Newsdesk Archive

The standard model of physics got it right when it predicted where the mass of ordinary matter comes from, according to a massive new computational effort. Particle physics explains that the bulk of atoms is made up of protons and neutrons, which are themselves composed of smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons. The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks [accounts for] only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

When the Lusitania went down, it left a mystery behind: What was the cause of the second blast? After nearly a century of investigation, argument and intrigue, clues are starting to surface.On May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania, jewel of the Cunard Line, was on a New York-to-Liverpool run when it was attacked by a German U-boat 12 miles off the coast of Ireland. At 2:10 p.m., a torpedo plowed into the ship and exploded. Fifteen seconds later, a massive second explosion rocked the ship again.

Recently uncovered documents in the British archives reveal dark secrets from World War II. One problem: they are forgeriesNothing is as central to the way the British view themselves as the telling and retelling of their gallant fight against the Nazis. Perhaps the colossal figure of Winston Churchill is taken for granted now, his boozy final years remembered with an indulgent chuckle, his elitist views and nostalgia for Empire taken as a slight embarrassment.

Four intriguing places on Mars have risen to the final round as NASA selects a landing site for its next Mars mission, the Mars Science Laboratory.The agency had a wider range of possible landing sites to choose from than for any previous mission, thanks to the Mars Science Laboratory's advanced technologies, and the highly capable orbiters helping this mission identify scientifically compelling places to explore.

Chemists at the University of Liverpool have developed a way of converting methane gas into a powder form in order to make it more transportable.Scientists have developed a material made out of a mixture of silica and water which can soak up large quantities of methane molecules. The material looks and acts like a fine white powder which, if developed for industrial use, might be easily transported or used as a vehicle fuel.

Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.

It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

The nuclear waste buried beneath Yucca Mountain will be there for millennia, untouchable and lethal. Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats would put that time and radioactivity to use by turning the dump into a generator of new universes.His plan is based on the laws of quantum physics, which state that each atomic particle exists in multiple states at once until observation fixes it in time and space. Keats, who recently built a temple of science to explore the implications of science-based religion, takes this literally.

When Russia launched the first component of what would become the International Space Station 10 years ago, NASA expected to finish construction in eight years, spend about $30 billion and fund hundreds of experiments in fields ranging from fluid physics to materials sciences to medical research.Up to seven people would live on the outpost, which would be regularly resupplied by the space shuttle and other ships. The crew would have its own habitation module, with a kitchen, bathroom, shower, sleeping quarters and a medical station.

The shiny metal "torpedo" seemed out of place in the daylight of the Main Green. So too did the men and women gathered around it wearing ivy wreaths and carrying spice "offerings."A standard-bearer marched to the beat of a snare drum as four young men carried the artifact on two support beams, as if carrying a ritual sacrifice to an altar

Human aerial bombardments might have pushed Neanderthals to extinction, suggests new research. Changes in bone shape left by a life of overhand throwing hint that Stone Age humans regularly threw heavy objects, such as stones or spears, while Neanderthals did not

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Under a sky of darkening clouds on a hill above the valley where tradition says David and Goliath battled, archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel triumphantly rests his hands on a 10-ton limestone rock, part of a newly discovered second gate to an ancient fortified city he is unearthing.Garfinkel sees the massive gate, the largest ever found from the period, as potentially further evidence that the first kingdom of the Israelites was as grand as the Bible describes.

Less than 1% of the world's oceans have been given protected status, according to a major survey.Governments have committed to a target of protecting 10% by 2012, which the authors of the new report say there is no chance of meeting.Protecting ecologically important areas can help fish stocks to regenerate, and benefit the tourism industry.The survey was led by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and is published in the journal Conservation Letters.

Long ago, astronomers spotted a galaxy far away and wondered why it was giving birth to so many stars. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, they have finally figured out the answer to the puzzle: The starburst galaxy turns out to be farther away than they thought

New clues suggest an 330-foot asteroid slammed into the Atlantic Ocean. Long before New York City was the Big Apple, or even New Amsterdam, a giant tsunami crashed ashore.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - Attention all culture-craving couch potatoes: Cultural riches from over 2,000 years of European civilization are going digital.

