resuming our exploration of Mars by next week."

"A tomato seed is planted on the ground floor on a rotating spiral and when it arrives at the top, 30 days later, you pick the fruit," the vice president of Plantagon, Hans Hassle, told AFP.In a few decades, 80 percent of the global population will live in cities, increasing the need "to grow fruits and vegetables in an urban environment due to the lack of land," he said.With a vertical greenhouse, "we could have fresh organic produce every day and sell it directly to consumers in the city," Hassle said.

Flowering plants and hippo-like creatures once thrived in the Arctic, where the tundra and polar bears now prevail.New research, detailed in the June issue of the journal Geology, is shedding light on the lives of prehistoric mammals on Canada's Ellesmere Island 53 million years ago, including how they survived the six months of darkness during the Arctic winter.Today, Ellesmere Island, located in the high Arctic (about 80 degrees north latitude), is a polar desert that features permafrost, ice sheets, sparse vegetation and a few mammals. Temperatures there range from minus 37 degrees Fahrenheit (-38 Celsius) in winter to plus 48 degrees F (9 Celsius) in summer. It is one of the coldest and driest places on Earth.

After years of speculation, the contents of the Nikwasi Mound may finally be revealed.

LIMA (Reuters) - Researchers at an archeological site in northern Peru have made an unusually large discovery of nearly three dozen people sacrificed some 600 years ago by the Incan civilization.The bodies, some of which show signs of having been cut along their necks and collarbones, were otherwise found in good condition, said Carlos Webster, who is leading excavations at the Chotuna-Chornancap camp.

Some of the Central American rainforest's hidden treasures are being revealed by the Maya, more than a millennium after their passing.A study of the giant trees and beautiful flowers depicted in Maya art has identified which they held sacred.Created during the Maya Classic Period, the depictions are so accurate they could help researchers spot plants with hitherto unknown medicinal uses.The research is published in the journal Economic Botany.

Since its construction between 285 and 246 BC on the island of Pharos off the Eastern Cape (which was connected to the mainland by means of a man-made dyke seven stadions long and hence known as the Heptastadion -- thus giving Alexandria city a double harbour) the lighthouse built by the Greek architect Sastrotus of Cnidus during the reign of Ptolemy II has been famous one way or another. After it had ceased to be a beacon of light indicating the harbour to homecoming sailors, it remained in universal memory as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now there is talk of recreating this epitome of a landmark.The ancient Alexandria lighthouse played an important role in guiding sailors and navigators across the Mediterranean.

PALAKKAD: The Geo-Heritage Archaeological Research Centre has discovered three Paleolithic, 27 Microlithic and 26 Megalithic sites, ranging from the prehistoric to historic periods, in a micro-region in the Thenmala valley in Kollengode near here.A large number of architectural remains such as postholes and sockets and rock engravings have been discovered from the area. Postholes of rectangular, circular and squarish shapes are considered as Neolithic residences. The style of the rock engravings dates back to the Paleolithic age, according to the research centre.

AT BARELY a centimetre across and almost unrecognisable after centuries underground, it may not look much, but could shed light on an almost unknown era of Welsh history.[Follow Article Link...]

A QUIET night in December 2050. Small town anywhere on Earth. In the hospital, little Peter has just made his appearance in the world. As the happy family takes pictures of mother and baby, the thought that his birth is incomplete is far from their minds. And the birth will not be complete for a few hours, until hundreds of miles away his virtual twin is born.While Peter is dreaming his first dreams, samples of his blood and tissue are analysed and the resulting data transmitted to the simulation and modelling department of the regional medical centre.

The skeleton was uncovered during ongoing excavations of the site at Viminacium, a Roman military settlement on the Danube river, said archaeologist Miomir Korac.Zoran Markovic of Serbia's Nature museum said the skeleton "is extremely well preserved, with only a slightly damaged skull."We believe the skeleton is about one million years old, based on the layers of the grounds where it has been found," Markovic told B92 television.Experts estimated that the mammoth was over four metres tall (13 feet), possibly weighing up to 10 tonnes.

Chris Herd, a professor in the University of Alberta's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and curator of the university's meteorite collection, presented his research findings at the 2009 American Geophysical Union joint assembly in Toronto at the end of May.Herd conducted his analysis on the Tagish Lake Meteorite, which he has described as being possibly the "most important rock that's ever been found anywhere on the Earth."The U of A scientist found levels of formic acid that were four times higher than had previously been recorded on a meteorite. Formic acid is one of a group of compounds dubbed "organics" because they are rich in carbon. This compound is also commonly associated with ants and bees because of its presence in their venom.

