Newsdesk Archive

Stone age people drove animals hundreds of miles to a site close to Stonehenge to be slaughtered for ritual feasts, according to scientists who have examined the chemical signatures of animal remains buried there.The research suggests that Neolithic people travelled further than archaeologists had previously realised in order to attend cultural events.

The discovery of figs in an 11,400-year-old house near the ancient city of Jericho may be evidence that cultivated crops came centuries before the first farmers planted cereal grains.Archeologists in Israel discovered the figs in an excavated house in a village called Gilgal 1. The fruits were mutant figs -- growing on a rare kind of tree that isn't pollinated by insects and won't reproduce unless someone takes a cutting and plants it.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Archaeologists have unearthed gold jewellery, weapons and pottery at an ancient burial site near Pella in northern Greece, the birthplace of Alexander the Great, the culture ministry said on Thursday.The excavations at the vast cemetery uncovered 43 graves dating from 650-279 BC which shed light on the early development of the Macedonian kingdom, which had an empire that stretched as far as India under Alexander's conquests.

The first whales once swam the seas by wiggling large hind feet, research now suggests.These new findings shed light on the mysterious shift these leviathans made away from land.The ancestors of whales once strode on land on four legs, just as other mammals do. Over time, as they evolved to dwell in water, their front legs became flippers while they lost their back legs and hips, although modern whales all still retain traces of pelvises, and occasionally throwbacks are born with vestiges of hind limbs.

The precise timing of the origin of life on Earth and the changes in life during the past 4.5 billion years has been a subject of great controversy for the past century. The principal indicator of the amount of organic carbon produced by biological activity traditionally used is the ratio of the less abundant isotope of carbon, 13C, to the more abundant isotope, 12C.

The use of vocalizations, such as grunts, songs or barks, is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, humans are the only species in which these vocalizations have attained the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of speech. How did our ancestors become the only speaking animals, some tens of thousands of years ago? Did this change happen abruptly, involving the sudden appearance of a new cerebral region or pattern of cerebral connections? Or did it happen through a more gradual evolutionary process, in which brain structures already present to some extent in other animals were put to a different and more complex use in the human brain?

He was judged by history as a crank, but an alchemist who jumped off the ramparts of a Scottish castle 500 years ago wearing wings made of hen feathers may have been the first man to fly.Not only was John Damian a success, experts now say, but he may also have invented the world's first hang glider.Damian's leap of faith in 1507 is the earliest recorded flight experiment in Scotland. It is believed that the alchemist and inventor was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, who carried out his own experiments on the Continent a few years earlier.

SWITZERLAND is to return a pharaoh's "eye" stolen 36 years ago from the ancient Egyptian statue of King Amenhotep III."The eye is around 50cm long and was stolen from Amenhotep III's statue, which was discovered in 1970 in his Luxor temple," Egypt's culture minister Faruk Hosni said.The eye was stolen in 1972 when a fire broke out around the temple.

Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang.They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash protons together with cataclysmic force.Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.

At 107, Frank Buckles must know there is not much time for him to honor the memory of his comrades who served the United States during the first World War. He's the last surviving U.S. veteran of what then was called the Great War.The old soldier came to Washington on Tuesday hoping to turn a run-down local memorial on the National Mall into something in keeping with other, permanent monuments to Americans who've sacrificed in other wars.

Without a way to measure religious beliefs, anthropologists have had difficulty studying religion. Now, two anthropologists from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University have developed a new approach to study religion by focusing on verbal communication, an identifiable behavior, instead of speculating about alleged beliefs in the supernatural that cannot actually be identified.

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.It's not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

That is how Sydney's oldest known ex-resident - Narrabeen Man - died at the hands of his own tribeScientists have revealed that bones found under a beachside bus shelter three years ago have now been carbon dated at more than 4000 years old.The bones give a rare insight into the punishment rituals of Aborigines before the arrival of Europeans.

