Newsdesk Archive

The first scientific mission with Sentry, a newly developed robot capable of diving as deep as 5,000 meters (3.1 miles) into the ocean, has been successfully completed by scientists and engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of Washington (UW).The vehicle surveyed and helped pinpoint several proposed deep-water sites for seafloor instruments that will be deployed in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s planned Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI).

(PhysOrg.com) -- The picture of a future with wireless sensor networks-webs of sensory devices that function without a central infrastructure--is quickly coming into sharper focus through the work of Los Alamos National Laboratory computer scientist Sami Ayyorgun.

SYDNEY (AFP) - Huge elephant seals have been recruited to help scientists break through a critical blind spot and chart climate change under the Antarctic sea ice in winter, researchers said Tuesday.The seals, which can weigh up to three tonnes, are fitted with sensors that transmit previously unavailable data to satellites when they surface to breathe.

WASHINGTON - NASA is not properly emphasizing safety in its design of a new spaceship and its return-to-the-moon program faces money, morale and leadership problems, an agency safety panel found Monday.The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel cited "surprising anxiety among NASA employees" about the Constellation moon program and said the project "lacks clear direction." Its 143-page annual report specifically faulted the agency's design of the Orion crew capsule for not putting safety features first.

WARREN, Mich. - The stinky, steaming air that escapes from a car's tailpipe could help us use less gas.Researchers are competing to meet a challenge from the U.S. Department of Energy: Improve fuel economy 10 percent by converting wasted exhaust heat into energy that can help power the vehicle.

The mystery of what killed off the Neanderthals about 30,000 years ago comes a step closer to being solved with a study suggesting that they formed a tiny population that had been teetering on the brink of extinction.Neanderthals first appeared in Europe at least 300,000 years ago but they disappeared after the arrival of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, who first arrived in Europe 50,000 years ago. This has led to speculation about whether the Neanderthals interbred with the new arrivals to form a hybrid population that became submerged in the human gene pool, or were instead wiped out by them, either through competition for resources or by violence.

The armed men were the good news on a recent archaeological tour of pillaged digs in Iraq.They were guards.Arriving by British Army helicopter on June 7, a British Museum team was surveying Lahm, an ancient settlement dating back to 1000 B.C., when the Iraqi Special Protection Force guards arrived to check out the visitors.

Staring up at a 6-foot screen at the Orlando Science Center on Friday, Jadie Ferreira, 13, was looking at her future. And perhaps the future of education.Jadie and about 20 other students in an oceanography camp were watching diver Terrence Tysall, coming to them live from a cave 35 feet underwater in Bermuda. Students could hear his words clearly and see his eyes as bubbles rose from his face mask.

MIT robotics professor Rodney Brooks helped bring about a paradigm shift in robotics in the late 1980s when he advocated a move away from top-down programming (which required complete control of the robot's environment) toward a biologically inspired model that helped robots navigate dynamic, constantly changing surroundings on their own. His breakthroughs paved the way for Roomba, the vacuuming robot disc that uses multiple sensors to adapt to different floor types and avoid obstalces in its path. (Brooks is chief technology officer and cofounder of Roomba's parent company, iRobot.) Brooks talked to NEWSWEEK's Katie Baker about the challenges involved in creating robots that can interact in social settings.

Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told.In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies.

Two weddings took place at the Pazo de Meirás in northwestern Spain on Friday. In one, held in the chapel of the faux-medieval palace, the real Leticia Giménez-Arnau, great-granddaughter of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, married her Salvadoran boyfriend in what was no doubt an appropriately austere ceremony. In the other, considerably more rambunctious celebration, an actress playing Leticia arrived at the wedding scene in a convertible driven by a Moorish guard (complete with requisite fez). Greeted with fascist salutes and the extravagant leering of a pompous archbishop, the lovely bride was given away by the familiarly paunchy figure of the caudillo himself, "resurrected" for the occasion by a local comedic theater troupe.

Resting on a tiny white cushion in a royal-blue embroidered box - secure in its new home behind a locked door at UC Berkeley's East Asian Library - is an old piece of chipped bone, the size of a matchbook and yellowed with age.

The ashes of actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in Star Trek, were lost on the way to space on Sunday morning, when the rocket carrying them malfunctioned minutes after take-off.The actor's ashes were among those of 208 people, including Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, who had paid to have their remains fired into space aboard Falcon 1, a rocket developed by the private space company SpaceX.

