Newsdesk Archive

CHENNAI: A chance visit to a remote Pudukkottai hamlet to assess the damage caused by illegal granite quarrying on an ancient protected' archaeological site helped an Archaeological Survey of India team uncover what could be evidence of the first artistic expression of prehistoric man in this region. The cup marks' or cupules, the oldest surviving rock art, similar to those showcased in the UNESCO world heritage sites of Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh, were found in a cave in a hillock in the remote Malayadipatti village, 35 km north of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Bidding failed to meet expectations Saturday on a uniquely complete skeleton of a Jurassic-era dryosaurus -- a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur -- so it was no-sale for the centerpiece at an auction of rare skeletons, fossils and other prehistoric memorabilia.Auctioneers at the I.M. Chait Gallery had hoped the 150-million-year-old, 9-foot-long dryosaurus would sell for as much as $500,000, but the bidding did not add up.Two museums are said to still be interested in acquiring the skeleton, being sold by Western Paleontological Laboratories out of Utah..

The Forensic Science Service (FSS) hailed the breakthrough as the most significant advancement in the science "in a decade".Scientists will now be able to use the technique in all serious crimes, after it proved successful in a series of pilots.

The year is 2065. Nearly two-thirds of Earth's ozone is gone -- not just over the poles, but everywhere. The infamous ozone hole over Antarctica, first discovered in the 1980s, is a year-round fixture, with a twin over the North Pole. The ultraviolet (UV) radiation falling on mid-latitude cities like Washington, D.C., is strong enough to cause sunburn in just five minutes. DNA-mutating UV radiation is up 650 percent, with likely harmful effects on plants, animals and human skin cancer rates.Such is the world we would have inherited if 193 nations had not agreed to ban ozone-depleting substances, according to atmospheric chemists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Bilthoven.

A quarter of all government databases are illegal and should be scrapped or redesigned, according to a report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.Nick Ravenscroft reports.

A quarter of major Government databases are fundamentally flawed and almost certainly break the human rights or data protection laws, say researchers.Britain's "database state" puts children at risk and wastes billions of pounds a year, according to a report for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.Of 46 databases studied, 11 - including a planned index of all children in England - should be axed, it said.

Researchers today worry about the collapse of West Antarctic ice shelves and loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but little is known about the past movements of this ice. Now climatologists from Penn State and the University of Massachusetts have modeled the past 5 million years of the West Antarctic ice sheet and found the ice expanse changes rapidly and is most influenced by ocean temperatures near the continent.

Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy.Due to its large mirror and location in outer space, the James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled for launch in 2013) will offer astronomers the first real possibility of finding those answers. In a new study, Lisa Kaltenegger (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Wesley Traub (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) examined the ability of JWST to characterize the atmospheres of hypothetical Earth-like planets during a transit, when part of the light of the star gets filtered through the planet's atmosphere. They found that JWST would be able to detect certain gases called biomarkers, such as ozone and methane, only for the closest Earth-size worlds.

An internationally renowned paleontologist will plead guilty to stealing dinosaur bones from federal land, his attorneys said in a court filing.Nate Murphy, whose famous finds include Leonardo, one of the best-preserved dinosaurs in the world, will make that plea in federal court in Billings, Montana.Earlier this month, Murphy pleaded guilty to state charges of stealing a fossil from private land in order to sell it. An expert cited in that case said Murphy's find was worth between $150,000 and $400,000.The self-taught dinosaur expert, who is director of vertebrate paleontology at the Judith River Dinosaur Institute, could face jail time.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A hatchling of a rare reptile with lineage dating back to the dinosaur age has been found in the wild on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in about 200 years, a wildlife official said Thursday.The baby tuatara was discovered by staff during routine maintenance work at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in the capital, Wellington, conservation manager Raewyn Empson said.

The evidences found in a house near to the San Isidoro church, still under research, might corroborate the hypothesis supported by specialists from their previous work on the house of the Lieutenant Governor, that suggested there was already an important population group since the mid-seventeenth century, reported the Ahora newspaper.

The traditional Irish language is everywhere this time of year, emblazoned on green T-shirts and echoing through pubs. But Irish, often called Gaelic in the United States, is one of thousands of "endangered languages" worldwide. Though it is Ireland's official tongue, there are only about 30,000 fluent speakers left, down from 250,000 when the country was founded in 1922.Irish schools teach the language as a core subject, but outside a few enclaves in western Ireland, it is relatively rare for families to speak it at home.

New information on Antarctica's regularly melting distant past is giving scientists a glimpse into what may be a flooded future as the planet warms up.