NASA experts are taking fuzzy pictures and trying out different recipes for Red Planet dirt as they continue their weeks-long effort to get a stuck Mars rover moving again.It's been more than three weeks since the Spirit rover became mired in loose dirt on the west side of the Martian feature known as "Home Plate." During that time, the mission team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has fielded scores of suggestions for freeing up Spirit, rover project manager John Callas told me today.Callas said he and his colleagues have heard from "farmers who have had tractors stuck in the mud and figured out how to get them out," as well as a 7-year-old boy named Julian who suggested having Spirit push itself out with its robotic arm.

It was only a few years ago that scientists figured out how to reprogram adult cells to make them act like multipurpose stem cells, but the next discoveries are coming fast and furious. Researchers had previously transformed human skin cells into so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that can grow into any type of tissue; now, a new study reports that the same feat has been accomplished with pig cells. The achievement raises the possibility that genetically engineered pigs could be reared as organ donors, researchers say.

Neil Armstrong missed out an "a" and did not say "one small step for a man" when he set foot on the Moon in 1969, a linguistic analysis has confirmed.The researchers show for the first time that he intended to say "a man" and that the "a" may have been lost because he was under pressure.They say that although the phrase was not strictly correct, it was poetic.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A new University of Florida study shows mammals change their dietary niches based on climate-driven environmental changes, contradicting a common assumption that species maintain their niches despite global warming.Led by Florida Museum of Natural History vertebrate paleontologist Larisa DeSantis, researchers examined fossil teeth from mammals at two sites representing different climates in Florida: a glacial period about 1.9 million years ago and a warmer, interglacial period about 1.3 million years ago. The researchers found that interglacial warming resulted in dramatic changes to the diets of animal groups at both sites. The study appears in the June 3 issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

June 3, 2009 -- Central Europe's prehistoric people would likely have been amused by today's hand-sized hamburgers and hot dogs, since archaeologists have just uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped kitchen where roasted gigantic mammoth was one of the last meals served.The site, called Pavlov VI in the Czech Republic near the Austrian and Slovak Republic borders, provides a homespun look at the rich culture of some of Europe's first anatomically modern humans.

Formic acid, a molecule implicated in the origins of life, has been found at record levels on a meteorite that fell into a Canadian lake in 2000.Cold temperatures on Tagish Lake prevented the volatile chemical from dissipating quickly.An analysis showed four times more formic acid in the fragments than has been recorded on previous meteorites.The researchers told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that the formic acid was extraterrestrial.

For years many companies, governments and researchers have predicted that our energy future must lie with the universe's simplest element. The mooted hydrogen economy would use the gas to store and transport renewable or low-carbon energy, and power fuel cells in the transport sector or in portable electronics.But creating the necessary society-wide infrastructure has proved difficult and expensive to get off the ground. And now a rival idea, first suggested in 2006 by Nobel chemistry laureate George Olah at the University of Southern California, has received a boost.

On a recent trip to Trujillo I had the opportunity to visit the ancient city of Chan Chan, the capital city of the Chimu Civilization. Taking the taxi into Trujillo from the airport the road passes through what looks to be about the center of this vast city made of mud bricks. You are immediately struck by two things, one is the immense size of the place and the other is the vast destruction done by looters, earthquakes and the weather.

According to archaeologist Ruth Shady, the ruins of the ancient city of Caral (located at 207 km or 128 miles to the north of Lima) meet the conditions to join the UNESCO World Heritage List.Shady is a well known researcher of the Caral civilization, based in Supe valley, province of Barranca in Lima region.

THE builders of the ancient Mayan temples at Tikal in Guatemala switched to inferior wood a few decades before they suddenly abandoned the city in the 9th century AD. The shift is the strongest evidence yet that Mayan civilisation collapsed because they ran out of resources, rather than, say, disease or warfare.Researchers led by David Lentz, a palaeoethnobotanist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, sampled wooden beams and lintels from all six major temples and two palaces within the ancient city of Tikal. The first three temples, built before AD 741, used only large, straight logs of the sapodilla tree - a particularly strong wood that is nevertheless easy to carve with ceremonial inscriptions.