It's long-winded and badly written, a tirade against all things non-German that would have disappeared if its author had never managed to turn many of his vile words into action. Adolf Hitler's notorious Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a manifesto posing as autobiography, has long been banned from German bookshelves "out of a responsibility and respect for the victims of the Holocaust." But 83 years after it was first published, some Germans argue it should be made available again in order to drain it of whatever power it might still have.

The moon is once again a popular destination, as several space-faring nations are talking about setting up bases there. One reason would be to mine fuel for future fusion reactors.The fuel in this case is helium-3, a lighter isotope of the helium used in balloons. In high energy collisions, helium-3 fuses with other nuclei to release more energy and less waste than the reactions in traditional nuclear reactors.

Archaeologists have discovered three 9,000-year-old skulls at the Yiftah'el dig in the Lower Galilee, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday. Experts said the placement of the skulls confirms the worship of ancestors from during that time, practiced by displaying skulls inside houses.

Research led by UK and Australian scientists sheds new light on the role that our ancestors played in the extinction of Australia's prehistoric animals. The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, provides the first evidence that Tasmania's giant kangaroos and marsupial 'rhinos' and 'leopards' were still roaming the island when humans first arrived. The findings suggest that the mass extinction of Tasmania's large prehistoric animals was the result of human hunting, and not climate change as previously believed.

LONDON, August 12 (IranMania) - Recent studies of a team of archeologists have shown that 5000 years ago (3200 BC) women had the economic control of the Burnt City.Some paleo-anthropologists believe that mothers in the Burnt City had social and financial prominence, director of the team working at the Burnt City in Sistan-Baluchestan Province, southeastern Iran said recently.

On Arwad Island off the coast of Syria, a group of 20 sailors-to-be are preparing for a voyage their captain believes has not been undertaken for two and a half millennia.They plan to set off on Sunday on a journey that attempts to replicate what the Greek historian Herodotus mentions as the first circumnavigation of Africa in about 600BC.Their vessel, the small, pine-wood Phoenicia, is modelled on the type of ship the Phoenician sailors he credited with the landmark voyage would have used.

The Cassini spacecraft has returned some remarkable new close-up images of the Saturnian moon Enceladus.They were captured during a flyby on 11 August, with the probe passing above the icy terrain at a distance of just 50km at closest approach.The pictures show previously unseen detail in the so-called tiger stripes that mark the south pole of Enceladus.These cracks run across a "hot-spot" region that is hurling plumes of ice particles into space.

Nasa has pushed back by a year its internal target date for flying the successor to the shuttle.Agency officials say they are now aiming for September 2014 for the first crewed mission of the Orion ship.This is a year later than Nasa had hoped for, but still inside its March 2015 absolute deadline.The officials say the funds currently available to develop Orion and its Ares launch rocket mean the faster timeline is no longer tenable.

Hardware used to spot gamma ray bursts could soon be helping direct troops on a battlefield.Defence firm Qinetiq has brought the technology down to Earth to make a monitoring system that may be able to track thousands of targets.The futuristic system manages the feat without using lenses to gather light from the scene it is watching.Instead it employs a sensor array, a special "mask" and image processing software to picture a scene.

Scientists in the US say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people invisible.Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear".The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre.The team says the principles could one day be scaled up to make invisibility cloaks large enough to hide people.

Prevailing theoretical models attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way. Now a new study by Northwestern University astronomers, using recent data from the 300 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars, turns that view on its head.

Arizona State University researchers have made a breakthrough in understanding the effect on climate change of a key component of urban pollution. The discovery could lead to more accurate forecasting of possible global-warming activity, say Peter Crozier and James Anderson.

Enjoy these Beijing Olympics, and pray to the Mayan sky gods that your country wins some gold, for these may be the last. The fate of humanity, the Earth and the London Olympics is seriously in question as 2012 marks the termination of the 13th b'ak'tun cycle, and possibly the end of the world. Again.

Last week was a good week for Virgin Galactic, a not-so-good week for SpaceX, and a fantastic week for XCOR Aerospace, which provided the engine for the Rocket Racing League's first custom-built aerial racer. The rocket plane performed without a hitch three times during last week's EAA AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wis. - marking a new milestone on XCOR's stealthier route to outer space.

