Newsdesk Archive

A mass grave unearthed Tuesday in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, is believed to contain bodies from an epidemic of yellow fever that swept the city in the 1870s, police said.Two buildings from the 1940s were torn down at the site, and maintenance workers grading the land in preparation for the construction of a new building uncovered the remains, said Montgomery police spokesman Maj. Huey Thornton.

Over the railroad tracks, near Agriculture Drive on the University of Georgia campus, sits a unique machine that may hold one of the solutions to big environmental problems like energy, food production and even global climate change."This machine right here is our baby," said UGA research engineer Brian Bibens, who is one of a handful of researchers around the world working on alternative ways to recycle carbon.Bibens' specialty is "biochar," a highly porous charcoal made from organic waste. The raw material can be any forest, agricultural or animal waste. Some examples are woodchips, corn husks, peanut shells, even chicken manure.

To keep this world tolerable for life as we like it, humanity must complete a marathon of technological change whose finish line lies far over the horizon. Robert H. Socolow and Stephen W. Pacala of Princeton University have compared the feat to a multigenerational relay race. They outline a strategy to win the first 50-year leg by reining back carbon dioxide emissions from a century of unbridled acceleration. Existing technologies, applied both wisely and promptly, should carry us to this first milestone without trampling the global economy. That is a sound plan A.

Dave Hackenberg makes a living moving honeybees. Up and down the East Coast and often coast to coast, Hackenberg trucks his beehives from field to field to pollinate crops as diverse as Florida melons, Pennsylvania apples, Maine blueberries and California almonds.As he has done for the past 42 years, in the fall of 2006 Hackenberg migrated with his family and his bees from their central Pennsylvania summer home to their winter locale in central Florida. The insects had just finished their pollination duties on blooming Pennsylvanian pumpkin fields and were now to catch the last of the Floridian Spanish needle nectar flow. When Hackenberg checked on his pollinators, the colonies were "boiling over" with bees, as he put it. But when he came back a month later, he was horrified. Many of the remaining colonies had lost large numbers of workers, and only the young workers and the queen remained and seemed healthy. More than half of the 3,000 hives were completely devoid of bees. But no dead bees were in sight. "It was like a ghost town," Hackenberg said when he called us seeking an explanation for the mysterious disappearance.

And you thought you felt old: Last week, in the village of Prishakhtinsk in central Kazakhstan, Sakhan Dosova celebrated what she, her family and Kazakh officials all agree was her 130th birthday. If true, her advanced age would shatter the old-timer record set by Jeanne Calment, who died in Arles, France, in 1997 at the age of 122.Dosova has a passport and an identification card verifying she was born March 27, 1879; she doesn't have a birth certificate but apparently that is because such records were not routinely kept where she grew up in the late 19th century. Soviet census records, however, list her as being 46 years old in 1926, further supporting Dosova's über-Methuselah status. (To add perspective, if Dosova's story is true, she was pushing 40 during the 1917 Russian Revolution and when World War I ended in 1918, and she was born the same year as Albert Einstein and Joseph Stalin.)

Analysis of complex shell tools is rewriting the history of human development.To understand human development, archaeologists tend to analyze either fossilized human bones or stone tools. In Africa and Europe stone tools are seen to increase in complexity over the last few million years.But in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Guinea, stone tools don't appear to develop until the last 4000 years.

Saturn's moon Titan is surprisingly non-spherical, suggesting it may hide vast reserves of liquid methane beneath its surface, according to a new study.Titan is 5150 kilometres across, making it larger than Mercury and only slightly smaller than the largest moon in the solar system, Jupiter's Ganymede.By bouncing radar signals off the moon's smog-enshrouded surface, the Cassini spacecraft has now measured Titan's shape precisely for the first time.

At sunset on Thursday, astronomers around the world will be limbering up for a 100-hour marathon aimed at celebrating the night sky and nurturing the Galileos of tomorrow.The exercise has been "400 years in the making," says the Paris-based International Astronomical Union (IAU), referring to observations made in 1609 by the Italian genius that swept away our conception of the Universe."It is a sense of discovery and awe that astronomers wish to share with our fellow citizens all over the world," says IAU president Catherine Cesarsky.

There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government.Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability".Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice.

Viruses have been used to help build batteries that may one day power cars and all types of electronic devices.The speed and relatively cheap cost of manufacturing virus batteries could prove attractive to industry.Professor Angela Belcher, who led the research team, said: "Our material is powerful enough to be able to be used in a car battery."The team from MIT in the US is now working on higher power batteries.

BEIJING, March 31 (Xinhua) -- A group of man-made cave houses dating back 5,500 years ranked top among the 10 most significant archaeological discoveries in China in 2008, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) announced on Tuesday.Other discoveries included a Bronze-Age graveyard in northwest China's Gansu Province, a tomb that proves the existence of a kingdom during the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC), and a "shopping district" of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) in southwest China's Chengdu City.

