Newsdesk Archive

Modern Australia lacks big land predators, but until about 30,000 years ago, the continent was ruled by Thylacoleo carnifex, the marsupial "lion."Several well-preserved skeletons of the leopard-size beast have been found. Now, a newly discovered cave painting offers a glimpse of the animal's external appearance.

TEGUCIGALPA - HONDURAN researchers believe they have uncovered the remains of one of the first kings of Central America's Mayan civilisation.Archaeologists working at Copan - a major site for Mayan civilization culture - believe they have found bones belonging to one of 16 Mayan kings.

THANJAVUR: Clear evidence of the existence of pre-historic humans in Thanjavur region has been identified in the archaeological excavations undertaken by Tamil University here.The excavations carried out in the past two weeks on the Tamil University campus revealed clinching evidence on the existence of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic cultures in stratified contexts.

Amid swine flu, sinking economies and other sorrows of the modern world, losing track of when life was really tough can be easy. Lucky for us, we have archaeologists to put things in a little perspective.Consider life on the high steppes of Central Asia, the Altai Mountains, around 500 B.C., in modern-day Mongolia. Back then, it was the home of the Pazyryk peoples, horse-riding nomads who lived next door to the not-so-friendly Scythians. In fact, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, in The Histories, described the Scythians as warriors who tangled with tribes of Amazons, practiced human sacrifice, scalping and cannibalism of their enemies. A lot more aggravating than the neighbor who borrows your lawn mower, in other words.

Palaeontologists found 40 strands of fossilised hair inside samples of coprolite, or fossilised dung, from a cave in South Africa that was used by brown hyaenas.

Robots are getting better at finding their way around unknown areas, and making their own maps as they explore. But robots lost in urban areas don't need to rely on their own faculties to get from place to place, German roboticists have shown.Their mobile robot simply rolls up to any humans nearby and asks for directions. By using that strategy, their robot has become one of the first to be properly let loose in the real world, not just carefully controlled environments.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues."Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

THEY may not have known about genes and Darwinism, but our ancestors knew how to drive the evolution of once-wild beasts to serve their own needs. A spate of studies published last week show how domestication suddenly gave horses coats of many colours, cows the extra genes to produce milk and fight infection - and even shrank sheep's horns.The studies also support what archaeologists have long argued about the domestication of wild beasts: that sheep were probably the first farmed animals, about 11,000 years ago, followed by cattle. Then, around 5500 years ago humans tamed horses, giving riders hitherto unmatched military might, speed and mobility. "It was a huge innovation," says Arne Ludwig of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany.

Ancient Madagascan hippos have shed light on the origins of the small brain of the 1-metre-tall human, known as the hobbit, scientists at the Natural History Museum report in the journal Nature May 7.By examining the skulls of extinct Madagascan hippos, Museum scientists discovered that dwarfed mammals on islands evolved much smaller brains in relation to their body size.

Despite whatever robots and aliens roam the landscapes of science fiction, the genre's real subject has always been people. Since "Star Trek" first hit the airwaves in 1966, the show has worked as part of this tradition, using extraterrestrial settings to ask ethical and philosophical questions about the way people behave. In this way, the TV series commented on most of the big issues of the past 40 years: war, sexism, racism, animal rights, the environment, religion, sexuality.

The Nanjing massacre was an orgy of violence in which Japanese soldiers murdered tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians.Although it took place more than 70 years ago, it is still remembered with anger in China, and continues to taint the country's relationship with Japan.Chinese director Lu Chuan hopes his new film about the incident, called City of Life and Death, will help heal some of those wounds.But the making of the film, and the subsequent public reaction, has revealed just how difficult it will be for the movie to achieve that goal.

GUIYANG, May 8 (Xinhua) -- A group of construction workers have accidentally stumbled upon a prehistoric man's cave underneath a Buddhist temple in southwest China's Guizhou Province, archaeologists said here Friday.

PREHISTORIC flint tools were a surprise discovery at an archaeological dig run by TV presenter Julian Richards at a school in Shaftesbury.Three trenches were dug in fields next to St James's Church, adjacent to Abbey Primary School and every pupil was allowed to visit them during the course of last week.

QANTARA, Egypt (Reuters) - A military garrison of mud-brick and seashells unearthed in Egypt's Sinai desert may be key to finding a web of pharaonic-era defenses at the northeast gateway to ancient Egypt, archaeologists said on Thursday.Archaeologists who discovered the 3,500-year-old garrison, where up to 50,000 soldiers could be posted in times of heightened tensions, say they hope inscriptions at Luxor's Karnak temple may serve as a guide to finding other outposts.

