Newsdesk Archive

Most fish have eyes on the sides of their heads, but a scientist now has confirmed a new and elusive species of carnivorous frogfish with eyes that face forward, like ours. The creature also has a fleshy chin and cheeks, adding to its strange appearance.The bizarre new species, Histiophryne psychedelica, made a brief splash a year ago when sport divers about 30 feet offshore of Ambon Island, Indonesia, photographed a shallow-water fish not seen before in 20 years of diving there.

Researchers have discovered the largest collection of ice age fossils beneath a demolished department store in central Los Angeles.The find includes an almost intact Colombian mammoth, nicknamed Zed by researchers, a complete sabre-tooth cat skeleton, a giant ground sloth and a North American lion.

Nobody at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad knows exactly how the three stolen Sumerian tablets got all the way to Lima, Peru. All authorities in Lima told Iraqi museum officials was that the three tablets, more than 2,000 years old and each small enough to hold in the palm of one's hand, were found roughly a year ago in the luggage of an American traveling in the country and seized at the airport. "I'm not involved in the other details," says Dr. Amira Edan, who heads of the museum's efforts to reclaim lost artifacts and flew to Peru to retrieve the tablets. "What was important for me was to take the items back."

Historians and archaeologists claim to have found the remains of King Robert the Bruce's palace, lost for more than 700 years.The discovery is being hailed as one of the most important in decades as it pinpoints the location of a monument many believe is as important to Scotland's history as Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace.

Researchers may be able to "freeze" water into a solid, not by cooling but by confining it to narrow spaces less than one-millionth of a millimeter wide, according to new results from an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers.It's more than a neat trick -- a deeper understanding of how thin films of water behave in nanometer-sized spaces may help advance numerous scientific endeavors, including the development of new energy sources, pharmaceuticals and self-cleaning surfaces.

ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.

Researchers have engineered antibodies that could potentially lead to a cure-all for multiple strains of influenza, including the dangerous H5N1 strain of bird flu, according to a study published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. Mice that were infected with bird flu and three days later were injected with the treatment exhibited no symptoms of illness. Whereas existing flu vaccines are able to target only one strain of virus at a time and need to be redeveloped every year, the new research suggests that a single treatment may work against many strains.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and whether that beholding eye belongs to a man or a woman may determine how beauty is processed and understood in the brain, according to a small, preliminary study. Researchers asked 10 men and 10 women to decide which paintings and photographs they found beautiful, while brain scans revealed which parts of their brains were active while they examined each image. The results suggested that while both sexes use parts of the brain associated with spacial awareness to process beauty, men use an area associated with big-picture thinking, while women also use a region linked to local details.

People fighting off winter colds and bouts of the flu typically reach for a glass vitamin C-packed orange juice, but new research suggests that vitamin D may be a better protector. People with low levels of the vitamin, which is often called the sunshine vitamin because sun exposure triggers its production in the body, are more likely to catch colds, the flu, and even pneumonia, a broad new study reports. The effect was magnified in people with asthma or other lung diseases.

NOW it's official: genes from genetically modified corn have escaped into wild varieties in rural Mexico. A new study resolves a long-running controversy over the spread of GM genes and suggests that detecting such escapes may be tougher than previously thought.In 2001, when biologists David Quist and Ignacio Chapela reported finding transgenes from GM corn in traditional varieties in Oaxaca, Mexico, they faced a barrage of criticism over their techniques. Nature, which had published the research, eventually disowned their paper, while a second study by different researchers failed to back up their findings.But now, Elena Alvarez-Buylla of the National Autonomous University in Mexico City and her team have backed Quist and Chapela's claim. They found transgenes in about 1 per cent of nearly 2000 samples they took from the region.

CAIRO - 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 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.The man was wearing a shoulder-length wig and was seated in a simple chair, his right hand clenched on his knee and holding an object. His left hand was resting on his thigh.

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory crashed into the Pacific just off the coast of Antarctica shortly after it lifted off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Tuesday.Just minutes after the OCO launched at 0155 PST (0955 GMT) on a Taurus XL rocket, its protective fairing, which shields the spacecraft during launch and atmospheric ascent, failed to separate and fall away as planned. As a result of its added weight, the satellite did not reach its orbit and crashed into the ocean.

