Newsdesk Archive

An Australian zoologist is leading a national project to help save the endangered Tasmanian devil from extinction, a situation that could arise within the next 20 years, experts predict.Jeremy Austin will lead the project, which has received $168,000 Australian (Australian dollars currently are about two-thirds the value of U.S. dollars) from that nation's government. The research will rely on genetic procedures to examine the impact of an infectious cancer, devil facial tumor disease, on Tasmanian devils.

LONDON - A mechanical snake that can enter the body through natural orifices -- not an incision -- to perform operations is just one futuristic device researchers believe will transform traditional surgical techniques.

The Next Big Thing? The memristor, a microscopic component that can "remember" electrical states even when turned off. It's expected to be far cheaper and faster than flash storage. A theoretical concept since 1971, it has now been built in labs and is already starting to revolutionize everything we know about computing, possibly making flash memory, RAM, and even hard drives obsolete within a decade.

A 12,000-year-old burial site in Israel contains offerings that include 50 tortoise shells and a human foot, and appears to be one of the earliest known graves of a female shaman.The remains were discovered in a small cave called Hilazon Tachtit, which functioned as a burial site for at least 28 individuals. The grave woman, likely a shaman, was separated from the other bodies by a circular wall of stones.

One of the teams competing for the $20 million top prize in the Google Lunar X Prize has announced its plans for an ambitious series of moon missions, beginning with a proposed trip to the historic Apollo 11 landing site. The team, Astrobotic Technology Inc., wants to send a rover to Tranquility Base in May 2010 to see how the relics left behind by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have weathered over the 40 years

An analysis of data from three states suggests that counties with higher precipitation levels also have higher autism rates, researchers report today.The scientists speculate that the precipitation itself, which might carry pollutants, or its possible consequences, such as increased TV-watching, decreased vitamin D levels or increased exposure to household chemicals, might trigger autism in genetically susceptible children

A manned mission to Mars is a step closer to reality after British scientists overcame one of its biggest obstacles - shielding astronauts from deadly solar storms.Putting a man on the Red Planet has been the favourite subject of science fiction writers and the dream of scientists ever since space travel was first envisaged.

Once in a while, we run across a science story that is hard to believe until you see it. That's how we felt about this story when we first saw human beings operating computers, writing e-mails, and driving wheelchairs with nothing but their thoughts.Quietly in a number of laboratories, an astounding technology is developing that directly connects the human brain to a computer. It's like a sudden leap in human evolution - a leap that could one day help paralyzed people to walk again and amputees to move bionic limbs. As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, the connection has already been made for a few people, and for them it has been life changing

Japanese scientists have managed to create clones from the bodies of mice which have been frozen for 16 years.Cloning has largely been done using just live donor cells, transferring their DNA to recipient eggs.Using previously frozen cells runs the risk of ice damage to the DNA unless carefully handled.The scientists in Kobe, Japan, said their technique raised the possibility of recreating extinct creatures, such as mammoth, from their frozen remains.

Future astronauts could benefit from a magnetic "umbrella" that deflects harmful space radiation around their crew capsule, scientists say.

Jakarta, Nov 3 (ANI): A team of archeologists, which has discovered six ancient relics, a Chinese coin, and a temple foundation in a village in the island of Java, Indonesia, have unearthed what looks like an altar and ancient ritual site used for offerings.

Indianapolis - A simple tool carved from a deer's leg bone that college students unearthed in 2003 is more than 10,000 years old, making it the oldest non-stone human artifact ever found in Indiana, scientists say.

After Japan's air force chief was sacked over an essay in which he appeared to question his country's accepted role as an aggressor in World War II, the BBC's Andre Vornic reports from Tokyo on Japanese attitudes to the war.

For an eighth year now, a team of archeologists led by Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov, has been exploring the grounds of the holy city of Perperikon(also Perpericon) in the eastern Rhodope Mountains.

