Newsdesk Archive

CAIRO, Egypt - Archaeologists and scholars will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great pyramid. They will then try to reassemble the craft.The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces in 1954 from another pit and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.

WASHINGTON - The No. 1 need right now for some of the builders of the nation's next spaceship: Lots of urine.Space program contractor Hamilton Sundstrand is seeking urine from workers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston as part of its work on the new Orion space capsule that would eventually take astronauts to the moon, according to an internal memo posted on the Web site Nasawatch.com.

SAFETY HARBOR - It started out as a simple plan to erect a pavilion-like shelter at the Marshall Street Park.Then it became an archeology dig.A city crew erecting the shelter stumbled upon an old knife on Monday, and archeologists today confirmed it is 6,000 to 8,000 years old, said Brad Purdy, the spokesman for the city of Safety Harbor.

A large-scale genetic study of native North Americans offers new insights into the migration of a small group of Athapaskan natives from their subarctic home in northwest North America to the southwestern United States. The migration, which left no known archaeological trace, is believed to have occurred about 500 years ago.The study, led by researchers at the University of Illinois, is detailed this month in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. It relied on a genetic analysis of the Y chromosome and so offers a window on the unique ancestral history of the male Athapaskan migrants. Previous genetic studies of this group focused on mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down exclusively from mothers to their offspring.

Research published in Nature Genetics by a team of international scientists including the department of zoology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, has established an identical mechanism of genetic imprinting, a process involved in marsupial and human fetal development, which evolved 150 million years ago.

In the primeval forests of Europe, scaly lizards leaped from the treetops and glided safely to the ground, according to a new study. Paleontologists investigated the fossilized remains of two kinds of kuehneosaurs, which were first found in the 1950s in an ancient cave system near Bristol [The Press Association]. They say that the prehistoric reptiles used extraordinary extensions of their ribs to form large gliding surfaces on the side of the body [LiveScience], which were surprisingly effective for the larger of the two species.

Undersea volcanic activity has been blamed for a mass extinction in the seas 93 million years ago.In the so-called "anoxic event" of the late Cretaceous Period, the ocean depths became starved of oxygen, wiping out swathes of marine organisms.Researchers from the University of Alberta, Canada, found a tell-tale signature of underwater volcanism in rocks dating to the period.Their findings have been published in the journal Nature.At the time of the anoxic event, the average temperatures were higher than those of today, researchers say.

YEKATERINBURG, Russia - Russia said on Wednesday that charred remains found in a pit belonged to Czar Nicholas II's only son and his daughter, exactly 90 years after the Bolsheviks shocked the world by murdering the last Czar.Moscow's confirmation that the remains included those of Czar Nicholas' 13-year-old heir, Prince Alexei, came as hundreds of Russians flocked to a church built on the site where the family was gunned down by Bolshevik executioners.

In the remote desert highlands of southern Yemen, a team of archaeologists have discovered new evidence of ancient transitions from hunting and herding to irrigation agriculture 5,200 years ago.As part of a larger program of archaeological research, Michael Harrower from the University of Toronto and The Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia (RASA) team explored the Wadi Sana watershed documenting 174 ancient irrigation structures, modeled topography and hydrology, and interviewed contemporary camel and goat herders and irrigation farmers.

FEARS have been raised that parts of the city's old Roman town - which lies beneath Verulamium Park - have disappeared.Archaeologists say there is a genuine concern that parts of the old town could be missing.Their concerns came to light on Sunday during a dig.The experienced team from St Albans District Council dug up part of a second century manor house buried under the park expecting to find a colourful mosaic tiled floor, discovered by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the 1930s.

THERE is a ridge and a creek in the heart of the 500,000-hectare Wollemi wilderness which are so remote they have never been officially named by Europeans.An archaeologist, Wayne Brennan, and his colleagues have called these wild features Forgotten Ridge and Creek and have just completed the first archaeological survey there. They have uncovered six archaeological sites, including a rock shelter with about 100 drawings and stencils.

The recent publication of a new edition of Red Land, Black Land is to be greeted with cries of joy and delight, and will probably provide an impetus to yet another generation (or more) of Egyptologists. The book is an updated edition of Barbara Mertz's 1964 well-loved, classic tome dealing with the daily life of the ancient Egyptians. The book is written in a very accessible style (some readers might know Mertz in her different fiction writing personas of Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels), and deals with the Egyptians as "people...not as featureless statistics or as the vague blur of humanity underlying such academic topics as Egyptian Literature or Egyptian Architecture."

