Newsdesk Archive

Fifty years ago, a chemist named Stanley Miller conducted a famous experiment to investigate how life could have started on Earth.Recently, scientists re-analyzed his results using modern technology and found a new implication: The original sparks for life on our planet could have come from volcanic eruptions.The 1950s experiment was designed to test how the ingredients necessary for life could arise.

A fracture of a spindle with a runic inscription was discovered in an archeological excavation near the Althingi parliament building in Reykjavík last week. It is believed to date back to the 11th century and may be the oldest runic inscription in Iceland.

The current round of financial uncertainty is coming at just the wrong time for America's largest and smallest fusion research programs.

Union County New Mexico is a landscape of striking diversity. Out of expansive rangelands rise sporadic yet majestic cinder cone volcanoes and mesas preserved by basalt, part of the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field. Capulin volcano, formed approximately 62,000 years ago, is the youngest volcano in the field. The cone rises 396 m from the plain, reaching an altitude of 2,495 m above sea level. The base of the volcano is 6.4 km in circumference, and the crater is 126 m deep and 442 m across.

Recent mapping of a number of raised beach ridges on the north coast of Greenland suggests that the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean was greatly reduced some 6000-7000 years ago. The Arctic Ocean may have been periodically ice free.

Report: Promising technologies to wean the world from fossil fuels, including offshore wind, solar, geothermal and hydrogen cars, among others.

Researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: it absorbs all the energy contained in sunlight, and generates electrons in a way that makes them easier to capture.Ohio State University chemists and their colleagues combined electrically conductive plastic with metals including molybdenum and titanium to create the hybrid material.

India has successfully launched its first mission to the Moon.The unmanned Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft blasted off smoothly from a launch pad in southern Andhra Pradesh to embark on a two-year mission of exploration.

GreenFuel Technologies on Tuesday is expected to announce what few in the algae fuel business can claim--a paying customer.The Cambridge, Mass.-based company detailed a multi-year deal worth $92 million to build greenhouses that grow algae, which can be harvested for vegetable oil to make biodiesel or to make animal feed.In the greenhouses, the algae will be fed sunlight and carbon dioxide from the Holcim cement plant near Jerez, Spain.

Several contradictory quotes greet the viewer on a wall that begins the new Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, now open at The Jewish Museum. One attributed to Father Roland de Vaux, among the first to excavate the site where the scrolls were found more than 50 years ago, argues that the scrolls belonged to a monastic Jewish sect possibly living there, the Essenes.

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.

The same cells electric eels use to shock predators and prey can be engineered to power implanted biomedical devices, say researchers from Yale University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)."We now understand how the natural electric eel cells work," said David LaVan of NIST. "Now we can think about how we can use those cells to power medical devices."

Vacationers have gazed in wonder as a gecko, shown here, scurries across the wall of their beachside cabana. Several years ago, scientists learned that the attractive force of millions of tiny branching bristles on the gecko's footpads is the factor behind the lizard's superb grip and equally stunning zippy-clean release. Now those scientists are making a variety of adhesives that mimic the technique, raising the possibility of wall-climbing robots, hair-friendly bandages and, yes, even gloves that could someday allow vacationers to scurry after their four-footed friends.

New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago.Scientists are baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way and are to launch mission to study the heliosphere.

A team of Japanese climbers claimed they have found the footprints of the legendary abominable snowman in the folds of the eastern Himalayas in Nepal.An eight-member team claimed the footprints of the snowman or Yeti were about 20 centimetres long and were human in appearance. The creature's footprints were found on snow at an altitude of about 4,800 metres (15,748 feet) in the Dhaulagiri mountain range in west Nepal.

Stone Age humans could well have deserved the name. Scientists have found the drug paraphernalia used by prehistoric humans to cook up herbal mixtures to get themselves high.Scientists have long suspected that humans have an ancient history of drug use but much of the evidence has been indirect, ranging from the bizarre images found in prehistoric cave art to the discovery of hemp seeds in excavations.