The Austrian archeological team that has been carrying out excavations in Ephesus enlarged the scope of their activity in the past months to cover the nearby tumulus Çukuriçihöyük. The team has uncovered archeologically unique relics in the ancient tumulus

Miners in Romania have unearthed the skeleton of a 2.5 million-year-old mastodon, believed to be one of the best preserved in Europe, a local official said Friday.They stumbled on the remains of the mammoth-like animal during excavations in June at a coal mine in the village of Racosul de Sus, around 100 miles (170 kilometers) northwest of Bucharest, according to Laszlo Demeter, a historian and local councilor.

(PhysOrg.com) -- By producing "6-D" images, an MIT professor and colleagues are creating unusually realistic pictures that not only have a full three-dimensional appearance, but also respond to their environment, producing natural shadows and highlights depending on the direction and intensity of the illumination around them.

Ever since the document was examined several weeks ago, it's been a mystery.Initially, it appeared to be a reproduction of the terms and conditions of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender in Appomattox, Va., in 1865.

On the western side of the Nile, on the edge of the low desert, the ancient Upper Egyptian town of Abydos spreads on a site of over eight square kilometres. The atmosphere is agreeable, embracing magnificent monuments within a great natural environment.As the city sacred to god Osiris where, according to legend, his head is buried, and coupled with the ancient Egyptian belief that the horizon west of Abydos was the gateway to the afterlife, Abydos was a favoured burial place for ancient Egyptians who wished to be buried near their legendary ancestor. Hence many cult structures were dedicated to Osiris and vast cemetery fields were developed there, incorporating not only the regional population but non-local people who also chose to build tombs and commemorative monuments in Abydos.

The U.S. military may be 30 percent robotic by the year 2020, according to Doug Few and Bill Smart of Washington University in St. Louis."When the military says 'robot' they mean everything from self-driving trucks up to what you would conventionally think of as a robot. You would more accurately call them autonomous systems rather than robots," says Smart, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

NEW YORK - Harvard scientists say they have created stems cells for 10 genetic disorders, which will allow researchers to watch the diseases develop in a lab dish.This early step, using a new technique, could help speed up efforts to find treatments for some of the most confounding ailments, the scientists said.The new work was reported online Thursday in the journal Cell, and the researchers said they plan to make the cell lines readily available to other scientists.

NICASIO, California (AP) -- George Lucas says he's already identified the one person who can keep the "Indiana Jones" franchise going: Harrison Ford.The filmmaker scoffed at the possibility of passing the famed fedora from Ford to Shia LaBeouf, the 22-year-old actor who played Indy's son Mutt Williams in this summer's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.""He is Indiana Jones," Lucas said of Ford. "If Indiana Jones wasn't in it, you'd have to call it 'Mutt Williams and the search for Elvis.' ... "Yeah, it's 'Mutt Williams and the Search for Elvis.' "

Centuries-old shards of pottery mingle with spent ammunition rounds on a wind-swept mountainside in northern Afghanistan where French archeologists believe they have found a vast ancient city.For years, villagers have dug the baked earth on the heights of Cheshme-Shafa for pottery and coins to sell to antique smugglers. Tracts of the site that locals call the "City of Infidels" look like a battleground, scarred by craters.

IKEA plans to pour $77 million into clean-technology start-ups within the next five years and could add "green" goods such as solar panels to its inventory, according to Cleantech Group.The four-person, 50 million euro IKEA GreenTech fund has been operating for eight months, the report said. And it could invest in up to 10 fledgling companies in the next few years, perhaps first in Europe, where IKEA rings up about 82 percent of its sales.

Our solar system emerged in surprisingly good order from the violence of planetary creation, according to a new simulation.Researchers found that planetary formation in the first few million years often resembles a violent wrestling match among hungry siblings, with planets fighting to feed on gas and dust while pulling at each other with gravitational arms.

NASA is considering flying a prototype plasma rocket engine designed by a former astronaut to the International Space Station for testing, officials said Wednesday.The engine is called a Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, or VASIMR, and if that sounds like something you'd see on Star Trek, you're not too far from the truth.Rather than heating chemicals and directing the resulting gases through high-temperature metal nozzles, VASIMR uses radio waves to create and speed up free-flying, electrically charged particles known as plasma. The concoction is then herded through nozzles made of magnetic fields, not metals like traditional rocket engines.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NASA scientists on Tuesday said the surprise discovery of a sometimes toxic chemical on the surface of Mars does not diminish the possibility of finding microbial life on the Red Planet and asked for patience while they study soil samples further.The space agency also cautioned that further tests were required to confirm that dirt analyzed by the Phoenix Mars Lander contains perchlorate, an oxidizing substance used in rocket fuel that on Earth can be harmful to life, and rule out contamination by the spacecraft

Fans of extraterrestrial life may have been disappointed when internet-fed rumors of Martian life ended in a NASA press conference on soil composition.But they can take solace in a newly popular theory that suggests the rest of space may teem with microbes.This once-controversial notion holds that the universe is filled with the ingredients of microbial life, and that earthly life first came from the skies as comet dust or meteorites salted with hardy bacteria.