A new batch of genetically engineered bacteria may be able to slash the cost of producing ethanol from tough materials like wood chips and switchgrass, pushing the young ethanol industry closer to its goal of creating commercially competitive alternative fuel from the waste products of farming and forestry. Ethanol from cellulose, the kind of sugar in the likes of cornstalks and sawdust, is being promoted as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels, with the advantage that it does not use food crops such as corn as raw materials.

NASA is about out of options for keeping U.S. astronauts in space after 2011.Unless President George Bush intervenes, or whoever succeeds him in January immediately steps into the space arena, the dismantling of the space shuttle program will be too far along to reverse course."That horse has left the barn," wrote NASA's former shuttle manager Wayne Hale in his Web blog.

If human memory were truly digital, it would have just received an upgrade from something like the capacity of a floppy disk to that of a flash drive. A new study found the brain can remember a lot more than previously believed.In a recent experiment, people who viewed pictures of thousands of objects over five hours were able to remember astonishing details afterward about most of the objects.

Next April, for a grand total of 8 minutes, NASA astronomers are going to glimpse a secret layer of the sun.Researchers call it "the transition region." It is a place in the sun's atmosphere, about 5000 km above the stellar surface, where magnetic fields overwhelm the pressure of matter and seize control of the sun's gases. It's where solar flares explode, where coronal mass ejections begin their journey to Earth, where the solar wind is mysteriously accelerated to a million mph.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study suggests that ancient features on the surface of Mars called valley networks were carved by recurrent floods during a long period when the martian climate may have been much like that of some arid or semiarid regions on Earth. An alternative theory that the valleys were carved by catastrophic flooding over a relatively short time is not supported by the new results.

Advanced extraterrestrial civilisations may be sending signals through space by "tickling" stars, new research suggests. The signalling would be the galactic equivalent of the internet."If it exists, it might be revealed by an analysis of already-existing stellar data," says John Learned of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

A TEAM of Qatari and Danish scientists working in the western region of Qatar have discovered evidence of early man which challenges the existing history of the country and the Southern Arabian region.Exploring under the patronage of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), the scientists found basic hunting tools which they believe date back 700,000 to 800,000 years. If accurate, the discovery means early man lived in Qatar far earlier than was previously believed.QMA CEO Abdullah al-Najjar said this provided a remarkable picture of prehistoric migration.

A new study has found that Neanderthal brains grew at much the same rate as modern human brains do, knocking down the idea that they grew faster in a style considered more primitive.The recent discoveries of two very young Neanderthal skeletons, as well analysis of a little-studied infant Neanderthal skeleton, allowed the researchers to trace how quickly the species' skulls grew.The results showed a greater similarity than expected between modern humans and Neanderthals, a hominid species that lived in Europe and Asia between 130,000 and 30,000 years ago.

BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT, N.M. - Inside the dark, cliffside cave last occupied by the people of Frijoles Canyon some 500 years ago, is evidence of more recent human activity: graffiti proclaiming "2008" and "I love you" carved into a wall."Oh, man," art conservator Larry Humetewa muttered as he bent to inspect the damage in the "cavate," a large, cave-live room.

Never before has such attention been focused on the click of a mouse. Yesterday, the click in question started up the biggest, most complicated machine in the world, the $10bn Large Hadron Collider, which was put through its paces for the first time at Cern, the European nuclear research organisation in Geneva.

Scientists are using new laser technology to improve the precision of telescopes, bringing the dream of watching the expansion of the universe in real time within reach.Published in the latest edition of Science, the researchers, including Swinburne University astronomer Michael Murphy, show how a laser frequency comb can be used to calibrate an infra-red telescope.This will allow astronomers to more precisely measure features of distant galaxies and stars.

When scientists fire up the biggest physics experiment in history this week they will face a task that makes finding a needle in a haystack look simple.Inside a 17-mile tunnel deep beneath the French-Swiss border they hope to detect evidence of extra dimensions, invisible "dark matter" and an elusive particle called the Higgs boson.Success in this $10 billion endeavor would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

A huge particle accelerator experiment is about to start and a tiny group of people believe it could spell the end of the world. But why are we so obsessed with the possibility of apocalypse?The world will end. That much is a certainty. But it may not be soon. And in all probability it will not come to a shuddering, fiery, boiling, cataclysmic end on Wednesday this week.That is when the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss/French border has its first full beam. The collider is a giant particle accelerator which, by smashing one particle into another, will tell us amazing things about the birth of the universe, scientists hope.

