Newsdesk Archive

A Thracian tomb with semi cylinder arch was found by archaeologists in the territory of the south seaside Tserovo municipality.Tombs of this kind haven't been found to the moment in the Strandja Mountain, the chief of the excavations works Daniela Agre informed.Undoubtedly the tomb is of a local dynasty ruler, who used to govern Southeastern Thrace and most probably controlled the production of ore.The tomb was incredibly beautiful with white soft limestone, but unfortunately is half destroyed by the treasure - hunters.

They were squat, crude and brutish - and barely capable of uttering more than a grunt.Little wonder that Neanderthal Man became a byword for stupidity.But the image of a knuckle-dragging bonehead with a beetle brow and a dimwitted stare may need a little updating.

University of Calgary archaeologists join the Blackfoot in studying unusual woodland-style settlement on Canadian plains A fortified village that pre-dates European arrival in Western Canada and is the only one of its kind discovered on the Canadian plains is yielding intriguing evidence of an unknown First Nations group settling on the prairies and is rekindling new ties between the Siksika Nation (Blackfoot) and aboriginal groups in the United States.

Higher than expected levels of sodium found in a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite suggest that the dust clouds from which the building blocks of the Earth and neighboring planets formed were much denser than previously supposed. The study, by scientists from the Carnegie Institution, American Museum of Natural History, and U.S. Geological Survey, is published in the June 20 issue of Science.

Temperatures spiked 22 degrees F in just 50 years, researchers say. Information gleaned from a Greenland ice core by an international science team shows that two huge Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes prior to the close of the last ice age some 11,500 years ago were tied to fundamental shifts in atmospheric circulation.

Analysis of elements in ancient mineral crystals suggests liquid water existed on Earth as long as 4.3 billion years ago, 100 million years earlier than previously thought, which may mean that Earth's conditions then could have supported life.No rocks have been found on Earth older than 4 billion years, which led many geologists to believe that for the 550 million years of Earth's existence prior to that, the world was literally hellish -- so molten hot it prevented solid rock from forming.

SUKHUMI, Georgia (Reuters) - Behind a thicket of weeds and broken window panes, one of the former Soviet Union's dark secrets is the laboratory where captured German scientists worked to build an atomic bomb for Josef Stalin.The Sukhumi Institute still exists, in a state of limbo. Limping along under semi-siege in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia whose existence the rest of the world does not recognize, its Cold War past has been all but forgotten.

PARIS (Reuters) - New computing technologies and the evolution of a "virtual man" to predict the effects of new drugs before they enter clinical trials could transform the fortunes of pharmaceutical research, a report said on Friday.By 2020, the drug research and development process may be shortened by two thirds, clinical trial costs slashed and productivity increased dramatically, said the report from consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

LOS ANGELES - The Phoenix lander stopped digging soil near Mars' north pole Wednesday as engineers on Earth worked to fix a glitch that caused the loss of some photos and science data.The problem was discovered late Tuesday after the spacecraft dug a trench inside a polygon-shaped surface feature that was likely caused by seasonal expansion and shrinking of ice.

The tide may be changing for the ocean suspected under the icy shell of Enceladus. Recent research has shown that this small moon of Saturn does not produce enough heat in its present configuration to keep water from freezing down to its core."There is no possible combination of parameters that allow for a thermally stable ocean," said James Roberts of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The future of the U.S. military looks a bit like a child's toy glider.Known as the Switchblade, the high-tech mini-plane built by Monrovia, Calif.-based contractor AeroVironment can be packed in a tube that weighs less than four pounds. Pull it out and its wings, about a foot long, snap into place. Throw it, and its motor engages, setting it to fly a pre-programmed route or a path guided by remote control.

A rare type of meteorite that could hold clues to the birth of our Solar System has been bought by London's Natural History Museum.The Ivuna meteorite, obtained from a US private collection, has the same chemical make-up from which the Solar System formed 4.5 billion years ago.It landed in Tanzania in 1938 as one 705g stone, since split into samples.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have begun excavating a quarry near Wrexham after evidence of a Neolithic settlement was uncovered.The exciting discovery was made at Tarmac's Borras Quarry, off Holt Road, near Wrexham and archaeologists have begun to uncover the remains of the settlement, believed to be about 4,000 years old.The archaeologists noticed dark areas resembling cooking pits appearing as topsoil and subsoil was being removed in preparation for sand and gravel extraction.