Remnants of the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers, Helicobacter pylori, (H. pylori) have been discovered in gastric tissue from North American mummies. A study of human remains believed to predate Columbus' discovery of the New World has shown for the first time that H. pylori infection occurred in native populations, according to research published in BioMed Central's open access journal, BMC Microbiology.

We've been listening for the signs of extraterrestrial civilizations for nearly 50 years - and if E.T.s are out there, they just might have picked up on the radio signals that we've been transmitting for even longer. More recently, some broadcasters have been sending intentional shout-outs to the aliens.Is that so wrong?

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - By day, the engineers work on NASA's new Ares moon rockets. By night, some go undercover to work on a competing design.These dissenting scientists and their backers insist they have created an alternative rocket that would be safer, cheaper and easier to build than the two Ares spacecraft that will replace the space shuttle.

They don't need oxygen, they don't need sunlight. They can survive acid baths and doses of radiation 5,000 times more intense than the amount needed to kill a human. They can breathe metal, eat nuclear waste, drink boiling toxins and even heal their own wounds. Now scientists think these superbugs--known as extremophiles--may be the secret to a new energy economy."Climate change and the problems with carbon-based fuels has really brought this area into focus," said Bruce Rittman, the director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology and a member of the National Academies of Engineering. "We've been working with micro-organisms for years but on a much smaller scale. Now all of a sudden it needs to be done on a massive scale throughout the world."

After giving a lecture on conspiracy theories to a largely US audience, I was stopped in the corridor by an intense-looking member of the audience. He icily recited my reason for questioning the popular hypothesis that aliens had landed at Roswell in New Mexico in 1946: that, if the extraterrestrials really contacted our planet then, it seemed strange that there had been no visit since.

Landfills and plastics don't mix well. It takes several hundred years for an oil-based plastic bottle to breakdown in a landfill. And plastics can consume as much as 25% of the landfill space, according to the US government's Energy Information Administration.Those two problems are helping drive innovation into new bioplastic packaging material at research institutions including Missouri University Science and Technology. There, researchers are cooking up recipes for super-biodegradable plastics that decompose in a few months.

An aging American Indian with rotting teeth and arthritic joints sat down and died in the Utah desert outside Escalante with a musket, ammunition and a bucket. Blowing sand covered his corpse for more than a century before a hiker stumbled across it last year.

Ancient bones from the city of Jericho are to be used by British scientists to develop treatments for tuberculosis. The project is part of a new scientific discipline in which archaeologists and medical researchers are cooperating to gain insights into modern ailments.Other diseases being tackled this way include syphilis, malaria, arthritis and influenza. Ancient history holds vital clues in seeking out treatments for modern diseases, according to these real-life counterparts of TV's new archaeological detective series Bonekickers, starring Hugh Bonneville and Adrian Lester. The programme gives dramatic relevance to the study of archaeology, as UK scientists are doing with the study of ancient diseases.

LEBANON -- There is disagreement over how it happened but not what happened -- about an acre of one of the country's most significant prehistoric sites was destroyed by bulldozing.Located to the east of Belleville Street, a mile or so from Lebanon's bricked and antique shop-lined main thoroughfare, the Pfeffer site has been listed for more than 20 years on the National Register of Historic Places.But in late June, about an acre of artifact-filled soil was destroyed when a bulldozer scraped it away during the building of a road on a multiple home construction site being built by developer Thomas Bow of Belleville.Archaeologist Jeff Kruchten of the University of Illinois surveyed the site recently with Tim Pauketat, another archaeologist from the same university.

FOUR ancient Aboriginal rock engravings have been uncovered at an archaeological dig on the Sydney Harbour foreshore.They are part of an Aboriginal site that had been partly covered over by a roadway at Waverton more than 80 years ago.The carvings - an image of a man, two "spirit men" with rays emanating from their heads, and what appears to be a school of fish - were found just off Balls Head Road next to an engraving of a whale with a man inside its belly that has long enthralled visitors.