The best map of wind speeds on Jupiter ever produced proves that the massive weather system known as the Great Red Spot has shrunken over the past dozen years.Understanding cloud patterns on distant planetary surfaces, such as those at Saturn or Jupiter, is potentially confusing because clouds deform over time. Using sophisticated software, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have been able to take the deformations into account (and the much easier-to-deal-with factor of the planet's rotation) and have calculated the best velocity maps yet for the surface of Jupiter.

FOR a company whose business is rocket science Lockheed Martin has been paying unusual attention to plumbing of late. The aerospace giant has kept its engineers occupied for the past 12 months poring over designs for what amounts to a very long fibreglass pipe.

WANTED: Rocky planet outside of our solar system. Must not be too hot or too cold, but just the right temperature to support life.It sounds like a simple enough wish list, but finding a planet that fulfils all of these criteria has kept astronomers busy for decades. Until recently, it meant finding a planet in the "Goldilocks zone" - orbiting its star at just the right distance to keep surface water liquid rather than being boiled off or frozen solid.

Scientists announced Wednesday the discovery of a previously unidentified nearby source of high-energy cosmic rays. The finding was made with a NASA-funded balloon-borne instrument high over Antarctica.Researchers from the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) collaboration, led by scientists at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, published the results in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Nature. The new results show an unexpected surplus of cosmic ray electrons at very high energy -- 300-800 billion electron volts -- that must come from a previously unidentified source or from the annihilation of very exotic theoretical particles used to explain dark matter.

An Arabic traveler who engraved his name on a block of red sandstone over 1,300 years ago may help solve a question about the Qur'an that has vexed historians for hundreds of years: Why was the text seemingly written without diacritical marks?Diacritical marks, which include accent marks, tildes, umlauts and other notations, help to distinguish one letter from another and aid in pronunciation. When added or removed, they can completely change the meaning of a word or sentence.

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya plans to invite the world's top archaeologists to unearth its ancient past as it tries to lure more tourists after decades in isolation, the head of the government's archaeology department said.With a central role in early human migration, the desert country on the Mediterranean is home to a multitude of ancient and prehistoric sites. Many are thought to remain undiscovered.

A 30-year-old Spanish woman has made medical history by becoming the first patient to receive a whole organ transplant grown using her own cells.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- Researchers studying a rare and endangered species of penguin have uncovered a species that disappeared about 500 years ago.The research suggests that the first humans in New Zealand hunted the newly found Waitaha penguin to extinction by 1500, about 250 years after their arrival on the islands. But the loss of the Waitaha allowed another kind of penguin to thrive -- the yellow-eyed species that now also faces extinction, Philip Seddon of Otago University, a co-author of the study, said Wednesday.

(CNN) -- A team of scientists at Penn State University could be one step closer to bringing extinct species back to life.Using next-generation instruments and groundbreaking DNA-reading techniques, scientists have uncovered much of the genetic code of the woolly mammoth, a prehistoric species of elephant.The achievement could help scientists study why some species go extinct but others do not, and may even be useful in protecting other animals from extinction.

"The Bible's Buried Secrets," premiering tonight on PBS, presents archaeological findings that will annoy believers as well as skeptics - which suggests the TV documentary just might be on the right track.

A small tribe of Indians in Paraguay who have had virtually no contact with the outside world won a legal battle this week when rights groups stopped a Brazilian company from continuing to bulldoze the forest to clear land for cattle ranches.The Totobiegosode tribe, said to number no more than 300, is the last group of uncontacted Indians in South America outside the Amazon River basin, indigenous rights groups say.The Totobiegosode, who are part of the larger Ayoreo ethnic group, are nomadic Indians who hunt and fish, as well as gather fruit and honey and cultivate small temporary plots during the rainy season. They live communally, four to six families to a dwelling, in the dense forests of northwestern Paraguay.

Mystery surrounding one of the county's medieval legends has been reignited after an ancient stone coffin linked to Richard III was unearthed on a building site.The solid stone sarcophagus was discovered in the grounds of a property in Earl Shilton, by the home's former gardener Reg Colver, where it had formed part of a water garden built in the early 1900s.Archaeologists believe it dates from the time Richard died and could have been buried in the same church, Greyfriars, which once existed near Leicester Cathedral.