BERLIN: Another six months should yield the DNA key to the full Neanderthal genome, says Svante Pääbo and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.The team, based in Leipzig, is on schedule by the end of the year to sequence one full sweep, or about 3.8 billion base pairs of ancient Neanderthal nuclear DNA, Pääbo told a packed house full of researchers at the International Congress of Genetics in Berlin last week.

While many today consider Potomac their home, in 3000 B.C., so did early Americans.Temporarily, at least.Archaeologists and volunteers this summer are excavating a prehistoric "rock shelter" within the Blockhouse Point Conservation Park in Potomac, and learning more about the American Indians that lived near the overhanging rock formation where the prehistoric people once lived.

Olympic athletes may benefit from today's sports drinks and high-tech training, but their gymnastics or wrestling performance probably pales in comparison to what early human ancestors could have pulled off.That's because we Homo sapiens have followed an evolutionary track away from sheer body strength and toward the lean, mean endurance qualities of a long-distance runner.

LONDON, (CAIS) -- The Parseh and Pasargadae Research Foundation director has called for constant vigilance against soil moisture, which is threatening the mausoleum of Cyrus the Great in Pasargadae.The foundation has prepared a plan to constantly monitor the soil moisture at the site in the southern province of Fars, Mohammad-Hassan Talebian told the Persian service of CHN on Tuesday.The plan will be approved and then financed by the Research Centre of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organisation (RCCTHO), he added.

Fossils recovered in a remote cave in the Southeast corner of Madagascar by William L. Jungers, Ph.D., a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University Medical Centre, and his colleagues in Hawaii, Oregon, Massachusetts and Madagascar have been reuinted and reconstructed via computed tomography (CT) technology by collaborators at Pennsylvania State University. The team used CT scanning and computerisation to virtually glue newly discovered skull fragments of a rare extinct lemur found in 2003 back into its partial skull, originally discovered in 1899 and housed in Vienna, Austria. An article describing the work will be published in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of 28 July 2008.

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) - Archaeologists have discovered traces of a Bronze Age place of worship in Germany in what they say might be the country's answer to Stonehenge.Scientists from a university in Halle are excavating a roughly 4,000 year-old circular site in eastern Germany which contains graves that bear a strong resemblance to Stonehenge, a prehistoric stone circle of towering megaliths in southern Britain.

Contrary to popular belief, the people who roamed north Africa in prehistoric times cared deeply for their children, recent discoveries by a team of Moroccan and British archaeologists show."For years these people have wrongly been thought of as individuals whose only wish was to eat, reproduce, and protect themselves from the elements and predators," said Abdeljalil Bouzouggar of Morocco's Institute of Archaeology and Heritage."Now we discover that 12000 years ago they granted their babies the same rights as adults."

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Egyptian scientists will carry out DNA tests on two mummified fetuses found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun to determine their link to the young pharaoh, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement Wednesday.The two tiny female fetuses -- found in the tomb in Luxor as part of the 1922 King Tut discovery -- may be his stillborn children, the Council said.The statement quoted Zahi Hawass, the head of the Egyptian antiquities, as saying that the tests will also try to determine Tutankhamun's family lineage, a source of ambiguity among many Egyptologists.

What some dinosaurs lacked in body armor, they made up for in size. The duck-billed hadrosaur grew to adulthood much faster than its predators, such as tyrannosaurs, a new study suggests.By about age 10, the plant-eating hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus stebingeri had likely ballooned to its mature length of 30 feet (9 meters) from nose to tail tip, the study showed. Meanwhile, the meat-eater and hadrosaur-enemy Tyrannosaurus rex would have still been a relative pipsqueak at that age, not reaching adult size until 20 to 30 years of age.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Tens of thousands bowed their heads at a ceremony in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Wednesday, the 63rd anniversary of the world's first atomic attack, as the city's mayor hit out at countries that refuse to abandon their bombs.A bell tolled at 8:15 a.m. to mark the exact moment when the bomb dubbed "Little Boy" was dropped on the city, killing tens of thousands immediately and many more later from radiation sickness.