FORT COLLINS - A Colorado State University archeologist has uncovered an ancient imperial ritual complex from Mexico's Purepecha (Tarascan) Empire dating to the last century before European Conquest.The discovery made by archeology Professor Christopher Fisher, was on an ancient island in the Lake Patzcuaro Basin in the Central Mexican state of Michoacan. The site included a small pyramid, several platforms, a large central structure that is likely an imperial treasury mentioned in historic documents, and an early 16th century colonial chapel.

WASHINGTON: A team of scientists has reported evidence of young and vast river valleys on Mars, which date back to 1.8 billion years.Most river valley systems on Mars existed only during the early history of the planet, before a major climate transition to colder, drier conditions.

Researchers are using a computer model to generate images such as this one that shows compressive stress in the cranium of Australopthecus africanus, an extinct early human that lived around 2.5 million years ago.The stresses in the model result from a simulation of biting, with substantial forces resulting from the use of the premolar teeth.

President Barack Obama has made no secret of his desire to develop a "green economy" that includes renewable energy projects meant to benefit the environment. He has said that part of the economic recovery in the U.S. will come from money for, and jobs created by, renewable energy projects. Around the world, politicians, businesses and scientists are developing the technology that could improve the cost-efficiency of renewable energy. One would expect that -- over time -- the costs associated with renewable energy would go down. With fossil fuels, costs can only go up as the un-renewable sources dwindle and become more scarce even as demand rises. Here are 5 feasible renewable energy sources that could be developed to help meet world energy needs: 1. Solar.

This super-realistic computer model makes it possible to explore the heart's anatomy in ways not possible in real patients.Created by a team of doctors from the Heart Hospital in London and computer animators from post-production company Glassworks, the beating heart can be manipulated via a computer mouse or keyboard.

Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth.Alan J. Kaufman, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, Maryland geology colleague James Farquhar, and a team of scientists from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S.A., uncovered evidence that the oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere - generally known as the Great Oxygenation Event - coincided with the first widespread ice age on the planet.

Imagine a group of Homo erectus, the earliest members of our family genus, living near a coastline on an Indonesia island and well aware of a lush island that is visible only a few miles offshore. One day while on the coast, a herd of elephants emerges from the nearby forest and crosses the beach. They enter the ocean and swim successfully to the offshore island. Could this be the experience that triggers a creative process in our ancestors who are watching nearby? Does their imagination and thinking include not only a desire to reach that island, but ideas about how to do so? Could this period of creative thought conclude with the invention of a raft large enough to hold several people, food and water? If we can find evidence of this situation in the dim past, in the early days of Homo erectus, then archeologists are fixing the time and place for one of the extraordinary events in all human history, a major advance in the evolution of the human mind.

Solar company Konarka has developed a transparent solar cell that it hopes will be built onto electricity-generating windows.The Lowell, Mass.-based company on Tuesday said it has reached an agreement with Arch Aluminum & Glass to use Konarka's plastic solar cells in building materials, including windows.Under its Arch Active Solar Glass development, the company has built prototypes of windows with the solar cells between two panes of glass. The photovoltaic cells can be tinted different colors.

BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.

THE bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912, an expert says.Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin, author of a dozen works on Egypt, the Middle East and ancient Islam, says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin's Altes Museum was made on the orders of Germany archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt on site at the digs by an artist named Gerardt Marks.

Stockholm, May 9 (ANI): Marine archaeologists in Sweden have discovered what they believe to be the wreck of a Viking ship at the bottom the country's largest lake.According to a report in The Local: Sweden's news in English, a team of 50 divers from the Swedish coastguard happened upon the 20-metre long wreck by chance on May 6th.

The entire human race outside Africa owes its existence to the survival of a single tribe of around 200 people who crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago, scientists have discovered.

Within 50 years humans will merge with machines and become both superintelligent and immortal, in an event known as the technological singularity. So says the ever-controversial futurist Ray Kurzweil. We pick his brains on his latest initiative, the Singularity University, and on his plan to use advancing technology to bring his father back from the dead in our exclusive interview with him this week.Kurzweil is just one of many players who have tried to map out the future of the human race, and tried to ensure that their vision comes true, from the transhumanist movementMovie Camera to "human cyborg" Kevin Warwick.