Now, the VOA Special English program, WORDS AND THEIR STORIES.Every week at this time, the Voice of America tells about popular words and expressions used in the United States. Some of these words and expressions are old. Some are new. Together, they form the living speech of the American people.Our story today is very old. It goes back about five-thousand years. It is about a sign that is used to represent some words.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters Life!) - In a lighted display case, an ancient pottery cylinder depicts a naked man kneeling before two menacing figures, one of which is holding a spear-like object topped with a large blade.The kneeling figure, archaeologists say, is about to be put to death for his defiance of the other characters on the vessel who have invaded the victim's land, and wish to demonstrate control of their new territory.

Anthony Peake, author of 'Is There Life After Death?' will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout April to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

Scientific evidence of an ancient invasion of Scotland from Ireland may have been uncovered by DNA techniques.Researchers from Edinburgh University said studies of Scots living on Islay, Lewis, Harris and Skye found strong links with Irish people.Early historical sources recount how the Gaels came from Ireland about 500 AD and conquered the Picts in Argyll.Scientists said the study was the first demonstration of a significant Irish genetics component in Scots' ancestry.

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

DARMSTADT, Germany - Researchers concerned about an increasing amount of debris orbiting the earth are calling for the active removal of space junk, saying it will ensure a safe environment around the planet.More than 300 scientists and other experts who met for four days at the European Space Agency said Thursday that sharing information is a crucial first step in preventing collisions and predicting with more accuracy where derelict satellites may fall to earth."We need to share more data," said Thomas Schildknecht of the Aeronautical Institute of the University of Bern. "We consider this most import and challenging part for the immediate future."

Everything about Jupiter is super-sized, including its colorful, turbulent atmosphere. But there's fresh evidence that one of the planet's most recognizable features, the Great Red Spot, is shrinking.The spot, which is actually an ancient monster storm that measures about three Earths across, lost 15 percent of its diameter between 1996 and 2006, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found.It shrank by about 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) a day during that time period, said Xylar Asay-Davis, a postdoctoral researcher who was part of the study.

April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.

At Imperial College London, medical students navigate a full-service hospital where they see patients, order X-rays, consult with colleagues and make diagnoses.It's an interactive, hands-on learning experience -- and none of it is real.These prospective doctors are treating virtual patients in Second Life, the Internet world where users interact through online alter egos called avatars. The third-year med students are taking part in a pilot program for game-based learning, which educators believe can be a stimulating change from lectures and textbooks.

Some of Egypt's most magnificent pyramids were deliberately designed to follow a pattern of invisible diagonal lines, an Italian study has concluded.According to Giulio Magli, professor of archaeoastronomy at Milan's Polytechnic University, these invisible lines would connect most of the funerary complexes raised by the kings of the Old Kingdom between 2630 and 2323 B.C."Following these diagonals, it appears clear that the arrangement of the monuments was carefully chosen in order to satisfy a number of criteria, which include dynastic lineage, religion and astronomical alignments," Magli told Discovery News.

Analysis of complex shell tools is rewriting the history of human development in Australasia, says one archaeologist.Dr Katherine Szabo of the University of Wollongong has just taken up a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship to further her research."This bears on questions of our history as a species," says Szabo.To understand human development, archaeologists tend to analyse either fossilised human bones or stone tools.

The largest mass extinction in the history of the earth could have been triggered off by giant salt lakes, whose emissions of halogenated gases changed the atmospheric composition so dramatically that vegetation was irretrievably damaged. At least that is what an international team of scientists have reported in the most recent edition of the "Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences" (Dokladi Earth Sciences). At the Permian/Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago about 90 percent of the animal and plant species ashore became extinct. Previously it was thought that volcanic eruptions, the impacts of asteroids, or methane hydrate were instigating causes. The new theory is based on a comparison with today's biochemical and atmospheric chemical processes. "Our calculations show that airborne pollutants from giant salt lakes like the Zechstein Sea must have had catastrophic effects at that time", states co-author Dr. Ludwig Weißflog from the Helmholtz-Center for Environmental Research (UFZ). Forecasts predict an increase in the surface areas of deserts and salt lakes due to climate change. That is why the researchers expect that the effects of these halogenated gases will equally increase.

The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun.The US National Ignition Facility is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion, a process that could offer abundant clean energy.The lab will kick-start the reaction by focusing 192 giant laser beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel.To work, it must show that more energy can be extracted from the process than is required to initiate it.

Giant lions were roaming around Britain, Europe and North America up to 13,000 years ago, scientists from Oxford University have found.Remains of giant cats previously discovered were thought to be a species of jaguar or tiger but after DNA analysis they were proved to be lions.They were 25% bigger than the species of African lion living today, and had longer legs to chase their prey.They would have lived in icy tundra with mammoth and sabretooth tigers.It is thought these animals would hunt over longer distances, and their longer legs would help them chase down their prey as opposed to the modern-day species which tends to ambush its victims.

