Newsdesk Archive

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.

Burials excavated at the earliest European settlement in the New World, established by Christopher Columbus in 1493, have surprised archaeologists by including women and children. It had been thought from documentary evidence that the settlers had all been men.

The Vatican said Friday it is not satisfied by the apology issued by a Catholic bishop who denied the Holocaust, saying the cleric must still clearly "distance himself" from the controversial comments.Bishop Richard Williamson, who is now in England, issued a statement Thursday saying he regretted making the remarks. But he did not retract them or say he had changed his mind about the Holocaust.A Vatican spokesman pointed out that the apology, which was posted on a Catholic Web site, was not addressed to Pope Benedict XVI.

New images from two observations of the Martian moon Deimos and more than 600 observations of Mars, acquired by the high-resolution camera (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, became available for viewing Monday.These color-enhanced views of Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars, result from imaging on Feb. 21, 2009, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the resulting effects on ocean water are making it increasingly difficult for coral reefs to grow, say scientists. A study to be published online March 13, 2009 in Geophysical Research Letters by researchers at the Carnegie Institution and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem warns that if carbon dioxide reaches double pre-industrial levels, coral reefs can be expected to not just stop growing, but also to begin dissolving all over the world.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Excavations at a site in northern Malaysia have uncovered the remnants of an iron smelt dating back to the third or fourth century A.D., a find that shows the area's early people were more advanced than previously thought, an archaeologist said Friday.Parts of a furnace used to heat iron and a structure believed to be a house or storage area were found in northern Kedah state, an area that was once home to the Bujang Valley people, said Mokhtar Saidin, the director of the Center for Archaeological Research Malaysia at the University of Science Malaysia. He is in charge of the excavation.

Scientists have taken another important step toward using ordinary skin cells that are made to behave like embryonic stem cells to find treatments for conditions like Parkinson's disease.Researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts removed a stumbling block in using so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, by taking out potentially cancer-causing genes.Writing in the journal Cell on Thursday, the scientists said they then turned these iPS cells into brain cells involved in Parkinson's disease.

Two colossal black holes appear to be orbiting one another in sort of a cosmic minuet at the center of a faraway galaxy formed when two separate galaxies collided, U.S. astronomers said on Wednesday.These two so-called supermassive black holes, which are celestial objects with enormous gravitational pull, are locked in orbit about 5 billion light years away from Earth, the scientists said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), or the distance light travels in a year.

If, as planned, the United States eventually establishes a lunar base in 2020, one of the most tempting patches of moonscape is Shackleton Crater at the south pole.There may be water ice for drinking or converting to rocket fuel, the nearly constant sunlight at the rim is ideal for solar power, and the temperature is relatively bearable.But perhaps the most compelling reason is something far more primal: surviving the lunar night, which lasts 14 Earth days and can hit temperatures so cold that oxygen turns to liquid.

What challenges will face future travellers to Mars? To find out, planetary scientist Pascal Lee leads yearly NASA-funded expeditions to Haughton Crater in the Canadian Arctic, where the barren, rocky terrain bears an uncanny resemblance to Martian landscapes.There, Lee and a few dozen others carry out simulated Mars expeditions and conduct scientific investigations of the crater and its environment. Lee spoke to New Scientist about lessons learned from the Haughton Mars Project and about an upcoming Mars isolation experiment set up by the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow in partnership with the European Space Agency.

The UK government has given the go-ahead for a team of British boffins to mount an expedition to a dark, cold lake buried in a cavern three kilometres beneath the ice sheet of Antarctica.The Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) is funding university researchers and the British Antarctic Survey to explore icy Lake Ellsworth, the size of Lake Windermere, hidden deep beneath the austral ice cap. The boffins will be allied with others from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, already well-known for their below-the-ice droid submarine probe powered by 5,000 D-cells.

Any solution to global climate change will eventually have to involve the whole globe, not just the richest countries.That's why deals like the one announced Tuesday between Pasadena's eSolar and the Indian conglomerate Acme Group are essential to any truly green global future. ESolar will sell Acme 1,000 megawatts worth of solar thermal technology, so that the latter can build a network of solar power plants in India's northern state of Haryana.

Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest.No matter what their religious beliefs, college-educated adults frequently agree with purpose-seeking yet false explanations of natural phenomena - finches diversified in order to survive, for instance."The very fact of belief in purpose itself might lead you to favour intelligent design," says Deborah Kelemen, a psychologist at Boston University, who led the study.

