Newsdesk Archive

At least 12,000 years ago, the most popular musical events might have taken place in torch-lit caves next to walls covered in art, according to new archaeological research in France.Stone Age-era caves there bear paintings located in the most acoustically resonant places, where sound lingers or echoes.The first cathedrals, theaters and concert halls, researchers now theorize, may have been inspired by musical performances held in caves.

WITH market analysts predicting a ten fold increase in the value of the organic light emitting display industry, from £1.5 billion to £15.5 billion, by 2014, it is no wonder that scientists and governments alike are keen to advance research into "plastic electronics".

In recent years, stem cell researchers have become very adept at manipulating the fate of adult stem cells cultured in the lab. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies achieved the same feat with adult neural stem cells still in place in the brain. They successfully coaxed mouse brain stem cells bound to join the neuronal network to differentiate into support cells instead.

Hydrogen-powered cars will not be commercially available on a large scale before 2020, a senior official from Japanese auto maker Mazda said Monday in Spain at an international oil conference."The earliest that customers will use these environmentally-friendly vehicles in a normal way will be 2020," the general manager of the firm's technical research centre, Tsutomu Matsuoka, said at the World Petroleum Congress in Madrid, one of the oil industry's biggest events.

You may not know what it is, but you burn more than your body weight of it every day. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a tiny molecule that packs a powerful punch, is the primary energy source for most of your cellular functions.Now researchers at the University of Illinois have identified a key step in the cellular recycling of ATP that allows your body to produce enough of it to survive. Without this cycling of ATP and its low-energy counterpart, adenosine diphosphate (ADP), into and out of the mitochondrion, where ADP is converted into ATP, life as we know it would end.

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 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.

MOSCOW (AFP) - Was it a gigantic meteorite? A tremendous bolt of lightning? Perhaps the crash of a UFO the size of Tokyo?No one is certain of the answer to one of the 20th century's greatest scientific mysteries -- the "Tunguska Event" 100 years ago this week.

CAIRO, Egypt - Egypt said Monday that it retrieved a 2,500-year-old limestone relief from London after its sale was blocked by Bonhams auction house there because it had been looted from a pharaoh's tomb.

PlanetSpace may not have kept up with the ambitious spaceship-building schedule it set out three years ago, but the U.S.-Canadian venture says it's moving ahead with concepts for a new suborbital craft as well as an orbital launch system.On the suborbital front, the company is working on a quarter-scale, turbojet-powered version of its Silver Dart hypersonic glider that will be tested as an unpiloted aerial vehicle. Meanwhile, on the orbital front, PlanetSpace says it has teamed up once again with Lockheed Martin and ATK to repitch a proposal for resupplying the international space station.SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, two companies that beat out PlanetSpace in earlier NASA competitions, say they have also submitted proposals.

A complete mandible of Homo erectus was discovered at the Thomas I quarry in Casablanca by a French-Moroccan team co-led by Jean-Paul Raynal, CNRS senior researcher at the PACEA[1] laboratory (CNRS/Université Bordeaux 1/ Ministry of Culture and Communication). This mandible is the oldest human fossil uncovered from scientific excavations in Morocco. The discovery will help better define northern Africa's possible role in first populating southern Europe.

The place is the Isis-Hathor Temple of Denderah, where the priests hasten along the columned aisle to witness an important event. The principal temple is dedicated to Hathor, whereas a small adjacent one is dedicated to Isis in which a statue of the goddess is located at the end of the aisle.It is a little before 5am on 22 July, 700 BC, the summer solstice; the priests wait to watch Sirius rise and its rays penetrate the temple to fall on Isis's gem. As they arrive the sun is still below the horizon, and they gaze impatiently for the apparent heliacal rising of the Dog Star. For the priests already knew that the appearance of Sepdet lasts only for a brief moment before Ra brightens the sky.

The SOHO spacecraft discovered its 1,500th comet this week, making the observatory the most successful comet detector.The NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory made its historic discovery on June 25, thanks to U.S.-based amateur astronomer Rob Matson. That puts SOHO's count ahead of all other discoverers of comets throughout history combined.