Teeth from exhumed skeletons of crew members Christopher Columbus left on the island of Hispaniola more than 500 years ago reveal the presence of at least one African in the New World as a contemporary of the explorer, it was announced.A team of researchers is extracting the chemical details of life history from the remains found at shallow graves at the site of La Isabela, the first European town in America, said T. Douglas Price, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of anthropology and leader of the team conducting an analysis of the tooth enamel of three individuals from a larger group excavated almost 20 years ago there.

The adage that dead men tell no tales has long been disproved by archaeology.Now, however, science is taking interrogation of the dead to new heights. In a study that promises fresh and perhaps personal insight into some of the earliest European visitors to the New World, a team or researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is extracting the chemical details of life history from the teeth of crew members Christopher Columbus left on the island of Hispaniola after his second voyage to America in 1493-94.

UNESCO is commemorating the mammoth combined effort by archaeologists, engineers and researchers from across the globe which led to the salvaging of extraordinary temples and Pharaonicc monuments which would otherwise have disappeared under the waters of Lake Nasser with the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Fifty years on from the earnest appeal sent out from Egypt and Sudan for an international salvage campaign for the Nubian monuments, UNESCO will be celebrating this important anniversary with the conference: 'Lower Nubia: Revisiting memories of the past, envisaging perspectives for the future' to be held on March 21-24.

Egyptian antiquities authorities on Thursday revealed an ancient pharaonic embalming bed unearthed from a mysterious tomb near Luxor used to prepare bodies for mummification more than 3,000 years ago.The wooden bed was painstakingly restored after being discovered in pieces in the KV-63 tomb in southern Egypt's famous Valley of the Kings, next to Tutankhamun's tomb, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement.

A film about a member of the Nazi party who saved thousands of Chinese during the massacre in Nanjing recently opened in Germany. The BBC's Zoe Murphy looks at the possible impact this unlikely hero's story may have on Sino-Japanese relations.On Christmas Eve in 1937, German businessman John Rabe visited the mortuary in China's then capital, Nanjing.

A photo of a UFO hovering next to an RAF jet over Scotland was treated seriously, newly-released Ministry of Defence files show.Officials briefed ministers on the sighting of a diamond-shaped object near Pitlochry, Perthshire, in 1990.A memo suggested the media be told "no definite conclusions" could be reached.The documents show officials were more concerned about secret weapons being developed by other countries rather than alien visitors.The sightings were brought to the attention of the MoD by the Daily Record newspaper.Witnesses reported seeing an object hanging in the air for 10 minutes before it ascended vertically at high speed.

IS LIFE bubbling onto the Martian surface in muddy squirts? The discovery of what could be mud volcanoes on the planet suggest it is possible, providing a new focus in the hunt for alien microbes.Three plumes have recently been identified as sources of methane in Mars's atmosphere (New Scientist, 24 January, p 19). This has led to suggestions that the gas could have been produced by microbes living a few kilometres beneath the surface, where it could be warm enough for liquid water to persist.

A discovery in China has prompted researchers to question the scaly image of dinosaurs.Previously, experts thought the first feathered dinosaurs appeared about 150 million years ago, but the find suggests feathers evolved much earlier.This has raised the question of whether many more of the creatures may have been covered with similar bristles, or "dino-fuzz".The team describe the fossil in the journal Nature.

A shoal of robotic fish which can detect pollution in the water are set to released into the sea off Spain, British scientists said Thursday.The fish, which are some 1.5 metres long and resemble carp, will be fitted with detectors which can identify the sources of pollution, such as ship fuel or chemicals in the water.Five of the robots, worth some 20,000 pounds (21,000 euros, 29,000 dollars) each, are being released into the Bay of Biscay at Gijon in northern Spain as part of a three-year joint project between engineering consultancy BMT Group and researchers at Essex University in southeast England.

Police officers in northern Scotland have been accused of vandalising a Bronze Age site through ignorance after they removed bones and textiles from the 4,000-year-old burial chamber, apparently because they thought they were investigating a crime scene.The burial chamber, or cist, was discovered intact, in a field near Oykel Bridge in Sutherland. The area is rich in Bronze Age remains, but this find was of huge importance to archaeologists. Unlike the vast chambered cairns of the earlier Neolithic period, burials from the metal-working people of the Bronze Age are modest affairs with artefacts such as pottery most commonly found.

The Nature and National Parks Protection Authority yesterday opened "Abraham's Gate" at Tel Dan in the north, for visits by the public.The ancient structure from the Canaanite period of the Bronze Age is made of mud and is thought to have been built around 1750 B.C.E. The authority named the archaeological site for Abraham, the first patriarch of the Jewish people, indicating that it dates from the period of Abraham.