A marble discus, which dates to the 5th-4th century BCE, was found by David Shalom, a lifeguard, while diving in the antiquities site of Yavne-Yam, next to Palmahim beach. The lifeguard gave the discus to the Israel Antiquities Authority.The white discus, which is flat on one side and convex on the other, measures 20 centimeters in diameter. In the middle of the discus are a perforation and the remains of two circles that are painted around the center of it. This object has been identified as representing the pupil of an eye that adorned the bow of an ancient warship or cargo ship. Its Greek name is ophtalmoi and a lead coupling or bronze nail that was driven through the hole in the center of the discus was used to attach the object to the hull of the ship.

The decade's most powerful environmental film doesn't star Al Gore or Greenpeace activists, but a trash-compacting, Hello Dolly-loving robot with a cockroach for a best friend.Backdropping the Chaplin-esque romantic robot comedy is a barren Earth smothered in junk, deserted but for the movie's eponymous hero, who is fated to compress garbage under sandstorm skies until his battered processors wind down.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have for the first time identified a key component to unravelling the mystery of room temperature superconductivity, according to a paper published in today's edition of the scientific journal Nature.

Last weekend, the best man at the table was a machine. Polaris, the University of Alberta poker playing computer program, took on professional players in Las Vegas and came out on top. Like last year's challenge, when the program was edged out in the final match, the final result came down to the wire.

DONETSK, Ukraine (CNN) -- A frail Irene Famulak clutched her brother on the airport tarmac, her arm wrapped around him in a tight embrace, tears streaming down their faces. It was the first time since 1942 they had seen each other, when she was 17 and he was just 7.That was the night the invading Nazis came to take her away from her Ukrainian home."I remember it well because I kissed him good-bye, and he pushed me away," she said of her brother. "I asked, 'Why did you do that?' And he said that he doesn't like kisses."

While re-digging his pond recently, Mongal Member at Sultanpur of Brahmanbaria Sadar upazila found a 10th century statue of Lord Vishnu five metres below the ground.The night after the discovery, the so-called Magnet Party (smuggling group) of the locality offered Mongal Tk 10 lakh for the statue. He refused the offer. He feared about the safety of the artefact and contacted the local police station to handover custody of the statue.

It is not well known that there were two Jewish temples in ancient Egypt. They do not form part of our traditional history, which concentrates on the going down into Egypt and the coming out of it, as based on the Torah accounts, for which there is little or no contemporary corroboration. But the two temples, though well attested by contemporary sources, have received little attention from our tradition.

A statue symbolising the mythical origins and power of Rome, long thought to have been made around 500BC, has been found to date from the 1200s.The statue depicts a she-wolf suckling Remus and his twin brother Romulus - who is said to have founded Rome.The statue of the wolf was carbon-dated last year, but the test results have only now been made public.The figures of Romulus and Remus have already been shown to be 15th Century additions to the statue.

PHILADELPHIA - The University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is dragging itself into the 21st century with an ambitious plan to share its treasures with the world via the Internet.The museum, a national and world leader in its field since its founding in 1887, in September will begin creating a "digital spine" in which all of its approximately 1 million objects will be cataloged on the internet.

A few miles inland from the Sea of Cortez, amid cracked earth and mesquite and sun-bleached cactus, neat rows of emerald plants are sprouting from the desert floor.The crop is salicornia. It is nourished by seawater flowing from a man-made canal. And if you believe the American who is farming it, this incongruous swath of green has the potential to feed the world, fuel our vehicles and slow global warming.He is Carl Hodges, a Tucson-based atmospheric physicist who has spent most of his 71 years figuring out how humans can feed themselves in places where good soil and fresh water are in short supply.

With its soaring stone pyramids and geometric temples, Teotihuacan was once the biggest city in the Americas and possibly the world.However, experts have never been able to say with certainty who built it and why it was suddenly abandoned.An international team of experts believes the answer may lie under the Pyramid of the Sun, the centre point of the vast ruined city 25 miles outside Mexico City.

The speed at which we react to threatening situations can have life or death implications. In the more primitive past, it could have meant escaping a wild animal; today it might mean swerving to avoid a head-on car crash.It has been thought for some years that mammals have two decision-making systems in their brains which operate at different speeds to cope with different situations. New research from the University of Bristol supports this theory and has shown that the evolutionary pressures arising from the older, faster, but less accurate, part of the brain may have shaped the more recent development of the slower-acting but more precise cortex, found in humans and higher animals. The research is published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

When our PC goes on strike again we tend to curse it as if it was a human. The question of why and under what circumstances we attribute human-like properties to machines and how such processes manifest on a cortical level was investigated in a project led by Dr. Sören Krach and Prof. Tilo Kircher from the RWTH Aachen University (Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy) in cooperation with the Department of "Social Robotics" (Bielefeld University) and the Neuroimage Nord (Hamburg). The findings are published July 9 in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE.