An international team of scientists who analyzed data from the Gamma Ray Spectrometer onboard NASA's Mars Odyssey reports new evidence for the controversial idea that oceans once covered about a third of ancient Mars.

Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear.The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma "jet."

Shock waves around dusty, young stars might be creating the raw materials for planets, scientists now say.

A US funeral business that specializes in launching cremated human remains into Earth's orbit has begun taking reservations for landing small capsules of ashes on the moon, announced the company's founder.

ATHENS - "I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it."For those who believe the ancient Greeks thought of everything first, proof has been found in a 4th century AD joke book featuring an ancestor of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch where a man returns a parrot to a shop, complaining it is dead.

It may not straddle the port as its predecessor once did, but in terms of sheer luminosity and eye-catching height the new Colossus of Rhodes will not disappoint. Nor will it fall short of the symbolism that once imbued the ancient monument.Twenty-three centuries after craftsmen carved the legendary statue that has inspired legions of painters, poets, playwrights and politicians, a new world wonder, built in the spirit of the original Colossus, is about to be born on the Aegean island.

A rare 2,500-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus shattered in a student protest almost four decades ago is expected to be a whole, new artifact when it returns to its home in Montreal after a sojourn in Gatineau.The elaborately-painted Hetep-Bastet coffin and the mummy inside are on loan to the Museum of Civilization, which plans to hand the ancient wooden coffin back to its owner, the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), in far better condition than when it left.

A recently discovered female pelvis is changing minds about the head size of an ancient human ancestor, Homo erectus, and consequently revising notions about how smart they may have been.

SETI, (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak and host of the weekly radio show "Are We Alone," predicted during a recent conference in San Francisco that "We'll find ET within two-dozen years", according to CNET News staffer Daniel Terdiman.The prediction is based on a few qualifiers. The first is the assumption made by researchers within SITI that the power, range and speed of the Allen Telescope Array with 42 radio camera dishes currently on line and a projected total of 350 dishes will evolve into new technologies capable of distances and speed unfathomable presently. Secondly, an obvious component is necessary funding for evolving technologies.

If US President-elect Barack Obama wants to abandon NASA's road map to the Moon, the space agency's chief says he wants no part of it.Not that NASA administrator Mike Griffin, a Bush administration appointee, is expecting to stay on when the Democrat takes office on 20 January

IT WAS the evolutionary theory of its age. A revolutionary hypothesis that undermined the cherished notion that we humans are somehow special, driving a deep wedge between science and religion. The philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for espousing it; Galileo Galilei, the most brilliant scientist of his age, was silenced. But Nicolaus Copernicus's idea that Earth was just one of many planets orbiting the sun - and so occupied no exceptional position in the cosmos - has endured and become a foundation stone of our understanding of the universe.

Iranian and Italian archeologists have found clues about the daily life of people living near Persepolis during the Achaemenid Dynasty.A detailed scientific study into the daily life of ordinary people living near Persepolis has been carried out for the first time, revealing that the area has been permanently occupied since the Achaemenid era.

Palaeontologists have pieced together the fossilised skull of the oldest example yet found of a woolly rhinoceros in Europe.The 460,000-year-old skull, which was found in Germany, had to be reconstructed from 53 fragments.The extinct mammals reached a length of three-and-a-half metres in adulthood and, unlike their modern relatives, were covered in shaggy hair.Details of the work appear in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews

European scientists said they had selected a shortlist of eight men Monday willing to take part in a 105-day isolation experiment to further knowledge about the stress of a manned trip to Mars.Six of the eight candidates will be chosen to live, eat, sleep and work inside a sealed laboratory in Moscow that will simulate a Martian mission, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

It sounds like a science fiction movie: A killer contagion threatens the Earth, but scientists save the day with a designer drug that forces the virus to mutate itself out of existence. The killer disease? Still a fiction. The drug? It could become a reality thanks to a new study by Rice University bioengineers.

Scientists are on the hunt for matter's arch nemesis, antimatter, and new evidence suggests the search may have become even trickier.The data, collected at a supercluster of galaxies called the Bullet Cluster, show no evidence of primordial antimatter. But the non-finding helps to set a limit on where the wacky particles could be hiding, the researchers say

The $3-million refurbishing of a Beijing studio belonging to one of China's most artistic emperors demanded an extraordinary international partnership.Reporting from Beijing -- For Bonnie Burnham, it was like entering a Chinese version of an Egyptian tomb.On a cool autumn day in 1999, the president of the World Monuments Fund followed her guides into an area where few had set foot since 1924, when China's last emperor vacated the palace and locked the doors to the studio behind him.