Can science fiction keep up with modern science?Does the genre need to stay up to date with the latest breakthroughs in order to be relevant?Four of the UK's leading writers of science fiction comment on its relationship with science fact. The discussion took place as part of National Science and Engineering Week.

The idea of generating hydrogen from salt water has often been claimed to work effectively. However, the systems proposed so far generally require a much greater energy input than the energy they produce, making them impractical for energy generation. Now, a recently revived system may be able to cheaply generate a small amount of power.

BEFORE my visit to Argentina, I had no real grasp of how large the very biggest dinosaurs could be. In the end, all it took was a glance at a single bone.I was in the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires when I came across a vertebra from a dinosaur's back. What to compare it with? A human vertebra would fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. An elephant's would take two hands. At 1.6 metres tall, the vertebra in front of me was on another scale entirely - it would need a forklift truck to shift it.The vertebra belonged to argentinosaurus, a 100-million-year-old dinosaur that, as far as we know, was the biggest land animal that ever lived. In life it was 35 metres long and weighed around 80 tonnes.

Stanford University researchers have developed a synthetic wood substitute that may one day save trees, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and shrink landfills.The faux lumber is made from a new biodegradable plastic that could be used in a variety of building materials and perhaps replace the petrochemical plastics now used in billions of disposable water bottles.

Scientists in the U.S. are developing a laser gun that could kill millions of mosquitoes in minutes.The laser, which has been dubbed a "weapon of mosquito destruction" fires at mosquitoes once it detects the audio frequency created by the beating of its wings.The laser beam then destroys the mosquito, burning it on the spot.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine is bringing its dramatic photographic history of medicine to the public by scanning its images and uploading them to Flickr. We've selected some of our favorites from the World War II collection here, including the X-ray of a fatal bullet wound and a flyer warning against venereal disease.

Cleopatra, the last Egyptian Pharaoh, renowned for her beauty, was part African, says a BBC team which believes it has found her sister's tomb.Queen Cleopatra was a descendant of Ptolemy, the Macedonian general who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great.But remains of the queen's sister Princess Arsinoe, found in Ephesus, Turkey, indicate that her mother had an "African" skeleton.

The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services boldly announced in 1984 that there would be an AIDS vaccine within two years. The discovery of an AIDS-causing virus (HIV), she said, was already demonstrating "the triumph of science over a dreaded disease."

Burning trees for power may seem backward, dirty, and environmentally hostile.But a high-tech new way of wood burning holds great potential to save energy, cut costs, and even fight global warming, a new study says.

A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope offers a rare view of an imminent collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with millions of times the mass of the sun.The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale.

BANGALORE: Three new species of bacteria, which are not found on earth and highly resistant to ultra violet radiation, have been discovered in the upper stratosphere by some Indian scientists.One of the new species has been named as Janibacter Hoylei after the distinguished astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. The second bacteria has been named as Bacillus Isronensis recognising the contribution of ISRO in balloon experiments which led to its discovery and the third bacterial bacillus Aryabhata after India's celebrated ancient astronomer Aryabhata and also the first satellite of ISRO.

Left on their own by adults, the young dinosaurs sank into the mud beside a lake and died 90 million years ago in what would become the Gobi Desert.The well-preserved fossils, excavated by a team of Chinese and American scientists, offer a rare bounty of clues about how this herd of ostrich-like sinornithomimus lived - and died.Two life-sized models of the sinornithomimus were put on public display for the first time Monday in Hohhot, capital of north China's Inner Mongolia region.

SALINAS, Calif. - Attorney general Eric Holder announced Wednesday that federal agents will no longer go after marijuana distributors that comply with state law.Under the Bush administration, pot dispensaries in California were raided by DEA agents for breaking federal law even though they're legal in the state."We have tinctures, the medical form in the 30s," said Lisa Molyneux, Greenway Dispensary founder.

Scientists in California say they're trying to replicate the power of the sun by firing laser beams at a tiny pellet of hydrogen.Physicists at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore say the nuclear fusion experiments may offer the world a clean source of energy, The Times of London reported Sunday.The hydrogen pellet will be hit with 192 laser beams capable of generating 500 trillion watts -- 1,000 times the power of the U.S. national grid, said the scientists.

Like teenagers today, some juvenile dinosaurs used to hang out together, according to research announced today.Also like teens, the dinos sometimes hung out in places they shouldn't have.The evidence comes from of a herd of young birdlike dinosaurs that died when they became mired in mud on the margins of a lake about 90 million years ago, according to a team of paleontologists that excavated the remains in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia.