HONOLULU - Surrounded by royal guards and the occasional tourist, Her Majesty Mahealani Kahau and her government ministers hold court every day under a tent outside the palace of Hawaii's last monarch, passing laws and discussing how to secure reparations for the Native Hawaiian people.Kahau and her followers are members of the self-proclaimed Hawaiian Kingdom Government, which is devoted to restoring the Hawaiian monarchy overthrown in 1893. Nearly two months ago, they stormed the gates of the old Iolani Palace, and they have politely occupied the grounds ever since, operating like a government-in-exile.

Councils in England have been urged to review the way they use surveillance powers to investigate suspected crime.Under laws brought in to help fight terrorism, councils can access phone and e-mail records and use surveillance to detect or stop a criminal offence.But Local Government Association chairman Sir Simon Milton has written to councils warning overzealous use of the powers could alienate the public.They should not be used for "trivial offences" such as dog fouling, he adds.

The identity of the mysterious dark matter thought to pervade the universe has eluded astrophysicists for decades. Now, for the first time a team hopes to look inside the sun for one of the prime candidates.The invisible stuff called dark matter is thought to make up as much as 90% of the universe's matter. To date, astrophysicists have only inferred the existence of some mysterious substance by identifying its gravitational effects on visible matter such as stars and galaxies. (For instance, dark matter makes galaxies spin faster than otherwise expected.)

ESA's Jules Verne ATV was used for the first time yesterday to transfer in one step 811 kg of refuelling propellant to the International Space Station while the two vehicles orbited Earth at 28 000 km/h. With this premiere for Europe, Jules Verne becomes the first western spaceship to succeed in refuelling another space infrastructure in orbit.

The biggest black holes may feed just like the smallest ones, according to data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes. This discovery supports the implication of Einstein's relativity theory that black holes of all sizes have similar properties, and will be useful for predicting the properties of a conjectured new class of black holes.

The analysis of the youngest pair of identical twin stars yet discovered has revealed surprising differences in brightness, surface temperature and possibly even the size of the two.The study, which is published in the June 19 issue of the journal Nature, suggests that one of the stars formed significantly earlier than its twin. Because astrophysicists have assumed that binary stars form simultaneously, the discovery provides an important new test for successful star formation theories, forcing theorists back to the drawing board to determine if their models can produce binaries with stars that form at different times.

Two wine presses found in Egypt were likely part of the area's earliest winery, producing holy wine for export to Christians abroad, archaeologists say.Egyptian archaeologists discovered the two presses with large crosses carved across them near St. Catherine's Monastery, a sixth-century A.D. complex near Mount Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula.

The U.S. and France plan to launch a new satellite Friday to study rising sea levels on Earth.The Jason 2 spacecraft is due to embark on an Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM) to research changes in Earth's oceans and their links to global climate change.

Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter.Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007.But now it is down to levels seen last June, at the beginning of a summer that broke records for sea ice loss.

A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music.The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester.The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of "Baby", the forerunner of all modern computers.The tunes were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine.

Plans to use a state-of-the-art camera onboard a satellite to monitor deforestation levels in Africa's Congo Basin have been unveiled.The high resolution RALCam3 camera, designed and built by UK scientists, will provide the first detailed view of the area's rate of forest cover loss.The project is part of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, a £108m joint-initiative by the UK and Norwegian governments.The fund aims to curb climate change by preventing deforestation in the region.

Scottish, English and British monarchs have been crowned on the ancient coronation stone since the ninth century.It spent 700 years under the chair in Westminster Abbey after it was seized in 1296 by King Edward I, and was finally returned to Scotland 12 years ago.It has since been viewed at Edinburgh Castle by tens of thousands of people, and is regarded as a symbol of Scottish independence.

LOS ANGELES - Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt? That's the question bedeviling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix lander began digging into Mars' north pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable.Shallow trenches excavated by the lander's backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt.

OSAKA--Archaeologists working at an ancient tomb in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, are taking advantage of a newly developed, computer-based technique that allows unearthed artifacts to be examined without risking damage by physically handling them.The technique involves first encasing artifacts in medical resin to protect them from harm. Computer-based technology then applies the principles of tomography--the study of the internal structure of solid objects--to generate three-dimensional images that reveal the encased items in great detail.

Some of the first farmers in the Near East probably used green beads as amulets to protect themselves and their crops, a study suggests.The authors of the research suggest that early agriculturalists attached special importance to this colour.Beads they recovered from dig sites in Israel had been made from a variety of green minerals and the farmers went to great efforts to obtain them.Details appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Astronomers have identified a trio of so-called "super-Earths" - rocky planets between two and 10 times the mass of Earth.The three new planets were detected using the Harps instrument at the La Silla Observatory in central Chile.The star they circle is slightly smaller than our Sun, and is located 42 light-years away near the southern Doradus and Pictor constellations.The discoveries were announced at an astronomy conference in Nantes, France.