AMBITIOUS plans have been unveiled for the rebuilding of the Temple of Artemis - one of the original seven wonders of the world at Selçuk, near Izmir.The Temple of Artemis, or Artemision in Greek, recalled in both Greek and Byzantine anthologies for its magnificence, was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World. After decades of vandalism, religious conflict and decay it is finally to be rebuilt.

A Japanese scholar leading a multiyear archaeological project in Bolivia says his team has found a small human skeleton well over 1,000 years old in this year's excavation, the first discovery of its kind in that country."The well-preserved skeleton was very small in size, about 70 cm tall, with a disproportionately large head, but it had characteristics of an adult," Katsuyoshi Sanematsu, a professor of anthropology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, said in a recent interview.

Iran has banned mining at the home of its world renowned salt mummies in a bid to protect the historical area northwest of the country.The Ministry of Industries and Mines has cancelled the mining permit for the Chehrabad Salt Mine; industrial authorities have also informed the mine owners that any actions on their behalf are as of now prohibited in the area.The area will become a scientific and archeological research center.

Nasa says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead.Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth.Phoenix, which landed on the planet's northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold and dark of an advancing winter.The US space agency says it will continue to try to contact the craft but does not expect to hear from it.

The recent run-up in gasoline prices was a not-too-subtle reminder that there's a limited amount of oil on Earth. Someday soon, we're going to need a new source of fuel.Part of the answer could be fuels made from the plant material cellulose. Researchers at the new Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley are working on a recipe for this biofuel.

Earth needs a "Plan B" in the fight against global warming, in case efforts to curb greenhouse emissions fail or are inadequate, said an American scientist in testimony Monday to the British government.Such a backup plan would probably need to involve climate engineering projects to deliberately counteract the effects of global warming. The engineering ideas that have been floated in recent years include injecting sunlight-blocking compounds into the upper atmosphere or building a gigantic structure in space to filter sunlight reaching Earth.

The surface of the largest known 'plutoid' appears to have changed in recent years, according to new measurements of how elements are layered on its icy surface. But astronomers cannot explain the cause of the apparent change.Eris is the largest known object beyond the orbit of Neptune, weighing nearly a third more than Pluto. It travels on an elongated path around the Sun that takes about 560 years to complete.Astronomers think the distant world is covered by a layer of frozen methane and small amounts of nitrogen ice. When it comes near the Sun, these ices are thought to vaporise from sunlit portions of the surface and condense onto regions in shadow.

"The first line of coconut trees has disappeared" - Kiribati inhabitantWhile the world dithers about tackling climate change, in some parts of the world people are running out of time. In Florida sea level rises can be worked around to some extent - condos can be put on stilts and moved away from the shoreline. But on some islands you can only move back so far before you have to start worrying about the water at your back door as well as the water in front.

The sound of the 767's jet engines changed pitch as we began our descent into Easter Island. The flight attendant paused beside my seat."The Mataveri airport runway has an extra 21/2 miles," she informed me. She obviously expected a response, so I asked, "How come?""It's an emergency landing site for the space shuttle."Satisfied with my reaction, she went forward to do the seatbelt and seat back bit, leaving me to ponder the unlikely pairing of space exploration with the ancient culture of this remote island. I have been fascinated with Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as the natives call it, for years.

BERLIN, Germany (AP) -- Germans and Israelis on Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-incited riots that began their campaign to destroy European Jewry, with ceremonies, concerts and vows to honor the victims with renewed vigilance.

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- An unusual sight greeted Jerusalem police as they entered one of Christianity's holiest sites Sunday morning: dozens of monks punching and kicking each other in a massive brawl.Monks from the Greek Orthodox and Armenian denominations were preparing for a ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City when a disagreement led to a full-fledged fistfight.

SYDNEY: New images of the far side of the Moon show that volcanoes continued to erupt there for much longer than previously thought.The Moon is covered by large 'seas' of basalt, called mares. Most mares stopped forming three billion years ago, one billion years after the Moon formed from a collision between the Earth and another nascent planetoid.