People who shudder atop skyscrapers or feel their knees buckle going over bridges have troubling perceiving vertical dimensions, two new studies suggest.Those with an extreme fear of heights - a condition called acrophobia and often mislabelled "vertigo" - significantly overestimate vertical distances. The stronger their fear, the bigger the error, say researchers.

Positive people may owe their optimism to a gene variant that helps them dwell on the good and ignore the bad.That's the conclusion from a study examining people's subliminal preferences for happy, neutral, and threatening images.

When astronomers in the distant future cast their eyes around the cosmos, they will come to the conclusion that our galaxy is alone in the universe.Even with the most sensitive detectors, future scientists will not be able to observe the leftover radiation from the Big Bang explosion, study the motion of distant galaxies to conclude that space is expanding or even see distant objects.In the future, the force astronomers now know as dark energy, will stretch the universe beyond detection, with objects receding faster than the speed of light.

A telescope at the South Pole is being fine tuned to search for gravity waves, hypothetical distortions of space-time that, if confirmed to exist, could further validate Einstein and reveal convincing evidence for a big cosmology theory.Cosmic inflation theory proposes that the early universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion, ballooning almost instantaneously from less than the size of an atom to about golf-ball size.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano's press conference this morning announcing his marijuana-legalization bill started punctually and stayed relentlessly on-point -- thereby denying a barb to every journalist present. Ammiano and the assembled speakers at San Francisco's State Building also spoke calmly and methodically, at one point being drowned out by a floor-waxer. The famously funny lawmaker reined himself in, presenting "The Marijuana Control, regulation and education act (AB 390)" as a simple matter of fiscal common sense.

CHICAGO - Scientists are pursuing earthquakes deep into their subterranean lairs, studying them on land and below the sea. Yet, confronted with the question of when and where the "next big one" will occur, an uncomfortable silence sets in.Based on history there will be quakes in Japan, also in Tibet, said Leigh Royden of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."Will we ever be able to predict them? I don't know," she said Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As agents of extinction, comet and asteroid impacts may be losing their punch.According to a new theory about how mass dyings work, cosmic collisions generally aren't enough to cause a major extinction event. To be truly devastating, they must be accompanied by another event that inflicts long-term suffering, like runaway climate change due to massive volcanic eruptions.In other words, a comet couldn't have killed the dinosaurs by itself -- unless they were already endangered species.

Scientists said on Tuesday that Antarctica's ice is covering up jagged mountains the size of the Alps, providing new clues about the vast ice sheet that will raise world sea levels if even a fraction of it melts, Reuters reported.First detected by Russian scientists 50 years ago at the heart of the East Antarctic ice sheet using radar and gravity sensors, the experts made the first detailed maps of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains.Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey who took part in the research, said not only is the mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the European Alps with its high peaks and valleys.

For centuries the story of Atlantis has captured the imagination - a fabled city of great beauty, culture and wealth that was suddenly swallowed up by the ocean.Its location - or at least the source of the legend - remained a tantalising mystery. Was it really in the Mediterranean and not in the Atlantic at all?Some claim its ruins lie beneath the waves off the coast of Cornwall. Others say they've been found in the Black Sea.

By FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO, CéSAR GAVIRIA and ERNESTO ZEDILLOThe war on drugs has failed. And it's high time to replace an ineffective strategy with more humane and efficient drug policies. This is the central message of the report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy we presented to the public recently in Rio de Janeiro.Mr. Cardoso is the former president of Brazil. Mr. Gaviria is a former president of Colombia. Mr. Zedillo is a former president of Mexico.

William Jackson was a slave in the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. It turns out he was also a spy for the Union Army, providing key secrets to the North about the Confederacy.Jackson was Davis' house servant and personal coachman. He learned high-level details about Confederate battle plans and movements because Davis saw him as a "piece of furniture" -- not a human, according to Ken Dagler, author of "Black Dispatches," which explores espionage by America's slaves."Because of his role as a menial servant, he simply was ignored," Dagler said. "So Jefferson Davis would hold conversations with military and Confederate civilian officials in his presence." .

As global warming worsens, the idea of vast projects to alter the Earth's environment is moving from fantasy to necessity.

An online initiative which asks members of the public to classify galaxies recorded unprecedented traffic in its first 48 hours.The venture is a follow-up to the Galaxy Zoo project launched in 2007.Co-founder Dr Chris Lintott said the website had been getting 12 clicks per second in its first two days.He said members of the public had answered some two million questions about galaxies in the database during that same period.

