Newsdesk Archive

Humans started wearing shoes about 40,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought, new anthropological research suggests.As any good clothes horse knows, the right outfit speaks volumes about the person wearing it. Now, anthropologists are tapping into that knowledge base, looking for the physical changes caused by wearing shoes to figure out when footwear first became fashionable.

Dunwich, on the Suffolk coast, was a thriving metropolis before a series of storms and sea surges consigned the city to the North Sea five centuries ago.Stuart Bacon, a marine archaeologist, has spent the last 30 years trying to discover the secrets of the city through a series of dives, but due to extremely poor visibility he has never seen the ruins.

An Egyptian-Dominican Republic archaeological team working at Taposiris Magna, an area of archaeological importance west of Alexandria and site of a temple dedicated to the prosperity god Osiris, as well as a number of Graeco- Roman catacombs, have stumbled upon several Ptolemaic objects that date back to the reign of the famous Queen Cleopatra.The team was searching the site in the hope of locating the tomb of Cleopatra VII and her lover Mark Anthony. Excavation work started early last year in the area, as it was believed that the tragic couple had dug their tomb in an area some distance from Alexandria in order to be out of reach of their enemies.

Marine archaeologists have salvaged ancient wine vases piled on the hull of a 2,350-year-old cargo ship lying on the seabed off Cyprus' southern shore, the island's Antiquities Department said.The vessel is one of only a few such commercial ships dating from the late Classical period (mid-4th century BC) to have been discovered so well-preserved.The ship rests under 150ft of water some one and a half miles from shore.

An international group of radio astronomers has found an unexpected morphology in the most distant radio quasar ever. This was done using the world's most sensitive network of radio telescopes called the European VLBI Network (EVN). The results of their discovery are published in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal on 5 June.

The 2,300-year old grave contained a female skeleton, accompanied by four gold wreaths and gold earrings in the shape of dogs' heads set with semiprecious stones.A Culture Ministry statement said Friday that the grave goods included a bronze mirror, a bronze vase and six clay pots.The woman had been buried in a wooden coffin, traces of which survived. The ministry said part of the grave had been destroyed by a modern sewage pipe.

New photos sent back by the spacecraft show its 8-foot-long robotic arm hovering over a miniature oven, ready to dump seven tablespoons inside where the soil sample will be heated and studied for its chemistry.Scientists hope to measure the amount of water and type of minerals in the arctic soil to determine whether the environment could support primitive life. In particular, they are looking for hints of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen in the sample.

Women in Ancient Greece were major power brokers in their own right, researchers have discovered, and often played key roles in running affairs of state. Until now it was thought they were treated little better than servants.The discovery is part of an investigation by Manchester researchers into the founders of Mycenae, Europe's first great city-state and capital of King Agamemnon's domains.

LONDON. The ancient Axum obelisk is to be re-erected on a plateau in the north of Ethiopia this month, according to Unesco officials. The obelisk was looted from the holy city of Axum by Mussolini in 1937 and re-erected in Rome. It was returned to the east African nation in 2005.Nada Al Hassan, a programme specialist at the Unesco World Heritage Centre, told The Art Newspaper that work is scheduled to start on 15 May. The $4m project, funded by Unesco and the Italian government, will last a month: the obelisk should be completely in place by 15 June. A delegation from Unesco, led by Francesco Bandarin, director of the World Heritage Centre, was in Axum in March to arrange the re-erection of the 160-tonne, 27-metre-high stone pillar, which dates from the fourth century AD.

Dozens of skeletons from the early Islamic period were discovered during excavations near the Temple Mount, on a site slated for construction by a right-wing Jewish organization. Contrary to regulations, the skeletons were removed, and were not reported to the Ministry of Religious Services. The Israel Antiquities Authority termed the incident "a serious mishap."

Over the tomb of Seught III (on the coin) in the mound Goliama Kosmatka near Shipka town (Central Bulgaria) is most probably located the temple of Dionysius - the God of Fruitfulness.The news was reported in Kazanluk city by the director of local History Museum Kosio Zarev.According to Zarev's words the conclusion was made after the detailed geo-radar examinations of the mound executed by a private team.