Scientists have identified a gene that may raise the risk of getting the most common kind of Alzheimer's disease by about 45 percent in people who inherit a certain form of it.That form of the gene appears to hamper a brain cell's ability to take in calcium, researchers said. If drugs can be found that reverse its effect, they may be useful in fighting Alzheimer's, researchers said.Most cases of Alzheimer's appear after age 65. So far, only one gene has been firmly established as affecting the risk of this late-onset version. The gene proposed in the new study, called CALHM1, appears to have a much smaller impact on the disease risk.

PARIS (AFP) - A hundred years ago this week, a gigantic explosion ripped open the dawn sky above the swampy taiga forest of western Siberia, leaving a scientific riddle that endures to this day.A dazzling light pierced the heavens, preceding a shock wave with the power of a thousand atomic bombs which flattened 80 million trees in a swathe of more than 2,000 square kilometres (800 square miles).

The phrase "blame it on the weather" takes new meaning in light of research suggesting that regional climate may very well have been responsible for the evolution of lifestyle, culture and even religion in the Middle East.A new study published in the journal Antiquity marks the first time researchers have applied regional climate information to geographic variation in the Y chromosome (which only men possess).

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - A group that campaigns for tribal peoples' rights denied on Tuesday that it and the Brazilian government had misled the media over photographs of an uncontacted Indian tribe in the Amazon last month.Britain's Observer newspaper reported on Sunday that the tribe, rather than being "undiscovered," had been known by the Brazilian government for nearly 100 years and the photos were an attempt to publicize the risk it faced from logging.

DAMASCUS (AFP) - Syrian archaeologists have unearthed a hieroglyph close to Damascus which dates back to the pharaonic period around 1,300 years BC, the official SANA news agency reported on Saturday."The antiquities department has discovered a hieroglyph on the outskirts of Damascus, 25 kilometres (15 miles) east (of the capital), engraved into a basalt stone slab (measuring) 70 by 50 cm (28 by 20 inches)," SANA said.

A team of researchers from UQ's Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) has proved you don't have to be psychic to predict the future.Led by Professor Bob Stimson, and funded through an ARC Linkage grant, the research group has developed a suite of models that simulate potential patterns of population and housing growth, and the location of jobs, across the South-East Queensland region.

One of the most interesting questions considered by astrophysicists deals with the start of our universe. Indeed, there is a great deal of speculation on the subject, with different theories about how the universe began, and what may have existed before the universe came into being.

A new publication answers centuries' old questions regarding the mechanism and function of humour, identifying the reason humour is common to all human societies, its fundamental role in the evolution of homo sapiens and its continuing importance in the cognitive development of infants.Alastair Clarke explains: "The theory is an evolutionary and cognitive explanation of how and why any individual finds anything funny. Effectively it explains that humour occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, and that recognition of this sort is rewarded with the experience of the humorous response, an element of which is broadcast as laughter.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Martian dirt is apparently good enough for asparagus to grow in, NASA scientists said Thursday, as they announced the results of a soil analysis collected by the US Phoenix Mars lander."There is nothing about the soil that would preclude life. In fact it seems very friendly," said Samuel Kounaves, the project's lead chemist at the University of Arizona in a telephone press conference."The soil you have there is the type of soil you have in your backyard," said Kounaves. "You may be able to grow asparagus very well."

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A five-year project has revolutionized scientific thought on the evolution of birds and the results are so surprising that now even the textbooks will have to be rewritten, a study said Thursday."With this study, we learned two major things," said Sushma Reddy, lead author and a fellow at The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

At a desert test site in Texas, a street battle rages between US soldiers and local "insurgents". It's much like any other training exercise, except the soldiers are accompanied by a Mule (Multifunctional utility/Logistics & Equipment), an armed robot the size of a Humvee. The insurgents are positioned overlooking an intersection, a potential kill zone. The commander pulls out what looks like a PlayStation gamepad and the Mule is sent forward.

Cuba has approved what is believed to be the world's first registered lung cancer vaccine and is offering it to Cuban and foreign patients in its hospitals.The therapeutic vaccine CimaVax EGF extends life with few side effects, and is another step in Cuba's expertise in biotechnology. It was unveiled on Monday at Havana's centre of molecular immunology.

