Newsdesk Archive

AS WELL as safeguarding our atmosphere, the Earth's protective shield may be stealing some of it on the sly.The region in space that contains the Earth's magnetic field, known as the magnetosphere, protects us from the charged particles that come streaming from the sun. By acting as a barrier to this solar wind, it is also thought to prevent these particles transferring enough of their energy to gas molecules in the atmosphere for these molecules to escape the Earth's gravitational pull.This may be only half the story, though. At the poles, the magnetosphere might be aiding loss of the atmosphere, according to Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna, who is principal investigator for the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission. Barabash bases his suggestion on measurements of the flow of ions escaping from Venus, Mars and Earth. It is thought that Venus has never had a magnetosphere, whereas Mars did until its magnetic dynamo wound down 3.5 billion years ago.

IF YOU'RE impressed that chimps can use tools to hunt or crack nuts, wait till you hear what they do when foraging for honey. Not only do they construct several different tools for the purpose, but they use them sequentially - an achievement approaching the abilities of early Stone Age humans.A team led by Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied chimps living in Loango National Park in Gabon. They found that the chimps built and used five different types of tools to help them find beehives and extract honey: thin, straight sticks to probe the ground for buried nests; thick, blunt-ended pounders to break open beehive entrances; thinner lever-like enlargers to break down walls within the hive; collectors with frayed ends to dip honey from the opened hive and bark spoons to scoop it out.

The smallpox epidemic that devastated the Aboriginal population surrouding Sydney in 1789, could have been the result of a stopover by the First Fleet, says an Australian historian.The research published by Dr Michael Bennett, a historian from the University of Tasmania, in the journal Bulletin of the History of Medicine says the source of the virus has long been debated.He says there are several theories as to how the disease arrived on Australian shores.

An ancient tomb, constructed in traditional keyhole style denoting someone of very high rank, may well be the final resting place of Himiko, the legendary third-century queen of the Yamatai kingdom, say archaeologists who relied on radiocarbon dating for their finding.Artifacts from near the earthen mound in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, were examined by researchers attached to the National Museum of Japanese History (Rekihaku) in Sakura, Chiba Prefecture.

Missing for decades, the remains of Cpl. Isaiah Mays, a Buffalo Soldier and Medal of Honor recipient, were laid to rest Friday at Arlington National Cemetery.Paying respects were African-American veterans, U.S. Army soldiers and those who rode for days as part of a motorcycle escort -- members of the Missing in America Project, who traveled from as far away as California and Arizona at their own expense to make sure Mays got a proper burial.None was a relative but they consider themselves his brothers.

After a 22-hour stay on the moon, Aldrin and Armstrong prepared to fire the ascent stage of the lunar module to launch back into lunar orbit. Here, Collins tries to find the Eagle with a telescope, Aldrin breaks the engine-arm circuit breaker and the lunar module executes a series of burns before docking and returning for splashdown.After a 22-hour stay on the moon, Aldrin and Armstrong prepared to fire the ascent stage of the lunar module to launch back into lunar orbit.

What does a Native American story have to do with a cataclysmic earthquake hitting the Pacific Northwest?Plenty, according to James Roddey of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. Roddey will be speaking Saturday about a possibility of a devastating earthquake that will be hit Oregon within 50 years.

An asteroid bombardment of Earth nearly 4 billion years ago may have actually been a boon to early life on the planet, instead of wiping it out or preventing it from originating, a new study suggests.Asteroids, comets and other impactors from space have been suggested as the causes behind some of the world's great mass extinctions, including the disappearance of the dinosaurs.Impact evidence from lunar samples, meteorites and the pockmarked surfaces of the inner planets paints a picture of a violent environment in the solar system during the Hadean Eon 4.5 to 3.8 billion years ago, particularly through a cataclysmic event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment about 3.9 million years ago.

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are reading now, have remained in use, but most have fallen into disuse.These dead scripts tantalise us. We can see that they are writing, but what do they say?

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. - Robots wag their tail fins and bob along like bathtub toys in a pool at a Vassar College lab. Their actions are dictated by microprocessors housed in round plastic containers, the sort you'd store soup in.It hardly looks like it, but the two swimming robots were set loose in the little pool to study evolution, acting out predator-prey encounters from roughly 540 million years ago.The prey robot, dubbed Preyro, can simulate evolution.This is not like robot evolution in the "Terminator" movie sense of machines turning on their human masters. Instead, Vassar biology and cognitive science professor John Long and his students can make changes to the tail of Preyro to see which designs help it avoid the predator robot.

A lot of people adored Pixar Animation Studios' 2008 dystopian robots-in-love story, "Wall-E." But one loosely connected organization can probably lay claim to being the biggest, or at least the most dedicated, group of fans.These are the 16,000 members of the Wall-E Builders Group, an Internet-organized collection of do-it-yourselfers who have each set out to create a live version of one of the Academy Award-winning film's fictional robots."There (are) tons of builders who are very interested in building Wall-E," said Matt Ebisu, the 18-year-old Cupertino, Calif., college student who is the public representative of the group. "So far, we've had several different versions completed. They vary in design, but pretty much everyone (in the group) is dedicated to building their own Wall-E, or at least finding out how to build their own Wall-E."