Florence, October 28 - The world's top Leonardo Da Vinci expert on Tuesday spoke out in favour of dismantling a 12-volume collection of work by the Renaissance genius. Commenting on plans to reverse a controversial 1970s restoration project, which would leave the Codex Atlanticus as a bundle of loose pages, Carlo Pedretti said he approved of the proposal. ''The damage has already been done. The Codex Atlanticus was ruined when its pages were first assembled into 12 volumes,'' he said.

Many years ago, when I was working as an inspector of antiquities in Luxor, I went one night by the light of the full moon with Sheikh Nagdi, head of the guards in the Valley of the Kings, to climb Al-Qurn, the pyramid-shaped mountain that rises above the valley. I went to sleep at the top of the mountain. At sunrise I opened my eyes and looked at all of the tombs in the valley from the top of the mountain, thinking about all the great discoveries that had been made there, and the many adventurers and archaeologists who had both good and difficult ones.

Until you notice the orange-suited men clambering around, it's hard to grasp the extraordinary scale of this underground crystal forest.

These astonishing scenes are the aftermath of a deluge of hailstones that buried a town in a river of ice.Ottery St Mary, in Devon, was plunged into chaos by the storm in the early hours yesterday

But a new book has now revealed in extraordinary detail the standards expected of Britain's soldiers fighting on the front line in the First World War.The compilation of officers' manuals - which have been published for the first time since the end of the conflict - gives a new insight into the daily perils the men faced as well as the lighter side of army life.

When Julius Caesar arrived off the coast of Britain with his hundred-ship force in August, 55 b.c., he was greeted by a host of defenders poised to hurl spears down on his invading army from the towering Dover cliffs. Seeking a better landing site, he sailed on a strong afternoon current and landed his troops at a beach seven miles away, according to his own account.

Changes to the climate due to human activity can now be detected on every continent, following a study showing that temperature rises in the Antarctic as well as the Arctic are the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

The old adage 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' has kept humans happy in business for centuries.But now scientists have discovered that chimpanzees keep a mental record of helpful acts so they can return a favour, a study claims.

HABITABLE planets may be lurking in the wake of Jupiter-like planets as they orbit distant stars.When a gas giant coalesces from the swirling nebula of gas and dust surrounding a young star, the planet's gravity forms a wake ahead and behind it, concentrating enough matter there for it to clump together and form smaller, rocky planets like Earth. That's according to simulations led by Wladimir Lyra of the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in Sweden. Objects born in Jupiter's wake may have merged to form the planet Saturn, which was then nudged into its current position by the gravity of other planets, the team says.

In the latest twist in the tug-of-war between Native Americans and anthropologists, officials at the University of California have decided not to repatriate a pair of well-preserved skeletons that are nearly 10,000 years old.

The Phoenicians, enigmatic people from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, stamped their mark on maritime history, and now research has revealed that they also left a lasting genetic imprint.

Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of the campsite of a marooned sailor who is said to have inspired the fictional castaway Robinson Crusoe.The findings, carried in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology, follow digs on a Pacific island west of Chile.Daniel Defoe is believed to have based Crusoe on Alexander Selkirk, a Scotsman rescued from the island in 1709.Postholes suggest the sailor built two shelters near a stream, with a look-out point to watch for approaching ships.

The oldest known cases of malaria have been discovered in two 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummies, scientists announced.Researchers in Germany studied bone tissue samples from more than 90 mummies found in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, now called Luxor.Two adult mummies from separate tombs had tissues containing ancient DNA from a parasite known to cause malaria, the researchers announced at a conference last week.

Petitions calling for the pardon of those executed in the UK's witch trials are being handed to the UK and Scottish governments.About 400 people in England and 2,000 in Scotland were executed following accusations of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries.The crime of being a witch was abolished by the 1735 Witchcraft Act.