Tyrannosaurus rex and other massive Mesozoic creatures might have had a little predator nipping at their ankles and pilfering their young. Scientists have described the smallest dinosaur in North America, and it was a carnivore.The new carnivorous dinosaur was smaller than a modern housecat and likely hunted insects, small mammals and other prey through the swamps and forests of the late Cretaceous Period (75 million years ago, precisely) in southeastern Alberta, Canada.

OSLO (Reuters) - A giant fossil sea monster found in the Arctic and known as "Predator X" had a bite that would make T-Rex look feeble, scientists said Monday.The 50 ft (15 meter) long Jurassic era marine reptile had a crushing 33,000 lbs (15 tonnes) per square inch bite force, the Natural History Museum of Oslo University said of the new find on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

An Indonesian known as "the Tree Man" had a ninth surgery Thursday to remove bark-like warts that grow all over his body, Agence France-Presse reported.Dede Koswara, 38, was diagnosed by a U.S. dermatologist as having a genetic defect that prevents his body from containing the growth of warts caused by the human papilloma virus. He first had surgery last year to remove the warts, but a doctor said Thursday they are growing back fast.

Humpback whales have come up with a novel way for getting an easy snack - stealing birds' dinners.A BBC crew filmed seabirds carefully corralling unwieldy shoals of herring into tightly packed "bait balls" from which the fish are easy to pluck.But they discovered that passing whales would wait for the birds to complete their hard graft before devouring the ball of fish in a single gulp.

Two decades after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, radiation is still causing a reduction in the numbers of insects and spiders.According to researchers working in the exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl, there is a "strong signal of decline associated with the contamination".The team found that bumblebees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies and spiders were affected.They report their findings in the journal Biology Letters.

The European Space Agency has launched its Goce gravity mapping satellite.Goce left Earth at 1421 GMT on a modified intercontinental ballistic missile from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in north-west Russia.The mission will give scientists new insights into how the interior of the planet is structured and provide key information on how the oceans move.The satellite is part of an armada of European spacecraft being sent up to study the planet.

Montserrat's "mountain chicken" frog has become the latest victim of the killer fungal disease that is devastating amphibians worldwide.UK researchers say that only two small pockets of the animals on the tiny Caribbean island remain disease-free.The mountain chicken (Leptodactylus fallax) is one of the world's largest frogs, and appears on the coat of arms of neighbouring Dominica.Conservationists plan to take surviving frogs into captive breeding programmes.

Russian space officials are to select the winning proposal for a new rocket intended to carry cosmonauts on missions to the Moon.This will mark the first time since 1964 that the Russian space programme has made the Moon its main objective.It will be only the second time since the collapse of the Soviet Union that Moscow has endorsed the development of a new space vehicle.The rocket is expected to fly its first test mission in about 2015.

A sleek satellite that is set to make the most detailed map of the Earth's gravity took to the skies on Tuesday. The probe is expected to make important contributions to ocean current measurements and climate models.After a day's delayMovie Camera to work out problems with the probe's launch tower, the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), launched on Tuesday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia, which lies some 800 km north of Moscow.If all goes well, the satellite will assume an orbit some 285 km above the Earth, gradually falling to an altitude of 268 km, where the probe will take much of its science data. It will remain in orbit for at least two years, beginning science operations in late August or early September when the probe will have sufficient solar power to do its observations.

Green guru James Lovelock claims that the only hope of mitigating catastrophic climate change is through biochar - biomass "cooked" by pyrolysis.It produces gas for energy generation, and charcoal - a stable form of carbon.The charcoal is then buried in the ground, making the process "carbon negative".Researchers say biochar can also improve farm productivity and cut demand for carbon-intensive fertilisers.There's a flurry of worldwide interest in the technology, but is the hype justified?

Electrodes implanted in the brains of people with epilepsy might have resolved an ancient question about consciousness.Signals from the electrodes seem to show that consciousness arises from the coordinated activity of the entire brain. The signals also take us closer to finding an objective "consciousness signature" that could be used to probe the process in animals and people with brain damage without inserting electrodes.Previously it wasn't clear whether a dedicated brain area, or "seat of consciousness", was responsible for guiding our subjective view of the world, or whether consciousness was the result of concerted activity across the whole brain

AROUND a quarter of the world's population speaks just three languages: Mandarin, English and Spanish. But out of the 6,700 of the world's identified languages, nearly 2,500 are deemed at risk according to UNESCO, the UN's cultural body.