Robots are invading college campuses, along with the students who want to learn how to build them.To help those wannabe pioneers in self-driving cars and automated bartending, CNET News spoke with Colin Angle, CEO of consumer robotics company iRobot, to learn more about which schools the company looks at to recruit new talent, and to give an insider's perspective of some of the latest developments in this still-new academic discipline.

It's been 35 years since the Society for Industrial Archeology first came to Pittsburgh for its annual conference, and to take the measure of how the city has changed since then, check out the group's 1974 itinerary:A tour of the open hearth furnaces of the South Side's Jones & Laughlin steel mill. The mill closed in 1986.A tour of the Westinghouse Extra-High-Voltage Test Laboratory in Trafford. The lab closed in 1986.Lunch at Sarah's Restaurant, serving Serbian and Eastern European food on the South Side for more than four decades. The restaurant closed in 1992.

(ANSA) - Florence, May 28 - Workmen inside Florence's courthouse have stumbled across a spiral column and hundreds of multicoloured fragments that experts believe may have belonged to a Roman temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis.Dating to the second century AD, the remains were discovered as the men dug a five by three metre hole, barely four metres deep, for a new water cistern for the courthouse's anti-incendiary system.''These finds are of extraordinary importance,'' said Alessandro Palchetti, the archaeologist charged with overseeing the works in the courthouse by Florence's archaeology superintendency, who suspected something interesting might be uncovered because of the

In new findings, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the Arctic may be home to 30 percent of the planet's undiscovered natural gas reserves and 13 percent of its undiscovered oil.A team of scientists at the USGS collaborated with international researchers to conduct the first-ever comprehensive assessment of undiscovered oil and gas reserves within the Arctic Circle."We tried to put some boundaries on the range of possibilities and resources available in the Arctic," said geologist Donald Gautier, lead author of the survey, which is published this week in the journal Science.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The first comprehensive report into the human cost of climate change warns the world is in the throes of a "silent crisis" that is killing 300,000 people each year.More than 300 million people are already seriously affected by the gradual warming of the earth and that number is set to double by 2030, the report from the Global Humanitarian Forum warns."For the first time we are trying to get the world's attention to the fact that climate change is not something waiting to happen. It is impacting seriously the lives of many people around the world," the forum's president, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, told CNN.

SYDNEY: Ancient rock art depicting the extinct marsupial lion has been found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, says a study in the journal Antiquity.The first convincing example of a marsupial lion found in rock art to date, the find suggests that early Australians and marsupial lions co-existed.It also hints at what marsupial lions may have looked like. Painted in red ochre, the image depicts a large four-legged animal, with a strong, prominent front limb poised for action, protruding claws and stripes running the length of its back.

HAVE Mars landers been destroying signs of life? Instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA's robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake.In 1976, many people's hopes of finding life on Mars collapsed when the twin Viking landers failed to detect even minute quantities of organic compounds - the complex, carbon-containing molecules that are central to life as we know it. "It contributed, in my opinion, to the fact that there were no additional [US lander] missions to Mars for 20 years," says Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

On Aug. 24, 79 A.D., Italy's Mount Vesuvius exploded, burying the Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii under tons of super-heated ash, rock and debris in one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history.Thousands died. But somehow, hundreds of papyrus scrolls survived -- sort of -- in a villa at Herculaneum thought to have been owned at one time by Julius Caesar's father-in-law.

A Bronze Age road has been found below Swansea's shifting foreshore.The short section of track was discovered by a metal detector enthusiast and archaeologists have now dated it to around 4,000 years ago.Woven from narrow branches of oak and alder the structure was covered in a thin layer of brushwood to provide a level walking-surface.

Archaeologists preparing for the expansion of a Tucson wastewater treatment facility have discovered the remains of the earliest known irrigation system in the Southwest, a farming community that dates to at least 1200 BC.That predates the well-known and much more sophisticated Hohokam tribe's canal system, which crisscrossed what is now Phoenix, by 1,200 years. The find suggests that the people who inhabited the region began with relatively simple irrigation systems and built up to more complex projects as the climate became hotter and drier.

Medieval fishermen first took to the open seas in about AD1,000 as a result of a sharp decline in large freshwater fish, scientists have suggested.They say the decline was probably the result of rising population and pollution levels.The study forms part of a series that examines the impact of humans on life beneath the waves throughout history.The findings will be presented at a Census of Marine Life (CoML) conference in Canada, which begins on Tuesday."Fish bones are found in archaeological sites... all around the north-western part of Europe," said co-author James Barrett, from Cambridge University's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

If you thought the golden anniversary of Olympus' Pen camera was something, get a load of this. From now until August 23rd, an elaborate exhibition entitled 'The Invention of Photography and the Earliest Photographs' will showcase some of digital imaging's earliest tools, including the planet's oldest camera. The wooden sliding box shown above will undoubtedly be the centerpiece of the Macau-based expo, though it will be surrounded by 250 photography antiques and 180 old photos, which were collections lent by the Nicephore Niepce Museum and 12 other museums, cultural institutions and private collectors around the world.