Fewer astronauts, more robots. That's the call from three European aerospace engineers, who argue that crewed satellite repair missions - like the ones flown by NASA to fix the ailing Hubble Space Telescope - are expensive, wasteful and set the wrong agenda for the space community.The trio - Alex Ellery, Joerg Kreidsel and Bernd Sommer - argue in the journal Acta Astronautica that while such missions may be spectacular, they are unsustainable. Space agencies and satellite operators should instead be accelerating their efforts to develop robotic mechanics that can ply various Earth orbits, fixing errant satellites on demand. That way failing spacecraft can be repaired much more economically.

WILL Australia's farmers fall for the charms of drought-resistant wheat, even if it's genetically modified? Faced with climate change and a growing food crisis, enthusiasts certainly hope such traits will help overcome aversion to GM technology.Of 24 strains of GM wheat tested in field trials, two lines exceeded the yield of the non-GM variety by 20 per cent under drought conditions, according to German Spangenberg of the Victoria Department of Primary Industries in Melbourne, Australia. The results were presented last week at the Bio2008 convention in San Diego, California.

Drizzle once fell on Martian soil, according to a new geochemical analysis by Berkeley scientists, though the rain probably stopped several billion years ago.Drawing on soil data from the five missions to Mars before the current Phoenix Lander and comparing it to information collected in Earth's driest places, the scientists concluded that water must have fallen from above, not welled up from below, as has been thought.

Humans have been attempting to send messages to the stars since ... I'm going to say the early '70s. I mean, theoretically some caveman could have yelled, "Hey! Stars! You suck!" a hundred thousand years ago, but he was an idiot.But of all the messages sent into space, which ones are good? Which ones conform to quality standards? That's what I'm here to tell you.

Coiled up in a tornado is as much energy as an entire power plant. So a Canadian engineer has a plan to spin up his own twister and extract energy from its tethered tail.It all depends on heating the air near the surface so that it is much warmer than the air above."You can generate energy whenever you have a temperature gradient," said Louis Michaud. "The source of the energy here is the natural movement of warm and cold air currents."

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.

CNN's Carol Costello reports on a study that shows how magic mushrooms affect the psyche.

Santiago: Eight perfectly preserved mummies, believed to be some 4,500 year old, were found by workers engaged in a restoration project in Chile's far north, Spain's EFE news agency reported on Saturday quoting media report."These mummies date back to between 2,000 BC and 5,000 BC." archaeologist Calogero Santoro told the daily El Mercurio.

QUEBEC - As buried treasures go, carbonized crumbs of centuries-old food likely wouldn't make it on to many people's Top 10 list.But to hear archeology doctoral student Julie-Anne Bouchard-Perron tell it, the modest materials she has helped to unearth on this forested hilltop in Cap Rouge, a wealthy suburb at the western limit of Quebec's provincial capital, are a motherlode of Canadian artifacts.

Metal rods and cables of the historic Dewey Bridge dangle over the Colorado River on April 29, east of Moab, Utah. The bridge was burned down when a child playing with matches lit dry brush nearby.So when the 92-year-old Dewey Bridge, about 30 miles northeast of town, burned this spring, Irish's neighbors offered condolences."Everybody in Moab called me. You'd think I'd lost my lovely wife," said Irish, 79, a lifelong Moab resident who led an effort to refurbish the bridge eight years ago.

Earth emits an ear-piercing series of chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, astronomers have discovered.The sound is awful, a new recording from space reveals.Scientists have known about the radiation since the 1970s. It is created high above the planet, where charged particles from the solar wind collide with Earth's magnetic field. It is related to the phenomenon that generates the colorful aurora, or Northern Lights.

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - From prison brothels to slave labor camps, 15 scholars concluded a two-week probe Thursday of an untapped repository of millions of Nazi records, and hailed it as a rich vein of raw material that will deepen the study of the Holocaust.It was the first concentrated academic sweep of the long-private archive administered by the International Tracing Service since it opened its doors last November to Holocaust survivors, victims relatives and historical researchers.

Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors: red.The study, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, also describes a previously undocumented disease, called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions. Additionally, the researchers found that mercury-containing medicine had been administered to 79 percent of the interred individuals with leprosy and 35 percent with syphilis.

MEXICO CITY: Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years. When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.If death had a sound, this was it.

BELGRADE (Reuters Life!) - A fragment of a human jaw found in Serbia and believed to be up to 250,000 years old is helping anthropologists piece together the story of prehistoric human migration from Africa to Europe."This is the earliest evidence we have of humans in the area," Canada's Winnipeg University anthropology professor Mirjana Roksandic told Reuters.The fragment of a lower jaw, complete with three teeth, was discovered in a small cave in the Sicevo gorge in south Serbia.