Tiny fossilized teeth excavated from an Indian open-pit coal mine could be the oldest Asian remains ever found of anthropoids, the primate lineage of today's monkeys, apes and humans, say researchers from Duke University and the Indian Institute of Technology.

Stanford University researchers peering at history's footprints on human DNA have found new evidence for how prehistoric people shared knowledge that advanced civilization.Using a genetic technique pioneered at Stanford, the team found that animal-herding methods arrived in southern Africa 2,000 years ago on a wave of human migration, rather than by movement of ideas between neighbors. The findings shed light on how early cultures interacted with each other and how societies learned to adopt advances.

STANFORD, Calif. - Age may not be rust after all. Specific genetic instructions drive aging in worms, report researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Their discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging is a buildup of tissue damage akin to rust, and implies science might eventually halt or even reverse the ravages of age."We were really surprised," said Stuart Kim, PhD, professor of developmental biology and of genetics, who is the senior author of the research.

A mummy of a middle-aged woman dating to Ancient Greek times has been discovered in a lead coffin inside a marble sarcophagus, the first clear indication of embalming in Greece from the era when the Romans ruled there.A research team co-led by Frank Rühli of the University of Zurich was able to show that various resins, oils and spices were used to embalm the body, dating to A.D. 300. Along with the skeleton, the methods partially preserved some soft tissues from the body, most of which are now brittle, thin and extremely desiccated, including eyebrows, a muscle in the hand, hair and blood cells.

Most rock paintings and rock carvings or petroglyphs were created by ancient and prehistoric societies. Archaeologists have long used them to gain clues to the way of life of such peoples. Certain rock frescos − such as the renowned Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings or the petroglyphs of Scandinavia and North America − have already yielded substantial information on our ancestors' daily lives.However, for other regions of the world like Latin America studies are still fragmentary. In Peru, where many sites have already been located, mystery still cloaks the signification and role of these concentrations of cave paintings and petroglyphs. One of these sites, Toro Muerto, in the South of the country, contains over 4000 carved blocks scattered over several dozen hectares.

Mark Lehner said his North Dakota upbringing helped him fulfill his dreams and goals with a career in uncovering ancient mysteries in Egypt.Lehner, who grew up in Minot, is considered one of the foremost experts on the Giza Pyramids in Egypt.

A traditional childhood pastime could provide a breakthrough in renewable energy, after successful experiments in flying a giant kite at one of Europe's top research centres.Scientists from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands harnessed energy from the wind by flying a 10-sq metre kite tethered to a generator, producing 10 kilowatts of power.

Companies developing genetically modified crops risk creating the biggest environmental disaster "of all time", Prince Charles has warned.GM crops were damaging Earth's soil and were an experiment "gone seriously wrong", he told the Daily Telegraph.A future reliance on corporations to mass-produce food would drive millions of farmers off their land, he said.The government said it welcomed all voices in the "important" debate over the future potential role of GM crops.

Reuters - The tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan officially became a democratic constitutional monarchy on Friday when King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck signed the country's constitution, which was seven years in the making.Here are some facts about the new constitution:* It requires the government to maximise so-called "Gross National Happiness", and guarantees citizens freedom of speech, thought, conscience and religion.* It requires that a minimum of 60 percent of Bhutan's total land be kept forested.

Conner Bolland's split second timing bodes well, as eight is considered a lucky number in many cultures.His mother Samantha Wilson, 20, was taken to hospital on Wednesday when her waters broke, but Conner waited until the exact stroke of 8.08am on Friday to make his remarkable entrance.Miss Wilson said: "It's just incredible."It wasn't until about an hour before he was born one of the midwives said 'if you can hang on for just a bit longer your baby could be born at 8am'."He was due on the seventh so it's almost as if he waited for the exact time to make his appearance.

Jerusalem's Zion Gate, one of the most impressive entryways into the capital's walled Old City, has finished undergoing major preservation work in time for its 468th birthday, the Antiquities Authority announced Sunday.

Is your overflowing e-mail in-box a herald of the next stage in human evolution? Those e-mails represent just a small sample of the vast amount of digital information being generated by the gigabyte every minute. If we can cope with this rising flood of information, we are likely to be on track for using technology in the creation of superhuman intelligence, according to Vernor Vinge, futurist, best-selling science fiction author, and retired professor of computer science. Machines will become far more than just tools; they will physically merge with us, seamlessly endowing powers that are currently beyond our imagination. And all of this will happen in our lifetime, Vinge says.