Simon Worrall explains why a recent discovery on the seabed of the Indian Ocean will revolutionise our understanding of two ancient civilisations."The local fishermen believe that there are underwater spirits guarding the wrecks," says Tilman Walterfang, as our boatman picks his way through a maze of coral reefs and submerged rocks."Sometimes, they perform prayers on the boats, sacrificing a goat, spreading the blood everywhere, to keep the vessel safe."I am on a fishing boat in the Gaspar Strait, near Belitung Island, off the south-east coast of Sumatra.

A team of researchers from the University of Tsukuba has uncovered the remains of a crematorium thought to be about 8,600 years old, at the Tell el-Kerkh complex in northwest Syria, it has been learned.Cremated bones thought to be over 20,000 years old have been found in the past, but the Tell el-Kerkh find is believed to be the world's oldest cremation site with both cremated bones and the pits used for cremation.

IT SEEMS China's catastrophic destruction of a defunct weather satellite last year may have been facilitated by the country's failure to translate an international agreement into domestic law.The smashed satellite created an orbiting blizzard of long-lived shards. This breached international guidelines covering the mitigation of space debris, which are defined by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), which counts the majority of spacefaring nations as members, including China.

A lunar base could be built from waterless concrete composed entirely of moon dust, according to US researchers.NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will next year scout out a good landing site ahead of the 2020 mission that will put US astronauts back on the moon.A four-strong team will spend seven days on the lunar surface, but NASA hopes to eventually have long-term moon bases.However, building permanent structures on the moon would be astronomically expensive, says Houssam Toutanji, a civil engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, US.

Another significant Bronze Age find has been unearthed at the Kingsmead Quarry in Horton.Archaeologists believe that the item, known as a Picardy pin, dates back to around the 11th century BC and was originally used as a costume or hair pin.

GENETIC diseases such as diabetes and Huntington's disease may be an evolutionary hangover from our primitive ancestors. This surprising discovery might make it possible to study human diseases in fish and insects - unlikely as that seems - as well in the more usual mice.

At first glance, the fox on the surface of the limestone pillar appears to be a trick of the bright sunlight. But as I move closer to the large, T-shaped megalith, I find it is carved with an improbable menagerie. A bull and a crane join the fox in an animal parade etched across the surface of the pillar, one of dozens erected by early Neolithic people at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. The press here is fond of calling the site "the Turkish Stonehenge," but the comparison hardly does justice to this 25-acre arrangement of at least seven stone circles. The first structures at Göbekli Tepe were built as early as 10,000 B.C., predating their famous British counterpart by about 7,000 years.

Tiny biology-based computers could eventually check up on the health of individual cells, and, based on what they find, could then treat those cells. That's according to new research from scientists at the California Institute of Technology published in the current issue of Science."This is the first time that someone has showed a molecular computer that can respond to stimuli inside a living cell," said Ehud Shapiro, a professor of computer science and biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Medieval pilgrims would have understood the throngs who crowded Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum to see the James Ossuary. Only six years ago, the stone box inscribed "James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus" in Aramaic, made Time magazine's cover and drew 100,000-person lines to see the limestone box that, by implication, may have once held the skeletal remain of Jesus' brother.But like so many religious relics before, the ossuary, a two-foot-long box that Jewish inhabitants of burial-site-poor Jerusalem typically used to store remains around the First Century, A.D., turned out to have a checkered past. The 2002 vetting of the box's authenticity described in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review came under fire quickly, from experts who complained the box's origins were unknown. Oded Golan, the antiquities dealer who owned the ossuary, only said he had bought it from another dealer in the 1970's.

It's called "buckypaper" and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don't be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.

Planetary scientists have long puzzled over why fast-moving rivers of air called jet streams flow eastward at the equator of Jupiter and Saturn, but go westward on Uranus and Neptune. Now a new simulation has begun unraveling that mystery by showing how turbulent thunderstorms create the jet streams.