A faint pinprick of light embedded in one of Saturn's outermost rings is now the 61st moon known to be circling the giant planet, astronomers announced today.Images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft over a 600-day stretch revealed the tiny moonlet moving in a partial ring known as a ring arc that extends about a sixth of the way around Saturn's faint G ring.

A proposed museum faces funding and technical challenges, writes Jack Shenker in Alexandria.SOME of the world's most exciting sunken treasures could soon be on view after Egypt confirmed plans to build a giant underwater museum in the Mediterranean.But as preparation begins on the site of Cleopatra's palace in Alexandria, funding and technical problems are proving as divisive and controversial as the famed queen herself.

A plutonium sample recently found at a U.S. waste dump is leftover from a batch used in 1945 for the world's first nuclear bomb test, a team of chemists has announced.A nuclear waste cleanup team unearthed the 13.5-ounce (400-milliliter) sample in a waste pit at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, where it was sealed in a glass jar and enclosed in a safe.

Scientists have discovered a tropical Asian turtle fossil not in Asia or in the tropics, but high in the Canadian Arctic.The find supports the view that, tens of millions of years ago, the Arctic was much warmer then than it is now. The fossil also suggests that Asian turtles took advantage of those balmy conditions to migrate across the North Pole on a land bridge that was filled with lakes and rivers.Previously, scientists thought turtles made the trek at lower latitudes.

THE four giant "Galilean" moons orbiting Jupiter are the last survivors of at least five generations of moons that once circled the gas giant."All the other moons - and there could have been 20 or more - were devoured by the planet in the early days of the solar system," says Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.The four Galilean moons have played a key role in the history of science - their discovery by Galileo 400 years ago provided irrefutable evidence that not all bodies orbited the Earth. But until recently, nobody had suspected that Jupiter had once had many more moons.

An unmanned Nasa mission to search the sky for Earth-like planets with the potential to host life has launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida.The Kepler telescope will orbit the Sun to watch a patch of space thought to contain about 100,000 stars like ours.It will look for the slight dimming of light from these "suns" as planets pass between them and the spacecraft.Controllers took their first opportunity to launch the probe, at 0349GMT (2249EST) on 7 March.

An international team of archaeologists has uncovered the earliest known evidence of horses being domesticated by humans. The discovery suggests that horses were both ridden and milked. The findings could point to the very beginnings of horse domestication and the origins of the horse breeds we know today. Led by the Universities of Exeter and Bristol (UK), the research is published on Friday 6 March 2009 in leading academic journal Science.

Malaysian archeologists yesterday said they had discovered the main site of an ancient kingdom that predates the Angkor temples of Cambodia and could be the oldest civilization in the region.Archeological team leader professor Mokhtar Saidin said the find, which could lead to a rewriting of history books on the region, was made in two palm oil plantations in northern Kedah State last month.

It seems that the recent archaeological season has been very successful. Wherever archaeologists have dug, they have come up with amazing and important discoveries.On Luxor's west bank, major discoveries have been uncovered in the noblemen's necropolis at Sheikh Abdel-Gourna and at Kom Al-Hittan, where the temple of the 18th-Dynasty Pharaoh Amenhotep III is located.After almost 130 years of exploring the sands of the archaeological hill of Sheikh Abdel-Gourna, the tomb of Amenhotep, a deputy of the overseer of seal-bearers during the reign of Pharaoh Tuthmosis III -- known among Egyptologists as "the lost tomb" -- has been found by a Belgian archaeological mission.

FARMANA(Rohtak): In an extraordinary archaeological finding, a big housing complex that matured during the Harappan era has been discovered in this little known village about 40 km from Rohtak.A cemetery belonging to the same civilization which existed about 3500-3000 BC has also been found at an adjacent site, where nearly 70 skeletons have been unearthed so far.

AKLAVIK - A soon to be released documentary will prove Canadians hoping they inherited some rebel blood from the infamous Mad Trapper dead wrong.Airing in May, the Hunt for the Mad Trapper will prove the outlaw, otherwise known as Albert Johnson, is either American or Scandinavian, not Canadian as originally thought.Carrie Gour, Myth Merchant Films producer, said the film will rewrite history.

How did humans living in the third millennium BCE manage to find sufficient quantities of meat in the arid desert regions? A new study of the "desert kites" that are spread across the expanses of Israel's Negev and Arava desert region, carried out by researchers from the University of Haifa, unearths the answer to this riddle.