In recent days I have been asked on three separate occasions whether I think physicists are going to destroy the world the moment they switch on the Large Hadron Collider - the huge underground particle accelerator in Geneva - later this year. They ask if, as has been reported, the energies it will produce when beams of near light-speed subatomic particles are smashed together will create mini black holes that will swallow up the whole planet.

Scientists have found an inexpensive way to produce hydrogen from water, a discovery that could lead to a plentiful source of environmentally friendly fuel to power homes and cars.The technique, which mimics the way photosynthesis works in plants, also provides a highly efficient way to store energy, potentially paving the way to making solar power more economically viable.

Three Northwestern University researchers have learned that our solar system in which the Earth orbits our sun is the exception in the Milky Way rather than the rule."We now know that these other planetary systems don't look like the solar system at all," said Frederic A. Rasio, senior author of the Science paper, and a theoretical astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern. "We now better understand the process of planet formation and can explain the properties of the strange exoplanets we've observed. We also know that the solar system is special and understand at some level what makes it special."

If you shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, when there is none, you understand that you might be arrested for irresponsible behaviour and breach of the peace. But from today, I smell smoke, I see flames and I think it is time to shout. I don't want you to panic, but I do think it would be a good idea to form an orderly queue to leave the building.Because in just 100 months' time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change. That said, among people working on global warming, there are countless models, scenarios, and different iterations of all those models and scenarios. So, let us be clear from the outset about exactly what we mean.

BERLIN (Reuters) - More than 1,600 years after it was written in Greek, one of the oldest copies of the Bible will become globally accessible online for the first time this week.From Thursday, sections of the Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the oldest complete New Testament, will be available on the Internet, said the University of Leipzig, one of the four curators of the ancient text worldwide.

Strands of DNA recovered from the fossilised leg bone of a Neanderthal have shed light on the fragility of the ancient population and pinpointed when they first split from what were to become modern humans. The 38,000-year-old bone was unearthed in a cave in Vindija in Croatia, and has since become part of a landmark project to read the entire genetic sequence of an ancient human ancestor, a feat scientists believe will help reveal how modern humans evolved into the world's dominant species.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- From Dallas, Texas to Dabancheng, China, energy companies are staking fortunes on harnessing wind power.Several Texan transmission companies announced Monday they were forming a consortium to invest in the $5 billion cost of building new power lines to take advantage of the state's vast wind power.The consortium, comprised of existing transmission operators, includes Dallas-based Oncor, the state's largest power delivery company, Electric Transmission Texas (ETT) and units of American Electric Power Co. among others.

A US military plane equipped with a powerful laser has moved a step closer to becoming a viable weapon.Engineers have started flowing chemical fuel through the laser to test its sequencing and control.This will set up the first test firing of the weapon aboard the aircraft while it is on the ground.

An almost complete skeleton of a bear that may have died 11,000 years ago has been recovered from a cave in the Scottish Highlands.The first pieces of bone were found in 1995 by cavers exploring a network of caves at Inchnadamph in Sutherland.But it was only recently that caving club, Grampian Speleological Group, reached some of the final fragments.

One of the classic dreams of aviation is to rise into the air with a flying machine strapped to your back. The jetpack dream is so iconic that it has shown up in movies ranging from "Thunderball" to "The Rocketeer" - and so elusive that it has spawned a book about high-tech failures titled "Where's My Jetpack?"Over the years, several ventures have tried to realize the jetpack dream - and now a New Zealand inventor is taking the wraps off a secret decade-long effort that he hopes will bring the dream to a sky near you.

CHICAGO - For the first time, an experimental drug shows promise for halting the progression of Alzheimer's disease by taking a new approach: breaking up the protein tangles that clog victims' brains.The encouraging results from the drug called Rember, reported Tuesday at a medical conference in Chicago, electrified a field battered by recent setbacks. The drug was developed by Singapore-based TauRx Therapeutics.

Morten Bo Madsen spends his work day crunching data on a laptop seated in front of a clear plastic-covered box about the size of a widescreen computer monitor that emits a startlingly bright blue light.No, this isn't a scene from a sci-fi movie. Madsen is one of the 150 scientists and engineers working on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The bright light keeps Madsen's internal clock in check, because Madsen, you see, is living on Mars time.