As humans, we have a very intuitive concept of time, and of the differences between the past, present, and future. But, as scientists Edward Feng of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gavin Crooks of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory point out, science does not provide a clear definition of time.

INUVIK, Northwest Territories - Amanda Joynt reached down and picked a fresh tomato from the vine. That's no small feat when you are living 120 miles above the Arctic Circle in Canada's Far North.Joynt, a resident of Inuvik is a member of the town's community greenhouse, a former ice hockey arena that has been converted into an oasis of vegetables and flowers on the permafrost.

The United Nations on Friday launched a bid to designate Iraq's famed marshlands, which were ravaged by Saddam Hussein, a World Heritage site after a four-year restoration project.The swampy southern region is believed by some to be the inspiration for the biblical Garden of Eden. Saddam drained the marshlands after the end of the first Gulf War to punish Iraq's Shiite majority for an uprising.

The spread of the Roman Empire through Europe could help explain why those living in its former colonies are more vulnerable to HIV.The claim, by French researchers, is that people once ruled by Rome are less likely to have a gene variant which protects against HIV.This includes England, France, Greece and Spain, New Scientist reports.

The secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities had much to tell his interviewer on "Spotlight". Zahi Hawass waxed lyrical about "exciting things" that have been happening in the field of archaeology -- the discovery of a new tomb of a queen at Saqqara that has yet to be formally announced; the entrance to two tombs in the Valley of the Kings on which excavation will begin in October; and "big happenings" in Aswan, Edfu and Kom Ombo. He was enthusiastic about the "improvements" at Dendera and the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, and gave details of the new museums at Rashid, Arish, Minya and Amarna, as well as site management at Beni Hassan and Tuna Al-Gabel.

Ethiopia is celebrating the unveiling of the reassembled Axum obelisk, one of the country's greatest treasures.The obelisk, at least 1,700 years old, was looted by Italian troops in the 1930s and returned to Ethiopia in 2005.A giant Ethiopian flag was removed from the obelisk in front of what organisers said was a crowd of tens of thousands in the ancient northern town of Axum.The ceremony is the last big event of Ethiopia's millennium year, the year 2000 by the country's Coptic calendar.

When Pope Benedict XVI visits this small town in the foothills of the French Pyrenees next weekend, he will follow in the footsteps of millions of pilgrims who have come before him.Like them, he will take Communion, drink from the holy spring and touch the stone at the base of a cliff by the Gave River, where heaven opened to a 14-year-old girl, known as Bernadette, who said she first saw the Virgin Mary there on Feb. 11, 1858. The pope will celebrate the 150th anniversary of St. Bernadette's apparitions, with a pilgrim's heart full of yearning for transformation.

A vitamin found in meat, fish and milk may help stave off memory loss in old age, a study has suggested.Older people with lower than average vitamin B12 levels were more than six times more likely to experience brain shrinkage, researchers concluded.The University of Oxford study, published in the journal Neurology, tested the 107 apparently healthy volunteers over a five-year period.Some studies suggest two out of five people are deficient in the vitamin.

Far from Earth, a robot spacecraft has been prodded from deep slumber to make a rare encounter with an asteroid, the intriguing orbital debris that could offer clues into the making of the Solar System.The pride of the European Space Agency (ESA), the probe Rosetta has been ordered out of hibernation four and a half years into a 10-year trek that will take it into the dark chill of deep space.

There are a number of worrisome events that scientists assure us we don't have to worry about yet. Our Milky Way Galaxy may collide with the Andromeda Galaxy in about 3 billion years. Our sun will eventually explode and extinguish life on Earth. God may actually have the voice of James Earl Jones.Add to this list the news that came from the European Space Agency last week: The Earth is leaking oxygen. But it is nothing to worry about, scientists again say, until our planet is much older and much hotter. One such example is building equipment.