When it was first proposed, it seemed like a good idea: open up the Greek seas to divers and create a paradise for tourists underwater. Those who backed the law never thought of it as a windfall for looters, nor did it occur to them that it might put the acquisition policies of museums under further scrutiny.

US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon's interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth's satellite formed.The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object.Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water.But a new study in Nature magazine shows water was delivered to the lunar surface from the interior in volcanic eruptions three billion years ago.This suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence.

The completion of the newly paved road along Kalifornsky Beach Road is a sign of modern infrastructure, but archaeologists doing exploratory survey work related to the construction project have uncovered evidence of a much older society."We've found sites from the street light (at Bridge Access Road) to past Cannery Road. It's a very historic corridor," said Dan Thompson, a state archaeologist with the Office of History and Archeology in Anchorage.

PARIS (AFP) - How about this for the next instalment of the Indy franchise: "Indiana Jones and the Dodgy Antiques Dealer"?Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery.Scientists from those two prestigious institutions on Wednesday said their crystal skulls were cut, honed and polished by tools of the industrial age, not by Mesoamerican craftsmen of yore.

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) -- The Simon Wiesenthal Center has strong evidence that a former SS member known as "Dr. Death" is in southern Chile or Argentina, a top Nazi hunter for the human rights organization said Tuesday.Efraim Zuroff, the center's director in Israel, will fly Wednesday to the southern Chilean city of Puerto Montt, where SS doctor Aribert Heim's daughter has lived for years.Zuroff and center Latin America director Sergio Widder will then travel to Bariloche across the Andes in Argentina on Friday.

It has been over 50 years since the discovery of the double-stranded nature of DNA, and over that half-century and more we have learned a lot about deoxyribonucleic acid, from the fact that it organizes into a double-stranded double helix all the way to having sequenced the entire DNA of humans and a range of other organisms. Now, according to a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team in Japan has created the world's first DNA strand made from artificial bases.

PARIS (AFP) - New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.

Burial mounds, rock carvings, ancient dwellings and other cultural heritage sites are increasingly being destroyed by new roads, agriculture and building sites. The number of criminal investigations connected with laws protecting Norway's archaeological heritage is at an all-time high.Not all the losses are the result of criminal activity. Dispensations from the rules and natural erosion also take their toll.

A group of US researchers laid out the foundations Monday for a new online library on human genetics stored within the existing framework of open-access encyclopedia Wikipedia."There are about 25,000 genes in the humane genome. We have 9,000 articles," said Andrew Su, one of those behind the "Gene Wiki" project from the Genomics Institute at the Novartis Research Foundation in San Diego, California.

Diamonds and precious metals found in the eastern United States might have rained down during the last Ice Age after a comet shattered over Canada and set North America ablaze, all leading to a mass die-off of animals and humans.New chemical analyses of diamond, gold and silver found in Ohio and Indiana reveal the minerals were transported there from Canada several thousand years ago. The question is, how?

Earth is one special planet.It has liquid water, plate tectonics, and an atmosphere that shelters it from the worst of the sun's rays. But many scientists agree our planet's most special feature might just be us."It's the only planet we know of that has life," said Alan Boss, a planet formation theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C.

A major archaeological investigation is getting under way at one of Western Europe's most impressive prehistoric sites.The Ring of Brodgar in Orkney is the third largest stone circle in the British Isles, but little is known about it.A month-long programme of investigations will be undertaken by a 15-strong team.The last important archaeological studies took place there in the 1970s.

Perugia, July 8 - An ancient Etruscan tomb has resurfaced after centuries underground during the course of building work in the central Italian city of Perugia.The tomb, which has been preserved in excellent condition, contains seven funerary urns, the municipal archaeology department said. It is in the shape of a square and was covered by a sheet of travertine marble, which had apparently remained untouched since being laid centuries ago. The tomb is split into two halves by a pillar and there are two benches running along each side. The funerary urns, which were placed on the benches, were marked with brightly coloured mythological and religious motifs. A preliminary study suggests that writing on the side of the urns probably refers to a family that was called the Aneis.