LAHORE: The ancient Hindu temple at Katas Raj, some 40 kilometres from Chakwal, has been robbed of all its relics, save for a stone carving depicting a god and a goddess, who are sitting, and two female slaves standing on either side.The sculpture, which has been defaced and marred by the ravages of time, is part of a wall in the right balcony of Ramachandra Temple, also known as the Temple of Snakes.

A replica 3000-year-old Pacific canoe, modelled on the world's first ocean-going vessels, has been tested in a world-leading Auckland wind tunnel.Preliminary results show the canoes of the type sailed from New Guinea to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa about 1000BC were so well designed they could probably sail against the wind.The 3m-long scale model has been tested and analysed in the University of Auckland's Tamaki campus wind tunnel, famed for its role in America's Cup yacht design.

Rick Strassman, Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna and Ede Frecska will be join us on our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout July to discuss their latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

1858: The Linnaean Society of London listens to the reading of a composite paper on how natural selection accounts for the evolution and variety of species. The authors are Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Modern biology is born.Scientists of the time knew that evolution occurred. The fossil record showed evidence of life forms that no longer existed. The question was, how did it occur?Darwin had been working on his theory since 1837, soon after his epic voyage on the HMS Beagle. The hypermethodical naturalist wanted not only to classify the prodigious variation he had observed, but also to explain how it came to be.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Flabbergasted" NASA scientists said on Thursday that Martian soil appeared to contain the requirements to support life, although more work would be needed to prove it.Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected.

Paris has long been known to be a very old city but its history as a settlement has just been extended by more than 3,000 years.An archaeological dig, whose findings were revealed yesterday, moves back Paris's first known human occupation to about 7600BC, in the Mesolithic period between the two stone ages.

A PREHISTORIC human skull dating back 5,000 years together with remains relating to a Neolithic house have been discovered during works on the runway extension project at Ronaldsway.Experts from Oxford Archaeology called in to carry out the excavation have described the finds as being of 'national and possibly European significance'.They include remains of a building, a rubbish dump and funerary and mortuary finds, including stone cairns built over the top of commemoration pyres, as well as flint flakes and tools and fragments of ancient pottery vessels.

CAIRO (AFP) - A team of Egyptian archaeologists have discovered several painted wooden coffins, including some dating back to the 13th century BC rule of pharaoh Ramses II."These coffins were found in the tombs of senior officials of the 18th and 19th dynasties," near Saqqara, Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Thursday.

More than 150 years after the disappearance of the Erebus and Terror - the famously ill-fated ships of the lost Franklin Expedition - fresh clues have emerged that could help solve Canadian history's most enduring mystery.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy -- starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies.

A church, built in 13th century was unearthed by the team of Bulgaria's prominent archaeologist Nikolay Ovcharov in the city of Veliko Tarnovo.The temple, called "St. Ivan Rilski", is the place where the relics of the saint were once saved before being sent to the Rila Monastery.

REPUBLIC COUNTY - You might be surprised what you can learn from a campfire. A campfire that has been cold for, say, 300 years.Stacey Lengyel hopes she can tell, within 30 years or so, when it was used.Lengyel, a research associate in anthropology at the Illinois State Museum, is the country's leading authority on archeomagnetic dating, a process built around two phenomena: when heated, magnetic particles reorient themselves to magnetic north; and over time, magnetic north is, literally, all over the map.

THE man behind photos of warriors from an "undiscovered" Amazon tribe that were beamed around the world has admitted it was a hoax.Indigenous tribes expert, José Carlos Meirelles, said the tribe's existence had been noted since 1910, and they had been photographed to prove that "uncontacted" tribes still existed in an area endangered by logging, The Guardian reported.Mr Meirelles, who was working for Funai, the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency dedicated to finding remote tribes and protecting them, said he found the group, recorded they lived, and planned the publicity to protect them from losing their habitat.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Individual human genomes change throughout a person's life influenced by environmental or nutritional factors which may explain why illnesses such as cancer come with age, a study said Tuesday.Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that the so-called epigenetic marks on the sequence of a person's DNA modify over the course of their life and the extent of such changes is similar among family members.