An international team of scientists has just identified what they believe is the world's first known dog, which was a large and toothy canine that lived 31,700 years ago and subsisted on a diet of horse, musk ox and reindeer, according to a new study.

Over the course of more than 45 years, and through more than 115 books, Ben Bova has been chronicling space exploration as fiction and fact. But in his latest novel, "Mars Life," Bova uses facts about the Red Planet - plus facts about the blue planet we live on - to weave a tale of interplanetary politics as well as scientific discovery.

The Second Kushite Kingdom controlled the whole Nile valley from Khartoum to the Mediterranean from 720BC to 660BC.Now archaeologists have discovered that a region of northern Sudan once considered a forgotten backwater once actually "a real power-base".

In 1947, a Bedouin boy stumbled upon 2,000-year-old scrolls in the caves of Qumran in the Judean Desert. This accidental find, one of the 20th century's greatest archaeological discoveries, is known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. A selection of these texts--the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible, commentaries, and other religious writings--is now on display at New York City's Jewish Museum in an exhibit titled, " The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World."

A development boom near Egypt's Abydos archaeological site is damaging one of the most sacred gathering places for ancient pilgrims, experts say.Millions of Egyptians crossed the desert surrounding Abydos from 664 B.C. to A.D. 395 to pay homage to the god of the dead, Osiris. Many of Egypt's earliest pharaohs were buried at the site.

King Aha, "The Fighter," was not killed while unifying the Nile's two warring kingdoms, nor while building the capital of Memphis. No, one legend has it that the first ruler of a united Egypt was killed in a hunting accident after a reign of 62 years, unceremoniously trampled to death by a rampaging hippopotamus. News of his demise brought a separate, special terror to his staff. For many, the honor of serving the king in life would lead to the more dubious distinction of serving the king in death.

According to legend, Genghis Khan lies buried somewhere beneath the dusty steppe of Northeastern Mongolia, entombed in a spot so secretive that anyone who made the mistake of encountering his funeral procession was executed on the spot.

ATHENS (Reuters) - In the past two and a half thousand years, the temples of the Acropolis have suffered fire, bombing and earthquake. Now, scientists are trying to save them from a new modern enemy: pollution.Standing on a hilltop at the centre of Athens, a city of 4 million people, the Acropolis' elaborately sculptured stones have fallen prey to a film of black crust from car exhaust fumes, industrial pollution, acid rain and fires.

Where did we come from? Many truth seekers turn to faith and religion and therein find their answers. Others approach the question through a scientific lens and the theory of evolution. They have pieced together a tale of human origins from the fossils of our ancestors. The tale is incomplete and its telling reshaped with fresh interpretation of the growing fossil record.

LONDON - Millvina Dean was only 2 months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat from the doomed Titanic. Now 96, the last survivor of the tragic sinking is selling mementos of the disaster to help pay her nursing home fees.Rescued from the bitterly cold Atlantic on that April 1912 night, Dean, her 2-year-old brother and her mother were taken to New York with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Before returning home to England, they were given a small wicker suitcase of donated clothing, a gift from New Yorkers to help them rebuild their lives.Now, Dean is selling the suitcase and other Titanic mementos to help pay her nursing home fees. They are expected to go for $5,200 at an auction of Titanic memorabilia Saturday in Devizes in western England.

A passenger jet bound for Heathrow Airport had a near miss with a UFO, Ministry of Defence files reveal.The captain of the Alitalia airliner shouted "Look out" to his co-pilot at the sight of a brown missile-shaped object shooting past them overhead.Civil Aviation Authority and military investigations could not explain the 1991 incident near Lydd in Kent.The unsolved close encounter features in UFO-related military documents made available by the National Archives.

Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists.