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual -- from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

HAVE Mars landers been destroying signs of life? Instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA's robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake.In 1976, many people's hopes of finding life on Mars collapsed when the twin Viking landers failed to detect even minute quantities of organic compounds - the complex, carbon-containing molecules that are central to life as we know it. "It contributed, in my opinion, to the fact that there were no additional [US lander] missions to Mars for 20 years," says Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

From the beginning, Ida's unveiling has been a master class in ballyhoo. A week ago, the first breathless press releases began to arrive, portending the presentation of the now famous 47-million-year-old primate fossil from Germany: "MEDIA ALERT," the notice shouted in all caps. "WORLD-RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING."The press releases were followed by an international press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the publication of a book, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor (Little, Brown), an ABC News exclusive and on May 25 a prime-time television special on the History Channel. Of the avalanche of media-related promotion, Jorn Hurum, a Norwegian paleontologist involved in Ida's discovery, told the New York Times, "Any pop band is doing the same thing.".

Eric Skopec demonstrates that global warming did not destroy the Ancestral Puebloan civilization. Although some authors bolster their warnings with historical references, many misrepresent the archeological record. According to Dr. Skopec, "much of what popular authors say about the Ancestral Puebloans is incomplete, misleading, and just plain wrong.

Newly discovered footprints of different sizes, apparently left by men, women and children, on an ancient military route, have helped recreate a war scene that occurred at least 2,000 years ago, an archaeologist said Friday.The footprints, the smallest of which were believed to belong to children around six years old, were found last week along vehicle tracks on China's first interprovincial road, a 700-km dirt road built under the reign of the "First Emperor", said Zhang Zaiming, a researcher with Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology, based in the ancient capital Xi'an.

Ancient bones suggest "lefties" have been coping with a right-handed world for more than half a million years. A study of Homo heidelbergensis, an ancestor of Neanderthals, seems to show that the ancient humans were predominately right-handed."Finding that a hominin species as old as Homo heidelbergensis is already right-handed helps to trace back the chain of modernity concerning hand laterality," says Marina Mosquera, a paleoanthropologist at Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, who was involved in the study.

From the time she was about 8 years old, Jane Tedeschi wanted to fly."[Charles] Lindbergh was flying across the Atlantic, and a lot of other people were flying air races and things like that. It was very romantic," she said.Flight was still relatively new in the 1920s and 1930s, and female pilots were few.But Tedeschi was determined.In 1941, she found a childhood friend who taught flying and started taking lessons. After the friend was sent off to war and the airport near her home in Bethesda, Maryland, was closed to private flying, she traveled about 40 miles to Frederick and spent nights on the floor of a farmhouse to continue her lessons.

The U.S. Supreme Court handed medical marijuana patients and advocates a resounding victory on Monday, refusing to hear a case brought by San Diego County, which has long chafed at implementing statewide medical marijuana laws.The state of California, in an effort to systematize the 1996 voter-approved initiative, required localities to implement identification card programs for patients with doctor approval in 2004. Such ID cards are required to enter medical marijuana shops in California and can be shown to police officers who find patients in possession of marijuana.

About 15,000 new species are still discovered every year, from psychedelic fish to pink millipedes, and from lungless frogs to the Dracula fish. Take our tour of some of the strangest species to be discovered in recent years.

People are more likely to become lovers if their genes share little in common, according to a study that demonstrates a possible biological mechanism controlling the sexual attraction between men and women.Heterosexual men and women with dissimilar genes are more likely to get married than people with a similar genetic heritage. The findings indicate that certain genes control some of the subconscious desires behind the choice of one partner over another, as a way of preventing inbreeding and boosting a child's immune defences.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - President Obama has chosen former astronaut Charles F. Bolden to head NASA. If confirmed by the Senate, Bolden would become the first African-American NASA administrator.Word of Obama's choice came Saturday in statements from NASA and the White House. The president also tapped former NASA official Lori Garver, who headed Obama's space transition team, to become deputy administrator."These talented individuals will help put NASA on course to boldly push the boundaries of science, aeronautics and exploration in the 21st century and ensure the long-term vibrancy of America's space program," Obama said in Saturday's statement.

At the international space station, it was one small sip for man and a giant gulp of recycled urine for mankind.Astronauts aboard the space station celebrated a space first on Wednesday by drinking water that had been recycled from their urine, sweat and water that condenses from exhaled air. They said "cheers," clicked drinking bags and toasted NASA workers on the ground who were sipping their own version of recycled drinking water."The taste is great," American astronaut Michael Barratt said. Then as Russian Gennady Padalka tried to catch little bubbles of the clear water floating in front of him, Barratt called the taste "worth chasing."