Continuing research at Stonehenge has established that, in addition to being a place of ceremony connected with the sun and moon, it also was a center of mortuary rituals.University of Sheffield archaeologist Mike Pearson, recently interviewed on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, said that it was, in fact, "the biggest cemetery of its time.".

An archaeological discovery described as the most important in 18 years has been made at the site of the Tarxien temples.Malta Environment Planning Authority (Mepa) officials discovered megaliths and other remains, which are most probably prehistoric, during development works within the buffer zone of the Neolithic temples.The site was described by archaeologist Kevin Borda as the most important one since a burial ground was unearthed at the Brockdorff Circle in Xagħra in 1990. It lies within a plot of land measuring 25 by eight metres towards the back of the plot.

Medicine has much to learn from nature. There are literally millions of medical compounds out there that could cure diseases, help improve treatment and even protect us from some types of bacteria.Scientists have been tapping into nature's resources for inspiration on how to treat humans.Humpback whales, sea cucumbers and Australian red algae are just a few of the species leading the way in modern medicine.

A man raced into Berlin's Madame Tussauds wax museum Saturday and ripped the head off a waxwork of Adolf Hitler, police said.Police said the 41-year-old entered the exhibit shortly after the museum doors opened and "made for the Hitler figure," scuffling with a guard assigned to protect it and the manager before tearing the head off the life-size statue.The man was arrested and is now in custody, Berlin police spokeswoman Uwe Kozelnik said. He told officers he wanted to protest the figure being included in the museum.

LIMA (AFP) - A Canadian-led team of archaeologists has unearthed the 1,700 year-old tomb of a leader of the pre-Columbian Moche culture in northern Peru, the scientists said.Canadian archaeologist Steve Bourget said the tomb was discovered in the Ucupe dig 39 kilometers (24 miles) from Chiclayo on Peru's northern coastal plain.

In the heart of the northern Indian city of Lucknow looms a national shrine where the infamous 1857 Indian Mutiny took place. Pockmarked buildings memorialize a fierce battle that sparked an attempt at Indian independence around the country. Although the rebellion ultimately failed, today this site is often visited by young Indians, who wander back to the peaceful cemetery to celebrate an independence of a different kind.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese sailor and environmentalist Kenichi Horie has completed a 110-day solo voyage across the Pacific Ocean in a boat propelled by wave power to claim another world first.Weak waves and opposing ocean currents delayed his arrival, which was originally set for late May.

Headlines around the world hailed the fossils as "Lucy's Child" and "Lucy's Daughter" when anthropologists first reported finding the skull and bones of a 3-year-old girl who lived and died more than 3.3 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia's Afar Desert.

The reason you are sitting where you are right now may be because Pangaea, the most recent supercontinent to gather together all the world's landmasses together, ate itself nearly 300 million years ago.Convection in the Earth's mantle shifts the floating continental plates around, eventually driving them together into supercontinents every few hundred million years. We know supercontinents eventually break up again, but it is not clear how they do this.

QUEBEC CITY (AFP) - UNESCO's World Heritage Committee on Sunday added three new sites to its heritage list, including a former slave hideout in Mauritius, the Nabataean archaeological site in Saudi Arabia, and China's Fujian Tulou earthen houses.The Archaeological Site of Al-Hijr, the largest conserved site of the civilization of the Nabataeans south of Petra in Jordan, is the first World Heritage site in Saudi Arabia.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. plans to add solar panels to its popular Prius hybrid early next year to power the vehicle's air conditioning, a newspaper report said on Monday.As part of a complete design makeover, the Prius will be fitted with rooftop solar panels on its high-end models, the Nikkei economic daily said without naming sources.

Here's a trivia question: What state has installed more solar panels than any other except California?If you said New Jersey, your solar-energy IQ is brilliant. And if you know why several thousand huge mirrors are splayed across the Mojave Desert in California, consider yourself a solar energy genius, CBS News correspondent Tony Guida reports."Every single day when the Sun comes up, we are bathed with enough energy in one day to supply all the power we need for five years across the globe," Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said.

(ANSA) - Palermo, July 3 - A proposal to privatize the management of the Valley of the Temples, one of Italy's most important archeological sites, has kicked up a storm of protests.The idea was the brainchild of Sicily's regional councillor for culture, Antonello Antinoro, who said that ''to make Sicily's cultural assets more profitable we must offer quality private operators a complete tourist attraction package for a period of 30 years''.''I'm thinking along the lines of the Valley of Temples or the Greek theatre in Siracusa,'' he added.