Yesterday the archaeology department of China's Chongqing Municipality announced a remarkable discovery: a Qing Dynasty tomb of an almost unique style, made out of more than 2,000 qing hua ci (blue and white porcelain) bowls.The Chongqing Economic Times quoted archaeologists as saying that this kind of tomb is very rare and had probably been constructed by migrants to the area.

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russian archaeologists said Wednesday they had found the long-lost capital of the Khazar kingdom in southern Russia, a breakthrough for research on the ancient Jewish state."This is a hugely important discovery," expedition organiser Dmitry Vasilyev told AFP by telephone from Astrakhan State University after returning from excavations near the village of Samosdelka, just north of the Caspian Sea.

JERUSALEM - Israeli agents who kidnapped Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960 found the notorious death camp doctor Josef Mengele but let him get away, one of the operatives said Tuesday.

Prehistoric footprints over 1-foot wide and 8-inches deep suggest that enormous sauropod dinosaurs once trampled Denmark, according to a new study that describes the first known Danish Mesozoic dinosaur tracks, which date to 144 million years ago.The study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, also documents the first lungfish burrows for that location and era, as well as possible tracks for small carnivorous dinosaurs.All were found on the Danish island of Bornholm to the east of mainland Denmark.

1803: English chemist-physicist John Dalton starts using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements.Dalton, considered the father of modern atomic theory, made a logbook entry that day titled, "Observations on the Ultimate Particles of Bodies and their Combinations." It was the first use of symbols to represent the elements of modern chemistry.

LASER weapons mounted on trucks could be ready to roll into battle within five years. This week Boeing won a $36 million contract from the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command to build the optics needed to track and focus lethal laser energy onto rockets, artillery shells and mortar rounds. The High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator will use a new solid-state laser powered by electricity from a truck-mounted diesel generator, rather than bulky and dangerous chemicals.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at Penn State have developed a new computational method that they say will help them to understand how life began on Earth. The team's method has the potential to trace the evolutionary histories of proteins all the way back to either cells or viruses, thus settling the debate once and for all over which of these life forms came first."We have just begun to tap the potential power of this method," said Randen Patterson, a Penn State assistant professor of biology and one of the project's leaders. "We believe, if it is possible at all, that it is within our grasp to determine whether viruses evolved from cells or vice-versa."

Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future.

Galactic hitchhikers visiting our solar system, if they exist, would probably love to get their hands on a new guide that puts GPS to shame.A planetary scientist has made the most detailed maps of our local planets, moons and asteroids yet by combining hundreds of spacecraft images to chart all the nooks and crannies of numerous surfaces, including the asteroids Phobos, Itokawa and Eros. Upcoming targets for mapping include the planet Mercury and eight of Saturn's moons, such as frozen Enceladus with its icy geysers, as well as Earth's moon.

Did America's ancient civilizations develop in isolation from the rest of the world, or did a variety of sea-faring cultures from the so-called Old World make contact during pre-Columbian times?Does the presence of pyramids in both Egypt and Mesoamerica indicate that the idea was carried from one place to the other, or could it have arisen independently in both regions?

Late in the second millennium B.C., as the Hittites were experimenting with bronze, they built a holy city called Nerik near the Black Sea, according to evidence being slowly gathered by archeologists.Today, excavators at the Oymaagaç mound in the Black Sea city of Samsun's Vezirköprü district are reveling in their potential find, believing the evidence is mounting and Oymaagaç will be unveiled as the holder of Nerik.

BROOKVILLE, Ind. - It's being called one of the biggest infrastructure improvements for the nation in 25 years but as the 1,700 mile Rocky Mountain Natural Gas pipeline winds into the Tri-State, it's making history in a way no one expected. Archaeologists said that what excavators found near Brookville, Ind., is so significant that it could help rewrite history books.