Beach erosion on a remote island in Tonga has revealed a trove of petroglyphs that archaeologists say are similar to those found in Hawai'i, hinting at the possibility of early travel between the two archipelagos.More than 50 petroglyphs were found late last year on several slabs of beach rock at the northern end of Foa Island, in Ha'apai. The rocks apparently were buried for centuries under several feet of sand until heavy seas exposed them.The carvings were spotted by two Australian visitors who notified Tonga artist and amateur archaeologist Shane Egan, who in turn contacted archaeologist and ethnohistorian David Burley, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Burley has conducted a number of field surveys and excavations in Tonga, which is about 3,000 miles southwest of Hawai'i.

The Syrian National Expedition working at al-Mishrefa (Qatana) site in Homs governorate discovered Wednesday a cuneiform tablet dating back to1700 B.C. of the Bronze era. The tablet tells the story of Mrs. Khimar Ashkhara who buys a wall to separate between her house and the house of her neighbors Mr. Akhla Ashmieh and to fix the real-estate of her property in return for 25 grams of silver.

LONDON: Health seems to be going hi-tech, thanks to scientists who have now developed camera pills and ultra-sound creating maps, which they claim will facilitate in accurate surgery and stressing patients as little as possible.In fact, an international team has created a new IT- based window on the inside of the body, which makes a patient transparent on a screen when a surgeon inserts instruments via small openings in the abdominal wall.

TOKYO: Japan is considering putting a robot on the moon by 2020 and an astronaut by 2030, a report from a government office showed on Friday, amid fears that the country will be left behind in Asia's space race.The plans follow China's first space walk and India's launch of their first unmanned moon mission last year. Beijing officials have said that China is looking to eventually put astronauts on the moon, though the government has not revealed any schedule.

Archaeologists reported the conclusion of the season of archaeological survey at Miyan-Rud Tappeh in Iraj area, of Rāmjerd, in the town of Marvdasht (Fārs Province) These are some of the number of discoveries reported the Persian service of CHN on Thursday.This survey was conducted for demarcation of The Miyan-Rud archaeological site.

Beyond the golden beaches and beneath the blue waters of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques is a site that resembles more of a munitions graveyard than a Caribbean paradise.Hundreds of corroding and unexploded bombs litter the sea floor, leaking toxins and taking a toll on nearby marine life. The munitions were left by the U.S. Navy, which had a training site on Vieques for six decades."We know that these munitions are leaking cancer-causing materials and endangering sea life," said marine ecologist James Porter, associate dean of the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia, who recently completed a research trip to Vieques.

When archaeologists on a dig in southern Portugal last year flipped over a heavy chunk of slate and saw writing not used for more than 2,500 years, they were elated.The enigmatic pattern of inscribed symbols curled symmetrically around the upper part of the rough-edged, yellowish stone tablet and coiled into the middle in a decorative style typical of an extinct Iberian language called Southwest Script."We didn't break into applause, but almost," says Amilcar Guerra, a University of Lisbon lecturer overseeing the excavation. "It's an extraordinary thing."

For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important.

The sun will pass directly behind National Public Radio's Galaxy 16 satellite on Feb. 28, knocking it off the air for a few minutes.It's a phenomenon known as a solar outage, and it happens to satellites in geosynchronous orbit for about five days twice each year when the sun passes directly behind them at just the right angle to drown out their signals.

AN AWESOME laser facility, built to provide fusion data for nuclear weapons simulations, will soon be used to probe the secrets of extrasolar planets.The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was declared ready for action earlier this month. Its vital statistics reveal it to be a powerful beast: its ultraviolet lasers can deliver 500 trillion watts in a 20-nanosecond burst. That power opens up new scientific possibilities.

Cuba is developing genetically modified corn (maize) that can be used with strong herbicides and are resistant to the boundless appetite of the fall armyworm, a major threat to tropical nations' corn crops, official media reported Saturday.Scientists at Havana's Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Center have planted three hectares of the crop in Yaguajay, in central Sancti Spiritus privince, hoping to develop seeds to boost output for human and animal consumption once they get a green light in terms of health, the newspaper Juventud Rebelde said.

Greek mathematics is considered one of the great intellectual achievements of antiquity. It has been decisive to the academic and cultural development of Western civilisation. The three Roman authors Varro, Cicero and Vitruvius were all, in their own way, influenced by Greek knowledge and transferred it to Roman literature. In his dissertation, Erik Bohlin, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, studied the traces of Greek influence on these authors with regard to the mathematical branch of geometry.

A wheelchair-mounted robotic arm controlled by thought alone has been created by scientists at the University of South Florida.The device could give people with amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or full body paralysis the ability to perform simple day to day functions that would otherwise be impossible."We aren't reading people's thoughts," said Redwan Alqasemi, a scientist at the University of South Florida who, along with Rajiv Dubey and Emanuel Donchin of USF, helped develop the software and hardware. "This is the first time a person with severe disabilities like ALS can perform daily activities for themselves."