It's not a silver lining that causes night-shining clouds to bounce radar, but that's close, claims plasma physicist Paul Bellan.He thinks the clouds, which sit on the edge of space, may be coated with a thin layer of metals.The ability to reflect radar is one of a handful of mysteries about noctilucent clouds, so named because of their luminescence in deep twilight.

Plenty of European astronauts and hardware have gone up to the space station or to other orbits around Earth, but now the European Space Agency is thinking of ways to get them back down on their own.A Vega rocket on the drawing boards is slated to carry ESA's Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle into space in 2012. The stubby white-and-black spacecraft is designed to use two rear flaps in a paddling motion to steer itself during atmospheric reentry.

The more than 1 million artifacts unearthed since 1994 at Jamestown, Va., are changing historians' views about the first Europeans who settled the Chesapeake Bay region, a prominent archeologist said last night at the Naval Academy.Records indicate that 104 men and boys came ashore on James Island on May 12, 1607, and by mid-June, they had already completed a fort. It was the first English settlement in the New World, and suffered a number of setbacks before the colony began to thrive.

New research has provided the first detailed look at the internal head skeleton of Tiktaalik roseae, the 375-million-year-old fossil animal that represents an important intermediate step in the evolutionary transition from fish to animals that walked on land.Results of the study, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature, show that the transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyle involved complex changes not only to appendages (fins to limbs) but also to the internal head skeleton.

JOSH VILLA was 26 and driving home after a drink with a friend on 28 August 2005 when his car mounted the kerb and flipped over. Villa was thrown through the windscreen, suffered massive head injuries and fell into a coma.Almost a year later, there was little sign of improvement. "He would open his eyes, but he was not responsive to any external stimuli in his environment," says Theresa Pape of the US Department of Veterans Affairs in Chicago, who helped treat him.Usually there is little more that can be done for people in this condition. Villa was to be sent home to Rockford, Illinois, where his mother, Laurie McAndrews, had volunteered to care for him.

More than 40 million years ago, primates preferred Texas to northern climates that were significantly cooling, according to new fossil evidence discovered by Chris Kirk, physical anthropologist at The University of Texas at Austin.

As a population of West African chimpanzees dwindles to critically endangered levels, scientists are calling for a definition of personhood that includes our close evolutionary cousins.Just two decades ago, the Ivory Coast boasted a 10,000-strong chimpanzee population, accounting for half of the world's population. According to a new survey, that number has fallen to just a few thousand.

BIG cities are the most vibrant centres of innovation - and it's all down to the mathematics of networking.People in bigger cities are known to be more innovative than those in smaller ones: the figures show that a doubling in the size of a city generally leads to a more than proportionate rise in the number of patents or inventors associated with it.

Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small's new book, "iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

In a place where clotheslines outnumber power lines and the people prefer horse-drawn buggies to automobiles, Pennsylvania's Amish community has begun to embrace a new technology that mainstream culture has been slow to endorse: solar energy.The Amish Church generally forbids any connection to the outside world, which includes tapping into the public utility grid. While they do not reject technology outright, they believe outside influences threaten the welfare of their small, closely-knit communities.

US space agency (Nasa) officials say the orbiting Hubble telescope should come back online for full science operations on Friday.The telescope suffered a glitch two weeks ago in a key electronics box that prevented it from routing data from its instruments to the ground.

Excavation work in southeastern Şanlıurfa province has led to the discovery of a Roman palace (A.D. fifth to sixth century) and floor mosaics.The Anatolia news agency reported on Sunday that the Haleplibahçe district, one of the oldest historical residential areas of the city, constitutes an important part of the ancient city of Edessa, famous for its wall pictures depicting the Amazonian queens Hippolyte, Antiope, Melanippe and Penthesileia hunting in the forest. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism began the excavation work two years ago after these wall pictures were found.