Deep inside the single leg bone of an 80-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur, scientists have found a hoard of proteins and blood cells providing the first clear biochemical evidence that dinosaurs are indeed the ancestors of modern birds - linked by evolution.Until now those links had been based mainly on physical evidence - on feathers from dinosaur fossils, on their fossil eggs, on their fossilized birdlike nestlings and on the close resemblance of dinosaurs and birds like the famed "flying dinosaur" called archaeopteryx

Earth's surface is mostly fresh in geologic terms.Weathering - wind and water, freezing and thawing - takes its toll, and longer-term changes caused by volcanic activity and sliding crustal plates, known as tectonic activity, fold today's ground into tomorrow's interior.The constant makeover of the planet is typically fastest in the mountains, slower in the tectonically inactive deserts.

A robotic submarine is undergoing final preparations to dive to the deepest-known part of the oceans.If successful, Nereus will be the first autonomous vehicle to visit the 11,000m (36,089ft) Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean.Only two other vehicles have ever visited the spot before, both of them human operated.

Israeli authorities say they have recovered a papyrus document which appears to be nearly 2,000 years old.The document measures 15cm by 15cm (6in by 6in), and contains 15 lines of ancient Hebrew script.It appears to be a legal instruction, transferring a widow's property to her late husband's brother.It was seized from two Palestinian men in a sting operation at a Jerusalem hotel, police said. The two could face several years in jail.

LAHUN, Egypt (Reuters) - Archaeologists have found a nearly 5,000-year-old tomb near Egypt's mud brick Lahun pyramid, in a sign that the site held religious significance a millennium before previously thought, the site head said Tuesday.The find, down crumbling steps in sand covered desert rock, debunks a prior understanding by archaeologists that the site dates back only to 12th dynasty pharaoh Senusret II who ruled 4,000 years ago, archaeologist Abdul Rahman Al-Ayedi said.

Swine flu? Global warming? Toxic oceans? Why does Mother Nature sometimes seem to be on the attack? According to the decades-old "Gaia hypothesis," it's because Earth is a self-regulating system that is responding to our own excesses. In a new book titled "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," British biologist James Lovelock says humanity is "Earth's infection.""Individuals occasionally suffer a disease called polycythaemia, an overpopulation of red blood cells. By analogy, Gaia's illness could be called polyanthroponemia, where humans overpopulate until they do more harm than good," Lovelock writes. He says the cure won't come until the human tribe is trimmed back from its current 6.8 billion to, say, 1 billion people.

In what may be the ultimate bid for clean energy, a NASA-backed group is designing a wind- and sun-powered fueling system for city buses -- and possibly other machines -- that run on hydrogen.The demonstration is intended to not only showcase a fuel with zero carbon emissions, but to produce the hydrogen in similar fashion.The project, spearheaded by NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, would use power produced by a windmill and solar energy cells to run a machine called an electrolyzer that splits water molecules into its base elements of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen, in turn, would be used as fuel for specially-equipped buses.

An innovative plan to retrieve comet particles from Earth's stratosphere has hit pay dirt, with the discovery that a large percentage of grains collected during a 2003 excursion predate the formation of the solar system."It was the largest number ever found," Henner Busemann, with the University of Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, told Discovery News.The samples analyzed by Busemann and colleagues were collected by a high-altitude NASA research jet flying in April 2003 as Earth traveled through the dusty wake of Comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup.

Prime numbers have intrigued curious thinkers for centuries. On one hand, prime numbers seem to be randomly distributed among the natural numbers with no other law than that of chance. But on the other hand, the global distribution of primes reveals a remarkably smooth regularity. This combination of randomness and regularity has motivated researchers to search for patterns in the distribution of primes that may eventually shed light on their ultimate nature.

A tsunami slammed into the New York and New Jersey region more than 2,000 years ago, according to scientists who say sedimentary deposits in the area back up that scenario.The theory, reported by BBC News, is undergoing some scrutiny to rule out other causes for what the scientists described as an upheaval along the Northeast coast in 300 B.C."If we're wrong, it was one heck of a storm," said Dr. Steven Goodbred, a scientist with Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Rome's underground Christian, Jewish and pagan burial sites, the Catacombs, date back to the 2nd Century AD.There are more than 40 of them stretching over 170km (105 miles).But, until now, they have never been fully documented, their vast scale only recorded with handmade maps.

HISTORIC Scotland is to launch an underwater survey after the discovery of ancient boat remains off the west coast.Marine archaeologists believe the find may point to the site of a boatbuilder's yard dating back many centuries, to the time when the Lords of the Isles used sea travel to rule a huge part of Scotland's western seaboard.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- From ancient Phoenician galleys to 21st century super yachts, a lot has changed about the way people travel the high seas over the centuries.Whether it's one intrepid "micro-yachtsman" navigating the Atlantic in a boat the size of a bathtub, or an elite racing team shattering world records in a state-of-the-art catamaran, these voyages all have one thing in common: they have altered the way mankind looks at the world.MainSail takes a look at the ships, and the revolutionaries they carried on their way.