Getting to space has never been simple. A standing army of thousands is needed to launch the space shuttle, land it safely, and refurbish it so it is once again ready for flight.And even the most basic space rockets require multiple stages, whose weight is mostly taken up by oxidisers needed to burn fuel. Rockets launch vertically to minimise the time they spend where Earth's atmosphere is thickest, shedding stages to reduce their weight as they climb.

A virtual reality helmet that recreates the sights, smells, sounds and even tastes of far-flung destinations has been devised by British scientists.The device will allow users a life-like experience of places such as Kenya's Masai Mara while sitting on their sofa.They can also enjoy the smell of flowers in an Alpine meadow or feel the heat of the Caribbean sun on their face.

Some newly recovered papyrus fragments may finally help solve a century-old puzzle, shedding new light on ancient Egyptian history.Found stored between two sheets of glass in the basement of the Museo Egizio in Turin, the fragments belong to a 3,000-year-old unique document, known as the Turin Kinglist.Like many ancient Egyptian documents, the Turin Kinglist is written on the stem of a papyrus plant.

Preliminary archaeological studies in St George's Square, Valletta have uncovered an undocumented network of underground passageways, which could possibly connect to the Palace.Studies are being undertaken in St George's Square in preparation for the building of a one-storey underground car park and the subsequent embellishment of the square.

Prehistoric whale bones found at a construction site in downtown San Diego might belong to an ancestor of the modern gray whale that died 600,000 years ago and measured 40 feet long, scientists said Friday.Thomas Demere, curator of paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum, said he needs more bones to be sure what species it is. Gray whales are part of a larger group called baleen whales, which filter feed through baleen plates.

Paleontologists working in Peru have found a fossil from a bird that lived 10 million years ago, scientists said on Friday after returning from the dig site on the country's desert coast.The species of bird had a wingspan of 19.7 feet and fed mostly on fish from the Pacific Ocean. It first appeared 50 million years ago and was extinct about 2.5 million years ago because of climate change, paleontologist Mario Urbina of Peru's Natural History Museum said.

Distinctive fractures in ancient lava flows on Mars suggest that water occasionally flooded portions of the planet's surface. The research piles onto previous findings that suggest the same.The fractures, called columnar joints, are the first that have been observed on a planet other than Earth.

1932: English physicist James Chadwick publishes a letter on the existence of the neutron. His discovery helps clear the way for splitting the nuclei of even the heaviest atomic elements, making possible the development of the atomic bomb.Unlike the proton, the other large subatomic particle that helps form the nucleus of an atom, the neutron contains no electric charge. This enables it to pass through the electric barrier of heavy atoms to penetrate and split their nuclei, the basis of the nuclear chain reaction.

NASA will stay on track to return humans to the Moon by 2020, according to an overview of President Obama's 2010 budget request released on Thursday.Recently, various groups - including Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin and the space advocacy group the Planetary Society - have called for NASA to send astronauts to new destinations, such as asteroids.

Health authorities are to prepare for the extension of mass fluoridation of drinking water to millions of people in a drive to improve dental health, following approval for the first new scheme in England for more than 25 years.Opponents, who consider the scheme mass medication, yesterday failed to stop plans for the small scheme in Southampton and south-west Hampshire, paving the way for far bigger schemes across the rest of the country.

A famous British explorer of the Arctic, Pen Hadow, together with Ann Daniel and Martin Hartley, landed on the Arctic ice on Saturday, approximately 670 miles north of Canada.From there they will trek 400 miles to the North Pole, taking measurements of ice thickness to determine to what degree the polar icecap is melting.The team will move for 75 minutes each day, then halt for fuel and food.They will consume, at least 7,500 calories a day - more food than they can carry.

The George Washington University professor Brian Richmond and his colleagues have discovered a set of 1.5 million-year-old human ancestor footprints in Kenya that show the earliest direct evidence of a modern human style of upright walking called bipedalism. The discovery of ancient hominin footprints is an incredibly rare event, and the new prints are the second oldest in the world after the 3.7-million year-old prints in Laetoli, Tanzania, making this one of the most important discoveries in recent years regarding the evolution of human walking. For the first time ever, research establishes a methodology for three-dimensional analysis and comparison of ancient human footprints.

The Ministry of Defence has lifted the lid on its Defence Technology Plan, the latest gadgets it hopes could help equip troops in the future.Cameras that can see through dust and unmanned ground vehicles were among the devices on show on Thursday.