Shedding some genetically induced excess baggage may have helped a tiny fish thrive in freshwater and outsize its marine ancestors, according to a UBC study published today in Science Express.Measuring three to 10 centimetres long, stickleback fish originated in the ocean but began populating freshwater lakes and streams following the last ice age. Over the past 20,000 years - a relatively short time span in evolutionary terms - freshwater sticklebacks have lost their bony lateral plates, or "armour," in these new environments.

The advantage of using two eyes to see the world around us has long been associated solely with our capacity to see in 3-D. Now, a new study from a scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has uncovered a truly eye-opening advantage to binocular vision: our ability to see through things.

Measuring just 2 inches by 2 inches, the Space Cube is roughly the size of a large die. However, the cube is actually a tiny PC, developed by the Shimafuji Corporation in Japan.The PC is designed for use in space, where its task is to control various electronics and manage an "interstellar computer network." While it´s normally only available in Japan, the UK-based site PC Pro recently got hold of a Space Cube, and revealed several interesting details.

More than 10 years ago, University of Cincinnati researcher John Hancock, professor of architecture in UC's top-ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), began an ambitious, complex project using modern technology to electronically rebuild lost or damaged Native American monuments that once rivaled Stonehenge in their astronomical accuracy.

SCIENTISTS behind Dolly the sheep may develop better treatments for schizophrenia and motor neurone disease within 20 years, it has been reported.Work has started in Edinburgh using stem cells from human skin, donated by patients at the Western General Hospital.

Researchers examining images of gullies on the flanks of craters on Mars say they formed as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago and in sites once occupied by glaciers. The features are eerily reminiscent of gullies formed in Antarctica's mars-like McMurdo Dry Valleys.

Bulgarian citizens have accidentally come across two stone blocks near a Proto-Bulgarian fortress near Mogila village, Kaspichan municipality.The fortress is a part of the system, constructed for the defense of the capital Pliska. It closely resembles the Madara fortress, but is considerably smaller.

COLUMBIA - The story begins, as many do, with curiosity. About 20 years ago, two men exploring "Picture Cave" found paintings on the rock walls and sent hand-drawn reproductions to archaeologists Jim Duncan and Carol Diaz-Granados."These things are fake!" Duncan remembered thinking at the time. As it turned out, the nature and location of the drawings contradicted widely held beliefs about Mississippian culture.

POINTE-A-LA-CROIX - People have been able to learn more about the excavations and the history of the long-gone Acadian village of Petite-Rochelle during talks which took place last week.La Societe Historique Machault held three three separate events between Aug. 14 to 16 on the history of Petite-Rochelle and what has been learned from the archealogical digs that were conducted on the site where the village is believed to have stood.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- They aren't the lost cities early explorers sought fruitlessly to discover.But ancient settlements in the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by tropical forest, were once large and complex enough to be considered "urban" as the term is commonly applied to both medieval European and ancient Greek communities.So says a paper set to appear Friday in Science co-authored by anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil, and a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian people who are the descendants of the settlements' original inhabitants.

A simple and cheap technique of applying fertilizer in small doses at the right time can double wheat crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa and feed millions of people, agronomists said in a report.A four-year experiment with the technique in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger has boosted sorghum and millet production by 44 to 120 percent, and family incomes by 50 to 130 percent, said an International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) report published Thursday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA's staff will study whether the space shuttle program could continue operating past its scheduled retirement in 2010, according to an internal e-mail sent this week.The e-mail obtained by The Orlando Sentinel describes NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's order for a study to determine if the shuttle could fly until 2015, when NASA's next-generation space platform is expected to be completed.

LONDON (AFP) - A British amateur diplomat tried to stop World War II by offering Nazi Germany rule over Europe if the British Empire could rule the rest of the world, according to secret files declassified Sunday.James Lonsdale-Bryans, a well-educated fascist sympathiser, flew to Rome in the early days of the war to try to negotiate the deal with Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador to Italy.