It's not your normal, electronic silicon-based machine, but scientists have made a computer from a small, circular piece of DNA, then inserted it into a living bacterial cell and unleashed the microbe to solve a mathematical sorting problem."A computer is any system that can read some input and give some readable output," says Karmella Haynes, a biologist at Davidson College in North Carolina and co-author of a new study appearing in the Journal of Biological Engineering. Haynes and her team looked to harness the power of DNA recombination to solve the so-called "burnt pancake problem": a puzzle about how to stack different-size flapjacks that are burned on one side and perfectly cooked on the other using the fewest number of flips to arrange them so the largest are on the bottom and all are golden side up."This work is the first work I've encountered which uses living cells in order to solve a specific computer science problem," says Tom Ran, a graduate student in the lab of computer scientist Ehud Shapiro at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Jyoti is the Hindi word for light. It's something Pranav Mehta has never had to live without. And he is lucky. Near where he lives in Gujarat, one of the most prosperous states in India, thousands of rural villages lack electricity or struggle with an intermittent supply at best."We need to empower these villages, and for empowerment, energy is a must," Mehta said. "Rural India is suffering a lot because of a lack of energy."By 2030, India's Planning Commission estimates that the country will have to generate at least 700,000 megawatts of additional power to meet the demands of its expanding economy and growing population.

Thirty-six-year-old Professor Eske Willerslev, University of Copenhagen, and his team of fossil DNA researchers have done it a couple of times before: rewritten world history. Most recently two months ago when he and his team discovered that the ancestors of the North American Indians were the first people to populate America, and that they came to the country more than 1,000 years earlier than originally assumed. And the evidence is, so to speak, quite tangible: DNA samples of fossilised human faeces found in deep caves in southern Oregon.

The unique book dedicated to the trial against templars issued by Secret Vatican City archive was presented Friday in Sofia's National Archeological Museum.The publication, called "Processus Conta Templarios", is an expensive limited edition of the proceedings of the 1307-1312 papal trial of the mysterious medieval crusading order of warrior-monks who were accused of heresy.The work was presented by the famous Bulgarian archaeologist Professor Nikolay Ovcharov and the Prior of the Bulgarian Priory Rumen Ralchev.

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.

Of the imaginary coordinate lines that astronomers and navigators use in mapping the sky, perhaps the most important one is the ecliptic, the apparent path the sun appears to take through the sky as a result of the Earth's revolution around it.Because of the Earth's yearly revolution around the sun, the sun appears to move in its annual journey through the heavens with the ecliptic as its path. Technically then, the ecliptic represents the extension or projection of the plane of the Earth's orbit out towards the sky.

Organizers of an effort to get UFO reports taken more seriously teased journalists on Friday with glimpses at dark, grainy video showing what appeared to be a face peeping up from a window.The video was played at a downtown Denver news conference, after days of buildup from a Denver resident who is circulating a petition calling on the city to create an "Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission" to deal with reports of alien encounters. The petition drive's organizer, Jeff Peckman, hopes to get 4,000 signatures to place his initiative on the ballot.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - An experiment to develop a salmonella vaccine aboard the US space shuttle Discovery could pave the way for a gush of commercial biotechnology research in space, NASA and biotech industry officials said Friday.Executives of Spacehab Inc. said that if the company's research on salmonella in the weightlessness of space leads to the vaccine, it would demonstrate the financial attractiveness of doing biotechnology research aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS).The company will send its test salmonella strain on board the Discovery when it launches on a 14 day mission on Saturday, planned for 5:02 pm (2102 GMT), weather permitting.

An army of inflatable, spherical robots might one day roll around on the Martian surface. Engineers who have designed the lightweight probes say they could economically explore vast regions of other planets."Our inflatable rovers are lightweight, travel great distances, use very low energy and will be fairly cheap," says Fredrik Bruhn of Ǻngström Aerospace in Uppsala, Sweden, who initiated the idea that has now been developed by a team of engineers. "One battery charge will let such a rover travel around 100 kilometres."