At Angkor Wat, the dancers' feet are crumbling.The palatial 12th-century Hindu temple, shrouded in the jungles of Cambodia, has played host to a thriving community of cyanobacteria ever since unsightly lichens were cleaned off its walls nearly 20 years ago. The microbes have not been good guests.

Aboriginal people are thought to have inhabited the Australian continent for around 45,000 years before European contact, and are frequently cited as the oldest continuous living culture on Earth.However, written records of their lives exist only since European contact. Many historians and archaeologists assumed that the culture and traditions of Aboriginal people had altered little over time, and that these written records were an accurate window into the lives of the ancestors of today's Aborigines.

WASHINGTON - Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. Even though Ventastega is likely an evolutionary dead-end, the finding sheds new details on the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapods. Tetrapods are animals with four limbs and include such descendants as amphibians, birds and mammals.

Archaeologists have found the remains of a 4,000-year-old Neolithic settlement in Wrexham.The Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT) is excavating the site at Borras Quarry, and hopes to discover evidence of timber houses.They began digging after cooking pits were discovered during work to expand the site, which is owned by Tarmac.The mining and construction company said topsoil removal nearby had ceased to allow artefacts to be retrieved.

Seventy-seven thousand years ago, a craftsman sat in a cave in a limestone cliff overlooking the rocky coast of what is now the Indian Ocean. It was a beautiful spot, a workshop with a glorious natural picture window, cooled by a sea breeze in summer, warmed by a small fire in winter. The sandy cliff top above was covered with a white-flowering shrub that one distant day would be known as blombos and give this place the name Blombos Cave.

From his bench toward the stern of the Sea Stallion From Glendalough, Erik Nielsen could see his crewmates' stricken faces peeping out of bright-red survival suits. A few feet behind him, the leather straps holding the ship's rudder to its side had snapped. The 98-foot vessel, a nearly $2.5 million replica of a thousand-year-old Viking ship, was rolling helplessly atop waves 15 feet high.

MOSCOW, June 24 (UPI) -- Bones found near the execution site of the Romanov family appear likely to be those of the heir to the Russian throne and his sister, authorities said Tuesday.Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the committee investigating the remains discovered in 2007 near Yekaterinburg, said the bones are those of a boy age 12 to 14 and a young woman in her late teens, RIA Novosti reported.

LOS ANGELES - Why is Mars two-faced? Scientists say fresh evidence supports the theory that a monster impact punched the red planet, leaving behind perhaps the largest gash on any heavenly body in the solar system.Today, the Martian surface has a split personality. The southern hemisphere of Mars is pockmarked and filled with ancient rugged highlands. By contrast, the northern hemisphere is smoother and covered by low-lying plains.Three papers in Thursday's journal Nature provide the most convincing evidence yet that an outside force was responsible.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - NASA unveiled a beefed-up redesign of a proposed moon rocket Wednesday, saying the Ares V spacecraft that is to carry astronauts to the lunar surface in 12 years will be around 38 stories tall and carry a heftier load than originally planned.The rocket is to be about 20 feet longer than a previous design and have six main engines at its base, instead of five. Engineers said they also decided to enlarge the twin solid-rocket boosters that will be bolted to its side so it can hold more fuel and carry more supplies and equipment than first envisioned.

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don't. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

Plants existing at the edges of their natural habitats may enhance survival of the species during global warming, says Queen's profThe hardiest plants and those most likely to survive the climatic shifts brought about by global warming are now easier to identify, thanks to new research findings by a team from Queen's University."Predicting the speed at which plants are likely to migrate during climate warming could be key to ensuring their survival," says Queen's Biology professor Christopher Eckert.

Ireland could become a key player in the production of biofuel from seaweed, scientists told a conference in the west of the country on Monday.Seaweed has long been investigated as a potential source of bioethanol, which is typically made from crops such as sugar cane and corn, but technological barriers remain to its commercial use.

Mystery of black hole 'feeding' resolved. Radio-telescope images have revealed previously-unseen galactic cannibalism -- a triggering event that leads to feeding frenzies by gigantic black holes at the cores of galaxies. Astronomers have long suspected that the extra-bright cores of spiral galaxies called Seyfert galaxies are powered by supermassive black holes consuming material. However, they could not see how the material is started on its journey toward the black hole.