A team of eight students hopes to unearth the remains of an ancient city on the Black Sea coast, regarded by many as the Ephesus of the Black Sea. Excavations will be made July 15, aiming to unveil the architectural plan of Teion (or Tion) located in the city of Zonguldak's Filyos district.Archaeologist Sümer Atasoy said the excavation team, composed of a map engineer, an archeologist, an art historian and eight students from Greek Yanya University, will conduct a major dig in the ancient city with a team of 35 people, speaking to the Anatolia news agency.

JERUSALEM - A secretive encounter with a Bedouin in a desert valley led to the discovery of two fragments from a nearly 2,000-year-old parchment scroll - the first such finding in decades, an Israeli archaeologist said today.The finding has given rise to hope that the Judean Desert may yield more treasures, said Professor Chanan Eshel, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv's Bar Ilan University.The two small pieces of brown animal skin, inscribed in Hebrew with verses from the Book of Leviticus, are from "refugee" caves in Nachal Arugot, a canyon near the Dead Sea where Jews hid from the Romans in the second century, Eshel said in an interview with The Associated Press.

SEOUL, South Korea - The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.

In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in "sacred mushrooms," produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.

ROME (Reuters) - The Italian government declared a state of emergency at the Pompeii archaeological site on Friday to try to rescue one of the world's most important cultural treasures from decades of neglect.A cabinet statement said it would appoint a special commissioner for Pompeii, the ancient Roman city buried by an eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in AD 79 and now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

LONDON, (CAIS) -- Archaeologists have begun their third season of archaeological research at Kanglou fortress located in the province of Mazandaran, north of Iran.Previous excavations had yielded a Sasanian necropolis and a fortress, which some experts believe was built in honour of the Mithra or deity of water, Anahita.The walls of the graves were made of stone and covered with mud, which were not common in Zoroastrian, the dominant religion of the Sasanian dynasty (224-651 CE).

The smallest planet in the Solar System has become even smaller, studies by the Messenger spacecraft have shown.Data from a flyby of Mercury in January 2008 show the planet has contracted by more than one mile (1.5km) in diameter over its geological history.Scientists believe the shrinkage is due to the planet's core slowly cooling.Studies published in the journal Science show the same process also powers the planet's magnetic field, a topic long debated by scientists.

LOS ANGELES - The Phoenix lander's first chemical sniff of Martian soil did not turn up any trace of the building blocks of life. Its next whiff could be its last.Engineers said a short circuit that occurred last month in one of its test ovens designed to shake and bake miniscule soil samples could happen again when the instrument is turned on.

More and more of the body is becoming, if not obsolete, then certainly replaceable. But which of our body parts can be engineered today, and which will we have to make do with?Building bonesImplants that copy the simple structural job of skeletal tissue are the easiest to build. One UK woman suffering from rheumatoid arthritis was recently left with only two of her original joints after having the rest replaced by metal and plastic alternatives.

1776: The Declaration of Independence is signed. It will take 117 years before someone gets around to saying, "Hey, maybe we should preserve this thing."The Declaration of Independence can be fairly said to stand alongside the Magna Carta and Bill of Rights as the most important documents in the history of democracy. Its significance was understood from the moment it was signed, so one is left to wonder why its preservation was ignored for so long.

Diversity among the ancestors of such marine creatures as clams, sand dollars and lobsters showed only a modest rise beginning 144 million years ago with no clear trend afterwards, according to an international team of researchers. This contradicts previous work showing dramatic increases beginning 248 million years ago and may shed light on future diversity.

Herds of dinosaurs once wandered Arabia and have left behind some footprints in what's being called the first set of trackways discovered on the Arabian Peninsula.The approximately 165 million-year-old tracks in Yemen appear to have been made by at least two types of dinosaurs, with young and old dinos traveling together along what was once a coastal mud flat."It's a bit of a dinosaur highway," said paleontologist Anne Schulp of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht in Maastricht, The Netherlands. He is the lead author of a paper describing the discovery in the May 20 issue of the journal PLoS One.