WASHINGTON: Researchers have come up with a faster, more specific method of detecting viruses.Viruses can be detected in fluids, which is of vital importance in diagnostics. But existing procedures are still too time consuming and labour intensive.The latest method, developed by Martin Hegner, professor of physics at Trinity College's Centre of Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), shows a more efficient and practical way of detecting viruses by using micro-sized cantilevers.

Small robots the size of riding mowers could prepare a safe landing site for NASA's Moon outpost, according to a NASA-sponsored study prepared by Astrobotic Technology Inc. with technical assistance from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.Astrobotic Technology and Carnegie Mellon researchers analyzed mission requirements and developed the design for an innovative new type of small lunar robot under contract from NASA's Lunar Surface Systems group.

At a national scientific meeting last week where biofuels - principally ethanol - were uniformly trashed as an environmental train wreck, one bright, carbon-free light gleamed in our energy future: the sun.Numerous sessions on energy and climate change at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement in Science (AAAS), held Feb. 12-16 in downtown Chicago, were premised on the conviction that the world must drastically reduce its carbon output to stave off the worst consequences of global warming.

Someone left their tools in a Boulder yard -- 13,000 years ago.The Clovis-era stone tools, uncovered last year, appeared to have been used to butcher ice-age camels and horses that roamed this part of North America until they became extinct.The find was announced by the University of Colorado at Boulder on Wednesday.

David Hatcher Childress, known as the real-life Indiana Jones to the many fans of his books, is a captivating speaker and the author or coauthor of over 15 books. He will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout March to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

Anti-terror measures worldwide have seriously undermined international human rights law, a report by legal experts says.After a three-year global study, the International Commission of Jurists said many states used the public's fear of terrorism to introduce measures.These included detention without trial, illegal disappearance and torture.It also said that the UK and the US have "actively undermined" international law by their actions.It concluded that many measures introduced to fight terrorism were illegal and counter-productive.

In the open garage doorway of a small white warehouse, six blocks from the Park County Sheriff's Office and minutes from the nouveau eateries and art galleries where tourists stroll, Homer Terry churns ice into a five-gallon bucket of marijuana.It's a hot Friday afternoon. The whir of Terry's power drill and stir paddle mixes with the shovel chucks of a nearby railroad crew spreading gravel. He gives the customary Montana greeting of a slight head nod and an easy smile to passers-by, but otherwise he keeps working, blending bits of marijuana into a potent smokable paste.

No one knows if there is life on Mars, but if all goes well with a Russian science mission later this year, there will be life on the Martian moon Phobos -- for a short time anyway.An assortment of critters and microbes are scheduled to make a round-trip journey to Phobos as passengers aboard a Russian spacecraft, scheduled to launch in October.The mission, called Phobos-Grunt, aims to return samples of the Martian moon to Earth for analysis. It will be the first Russian-led mission to Mars since the loss of the Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 probes in 1988 and the botched launch of the Mars 96 spacecraft.

Leech jars, early attempts at reconstructive surgery and nerve-jangling surgical instruments are going online in a Science Museum display.The 2,500 items will illustrate stories such as experiments being carried out on prisoners in Ancient Greece.The history of medicine is examined in the online exhibition from the London museum, bringing material from its crowded storerooms into view.The display is being targeted at both school and university students.

Investigators in Peru say they have for the first time successfully used DNA to identify victims of the country's civil conflict in the 1980s and 1990s.The technique identified 23 victims, who were buried in Peru's largest mass grave in 1984.The director of the Peruvian forensic anthropology team, Jose Pablo Baraybar, said they expected to identify several more victims in the next few weeks.Some 70,000 people died in the conflict between the military and Maoist rebels.

WHEN Roman civilisation fell in the early centuries AD, the light of scholarship was extinguished. It was close to a thousand years before civilisation recovered, thanks to European scholars who rediscovered classical Greek learning and ushered in the new dawn of the Renaissance.At least, this is how history is taught. Now two books argue that this view ignores the crucial role of Islamic scholars.

IN A room in London late last year, a group of British politicians were grilling a selection of climate scientists on geoengineering - the notion that to save the planet from climate change, we must artificially tweak its thermostat by firing fine dust into the atmosphere to deflect the sun's rays, for instance, or perhaps even by launching clouds of mirrors into space.Surely the scientists gave such a heretical idea short shrift. After all, messing with the climate is exactly what got us into such trouble in the first place. The politicians on the committee certainly seemed to believe so. "It is not sensible, is it? It is not a serious suggestion?".