The United States is not developing space weapons and could not afford to do so even if it wanted to, an official with the Pentagon's National Security Space Office said Thursday.Pete Hays, a senior policy analyst at the space office who is also associate director of the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies, said U.S. policy on space weaponry has remained pretty much the same over the last 30 years despite the occasionally heated debate on the subject during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush.

Why rely on batteries when the world is full of objects just waiting to be harnessed as power generators?Materials scientist Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology is showing the way with his gadget that can transform a hamster in its wheel or a moving human finger into a tiny electrical generator.

CAIRO, Feb. 18 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian archaeologists on Wednesday uncovered a statue of pharaoh and a bust of the famous woman pharaoh Hatshepsut in the southern city of Luxor, the state MENA news agency reported.The three-meter Amenhotep statue was "dug out with only one damage in the nose and one in the teeth," said Moustafa el-Waziri, director of the archaeological mission, adding that more antiques would be unearthed in the future.

Something happened along the shores of the Black Sea about 9,500 years ago. According to one theory, a huge flood suddenly drowned the landscape, forcing some of the planet's first farmers to move elsewhere.A new study paints a different picture."I would say there was never a big flood," said Liviu Giosan, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod, Mass., and lead author of the study. "What we showed was that it's impossible."

Chemists have taken us a little further along the road to a hydrogen economy with a fuel-tank material that might one day replace the automobile petrol tank.Researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK and General Motors in Warren, Michigan, have come up with a sponge-like material that can hold 10% of its own weight in hydrogen gas.

The Met Police got a short sharp rap over the knuckles yesterday, as the Office of the Information Commissioner questioned what looks very much like a blanket policy to force CCTV onto public houses in certain parts of London.

Japan's Kaguya lunar orbiter has beamed home a spectacular movie of Earth eclipsing the sun as seen from the moon.Kaguya caught the stunning sight on Feb. 10 and used its high definition camera to record the moment when the Earth looked like a diamond ring.This HDTV moment in time and space came when a penumbral lunar eclipse occurred and the view of the sun from the Kaguya was mostly covered by the Earth, thus the Earth looked like a diamond ring. The moon's limb, hidden by darkness, obscures part of the lower portion of the ring.

Image taken from Google Ocean, a feature of Google Earth -- an interactive 3D view of the globe as seen from space. Google Earth allows viewers to go on virtual aerial tours of many famous places on Earth.The sharp outlines and uniform wall-like structures seen in the image are believed by many to be completely unnatural and the result of manmade activity and his structures. What can be seen clearly are several nearly straight lines, near perfect rectangles and what may be roads extending out toward dry land. The structure is currently under several thousand feet of water and was only recently made available thanks to the Ocean extension of Google Earth.

Plate tectonics is the process of continents on the Earth drifting and colliding, rock grinding and scraping, mountain ranges being formed, and earthquakes tearing land apart. It makes our world dynamic and ever-changing. But should it factor into our search for life elsewhere in the universe?Tilman Spohn believes so. As director of the German Space Research Centre Institute of Planetary Research, and chairman of ESA's scientific advisory committee, he studies worlds beyond our Earth. When looking into the relationship between habitability and plate tectonics, some fascinating possibilities emerged.

Strange globs seen on the landing strut of the Phoenix Mars lander could be the first proof that modern Mars hosts liquid water, a new paper reports.Images from the robotic craft show what appear to be liquid droplets growing, merging, and dripping on the lander's leg over the course of a Martian month.

Liquid droplets seem to form and move on the leg of the Phoenix Mars lander, as seen in images taken on days 8, 31, and 44 (seen above from left to right) of the craft's mission.Scientists think the water could stay liquid even in the frigid Martian arctic because of its high concentration of perchlorates, salts that acts like antifreeze.

Can we thank past civilisations for the way tropical rainforests are soaking up our carbon pollution? A new analysis of tree growth and death in 79 plots across tropical Africa finds that every hectare is soaking up an average 0.6 tonnes of carbon from the air per year.The findings of the international study, reported by Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds, UK, mirror past discoveries of the huge carbon-absorbing ability of the Amazon rainforest. Together, they confirm estimates from atmospheric chemists that natural tropical forests absorb about a fifth of our carbon emissions.