A new wingless, saucer-shaped aircraft is scheduled to take to the skies. Just don't call it a UFO.Subrata Roy, a scientist at the University of Florida, calls his aircraft a "wingless electromagnetic air vehicle," or WEAV, and if it flies he says it could usher in a new age of aircraft design.

When astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean stepped out of the Apollo 12 lunar module in November 1969, they were within walking distance of Surveyor 3, an unmanned U.S. spacecraft that had landed in April 1967.The Apollo landing site was picked on purpose. Surveyor 3 had spent more than two years exposed to the moon's harsh vacuum, intense cosmic radiation, bombardment by meteoroids and extreme temperature swings. NASA engineers wanted to know how metals, glass and other spacecraft building materials held up.

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis feels like she's really won a prize."I felt like I won an Oscar," says Curtis.But it's not an Academy Award that's got her excited. It's the chance to rent the potential car of the future - one fueled entirely by hydrogen, not gasoline, reports CBS News correspondent Hattie Kauffman.

Washington DC - For the past few months, the legal proceedings surrounding the sale of Persian artifacts on loan to American museums and universities had remained mostly dormant. That is, until, revelations occurred on three separate fronts of the issue. In the case of the Northern Illinois case Rubin et al. v IRI, two very separate developments have occurred. On March 29, new plaintiffs emerged seeking the clay tablets from Persepolis which are already targeted by the victims of a 1997 Jerusalem attack, Rubin et al. these additional plaintiffs want to lay claim to the artifacts so as to sell them and receive payment for a $2.7 billion decision in their favor.

laanbaatar, /MONTSAME/. A grave of noble of Kokturk Empire which existed on the territory of Mongolia between 7th and 8th centuries has been explored on the territory of Galuut soum of Bayankhongor aimag.A team led by State Honored Scientific Figure D.Bayar that had been deployed by the Archeological Institute of the Academy of Sciences has worked on the place.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Archeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old cylinder seal adorned with cuneiform inscriptions from an ancient grave in southwest Iran.The seal, which is 2 centimeters long and has a radius of 1 centimeter, was discovered near the city of Dena in Kohgilouyeh and Boyer Ahmad province in a grave measuring 3.5 meters by 0.5 meter.

A chemist of Vienna University of Technology demonstrates how chemical fingerprints of volcanic eruptions and numerous pumice lump finds from archaeological excavations illustrate relations between individual advanced civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Thanks to his tests and to the provenancing of the respective pumice samples to partially far-reaching volcanic eruptions, it became possible to redefine a piece of cultural history from the second millenium B.C.

The discovery of an ancient city buried beneath the sands of modern-day Syria has provided evidence for a Hellenistic settlement that existed for more than six centuries extending into the time of the Roman Empire. The site provides a unique insight into the structures of a pre-Roman Hellenistic settlement. The project, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, sheds new light on city life in the Hellenistic period.

To clear up a few common misconceptions: David Morrison, interim director of NASA's Lunar Science Institute, has never seen a Martian. He has no idea what's in Area 51, the infamous place in Nevada where some people claim the government has captured and experimented on aliens, but he suspects it is merely a testing ground for aircraft. He has never seen a UFO, but he promises that NASA would tell us if a real one were spotted.

India said that it needs a military space program to defend its satellites from threats like China's newly revealed ability to shoot down targets in orbit.The comments by India's army chief raise the possibility of a regional race that could accelerate the militarization of space and heighten tensions between the regional giants, who have been enjoying their warmest ties in decades.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Bizarre microbes flourish in the most punishing environments on Earth from the bone-dry Atacama Desert in Chile to the boiling hot springs of Yellowstone National Park to the sunless sea bottom vents in the Pacific.Could such exotic life emerge in the frigid arctic plains of Mars?

This weekend marks four years since Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites ushered in the age of privately developed spaceflight with the SpaceShipOne rocket plane. But don't expect a big celebration: Rutan told me he's been so busy ushering in the next stage of the spaceflight age that he forgot about the anniversary . . . until I reminded him.

Some people point to 1906 as the year of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, but, for anthropologists who study American Indians, it is the year that split the Hopi community of Orayvi, the longest continually occupied settlement in North America.