Japanese car manufacturer Honda has begun the first commercial production of a zero-emission, hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle.The four-seater, called FCX Clarity, runs on electricity produced by combining hydrogen with oxygen, and emits water vapour.Honda claims the vehicle offers three times better fuel efficiency than a traditional, petrol-powered car.Honda plans to produce 200 of the cars over the next three years.

BISMARCK, N.D. - Parts of a rare mummified dinosaur that has attracted worldwide interest went on display in North Dakota's state museum.People from across the country and even England gathered Saturday at the Heritage Center on the state Capitol grounds for the unveiling.

In Steven Spielberg's movie Minority Report, the agents of a police state monitor people's lives to stop crimes before they are committed, using giant computer screens that they operate using mid-air hand gestures. But in the real world surgeons, not spies, may be the first to handle data in this way. It appears to be a great way to avoid hospital-acquired infections like MRSA, which can easily be spread via a keyboard or mouse.

PARIS: Genetic material from outer space found in a meteorite in Australia may well have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth, according to a new international study.European and U.S. scientists have proved for the first time that two bits of genetic coding, called nucleobases, contained in the meteor fragment, are truly extraterrestrial.

It's easy to magnetize iron: rub it with a magnet. But how do you magnetize the iron core of Earth?By spinning a 26-ton steel sphere filled with boiling metal at about 90 miles an hour, Dan Lathrop, a scientist at the University of Maryland, hopes to unlock Earth's spinning magnetic heart.In the process he would create the world's first artificial, spherical and self-sustaining magnetic field, or dynamo, which could predict fluctuation in the Earth's magnetic field. This fluctuation damages electronics in orbit and on land.

Inspired by a chance discovery during another experiment, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have created a small molecule that stimulates nerve stem cells to begin maturing into nerve cells in culture.This finding might someday allow a person's own nerve stem cells to be grown outside the body, stimulated into maturity, and then re-implanted as working nerve cells to treat various diseases, the researchers said.

If you are curious about Earth's periodic mass extinction events such as the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might consider crashing asteroids and sky-darkening super volcanoes as culprits.But a new study, published online today (June 15, 2008) in the journal Nature, suggests that it is the ocean, and in particular the epic ebbs and flows of sea level and sediment over the course of geologic time, that is the primary cause of the world's periodic mass extinctions during the past 500[sc1] million years.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the USA have discovered that some of the Hindu temples, dating back as far as the 7th century, had musical pillars.Paul Calamia and Jonas Braasch say that the pillars were often carved from a single piece of stone, and tune by size.According to them, such pillars were "played" during certain ritual performances.

ATHENS, Greece (AP): A replica of the Argo, the ship that according to legend carried Jason and the 50 Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, sailed Saturday from the central Greek city of Volos on a two-month journey to Venice in Italy.

It has been a source of enduring fascination for archaeologists and amateur Egyptologists everywhere: what exactly happened to the sarcophagus of Menkaure, one of Egypt's greatest Pharaohs? Now, more than 170 years after it was found and lost, the mystery could be solved.Built from polished blue basalt to transport the king's earthly remains to the next world, the elaborately decorated vessel lay hidden inside the third-largest of Giza's renowned Pyramids for more than 4,000 years. In 1837 the British colonel Richard William Howard Vyse blasted his way into Menkaure's sepulchral chamber using gunpowder and discovered the stone casket.

London's Covent Garden district, formerly the Anglo Saxon city of Lundenwic, is at least 100 years older than previously thought, based on analysis of skeletons and objects found in the region's oldest Anglo Saxon cemetery, which was recently discovered.Instead of being founded in 650 A.D., as was earlier believed, archaeologists now think Lundenwic dates to 550 A.D. or earlier, according to a report published today in British ArchaeologyLundenwic also appears to have been relatively wealthy and cosmopolitan from its first days, based on the quality of artifacts found in the graves.

THE lives of hundreds of pedestrians are set to be saved each year in the UK after a major car firm revealed it is close to perfecting exterior airbags.A Toyota subsidiary is fine-tuning a system which, in the event of a collision with a pedestrian, deploys airbags at the front of the bonnet and just below the windscreen.

Jamming the right two pieces of plastic together creates a thin but strongly conducting channel along the junction that acts like a metal, say Dutch researchers. The discovery could lead to a whole new way of making electronics from non-metallic materials, and even new superconductors.Alberto Morpurgo's team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands attached a micrometer-thick crystal of the organic polymer TTF to a similarly thin organic crystal of the polymer TCNQ.