1961: The Soviet Union detonates the largest nuclear or thermonuclear weapon ever constructed.The Tsar Bomba (as it was known in the West; the Soviets referred to it as Big Ivan or, more officially, RDS-220) was a three-stage hydrogen device with a 100-megaton capacity. Andrei Sakharov, who later suffered a crisis of conscience and became a celebrated Soviet anti-nuclear dissident, was the project leader and senior weapons designer.

If it seems like spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites have been around forever, it's because they nearly have, according to new genetic research that found these arachnids first emerged at least 400 to 450 million years ago.The study, published in the latest issue of Experimental and Applied Acarology, extends the known world presence of these creepy crawlies by over 200 million years. The oldest fossil spider is 125 to 135 million years old, while the oldest fossil scorpion is around 200 million years old.

A quiet wind turbine developed in Scotland is now available in the US and Canada. Its developers say that the roof-based turbine can provide significant power for homes and commercial buildings alike.Originally designed by Scotland-based Renewable Devices, the Swift wind turbine is being sold in the US by Cascade Engineering of Grand Rapids, Mich.

During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn't believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

A rare reptile with lineage dating back to the dinosaur age has been found nesting on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in about 200 years, officials said Friday.Four leathery, white eggs from an indigenous tuatara were found by staff at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in the capital, Wellington, during routine maintenance work Friday, conservation manager Rouen Epson said.

New excavations have revealed that İzmir, once believe to be 5,000 years old, may be as old as 8,500 years.

The Cologne archaeologist Dr. Ralf Vogelsang from the Africa Research Centre of the Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology and a team of international researchers have succeeded in dating layers in South Africa that provide information about stone tool innovation on the Middle Stone Age. This archaeological epoch began at the same time as the earliest appearances of humans (homo sapiens sapiens), about 200,000 years ago, in Africa and differs from the European Middle Stone Age chronologically.

Halloween conjures visions of ghosts, hauntings and many unexplained phenomena that play on our worst fears

The moon fascinates us. The only world other than Earth upon which humans have set foot, we know a remarkable amount about it, yet countless mysteries remain.One theory, presented at Europlanet's latest Planetary Science Congress by Joop Houtkooper from the University of Giessen, suggests that conditions in some lunar craters may be perfect for preserving samples of life from Earth and maybe even Mars.

The agency unveils the test module for structural testing at Edwards Air Force Base. The capsule, designed to carry humans to the moon, looks a lot like the one that first did so four decades ago.Reporting from Edwards Air Force Base -- NASA rolled out its next-generation space capsule here Wednesday, revealing a bulbous module that is scheduled to carry humans back to the moon in 2020 and eventually onward to Mars.

Guatemala City - At a Press Conference today, given by the Ministry of Culture, Guatemala's Archaeologists Christa Schieber de Lavarreda and Miguel Orrego Corzo presented the new and mysterious finding of the enigmatic sculpture:"The Carrier of the Ancestor of Tak'alik Ab'aj ". Monuments 215 and 217.

The Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 was not the first of its size to hit the region, according to new research.Two international collaborations have sampled the sediments in Thailand and Sumatra to examine tsunami history.At both sites, there was evidence of sediment laid down by a large tsunami between 600 and 700 years ago, pre-dating written and oral records.

A "living fossil" tree species is helping a University of Michigan researcher understand how tropical forests responded to past climate change and how they may react to global warming in the future. The research appears in the November issue of the journal Evolution.Symphonia globulifera is a widespread tropical tree with a history that goes back some 45 million years in Africa, said Christopher Dick, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who is lead author on the paper. It is unusual among tropical trees in having a well-studied fossil record, partly because the oil industry uses its distinctive pollen fossils as a stratigraphic tool.

The importance of a new archeological site in St George, Utah, U.S. was recently highlighted by Andrew Milner, Paleontologist, City of St. George, Jim Kirkland, State Paleontologist and Sidney Ash, Paleo-botanists. The site is significant because it is the only early Jurassic land flora known in the western United States. It provides evidence that a variety of land plants were present in the area about 200 million years ago.