The discovery of the oldest known infant born with a skull deformity hints that, contrary to popular belief, early humans might not have immediately abandoned or killed their abnormal offspring, a new study says.Many mammals are known to reject newborns with severe deformities. Scientists had therefore assumed that ancient humans behaved likewise.

A fondly-held belief about long-necked sauropods, the giant four-footed dinosaurs beloved of monster movies and children, is most probably untrue, a dino expert said on Wednesday.At the zenith of the dinosaurs' reign, some sauropods evolved necks of extraordinary length -- more than nine metres (29.25 feet) in the case of the Mamenchisaurus, a titan of the Late Jurassic period around 150 million years ago.Prevailing wisdom has it that these leviathans used their necks like giraffes today. They reached up high into the trees, munching leisurely on forest canopy that was out of reach for rival herbivores.

Japan's Honda said Tuesday it had developed a robot steered by human thought, thanks to a helmet-like device that measures a person's brain activity and sends signals to the machine.The latest version of ASIMO -- the celebrity robot of Honda Motor Co. that can already dance, run and guide guests through an office floor -- has now been fitted with a so-called "brain machine interface" (BMI), the company said.The state-of-the-art technology means the humanoid can perform four basic movements with its arms, legs and tongue based on the non-verbal instructions a person sends to it by concentrating on performing the action themselves.

Looking for an explanation for recurring nightmares of leaving the house without your trousers on or losing your teeth? New research suggests you can blame the Earth's magnetic field, rather than a repressed childhood.Darren Lipnicki, a psychologist formerly at the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin, Germany, found a correlation between the bizarreness of his dreams, recorded over eight years, and extremes in local geomagnetic activity.

Clean up your fumes or stay away. That's the message US officials are sending to all vessels approaching US coasts. On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its intention to designate the US coastal region an "emission control area" within four years.Ships entering US coastal waters, which typically extend 370 kilometres from the coast, will need to meet the highest clean air standards under international law. To approach the US, international vessels will have to cut sulphur emissions by 98 per cent on average by either burning cleaner fuel or chemically "scrubbing" their exhaust. Annual shipping emissions are thought to contribute to 60,000 deaths worldwide, via illnesses such as respiratory disease.

The Sun Temple at Abu Simbel is a popular tourist attraction which has featured in well-known films like Death on the Nile and The Mummy Returns but had it been left where Ramses II built it 35 centuries ago, it would now be under water.Fifty years ago this year Egypt and Sudan asked for international help to save ancient sites threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam."It was going to submerge all the area of Nubia - monuments, people, the landscape, everything," says Costanza de Simone from the United Nations' culture agency, Unesco."So the two governments launched an appeal to Unesco.

240 B.C. Chinese astronomers observe a new broom-shaped "star" in the sky. It's the first confirmed sighting of Halley's Comet.Some have made the case that a sighting in 2467 B.C. is responsible for the alignment of the Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza. Interesting. Even a supposed Chinese sighting in 613 B.C. would be seven years later than the calculated 620 B.C. for a Halley's passage. Was that a record-keeping error or a different comet?

Scientists have come up with a novel theory to explain the unexplained terrain on one of Saturn's icy moons.The most striking feature of Iapetus is a bulging ridge, which encircles the moon's equator and reaches an altitude of 20km in places.A new theory suggests the ridge formed when the moon went from a relatively fast-spinning body to one spinning more slowly.Details were presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.

The new medieval gallery at the British Museum is full of beautiful images of saints in ivory, stone, gold and wood - but invisible to visitors, it also holds the bones of 39 real saints, whose discovery came as a shock to their curator.The relics, packed in tiny bundles of cloth including one scrap of fabric over 1,000 years old, were found when a 12th-century German portable altar was opened for the first time since it came into the British Museum collection in 1902.

Archeologists have discovered inscriptions on bones which offer clues to the name of the father of Emperor Wen, founder of the Western Zhou Dynasty some three-thousand years ago. The discovery was made during an excavation in northern China's Shaanxi Province.In an area where were the domain of the Western Zhou Dynasty, about 700 animal bones bearing inscriptions have been uncovered.

As highway traffic increases, you'd probably expect a traffic jam, where vehicles slow down due to the high density. While traffic jams are a common occurrence on our highways, high density traffic has completely different effects for ants traveling on trails. As a new study has found, ants don't have traffic jams. Rather, as ant traffic density increases, the traffic maintains the same average velocity as at low densities.

Video games that involve high levels of action, such as first-person-shooter games, increase a player's real-world vision, according to research in today's Nature Neuroscience.The ability to discern slight differences in shades of gray has long been thought to be an attribute of the human visual system that cannot be improved. But Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has discovered that very practiced action gamers become 58 percent better at perceiving fine differences in contrast.