A new geochemical study illuminates 7,000 years of mining and metal use in central China and links these trends to fluctuations in airborne pollution during the Bronze Age and other military and industrial periods in Chinese history. The study could help scientists better assess the accumulative environmental effects of human activity in the region since prehistory times.

Iran's National Museum is slated to exhibit "Cyrus the Great Cylinder", which is currently housed in the British Museum in London.During a meeting at Iran's National Museum, the director of the British Museum said they were ready to display the cylinder in Iran. "The British Museum is ready to display the Cyrus Cylinder in Iran after 130 years," said Neil MacGregor.

Extra staff have been dispatched to guard the great cultural gems of Greece as the government in Athens tries to deflect growing criticism of its handling of national treasures.Amid unprecedented protests from tour guides, travel companies and tourists irritated by conditions at prime archaeological sites, the ruling conservatives last week rushed hundreds of additional personnel to staff museums and open-air antiquities.

Don't tell Indiana Jones, but most archaeologists pack spades, not bullwhips, and big discoveries usually come after lots of digging, not looting. Maya discoveries in Mexico that are rewriting the history of this classic civilization, for example, are coming from years of careful digging, not looted idols.The classic Maya were part of a Central American civilization best known for stepped pyramids, beautiful carvings and murals and the widespread abandonment of cities around 900 A.D. in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador, leaving the Maya only the northern lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula. The conventional wisdom of this upheaval is that many Maya moved north at the time of this collapse, also colonizing the hilly "Puuc" region of the Yucatan for a short while, until those new cities collapsed as well.

SHANGHAI has discovered 4000-year-old ancestral tombs, Xinmin Evening News reported today.Five tombs with skulls and human remains as well as pottery and animal bodies were excavated from the northwestern corner of an archeological site in the city's Songjiang District.Remnants of 4000-year-old buildings were also found to the north of the site beside a lake.Dozens of wood stakes discovered at the scene were very rare, said an archaeologist working at the scene.

The puzzle of why the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars look so different may now have been solved.Mars' crust is thicker in the southern hemisphere, and magnetic anomalies are found in the south but not the north.New studies in Nature magazine suggest that a massive space rock smashing into the planet could have created an abrupt disparity between the two halves.This asteroid would have been close to the size of Earth's moon and hit Mars' northern regions, scientists say.According to one group of researchers, the rock struck with an energy equivalent to one million billion atomic bombs like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

Humans are fundamentally social animals. Our social nature means that we interact with each other in positive, friendly ways, and it also means we know how to manipulate others in a very negative way.Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California, San Francisco, has also recently discovered that sarcasm, which is both positively funny and negatively nasty, plays an important part in human social interaction.So what?

Olive oil infused with fragrant herbs has been identified in an ancient Greek ceramic transport jar known as an amphora, along with another container of what could be the world's oldest retsina-type wine, according to a recent Journal of Archaeological Science paper.It is the first time DNA has been extracted from shipwrecked artifacts -- the two large jars were recovered from a 2,400-year-old wrecked vessel off the Greek island of Chios. If the second jar indeed contained a retsina-like wine, which is preserved and flavored with a tree resin known as mastic, then the find would push back the known origins of mastic cultivation by 200 years.

Europe's CERN particle-physics lab has issued its long-awaited report on safety issues surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest and most expensive atom-smasher. Some have feared that when the collider reaches full power, sometime next year, it might create microscopic black holes or other exotic phenomena that could endanger Earth. The new report, like earlier safety studies, rules out the possibility of global danger.

He has been standing in an undeniably prominent position for hundreds of years.But the famous Cerne Abbas giant appears to be fading from view as his modesty - and everything else besides - is covered by grass.The damp spring has led to the ancient chalk figure being swamped by fast growing vegetation.And thanks to a decline in sheep farming in the surrounding area, the flock that traditionally graze on the site have been unavailable to provide the giant figure with its annual trim.

A series of DNA analyses conducted on ancient wheat samples have led scientists to conclude that the oldest known wheat was grown in Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia.Professor Mahinur Akkaya from the Middle East Technical University's (ODTÜ) department of chemistry says the world's oldest wheat found so far comes from Çatalhöyük, this according to a series of DNA analyses made on 8,500-year-old wheat samples. "Our discovery is of great importance as it gives us significant insight into the birth of the first civilization in Anatolia. With our analyses, we have shown that the oldest known wheat was grown in Çatalhöyük," she said in an interview with the Anatolia news agency.