A judge is set to throw out charges against experts accused of faking a stone box that claimed to offer the first physical proof of the existence of Christ - raising the possibility once again that it could be genuine.The discovery of the 2,000-year-old ossuary, or bone box, bearing the words, 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus', was regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries when it emerged nearly a decade ago.

In the latest twist in the tug-of-war between Native Americans and anthropologists, officials at the University of California have decided not to repatriate a pair of well-preserved skeletons that are nearly 10,000 years old.Archaeology students unearthed the bones in 1976 near the clifftop home of the chancellor of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). It may be possible to extract some of the oldest human DNA in North America from the exquisitely preserved remains, say researchers. But in the past two years the bones have become a political football over US$7-million plans to demolish and rebuild the house.

A 3,000-year-old temple featuring an image of a spider god may hold clues to little-known cultures in ancient Peru.People of the Cupisnique culture, which thrived from roughly 1500 to 1000 B.C., built the temple in the Lambayeque valley on Peru's north coast.The adobe temple, found this summer and called Collud, is the third discovered in the area in recent years.

Small islands dwarf large ones in archaeological importance, says a University of Florida researcher, who found that people who settled the Caribbean before Christopher Columbus preferred more minute pieces of land because they relied heavily on the sea.

1961: The Soviet Union detonates the largest nuclear or thermonuclear weapon ever constructed.The Tsar Bomba (as it was known in the West; the Soviets referred to it as Big Ivan or, more officially, RDS-220) was a three-stage hydrogen device with a 100-megaton capacity. Andrei Sakharov, who later suffered a crisis of conscience and became a celebrated Soviet anti-nuclear dissident, was the project leader and senior weapons designer.

Robet R. Hieronimus, Ph.D., visual artist, talk radio host, and historian will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout November to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2008, Graham will be speaking at the 2008 Earth Spirit Conference on Wisdom for Changing Times, about A Species with Amnesia. The conference will be at the Bolton Valley Resort at the top of the beautiful Green Mountains of Vermont.

LAS CRUCES, N.M. - The development of commercial suborbital space vehicles should lead eventually to businesses such as commercial hypersonic point-to-point air travel and low-cost launches to low Earth orbit, according to spaceship builders, venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs who gathered here October 22-23 to take part in the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight.

The elements are no longer able to weather away at Çatalhöyük, one of the oldest known sites of human settlement, now that the construction of a large wooden protective roof has been completed.Çatalhöyük, Turkey's most famous Neolithic site, is one the oldest known areas of human settlement, animal domestication and wheat cultivation. The Culture and Tourism Ministry's Cultural Assets and Museums general manager, Orhan Düzgün, told the Anatolia news agency that the roof's construction, which began in June of this year, had been finished.

LIMA, Peru (AP) - The government of Spain has returned 45 allegedly contraband pre-Columbian artifacts to Peru during a visit by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, officials said Monday.

YEKATERINBURG, October 27 (RIA Novosti) - Additional excavations could be carried out in the Urals area where the remains of the family of Russia's last tsar Nicholas II were found, a local archeologist said on Monday.The remains were discovered near Yekaterinburg in 1991."We plan to begin the excavations in June next year. We earlier thought we could start this fall, but the work was postponed due to lack of funding," Sergei Pogorelov told RIA Novosti

The average Viking lived a life in which spirituality and thoughts of immortality played a far more important part than the rape and pillage more usually associated with his violent race, according to new research. A study of thousands of excavated Viking graves suggests that rituals were performed at the graveside in which stories about life and death were presented as theatre, with live performances designed to help the passage of the deceased from this world into the next.

Inca nobility at Machu Picchu relied on special, permanent servants from the far corners of the empire to manage the royal estate, according to a new study of human skeletons found buried at the site.Machu Picchu sits high in the Peruvian Andes about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of the former Inca capital of Cusco.