Romantic human-robot relationships are no longer the stuff of science fiction -- researchers expect them to become reality within four decades. And they do not mean simply, mechanical sex."I am talking about loving relationships about 40 years from now," David Levy, author of the book "Love + sex with robots", told AFP at an international conference held last week at the University of Maastricht in the south-east of the country."... when there are robots that have also emotions, personality, consciousness. They can talk to you, they can make you laugh. They can ... say they love you just like a human would say 'I love you', and say it as though they mean it ..."

CALLAO, PERU - 'Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago."Simple enough, right? But not for Demetrio Tupac Yupanqui.Instead, he regales visitors to his home in this gritty port city on Lima's edge with his Quechua version of the opening words of "Don Quixote": "Huh k'iti, la Mancha llahta suyupin, mana yuyarina markapin, yaqa kay watakuna kama, huh axllasqa wiraqucha."

Washington, June 14 (ANI): The recent discovery of the world's first Christian church by a Jordanian archaeologist has been dismissed by critics as "ridiculous."A team of archaeologists in Jordan led by Abdel-Qader al-Housan, director of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies had announced the discovery of the world's oldest church dating from 33 AD to 70 AD.

When fossils of a diminutive, recently extinct race of humans were discovered in a cave on Flores, one of the most easterly islands of the Indonesian archipelago, researchers can be forgiven for assuming they were down-sized by the peculiar selection pressures that act upon insular species.On Flores, natural selection has morphed several familiar species to unfamiliar sizes. There be dragons: three metre, 200kg monitor lizards, also known as the Komodo dragon, plus the fossilised remains of an extinct giant rodent, Spelaeomys, and extinct Stegodon pigmy elephants.

n 2005 and 2006, I gave public tours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston of antiquities that were known or widely suspected to have been looted. I took groups of 15 or 20 through gallery after gallery, showing how lack of provenance indicated the likely illicit origin of Maya vessels, Iraqi cuneiform tablets, Greek funerary gold, and dozens of other artifacts. I discussed the history of looting associated with the pieces, which is often more than is known about the objects themselves.The idea was not to increase the pieces' notoriety--many were famous enough. It was to show how museums were doing a disservice to the historical record by acquiring huge numbers of antiquities that could have reached them only through looting and illegal export. One piece on my Boston tour was a red Apulian amphora that had no information on its exact origin and had been acquired in the early 1990s--a time of rampant grave-robbing in southern Italy.

The photograph is arresting: three almost naked men with long flowing hair, one painted black and the other two painted bright red, shooting arrows into the sky to ward off some aerial evil.The National Geographic Society recently released this and other photographs of what appears to be a group of Amazonian Indians who have never seen modern civilization. The photograph is stunning because we are well past the Age of Discovery, and yet here are some fellow humans who escaped discovery. We pause and look, fascinated, because the idea of a bunch of people hidden in a forest, undetected and unspoiled, is just way too romantic.

We may all be aliens, it seems.Some of the building blocks of life on Earth came from space, according to a new study of molecules in meteorite fragments.The study confirmed that some of the raw material for DNA and RNA found in a meteorite did not contaminate the rock after it landed on Earth, but actually originated in space.

HOW could evidence of a major asteroid impact have been missed when it was in plain sight all along? The telltale signs of a huge impact site were sitting alongside a busy road 8 kilometres north-east of Santa Fe, New Mexico.Unusual cracks radiating from the tips of cone-shaped structures in rocks along the Santa Fe National Forest Scenic Byway were first spotted by independent geologist Tim McElvain. He called in experts, who identified the projections as shatter cones, distinctive structures that form when shock waves from a high-speed impact fracture the underlying rock.

If your town was bombed out of existence, would anyone care?If you live in one of the dusty, poor corners of the world, maybe not. Carnage in developing countries often goes unnoticed in the more wired, wealthy parts of the world.That's where the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences' Geospatial Technology and Human Rights Project comes in. It is charged with using the latest in technology, primarily high-resolution satellite photography, to detect and call attention to possible human rights violations.

The short answer is, of course, not long. But your build, age and general level of cardiovascular health could make a small difference in how long you'd get to relish the unique experience.A new calculator will estimate you how long you'd last. It is unclear exactly how the tool calculates survival times, or whether it's in any way accurate. I tested the survey with a few variations. A person with uber-thin Nicole Richie's build might make it 54 seconds. But a moderately healthy person weighing more than 250 pounds could hold out for 1 minute, 47 seconds.

The idea of having an irreparably damaged bone scanned, a titanium copy created in a replicator and then surgically inserted into our bodies seems more Star Trek science fiction than modern-day medicine. But advances in three-dimensional printing and a key piece of breakthrough software mean that, within a year, this will be a reality.