NEW Thoughts on Ancient Northumberland was the title of Paul Frodsham's lecture at Morpeth Antiquarian Society.Mr Frodsham was the Northumberland National Park archaeologist for 15 years until 2007.His talk concentrated on a small but incredibly rich area of the Breamish valley on and around Ingram Farm, where amazing archaeology has survived years of agricultural work. Twelve years of research from 1994 revealed evidence of occupation from the Neolithic to the present-day.

Satellites and spent rocket stages could soon deploy "sails" to guide them back to Earth much faster than they would otherwise fall out of the sky.With space becoming ever more crowded, there is a need to remove redundant objects that could pose a collision threat to operational missions.Extending a sail on an old spacecraft would increase drag and pull it into the Earth's atmosphere to burn up.Major European space firm EADS Astrium says the scheme has great potential.

BEIJING, May 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists will soon launch an excavation at a cave where the first Peking Man skull was found with an aim to find more relics of ape men who were believed to live as early as 770,000 years ago.The excavation will start in mid May and last two months at the western slope of the Peking Man Site, said Gao Xing, deputy director and a research fellow of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology, in an interview with Xinhua on Monday.

It's been almost 50 years since scientists first came up with the idea of looking for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations - and although there have been a couple of curious blips, we haven't yet definitively heard E.T.'s cosmic call. Now the experts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, are wondering whether we've been looking in the wrong places for the wrong kinds of signals.Or maybe we just haven't been looking long enough.

Egyptian archaeologists have uncovered the "missing pyramid" of a pharaoh and a ceremonial procession road where high priests carried mummified remains of sacred bulls, Egypt's antiquities chief said Thursday.Zahi Hawass said the pyramid -- of which only the base remains -- is believed to be that of King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh who ruled for only eight years more than 4,000 years ago.In 1842, German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius mentioned Menkauhor's pyramid among his finds at Saqqara, calling it the "Headless Pyramid" because its top was missing, Hawass said.

PARALYSED people could navigate around buildings using a robotic wheelchair that can be controlled by thoughts alone.The wheelchair is designed for people with severe neuromuscular disabilities, and can even be used in crowded or unfamiliar surroundings, says Javier Minguez, head of the team at the University of Zaragoza in Spain that is developing the chair.To direct the wheelchair, users concentrate on one of several possible destinations in a 3D map of their surroundings, which appears on a screen in front of them. Users wear a skullcap with 16 electrodes positioned around their scalp. These detect millisecond-long fluctuations in brain activity, which happen when the user looks at the point on the screen that coincides with a target destination.

EARTHQUAKES and asbestos may seem an unlikely alliance to help life evolve on early Earth, yet they could have done just that.Sea-floor fissures lined with an asbestos mineral called chrysotile are places where life could have gained a foothold 3.5 billion years ago. To mimic that environment, Naoto Yoshida and Nori Fujiura of the University of Miyazaki in Japan formed a bacterial biofilm on a layer of gum. They added chrysotile minerals, bacterial DNA molecules called plasmids that had genes for antibiotic resistance, and silica beads representing inert rock. They then shook the mix for 60 seconds to mimic the low-energy tremors that would have occurred early in Earth's history.

Ray Kurzweil has a surrealist's eye for disorientation. The lobby of his offices outside Boston have the quality of a Dadaist art gallery: nothing is quite what it seems. Immediately inside the door is an old metal box that turns out to be a dictation machine built by Thomas Edison. An old man is sitting next to it, with a badge on his lapel that reads: "I'm an inventor". He is George, the receptionist tells me, and he is made of wax. A cabinet along the hall is covered entirely in boxes of vitamin pills, hundreds of them, from acai berry, red yeast rice and milk thistle to a very large jar marked "Anti-ageing multi-pack".

The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously noted the similarities between advanced technology and magic. This summer on the big screen, the young wizard Harry Potter will once again don his magic invisibility cloak and disappear. Meanwhile, researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California Berkeley will be studying an invisibility cloak of their own that also hides objects from view.

When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn't expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, they were already posted on another Web site, and a historical map of Tokyo put up in 2006 hadn't caused any problems.But Google failed to judge how its offering would be received, as it has often done in Japan. The company is now facing inquiries from the Justice Ministry and angry accusations of prejudice because its maps detailed the locations of former low-caste communities.