The painted caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France are one of the most famed monuments of Ice Age art. Dating back about 17,000 years, the great Hall of the Bulls and its adjacent chambers proved so popular with visitors that a generation ago the cave had to be closed to save the paintings from encroaching mould. A replica, Lascaux II, was built nearby and has proved equally popular.

A German archaeologist in charge of excavations in ancient Troy announced that a new dimension will be added to the excavations with the finds of the past 20 years being gathered together for the first time. Member of the teaching staff at Tübingen University, Dr. Ernst Pernicka told the Anatolia news agency Thursday that they were ready to present the intermediate results of the two-decade dig saying, "We will crown the past 20 years of work with publications. This project will be the intermediate results of the past 20 years of work."

HOUVIG, Denmark (AFP) - With a tight grip on his flashlight, Tommy Cassoe looks like a Danish Indiana Jones as he crawls out of a bunker buried under the sand, one of 7,000 the Nazis built along Denmark's western shores to fend off an allied invasion."Mission accomplished. The bunker is empty," Cassoe exclaims, showing off his bounty on the Krylen beach to a crowd of onlookers: rusty cans, a plastic vial containing medicine in case of a mustard gas attack, and electrical cables.

Hewlett Packard is up to two years away from starting to build a "central nervous system for the Earth", known as CeNSE.The man leading this ambitious project is Dr Stan Williams, who runs HP's Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory."The motivation for this work is realising and understanding the planet is sick and the disease is us," he told BBC News.

It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light.Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics."We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org

Roads, obviously. Sanitation. But no great buildings from their time in Britain. But the greatest legacy is how we use language to persuade, says Lisa Jardine.In a rapidly changing world, I am intrigued to find that the ability to use Latin with confidence continues to provoke widespread wonder and admiration.Last week, at the opening of the exhibition on the Roman Emperor Hadrian at the British Museum, the Mayor of London addressed the assembled company in Latin, to general acclaim.

A lost world has been found in Antarctica, preserved just the way it was when it was frozen in time some 14 million years ago.The fossils of plants and animals high in the mountains is an extremely rare find in the continent, one that also gives a glimpse of a what could be there in a century or two as the planet warms.A team working in an ice-free region has discovered the trove of ancient life in what must have been the last traces of tundra on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began to drop relentlessly.

A BLACK hole ejected from its host galaxy could be detected by bright flares emitted by a retinue of captured stars.When two supermassive black holes collide, one or both may be hurled from the centre of the galaxy. Some such "recoiling" black holes can be detected by their accretion discs of swirling, glowing hot gas.

In July of 1518, a woman referred to as Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street in Strasbourg, France and began a fervent dancing vigil that lasted between four and six days. By the end of the week, 34 others had joined her and, within a month, the crowd of dancing, hopping and leaping individuals had swelled to 400.Authorities prescribed "more dancing" to cure the tormented movers but, by summer's end, dozens in the Alsatian city had died of heart attacks, strokes and sheer exhaustion due to nonstop dancing.

Create your own eco-car, design a super-food and journey into a future world of sustainable living at the "Science of Survival" exhibition this summer in London.Curators of the exhibition at the Science Museum (www.sciencemuseum.org.uk) said the interactive attraction will explore how humans can survive on a changing planet, including how we should respond to climate change, diminishing resources and our other options for a sustainable future.

WARSAW (Reuters) - Palaeontologists digging in a brickyard in southern Poland have discovered the fossilised remains of a dinosaur that they say is a previously unknown ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.The predator dinosaur, given the working name "Dragon", lived around 200 million years ago, team member Dr Tomasz Sulej of the Polish Science Academy told Reuters.

WASHINGTON - The international space station, a $100 billion symbol of global cooperation, might become a casualty of U.S. opposition to Iran's nuclear ambitions.A little-known law intended to prevent the sale of nuclear technology to Iran would also bar NASA from buying Russian Soyuz spacecraft after 2011. With the space shuttle slated to retire in 2010 and its replacement not scheduled to fly before 2015, the agency would have no way to send astronauts to the space station.

PHILADELPHIA - Officials at a small Civil War museum made an intriguing discovery while sifting through storage: A document long treated as a photo reproduction of the terms of Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender appears, upon closer inspection, to contain actual signatures and date to 1865.Museum officials believe they have one of the three original documents signed by representatives of the Union and Confederacy in Appomattox Court House, Va., on April 10, 1865, a day after Lee's surrender.