STAND on the banks of the Rhine where it flows into the North Sea, near the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and you'll witness a vast, untapped source of energy swirling in the estuary. According to Dutch engineer Joost Veerman, it's possible to tap this energy without damaging the environment or disrupting the river's busy shipping. For rather than constructing a huge barrage or dotting the river bed with turbines, Veerman and his colleagues at Wetsus, the Dutch Centre for Sustainable Water Technology in Leeuwarden, believe they can tap energy locked up in the North Sea's saltwater by channelling it, along with fresh water from the Rhine, into a novel kind of battery. With a large enough array of these batteries, he says, the estuary could easily provide over a gigawatt of electricity by a process they've called Blue Energy - enough to supply about 650,000 homes.

The patterns of missing asteroids are like the footprints of wandering giant planets preserved in the asteroid belt.University of Arizona scientists have uncovered a curious case of missing asteroids.The main asteroid belt is a zone containing millions of rocky objects between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The scientists find that there ought to be more asteroids there than researchers observe. The missing asteroids may be evidence of an event that took place about 4 billion years ago, when the solar system's giant planets migrated to their present locations.

More than 80 stone implements discovered together in Boulder city limits by landscapersA biochemical analysis of a rare Clovis-era stone tool cache recently unearthed in the city limits of Boulder, Colo., indicates some of the implements were used to butcher ice-age camels and horses that roamed North America until their extinction about 13,000 years ago, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder study.

Elhanan Borenstein is lead author of a paper that offers clues to the complex evolutionary interplay between organisms such as parasites and hosts.From hair color to the ancestral line of parasitic bacteria, scientists can glean a lot from genes. But imagine if genes also revealed where you lived or who you spent time with. It turns out they do, if you know where and how to look.

Over 14,000 years ago during the last Pleistocene Ice Age, when a large part of the European continent was covered in ice and snow, Neanderthals in the region of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian peninsula were able to survive because of the refugium of plant and animal biodiversity. Today, plant fossil remains discovered in Gorham's Cave confirm this unique diversity and wealth of resources available in this area of the planet.

A fossil fish from Australia was one of the earliest known vertebrates to reproduce by fertilising eggs inside the female, a study suggests.Nature journal says the ancient fish was carrying a 5cm-long embryo.The fertilisation of eggs by sperm outside the mother's body - external fertilisation - is thought to have evolved before copulation.

This stegosaur wasn't neck and neck with its peers.The dinosaurs have long been identified by the bony plates on their backs, the spikes on their tales, short forelimbs, and stubby little necks.But now paleontologists have discovered a 150-million-year-old stegosaur in Portugal with a neck that stretched over 5.9 feet (1.8 meters).

Ancient groundwater being tapped by Jordan, one of the 10 most water-deprived nations in the world, has been found to contain twenty times the radiation considered safe for drinking water in a new study by an international team of researchers.

Early humans had feet like ours and left lasting impressions in the form of 1.5 million-year-old footprints, some of which were made by feet that could wear a size 9 men's shoe.The findings at a Northern Kenya site represent the oldest evidence of modern-human foot anatomy. They also help tell an ancestral story of humans who had fully transitioned from tree-dwellers to land walkers.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Maintenance workers at Egypt's Giza Pyramids have found an ancient quartzite statue of a seated man buried close to the surface of the desert, the culture ministry said on Tuesday.The statue, about life-size at 149 cm (five feet) tall, was found north of the smallest of Giza's three main pyramids, the tomb of the fourth dynasty Pharaoh Mycerinus, who ruled in the 26th century BC, the ministry said in a statement.

Scholars using DNA testing hope to unravel age-old mysteries surrounding the Okhotsk people, who suddenly disappeared around the 10th century in northern parts of Hokkaido.And their research could shatter theories on the evolution of the indigenous Ainu people.

As a human being, have you ever wondered when humans colonized the Americas? Where did anatomically modern humans migrate from? What routes did humans use?In an effort to answer these questions, Benjamin Auerbach, assistant professor of anthropology, spoke to the UT Science Forum about the process and history of human migration from an archeological standpoint.

An internationally known german novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger had been a harsh critic of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s. One of his novels, The Oppermanns, was a thinly veiled exposé of Nazi brutality. He called the Führer's Mein Kampf a 140,000-word book with 140,000 mistakes. "The Nazis had denounced me as Enemy Number One," he once said. They also stripped him of his German citizenship and publicly burned his books.