MELBOURNE: In a bid to encourage heart patients to complete their rehabilitation programs after surgery, Australian scientists have come up with a new technique that will see nurses monitoring them via a mobile phone.The trial, being run by the CSIRO's Australian E-Health Research Centre (AEHRC) and Queensland Health, uses a mobile phone to collect and send health-related information about patients' activities at home to a central computer.

The most distant cosmic explosion ever recorded would have made a fascinating target for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), according to scientists now building the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.The cataclysmic detonation reported this week is the most far-flung object in the Universe yet seen.It was a class of celestial object known as a gamma-ray blast. At a distance of 13 billion light-years, the blast was so remote that today's telescopes were stretched to their limits in revealing much information about it.

A big archaeological dig is taking place at the site in South Lanarkshire where the earliest evidence of human beings in Scotland was found.The Biggar Archaeology Group is beginning a major excavation of the area at Howburn Farm near Elsrickle.Last month it was revealed that flint artefacts unearthed there could date back 14,000 years to 12,000 BC.Volunteers have been encouraged to go along to the site this weekend to take part in further exploration.

THE human genome sequence, published in 2003, is revealing a multitude of secrets. And when the chimpanzee genome followed in 2005, we discovered just how similar humans are to our closest living relative.Now scientists have a draft genome sequence from the extinct Neanderthals (homo neanderthalensis) and are poised to clear up many long-debated issues, not least how like us our ancient cousins really were.

For the past two years, a team of UCLA Egyptologists, digital modelers, web designers, staff and students has been building a three-dimensional virtual-reality model of the ancient Egyptian religious site known as Karnak, one of the largest temple complexes ever constructed.The result is Digital Karnak, a high-tech model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate 2,000 years of history at the popular ancient Egyptian tourist site near modern-day Luxor, where generations of pharaohs constructed temples, chapels, obelisks, sphinxes, shrines and other sacred structures beginning in the 20th century B.C.

Dear Gil:Congratulations on your confirmation as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.Bit of an irony, isn't it? Two Seattle police chiefs on opposite sides of the drug war? As "drug czar" (please retire that ill-begotten label), you are responsible for advising the president and vice president on drug control programs, and for coordinating drug policies among all federal agencies. I, on the other hand, as a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, am devoted to ending the drug war, along with the prohibition model on which it's based.But how far apart are we, really?.

From goofy to erudite, more than three dozen theories have attempted to explain the origins of grassy mounds that dot the prairies of Southwest Washington. The latest twist won't settle the debate, but it casts the mysterious hummocks in a different light.Laser light, that is.Scientists used airborne laser surveys to create topographic maps that reveal new details about the so-called Mima Mounds scattered across lowlands south of Olympia and Tacoma. The technique fires 23,000 pulses a second toward the ground, and erases signals that bounce back from vegetation and buildings. The result is an exceptionally crisp image accurate to a few inches or feet.

The threat of snakes gave primates superior vision and large brains -- and fueled a critical aspect of human evolution, UC Davis anthropology professor Lynne Isbell argues in a new book.From the temptation of Eve to the venomous murder of the mighty Thor, the serpent appears throughout time and cultures as a figure of mischief and misery.

WASHINGTON: A second fly-by of Mercury in October 2008 by the U.S. space probe MESSENGER has revealed the Solar System's smallest planet to be far more active than previously thought, four studies reveal.Cameras aboard the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) probe took more than 1,200 images of the surface, including details of a mammoth well-preserved 692-km impact basin that shows signs of a volcanic past.

An international team of scientists has determined the structure of the chlorophyll molecules in green bacteria that are responsible for harvesting light energy. The team's results one day could be used to build artificial photosynthetic systems, such as those that convert solar energy to electrical energy.A research paper about the discovery will be published on 4 May 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The scientists found that the chlorophylls are highly efficient at harvesting light energy. "We found that the orientation of the chlorophyll molecules make green bacteria extremely efficient at harvesting light," said Donald Bryant, Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State and one of the team's leaders.

Scientists have found more evidence that the Indonesian "Hobbit" skeletons belong to a new species of human - and not modern pygmies.The one metre (3ft) tall, 30kg (65lbs) humans roamed the Indonesian island of Flores, perhaps up to 8,000 years ago.Since the discovery, researchers have argued vehemently as to the identity of these diminutive people.Two papers in the journal Nature now support the idea they were an entirely new species of human.

Bones found at a former hospital in Worcestershire show evidence of early amputations and other medical research, say archaeologists.County council archaeologists were called in after workers building the new city university campus found about 200 bone pieces in a pit at the former Worcester Royal Infirmary site.Simon Sworn, archaeologist and project officer, said many of the 19th Century bones had been deliberately cut and were "evidence of amputations in their infancy".