Over-the-counter tests for lung, colon, prostate and other cancers could soon be available at your local pharmacy, say scientists from the University of Central Florida.The tests, which scientists compare to over-the-counter pregnancy tests, would detect seven to 10 different kinds of common cancers using a single drop of blood, and take a few minutes to complete."We want to use this as a screening tool, not a diagnostic tool," said Qun Huo, a professor at the University of Central Florida who developed the testing system and announced it at a recent conference in Houston. "If people are willing to do more screening, then they can catch any unusual changes due to cancer sooner, and the survival rates should increase.

Australia's Tasmanian devil, the world's largest surviving marsupial carnivore, will be listed as endangered because of a contagious and deadly cancer, the government said.

You can't grow biofuel without cutting down trees, right? Not so, says plant scientist Marcos Buckeridge who tells Jan Rocha how Brazil can supply the world with green ethanolYour aim is for Brazil to produce sustainable biofuel while preserving its rainforests. Isn't that close to having your cake and eating it?It's true that those of us who think like this are in a minority, caught between those who don't worry about the environmental costs of bioethanol and those who claim it is impossible to produce biofuels sustainably. The answer to those who condemn all biofuels has to be to differentiate where these fuels are being produced: we must ensure that Brazil's biofuel is green and sustainable.

Fire and water are all that is needed to unlock the internal clocks' of archaeological remains and accurately reveal their age, say scientists. The research, published online today in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, will help archaeologists date remains that are thousands of years old, and also reveal where other techniques go wrong.Dating methods are of paramount importance in the earth and environmental sciences, palaeontology, archaeology, and art history. Fired clay material such as bricks, tile and ceramics represent an important sample of the remains unearthed at archaeological digs, but they are notoriously hard to date accurately. Carbon 14 dating, which can be used on bone, does not work with ceramics, and those techniques that do exist are extremely complex.

Listening to Tom Standage talking about his new book, An Edible History of Humanity this morning I was reminded of a paper written by the anthropologist and author Jared Diamond in the late 1980's.Diamond described agriculture as, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".Farming was, he argued, a catastrophe from which we have never quite recovered. With agriculture came "the social and sexual inequality, disease and despotism, that curse our existence".

Don't throw out your map and compass just yet.U.S. officials are concerned that Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are on the verge of breaking down as soon as 2010, they tell The Guardian.Blackouts, failures and even inaccurate directions are possible, the officials say.The U.S. Air Force has maintained GPS satellites for the past decade, but according to a Government Accounting Office report, a lack of investment could lead to a deterioration of the navigation system, The Guardian reports.

LONDON: Skin from a factory has long been the dream of dermatologists. Now, scientists are on track to develop what they claim is the "artificial skin".A team from four Fraunhofer institutes in Germany is developing the first fully automatic production system for two-layer "skin models" -- an almost perfect copy of human skin or artificial skin.

A discovery of a 47-million-year-old fossil primate that is said to be a human ancestor was announced and unveiled today at a press conference in New York City.Known as "Ida," the nearly complete transitional fossil is 20 times older than most fossils that provide evidence for human evolution.

At first glance, it didn't appear that impressive: a worn limestone pillar, six feet high and two feet wide, standing slightly askew beside a country road near the village of Pélissanne in southern France. "A lot of people pass by without knowing what it is," Bruno Tassan, 61, was saying, as he tugged aside dense weeds that had grown over the column since he last inspected it. Tassan was showing me a milliaire, or milestone, one of hundreds planted along the highways of Gaul at the time of the Roman Empire. The inscription had worn away ages ago, but Tassan, a documentary filmmaker and amateur archaeologist, was well versed in the artifact's history. This particular stone, set in place in 3 B.C. during the reign of Augustus, was once a perfect cylinder, set along the nearly 50 miles between Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence) and Arelate (Arles). "It's one of the last standing," Tassan said.

The Mayan ruins of Lubaantun have magic stories to tell, but few have been listening, writes Sue White.Years of travelling have led me to form a theory about ancient ruins: unless you're an archaeologist, visiting them as a novice is a journey into the imagination.Of course, there are exceptions. The Egyptian pyramids and Machu Picchu would inspire the most unimaginative of beings but in the case of the world's lesser-known sites, a strong dose of visualisation will pay off in spades.

Rocket engines don't get much cooler than this. The Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine being developed for NASA burns a mixture of liquid oxygen (-297 degrees Fahrenheit) and liquid hydrogen (-423 degrees). Though the fuels are frosty, upon ignition they generate scorching steam (5,000 degrees) and plenty of thrust: Hydrogen is 40 percent more efficient than other propellants. But because the icy H is pumping through the entire system, the engine nozzle remains cold. As the hot steam condenses on the edges, it refreezes and forms icicles.