Archeological studies near the ancient city of Persepolis in the southern Iranian province of Fars have resulted in new discoveries.Iranian and Italian archaeologists have been excavating the areas surrounding the ancient city of Persepolis since mid October. The latest round of excavations led to the discovery of various ancient dwellings near Takht-e Jamshid.

FOR dinosaur hunters, finding fossils with soft tissue and even their last meals intact has been like hitting the jackpot. Now it seems that the much-hyped dinosaur "mummies" were merely thick-skinned, suggesting that more may be found than palaeontologists had previously expected.Eric Lund of the Utah Museum of Natural History examined over a dozen newly discovered mummies in southern Utah. His analysis showed that these and other fossils all came from sand deposited in river beds that also contained remnants of wood and leaves - signs of a moist environment. This means it was too wet to dry out and mummify a dinosaur carcass, he told the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Cleveland last week. "It doesn't look like desiccation," he said.

NASA spinoff firm the Ad Astra Rocket Company has announced a key milestone in ground testing of its prototype plasma drive technology, Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR).The VASIMR "helicon first stage" - which generates the plasma for acceleration by the rest of the drive - has achieved its full rated power of 30 kilowatts using Argon propellant, according to the company. This paves the way for further trials in which in which the ion-cyclotron second stage will get to strut its stuff, boosting the helicon plasma stream to the target power of 200 kW.

German scientists took an expedition to a remote region of the Brazilian Amazon on the border with French Guyana to see if they could set up a Nazi outpost in the Amazon.The book, The Guyana Project: A German Adventure on the Amazon, says the Nazis believed they were destined to colonise and settle in parts of the world much like the pioneers of America's west.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed a new category of minerals spread across large regions of Mars. This discovery suggests that liquid water remained on the planet's surface a billion years later than scientists believed, and it played an important role in shaping the planet's surface and possibly hosting life.Researchers examining data from the orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars have found evidence of hydrated silica, commonly known as opal. The hydrated, or water-containing, mineral deposits are telltale signs of where and when water was present on ancient Mars.

Astronomers have discovered that the nearby star Epsilon Eridani has two rocky asteroid belts and an outer icy ring, making it a triple-ring system. The inner asteroid belt is a virtual twin of the belt in our solar system, while the outer asteroid belt holds 20 times more material. Moreover, the presence of these three rings of material implies that unseen planets confine and shape them.

From the moment we saw it, we knew the place held many great secrets. We had been looking for new fossil sites on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1992 with our colleagues, Helen F. James and Storrs L. Olson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., along with their children, Travis and Sydney, and our own, Mara and Alec.

Did the Bible's King David and his son Solomon control the copper industry in present-day southern Jordan? Though that remains an open question, the possibility is raised once again by research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Led by Thomas Levy of UC San Diego and Mohammad Najjar of Jordan's Friends of Archaeology, an international team of archaeologists has excavated an ancient copper-production center at Khirbat en-Nahas down to virgin soil, through more than 20 feet of industrial smelting debris, or slag.

Fossil fuels could be eliminated by 2090 if the world community took aggressive action by investing trillions of dollars on renewable energy, according to the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) and environmental group Greenpeace on Monday.The new study calls for an overhaul of worldwide energy use in order to meet worst-case scenarios for curbing greenhouse cas emissions."Renewable energy could provide all global energy needs by 2090," according to the study, entitled "Energy (R)evolution." EREC represents renewable energy industries and trade and research associations in Europe.

A new book, The Atlas of the Real World, aims to show the world through different eyes.It contains a set of world maps in which the sizes of countries have been changed, variously according to the proportions of different resources they share, and by their contributions to human society.The book is published by Thames and Hudson and produced by the researchers behind the Worldmapper website.