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is using modern technology to digitally record thousands of tablets that, as they are being pieced together, tell an unusually detailed story of the Persian Empire.These ancient tablets from the palaces of Persepolis include pieces of language and art from the center of the Persian Empire, all made when it extended from India and Central Asia to Egypt and the Mediterranean. Most have texts in impressed cuneiform characters, many them have inked texts in Aramaic writing and almost all of the tablets have seal impressions.

Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet. A new genetic survey of people in Africa, the largest of its kind, suggests, however, that the region in southwest Africa seems, on the present evidence, to be the origin of modern humans. The authors have also identified some 14 ancestral populations.

Researchers have developed a technique that uses sensors and computational software to constantly monitor forces exerted on wind turbine blades, a step toward improving efficiency by adjusting for rapidly changing wind conditions.The research by engineers at Purdue University and Sandia National Laboratories is part of an effort to develop a smarter wind turbine structure .

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) drillship JOIDES Resolution is returning to port in Honolulu this week after a two-month voyage to chart detailed climate history in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The expedition was the first of two back-to-back voyages of a scientific project called Pacific Equatorial Age Transect (PEAT). It was the first international scientific drilling expedition after the JOIDES Resolution underwent a multi-year transformation into a 21st-century floating science laboratory.

A group of scientists have unveiled what they say is the most comprehensive study ever of African genes.Published following a decade of study, the researchers say their findings give new insight into the origins of humans.The first humans probably evolved near the South Africa-Namibia border before migrating north, the study says.Published in the US journal Science, it aims to teach Africans on population history and aid research into why diseases hit particular groups.

It has long been known that heat is an effective weapon against tumor cells. However, it's difficult to heat patients' tumors without damaging nearby tissues.Now, MIT researchers have developed tiny gold particles that can home in on tumors, and then, by absorbing energy from near-infrared light and emitting it as heat, destroy tumors with minimal side effects.Such particles, known as gold nanorods, could diagnose as well as treat tumors, says MIT graduate student Geoffrey von Maltzahn, who developed the tumor-homing particles with Sangeeta Bhatia, professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Since its launch last June, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colo., Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery."Fermi's Large Area Telescope is a state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector, but it's also a terrific tool for investigating the high-energy electrons in cosmic rays," said Alexander Moiseev, who presented the findings. Moiseev is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

At the moment physicists are having enough difficulty just taming antihydrogen, the simplest possible anti-atom. Can we ever expect them to make antihelium, and then organic antimolecules made from anticarbon and a whole anti-periodic table, too?The problem here is that every anti-atom has to be built one subatomic antiparticle at a time. For example, if you want to make antideuterium - like antihydrogen, but with an added antineutron - you first have to make the antineutron. Antineutrons are neutral, making them impossible to steer in the conventional way with electromagnetic fields, so you just have to make great numbers of them and hope that for every million or so antineutrons you make, one ends up in the right place to make an antideuterium atom. "And for every further antineutron or antiproton you add, you lose another factor of a million," says Michael Doser, spokesman for CERN's AEGIS experiment studying the properties of antimatter.

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.Proteins such as collagen are far more durable than DNA, but they had not been expected to last the 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out. So palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University attracted wide attention when she reported finding first soft tissue and later collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone that was intact until it was broken during excavation.

Days after more than 10,000 students gathered in Atlanta's Georgia Dome to compete in a robotics championship, Brian Toohey has one thing on his mind: how to make a robotics education accessible to every public high school.Toohey, senior vice president for international affairs at Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, is rallying support among members of Congress and Department of Education employees for legislation to help his cause. And with the publicity boost from the competition, sponsored by robotics education non-profit FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), Toohey hopes it's enough to inspire Congress to fund a program that would allow inner-city schools access to the FIRST program.

If you could choose the colour of your child's eyes, what colour would you choose? If you could rebuild damaged leg cartilage and, in doing so, make it stronger and more flexible than any natural biological substance, would you? What if you could take a pill that would allow you to concentrate intensely over a short and crucial period in your life, when distraction could mean the loss of something very important, like somebody's life?

Naples, April 30 - A stunning collection of frescoes that once adorned the walls of Ancient Roman buildings in Pompeii are set to go on show in Naples.The National Archaeological Museum is to open its completely revamped fresco section, which hosts 400 works of art, following a ten-year renovation project. Preserved by a hail of lava and ash from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79, the precious artwork lay untouched for centuries until excavations started in the 1700s. Over the next 150 years, hundreds of frescoes were removed from their original location and carried away, sometimes for profit, sometimes in a bid to protect the art.In nearly all cases, removing the artwork damaged the walls of the ancient buildings. Today, the collection housed in the Naples museum is the largest in the world, and is ready to go on show again. The principal change is an entirely new layout, which seeks to place the works in their historical context. The new layout offers visitors a chronological route through the works, charting developments in Pompeian art, as well as a thematic route, which groups together items removed from the same building wherever possible.