LIKE a giant pale blue eye, the Earth stares at the centre of our galaxy. Through the glare and the fog it is trying to catch a glimpse of an indistinct something 30,000 light years away. Over there, within the sparkling starscape of the galaxy's core... no, not those giant suns or those colliding gas clouds; not the gamma-ray glow of annihilating antimatter. No, right there in the very centre, inside that swirling nebula of doomed matter, could that be just a hint of a shadow?The shadow we're straining to see is that of a monstrous black hole, a place where gravity rules supreme, swallowing light and stretching the fabric of space to breaking point. Black holes are perhaps the most outrageous prediction of science, and even though we can paint fine theoretical pictures of them and point to evidence for many objects that seem to be black hole-ish, nobody has ever actually seen one.

Global warming will be twice as severe as previous estimates indicate, according to a new study published this month in the Journal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society.The research, conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), predicts a 90% probability that worldwide surface temperatures will rise more than 9 degrees (F) by 2100, compared to a previous 2003 MIT study that forecast a rise of just over 4 degrees.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 forecast a temperature rise of anywhere from 2 to 11 degrees by 2100 based on a variety of different greenhouse-gas-emissions scenarios.

NASA's return to the moon will get a boost in June with the launch of two satellites that will return a wealth of data about Earth's nearest neighbor. On Thursday, the agency outlined the upcoming missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. The spacecraft will launch together June 17 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.Using a suite of seven instruments, LRO will help identify safe landing sites for future human explorers, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment and test new technology. LCROSS will seek a definitive answer about the presence of water ice at the lunar poles. LCROSS will use the spent second stage Atlas Centaur rocket in an unprecedented way that will culminate with two spectacular impacts on the moon's surface.

The Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990, forever changed how humanity views the cosmos. Along the way, the observatory has opened eyes to the expansion of the universe, the evolution of stars and the beginning of time. As Hubble's expiration date nears, what's next in the realm of big science? Click the "Next" arrow above to learn about seven projects that a consortia of scientists, government agencies, and private corporations are working on hard to get off the ground. Technological and budgetary hurdles may prove insurmountable for some.

Demand for the mercury compound vermilion was strong enough to support a large-scale mercury mining industry in the Andes as far back as 1400 B.C., according to a new study (see pictures from the expedition).A bright red pigment, vermilion was used in ancient Andean rituals and is frequently found adorning gold and silver ceremonial objects in ancient burials of kings and nobles in South America.

Ciguatera poisoning, the food-borne disease that can come from eating large, carnivorous reef fish, causes vomiting, headaches, and a burning sensation upon contact with cold surfaces. An early morning walk on cool beach sand can become a painful stroll on fiery coals to a ciguatera victim. But is this common toxin poisoning also the key to a larger mystery? That is, the storied migrations of the Polynesian natives who colonized New Zealand, Easter Island and, possibly, Hawaii in the 11th to 15th centuries? Could ciguatera be the reason masses of people left paradise?

Smart missiles, rolling robots, and flying drones currently controlled by humans, are being used on the battlefield more every day. But what happens when humans are taken out of the loop, and robots are left to make decisions, like who to kill or what to bomb, on their own?Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an "ethical governor," a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots," comes out this month.

SIGNS of life on planets beyond our own solar system may soon be in our sights. Experiments and calculations presented at an astrobiology meeting last week reveal how the coming generation of space telescopes will for the first time be capable of detecting "biosignatures" in the light from planets orbiting other stars.

The familiar model of Atlantic ocean currents that shows a discrete "conveyor belt" of deep, cold water flowing southward from the Labrador Sea is probably all wet.New research led by Duke University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution relied on an armada of sophisticated floats to show that much of this water, originating in the sea between Newfoundland and Greenland, is diverted generally eastward by the time it flows as far south as Massachusetts. From there it disburses to the depths in complex ways that are difficult to follow.

One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - Archaeologists and volunteers will fan out over part of the Four Corners region tomorrow to send out smoke signals..

Canada has unveiled the first comprehensive Arctic atlas, detailing geological features that point to where oil and gas, gold and diamond deposits are likely hidden beneath snow and ice.The Geologic Survey of Canada maps contain data collected and compiled over several years by Canada, Russia, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden at a cost of one billion dollars.They are expected to help mining and oil and gas exploration companies narrow their searches for resource riches, and may help support several nations' Arctic claims.

Take some NASA-developed plastic membranes, add algae and municipal waste water and float it out to sea. What have you got? An environmentally friendly alternative to U.S. dependence on foreign oil, says one NASA scientist.Jonathan Trent, a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., sees algae farmed at sea as a win-win-win scenario: The plants are oil-rich and easy to grow; sea-based nurseries leave land free for food production; and the process should take out more carbon from the atmosphere than what it puts in.

BUCHAREST, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Romanian archaeologists has discovered, in southeastern county of Caras-Severin, a complex structure estimated to be 2,000 years old belonging to the Roman culture, local media reported on Thursday.