For a millennium it has lain undisturbed beneath the waves a stone's throw from one of Britain's best-loved beaches.But now modern technology has revealed this ancient fish trap, used at the time of the Norman Conquest.Stretching more than 280 yards along the sea bed, the V-shaped structure was used to catch fish without the need for a boat or rod. Scientists believe it is one of the biggest of its kind.The trap close to Poppit Sands on the Teifi Estuary in Dyfed was discovered by archaeologists studying aerial photographs of the West Wales coast.

If the deeply devout seem less self-doubting than others, perhaps it's because religion helps them shrug off mistakes. So say researchers who found religious people exhibit lower activity than non-believers in a brain region linked to anxiety when erring on a simple test."Religion offers an interpretative framework to understand the world. It lets you know when to act, how to act, and what to do in specific situation," saysMichael Inzlicht, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, who led the new study. "It provides a kind of blueprint on how to interact with the world."

Devices from electric cars to laptops could benefit from a new kind of capacitor, which combines the best features of conventional devices to store a large quantity of charge and release it rapidly.Electrostatic capacitors store charge on the surface of two conducting plates separated by an insulating layer. Their advantage is that they can store and release energy much faster than batteries.

Pharaoh Hatshepsut was a power-conscious woman who assumed the reins of government in Egypt around the year 1479 B.C. In actual fact, she was only supposed to represent her step-son Thutmose III, who was three years old at the time, until he was old enough to take over. But the interregnum lasted 20 years. "She systematically kept Thutmose out of power", says Michael Höveler-Müller, the curator of Bonn University´s Egyptian Museum.

Archeologists and forensic experts believe they have identified the skeleton of Cleopatra's younger sister, murdered more than 2,000 years ago on the orders of the Egyptian queen.The remains of Princess Arsinoe, put to death in 41BC on the orders of Cleopatra and her Roman lover Mark Antony to eliminate her as a rival, are the first relics of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be identified.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) -- The space shuttle Discovery lifted off Sunday evening on a mission to the international space station, where Discovery will deliver supplies needed to expand the station's crew to six people.The shuttle launched at 7:43 p.m. Sunday, after NASA engineers repaired a leaky gas line. The hydrogen leak caused the cancelation of Wednesday's planned launch.Lead shuttle flight director Mike Moses said repairs on the hydrogen gas vent line went smoothly. The line funnels flammable hydrogen away from the launch pad so it does not present a fire risk during takeoff.

Construction of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's largest and highest-energy laser system, was essentially completed on Feb. 26, when technicians at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where the laser is located, fired the first full system shot to the center of the NIF target chamber.

A pair of stone-age boats, thought to be the oldest in Europe, have been allowed to rot in a partially collapsed shed while the northern German regional archaeology authorities stood by broke and helpless, it emerged this week.The two 7,000-year-old wooden boats and a third one thought to be around 6,000 years old, were hailed as a sensation when they were found during construction work on the Baltic coast near Stralsund in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern seven years ago.

Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, Japan, have been able to prove the existence of a "spin battery," a battery that is "charged" by applying a large magnetic field to nano-magnets in a device called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). The new technology is a step towards the creation of computer hard drives with no moving parts, which would be much faster, less expensive and use less energy than current ones. In the future, the new battery could be developed to power cars.The study will be published in an upcoming issue of Nature and is available in an online advance publication of the journal.The device created by University of Miami Physicist Stewart E. Barnes, of the College of Arts and Sciences and his collaborators can store energy in magnets rather than through chemical reactions. Like a winding up toy car, the spin battery is "wound up" by applying a large magnetic field --no chemistry involved. The device is potentially better than anything found so far, said Barnes

The ancient Egyptians pioneered the development of river craft for various uses, including agricultural and for transporting troops, cattle and building materials, as well as for funeral processions. But what about seafaring vessels? Until a few years ago, there was a widely held belief that the ancient Egyptians did not travel long distances by sea because of their poor naval technology. However, this view is changing.People in the past tended to assume that the ancient Egyptians did not make long-distance trips because little evidence of such journeys has been found. Based on this belief they also thought that the Land of Punt, the fabled source of many ancient Egyptian imports, could not have been located in the Horn of Africa, but must have been in southern Sinai.

It appears that the workers, or should we say workmen and artisans, the people who built the rock-cut tombs of the Pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings from about 1500 BC onwards, may have later been employed on a project aimed at "emptying" and "recycling" their contents -- or that, at least, is what Rob Demaree of Leiden University thinks.In his recent talk at the Dutch Institute in Cairo, Demaree said that an impressive number of texts on papyri, ostraca and graffiti had provided researchers with extensive information on the workers' community at Deir Al-Medina, especially from the Ramasside Period and the second half of the New Kingdom, but that in spite of all our knowledge we did not know what happened at the end of this period when the Ramasside line of kings was no longer in power and no more royal tombs were built. "Now, thanks to a largely unpublished dossier of texts, we are gradually beginning to understand what happened to them," he said.