Forget sit-ups. Soon, people bent on betterment may well be able to turn to neural implants, wearable robotics, and brain-tweaking software to become smarter, stronger, and faster. We are entering the age of neuroengineering. This polymathic discipline capitalizes on new advances in neuroscience, computation, and biomedicine to engineer work-arounds to the frailties of humankind, be they brains crippled by Parkinson's or simply a desire to bench-press 200 pounds without breaking a sweat.

One of the world's most valuable fossil beds has been rediscovered, having been forgotten during Victorian times. Fossils recovered near Christian Malford in Wiltshire caused a sensation when they were unearthed in 1840 because they were the first to include the flesh of Jurassic wildlife.Phil Wilby, of the British Geological Survey, has now rediscovered the site and led the first dig there in more than 150 years. He hopes that freshly recovered fossils can help to explain why tens of thousands of animals died simultaneously in episodes repeated many times over about a million years.

The Neanderthal's huge nose is a fluke of evolution, not some grand adaptation, research suggests.The Neanderthal nose has been a matter of befuddlement for anthropologists, who point out that modern cold-adapted humans have narrow noses to moisten and warm air as it enters the lung, and reduce water and heat loss during exhalation.Big noses tend to be found in people whose ancestors evolved in tropical climates, where a large nasal opening helps cool the body.

It has often been said that talking to plants can help them grow, but now a plant in Japan has been taught to answer back - in the form of an internet blog.A 40cm pot plant in a Japanese cafe has been writing a regular blog about its feelings.The plant, named "Midori-san", which means "green" in Japanese, is placed on a cafe counter in Kamakura, near Tokyo and can compile its daily blog with the help of a sensor that measures electric signals and a computer algorithm that translates them into Japanese

It has often been said that talking to plants can help them grow, but now a plant in Japan has been taught to answer back - in the form of an internet blog.A 40cm pot plant in a Japanese cafe has been writing a regular blog about its feelings.The plant, named "Midori-san", which means "green" in Japanese, is placed on a cafe counter in Kamakura, near Tokyo and can compile its daily blog with the help of a sensor that measures electric signals and a computer algorithm that translates them into Japanese

Medan (ANTARA News) - Archaeologists from North Sumatra found three stone axes from prehistory periode in an excavation in a land fortress site of Putri Hijau in Namorambe village, Deli Serdang regency.

Using cutting edge technology, Egyptologist Bob Brier of the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University delved into the only standing wonder of the ancient world, the Great Pyramid, and uncovered the mystery behind cracks in the massive Egyptian structure, unearthing a new room along the way.

One of Europe's flagship space projects looks as though it is going to proceed with the UK continuing to be a bit-part player, scientists and engineers fear.

The deepening economic crisis may appear to be the perfect storm for environmentalism, but many in and around the green movement contend the opposite, seeing in it a time of opportunity.The conventional view is this: willingness to protect the environment is wedded to prosperity.When times get tough, people tighten their belts -- so their eagerness to switch to renewable energy, buy a more fuel-efficient car or promote forest conservation melts faster than organic ice cream in the Sahara.

When it comes to repairing damage done to the Earth's climate there's no shortage of ideas, ranging from schemes to put "sunshades" in orbit to burying the offending carbon dioxide underground.But ideas won't be enough, so there is an urgent need to rank those proposals to work out which should undergo rigorous testing, argues Philip Boyd of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Dunedin, New Zealand.

People in the alternative energy business have said repeatedly there are "great fundamentals" driving their businesses, namely high fossil fuel prices, supportive government policies, and growing environmental awareness.Now some of the pillars underpinning green technologies are wobbling. Oil prices have plummeted more than 50 percent since the summer, making traditional energy sources look a lot more affordable than they did six months ago for businesses and consumers alike. And the global credit crisis that has sucked the wind out of the economy has done damage to the funding of alternative energy projects as well.