Many of the world's deep-sea octopuses evolved from a common ancestor, whose closest living relative still exists in the Southern Ocean, a study has shown.Researchers suggest that the creatures evolved after being driven to other ocean basins 30 million years ago by nutrient-rich and salty currents.The findings form part of a decade-long global research programme to learn more about life in the world's oceans.

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

A British scientist is hoping to reverse the critical decline of the honeybee by breeding 'cleaner bees' to protect hives from potentially devastating diseases.Francis Ratnieks, the UK's only professor of apiculture, is undertaking pioneering research based on a breed of worker bee genetically programmed to keep hives clean. So-called 'hygienic' bees are responsible for removing dead pupae and larvae from hives, but they only exist in very small numbers.

The Internet is a fast-growing 40-year-old city in desperate need of renovation. In 2008 1.5 billion people worldwide used the likes of BitTorrent, IM, Facebook, e-mail, Google, and Skype via communications protocols originally intended for mere hundreds. The wear is not only showing but worsening: Upkeep and patchwork programming continue to make running networks expensive, and cybercrime is flourishing. In response, teams of computer scientists are gathering to form a Manhattan Project of sorts to rethink the Internet.

In a paper published in Genome Research on Nov. 4, scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) report that what was previously believed to be "junk" DNA is one of the important ingredients distinguishing humans from other species.

Where are the muon-muon pairs coming from?That's the question that has been consuming the blogs of physicists and others since late last week. Intrigued by a new study published by Fermilab´s CDF collaboration at arxiv.org, scientists are speculating - with great caution - that unusual muon-muon observations could point to physics beyond the Standard Model.

In the early 1800s, during the peak of the Industrial Revolution, modern science revolved around steam engines and other coal-powered applications. So it may seem a bit out of place that, in 1833, an Italian physicist named G. D. Botto was performing experiments on a technique for generating hydrogen.

You may appreciate the romantic twinkling of the stars, but the way Earth's atmosphere distorts the light from celestial objects is a nightmare for astronomers, making them appear blurry.So a shape-shifting magnetic mirror made from antifreeze would be good news, making it easier to remove those twinkles and clear the view for ground-based telescopes.

THE European Aviation Safety Agency is developing safety rules for civilian space flight - but they will only apply while craft are in the Earth's atmosphere.With Sweden already building a spaceport from which Virgin Galactic may offer flights into the aurora borealis, EASA has decided to act. "Both [Virgin's] carrier aircraft and the rocket-powered aeroplane/glider would meet the definition of an aircraft, and therefore fall under EASA's scope," says a spokesman.

Apocalypto fans might be forgiven for thinking the fabled collapse of the ancient Maya, the retreat of a civilization from pyramids and ceremonial centers across Central America from 800 to 1000 A.D., involved all sorts of cataclysmic events, war, famine and devastation. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed detailed how environmental disasters might be to blame, a popular scholarly explanation for the Maya collapse.

WASHINGTON - Space Exploration Technologies held an invitation-only meeting at its Hawthorne, Calif.-based headquarters on Friday for potential customers of its new DragonLab, a free-flying version of the reusable Dragon capsule the company is building for international space station resupply missions.

SALT LAKE CITY - So maybe there was no dinosaur dancing after all.Paleontologists say there are no signs of dinosaur tracks at a remote spot along the Utah-Arizona border that was previously described by University of Utah geologists as a "dinosaur dance floor" for its density of tracks.

Nasa scientists have contributed to a spate of UFO sighting videos sweeping the internet.The US space agency were filming from a shuttle outside the earth's orbit in April this year when the cameras picked up four objects that have never been identified.The footage came after two similarly eerie sightings a few days apart on different sides of the world.

Wind, temperature, humidity and the moisture level of the fuel all combine to occasionally make the right settings for the National Park Service to conduct a prescribed burn. All were in alignment Wednesday for a 6-acre prescribed burn in Hopewell Culture National Historic Park at 4731 Sulphur Lick Road.

India is celebrating the arrival of its Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft at the Moon.An 817-second burn from the probe's engine on Saturday slowed Chandrayaan sufficiently for it to be captured by the lunar body's gravity.