The sun's surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun's 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.Could a new sunspot drought plunge us into another decades-long cold spell?It's not very likely, says David Hathaway a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Sometimes we need to think the unthinkable, particularly when dealing with a problem as dangerous as climate change - there is no room for dogma when considering the future habitability of our planet. It was in this spirit that I and a panel of other specialists in climate, economics and policy-making met under the aegis of the Stockholm Network thinktank to map out future scenarios for how international policy might evolve - and what the eventual impact might be on the earth's climate. We came up with three alternative visions of the future, and asked experts at the Met Office Hadley Centre to run them through its climate models to give each a projected temperature rise. The results were both surprising, and profoundly disturbing.

A way to close off diseased blood vessels with unprecedented accuracy using a zap of laser light has been tested in mice.The technique developed by Canadian, British and American researchers could be used to shut off blood vessels to treat certain tumours or a common eye disease.It is a significant upgrade to an existing treatment called photodynamic therapy (PDT), which involves injecting a light-sensitive compound into diseased tissue. Exposing the compound to laser light generates a high-energy form of oxygen that is toxic to cells.

It could be the longest commercial break in history. Over a six-hour period this morning, high-powered radars in the Arctic Circle broadcast an advertisement into space for the first time.The advertisement, for Doritos tortilla chips, was being directed towards a solar system in the Ursa Major constellation, just 42 light years from Earth. The solar system contains a habitable zone, and could host an Earth-like planet and extraterrestrial life.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA has turned to a new lead contractor to build spacesuits for its revived lunar exploration program that aims to land astronauts on the moon again by 2020, officials said on Thursday.Oceaneering International Inc of Houston defeated a bid by Exploration Systems and Technology, a joint venture of current lead spacesuit contractors United Technologies Corp's Hamilton Sundstrand of Windsor Locks, Connecticut, and ILC Dover of Frederica, Delaware.

OHANNESBURG, South Africa - The United Nations environment agency unveiled a new atlas Tuesday that shows what the agency says are the dramatic effects of climate change on Africa.The nearly 400-page publication features over 300 satellite images taken in every African country. The before and after photographs, some of which span a 35-year period, appear to show striking environmental changes across the continent.

PARIS (AFP) - A dinosaur bone discovered in Australia has defied prevailing wisdom about how the world's continents separated from a super-continent millions of years ago, a new study published on Tuesday said.The 19-centimetre (eight-inch) bone was found in southeastern Australia but it comes from a very close cousin to Megaraptor, a flesh-ripping monster that lorded over swathes of South American some 90 million years ago.

New medical equipment recently delivered to the Antarctic station Concordia will help understand how our bodies physically adapt to this extreme environment - knowledge which could help prepare for a future human mission to Mars. ESA is currently looking for a candidate with a medical background to support projects at the research base.

After over 17 years of operation, the joint ESA/NASA mission Ulysses will officially conclude on 1 July this year. The spacecraft, which studied the Sun and its effect on the surrounding space for almost four times its expected lifespan, will cease to function because of the decline in power produced by its on-board generators.Ulysses has forever changed the way scientists view the Sun and its effect on the surrounding space. The mission's major results and the legacy it leaves behind have been presented today at ESA Headquarters in Paris.

A partial dinosaur skeleton unearthed in 1971 from a remote British Columbia site is the first ever found in Canadian mountains and may represent a new species, according to a recent examination by a University of Alberta researcher.Discovered by a geologist in the Sustut Basin of north-central British Columbia 37 years ago, the bones, which are about 70 million years old, were tucked away until being donated to Dalhousie University in 2004 and assigned to then-undergraduate student Victoria Arbour to research as an honours project. She soon realized that the bones were a rare find: they are very well-preserved and are the most complete dinosaur specimen found in B.C. to date. They are also the first bones found in B.C.'s Skeena mountain range.

An international team of scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II) has unveiled the most complete and detailed map yet of the chemical composition of our Galaxy."This compilation of the compositions of more than 2.5 million stars in the Milky Way will greatly enhance our understanding of our galactic home, and likely will help to solve some mysteries about our Galaxy's birth and growth," said Donald Schneider, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, who is a member of the research team and a leader in the SDSS-II organization.

CHICAGO: A genetic propensity for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may actually help people thrive in nomadic environments, says a study of Kenyan tribesmen.U.S. researchers found that a gene associated with the disorder was linked to better health and body weight in a group of nomadic cattle herders, but could cause malnourishment in their cousins who have recently settled and begun to grow crops.