Harry Bingham's father's crowning achievement was his exploration of Machu Picchu almost 100 years ago. Yet Hiram Bingham III's status as the "discoverer" of the ruins is in dispute, and the Peruvian government has demanded that Yale University, where Bingham taught, return all the artifacts he took home from Inca lands.

As persecution of Jews in Europe mounted in the years prior to and during World War II, many people desperately sought visas to escape the Nazi regime. Diplomats, consuls and foreign officials were in a unique position to extend significant help to Jews and other refugees seeking asylum in other countries. But too often the stated policy of foreign governments to stay neutral or restrict immigration left many to perish in Holocaust. As official representatives of their governments, diplomats were obliged to uphold the policies of their countries. Those who acted contrary put themselves at peril.

Two hundred years ago this week, the warship HMS Warren Hastings was struck by a weird phenomenon: "Three distinct balls of fire" fell from the heavens, striking the ship and killing two crewmen, leaving behind "a nauseous, sulfurous smell," according to the Times of London.Ball lightning has been the subject of much scientific scrutiny over the years. And, as with many powerful natural phenomena, the question arises: "Can we turn it into a weapon?" Peculiar as it may seem, that's exactly what some researchers are working on -- even though it hasn't even been properly replicated in the laboratory yet.

In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett ventured into the Amazon, vowing to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history. He was searching for an ancient civilization, which he had named, simply, the City of Z.Ever since the Spanish conquistadores descended the Amazon River, in 1542, perhaps no region on the planet had so ignited the imagination - or lured so many men to their death. For centuries, the conquistadores had searched the jungle for the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. The kingdom, which the conquistadores had heard about from Indians, was said to be so plentiful in gold that its inhabitants ground the metal into powder and blew it through "hollow canes upon their naked bodies." (El Dorado literally means the Gilded Man.) Thousands had died looking for this golden realmecause of their heroic deeds, tens of thousands of lives were saved.

Murals over two thousand years old still retaining their colors: that's an amazing find in a tomb in the suburbs of Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi province.A ramp leads to the tomb chambers. Murals decorate both the vault and the brick walls.Cheng Linquan, director, Institute of archeology, said, The upper part is painted with celestial signs and the lower part is painted with life scenes. We see here is a woman carrying a baby, while leading another child. The lines are simple and earthy, reflecting the art style of that era.

Archaeologists in Malaysia say they have discovered stone tools that are 1.8 million years old including the oldest handaxe in the world.

Nasa has launched its first mission dedicated to measuring carbon dioxide (CO2) from space.The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) will help pinpoint the key locations on our planet's surface where the gas is being emitted and absorbed.CO2's increased concentration in the atmosphere will lead to global climate change, say the major institutions and agencies that study Earth sciences.

Where is UFO country? PM went to the Center for UFO Studies' database to find out where the top counties for UFO spotting reside and how they coincide with air traffic control boundaries. Here are the top regions for UFO spots along with tips on how to report a sighting.

We're destined to go to the stars. That's the assumption we've been making for a century, and I daresay most readers believe this as surely as they believe we'll eventually cure dandruff.Our anticipation of an interstellar destiny is not merely the consequence of too many couch-hours spent watching Spandex-suited astronauts in Star Trek, Star Wars, or Futurama. It's been a subtext of our space program. You might recall a low-grade, 1960 biopic about Wernher von Braun entitled I Aim at the Stars. Or perhaps you know the sunny motto of the National Space Society: "ad astra" ("to the stars"). Boldly sending our descendants into the galaxy's stellar realms seems as inevitable as teen sex.

More than 60 years after reneging on a promise to the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who fought for the United States during World War II, the U.S. government will soon be sending out checks -- to the few who are still alive."For a poor man like me, $15,000 is a lot of money," said 91-year-old Celestino Almeda.Still, he said, "After what we have suffered, what we have contributed for the sake of democracy, it's peanuts. It's a drop in the bucket."During the war, the Philippines was a U.S. commonwealth. The U.S. military promised full veterans benefits to Filipinos who volunteered to fight. More than 250,000 joined.

Norway's navy announced on Monday that it will help search for the missing plane of 20th century explorer Roald Amundsen, more than 80 years after his death.The search -- scheduled for later this year -- will focus on a 40 square-mile (104 square-kilometer) area of the Arctic Ocean where researchers believe Amundsen's plane crashed in 1928."If there is something down there, we will find it," said senior Commander Frode Loeseth told CNN.Loeseth said they will be concentrating on finding the plane's wreckage, and do not expect to find any remains.