Hebrew University excavations in the north of Israel have revealed a prehistoric funerary precinct dating back to 6,750-8,500 BCE.The precinct, a massive walled enclosure measuring 10 meters by at least 20 meters, was discovered at excavations being undertaken at Kfar HaHoresh. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site in the Nazareth hills of the lower Galilee is interpreted as having been a regional funerary and cult center for nearby lowland villages.

The wooden construction extended nearly two miles across Salisbury Plain more than 5,000 years ago, and would have served to shield the sacred site from the prying eyes of ordinary lower-class locals.Trenches have been dug around the monument, tracing the course of the fence which meanders around the stone circle.

1939: Germany invades Poland, starting the second European war in a generation and introducing the world to a new kind of warfare: blitzkrieg.This form of attack, which helped the Germans obliterate the Poles in three weeks and the French in only six, relies on rapid mobility and the coordination of massed armor and infantry, with fighter planes and dive bombers providing air support. It also depends on the element of surprise, one reason Nazi Germany never declared war prior to invading an enemy.

1985: French and American researchers announce they've found the wreck of the RMS Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Jaws drop.The most famous shipwreck of all time, the purportedly unsinkable Titanic hit an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage on a cold, starry night in April 1912. The ship sank to the bottom within hours, killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew. A scant 700 or so escaped in the insufficient lifeboats.

t was the greatest mass murder of all time - poison everywhere, billions slain - but the killers have never been positively identified.An estimated 95 percent of marine species and 85 percent of land creatures died, said Peter Ward, a paleobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.Scientists call it "The Great Dying." Life took millions of years to recover.Scientific sleuths now think they're making progress toward learning what caused the extinction of most plants and animals 251 million years ago.

PARIS: A fresh storm has broken out over an ancient fossil presented by its defenders as a forebear of humanity and dismissed by its critics as the remains of a vulgar chimp.Controversy has swirled around Toumai, the name given to the nearly complete skull, ever since it was found in the Chadian desert in 2001. Toumai's big defender is French palaeontologist Michel Brunet of The College of France in Paris, who says Toumai walked the Earth shortly after chimpanzees and hominids diverged from a common ancestral primate.

Genetic analysis has helped identify a new giant clam species in the Red Sea, a new study says.The mollusk may hold clues to how and why humans migrated out of Africa more than a hundred thousand years ago.The apparent near collapse of the species around that time likely points to overharvesting by early hunter-gatherers, says the study, published this week in the journal Current Biology.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS are warning climate change not only poses a threat to future generations but could also damage the past by destroying remains dating back to the Bronze Age.A conference at Bradford University has been discussing the damage global warming has done to sites of archaeological interest across the north Atlantic.

What do Johann Sebastian Bach, Saint Nicholas, and the firstborn son of Pharaoh Rameses II all have in common?The answer? All their faces have been reconstructed using cutting-edge computer technology.Dr Caroline Wilkinson is a forensic anthropologist, recreating faces from human remains for archaeological and police investigations - bringing the past to life.

The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH, National Anthropology and History Institute) and the Instituto Tecnológico de Mérida (ITM, Mérida Technological Institute), joined into the preservation of some buildings of the Maya area built around 1,500 to 1,700 years ago and despite their age they continue to stand.Both organisms are joined by a new project involved in processing digital models of the prehispanic architectural systems, their structural diagnose as well as a mortar (the mix used to build their foundations) as close as possible to the original materials and structures.

Two foetuses found buried with Tutankhamun may have been his twin daughters, an expert has claimed.Professor Robert Connolly, an anatomist who is working with Egyptian authorities to analyse the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh, says that preliminary tests on the mummified remains of the two still-born babies indicate that Tutankhamun may have fathered them both. He will present the new findings at the Pharmacy and Medicine in Ancient Egypt Conference at the University of Manchester today.

The "extremely rare" fossilised skull of a steppe mammoth has been unearthed in southern France.The discovery in the Auvergne region could shed much needed light on the evolution of these mighty beasts.Many isolated teeth of steppe mammoth have been found, but only a handful of skeletons exist; and in these surviving specimens, the skull is rarely intact.Palaeontologists Frederic Lacombat and Dick Mol describe this skull specimen as being well preserved.