With a recent government study projecting that at least 36 states will face water shortages within the next five years, some states are looking to tap our oceans for more than a trickle of our freshwater needs. The only significant seawater desalination, or desal, facility in operation in the United States is the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination Plant, which after a problem-plagued start is finally producing 25 million gallons of water a day, or about 10 percent of the region's water supply. California, Texas, Massachusetts, and Georgia are all cautiously considering similar saltwater desal plants. But critics say (pdf) these plants are energy hogs that have a hugely detrimental impact on coastal marine life.

It was one of those Eureka! moments.Army doctors home from Iraq and Afghanistan were watching NFL players pound it out, and thought, "that's what our soldiers need, helmets like ... that."Because, believe it or not, the effects on the brain of on-field collisions can be a lot like an IED explosion, CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports.Blasts strong enough to shake and even bruise the brain, often leading to traumatic brain injury, known as "TBI."

Long-tailed macaque monkeys have a reputation for knowing how to find food - whether it be grabbing fruit from jungle trees or snatching a banana from a startled tourist.Now, researchers say they have discovered groups of the silver-haired monkeys in Indonesia that fish.Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in Indonesia's East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust.

The first private manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is set to go ahead in 2011, a US space tourism company has announced.The mission has been agreed between the company Space Adventures and the Russian federal space agency.A Soyuz spacecraft will be specially manufactured for this mission.Space Adventures has so far bought seats on Soyuz missions to the ISS for five clients, with the price of a seat costing upwards of $20m (£10m).

"Plutoid" is the word of the moment for astronomers.It is the new classification that has been sanctioned for the object that was formerly known as the "ninth planet".It is nearly two years since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stripped Pluto of its former status as a "proper" planet.Now an IAU committee, meeting in Oslo, has suggested that small, nearly spherical objects orbiting beyond Neptune should carry the "plutoid" tag.

A team of forensic scientists at the University of Copenhagen has studied human remains found in two ancient Danish burial grounds dating back to the iron age, and discovered a man who appears to be of arabian origin. The findings suggest that human beings were as genetically diverse 2000 years ago as they are today and indicate greater mobility among iron age populations than was previously thought. The findings also suggest that people in the Danish iron age did not live and die in small, isolated villages but, on the contrary, were in constant contact with the wider world.

Looters and collectors got there first in almost every case, but enough evidence may remain in the hundreds of tepee rings that cover Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area to fill information gaps 10,000 years wide."The nice thing about tepee rings is that most people don't pick up the rocks and take them away," said Laura Scheiber, an archaeologist from Indiana University conducting her fourth field school on the park's Bad Pass Trail.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- About 15,000 feet up on Tibet's desolate Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, an international research team led by Florida State University geologist Yang Wang was surprised to find thick layers of ancient lake sediment filled with plant, fish and animal fossils typical of far lower elevations and warmer, wetter climates.Back at the FSU-based National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes in the fossils revealed the animals' diet (abundant plants) and the reason for their demise during the late Pliocene era in the region (a drastic climate change). Paleo-magnetic study determined the sample's age (a very young 2 or 3 million years old).

ROME (Reuters) - Archaeologists have discovered a nearly 2,000-year-old, intact necropolis on the outskirts of Rome that gives a rare insight into the lives of poor laborers in the Roman era.The simple burial complex, dating to the 1st and 2nd century A.D. when the Roman empire was at its height, held about 320 tombs bearing well-preserved skeletal remains and artifacts like lamps and jewelry to accompany the dead into the after-life.Archaeologists on Monday hailed the discovery as significant for offering a rare glimpse into the beliefs and traits of one of the poorest sections of Roman society -- laborers or slaves who probably carried merchandise at a nearby port.

As world oil prices skyrocket, thousands of households in energy-poor Japan are taking part in an ambitious experiment to use fuel cells to light and heat their homes.Since the prime minister's official residence became the first house in the world to be equipped with a domestic fuel cell in 2005, about 3,000 households have signed up to have the grey boxes installed outside their homes.

One of the great scientific challenges is to understand the design principles and origins of the human brain. New research has shed light on the evolutionary origins of the brain and how it evolved into the remarkably complex structure found in humans.The research suggests that it is not size alone that gives more brain power, but that, during evolution, increasingly sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses allowed development of animals with more complex behaviours.

A team of historians says the lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu, in Peru was discovered more than 40 years earlier than previously thought and ransacked.Machu Picchu, now Peru's biggest tourist attraction, was famously believed to have been discovered in 1911 by US explorer Hiram Bingham.The ruins are the crown jewel of Peru's archaeological sites in Peru and draw thousands of tourists every day.Machu Pichu carries symbolic value for Peru's indigenous people.