Two mockingbirds, which are said to have helped Charles Darwin develop his theory on evolution, are to go on public display for the first time.

After more than two years of very low sunspot activity and hardly any flares, the sun is ramping up activity now.The sun's activity ebbs and flows on a roughly 11-year cycle. It can range from very quiet to violent space storms that knock out power grids on Earth and disrupt radio and satellite communications. The last peak was in 2000, and scientists have in recent months figured the low point was occurring. Fresh sunspots during October suggest the corner has been turned.

A bit of greenery near our homes can cut the "health gap" between rich and poor, say researchers from two Scottish universities.Even small parks in the heart of our cities can protect us from strokes and heart disease, perhaps by cutting stress or boosting exercise.Their study, in The Lancet, matched data about hundreds of thousands of deaths to green spaces in local areas.Councils should introduce more greenery to improve wellbeing, they said

Some of the tiniest solar cells ever built have been successfully tested as a power source for even tinier microscopic machines. An article in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (JRSE), published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP), describes an inch-long array of 20 of these cells -- each one about a quarter the size of a lowercase "o" in a standard 12-point font.

Earth scientists are attempting to predict the future impacts of climate change by reconstructing the past behavior of Arctic climate and ocean circulation. In a November special issue of the journal Ecology, a group of scientists report that if current patterns of change in the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans continue, alterations of ocean circulation could occur on a global scale, with potentially dramatic implications for the world's climate and biosphere.

They are looking for the hockey stick. Hockey sticks are the shape technology startups hope their sales graphs will assume: a modestly ascending blade, followed by a sudden turn to a near-vertical long handle. Those who assembled in San Jose in late October for the Singularity Summit are awaiting the point where machine intelligence surpasses that of humans and takes off near-vertically into recursive self-improvement.

The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world. Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up with engineers from Caterpillar to automate the 700-ton trucks, which are made to haul loads up to 240 tons from mines.

Volcanic activity on the far side of the moon may have lasted longer than previously thought, recent images from a Japanese lunar satellite suggest.

A hot air balloon drifts gently in the breeze, gliding over mountain ranges and vast lakes. Thick clouds extend over the entire horizon, threatening rain. The meager light that filters through illuminates one side of the balloon, making it look like a giant question mark in the sky.

An inch-long array of some of the tiniest solar cells ever built has been successfully tested as a power source for microscopic machines, a new study reports.

Scientists have decoded the complete DNA of a cancer patient and traced her disease to its genetic roots.The Washington University team identified 10 gene mutations which appeared key to the development of the woman's acute myeloid leukaemia.Just two of these had been linked to the disease before.The sequencing technique, described in the journal Nature, could be applied to other cancers and aid the design of targeted drugs

Epic voyage to discover the origins and migration routes of the ancestors of ancient Polynesians and their animalsTwo Durham University scientists are to play a key part in a 6000km trip following the migration route of ancient Pacific cultures.

The demise of some of China's ruling dynasties may have been linked to changes in the strength of monsoon rains, a new study suggests.The findings come from 1,800-year record of the Asian monsoon preserved in a stalagmite from a Chinese cave.Weak - and therefore dry - monsoon periods coincided with the demise of the Tang, Yuan and Ming imperial dynasties, the scientists said.A US-Chinese team report their work in the journal Sciencee, could be applied to other cancers and aid the design of targeted drugs.

Chinese history is replete with the rise and fall of dynasties, but researchers now have identified a natural phenomenon that may have been the last straw for some of them: a weakening of the summer Asian Monsoons.Such weakening accompanied the fall of three dynasties and now could be lessening precipitation in northern China.Results of the study, led by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Lanzhou University in China, appear in the journal Science.

Internet "black boxes" will be used to collect every email and web visit in the UK under the Government's plans for a giant "big brother" database, The Independent has learnt.Home Office officials have told senior figures from the internet and telecommunications industries that the "black box" technology could automatically retain and store raw data from the web before transferring it to a giant central database controlled by the Government.Plans to create a database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made in the UK have provoked a huge public outcry. Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, described it as "step too far" and the Government's own terrorism watchdog said that as a "raw idea" it was "awful".

Voters yesterday overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, making getting caught with less than an ounce of pot punishable by a civil fine of $100. The change in the law means someone found carrying dozens of joints will no longer be reported to the state's criminal history board.