The first astronauts sent to Mars should be prepared to spend the rest of their lives there, in the same way that European pioneers headed to America knowing they would not return home, says moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. In an interview with AFP, the second man to set foot on the Moon said the Red Planet offered far greater potential than Earth's satellite as a place for habitation.With what appears to be vast reserves of frozen water, Mars "is nearer terrestrial conditions, much better than the Moon and any other place," Aldrin, 78, said in a visit to Paris on Tuesday.

Everything in our universe is made of matter, but a century of physics has revealed that at the beginning of time, an exactly equal amount of antimatter existed. Then, two seconds after the Big Bang, something changed and suddenly there was more matter than antimatter. What we don't know is how matter won and opened the door to existence as we know it.Now, in a former salt mine next door to a nuclear weapons waste repository, Stanford physicists are completing the installation of a new particle detector, the Enriched Xenon Observatory 200, that they hope will provide the answer to that question.

Long before it flew to the moon, waved over the White House or was folded into tight triangles at Arlington National Cemetery; before it sparked fiery Congressional debates, reached the North Pole or the summit of Mount Everest; before it became a lapel fixture, testified to the Marines' possession of Iwo Jima, or fluttered over front porches, firetrucks and construction cranes; before it inspired a national anthem or recruiting posters for two world wars, the American ensign was just a flag.

European diners around 8,000 years ago could enjoy a bowl of instant wheat cereal that, aside from uneven cooking and maybe a few extra lumps, wasn't very different from hot wheat cereals served today, suggests a new study that describes the world's oldest known cooked cereal.Dating from between 5920 to 5730 B.C., the ancient cereal consisted of parboiled bulgur wheat that Early Neolithic Bulgarians could refresh in minutes with hot water.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Archaeologists in northern Greece have unearthed the ruins of a Neolithic house, a rare find that offers valuable information about everyday life 6,000 years ago, the Greek culture ministry said Friday.A kitchen area with two ovens, clay pots and stone tools, and two more rooms show stone age farmers processed grains in the house, which appears to have burned down."This is a rare case. All findings have remained untouched by farming or any other activity for about 6,000 years," the ministry said in a statement.

Two Egyptian mummies who died more than 3,500 years ago have provided clear evidence for the earliest known cases of malaria, according to a study presented this week in Naples at an international conference on ancient DNA.Pathologist Andreas Nerlich and colleagues at the Academic Teaching Hospital München-Bogenhausen in Munich, Germany, studied 91 bone tissue samples from ancient Egyptian mummies and skeletons dating from 3500 to 500 B.C.

If you want someone to warm to you give them a steaming hot drink, say US researchers.People are more likely to judge strangers as welcoming and trustworthy when they are holding a hot cup of coffee, experiments show.Volunteers rated people as 11% "warmer" after holding a hot drink than after holding a cold drink, the study in Science reports.The warmth of a drink also influenced how selfish participants were.

A woman has been arrested in Japan after she allegedly killed her virtual husband in a popular video game.The 43-year-old was reportedly furious at finding herself suddenly divorced in the online game Maplestory.Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character.The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data.

Inscribed animal bones and jade pieces unearthed in Changle County of eastern Shandong Province are earliest examples of Chinese characters dating back 4,500 years ago, the latest archaeological studies show.

When Philippine police confiscated 22 bags of broken pottery from antiquity smugglers near an area where Muslim rebels operated, little did they know that they may have uncovered the remnants of a long-lost tribe.Now, experts at the National Museum in the capital Manila are studying the burial urns from a tribe that lived in the Philippines over 2,000 years ago, in what could be a major archaeological discovery.

An archaeological dig this summer at Battersea, the 1768 home of the first mayor of Petersburg, found artifacts that go back 4,000 years.

NARA--Archaeologists excavating the site of a former Japanese Imperial Army facility here uncovered evidence of what they believe is the long-lost original "golden hall" of a mid-eighth century temple.Stones used for the foundations of the temple suggest the structure measured 54 by 27 meters, comparable in scale to the Great Buddha Hall of Todaiji temple, also in Nara.The dig is being conducted at the campus of the Nara University of Education.