We live at a time when many of the certainties taken for granted by our parents and grandparents are being destroyed under our very eyes.Even in the socialist Seventies, no one imagined the Government could control not one, not two, but three High Street banks.Our forefathers also believed, with some justification, that Britain was the freest country in the world.Unlike some Continental nations, let alone those in the Soviet Bloc, we did not have a large state apparatus spying on people's private activities.However, since 1997 New Labour has progressively undermined this assumption.We have more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world. Our DNA database, which comprises four million people, many of whom have committed no crime at all, is also bigger than that of any other country. Identity cards are in the pipeline.Even so, I am dumbfounded by proposals unveiled by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, in a speech yesterday.

In the beginning, there was a boy, a girl and an apple.He was a teenager in a death camp in Nazi-controlled Germany. She was a bit younger, living free in the village, her family posing as Christians.Their eyes met through a barbed-wire fence and she wondered what she could do for this handsome young man.

Archeologists studying the area of the well-known Tavdinsky Caves in Altai assume that early people used to perform hunting magic there.Back in 2005 three archeological layers were unearthed in this site giving evidence to the fact that from the Neolithic epoch already it was a cult place.

Over the centuries, many in the British Isles have appealed to witches in times of need--to cure a toothache, concoct a love potion, or curse a neighbor. Witchcraft, the rituals of a number of pagan belief systems, was thought to offer control of the world through rites and incantations. Common as it has been over the past several centuries, the practice is secretive and there are few written records.

Researchers have found a possible new route taken by early modern humans as they expanded out of Africa to colonise the rest of the world.A study published in the journal PNAS proposes a "wet corridor" through Libya for ancient human migrations.Rivers once flowed from the central Saharan watershed all the way to the Mediterranean, the team explains.

As the solar system carts around our little section of the Milky Way galaxy, it disturbs the relative calm and cold fabric of intergalactic space. Not much is known about this boundary, except that the meeting is far from sedate -- something akin to a boat slamming through water at 50,000 mph.So far, only the Voyager probes have crossed into the boundary zone, some eight to nine billion miles from Earth, with surprising results. On Sunday, NASA plans to launch a spacecraft that for the first time will be able to map the zone -- without having to go there.

The fledgling ocean energy industry is awash in ideas for making electricity from moving water but it is still reaching for a toehold in the commercial world.Ocean power--a resource often located near large population centers--could ultimately generate 25 percent of today's total electricity usage, said report co-author Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.

The thought of a driverless, computer-guided car transporting people where they want to go on demand is a futuristic notion to some.To Jacob Roberts, podcars - or PRTs, for personal rapid transit - represent an important component in the here-and-now of transportation."It's time we design cities for the human, not for the automobile," said Roberts, president of Connect Ithaca, a group of planning and building professionals, activists and students committed to making this upstate New York college town the first podcar community in the United States.

Key nuclear international institutions on Monday signed a deal to step up their collaboration, marking a step forward in the development of a multibillion dollar experimental nuclear fusion project.The accord was signed in Geneva by International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Director General Kaname Ikeda and Yury Sokolov, the deputy director general of the UN's nucler watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Computer simulations of the atmospheric circulation on Jupiter-like planets around other stars can explain temperature observations of these planets and shed light on the exotic weather experienced by these far-away worlds.Approximately 300 planets have been discovered around other stars, and for most of those planets, scientists know little more than the mass and orbital properties of the planet. However, for a handful of the brightest planets, temperatures have been inferred from observations carried out with spacebased platforms such as NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Those observations and the computer simulations used to explain them, hint at weather patterns truly alien to our Earth-based experience.

It's official: the oldest human footprints ever found are 345,000 years old, give or take 6000. Known as the "devils' trails", they have been preserved in volcanic ash atop the Roccamonfina volcano in Italy.The prints were first described to the world by Paolo Mietto and colleagues of the University of Padova in Italy in 2003 after amateur archaeologists pointed them out.