In 1900, the sister of an eccentric Austro-Hungarian aristocrat named Baron von Nopsca found a tiny bone on the baron's family estate in Transylvania, a historical region in present-day Romania. The baron, who was a dinosaur buff, identified the bone as belonging to a dwarf dino that likely once lived on an island in the region.

Sometime between 145 and 100 million years ago, a Korean dinosaur ran nearly 11 miles per hour in a straight line next to a lake, according to recent study of footprints left behind by the speedy raptor.

Body art was all the rage in early Australia, as it was in many other parts of the ancient world, and now a new study reports that elaborate and distinctive designs on the skin of indigenous Aussies repeated characters and motifs found on rock art and all sorts of portable objects, ranging from toys to pipes.The study not only illustrates the link between body art, such as tattoos and intentional scarring, with cultural identity, but it also suggests that study of this imagery may help to unravel mysteries about where certain groups traveled in the past, what their values and rituals were, and how they related to other cultures.

A NASA spacecraft's first flyby of Mercury has yielded a wealth of information about the innermost planet, some of which confirms volcanism occurred there, settling a longstanding debate.Information about such planetary mysteries as Mercury's magnetic field and geological history also has flooded in.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Archeologists are opening a cave sealed for more than 30 years deep beneath a Mexican pyramid to look for clues about the mysterious collapse of one of ancient civilization's largest cities.The soaring Teotihuacan stone pyramids, now a major tourist site about an hour outside Mexico City, were discovered by the ancient Aztecs around 1500 AD, not long before the arrival of Spanish explorers to Mexico.

Can our cities keep consuming in the face of food shortages and higher prices? A solution could be for urban areas to grow their own food as is being tried in Canada.Campaigners hope the UK will follow and some hope the 2012 Olympics in London could be the catalyst.So, would you like to study on an edible campus? Or live on an edible estate?And no, we're not talking about a university run by Willy Wonka or a home designed by Hansel and Gretel.Instead, this is architecture - and entire urban landscapes - designed to fulfil our ever-growing need for food.

LIMA, Peru - An influx of tourists to Peru's famed Inca citadel of Machu Picchu may prompt UNESCO to add the jungle-shrouded ruins to its list of endangered World Heritage sites.Yearly visits to Machu Picchu, Peru's top tourist destination, have more than doubled since 1998 to 800,000 people, and conservationists advising UNESCO's World Heritage Committee warn that landslides, fires and creeping development threaten the site.

Voyager 2's journey toward interstellar space has revealed surprising insights into the energy and magnetic forces at the solar system's outer edge, and confirmed the solar system's squashed shape.Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 continue to send data to Earth more than thirty years after they first launched. During the 1990s, Voyager 1 became the farthest manmade object in space.

NASA's sun-focused STEREO spacecraft unexpectedly detected particles from the edge of the solar system last year, allowing University of California, Berkeley, scientists to map for the first time the energized particles in the region where the hot solar wind slams into the cold interstellar medium.

Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55BC could not have occurred on the dates stated in most history books, a team of astronomers has claimed.The traditional view is that Caesar landed in Britain on 26-27 August, but researchers from Texas State University say this cannot be right.Dr Donald Olson, an expert on tides, says that the English Channel was flowing the wrong way on these dates.An invasion of the south coast at Deal on August 22-23 is favoured instead.The claims appear in the latest issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.

PALERMO, Italy, July 1 (UPI) -- Italian researchers say a rostrum, used by ancient Romans to ram enemy ships, was found off the coast of Sicily.The rare bronze appendage may have been used in the final naval battle of the First Punic War, ANSA reported Tuesday. The rostrum was recovered about 230 feet below the surface by divers aided by remotely operated vehicles.

JAIPUR: It is a 2,278-year-old mummy of an Egyptian priestess and decaying fast at the city's Albert Hall Museum. Displayed in a glass case, it is a key attraction of the museum but may not be around very soon, as exposure to oxygen and moisture has led to its case crumbling to dust.Egyptian experts, who had visited the city a few years ago, had said that the mummy bought by Sawai Ram Singh, then ruler of Jaipur, from Cairo in 1887 needed to be kept in an oxygen-free environment.

Tiny slivers of diamond forged on an infant Earth may contain the earliest traces of life, a study has shown.Analysis of the crystals showed they contain a form of carbon often associated with plants and bacteria.The rare gems were found inside zircon crystals, formed a few hundred million years after the Earth came into being.Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers caution that their results are not definitive proof of early life but do "not exclude" the possibility.