From an Antarctic research base to the Great Pyramids of Egypt and beyond, the world switched off the lights on Saturday for Earth Hour, dimming skyscrapers, city streets and some of the world's most recognizable monuments for 60 minutes to highlight the threat of climate change.Time zone by time zone, nearly 4,000 cities and towns in 88 countries joined the event sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to dim nonessential lights from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.An agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, is supposed to be reached in Copenhagen, Denmark, this December, and environmentalists' sense of urgency has spurred interest in this year's Earth Hour. Last year, only 400 cities participated; Sydney held a solo event in 2007.

The recent warming trend in the Atlantic Ocean is largely due to reductions in airborne dust and volcanic emissions during the past 30 years, according to a new study.Since 1980, the tropical North Atlantic has been warming by an average of a quarter-degree Celsius (a half-degree Fahrenheit) per decade. Though this number sounds small, it can translate to big impacts on hurricanes, which thrive on warmer water, says Amato Evan, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies and lead author of the new study. For example, the ocean temperature difference between 1994, a quiet hurricane year, and 2005's record-breaking year of storms, was just one degree Fahrenheit.

It appears that when it comes to teen brain development, parents should be more worried about alcohol abuse than marijuana abuse. Two recent studies have been published showing that alcohol -- a legal substance (though not legal for teens in the U.S.) -- is considered more dangerous than marijuana, which is illegal in many countries.One study has been published in the U.S., in the journal Clinical EEG and neuroscience: official journal of the EEG and Clinical Neuroscience Society (ENCS), and shows that alcohol has a stronger effect on teen brain development than marijuana. The other is a study published in the Lancet, offering the results of substance classification by a number of U.K. professionals, purporting that alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana to individuals and to society.

Electric cars have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but a more immediately viable transportation fuel of the future could be liquid derived from coal. Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives.

The Sultanate of Oman is gifted with geographical diversity, its coastline that stretches for 3,165 kilometers including islands and gulfs, and its land area of 309,500 square kilometers, all of which have attracted travelers, traders, and immigrants throughout history.Its geographical position forms a local point of contact with other nations and civilizations, and enables the Omanies with their neighbors to shape the historical events in their region.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, March 28 (UPI) -- A 4,000-year-old male human skeleton has been discovered in Tajikistan, experts say.The well-preserved skeleton was found by a group of local residents in the foothills near the Tajik village of Tudakavsh, ITAR-TASS reported Saturday.

IT ALL started with a wolf named Pluie. One rainy day in the summer of 1991, the 5-year-old female crossed paths with a team of researchers in the Peter Lougheed Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. They captured her and fitted a collar and satellite transmitter. For the next two years, they watched in amazement as Pluie went on an epic journey - one that would ultimately inspire a new kind of conservation.

In a car park not so far away ... It is a big brother experiment like no other, an experiment which will boldly go where few have gone - or probably wanted to go - before.Six apparently fearless volunteers are to take part in a unique test by being locked up in what amounts to a series of small steel tins off a parking lot in Moscow for 105 days as scientists simulate a space rocket ride to Mars.

WASHINGTON: Scientists have decoded the unique structure and mechanism of a tuberculosis enzyme, paving the way for development of new drugs to combat active and latent tuberculosis infections. Barbara Gerratana, assistant chemistry and biochemistry professor in Maryland University College of Chemical and Life Sciences, led the research team, which included her graduate student Melissa Resto and assistant professor Nicole LaRonde-LeBlanc.

During the shuttle Discovery's high-speed plunge back to Earth, engineers will be collecting data from a unique experiment to understand exactly how airflow over the orbiter's belly transitions from smooth, laminar flow (which provides a thin layer of insulation) to the disturbed turbulent flow that can cause downstream temperatures to climb, possibly damaging a spacecraft's heat shield.A single tile on the bottom of Discovery's left wing, about 10 feet behind the leading edge, features a quarter-of-an-inch-high ridge that will cause the insulating "boundary layer" downstream to go turbulent between mach 12 and 14.That, in turn, will raise the temperatures of downstream tiles by 500 to 600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Diamonds and precious metals found in the eastern United States might have rained down during the last Ice Age after a comet shattered over Canada and set North America ablaze, all leading to a mass die-off of animals and humans.New chemical analyses of diamond, gold and silver found in Ohio and Indiana reveal the minerals were transported there from Canada several thousand years ago. The question is, how?

It is advisable to wait a few minutes for the drink to cool a little before drinking tea, doctors said, after a study found very hot tea was linked with an eightfold increased risk of cancer of the oesophagus.

Several archaeologists, once split over when human beings turned from nut collectors into rice farmers, seem to have solved their differences after collaborating on a project using methodologies agreed upon by both parties.