A medieval church which tumbled from an eroding cliff into the sea has been rediscovered by marine archaeologists.They believe the ruins they have found are St John's church, the biggest in Dunwich which was lost to the sea off the coast of Suffolk.Dunwich was once a thriving community before being swallowed up by the North Sea more than 500 years ago.Experts are using the latest acoustic imaging technology to uncover clues about the lost city in the North Sea.

Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian Indians gathering in Juneau, Alaska, today will get a chance to prove they're directly related to one of the very first Alaskans - a 10,300-year old mariner whose bear-chewed bones were discovered a decade ago in a cave on Prince of Wales Island.In return, molecular anthropologists collecting the participants' DNA hope to add to their knowledge about how the earliest Americans spread across the western hemisphere - possibly along coastal sea routes - in spite of the ice-choked plains.

More than 13,000 years ago, South Carolina was a wild kingdom alive with all sorts of beasts: saber-tooth tigers, beavers the size of Great Danes, camels, elephants and mastodons.Until recently, these animals were believed to have vanished before the first Americans -- called the Clovis people -- arrived about 13,000 years ago from Asia via the Bering Sea land bridge.EDIT - Link Fixed

The brains of gay men and women look like those found in straight people of the opposite sex, research suggests.The Swedish study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, compared the size of the brain's halves in 90 adults.Gay men and straight women had halves of a similar size, while the right side was bigger in lesbian women and straight men.A UK scientist said this was evidence sexual preference was set in the womb.

A biotech company, founded by researchers from the University of Munich, has developed a fascinating way to make the immune system fight cancer.On Thursday, Micromet Inc. announced that its experimental drug, MT103, had impressive results in a test upon seven Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma patients. All of them had failed at least three conventional treatments, but showed signs of recovery after receiving doses of a two-headed antibody.

Back in the 1970s, when paisley was still funky and NASA let its visionaries boogie down, the now-staid space agency turned its imagination to the design of space colonies.How could hundreds of thousands of people not merely live in space, but live in style? Led by Princeton physicist and space-colony designer Gerard O'Neill, NASA's studies showed that the colonies "could be wonderful places to live; about the size of a California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views, freedom, elbow-room in spades and great wealth."

Neolithic age men fought over women too, according to a study that provides the most ancient evidence of the lengths men will go to in the hunt for partners.Many archaeologists have argued that women have long motivated cycles of violence and blood feuds throughout history but there has really been no solid archaeological evidence to support this view.

The normal human genome contains 46 chromosomes: 23 from the mother and 23 from the father. Thus, you have two copies of every gene (excluding some irregularity in the pair of sex chromosomes). In general, which parent contributes a chromosome has no effect on the expression of the genes found on it. Exceptions to this rule are caused by "genomic imprinting"--modification of DNA, which means that gene expression is influenced by which parent the gene came from. A new paper investigates the evolution of genomic imprinting in a specific region of the mammalian genome. The work, by Anne Ferguson-Smith and colleagues in the UK and Australia, shows that different regions became imprinted at different times during mammalian evolution.

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old.Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.Details of the work have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

Scientists working on Nasa's Phoenix lander are trying to work out why a soil sample dropped on to an instrument bay was not registered.Images sent back from Mars clearly show the sample lying across a screen protecting the opening to a tiny oven.But it seems the soil may have been too lumpy to pass through into the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer.The oven would have baked the soil to gain some insights into its possible water content and mineral make-up.

Tests on a UK-led technology at the heart of a planned Moon mission have been a spectacular success, according to the experts involved in the project.Three penetrator missiles were fired into a sand bunker in Wales, designed to mimic the lunar surface.Professor Alan Smith, of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told BBC News the results had exceeded expectations.He is a leading figure in the Moonlite mission, which hopes to fire instruments into the Moon in 2013.

Federal officials have confirmed what biologists have long thought: The Caribbean monk seal has gone the way of the dodo.Humans hunting the docile creatures for research, food and blubber left the population unsustainable, say biologists who warn that Hawaiian and Mediterranean monk seals could be the next to go.The last confirmed sighting of a Caribbean monk seal was in 1952 between Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service confirmed Friday that the species is extinct.

Plans for a levitating train from Las Vegas to Disneyland can move forward under a transportation bill signed by President Bush on Friday that frees up $45 million for the futuristic project.Derided by critics as pie in the sky, the train would use magnetic levitation technology to carry passengers from Disneyland to Las Vegas in well under two hours, traveling at speeds of up to 300 mph. It would be the first MagLev system in the U.S.The money is the largest cash infusion in the project's nearly 20-year history. It will pay for environmental studies for the first leg of the project.