TWO great challenges of the 21st century - green energy and wildlife conservation - could have a symbiotic solution.Michael McGuigan of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, has suggested that combining solar power plants with nature reserves could tackle both problems. A sanctuary for 300 tigers, for example, would cover a patch of land about 50 kilometres across. Surrounding this with a 5-kilometre-wide ring of solar panels would create a power plant producing 60 gigawatts of electricity.

THE moon has been hiding the scars of its violent, asteroid-filled past.Most surveys of lunar impact craters have used photos, but Herbert Frey of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wanted to know if there were any old craters buried beneath younger ones. So he studied elevation mapping data from the Clementine mission in the 1990s. He also used simulations to identify impact signatures, such as a roughly circular crater with a thin crust and a thicker rim. This approach uncovered 150 craters more than 300 kilometres wide instead of 45.

Google has upgraded its Red Planet browser to reveal fresh as well as long-faded views of Mars, marking the latest advance in a visualization revolution.Today's add-ons for Google Earth 5.0 include a "Live From Mars" layer that incorporates the latest available imagery from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, as well as historical maps of the planet's "canali" as seen by 19th-century astronomers and guided tours that are narrated by NPR's Ira Flatow and Bill Nye the Science Guy.

They are 8,000 miles apart, but the top and bottom of the Earth share a surprising number of species in common: 235 and counting."We think of the Antarctic and the Arctic as being united by ice but so far apart that we didn't think there was much commonality between them," said Russ Hopcroft, a zooplankton ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "The current count is 235 but will probably go up. That's remarkable, and it raises a lot of questions."

When Europeans invaded the Americas they introduced many Old World diseases that decimated Native Americans. Scientists had thought that anthrax was one of them. New research shows, however, that the deadly bacteria arrived in the Americas thousands of years earlier, when Stone Age humans crossed the Bering land bridge.The military Ames strain behind the 2001 anthrax attacks, however, is a recent Asian immigrant.Anthrax bacteria can live in soil for decades as tough spores, until they are inhaled by a grazing animal. Then they multiply explosively, kill the animal, and bleed into the soil to await the next victim.

Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade.Passengers leaving every international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal information as well as their travel plans. So-called "booze crusiers" who cross the Channel for a couple of hours to stock up on wine, beer and cigarettes will be subject to the rules.In addition, weekend sailors and sea fishermen will be caught by the system if they plan to travel to another country - or face the possibility of criminal prosecution.

SYDNEY: Rare fossilised handprints of a carnivorous dinosaur have helped answer questions about the orientation of limbs which later evolved into wings in birds."Other supposed theropod hand prints had been reported in the past, but they were all either shapeless blobs or made by animals with downward-facing palms," said Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado in Denver, a dinosaur tracks expert and co-author of a paper detailing the find in the open access journal PloS One.

Ever since the Dalai Lama fled into India in 1959, Tibetans have been making the same perilous journey by foot over the Himalayas into exile.Today there is a large Tibetan community in India, many of whom have clear memories of their homeland before the Chinese took control.One such is Kesang Takla, now minister of information and international relations for the Tibetan Government in Exile (GOE), based in Dharamsala."I suppose you could say I was born on the roof of the world - in a small town called Puri, high on the Tibetan plateau," she said."I remember annual picnics, festivals and visits to the monasteries, horse-riding; it was very close to nature." .

The son of an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls has been arrested in New York, accused of trying to discredit one of his father's academic rivals.Police say Raphael Haim Golb, 49, set up an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence Schiffman, an academic at New York University.Posing as Mr Schiffman, Mr Golb then allegedly sent messages around the university admitting to plagiarism.He faces a charge of identity theft - which carries a four-year jail term.

WHEN the Nobel prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman died in 1988, his blackboard carried the inscription, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." By that measure, biologists still have a lot to learn, because no one has yet succeeded in turning a chemical soup into a living, reproducing, evolving life form. We're still stuck with Life 1.0, the stuff that first quickened at least 3.5 billion years ago. There's been nothing new under the sun since then, as far as we know.

Some stars have a high level of comet activity around them, and that could spell doom for any life trying to take root on any local planets. Ongoing research is trying to determine what fraction of stellar systems may be uninhabitable due to comet impacts.Many of our own solar system's comets are found in the Kuiper Belt, a debris-filled disk that extends from Neptune's orbit (30 AU) out to almost twice that distance. Other stars have been shown to have similar debris disks.