A primate skeleton claimed to be 47 million years old could further amplify the often contentious debate between evolutionists and creationists.A prominent paleontologist says the discovery of the ancient primate fossil suggests the creature is the common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans.

Was the cradle of civilization also the birthplace of atrocity? Historians have been researching the most extreme forms of torture in the ancient world. Among other things, they have found that, back then, "sitting in the tub" was actually a pretty nasty way to kick the bucket.In total, Julius Caesar reckoned that he had 1,192,000 enemies killed during his reign. Meanwhile the Emperor Tiberius would have young men's urethras laced shut before force-feeding them wine. And, under Caligula, it became customary to saw noblemen in half.

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.The story of the brave rescue efforts by local residents remains a part of Turkish historical lore to this day.

BERLIN - A 35,000-year-old ivory carving of a woman found in a German cave was unveiled yesterday by archeologists who believe it is the oldest known sculpture of the human form.The carving found in six fragments in Germany's Hohle Fels cave depicts a woman with a swollen belly, wide-set thighs, and large, protruding breasts."It's very sexually charged," said University of Tuebingen archeologist Nicholas Conard, whose team discovered the figure in September.Carbon dating suggests it was carved at least 35,000 years ago, according to the researchers' findings, being published today in the scientific journal Nature.

The government's battle against UK drug use has been condemned as a "phoney war" in a report by a think tank.The Centre for Policy Studies document called Labour's £1.5bn-a-year anti-drugs policy an "expensive failure".It said the UK's policy of spending most of its drug budget on treatment was less effective than spending more on prevention and enforcement.The Home Office said the report "inaccurately portrays the impact of the government's drug strategy".According to author Kathy Gyngell, spending on methadone increased threefold between 2003 and 2008, as the government switched focus from combating illegal drug use to dealing with addicts.She argued that this "harm-reduction approach" had failed, instead leaving 147,000 people in "state-sponsored" addiction.

Here's a little-known fact: Under current law, it's possible to hold a patent on a piece of human DNA, otherwise known as a gene.Companies that have acquired patents for genes have specific rights to their use, which may include diagnostic tests based on those genes, as well as future mutations that are discovered.In a new lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union alleges that the policy is unconstitutional.The targets of the lawsuit, Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation, hold patents to BRCA1 and BRCA2, the genes responsible for many cases of hereditary breast and ovarian cancers.The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is also named in the suit.

The active chemical in marijuana promotes the death of brain cancer cells by essentially helping them feed upon themselves, researchers in Spain report.

Rats across Britain are evolving a resistance to poison that makes them almost impossible to kill, scientists have warned.

If human culture seems obsessed with sex lately, it's nothing new. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known artistic representation of a woman - a carved ivory statue of a naked female, dating from 35,000 years ago.The figurine, unearthed in September 2008 in Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, may be the oldest known example of figurative art, meaning art that is supposed to represent and resemble a real person, animal or object. The discovery could help scientists understand the origins of art and the advent of symbolic thinking, including complicated language.

High-tech facilities hoard water, generate electricity and produce 20 times more tomatoes per acre than conventional farms. But the seed money needed is also far greater.On a coastal plain near Camarillo not far from a U.S. Navy base and an outlet mall, the future of California farming is taking shape.Rising out of verdant acres of strawberries and artichokes between Highway 101 and the Pacific Ocean in Ventura County are two mammoth, high-tech greenhouses.

We all know that the "mansions of millions of years", the tombs and temples built by the ancient Egyptians that were meant to last forever, are seriously threatened -- and have been for a long time now. Among the many causes are subsoil water seepage, infrastructure development, unrestricted housing, and that greatest menace of all -- tourism. Fifty years ago fewer than a hundred visitors a day visited Luxor's magnificent monuments. Now there are as many as 9,000, and they are largely responsible for rapid changes in temperature and humidity levels in the tombs.It's a never-ending struggle.

Neandertals, the 'stupid' cousins of modern humans were capable of capturing the most impressive animals. This indicates that Neandertals were anything but dim. Dutch researcher Gerrit Dusseldorp analysed their daily forays for food to gain insights into the complex behaviour of the Neandertal. His analysis revealed that the hunting was very knowledge intensive.Although it is now clear that Neandertals were hunters and not scavengers, their exact hunting methods are still something of a mystery. Dusseldorp investigated just how sophisticated the Neandertals' hunting methods really were. His analysis of two archaeological sites revealed that Neandertals in warm forested areas preferred to hunt solitary game but that in colder, less forested areas they preferred to hunt the more difficult to capture herding animals.

An island for ancient elites has been found in central Mexico, archaeologists say. Among the ruins are a treasury and a small pyramid that may have been used for rituals.The island, called Apupato, belonged to the powerful Tarascan Empire, which dominated much of western Mexico from A.D. 1400 to 1520, before the European conquest of the region.