The mysterious disappearance of Everett Ruess, a 20-year-old artist, writer and footloose explorer who wandered the Southwest in the early 1930s on a burro and who has become a folk hero to many, has been solved with the help of University of Colorado at Boulder researchers and the National Geographic Society.The short, compelling life of Ruess, who went missing in 1934 after leaving the town of Escalante, Utah, has been the subject of much speculation. His story has spawned two documentary films, as well as plays, books, magazine and newspaper articles and a T-shirt line, and his name now graces an annual art festival in Escalante.

Dinosaurs were dying out much earlier than the mass extinction event 65 million years ago, Natural History Museum scientists report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society journal today.The diversity of dinosaur species was already on the decline millions of years before this event. This changes the current theory about how and when dinosaurs became extinct.'It appears that dinosaurs were declining well before the famous meteor impact,' says Paul Barrett, part of the research team and dinosaur expert at the Natural History Museum.

SYDNEY: An astronomy student spotted a huge rock orbiting the outer reaches of our solar system, when he was scanning the skies for potentially hazardous asteroids."The asteroid image obtained by the Zadko telescope is the same as detecting a grain of sand from 130 km away," said David Coward, a professor at the University of Western Australia (UWA).

Scientists have rendered objects invisible under near-infrared light.Unlike previous such "cloaks", the new work does not employ metals, which introduce losses of light and result in imperfect cloaking.Because the approach can be scaled down further in size, researchers say this is a major step towards a cloak that would work for visible light.One of the research teams describes its miniature "carpet cloak" in the journal Nature Materials.

A new wave energy device known as "Anaconda" is the latest idea to harness the power of the seas.Its inventors claim the key to its success lies in its simplicity: Anaconda is little more than a length of rubber tubing filled with water.Waves in the water create bulges along the tubing that travel along its length gathering energy.At the end of the tube, the surge of energy drives a turbine and generates electricity.

Manchester will be the first city where people can voluntarily sign up for an ID card, ministers are set to confirm.Anyone over 16 in the city who holds a UK passport will be able to apply for a card from the autumn at a cost of £60.People will be able to enrol in post offices and pharmacies, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is expected to say.Opposition parties have called for the £5bn scheme to be scrapped while some Labour MPs have expressed their doubts about its cost in the current climate.

A group of scientists have unveiled what they say is the most comprehensive study ever of African genes.Published following a decade of study, the researchers say their findings give new insight into the origins of humans.The first humans probably evolved near the South Africa-Namibia border before migrating north, the study says.Published in the US journal Science, it aims to teach Africans on population history and aid research into why diseases hit particular groups.

Dinosaur footprint fossils discovered in Yongjing County in the northwestern province of Gansu are significant on a global scale. The size of the fossils, their diversity and good condition all add to their scientific research value. But these valuable finds now face the triple threats of erosion, weathering and landslides.The fossils have been left untended for too long. Some of them are covered by grass, while others are now buried by sand. Those that are left on the ground have broken into pieces.

Probably - for now. The internet is a disparate mix of interconnected computers, many of them on large networks run by universities, businesses and so on. What unites this network of networks are the communication languages known as the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol, collectively TCP/IP.There are also a few large networks that use different protocols and which remain largely isolated from the internet, including something called FidoNet, which links bulletin board systems via the global telephone network, as well as a handful of military networks. The main internet is the only one of any significant size, as far as we know.

A high-seas mission departs from San Francisco next month to map and explore a sinister and shifting 21st-century continent: one twice the size of Texas and created from six million tonnes of discarded plastic.Scientists and conservationists on the expedition will begin attempts to retrieve and recycle a monument to throwaway living in the middle of the North Pacific.

The Old North Church is best known for the pivotal role it played in the American Revolution. It's the site of the famous "One if by land and two if by sea" warning: On April 18, 1775, after Paul Revere's ride, two lanterns hung in the church steeple signaled the advancement of the British troops to Lexington.

LONDON: For over 400 years, astronomers have studied the Sun from afar. Now, a team at European Space Agency, with backing from NASA, is planning to send two space missions to explore the brightest star.According to the ESA astronomers, the aim of the space missions is to get closer to the centre of the Sun, which will help in unravelling a long list of questions that exist about the star, including why its outer atmosphere is hotter than its surface, and what causes solar wind, sun spots and flares.