In the Mesozoic Era, 70 million years before birds first conquered the skies, pterosaurs dominated the air with sparrow- to Cessna-sized wingspans. Researchers suspected that these extinct reptiles sustained flight through flapping, based on fossil evidence from the wings, but had little understanding of how pterosaurs met the energetic demands of active flight.

Whether devastating faults, dank caves or mud cracks on a drying desert plain, Earth's surface is riddled with fractures. Now a new study had found that the cracks exhale large quantities of gas, perhaps enough to affect global warming.Noam Weisbrod of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and a team of researchers monitored a crack about 2 meters long (6.5 feet) and 1 meter (3.3 feet) deep for two years in the Negev Desert is Israel. Each night, they watched as warm air in the crack drew water vapor out of the surrounding rock, and lifted it into the cold evening air.

NASA's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said.The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.

THE Chinese government has closed Tibet to outside observers, poured security forces into the region and vowed to "crush" supporters of the Dalai Lama.The move came before the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight into exile in March 1959, triggering worries of a heavy-handed reaction to any dissent.The local government has ordered security forces to "mobilise and fully deploy" in order to "firmly crush the savage aggression of the Dalai Lama clique, defeat separatism and maintain stability", according to the Tibet Daily, a state newspaper. Witnesses in Tibet reported shop closures and a heavy security presence on the streets.

A century and a half after Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, some still doubt its ability to explain the emergence of human beings and other forms of life.These days, some Darwin skeptics are focusing on the human brain. They say a higher power must be involved; otherwise, how could a bunch of cells produce such complicated mental processes as consciousness or subjective experiences? How could something like free will be the result of evolution?.

A new study shows that teenage boy developed cancerous tumors because of the stem cell therapy he received years ago for a rare genetic condition. The boy, now 17, suffered from ataxia telangiectasia, or AT, a neurodegenerative disease that interferes with the part of the brain that controls movement and speech. AT patients do not usually live past their teens or 20s, and the Israeli boy, whose identity was not publicly revealed, was taken to Russia for experimental treatment. The first neural stem cells, taken from fetuses, were first injected into his brain and spinal cord when he was nine, and he received further injections at ages 10 and 12.

A sample taken from what are believed to be the only polar bear remains to have been found in Britain has defied DNA analysis, it has emerged.Ireland-based genetics expert Ceiridwen Edwards had hoped to compare the DNA of the animal found in a cave in Scotland with that of modern polar bears.However, she said there was not enough DNA left in the sample for an analysis to be done.

An innovative UK launcher concept is to get 1m euros (£900,000) of investment from the European Space Agency (Esa).The Skylon spaceplane would take off from a conventional aircraft runway, carry over 12 tonnes to orbit and then return to land on the same runway.The money will help prove the vehicle's core technologies, including its Sabre air-breathing rocket engine.Reaction Engines, the company behind the project, believes its reusable launcher could fly within 10 years.

Europe's next space freighter will be called Johannes Kepler in honour of the great 17th Century German scientist.The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is currently being assembled in Bremen ready for its 2010 mission to resupply the International Space Station.European Space Agency delegates agreed the name at a meeting on Wednesday.The first ATV was called Jules Verne after the French science fiction writer and completed a flawless maiden mission last year.It delivered more than five tonnes of supplies to the orbiting outpost before dropping back to Earth in a controlled burn-up over the Pacific Ocean.Another Kepler spacecraft is about to make the headlines. The US space agency has also used the name for its planet-hunting telescope due for launch next month.

When I think of pirates, I think of the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Aden. I don't think of the Ohio River; or at least I didn't before I read Going to See the Varmint: Piracy in Myth and Reality on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, 1785-1830 by Illinois archaeologists Mark Wagner and Mary McCorvie.Throughout the late 18th century, flatboats made their way up and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers bearing produce and manufactured goods as well as immigrants to the West.

Three fragments of a Greek inscription, believed to be part of the "Heliodoros stele" were recently found at an Israel Antiquities Authority excavation at the National Park of Beit Guvrin.The Heliodoros stele, dating back to 178 B.C.E. and consisting of 23 lines inscribed in limestone, is considered one of the most important ancient inscriptions found in Israel.

Our knowledge of life in the Mediterranean region between 3500 and 2000 years ago has been enhanced by a combination of archaeological and computer technologies, as Professor Lin Foxhall will reveal at a public lecture at the University of Leicester on Tuesday 10th March.How do we gather knowledge about how societies came to operate the way they do? And, how can this help us address pressing questions and issues we face today? We can't travel in time and observe how complex networks evolved, but we can collect, organise and interpret the remains of ancient networks.