Eryka Thorley had already excavated ancient fire hearths and stone flakes, but a severe thunderstorm on the final day of field work added a new dimension to the archaeology dig in southeast Montana.

Europe's gravity mission has been bumped to next year because of ongoing technical problems with its launcher.The arrow-shaped Goce satellite will map tiny variations in the pull of gravity experienced across the world.The information will give scientists a clearer insight into how the oceans move, and provide a universal reference to measure height anywhere on Earth.But concerns about the reliability of its Russian rocket mean a lift-off is now unlikely before February.

Your work is dangerous and your co-workers rely on you to stay alive. But you can never get far from those colleagues. You can't see your family for months, even years. The food isn't great. And forget stepping out for some fresh air.No wonder the adventure of space flight can also be stressful, isolating and depressing. So scientists are working on giving a computer the ability to offer some of the understanding guidance - if not all the warmth - of a human therapist, before psychological problems or interpersonal conflicts compromise a mission.

During the next few weeks on some clear moonless early morning, if you are fortunate to be far from any haze and bright lights, keep a close watch on the eastern horizon about two hours before sunrise. If you're lucky you might catch a glimpse of a ghostly column of light extending upward into the sky.

CAMBRIDGE, England - Cosmologist Stephen Hawking will retire from his prestigious post at Cambridge University next year, but intends to continue his exploration of time and space.Hawking, 66, is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a title once held by the great 18th century physicist Isaac Newton. The university said Friday that he would step down at the end of the academic year in September, but would continue working as Emeritus Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

A pigeon-sized dinosaur that lived more than 100 million years ago sported four ribbon-like tail feathers that likely helped the creature balance on tree branches.That picture comes from a fossil of a nearly complete skeleton and the well-preserved feathers of Epidexipteryx hui, discovered in Inner Mongolia, China. The finding, detailed in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Nature, fills in gaps about the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds.

Yeah, it's cliché to say Tyrannosaurus rex was deadly. But the tyrant king was likely true to the billing. Its bone-crushing jaws could splinter prey like toothpicks, after all. And the beast was big, up to 40 feet long, 20 feet tall, and may have topped the scales at nearly 16,000 pounds.The king walked on two legs over a vast territory in western North America at the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago. Scientists wonder whether T. rex was more a lumbering scavenger or a quick and agile predator, but dead or alive, its meals were big, meaty and bloody.

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

A British team has launched its attempt to hold on to the world land speed record with a car that could reach 1,000mph.The Bloodhound Project aims to smash the existing top speed of 763mph set by Wing Commander Andy Green in 1997.The same team now hopes to raise the bar and keep the record in UK hands - as it has been for 25 years.

In a music recording studio, just like in a Las Vegas casino, there is no evidence of the passage of time. You work in the dark. There are no windows because windows are not soundproof.In the absence of natural time, artificial time rules everything that happens in that room. Recording sessions can now take place continents away, simultaneously. For example, say a band has recorded a drum part in Los Angeles but the lead guitarist is in London pretending to go out with Kate Moss. He can go into a London studio, connect via broadband using Pro Tools, which is probably the most common recording software in use today, and lay down a guitar solo that will sync perfectly with the drum part.

This seems an unlikely place to go fishing for your dinner. The dusty scrublands of Zomba West have been brittle dry since April, when the rainy season ended.The place is spookily deserted today - the funeral of the local chief. In the marketplace, we find only one stall open, run by children. And all they are selling is fish.

The first hard evidence of psychoactive drug use in the ancient Andes has been discovered in mummies' hair, a new study says.The finding confirms that predecessors of the Inca known as the Tiwanaku used mind-altering substances, and hints that the civilization relied on far-reaching trade networks to obtain the drugs.Scientists recently analyzed 32 naturally mummified Tiwanaku bodies discovered in northern Chile's Azapa Valley, which lies in the Atacama Desert.