Or so claims the advertisements for Discovery Channel's new six-part documentary/tribute to the first 50 years of U.S. space exploration, "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions." The mini-series will premiere Sunday, June 8 with the first two, one-hour episodes followed by two more installments every Sunday.But the claim isn't exactly true. Private and public efforts to share and preserve NASA's multimedia archives have led to growing online libraries and unabridged DVDs. And what they have missed has been seen by historians and space history enthusiasts over the course of the past half century. There's no unseen footage, nor are there "secret film vaults," as another of Discovery's ads professes.

The scientists behind NASA's three Great Observatories had a great opportunity to show their stuff this week at a gathering of thousands of astronomers from around the world. The good stuff included a wide shot of starbirth in our home galaxy, a second look at a supernova's leftovers, and a break in "the case of the missing dwarf."In all three cases, the results weren't the result of one team working on its own. Observations from multiple instruments and even multiple telescopes were pooled together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This week's cosmic pictures serve to show what can happen when telescopes team up.

AOMORI, Japan (AFP) - Japan and the United States on Saturday agreed to cooperate on research into methane hydrate, known as the "ice that burns" which is seen as a promising future energy source.Energy ministers from the world's two largest economies signed the cooperation agreement at a meeting in northern Japan that comes amid mounting concern about record-high oil prices.

TOKYO (AFP) - Toyota Motor Corp. said Friday it had developed a new zero-emission fuel-cell vehicle that has a longer cruising distance than previous models and can operate in freezing temperatures.Japanese companies have been working to create a viable zero-emission car running on fuel cells, which produce electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, leaving water as the only by-product.

Punching your way out of a paper bag could become a lot harder, thanks to the development of a new kind of paper that is stronger than cast iron.The new paper could be used to reinforce conventional paper, produce extra-strong sticky tape or help create tough synthetic replacements for biological tissues, says Lars Berglund from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.Despite its great strength, Berglund's "nanopaper" is produced from a biological material found in conventional paper: cellulose. This long sugar molecule is a principal component of plant cell walls and is the most common organic compound on Earth.

It might have been used to bring down a small blue duiker or perhaps pick off a bird high in the forest canopy. Its exact target will never be known, but scientists now know what this ordinary-looking piece of bone was used for.Two researchers from Wits University believe that what they have discovered is a 60 000-year-old arrow that was fired from the earliest known bow. Their discovery has pushed back the origins of bow-and-arrow technology by 20 000 years.

Solving the "Sapient Paradox" Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory. Clive Gamble. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007. 364 pp., illus. $27.99 (ISBN 9780521677493 paper). The origin of humankind continues to be one of the most difficult and intriguing uncertainties in the field of science. Discoveries of fossils, notably in Africa, and the development of DNA studies situate the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa more than 150,000 years ago, and the dispersal of our species out of Africa about 60,000 years ago. But when and how did the behaviors that we associate with modern humankind emerge? And in particular, if the genotype was established 60,000 years ago or earlier, why did it take the new behaviors that accompanied the sedentary revolution of some 10,000 years ago so long to develop?

AT SOME point between AD575 and 600, at least 33 men, women and children entered a cave near modern Andritsa, southwest of Argolid, in the eastern Peloponnese. They carried a Christian cross, some money and food supplies, perhaps intending to hide from some temporary threat. They were never to see the light of day again. One by one, they died from starvation, unable or unwilling to escape the cave. Fourteen centuries later, Greek archaeologists discovered the remains of this early Byzantine community and its tragic and mysterious end.

At the bottom of the sea, some 300 meters west of the Atlit fortress, lies one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of the Mediterranean basin. About 20 years ago, archaeologists discovered a complex of ancient buildings and ancient graves with dozens of skeletons at the underwater site of Atlit-Yam. The team of marine archaeologists that excavated the site, headed by Dr. Ehud Galili of the Israel Antiquities Authority, came to the consclusion that an ancient settlement once existed there, but sank beneath the surface of the sea some 8,000 years ago. The finds at the site, including goat and pig bones and wheat seeds, indicate that it was a well-established community whose residents supported themselves by agriculture, hunting, fishing and animal husbandry.

SAKKARA, Egypt (Reuters) - Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Thursday he had identified a badly eroded pyramid south of Cairo as that of the Fifth Dynasty Pharaoh Menkauhor, who ruled Egypt in the 24th century BC.The identification by Zahi Hawas, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, could end the long controversy over the structure known as the Headless Pyramid, first described by the German archaeologist Lepsius in the 19th century.