Divers exploring a southern Florida sinkhole have uncovered clues to what life was like for some of America's first residents.Led by University of Miami professor John Gifford, underwater archaeologists are exploring Little Salt Spring, 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Sarasota.

EVENT: Interview with Curandero Don Lucho CulquitonDATE & TIME: Sunday, February 22nd at 8:00pm EasternFORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast -- it's your choice)

LOS ANGELES - Scientists are studying a huge cache of Ice Age fossil deposits recovered near the famous La Brea Tar Pits in the middle of the second-largest U.S. city.Among the finds is a near-intact mammoth skeleton and bones of saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, bisons, horses, ground sloths and other mammals.

An international team of scientists have discovered that rainforest trees are getting bigger. They are storing more carbon from the atmosphere in their trunks, which has significantly reduced the rate of climate change.Globally, tropical trees in undisturbed forest are absorbing nearly a fifth of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels. The researchers show that remaining tropical forests remove a massive 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere each year. This includes a previously unknown carbon sink in Africa, mopping up 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 each year.

People who are deaf create their own languages in a variety of circumstances, according to experts who will be discussing this phenomenon during the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting, taking place 12-16 February 2009 in Chicago, Illinois.

Evidence of star birth within a cloud of primordial gas has given astronomers a glimpse of a previously unknown mode of galaxy formation. The cloud, known as the Leo Ring, appears to lack the dark matter and heavy elements normally found in galaxies today. The unexpected discovery comes thanks to instruments aboard NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spacecraft which are sensitive to the ultraviolet radiation emitted by newly formed stars.

IMAGINE going into hospital with HIV and receiving a single treatment that knocks the virus on the head for good. That dream may come true sooner than we thought following a flurry of progress in gene therapy.The story begins with a man in Germany who last week was reported to be free of HIV following a bone marrow transplant. The donor was known to have two copies of a gene that prevents HIV from invading white blood cells. For the first time, it may be possible to eliminate the virus from the body, as opposed to simply keeping it in check with antiretroviral therapies (ART).

THEY are the places gravity forgot. Vast regions of space, millions of kilometres across, in which celestial forces conspire to cancel out gravity and so trap anything that falls into them. They sit in the Earth's orbit, one marching ahead of our planet, the other trailing along behind. Astronomers call them Lagrangian points, or L4 and L5 for short. The best way to think of them, though, is as celestial flypaper.In the 4.5 billion years since the formation of the solar system, everything from dust clouds to asteroids and hidden planets may have accumulated there. Some have even speculated that alien spacecraft are watching us from the Lagrangian points, looking for signs of intelligence.

THERE'S nothing like a little antifreeze to thaw out a frozen planet. Thanks to chemicals called perchlorates, liquid water may play a bigger role on Mars than expected, which is good news for the search for life.Last year, NASA's Phoenix lander team announced the unexpected discovery on Mars of perchlorates - compounds containing an atom of chlorine bound to four oxygen atoms. Relatively sparse on Earth, they turn out to be abundant on Mars, forming 1 per cent of the soil tasted by Phoenix.

Key Concepts* In the universe as we experience it, we can directly affect only objects we can touch; thus, the world seems local.* Quantum mechanics, however, embraces action at a distance with a property called entanglement, in which two particles behave synchronously with no intermediary; it is nonlocal.* This nonlocal effect is not merely counterintuitive: it presents a serious problem to Einstein's special theory of relativity, thus shaking the foundations of physics.

The U.S. aerospace industry is officially onboard the biofuel bandwagon, with the test fire of a small rocket engine that burns commercially available biodiesel.California-based Flometrics did the honors and discovered the Rocketdyne LR-101 engine produced nearly the same amount of thrust burning biodiesel as it did chugging through a kerosene-based conventional rocket fuel.

Contrary to the TV sitcom where the wife experiencing strong labor pains screams at her husband to stay away from her, women rarely give birth alone. There are typically doctors, nurses and husbands in hospital delivery rooms, and sometimes even other relatives and friends. Midwives often are called on to help with births at home.Assisted birth has likely been around for millennia, possibly dating as far back as 5 million years ago when our ancestors first began walking upright, according to University of Delaware paleoanthropologist Karen Rosenberg.