With an outdated kitchen and living space that measures only about 900 square feet, the modest house at 4420 Ohio Street isn't your typical $400,000 listing. It's what lies beneath the home that excites lovers of St. Louis history, or, in this case, prehistory.The house sits on Sugar Loaf Mound, the city's last remaining link with the native people who lived here centuries before 1764, when Auguste Chouteau and a band of Creoles landed at the river's edge.

What should be done with objects from antiquity, when their provenance is uncertain?From the debate over the British Museum's Elgin Marbles, to the conviction of art dealer Giacomo Medici in 2004 for selling millions of pounds worth of stolen Italian antiquities on the international market, curators face a minefield when acquiring new objects.Now, the director of the Art Institute in Chicago, James Cuno, has argued that we should not waste time debating what to do with objects whose origin is less than completely certain.

The author and 'This American Life' correspondent talks about her newest book on the words and influence of the colonies' early religious leaders

LONDON - A computer simulation showing the formation and evolution of a galaxy like the Milky Way points to where scientists should look to spot dark matter, researchers reported Wednesday.The findings published in the journal Nature move researchers a step closer to unraveling the mystery of the substance that makes up most of the universe, said Carlos Frenk, a cosmologist at Durham University in Britain.

Laboratories have for the first time sequenced the full genetic code of an African and an Asian in what amounts to a major step towards the goal of a tailor-made profile of one's DNA.Until now, the genomes of only two individuals -- James Watson, who co-determined DNA's double-helix structure, and maverick biotech entrepreneur Craig Venter -- have been unravelled.

The universe is full of water, mostly in the form of very cold ice films deposited on interstellar dust particles, but until recently little was known about the detailed small scale structure. Now the latest quick freezing techniques coupled with sophisticated scanning electron microscopy techniques, are allowing physicists to create ice films in cold conditions similar to outer space and observe the detailed molecular organisation, yielding clues to fundamental questions including possibly the origin of life. Researchers have been surprised by some of the results, not least by the sheer beauty of some of the images created, according to Julyan Cartwright, a specialist in ice structures at the Andalusian Institute for Earth Sciences (IACT) of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Granada in Spain.

CNN viewers saw double Tuesday when the cable news giant used a hologram to "beam up" a reporter from Chicago to New York for election analysis.Like a character out of the science fiction movie "Star Wars," veteran political anchor Wolf Blitzer used a 3D hologram system to transport correspondent Jessica Yellin into his studio.

Scientists believe they have found a way of protecting astronauts from a dangerous source of space radiation, thus lifting a major doubt clouding the dream to send humans to Mars.Their breakthrough takes forward ideas born in the golden age of science fiction, including a proton shield used in the TV show "Star Trek," says one of the researchers.Space weather is one of the greatest challenges facing Mission Red Planet sketched by the United States and Europe for some three decades from now.

There's a child-like glee in knowing that off the back of recent experiments, scientists may try to "resurrect" long dead Woolly Mammoths that keeled over in the Siberian permafrost 11,000 years ago.The flurry of excitement follows an announcement from Japanese researchers who created healthy mouse pups by cloning cells from adult mice that had been languishing in the deep freeze for more than a year.

Take a close look at that cheap piece of scrap iron before you toss it in the trash. Wei-xian Zhang has a good use for it. Someday soon, much of the world might also.Zhang, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, recently concluded a five-year research project in which he and his colleagues at Tongji University in Shanghai used two million pounds of iron to detoxify pollutants in industrial wastewater.

Cuzco, I decided, had to be the gayest city in South America.Everywhere I turned were rainbow flags. They fluttered in front of banks, in hotel lobbies, in restaurants, atop government buildings. There was an enormous one flapping on a flagpole in the Plaza de Armas, right next to the Peruvian flag. It made the Castro district look almost homophobic by comparison

A unique fungus that makes diesel compounds has been discovered living in trees in the rainforest, according to a paper published in the November issue of Microbiology. The fungus is potentially a totally new source of green energy and scientists are now working to develop its fuel producing potential."This is the only organism that has ever been shown to produce such an important combination of fuel substances," said Professor Gary Strobel from Montana State University. "The fungus can even make these diesel compounds from cellulose, which would make it a better source of biofuel than anything we use at the moment."