Around 2300 B.C., an acrobat was killed during a bizarre sacrificial ceremony in what is now northeastern Syria, according to a new study published in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.Gory evidence of the entertainer's death -- along with the remains of several rare horse-like animals which appear to have been sacrificed as well -- was found in the remains of a building at a site called Tell Brak, which was once the ancient city of Nagar. The findings suggest some ancient cultures may have sacrificed well-known public figures, as well as animals of great personal and monetary worth.

Extinction risks for natural populations of endangered species are likely being underestimated by as much as 100-fold because of a mathematical "misdiagnosis," according to a new study led by a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher.

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has sequenced the equivalent of 300 human genomes in just over six months. The Institute has just reached the staggering total of 1,000,000,000,000 letters of genetic code that will be read by researchers worldwide, helping them to understand the role of genes in health and disease. Scientists will be able to answer questions unthinkable even a few years ago and human medical genetics will be transformed.

Wrapped in shawls and long gingham dresses, the traditional market women of La Paz, Bolivia, gaze impassively at the photographer. They are surrounded by heaps of drying herbs, colorful packets, clay figures and llama fetuses. Through the doorway behind them, the fluorescent-lit walls of a modern pharmacy are stocked to the ceiling with contemporary potions and elixirs.

Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today.Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation.

Could strawberry ice cream disappear from our lives? What about vanilla Swiss almond?The folks at Haagen-Dazs are worried enough that they and others have mounted a campaign to halt the shocking decline of honeybees and other pollinators of strawberry plants, almond trees and the rest of the roughly 90 percent of terrestrial plant life that needs pollination.

Unrealistic cost estimates could make an ambitious NASA space mission to study dark energy no better than ground-based projects, experts warn.The agency is preparing a call for proposals for the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM), as part of its Beyond Einstein cosmology programme, which was revived after it had been put under review in 2006 for budgetary reasons.

Medieval skywatchers got to see a star explode, but modern-day astronomy buffs get all the pretty pictures of its ghostly remains.Hubble has captured a close-up of the remnant of a supernova that exploded in the Milky Way over 8000 years ago, and whose light reached Earth on 1 May 1006. The explosion is one of the brightest in recorded history and was visible with the naked eye.The delicate-looking remnant is actually part of a shock wave from the stellar explosion. The roiling remains are still expanding, moving at a clip of about 10 million kilometres per hour.

Tens of thousands of years ago, "armadas of ice" crumbled off of the ice sheet covering North America into the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away on the other side of the continent, icebergs calved off of another ice sheet into the Pacific.Their synchrony -- just uncovered by new research -- suggests the events might be connected in a long-distance domino effect. The fact that melting at one location may influence ice sheets afar may be useful in understanding the behavior of ice today, according to the study's authors.

LONDON: A laser treatment that wipes out drug-resistant bacterial infections may one day help doctors tackle the growing problem of superbugs, British researchers said on Tuesday.Laboratory experiments showed that a laser-activated dye widely used for medical diagnosis produces a number of bacteria-killing chemicals, Michael Wilson of University College London and colleagues said.

WORK will start next week to unearth the secrets of one of Europe's most important prehistoric sites.The Ring of Brodgar in Orkney, the third-largest stone circle in the British Isles and thought to date back to 3000-2000BC, is regarded by archaeologists as an outstanding example of Neolithic settlement and has become a popular tourist attraction in the islands.

SAN JUAN -- The lady carved on the ancient rock is squatting, with frog-like legs sticking out to each side. Her decapitated head is dangling to the right.That's how she had been, perfectly preserved, for up to 800 years, until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came upon her last year while building a $375 million dam to control flooding in southern Puerto Rico.She was buried again last week with the hope that some day specialists will study her and Puerto Rican children will visit and learn about the lives of the Taino Indians who created her. But archaeologists and government officals first had to settle a raging debate about who should have control over her and other artifacts sent to Georgia for analysis.

LEE HOCHBERG, NewsHour correspondent: What archaeologist Dennis Jenkins found in the Paisley Caves in south central Oregon may turn on its head the theory of how and when the first people came to North America.Many scientists believe humans first came to this continent 13,000 years ago across a land bridge from Asia and they started the so-called Clovis culture. But Jenkins says they may have been living in these caves 1,000 years earlier, toward the end of the last ice age.