NICOSIA, Cyprus: An Italian archaeologist claimed Friday to have discovered Cyprus' oldest religious site, which she said echoes descriptions in the Bible of temples in ancient Palestine.Maria Rosaria Belgiorno said the 4,000-year-old triangular temple predates any other found on the east Mediterranean island by a millennium."For sure it's the most ancient religious site on the island," she told The Associated Press from her home in Rome. "This confirms that religious worship in Cyprus began much earlier than previously believed."But authorities on the island say they cannot confirm her claim before further study.

An academic who tried to discredit a University of Wollongong team's discovery of a hobbit-like human species in Indonesia faced disciplinary action for serious misconduct.Professor Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide criticised University of Wollongong archaeology Professor Mike Morwood's theories concerning the tiny 97cm "hobbits", whose remains were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003.He claimed instead that they simply suffered from the condition dwarf cretinism. Prof Henneberg also wrote a book entitled The Hobbit Trap: Money, Fame, Science and the Discovery of a New Species, in which he spoke out against Prof Morwood and his team.

All right, tell me this doesn't sound a little strange: I'm sitting in Costa Mesa with a silver-haired gent who once ran for Congress as a Republican and used to lock up drug dealers as a federal prosecutor, a man who served as an Orange County judge for 25 years. And what are we talking about? He's begging me to tell you we need to legalize drugs in America."Please quote me," says Jim Gray, insisting the war on drugs is hopeless. "What we are doing has failed."

Two University of Rhode Island scientists have revealed how a cancer causing protein is regulated by reactive oxygen species (ROS) -- a type of stress signal. Their findings provide new insight into how this protein normally behaves in human cells and may help in the design of drugs targeting specific cancers.

Large size and a fast bite spelled doom for bony fishes during the last mass extinction 65 million years ago, according to a new study to be published March 31, 2009, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Today, those same features characterize large predatory bony fishes, such as tuna and billfishes, that are currently in decline and at risk of extinction themselves, said Matt Friedman, author of the study and a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago.

TOKYO - A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II, officials said Tuesday.Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified "hibakusha," or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.

It's one of the world's most enduring mysteries that has lasted for the last three centuries and been charged with the disappearance of more than 2,000 sea vessels and 200 airplanes.The Bermuda Triangle, which spans from Bermuda to Puerto Rico and over to the Miami-Fort Lauderdale coast, comprises half a million square miles of infamous seas.

A piece of ironware excavated from a Turkish archaeological site is about 4,000 years old, making it the world's oldest steel, Japanese archaeologists said on Thursday.Archaeologists from the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan excavated the 5-centimetre piece at the Kaman-Kalehoyuk archaeological site in Turkey, about 100 kilometers southeast of Ankara, in 2000. The ironware piece is believed to be a part of a knife from a stratum about 4,000 years old, or 2100-1950 B.C., according to them.

I AM shocked, truly shocked," says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. "I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them."

IT IS 2036. A large asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. Unless it is stopped, it will crash into the Pacific Ocean, creating a devastating tsunami. What should we do?We could blast the asteroid with a nuclear bomb, but that would risk shattering it into smaller pieces that could still threaten Earth. Or maybe we should try to force it off course by slamming into it with a heavy object - an unproven and therefore risky technique. Now there may be a third option: gently nudging the asteroid away from Earth without breaking it apart, either by exploding a nuclear device at a distance or zapping it with high-powered lasers.

In 1832, 57 emigrants from Donegal, Derry and the surrounding counties set sail for a new life in America.They found work on the railroads, but within weeks they were all dead, struck down by cholera - or possibly even murdered by locals who believed the immigrants had brought the disease with them.The men were buried where they had died, in a mass unmarked grave along 'Duffy's Cut', the section of the Philadelphia and Columbia railroad they helped to build.

Chimpanzees share many of our genes, but dogs have lived with us for so long and undergone so much domestication that they are now serving as a model for understanding human social behavior, according to a new paper.Cooperation, attachment to people, understanding human verbal and non-verbal communications, and the ability to imitate are just a handful of the social behaviors we share with dogs. They might even think like us at times too, according to the paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Advances in the Study of Behavior.

A company that has built mini-biospheres for orbiting space stations says it's ready for the next giant leap: growing flowers on the moon."It's all very aggressive," Taber MacCallum, chief executive officer of Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corp., said of his company's plan to send a miniature greenhouse to the lunar surface. "But it isn't fun if it isn't aggressive."

Power generated from flowing blood, simple body movements or a gentle breeze could one day be converted to electricity to charge iPods, cell phones and other personal electronic devices.

The race is on to develop smaller, more powerful and more solid batteries for devices like laptop computers, cell phones, GPS receivers and other portable devices.Scientists at MIT are taking the opposite approach, developing large, eco-friendly stationary batteries made entirely from liquid metal that would store large amounts of power from wind farms or solar cells or serve as backup power sources for hospitals."Since these batteries won't be in someone's hand or in a car, we don't have to make them crash-worthy, idiot-proof, and it doesn't have to operate at around body temperature," said Don Sadoway, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, along with graduate student David Bradwell and fellow professor Gerbrand Ceder, is developing the molten metal battery.

The Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) gained another 4.77 teraflops of computing power recently with the activation of the "Painter" supercomputer housed in the Data Replication Center at Louisiana Tech University.Painter is the fifth of six Dell Linux Clusters that comprise the LONI system, a state-of-the-art fiber optics network running throughout Louisiana, and connecting Louisiana and Mississippi research universities to one another as well as National LambdaRail and Internet2."This supercomputer will help support scientific calculations and data processing by several different disciplines on the Louisiana Tech campus," says Dr. Zeno Greenwood, associate professor of physics. "Painter will give us much, much more and incredibly faster computing than we ever had previously."

They have identified a brain region that predicts choices before we even know what they are.The caudate nucleus, part of a structure called the striatum, is involved in anticipating rewards.Scientists conducted an experiment in which volunteers imagined taking a holiday in 80 different destinations around the world. At the same time their brain activity was monitored.

JAPAN'S scientists believe they may have made a breakthrough in odour-free underwear and casual clothing.Koichi Wakata, the first Japanese astronaut to live on the International Space Station, is testing the clothes, called J-ware and created by textile experts at Japan Women's University in Tokyo."He can wear his trunks (underwear) more than a week," said Koji Yanagawa, an official with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Conservation International has done it again, inspiring us with images and accounts of species new to science. Just the other day, it was four new species -- two beetles, a mouse and a plant -- discovered in the Peruvian Andes. Now, it's more than 50 species, like this Litoria sp. frog, which uses a loud ringing song to call for a mate from rushing torrents in the rain forests of Papua New Guinea.

Researchers may have discovered a mass grave for nearly five dozen 19th century Irish immigrants who died of cholera weeks after coming to Pennsylvania to build a railroad.Historians at Immaculata University have known for years about the 57 immigrants who died in August 1832, but could not find the actual grave. Human bones discovered last week near the suburban Philadelphia university may at last reveal their final resting place - and possibly allow researchers to identify the remains and rebury them.

KASHGAR, China -- For hundreds of years, Uighur shopkeepers have been selling bread and firewood along the edges of Kashgar's old town to families whose ancestors bought their traditional mud-brick homes with gold coin and handed them down through the generations.Now, this labyrinth of ancient courtyard homes and narrow, winding streets is endangered by the latest government plan to modernize a way of life that officials consider dangerous and backward.

Pools of salty water might be able to exist just below the surface of Mars, planetary scientists believe.Researchers previously thought water existed largely as ice or as vapour on Mars, because of the low temperatures and atmospheric pressure.But Nasa's Phoenix lander has shown the presence in Martian soil of perchlorate salts, which can keep water liquid at temperatures of minus 70C.Pockets of brine might form when soil interacted with ice.

The age-old trek of African women to collect water from distant rivers and dirty ponds is once more a feature of the continent. Millions of women must take the old paths through the bush because an estimated 50,000 recent boreholes, pumps and wells installed with foreign aid are lying derelict for want of basic maintenance.So claims a new report presented last week at the World Water Forum, a triennial summit, in Istanbul, Turkey.

NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus returns to Earth this week with a new skill honed during four months in weightlessness: orbital cooking.It started innocently enough: She took a can of Russian chicken with vegetables and added olives, sun-dried tomatoes and pesto paste. The result left a bit to be desired."In the end, it was a mediocre product since the original base dish already had an overwhelming flavor to it," Magnus wrote in a journal she kept of her cooking experiences.

Red jasper cored from layers 3.46 billion years old suggests that not only did the oceans contain abundant oxygen then, but that the atmosphere was as oxygen rich as it is today, according to geologists.This jasper or hematite-rich chert formed in ways similar to the way this rock forms around hydrothermal vents in the deep oceans today."Many people have assumed that the hematite in ancient rocks formed by the oxidation of siderite in the modern atmosphere," said Hiroshi Ohmoto, professor of geochemistry, Penn State. "That is why we wanted to drill deeper, below the water table and recover unweathered rocks."

ALIEN worlds that are friendly to life could reveal themselves by radio signals crackling from their magnetic fields.When struck by high energy particles in the solar wind, an exoplanet's magnetic field may produce radio signals from auroras in the planet's atmosphere. While current telescopes have yet to pick up these crackles, it's an area worth exploring, argue Joseph Lazio at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and colleagues in a paper submitted to Astro2010.Because a magnetic field helps to preserve atmospheres and oceans, a magnetosphere may signify that a planet has complex surface life. "This is something we think is worth studying at a modest level," says Lazio, "the payoff could be immense.".

A boomerang-shaped object seen from an airport control tower and a woman's encounter with an "alien" are among the secrets revealed in official UFO files.The woman reported seeing a glowing, spherical object rise into the air in Norwich after meeting a man who said he came from a planet similar to Earth.In another sighting, a triangular craft hovered then "shot off at 500mph".The third set of UFO documents to be released by the Ministry of Defence covers the period from 1987 to 1993.