The collapse of a major polar ice sheet will not raise global sea levels as much as previous projections suggest, a team of scientists has calculated.Writing in Science, the researchers said that the demise of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would result in a sea level rise of 3.3m (10 ft).Previous estimates had forecast a rise in the region of five to six metres.However, they added, the rise would still pose a serious threat to major coastal cities, such as New York."Sea level rise is considered to be the one of the most serious consequence of climate change," lead author Jonathan Bamber told the Science podcast."A sea level rise of just 1.5m would displace 17 million people in Bangladesh alone," he added.

Three UK explorers who endured frostbite and food shortages had mixed feelings at the end of their pioneering Arctic research expedition.On Wednesday, two aircraft landed on the floating Arctic ice to collect Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley.They have been measuring the thickness of the sea ice as they trekked across the Arctic.

The oceans of the world remain one of the great mysteries but one man believes his latest invention will change all that.Graham Hawkes has built a state of the art submersible that offers "exotic new capabilities to explore one of the least understood parts of the planet".His Deep Flight Super Falcon has been dubbed the Lear jet of the oceans.Unlike other submersibles, Mr Hawkes said his deep sea craft can actually "fly underwater".

Long-necked dinosaurs didn't graze treetops, according to new research that suggests the prehistoric animals were better off holding their necks horizontal, not upright.Lifting long necks at steep angles would have put intense pressure on sauropod hearts, requiring dramatic expenditures of energy to keep blood pumping to the brain, a new study of dinosaur circulation says.

Reporting from Jerusalem -- Pope Benedict's pilgrimage to the Holy Land veered Tuesday into controversy over his past when the Vatican, stung by Israeli criticism, denied and then acknowledged his membership in the Hitler Youth during World War II.The conflicting accounts came in response to Israeli leaders who faulted the German-born pontiff for not mentioning, in an address Monday at the Holocaust Memorial, that he had witnessed Nazi terror as a conscript in the youth movement and the German army.

CAIRO - An Egyptian archaeological team has found prehistoric fishing gear, sewing equipment and jewellery all made from animal bones, as well as pottery and coins, near an oasis south of Cairo, officials said on Tuesday.

A unique collection of silver coins and an unidentified skeleton have been found in Skänninge in southern Sweden.The collection of around 100 silver coins, thought to date from the 12th century, were found in a grave dating from the early 14th century."It is fantastic that we have found silver coins in a grave," said the archaeologist Hanna Menander to local newspaper Motala & Vadstena Tidning.

Cartoonists love to chuckle over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, with drawings of fish creeping timorously up from sea to land and quickly turning themselves into timid four-legged creatures peering warily at a hostile new world.

Kick-starting the hydrogen economy will require cheap ways to produce vast quantities of the gas. But rather than building a new and costly plants, societies could modify existing gas powered stations instead, say Dutch and French chemists.It is the latest proposal in a long line aimed at solving a problem that is the main barrier to a cleaner, low-carbon, hydrogen-fuelled future. However, the new idea is not without its problems: critics say retrofitting gas plants would be inefficient, but agree that the hydrogen-generation hurdle will only be surmounted using existing fossil fuel technology.

British scientists' exploration of the ocean depths has revealed an amazing array of new lifeforms, at depths where life was once thought impossible.

Spacewalking astronauts gave the Hubble Space Telescope a better view of the cosmos by installing a new high-tech instrument Saturday, then pulled off their toughest job yet: fixing a broken camera.It was the third spacewalk in as many days for the shuttle Atlantis crew, and it had been expected to be the most challenging ever performed because of the unprecedented camera repairs. Astronauts had never before tried to take apart a science instrument at the 19-year-old observatory.Hubble's chief mechanic, John Grunsfeld, deftly opened up the burned-out camera and plucked out all four electronic cards that needed to be replaced.

AROUND the time of the G20 summit in London on 2 April, the streets of cities across the world were filled with people protesting against the excesses of the banking bosses, among other things. Chances are you agreed with the sentiment. Chances are too that if you had been asked to put your hand in your pocket to fund a campaign to seize their bonuses, even if you wouldn't see any of the money, you'd have been sorely tempted.If so, congratulations: you have just confounded classical economics, which says that no rational person should ever reduce their own income just to slash someone else's. And yet that's exactly what we do. Classical economics, it turns out, is a pretty terrible predictor of how we actually behave..

A decades-long battle against invasive fire ants in the southern U.S. might be turning a corner, thanks to a nightmarish little fly.Fire ants are widely hated, because they bite people's feet, kill infant birds, short out electrical units, and outcompete native ant species.But as punishing as fire ants can be, they've got serious competition in parasitic phorid flies.