March 11, 1916 - Readers learn that President Woodrow Wilson has ordered thousands of U.S. troops to invade Mexico and capture Pancho Villa, the revolutionary leader who had raided the New Mexican town of Columbus two days earlier.In a statement from the White House, the president declared:"An adequate force will be sent at once in pursuit of Villa with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays."This can be done and will be done in entirely friendly aid of the constituted authorities in Mexico, and with scrupulous respect for the sovereignty of that republic.".

Scientists say for the first time they have understood someone's thoughts by looking at what their brain is doing.The hippocampus is widely known to be integral to memory, but researchers say they now see just how images are stored and recalled in this part of the brain.Wellcome Trust scientists trained four participants to recognise several virtual reality environments.Discernible patterns in brain activity then signalled where they were, they wrote in the journal Current Biology.

Female monkeys living in a 250-strong colony were observed by scientists teaching their young how to use strands of hair to clean between their teeth.The theory that primates are able to teach offspring how to use tools was confirmed by the discovery, according to Professor Nobuo Masataka of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute, who conducted the study."I was surprised because teaching techniques on using tools properly to a third party are said to be an activity carried out only by humans," he said.

A fragment of a pottery vessel of Persian provenance that dates to the Middle Ages (12th-13th centuries CE) was discovered in an archaeological excavation directed by Dr. Rina Avner, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, in the Old City of Jerusalem, prior to construction by a private contractor.

Microbes living deep underground could have survived the massive barrage of impacts that blasted the Earth 3.9 billion years ago, according to a new analysis. That means that today's life might be descended from microbes that arose as far back as 4.4 billion years ago, when the oceans formed.Around 3.9 billion years ago, shifts in the orbits of the gas giant planets are thought to have disrupted other objects in the solar system, sending many hurtling into the inner planets. Geologists call that time the Hadean Eon, and thought its fiery hell of impacts would have sterilised the Earth.

Sulfuryl fluoride, a compound developed to phase out the use of methyl bromide in fumigants has been implicated as a possibly significant contributing factor for greenhouse warming, according to an international team of researchers.Methyl bromide has been used to control insect infestations in grain storage facilities.As methyl bromide use was being reduced under the Montreal Protocol because of its detrimental effects on the environment, scientists introduced sulfuryl fluoride as its replacement.

Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio used revolutionary optical instruments to "photograph" his models more than 200 years before the invention of the camera, according to a researcher in Florence.The 16th-century artist celebrated for his dramatic chiaroscuro (light and shadow) paintings mastered "a whole set of techniques that are the basis of photography," Roberta Lapucci said.

Shaun Boyd of CBS4 Denver reports on a blind Colorado girl who went to China for experimental stem cell treatments which have radically improved her vision -- she's now taking driving lessons.Macie Morse was born with optic nerve hypoplasia, meaning her optic nerve didn't develop all the way. The only way to repair it was to grow more of the nerve using umbilical cord stem cells.She and her mother traveled all the way to China for an experimental treatment.

Nanotechnology has been used for the first time to destroy cancer cells with a highly targeted package of "tumour busting" genes.The technique, which leaves healthy cells unaffected, could potentially offer hope to people with hard-to-treat cancers where surgery is not possible.Although it has only been tested in mice so far, the researchers hope for human trials in two years.The UK study is published online by the journal Cancer Research.

Egypt says archaeologists have found ancient golden jewelry in the tomb of a senior official who died about about 3,500 years ago. Culture and antiquities officials say an excavation team found five golden earrings and two rings in the tomb of the state treasurer who served during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut.The walls of his burial chamber are decorated with texts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

A long-hidden message has been discovered inside Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch, the Smithsonian's Museum of American History announced Tuesday.Watchmaker Jonathan Dillon was repairing Lincoln's watch in April 1861 when he heard about the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and wrote a short message on the metal inside the watch, the Smithsonian said.There it remained, unseen for almost 150 years, it said.In a 1906 interview with The New York Times, Dillon reported that as soon as he heard the news about the first shots of the Civil War, he unscrewed the dial of the watch and wrote on the metal, "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.".

During its more than five-month stint on Mars last year, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander found evidence that liquid water existed at the spacecraft's landing site, some Phoenix team members say.Water is key to all forms of life as we know it and the discovery of liquid water would suggest a greater opportunity for biology on the red planet.

After a group of Israeli farmers sought last year to expand their property in the hills near Jerusalem, they discovered an archeological gem beneath the dirt.A team led by Daniel Ein Mor barely had to scratch the surface before finding the remains of a Byzantine monastery, he told CNN on Wednesday."The excavation at Nes-Harim supplements our knowledge about the nature of the Christian-Byzantine settlement in the rural areas between the main cities in this part of the country during the Byzantine period," including Jerusalem, Mor said.