The fireball that streaked across the sky and alarmed numerous Texas residents was likely just a big meteor and not wreckage from colliding satellites, experts said Monday.Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Roland Herwig said the fireball seen across a wide stretch of the state Sunday morning probably was a natural phenomenon and not debris from last week's collision between an Iridium communications satellite and a Russian military space vehicle.

Scientists are one step closer to curing severe nut allergies that affect thousands of people across the UK, according to research published today.Doctors at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge said they had developed a successful desensitisation programme which builds up tolerance in patients by slowly exposing them to tiny doses of peanut.

Women undergoing routine breast screening in the UK are being misled about the risks involved, warn a group of UK experts.Invitation letters and leaflets do not tell the truth about the number of tests ending in unnecessary treatment, they write in The Times.It comes after a report in the British Medical Journal found women are given one-sided information on screening.The NHS Screening Programme said leaflets were being reviewed.

NASA and the military play close attention to the stuff flying around their spacecraft and regularly scoot them up or down to give passing objects wide berth.But when it comes to privately operated satellites, there is no Federal Aviation Administration for space."There is no universal space traffic control," said Nicholas Johnson, an orbital debris expert at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Debris from this week's satellite collision could circle Earth for up to 10,000 years, threatening many other satellites in an already-crowded area, Russia's Mission Control chief said Friday.Vladimir Solovyov said Tuesday's smashup of a derelict Russian military satellite and a working U.S. Iridium commercial satellite occurred some 500 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth -- the busiest part of near-Earth space."800 kilometers is a very popular orbit which is used by Earth-tracking and communications satellites," Solovyov told reporters. "The clouds of debris pose a serious danger to them."

MONKEYS and apes have a sense of morality and the rudimentary ability to tell right from wrong, according to new research.In a series of studies scientists have found that monkeys and apes can make judgments about fairness, offer altruistic help and empathise when a fellow animal is ill or in difficulties. They even appear to have consciences and the ability to remember obligations.The research implies that morality is not a uniquely human quality and suggests it arose through evolution. That could mean the strength of our consciences is partly determined by our genes.

Galena, Alaska, could be the type specimen for remoteness. A tiny town of about 700 on a bend of the Yukon River, it has no roads in and depends on the river for food, fuel and supplies. The river is frozen eight to nine months of the year. Galena residents pay three times the national average per kilowatt hour for diesel-generated electricity. Alternative energy would have special appeal for Galena, but with an evening that stretches 20 hours in the winter, solar is out. With the help of Toshiba and its American holding, Westinghouse, Galena is thinking nuclear.Will a swaggering nuclear policy in Galena be the next big headache for nearby Tanana and McGrath?

Mounds on Mars that could be from ancient hot springs are described in a new study, after setting the astrobiology community abuzz last spring.Hydrothermal springs on Earth, like those in Yellowstone National Park, harbor what scientists figure are the closest relatives to the original organisms that lived on our planet. Finding these features on Mars (or any other planet) could have big implications for the question of extraterrestrial life.

IF WE ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. As we are many light years away, our signals would take many years to reach them, so there would be no scope for snappy repartee. There could be an IQ gap and the aliens might be built from quite different chemistry.

The stores of seeds in a "doomsday" vault in the Norwegian Arctic are growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction.The imperiled seeds are going to be critical for protecting the global food supply against devastating crop losses as a result of climate change, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust."These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation," Fowler said. "You can't imagine a solution to climate change without crop diversity."

Scientists have found fossil remains of an omnivorous dinosaur in Argentina -- a missing link to the carnivores, a researcher said Monday."It is an omnivore -- in other words it ate everything (plants and meat) -- which is the missing link between carnivorous dinosaurs and giant four-footed herbivores," said Oscar Alcober, also director of the Natural Sciences Museum in San Juan, 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) west of Buenos Aires."This is a very important piece of the puzzle on the origin of dinosaurs," said Alcober.

Ehsan Masood explores the status of science in the Islamic world today for a new series on BBC Radio 4. He asks whether measures taken to promote science in recent years are having an impact.In the mid 1990s, I was asked by the science journal Nature to discover the state of science in Pakistan.Like today, Pakistan had become a democracy after more than a decade of military rule. Benazir Bhutto was prime minister. But science then was not a priority.The ministry had no minister and - the nuclear programme aside - the national research budget was less than that of an average UK university.