The melting of one of the world's largest ice sheets would alter the Earth's field of gravity and even its rotation in space so much that it would cause sea levels along some coasts to rise faster than the global average, scientists said yesterday.The rise in sea levels would be highest on the west and east coasts of North America where increases of 25 per cent more than the global average would cause catastrophic flooding in cities such as New York, Washington DC and San Francisco.A study into how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could respond to global warming has found its disintegration would change the focus of the planet's gravitational field, so sea levels would rise disproportionately more around North America than in other parts of the world. If the ice sheet covering West Antarctica disappears, the loss of so much mass from the southern hemisphere would effectively make the pull of gravity stronger in the northern hemisphere, affecting the spin of the Earth and causing sea levels to rise higher here than in the south, where the mass of ice is currently located.

He was a giant of a man, a chieftain who ruled with a royal sceptre and a warrior's axe.When they laid him to rest they dressed him in his finest regalia and placed his weapons at his side. Then they turned his face towards the setting sun and sealed him in a burial mound that would keep him safe for the next 4,000 years.In his grave were some of the most exquisitely fashioned artefacts of the Bronze Age, intricately crafted to honour the status of a figure who bore them in life in death.

Alien creatures are the least of NASA's worries when it comes to moon travel. There are several potential threats to future missions - with space radiation at the top of the list. Now, a group of students at North Carolina State University has developed a "blanket" of sorts that covers lunar outposts - the astronauts' living quarters - to provide astronauts protection against radiation while also generating and storing power.

JERUSALEM - Pope Benedict XVI confronted the dark history of his native Germany on the first day of his visit to Israel on Monday, shaking the hands of six Holocaust survivors and saying victims of the genocide "lost their lives but they will never lose their names."Benedict's attempts to ease tensions with Jews after his recent decision to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust denying bishop appeared to enjoy only partial success. The top two officials at Israel's Holocaust memorial faulted the pope for not apologizing nor using the words "murder" or "Nazis" during a speech at the site.

Nazi war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk was deported to Germany on Monday evening after he was removed from his Cleveland, Ohio-area home in the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers earlier in the day.An ambulance transported him to an airstrip at the Cleveland airport. The plane carrying Demjanjuk departed at 7:13 p.m.Demjanjuk, 89, is wanted by German authorities for his alleged involvement during World War II in killings at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Polande.

Maitum, Sarangani (8 May) -- Long after the National Museum excavated a cave in barangay Pinol, the archaeological discovery was never heard among locals and no media report came out about it. In 1996, Sarangani information officer Serafin Ramos Jr. got a tip from a friend in the Moro National Liberation Front. This is his story released in October 1996.

A real-life Indiana Jones tale is unfolding in New Mexico.A group of Albuquerque archaeologists think they've solved a biblical mystery."From a biblical point of view, this is arguably the most important archaeological excavation of all time," archaeologist Dr. Steven Collins said.

XI'AN, May 11 (Xinhua) -- The first emperor of a united China could go down in history not only for the Great Wall or the terra cotta army of guards and horses, but also for his attempt to crush Buddhism that had apparently become prevalent in his days, according to a researcher on Monday.

Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said that the researches conducted via satellites have confirmed the existence of 132 archaeological sites in Egypt that witnessed no excavations until now.

A single tribe of around 200 people which crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago is responsible for the existence of the entire human race outside Africa, a new study has found.Research by geneticists and archaeologists has allowed them to trace the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia. From there they went on to colonise the rest of the world.

WE ARE poised to peer further back in time than ever before. Next week, cosmology's biggest experiment in nearly a decade is due to blast into space. The European Space Agency's Planck satellite will enable us to find out what happened just fractions of a second after the big bang, when the universe is thought to have blown up to cosmic proportions from a speck of space-time.The probe, which is fuelled and ready for launch in French Guiana, will examine in exquisite detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the relic radiation of the big bang. It is "like a surgical instrument", says Andrei Linde of Stanford University.

The environmental case for ethanol from corn continues to weaken. Turning the food crop into ethanol would not be the best use of the energy embedded in the kernels' carbohydrates, according to a new study in Science. That's because fermenting corn into ethanol delivers less liquid fuel energy for internal combustion engines than does burning the kernels to generate power for electric motors."We had been studying the area of land that would be available to grow crops for energy and we were curious to discover the most efficient use of these crops," explains environmental engineer Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced, who led the study. "We found that with a given amount of biomass you could produce more transportation and greenhouse gas offsets with electricity than with ethanol.".

Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.The model, published online May 6 in the journal Physical Review D, was developed by Research Associate Sourish Dutta and Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer at Vanderbilt University, working with Professor of Physics Stephen Hsu and graduate student David Reeb at the University of Oregon.

As if the sky were calling it, the Space Shuttle Atlantis made its slow and stately way across a perfect Florida dawn to the launch pad.Tomorrow, if all goes well, it will be making its way toward the Hubble Space Telescope one last time, to repair it, upgrade it, and give it at least another five years of life - to install a new camera that will allow us to see even more spectacular pictures from even farther into deep space.Call it celestial symmetry - the mission is taking place 400 years after Galileo first turned a telescope toward the night sky.