The 15th century explorer who opened up the American continents to Europe was actually called Pedro Scotto - not Christopher Columbus - and his family originally hailed from Scotland, a Spanish historian has claimed.

HOW long will it be before we can wave goodbye to experiments involving animals? This question, which causes more antagonism than just about any other issue in science, is about to come to a head again: after 23 years, the European Union legislation governing the use of animals in research is being revised.

A SKELETON exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the "vampires" widely referred to in contemporary documents.Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth (see right) while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice.

A research institute for cultural properties will begin a study on the conservation and restoration of deteriorating ancient murals at the Saqqara ancient burial site near Cairo on March 21.The Institute for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Properties (ICP) aims to study techniques on the conservation and restoration of ancient murals worldwide.

An archaeologist who examined remnants of the oldest-known seafaring ships has now put ancient Egyptian technology to the test. She teamed up with a naval architect, modern shipwrights and an on-site Egyptian archaeologist to build a replica 3,800-year-old ship for a Red Sea trial run this past December.

A new Mayan archaeological discovery of a 2,200 year old carving was found at El Mirador, Guatemala. The archaeological site El Mirador continues to astound the world. A team of archaeologists, mostly Guatemalans, under the coordination of Richard Hansen made the discovery of a carving of the Mayan Pre-Classic Period which dates from 200 BC. This new finding was presented by the Minister of Culture and Sports, Jeronimo Lancerio and businessmen who support the project. Vice- President Rafael Espada and important members of the Guatemalan Press where also present.

On Earth, hurricanes form and dissipate in a matter of days. On Jupiter, storms can rage for years or even centuries. The Great Red Spot, a colossal storm twice the diameter of our planet, has lasted at least 300 years.But now that mother of all storms is shrinking just as other spots emerge to challenge its status.Observations of cloud cover over the past decade or so have suggested the huge, oval tempest was getting smaller as Jupiter's climate changes. But such observations are tricky because it's hard to find the edges of the storm compared with nearby clouds on the visible surface of a gas planet that is entirely shrouded in colorful clouds. Nearby storms can nip off parts of the giant storm, and in turn the Great Red Spot can consume nearby clouds.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen have succeeded in demonstrating for the first time that the activities of large parts of the brain can be altered in the long term.The breakthrough was achieved through the experimental stimulation of nerve cells in the hippocampus. Using a combination of functional magnetic resonance tomography, microstimulation and electrophysiology, the scientists were able to trace how large populations of nerve cells in the forebrain reorganize. This area of the brain is active when we remember something or orient ourselves spatially. The insights gained here represent the first experimental proof that large parts of the brain change when learning processes take place.

A floating city off the coast of San Francisco may sound like science fiction, but it could be reality in the not-too-distant future.The Seasteading Institute already has drawn up plans for the construction of a homestead on the Pacific Ocean.One project engineer described the prototype as similar to a cruise ship, but from a distance the cities might look like oil-drilling platforms.According to the plans, the floating cities would not only look different from their land-based counterparts, but they might operate differently, too.

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Monday cleared the way for a significant increase in federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research and promised no scientific data will be "distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda."Obama signed the executive order on the divisive stem cell issue and a memo addressing what he called scientific integrity before an East Room audience packed with scientists. He laced his remarks with several jabs at the way science was handled by former President George W. Bush.

Scientists will warn this week that rising sea levels, triggered by global warming, pose a far greater danger to the planet than previously estimated. There is now a major risk that many coastal areas around the world will be inundated by the end of the century because Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting faster than previously estimated.Low-lying areas including Bangladesh, Florida, the Maldives and the Netherlands face catastrophic flooding, while, in Britain, large areas of the Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary are likely to disappear by 2100. In addition, cities including London, Hull and Portsmouth will need new flood defences.

A peaceful garden on land that was once part of the sprawling Bunker Hill battlefield is being eyed as the possible site of a previously unknown makeshift grave for dozens of Colonial-era British soldiers.

A new search engine described as an "electronic brain" could make searching the Internet more intelligent. Called Wolfram Alpha, the search engine computes its own answers rather than looking them up in a large database, as Google and many other search engines currently do. With its computational abilities, Wolfram Alpha could lead to new types of questions, answers and computations that today's search engines can't handle.

Recent research by scientists in Italy and France shows that that single molecules have the ability to store information via their magnetic state. Their work is a first step toward a new generation of ultra-compact data storage technologies based on individual molecules.