When Hallstein son of Thorolf Mostbeard found a suitable homestead on Iceland, he sacrificed to Thor, imploring the god to provide the ceremonial high seat posts he needed to complete his great hall. Evidently Thor heard: a mighty log washed ashore, big enough to supply seat posts for all the settlers round about. Years earlier, when Hallstein's father and other Norse pioneers sailed for Iceland, they had found themselves in the opposite fix. They had brought seat posts from home but needed a good place to settle. As they approached Iceland, they tossed their precious posts overboard and followed them to the places Thor supposedly chose for them. But the two prayers had something in common: the same sound ocean science underlay them both.OLD Kveldulf knew it was time to get out of Norway. He had pushed his luck by refusing to swear allegiance to Harald Tanglehair - a king not to be trifled with. When the king slew his son Thorolf, Kveldulf went berserk. He and his surviving son Skallagrim ambushed two of the king's emissaries, killing them and 50 companions, and fled to sea.

In science, the grandest revolutions are often triggered by the smallest discrepancies. In the 16th century, based on what struck many of his contemporaries as the esoteric minutiae of celestial motions, Copernicus suggested that Earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. In our own era, another revolution began to unfold 11 years ago with the discovery of the accelerating universe. A tiny deviation in the brightness of exploding stars led astronomers to conclude that they had no idea what 70 percent of the cosmos consists of. All they could tell was that space is filled with a substance unlike any other one that pushes along the expansion of the universe rather than holding it back. This substance became known as dark energy.

Problem Building wind turbines and solar farms in the middle of nowhere sounds great. But it's not easy to move all that clean energy to the people. Obama just signed into law $6 billion in loan guarantees for energy projects, including new transmission lines. But constructing those lines will require the approval of landowners and city planners, who want the electricity but not the unsightly high-voltage wires strung across their property.Solution

Maize was domesticated from its wild ancestor more than 8700 years according to biological evidence uncovered by researchers in the Mexico's Central Balsas River Valley. This is the earliest dated evidence -- by 1200 years -- for the presence and use of domesticated maize.The researchers, led by Anthony Ranere of Temple University and Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, reported their findings in two studies -- "The Cultural and chronological context of early Holocene maize and squash domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexcio" and "Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico" -- being published in the PNAS Early edition, March 24.

ATHENS, Greece -- A Greek fisherman must have been expecting a monster of a catch when he brought up his nets in the Aegean Sea last week. Instead, Greek authorities say his haul was a section of a 2,200-year-old bronze statue of a horseman.A Culture Ministry announcement said Monday the accidental find was made in waters between the eastern islands of Kos and Kalymnos. The fisherman handed over the corroded metal figure to authorities, who have started the cleaning process.

Rising over the battered surface of the moon, Earth loomed in a shimmering arc covered in a swirling skin of clouds.The image, taken in 1966 by NASA's robotic probe Lunar Orbiter 1, presented a stunning juxtaposition of planet and moon that no earthling had ever seen before.

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

Among the hundreds of plants that have been domesticated in the New World, none has received as much attention or been subject to as much debate as corn, or maize (Zea mays L.), arguably the most important crop of the Americas. Controversies have existed for years over what the wild ancestor of maize is and where and when it was domesticated.

In the future, natural gas derived from chunks of ice that workers collect from beneath the ocean floor and beneath the arctic permafrost may fuel cars, heat homes, and power factories. Government researchers are reporting that these so-called "gas hydrates," a frozen form of natural gas that bursts into flames at the touch of a match, show increasing promise as an abundant, untapped source of clean, sustainable energy. The icy chunks could supplement traditional energy sources that are in short supply and which produce large amounts of carbon dioxide linked to global warming, the scientists say."These gas hydrates could serve as a bridge to our energy future until cleaner fuel sources, such as hydrogen and solar energy, are more fully realized," says study co-leader Tim Collett, Ph.D., a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Denver, Colo. Gas hydrates, known as "ice that burns," hold special promise for helping to combat global warming by leaving a smaller carbon dioxide footprint than other fossil fuels, Collett and colleagues note.

On March 19th, astronauts onboard the International Space Station checked themselves for microbes before stepping outside on a space walk. It was a first-ever test of planetary protection technology that, one day, could keep humans from contaminating the sands of Mars."We conducted the tests using LOCAD-PTS, a miniature biological lab for space travelers," explains Jake Maule, principal investigator for the experiment. LOCAD-PTS stands for Lab-On-A-Chip Application Development Portable Test System."Before STS-119 crew members Steve Swanson and Richard Arnold exited the International Space Station airlock to install the station's new solar arrays, astronaut Sandy Magnus swabbed their gloves with LOCAD's high-tech 'Q-tip' and then tested that Q-tip for microbes. The procedure was repeated when the astronauts re-entered the space station more than six hours later."