In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

This series of concentric circles, carved on rocks in Northumberland, UK, is featured in a new catalogue of carvings from the region. English Heritage, the government-funded body in charge of protecting historic sites, hopes that three-dimensional models of the carvings uploaded to the Internet will help researchers and those working to preserve the art. The agency says around 2,500 rock carvings are currently known in England, and it expects to discover more with a national survey building on this regional work.

Irene Greenwald was only 14 when she spent a harrowing month at Munkacs ghetto in Hungary during the Holocaust caring for children, before she was shipped to Auschwitz."Mothers came with five or six children; you help out with the kids," she recalled. "I was a kid myself."Now, 64 years later, Greenwald, 78, has applied for compensation for the work she did all those years ago.

Since its discovery on the bottom of a lake north of Montreal more than 20 years ago, an amazingly well-preserved and possibly prehistoric dugout canoe has sparked debate among archaeologists.The debate has focused on whether the vessel was hollowed out of a massive white pine by Amerindians using stone tools and fire in the 1400s, making it a rare example of dugout technology in the St. Lawrence River valley before the European conquest.

Three year after part of a protective roof collapsed killing a British tourist, the ancient Minoan site of Akrotiri on Santorini remains closed. Excavations have halted and the reconstruction of its roof is stuck in the wheels of bureaucracy. Tourism businesses on the island say they are losing money and prestige as a result.

Bundles of paper covered with ancient Arabic letters lie on tables and dusty leather stools. In the sweltering heat, a man wearing blue Muslim robes flips through a worn folio, while others are busy repairing yellowed pages.An astonishing project is underway in Timbuktu, Mali, one of the world's poorest countries. On the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, experts are opening an enchanted Aladdin's Cave, filled with hundreds of thousands of ancient documents.

China's rapid investment in low carbon technologies has catapulted the nation up the global renewable energy rankings, a report shows.The Climate Group study said China invested $12bn (£6bn) in renewables during 2007, second only to Germany.However, it was expected to top the table by the end of 2009, it added.

It's one of the most dramatic examples of climate change in Earth's history, and scientists now say it happened almost entirely in one year's time.Thirteen thousands years ago, Europe was much like it is today -- cool but temperate, with great forests carpeting the land. Ice sheets still nibbled at Finland and Sweden, but for much of the continent the last Ice Age was a distant memory.Suddenly, the climate went haywire. Warm Gulf Stream currents that brought heat from the equator up toward the pole began to fail. Temperatures plummeted 3 to 4 degrees Celsius, and stayed that way for a millennium.

Bhubaneswar, July 31: Encouraged by the discovery of a Buddhist site in Jajpur recently, the state culture department has now decided to begin further excavations in six more sites.A team of archaeologists had found an inscribed monolithic stupa on top of the Panturi hill and several non-monolithic stupas in at Langudi, Tarapur, Deuli Kayama Hills, Neulipur, Bajragiri, Kantigadia and Panturi.The names of Tapasu and Bhallika, the first two disciples of Lord Buddha, were found inscribed in Brahmi on the rocks.

The world's geologists have dug out their maps and are sticking them together to produce the first truly global resource of the world's rocks.The OneGeology project pools existing data about what lies under our feet and has made it available on the web.Led by the British Geological Survey (BGS), the project involved geologists from 80 nations.

The latest ruins of the ancient city of Prishtina discovered under mosques and steaming communal baths or hammams built by Ottoman emperors is further proof of antiquity of the capital of Kosovo, known in the ancient times as Pristinium and going back to prehistory.The new archeological ruins next to the Ottoman Emperor Mosque and near the foundations of the Parliament of the Republic of Kosovo, and other archeological ruins discovered nearby the University Clinic of the University of Prishtina and near the ancient Illyrian capital of Ulpiana are further proof that Prishtina has existed since the prehistoric ages.

A seal impression belonging to a minister of the Biblical King Zedekiah which dates back 2,600 years has been uncovered completely intact during an archeological dig in Jerusalem's ancient City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said on Thursday.The seal impression, or bulla, with the name Gedalyahu ben Pashur, who served as minister to King Zedekiah (597-586 BCE) according to the Book of Jeremiah, was found just meters away from a separate seal impression of another of Zedekia's ministers, Yehukual ben Shelemyahu, which was uncovered three years ago, said Prof. Eilat Mazar who is leading the dig at the site.The excavation at the City of David, which is located just outside the walls of the Old City near Dung Gate, has proven, in recent years, to be a treasure trove for archeologists.