Physicist Professor Brian Cox has looked at the different strategies now being pursued to make nuclear fusion a reality. His personal assessment is presented on the BBC's Horizon programme.Nuclear fusion is nature's power source. From the Sun to the most distant stars, the energy that lights up the Universe is released by sticking hydrogen nuclei together to make helium.

John Ackerman wasn't looking to dig up history as he crept through the cold, wet southern Minnesota cave that spring afternoon in 2008. A longtime caver, the 54-year-old Farmington man simply wanted to dig out some sediment to see where a newly discovered side passage might lead.But the prehistoric stag moose antler he and two friends unearthed that day and a saber-tooth cat skull they found two months later may be the most significant paleontological discoveries in the Upper Midwest in years.Scientists say the fossils are the first of their kind discovered in Minnesota, meaning that both ice-age mammals, long extinct, ventured farther north than previously thought.

PARIS, France (CNN) -- France bears responsibility for deporting Jews to their deaths in concentration camps during World War II, the country's highest court ruled Monday.But, the Council of State said, "measures taken since the end of the Second World War have compensated for the damage."Northern France was directly occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II while the south of the country was ruled by the Vichy government that collaborated with Adolf Hitler.

Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard.Our planet may harbour forms of "weird life" unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.This "shadow life" may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says.He has called on scientists to launch a "mission to Earth" by trawling hostile environments for signs of bio-activity.Weird life could even be living among us, in forms which we don't yet recognise, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago."We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life.

A zero-carbon home which borrows from a building style first used more than 600 years ago has been unveiled in Kent.The design of the four-bedroom house, called Crossways, has been adapted from the technique "timbrel vaulting", used in Catalonia, Spain.The arched building in Staplehurst is covered with earth and plants and was designed by architect Richard Hawkes.It has been given zero-carbon status because fossil fuels are not needed to heat it.

Nasa and the European Space Agency have decided to forge ahead with an ambitious plan to send a probe to the Jupiter system and its icy moon Europa.The proposal could be the agencies' next "flagship" endeavour, to follow on from the successful Cassini-Huygens mission to the Saturn system.Officials had been considering the Jupiter mission along with a venture to Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus.But they will target an earlier flight opportunity for the Europa mission.A Saturnian return will have to wait until later in the century, agency chiefs say.The missions would cost several billion dollars/euros to build and execute and might never fly if other future space endeavours become higher research priorities.

Europe's particle physics lab, Cern, is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle", its US rival claims.The particle, whose existence has been predicted by theoreticians, would help to explain why matter has mass.Finding the Higgs is a major goal of Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Specialists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) discovered an earlier façade in the Great Pyramid in Uxmal Archaeological Site that represents the antecedents of Puuc architectural style, which splendor occurred during the Late Classic period (900-1000 AD).Jose Huchim Herrera, man in charge of the Uxmal Archaeological Project, declared this finding is important because it demonstrates the evolution of Puuc architecture, famous for its fine carved stone mosaics, thin and precisely cut, that cover facades in different Maya cities.

Chemists at New York University and China's Nanjing University have developed a two-armed nanorobotic device that can manipulate molecules within a device built from DNA. The device is described in the latest issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Twenty years ago this week, Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan, after nine years of occupation. Lyse Doucet was our correspondent in Kabul then and she's back in the Afghan capital now.I still keep the single sheet of paper - dull grey, stark black font, with the seal of the British embassy in Kabul, dated 19 January 1989.

People with a sprained ankle recover faster if they are given a plaster cast, British researchers say.A study of 600 patients found that a 10-day below-knee cast is more effective than standard treatment with a tubular bandage.The findings, published in The Lancet, are at odds with general medical opinion that the best thing for a sprained ankle is to keep it moving.Up to 1.5m people a year in the UK go to A&E with a sprained ankle.

BANGKOK, Thailand - The polar oceans are not biological deserts after all.A marine census released Monday documented 7,500 species in the Antarctic and 5,500 in the Arctic, including several hundred that researchers believe could be new to science."The textbooks have said there is less diversity at the poles than the tropics, but we found astonishing richness of marine life in the Antarctic and Arctic oceans," said Victoria Wadley, a researcher from the Australian Antarctic Division who took part in the Antarctic survey. "We are rewriting the textbooks."