POCATELLO, Idaho (AP) - The Idaho Museum of Natural History is displaying some of the nation's oldest archaeological discoveries -- ancient tools found in southeastern Idaho in 2006.An archaeological team from Idaho State University dug up the artifacts at Castle Rocks State Park. They include stone tools and the rocks used to shape them. Skip Lohse, the director of the Idaho Museum of Natural History and the lead member of the ISU team, says some of the tools are believed to be nearly 16,000 years old, which means they predate the Clovis culture until 13,000 years ago. The Clovis culture was thought until recent years to mark the advent of humans in North America.

PARIS (AFP) - The challenge posed by climate change could be resolved by a peaceful switch to a low-carbon economy, or alternatively inflict stresses that could include war and desertification of swathes of the US and Australia, a thinktank said on Monday.The provocative report is published by a British NGO, Forum for the Future, which carries out strategic analysis on sustainable development on behalf of business.It sketches a wide range of social consequences from today's global warming crisis, derived from published studies and consultations with more than 60 climate-change specialists. It is published in collaboration with the technology giant HP.

From the outside, the house at the bottom of Stocking Street looks no different from any other in the cul-de-sac. But step around the back and a purpose-built shed hums with the latest in green technology - a state of the art hydrogen fuel cell.

A collection of letters penned by Albert Einstein in which he set out his views on how to deal with a belligerent post-war Russia and dismissed as "twaddle" the notion that his theories were difficult to understand, will go under the hammer in London next Thursday.

NISKAYUNA, N.Y. - On a bank of the Mohawk River, a windowless industrial building of corrugated steel hides something that could make floor lamps, bedside lamps, wall sconces and nearly every other household lamp obsolete.It's a machine that prints lights.

New findings about early inhabitants of the Port Joli area that are surfacing as scientists examine Mi'kmaq shell middens (refuse heaps containing mollusc shells, bones, and artifacts) created between 2,500 and 500 years ago will be presented at a public meeting Oct. 10 at Thomas Raddall Park.

The historic Deir al-Sultan monastery on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is in danger of collapse.The church is one of the most sacred sites in Christendom. By tradition, it is the site both of Golgotha where the New Testament says that Jesus was crucified,[2] and the place where Jesus was buried (the sepulchre).

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday gave the Roman Catholic church four new saints, including an Indian woman whose canonization is seen as a morale boost to Christians in India who have suffered Hindu violence.Thousands of faithful from the homelands of the new saints, including a delegation from India, where Catholics are a tiny minority, turned out for the ceremony in St. Peter's Square.The honor for Sister Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, the first Indian woman to become a saint, comes as Christians increasingly have been the object of attacks from Hindu mobs in eastern and southern India.

Archeologists have been exploring a necropolis housing 55 bodies and 18 pieces of 1,700-year-old golden jewelry in the ancient city of Ephesus, located in the Aegean province of İzmir.The deputy leader of the excavation team, Austrian Sabine Ladstätter, spoke yesterday to the Anatolia news agency and said they had found important archeological remains during this year's Ephesus excavation season, which finished at the end of September, and added that the jewelry they found had been a surprise.

Messages have been sent to a planet 20 light years from Earth in the hope they will reach intelligent alien life.Some 501 photos, drawings and text messages were transmitted on Thursday by a giant radio-telescope in Ukraine normally used to track asteroids.The target planet was chosen as it is thought capable of supporting life.

Making arrowheads, tossing spears, wandering old homesteads, and studying petroglyphs: All are part of a Washington state program designed to ensure that material progress doesn't completely obliterate the past.One thing I learned down on the Columbia River last week: If I were left to survive using prehistoric technologies, I would starve if I did not die of exposure first. And it would not be the fault of early North American technologies, but my own lack of adaptation. As archaeologist Jeff Flenniken explained, Darwinian winnowing worked well in the old days. Our ancient predecessors were pretty damn smart.