The ancient Egyptian's secret to making the strongest of all rigging ropes lies in a tangle of cord coils in a cave at the Red Sea coast, according to preliminary study results presented at the recent congress of Egyptologists in Rhodes.Discovered three years ago by archaeologists Rodolfo Fattovich of the Oriental Studies University of Naples and Kathryn Bard of Boston University, the ropes offer an unprecedented look at seafaring activities in ancient Egypt.

Goettingen, Germany - An autopsy on the body of an ancient Scythian cavalier found in the Altai Mountains shows he had a degenerative bone disease for several years before he died, German scientists said Friday. The 2006 find of the preserved body and the man's rich possessions on the Mongolian side of the mountains was a scientific sensation. The Scythians were a nation of horsemen in central Asia.

Sunrise at Saqqara, and all is well on the necropolis. It is, as usual, silent, peaceful and still out here in the desert. Last Tuesday, however, the serenity and divinity were broken by the arrival of an American-Japanese scientific mission to carry out a laser scanning survey of Djoser's Step Pyramid. At the footsteps of the pyramid were gathered dozens of people, from scientists to technicians, archaeologists and restorers to workmen, all there to witness the first ever endeavour to document, in detail, the present condition of the great and distinctive monument using a high-tech laser device in an attempt to create a virtual three-dimensional model of Egypt's oldest pyramid complex.

The archaeologist team of Bulgaria's Georgi Kitov has unearthed precious jewels dating back to the second or third century A.D. in the Drumeva Mound near the city of Sliven.The news was announced by Kitov himself on Thursday.The scientists found golden earrings, silver bracelets and three bronze rings in a brick tomb of a Roman woman buried in the mound.

The U.S. military is shifting $32 million away from its premiere research agency -- because that agency, Darpa, can't find enough qualified people to run its cutting-edge projects.A Pentagon "reprogramming action," obtained by DANGER ROOM, takes the cash from Darpa to "fund higher priorities within the Department" -- including "infrastructure to prevent IT security breaches." That money is available, the document adds, because the agency "continues to underexecute its Research, Development, Test and Evaluation programs."

Violent swings in weather patterns occurred after Earth's climate crossed "tipping points" thousands of years ago, a new study argues.In as little as three years, patterns in the atmosphere have suddenly shifted and flipped into a new state, apparently contributing to rapid warming of the Northern Hemisphere, according to the new analysis of an ice core from northern Greenland.

240 B.C.: Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and librarian Eratosthenes calculates the Earth's circumference. His data was rough, but he wasn't far off.Eratosthenes was an all-around guy, a Renaissance man centuries before the Renaissance. Some contemporaries called him Pentathalos, a champion of multiple skills. The breadth of his knowledge made him a natural for the post of librarian of the library of Alexandria, Egypt, the greatest repository of classical knowledge.

TOKYO - Japan's biggest astronomical observatories are teaming up for an unprecedented quest to find out whether there is life in outer space.The project, led by Japanese astronomers, will bring together a dozen or more observatories from all over the country to study one star that researchers see as a potential home to an extraterrestrial civilization."Everyone wonders at least once in their lifetime whether space is infinite and whether aliens really do exist," said Shinya Narusawa, chief researcher at Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory in western Japan.

Nasa's Phoenix spacecraft has found compelling evidence of ice at its landing site on Mars, scientists say.Chunks of a bright material found in a trench dug by the craft have disappeared over four Martian days, suggesting they have vaporised.While digging in another trench, the lander's arm connected with a hard surface at the same depth.The finds lend weight to suggestions water is locked up in a permafrost layer just below the dusty surface.

"Ancient Egyptian administration is mainly known from texts, but the full understanding of the institutions involved and their role with towns and cities has been so far difficult to grasp because of the lack of archaeological evidence with which textual data needs to be combined," says Nadine Moller, assistant professor at the Oriental Institute of Chicago University and head of the archaeological mission in Tel Edfu. At Tel Edfu, Moller says, the mission has uncovered what is considered to be a downtown centre, a community located half way between the modern city of Aswan and Luxor. Tel Edfu was also a rare example where almost 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian history are still preserved in the stratigraphy of a single mound.