Scholars are reconsidering what ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes knew of the concept of infinity, and archaeologists may have found a fossil brain millions of years old, thanks to new ways of looking beneath the surface of ancient objects.

Spectral instrumentation manufacturer Headwall Photonics (Fitchburg, MA) announced that its Hyperspec short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral imaging instrumentation was used by archeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority to analyze five lines of text found on an ancient shard of pottery that dates back 3,000 years in history. The inscribed pottery shard, known as an ostracon, was scanned and imaged in the range of 1000 to 2500 nm.

A new facility opening later this year at the Diamond synchrotron is set to revolutionise world heritage science. A new research platform soon to be available at the leading UK science facility, Diamond Light Source, will help uncover ancient secrets that have been locked away for centuries. For the first time ever, cultural heritage scientists will be able to scan and image large relics and artefacts up to two tonnes in weight in incredible precision. They will no longer be restricted to examining small items.

DALLAS - What looked like a fireball streaked across the Texas sky on Sunday morning, leading many people to call authorities to report seeing falling debris."We don't know what it was," said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Roland Herwig.The Williamson County Sheriff's Office used a helicopter to search after callers said they thought they saw a plane crashing, a spokesman said."We don't doubt what people saw" but authorities found nothing, said spokesman John Foster.

Challenging commonly held ideas about human history, Haldin Aydingün describes the T-shaped obelisks of Göbeklitepe in south-eastern Turkey - a sanctuary from the 10th millennium BC. Erected 10,000 years before the founding of the Roman Empire, 8,000 years before the appearance of the Hittites and 7,000 years before the building of the Great Pyramids, the hilltop settlement near the town of Urfa was established by hunter-gathers.

Mysterious debris said to look like a meteor or fireball in the sky has been captured on film over Austin, Texas.

The beautiful singer was about 30 years old when the world forgot about her. But now we know what she looks like for the first time in nearly 3,000 years.

Current treatments for diseases like cancer typically destroy nasty malignant cells, while also hammering the healthy ones. Using new advances in synthetic biology, researchers are designing molecules intelligent enough to recognize diseased cells, leaving the healthy cells alone.

A major new project is under way in Paris to provide ecologically clean heating for an entire district by extracting piping hot water from nearly two kilometres under the earth.In a revival of the French capital's geothermal potential, drilling has just begun in the north of the city on a desolate building site sandwiched between the traffic-clogged inner ring road and the Saint-Denis canal.

Farmers across the tropics might raze forests to plant biofuel crops, according to new research by Holly Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment."If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances will be good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks," she warned.

The remarkable behaviour of bacteria that have been forced to live without their protective wall has allowed Newcastle University scientists to open a new window on the origins of life on earth.All living cells on the planet go through the process of division in order to survive and thrive. Cell division, or binary fission, allows one cell to split down the middle to become two cells.

A simple, chemical materials model may lead to a better understanding of the structure and organization of the cell according to a Penn State researcher."Cells are interesting because they show organization even at the level of the cytoplasm, and while it is thought to be important for cell functions, it is not always clear how this organization is achieved," said Christine Keating, associate professor of chemistry. "We are taking a materials chemistry approach in developing simple experimental models for cytoplasm organization," she told attendees at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Genetic diseases and genetically mixed populations can help researchers understand human diversity and human origins according to a Penn State physical anthropologist."We wanted to get to a strategy to predict what a face will look like," said Mark D. Shriver, associate professor of biological anthropology. "We want to understand the path of evolution that leads to that part of the selection process."To pinpoint genes that influence the shape of the human face and head, Shriver began with an online database of genes linked to disease -- Online Mendelian Inheritance of Man. If the symptoms of the disease involved the face or skull the gene implicated in the disease became a candidate for those facial traits.

Cultural treasures from ancient civilisations belong in the places they come from. Museums in Sweden, Germany, America and the Vatican have already acknowledged this and returned items taken from the Acropolis. The British museum should follow suit and put an end to more than two centuries of bad feeling in Greece.

In 1964, when the space race was in full swing, a futuristic building appeared on a hill overlooking the University of Nevada campus in Reno. Designed by architect Ray Hellman, the Fleischmann Atmospherium-Planetarium featured a soaring, curved roof line; large, rotating solar panels; and a 30-foot-diameter dome theater. It was the first structure of its kind in the country to show full-dome motion pictures.