Alfreda Gasparillo Pineda sees me stagger on the trail that leads up to a sacred well on the side of Mount Pacho. I'm carrying a wicker basket full of tamales that is rubbing my shoulder raw and pulling me off balance. "If you are tired, one of the women can carry it for you," she suggests in Spanish. Sergio Garza, an ethnoarchaeologist from University of California, Riverside, translates. A coy grin spreads across Alfreda's broad face as she waits to see how much machismo I'm willing to sacrifice to participate in this religious procession. Everything here is about machismo and sacrifice.

More than one in four commuters has bacteria from faeces on their hands, an investigation suggests.Scientists from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine swabbed 409 people at bus and train stations in five major cities in England and Wales.The further north they went, the more often they found commuters with faecal bacteria on their hands - men in Newcastle were the worst offenders.Experts stressed the importance of hand hygiene for preventing illness.

WHY are Saturn's rings so spectacular? It could be that the planet managed to cling onto a moon when all the other gas giants in our solar system had already lost theirs. Today's rings formed when the moon was smashed up.Sebastien Charnoz and colleagues at the University of Diderot, Paris, suggest it was during the "late heavy bombardment", 700 million years after Saturn formed, that a chunk of debris collided with one of the planet's moons. Because the moon was orbiting at just the right distance from Saturn when it shattered - within the so-called Roche limit - the tiny pieces formed the rings instead of dispersing.

IBM on Friday opened online doors to a virtual version of the famed Forbidden City in China that served for centuries as an exclusive realm for the nation's emperors.The US technology colossus spent more than three years working with Chinese officials and the Palace Museum to construct an interactive, animated replica of the 178-acre (720,000 square-meter) walled fortress in the Dongcheng District of Beijing."Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time," online at http://www.beyondspaceandtime.org, is billed as a first-of-a-kind, fully immersive, three-dimensional virtual recreation of "this Chinese cultural treasure."

What happened to the prehistoric village on Lake Mondsee in the Austrian Alps? One geologist has found evidence that a vast rock slide may have set off a tsunami that buried the lakeside settlement. He's hoping to find funding -- and mummies.

This toy hedgehog, found in a child's grave at Stonehenge, is proof of what we have always known - children have always loved to play.The chalk figurine was probably a favourite possession of the three year old, and placed next to the child when they died in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago.

Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark.In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female blacktip shark in a Virginia aquarium contained no genetic material from a male.The first documented case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Nebraska, zoo.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The museum exhibits are taken from the Old Testament, but the special effects are pure Hollywood: a state-of-the-art planetarium, animatronics and a massive model of Noah's Ark, all intended to explain the origins of the universe from a biblical viewpoint.

The site of the 5,000-year-old Giza Pyramids is now up to speed with the twenty-first century, complete with cameras, lasers and control rooms. Last month, part of a multi-phase plan to renovate the site of the only remaining Wonder of the Ancient World was completed, a modern makeover cooked up by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) to make the Giza Plateau more tourist-friendly.

The authorities call it a Greek tragedy, but the graffiti artists who have increasingly left their mark on this ancient city and its monuments say they are simply responding to a different sort of muse.Churches and archaeological sites in Greece used to enjoy a certain immunity from graffiti and the stylised signatures known as tagging, but are now increasingly part of the action as the phenomenon takes off in Athens.

Belgrade - Serbian archaeologists say a 7,500-year-old copper axe found at a Balkan site shows the metal was used in the Balkans hundreds of years earlier than previously thought.The find near the Serbian town of Prokuplje shifts the timeline of the Copper Age and the Stone Age's neolithic period, archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic told the independent Beta news agency.

This bird's-eye view of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first image ever seen by the GeoEye-1, the world's highest-resolution commercial satellite sponsored by Google, when it opened its camera door earlier this week.

An alternative fusion project has been kicked off in Europe that would seek abundant clean energy using a colossal laser the size of a football stadium.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Cremation, "air burial," grave cairns, funeral mounds, mummification, belief in life after death -- death practices sacred to one culture are often considered "odd" or even terrifying by another.The Greeks, for example, were fascinated with the historian Herodotus' description of the ancient Issedonians chopping up their dead into a mixed grill and devouring them in a communal barbeque, something entirely contrary to the Greeks' treatment of their own dead.