Strange circles have once again appeared in the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia, as spotted by astronauts aboard the International Space Station this April. News reports described the ice rings as a puzzling phenomenon.

An ambitious project to extract geothermal energy from hot rocks was launched in the UK this week. Can it avoid the same fate as recent high-profile and potentially dangerous failed attempts elsewhere in the world?The plan is to build a 3-megawatt commercial geothermal energy plant to power the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK, and the nearby community. A pilot project will test a technique to extract heat from hot dry rocks at a depth of about 3.5 kilometres.

Cultural heritage has emerged in the last few decades as a subject of increasing debate and interest. Controversies such as the Greek claim on the Parthenon Marbles, in the collection of the British Museum since 1816, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001 and the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad in 2003 have shown how objects and sites can have significance for both scholars and the public.

A 600ft jellyfish pattern has appeared in a barley field in Kingstone Coombes, Oxfordshire, in what is one of the most intriguing crop circles ever seen in Britain.

It is by turns aloof and affectionate, serene and savage, endearing and exasperating. Despite its mercurial nature, however, the house cat is the most popular pet in the world. A third of American households have feline members, and more than 600 million cats live among humans worldwide. Yet as familiar as these creatures are, a complete understanding of their origins has proved elusive. Whereas other once wild animals were domesticated for their milk, meat, wool or servile labor, cats contribute virtually nothing in the way of sustenance or work to human endeavor. How, then, did they become commonplace fixtures in our homes?

Millions of years before early humans evolved in Africa, their ancestors may have lived in Europe, a 12-million-year-old fossil hominid from Spain suggests.The fossil, named Anoiapithecus brevirostris by Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona, Spain, and his colleagues, dates from a period of human evolution for which the record is very thin. While only the animal's face, jaw and teeth survive, their shape places it within the African hominid lineage that gave rise to gorillas, chimps and humans. However, it also has features of a related group called kenyapithecins.

(PhysOrg.com) -- An international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle. Solar Cycle 24 will peak, they say, in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots. "If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78," says panel chairman Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.It is tempting to describe such a cycle as "weak" or "mild," but that could give the wrong impression.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new NASA study provides further evidence that Martian minerals dissolved in water could have kept that water from freezing, even on a cold, early Mars.NASA scientists modeled freezing conditions on Mars to test whether liquid water could have been present to form the surface features of the Martian landscape.

PhysOrg.com) -- Ancestors of tapirs and ancient cousins of rhinos living above the Arctic Circle 53 million years ago endured six months of darkness each year in a far milder climate than today that featured lush, swampy forests, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Jaelyn Eberle said the study shows several varieties of prehistoric mammals as heavy as 1,000 pounds each lived on what is today Ellesmere Island near Greenland on a summer diet of flowering plants, deciduous leaves and aquatic vegetation. But in winter's twilight they apparently switched over to foods like twigs, leaf litter, evergreen needles and fungi, said Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and chief study author.

June 1, 2009 -- Early humans living off the coast of California may have been the first "farmers" of the sea.By managing sea otter populations they maximized their harvest of abalone and mussels, making them pioneers in the art of sustainable fishery management, according to a new study.Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon and team of researchers collected thousands of shells from ancient settlements of the Chumash people in the Channels Islands near Santa Barbara, Calif., dating back to around 12,000 years ago.

The discovery of a Jupiter-like "exoplanet" orbiting the star VB 10 is the first to be made using the astrometry method.Astrometry is based on measuring small changes in a star's position.At one-twelfth the mass of the Sun, VB 10 is tiny; though the star is more massive than its planet, it would have about the same girth, experts say.Astrometry has long been proposed as a tool for finding other planets, but this is the method's first "catch".

A virtual book of all life on Earth is being created by UK and US scientists.The online reference work will create a detailed world map of flora and fauna and track changes in biodiversity.The database, dubbed a "macroscopic observatory", will be populated with data about local species gathered by members of the public.

PROFESSOR ROBERT TEMPLE is author of a dozen challenging and provocative books, commencing with the international best-seller, The Sirius Mystery, will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout June to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

The precise spot at which a space storm struck the Earth's outer atmosphere has been pinpointed for the first time.These storms are caused by the bending and stretching of the Earth's magnetic field by material from the Sun.Observations like this may one day lead to better forecasting of these events, a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Toronto, Canada, has heard.