MOFFETT FIELD, California - One of the host of challenges facing NASA as the agency plans to rekindle robotic and human exploration of the moon is the development of a corps of investigators and technologies suitable for long-term missions akin to the research stations that dot Antarctica.

HAIFA, Israel (Reuters) - paralyzed for the past 20 years, former Israeli paratrooper Radi Kaiof now walks down the street with a dim mechanical hum.That is the sound of an electronic exoskeleton moving the 41-year-old's legs and propelling him forward -- with a proud expression on his face -- as passersby stare in surprise.

The race to go green has taken to the high seas with two Japanese companies saying they will begin work on the world's first ship to have propulsion engines partially powered by solar energy.Japan's biggest shipping line Nippon Yusen KK and Nippon Oil Corp said solar panels capable of generating 40 kilowatts of electricity each would be placed on top of a 60,000-tonne car carrier to be used by Toyota Motor Corp.

Viruses intended to steal passwords and send them to a remote server infected laptops in the Iss_laptopsInternational Space Station in July, NASA confirmed Tuesday.And according to NASA, this wasn't the first infection."This is not the first time we have had a worm or a virus," NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries said. "It's not a frequent occurrence, but this isn't the first time."

In the Cold War '60s, as the space race heated up, another race began: to the center of the earth.Well, perhaps the Soviets and Americans couldn't drill quite that deep, but they could try to get to the so-called Moho, more formally the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the theorized but much-disputed boundary between the mostly solid crust and the magma-filled mantle.

When in space, keep an eye on the window. You never know what you might see.Last month, astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) witnessed a beautiful display of noctilucent or "night-shining" clouds.

More than 10 years ago, University of Cincinnati researcher John Hancock, professor of architecture in UC's top-ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), began an ambitious, complex project using modern technology to electronically rebuild lost or damaged Native American monuments that once rivaled Stonehenge in their astronomical accuracy.

More than 2,000 years after they were written, the Dead Sea Scrolls are going digital as part of an effort to better preserve the ancient texts and let more people see them than ever before.The high-tech initiative, announced Wednesday, will also reveal text that was not visible to the naked eye.

People who inhabited Palau in western Micronesia nearly 3,000 years ago have achieved new and disputed heights. Contrary to an earlier report that these ancient islanders had unusually small bodies, human remains recently excavated in a Palau cave come from individuals who physically measured up to people today, according to a new report published online August 27 in PLoS ONE.

SARUHANLI - An ancient city in western Turkey, discovered by smugglers of ancient artifacts at an illegal excavation six years ago and recovered with soil by officials, now waits to be unearthed.Local officials asked archaeologists to dig the region in Saruhanli town of the western province of Manisa to bring to light the ancient city which is thought to be dated from around 3rd or 4th century B.C.

NEW YORK: NASA's Mars Exploration rover 'Opportunity' is driving out of a giant crater nearly a year after descending into it to examine exposed ancient rock layers, the American space agency has announced."We have done everything. We entered Victoria Crater to do and more," said Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Banerdt is project scientist for 'Opportunity' and its rover twin, Spirit.

A turtle that toddled alongside the dinosaurs died just days before laying a clutch of eggs. Now, about 75 million years later, paleontologists are announcing their find of the fossilized mother-to-be and the eggs tucked inside her body.

Hydrogen is the cleanest and most abundant fuel there is, but extracting it from water or organic material is currently not a very efficient process. Scientists are therefore studying certain bacteria that exhale hydrogen as part of their normal metabolism.

A crucial step in developing minuscule structures with application potential in sophisticated sensors, catalysis, and nanoelectronics has been developed by Scottish researchers.Dr Manfred Buck and his team at the University of St Andrews have accomplished one of the big quests in nanotechnology, opening up an exciting new development in tiny technology.