HOUSTON - The robotic Mars program is sort of a planetary Dead Man Walking these days, as scientists debate what missions should be next on the agenda and how Mars should compete for funding with other compelling destinations ranging from our own moon to potentially life-harboring moons in the outer solar system.Longtime Mars researcher Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center thinks it's time to recast the exploration agenda for the Red Planet.

The long-standing debate about cold fusion is receiving new impetus at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in the US this week.Cold fusion, first announced 20 years ago on Monday, was claimed to be a boundless source of clean energy by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons.Attempts to replicate their experiments failed, but a number of researchers insist that cold fusion is possible.The meeting will see several approaches that claim to produce fusion power.The American Chemical Society has organised sessions surrounding the research at its meetings before, suggesting that the field would otherwise have no suitable forum for debate.

A pre-Inca citadel, and cemetery, have been discovered near the Chucmar village in Bagua Grande, capital of Utcubamba, province in the jungle region of Amazonas.The archaeological complex, located in one of the highest part of a mountain with lush vegetation, has several circular stone houses. The expedition found also stone pestle to crush seeds, as well as stone axes and pottery bowls. A number of skulls and another ancient human remains were found at the cemetery area.

NARA--Researchers say they have found evidence of what may be an early third-century palace that could have been part of the Yamatai kingdom ruled by Himiko, the legendary queen.Excavations at the Makimuku ruins in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, show there were as many as three buildings facing the same direction in a line, the city's board of education said Friday.The site is estimated to date from the late second century to early fourth century.

The biggest ever investigation into "ocean fertilisation" as a climate change fix has brought modest results.The idea is that putting iron filings in the ocean will stimulate growth of algae, which will absorb CO2 from air.But scientists on the Lohafex project, which put six tonnes of iron into the Southern Ocean, said little extra carbon dioxide was taken up.Germany's environment ministry had tried to stop the project, which green campaign groups said was "dangerous".

Over the past two years, drug violence in Mexico has become a fixture of the daily news. Some of this violence pits drug cartels against one another; some involves confrontations between law enforcement and traffickers.Recent estimates suggest thousands have lost their lives in this "war on drugs."The U.S. and Mexican responses to this violence have been predictable: more troops and police, greater border controls and expanded enforcement of every kind. Escalation is the wrong response, however; drug prohibition is the cause of the violence.Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after.

A pink baby elephant has been caught on camera in Botswana.A wildlife cameraman took pictures of the calf when he spotted it among a herd of about 80 elephants in the Okavango Delta.Experts believe it is probably an albino, which is an extremely rare phenomenon in African elephants.They are unsure of its chances of long-term survival - the blazing African sunlight may cause blindness and skin problems for the calf.

How scientists and Native Americans pulled off a major dig before the feds triple border fence destroyed everythingDuring the past year, archaeologists have been digging like mad to preserve one of the last remaining ancient Indian village sites in coastal Southern California, racing against the claw of the bulldozers and massive grind of the steam rollers to get the work done before the federal government erases in one year what had managed to survive for millennia.And they did it in almost complete secrecy.

1989: Two electrochemists announce they've produced energy with a fusion reaction in a benchtop apparatus at room temperature. The world reacts with surprise, skepticism and, ultimately, derision.Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and his mentor, Martin Fleischmann of Britain's University of Southampton, made the startling revelation in a news conference 20 years ago today in Salt Lake City. They claimed they had fused the atomic nuclei of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) using routine electrochemical techniques. Each deuterium nucleus with one proton and one neutron would couple with another nucleus to create a helium nucleus with two protons and two neutrons, plus extra energy that could be harvested for human use.

The world is moving nearer to ending the use of capital punishment, Amnesty International says, despite its latest report revealing a mixed picture.In its annual survey the group says 2,390 people were put to death in 2008, up from 1,252 in 2007. And 8,864 were sentenced to death, up from 3,347.Of 25 nations using the death penalty in 2008, China was the most prolific.But Amnesty said it was encouraging that just 59 nations retained the death penalty and so few actually used it.The group's secretary general, Irene Khan, said such punishments as beheading, stoning and electrocution "have no place in the 21st Century".

After nearly eight years of conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia, it is hard to say that the American public is much more knowledgeable about the Islamic world than before the war began..

Last month, University of Colorado archaeologist Douglas Bamforth announced the discovery of a 13,000-year-old cache of 83 stone tools found by a landscaping crew in Boulder, Colo.Biochemical analyses of residues on their edges indicate that some were used to butcher horses and camels. Robert Yohe, with the Laboratory of Archaeological Science at California State, performed the tests.

Iraq is suffering one of the worst droughts in decades. While this is bad news for farmers, it is good news for archaeologists in the country.The receding waters of the Euphrates River have revealed ancient archaeological sites, some of which were unknown until now.For Ratib Ali al-Kubaisi, the director of Anbar province's Antiquities Department, the drought has opened up a whole new land of opportunity.