A large building that dates to the time of the First and Second Temples, in which there was an amazing wealth of inscriptions, was discovered in a salvage excavation conducted by Zubair Adawi, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, in the village of Umm Tuba in southern Jerusalem (between Zur Baher and the Har Homa quarter), prior to construction work by a private contractor.

Iraq on Monday partially reopened its National Museum, once a trove of artefacts dating back to the dawn of civilisation but which was plundered after the 2003 invasion while U.S. troops stood by.Around 6,000 items out of around 15,000 stolen when order collapsed following the fall of Saddam Hussein were back on display. But only eight of the museum's more than 20 wings were reopened due to a dispute between government departments.

For a few days back in July 2007, it was hard for archaeologist Deborah Carlson to get any work done at her site off the Aegean coast of western Turkey. She was leading an underwater excavation of a 2,000-year-old shipwreck, but the Turkish members of her crew had taken time off to vote in national elections. So things were quiet at her camp on an isolated cape called Kızılburun.

Knowledge is the key to everything, and that truism was proved yet again in the causes behind the first collision between two satellites, which occurred on 10 February. None of the parties involved - the US military, Iridium LLC, and Russia - seems to have had any warning or knowledge about the incident beforehand. Yet at least one party, the US military, had the information that could have provided a warning, had it simply been looked at. All parties also knew about the risk of collision in that region of Earth orbit.

People have been coming to Surprise Springs for 9,000 years.So, for archaeologist Marie Cottrell it's no big deal to find evidence of man in the sandy soil above a now-dry creek bed."Did you find some pottery? Here's some," Cottrell says, picking up a smooth, small brick-red shard from the ground near a stand of tamarisk trees. "Here's a grind stone," she adds, bending to retrieve a rounded piece of granite from the soil. Then she changes her mind.

According to astronomer Dr Roger Angel, at the University of Arizona, the trillions of mirrors would have to be fired one million miles above the earth using a huge cannon with a barrel of 0.6 miles across.The gun would pack 100 times the power of conventional weapons and need an exclusion zone of several miles before being fired.Despite the obvious obstacles - including an estimated $350 trillion (£244trn) price tag for the project - Dr Angel is confident of getting the project off the ground.

Dr. Krzysztof Grzymski doesn't immediately strike you as an Indiana Jones type. But I can tell you that accidentally stumbling across the Royal Ontario Museum's senior curator by the 6th Nile Cataract in windswept Sudan was just as exciting as running into Harrison Ford's character -- the romance of archaeology, I suppose. There Dr. Grzymski was, wearing a Maple Leaf T-shirt and dusting off some shards of ancient pottery, somewhere between Khartoum and Port Sudan. All I could think of was, what are the odds?.

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct - citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties.

A 19th-century Belgian priest who ministered to leprosy patients in Hawaii, and died of the disease, will be declared a saint this year at a Vatican ceremony presided over by Pope Benedict XVI.The Rev. Damien de Veuster's canonization date of Oct. 11 was set Saturday.Born Joseph de Veuster in 1840, he took the name Damien and went to Hawaii in 1864 to join other missionaries of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Nine years later, he began ministering to leprosy patients on the remote Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai island, where some 8,000 people had been banished amid an epidemic in Hawaii in the 1850s.

Britain's love of seafood is helping to destroy the nation's maritime heritage. That is the stark warning of marine archaeologists who say hundreds of sunken ships, from Elizabethan warships to second world war submarines, are being torn apart by trawlers - fishing for scallops and flatfish - dragging chains and cables across the seabed.

Sapphire crystals may be the next material to transform the electronics industry, thanks to nanotechnology researchers who have announced a new way of storing data that would fit the contents of 250 DVDs on a coin-sized surface. The study, published in Science, illustrates how nanoscale elements can organize themselves over a large sheet of semiconductor film. The researchers expect that when applied to electronic media, their discovery will improve the efficiency of data storage, savings which can then be transferred to improve other pieces of electronics besides just storage, like high-definition screens and solar cells.

A NEW kind of star may be lurking in the debris from a nearby supernova explosion. If confirmed, the "quark star" could offer fresh insights into the earliest moments of the universe.When supernovae explode, they leave behind either a black hole or a dense remnant called a neutron star. However, recent calculations suggest a third possibility: a quark star, which forms when the pressure falls just short of creating a black hole.

A bizarre deep-water fish called the barreleye has a transparent head and tubular eyes. Since the fish's discovery in 1939, biologists have known the eyes were very good at collecting light. But their shape seemed to leave the fish with tunnel vision.Now scientists say the eyes rotate, allowing the barreleye to see directly forward or look upward through its transparent head.