An archaeologist says a rock used to mark a parking lot at a church in Sweden is actually a 1,000-year-old runestone.

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth believe they have solved an ancient Mediterranean mystery.The mystery of how 2ft deep tracks were cut into the rock of Malta has been a puzzle for years.Now Professor Derek Mottershead, of the university's geography department, has followed generations of scholars to unravel the mysteries of the Maltese landscape.

London - England's King Henry VIII is known as a tyrant who killed two of his six wives, but a series of exhibitions marking 500 years since his coronation reveal he was also a romantic, a keen sportsman - and the country's first eurosceptic.

REMAINS of the largest ancient Egyptian temple yet to be found in Sinai have been uncovered in Qantara, reports Nevine El-Aref.At Tel-Hebua, known in Pharaonic times as Tharo, the area from which the ancient Egyptian army embarked on military campaigns along Egypt's eastern borders, an Egyptian archaeological mission stumbled upon what is believed to be the largest New Kingdom temple ever discovered.

Astronomers have reported that the Sun is at its dimmest for almost a century.Some scientists believe a similar "quiet spell" is connected to a cooling of temperatures in a period of time called the Maunder Minimum.Also known as the Little Ice Age, it lasted 70 years from 1645 to 1715 and featured The Great Frost which froze the River Thames in London for days.Interestingly, this period coincided with some of the most dramatic events in Scotland's history.A king was forced into exile, there was rebellion, famine, an ill-fated Scottish bid to establish a colony in Central America and a sandstorm buried a coastal estate.

You know the scenario: 65 million years ago, a big meteor crash sets off volcanoes galore, dust and smoke fill the air, dinosaurs go belly up.One theory holds that cold, brought on by the Sun's concealment, is what did them in, but a team of paleontologists led by Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, argues otherwise. Some dinosaurs (warm-blooded, perhaps) were surprisingly good at withstanding near-freezing temperatures, they say.

THE humble sticking plaster is getting a high-tech upgrade. As well as simply patching up small cuts and grazes, plasters embedded with light-emitting diodes could be used to treat skin cancer in combination with light-sensitive drugs.Polymertronics, based in Banbury, UK, is developing the plasters, which are impregnated with a ser ies of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The light plasters are designed for use in photodynamic therapy, in which light-sensitive drugs are applied to the skin as a cream. When you shine red light on the area it activates the drugs, which destroy the tumour as they soak though the skin.

A rare Roman millefiori dish has been unearthed by archaeologists from the grave of a wealthy Londoner.The dish, which has gone on display at the Museum of London in Docklands, was found during excavations in Prescot Street, in Aldgate, east London.It was pieced together from its many fragments.It is made up of hundreds of translucent blue indented glass petals, bordered with white embedded in a bright red glass background.

For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations.Now, after painstakingly comparing DNA samples from people in dozens of modern-day Native American and Eurasian groups, an international team of scientists thinks it can put the matter to rest: Virtually without exception the new evidence supports the single ancestral population theory.

ZHENGZHOU, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists say they have identified the country's earliest known carving -- a deer antler sculpted into the shape of a bird -- dating back 12,000 to 15,000 years.The fossilized grey figurine, which is 2.1 centimeters long, 1.2 centimeters high and 0.6 centimeters thick, was found in Xuchang County in China's central Henan Province in March.

The enduringly popular theory that the Chicxulub crater holds the clue to the demise of the dinosaurs, along with some 65 percent of all species 65 million years ago, is challenged in a paper to be published in the Journal of the Geological Society on April 27, 2009.The crater, discovered in 1978 in northern Yucutan and measuring about 180 kilometers (112 miles) in diameter, records a massive extra-terrestrial impact.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation today announced its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2009. The Trust creates this list annually to highlight historical sites at risk of destruction. On hand to make the announcement were Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton.

JONESBORO, Ark. (AP) - Artifacts of prehistoric people who lived in Arkansas are being excavated by professionals who are trying to piece together more of the story of those who once lived here. Those artifacts are also being dug up by criminals.Dr. Julie Morrow, station archaeologist for Arkansas Archaeological Survey, wants to get the word out that raiding the state's past can be a felony.

Astronomers have spotted a burst of energy from a dying star, setting a record for the oldest and most distant object seen by Earth yet.The 10-second blast was from when the universe was only 630 million years old.NASA's Swift satellite spotted the gamma-ray burst, an explosion of high-powered radiation, on April 23.Then ground telescopes watched the X-ray afterglow and calculated it had traveled 13.035 billion light-years to get here.