There have been many reports in the media about the effects of global warming on the Greenland ice-sheet, but there is still great uncertainty as to why there is an ice-sheet there at all.Reporting today (28 August) in the journal Nature, scientists at the University of Bristol and the University of Leeds show that only changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide are able to explain the transition from the mostly ice-free Greenland of three million years ago, to the ice-covered Greenland of today.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Arctic ice cap keeps melting under the effects of global warming and in August saw its second largest summer shrinkage since satellite observations began 30 years ago, US scientists said.Measurements on August 26 showed an ice cap of 5.26 million square kilometers (2.03 million square miles), just below the 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles) observed on 21 September 2005, making it the second biggest summer Arctic ice-cap melt in history, said the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

A panel of marine scientists said on Wednesday that in order to keep coral reefs from being eaten away by increasingly acidic oceans, humans need to limit the amount of climate-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.The scientists authored a document called the Honolulu Declaration, for release at a U.S. conference on coral reefs in Hawaii."The most logical and critical action to address the impacts of ocean acidification on coral reefs is to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration," the report warned.

Scientists in Japan have given a beluga whale a vocabulary of three words, the first time a marine creature has been able to link a sound to an object and then repeat the sound as a 'word'.Nack, a 23-year-old beluga whale at the Kamogawa Sea World aquarium in Chiba Prefecture, has been taught to make different noises for a bucket, diving goggles and a pair of diving fins, said Takashi Murayama, a professor at Tokai University who has been training the creature for the last five years.

The curious Ian Vince is willing to go to huge lengths to join a hillside pagan ritualI am hiding behind a long wall in an East Sussex car park trying to keep dry in the face of a blustery squall, but it's not working.Wherever I stand, the wind and its cargo of super-sized raindrops seeks me out this side of the wall, that side of the wall, it doesn't matter.

Today, cutting-edge astronomers use space-based observatories to gain a sharp view of the stars and advance our understanding of the cosmos. But appreciation for celestial bodies dates back to ancient times. Many cultures built structures in ways that suggest they were in tune with Earth's annual trek around the sun. Other structures appear to take constellations and planets into account.

(AP) Rapidly melting ice on Alaska's Arctic is opening up a new navigable ocean in the extreme north, allowing oil tankers, fishing vessels and even cruise ships to venture into a realm once trolled mostly by indigenous hunters.The Coast Guard expects so much traffic that it opened two temporary stations on the nation's northernmost waters, anticipating the day when an ocean the size of the contiguous United States could be ice-free for most of the summer.

At Maryland's Camp Calleva, most campers engage in typical activities like rafting, kayaking or rock climbing. But a few spend a week in a program called Building Green, learning about environmentally friendly design and alternative energy. This year's project: alternative fuels.

One more Bigfoot hoax went down in history this week.Two men in Georgia claimed they had found the legendary creature's body last month. But amateur Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi realized it was a rubber gorilla suit filled with animal guts and encased in ice when he discovered that the hair on the body melted under heat. Unfortunately, Biscardi had already paid an undisclosed sum of money for it.

SYDNEY: Genetically-modified plants that turn red when they grow in the presence of explosives are being trailed for their effectiveness to detect landmines in South Africa.Scientists at Stellenbosch University, in collaboration with a Danish biotechnology firm, are testing a type of tobacco plant that produces the red pigment anthocyanin in the presence of breakdown products of TNT (trinitrotoluene). TNT is an explosive often found in landmines.

Climate change could release unexpectedly huge stores of carbon dioxide from Arctic soils, which would in turn fuel a vicious circle of global warming, a new study warned Sunday.And according to one commentary on the research, current models of climate change have not taken this extra source of greenhouse gas into account.Scientists have long known that organic carbon trapped inside a blanket of frozen permafrost covering one fifth of the world's land mass would, if thawed, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Looking for a recipe for a great civilization? How about: Take people, add water, and shake very, very vigorously. Earthquake-prone areas along the edges of tectonic plates were far more likely to give birth to great ancient civilizations than less dynamic landscapes, according to a new study. Researchers say the relationship suggests that forces typically viewed as destructive--such as earthquakes--might have also played a constructive role in human history.