Experts from the University of Bristol are to attempt to accurately date prehistoric caves.The team from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology travelled to northern Spain to collect samples of paintings from more than 20 caves.They will use a new method, based on the radioactive decay of uranium, to date the paintings.Samples have been taken from the cave of Tito Bustillo in Asturias and La Pasiega Cave in Cantabria.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (AP) -- A genealogy Web site says it has found the king of America -- or rather, the descendant of George Washington's family who would have most likely held the title had the nation's first president been its first monarch instead.

Sea levels could rise one metre (3.3 feet) by 2100, a leading German research institute said Thursday, much more than even the most pessimistic projection by the UN climate panel."We should prepare for a rise of sea levels of one metre this century," said Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which advises the German government on environmental policy.

The next alternative fuel in a vehicle's tank might be nothing more than gas with a little help from corn. However, instead of the usual petroleum-based fuel, this gas will be hydrogen, and the corn will be in the form of corncob-charcoaled briquettes. To further develop this alternative fuel concept, researchers at the University of Missouri and Midwest Research Institute (MRI) were recently awarded a three-year, $1.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to continue studying a solution to hydrogen storage in vehicles.

Scientists have discovered mystery snippets of mammal DNA that have survived eons of evolution and yet have no apparent purpose. The finding reveals just how much we don't know about the secrets hidden in our genome and that of other animals.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Satellites are helping scientists expand a virtual network to watch for increases in ocean temperatures that can damage or kill the fragile ecosystems of coral reefs worldwide.

The Hubble Space Telescope's handlers are weighing a plan to turn on a never-used backup system to restore communications as early as next week. If it works, the world's favorite orbiting observatory could be back in business just a couple of days later. If it doesn't, Hubble could conceivably be worse off than it was before.

Pope Benedict XVI's mostly warm but sometimes chilly relationship with the worldwide Jewish community may have just hit a major ice patch. On Thursday, Benedict put his moral weight (though not yet his signature) behind the cause for sainthood for Pope Pius XII, the wartime Pontiff who many Jewish leaders criticize for not having done enough to oppose the Holocaust.

Schwerin, Germany - Archaeologists have discovered the bones of at least 50 prehistoric people killed in an armed attack in Germany around 1300 BC. The signs of battle from around 1300 BC were found near Demmin, north of Berlin. They are the first proof of any war north of the Alps during the Bronze Age, said state archaeologist Detlef Jantzen on Thursday.

Over a million years ago, a band of early humans left their stone tools and two front teeth near a stream in southwest China. For decades, the precise age of the fossils has remained a mystery, leaving open a central question in paleontology: How quickly did our human ancestors reach China after leaving Africa? Now, thanks to advanced dating techniques, scientists may finally have the answer.

Stonehenge was used as a cremation cemetry throughout its history, according to new evidence that divides archaeologists over whether England's most famous ancient monument was about celebrating life or death.The origins and purposes of Stonehenge have eluded academics and historians for centuries and been the subject of much debate.

New findings at Stonehenge suggest its stones were erected much earlier than thought, challenging the site's conventional history.A new excavation puts the stones' arrival at 3000 BC - almost 500 years earlier than originally thought - and suggests it was mainly a burial site.The latest results are from a dig by the Stonehenge Riverside Project.It is in conflict with recent research dating construction to 2300 BC and suggesting it was a healing centre.

A scientist in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt believes he has uncovered tracks from the world's oldest dinosaur. But the footprints at the center of the find have sparked a major debate among scientists.A massive creature tromped its way across an expansive limestone marsh. Horseshoe crabs scurried in its wake, and a reptile similar to a crocodile crossed its path. Weighing between 600 and 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds), the creature left impressive footprints in the limestone deposit. Shifting sand then covered the tracks. The creature's rear foot measured a large 35 centimeters (14 inches).