Newsdesk Archive

A NASA review appears to spell the end for Gravity Probe B, the project conceived in the 1960s to measure how the Earth warps the fabric of nearby space-time.A panel of about 15 experts commissioned by NASA analysed the performance of 10 NASA astrophysics missions that are currently operating in Earth orbit. A copy of the "senior review" obtained by New Scientist concludes that extending the lifetimes of the top nine missions "would be certain to deliver unique data of high scientific value". But Gravity Probe B didn't make the cut because the panel doubted further analysis of its results would yield significant new information.

The Universe may be brighter than thought: perhaps twice as bright as seen from Earth.Interstellar cosmic dust absorbs some starlight, but quantifying this has proved difficult. Researchers from the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia looked closely at how dust obscures light in some nearby galaxies, depending on various factors including the size, shape and inclination of the galaxy. They used these data to make a better model of how dust absorbs light, and applied the model to a catalogue of 10,000 galaxies.

Mars' north pole, like a French parfait, comes in layers.Scientists analyzing radar images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft have found as many as seven distinct layers of ice and dust beneath the north pole.Roger J. Phillips, a scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said the layering was probably caused by changes in the planet's orbit over the last 4 million years.When the planet tilts strongly on its axis, the surface ice erodes and is covered by a layer of dust, Phillips said.

BEX, Switzerland - A Swiss pilot strapped on a jet-powered wing and leaped from a plane Wednesday for the first public demonstration of the homemade device, turning figure eights and soaring high above the Alps.Yves Rossy's performance in front of the world press capped five years of training and many more years of dreaming.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers are baffled after finding an exotic type of star called a pulsar apparently locked in an elongated orbit around a star much like the sun -- an arrangement defying what had been known about such objects.The rapidly spinning pulsar -- an extraordinarily dense object created when a massive star exploded as a supernova -- is called J1903+0327 and is located about 21,000 light years from Earth, the astronomers said.

If you discount all of the wars, conflicts, consumer enslavement and carbon dioxide emissions it's generated, oil has been pretty good to humanity. It's fostered our global development at warp speed pace. But oil is finite -- it's a nonrenewable resource, which means that we will eventually run out of it.The sense that humanity is racing against the fuel-source clock makes alternative energy a front-and-center issue. Ideas like switchgrass ethanol, biodiesel and wind and solar power may soon actually power the globe. But each of these still has its own obstacles to large-scale energy production. So researchers continue to look around our planet for novel ways to power it.

The most recent supernova in our Galaxy has been discovered by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains. This result, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA), has implications for understanding how often supernovas explode in the Milky Way galaxy.The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent supernova in the Milky Way as measured in Earth's time frame. Previously, the last known galactic supernova occurred around 1680, based on studying the expansion of its remnant Cassiopeia A.

TOKYO (AFP) - The world's smallest one-man helicopter will soon take flight in the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci, who is credited with having first thought of a vertical-flight machine, its developer said.The 75-kilogram (165-pound) helicopter will make a demonstration flight in the city of Vinci, near Florence, on May 25, according to Japanese developer Gennai Yanagisawa, 75."Since the concept of our helicopter came from Italy, I always wanted to take a flight in the birthplace of da Vinci," Yanagisawa said.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and Europe are teaming up to build a spaceship which will fly astronauts to the moon, Russia said on Wednesday, although the European Space Agency struck a more cautious note.The first test flight is set for 2015 and the first manned flight is planned for 2018, Russian space agency Roskosmos said.

A number of elite tombs from Ancient Egypt are now accessible to all thanks to the launch of the Mastabase. The Mastabase is a CD-ROM containing descriptions and hieroglyphic inscriptions of scenes of daily life from 337 Mastaba tombs. This resource will make research into these elite tombs a lot easier. On 13 May 2008, Dutch Egyptologist René van Walsem will officially present the MastaBase in Leiden, Netherlands.

Researchers have finally published the results of data recovered from a cracked and singed hard drive that fell to Earth in the debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke up during reentry on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members.The hard drive contained data from the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment, designed to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity. The findings, published this April in the journal Physical Review E, confirmed that when stirred vigorously, xenon exhibits a sudden change in viscosity known as shear thinning. The same effect allows whipped cream and ketchup to go from flowing smoothly like liquids to holding their shapes like solids.

Digital medical imaging and information technology from Carestream Health, Inc., is playing a key role in helping The Field Museum of Chicago discover and analyze secrets hidden within its world-class collections.Carestream Health has donated a computed radiography (CR) system that enables The Field Museum--for the first time--to capture, archive and share digital x-ray images from more than one million priceless specimens and artifacts in its Anthropology collection. The Field Museum is also using a picture archiving and communications system (PACS) from Carestream Health for the management, viewing and storage of the growing collection of digital images managed by the museum's staff.

The ancient catastrophe that gave birth to the Moon may have produced additional satellites that lingered in Earth's skies for tens of millions of years.A new model suggests moonlets may have once occupied the two Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, regions in space where the gravitational tug of the Earth and the Moon exactly cancel each other out. Objects trapped in these points are called Trojans and can remain stationary forever if left undisturbed.Scientists think the Moon was created when Earth was struck by a Mars-sized object some 4.5 billion years ago.

A NASA spacecraft set to launch in 2015 will come eight times closer to the Sun than any previous probe, operating within the star's scorching outer atmosphere, or corona. The $750 million Solar Probe will study the birthplace of the solar wind.During its expected seven-year lifetime, Solar Probe will make seven gravity slingshots around Venus, each time getting closer to the Sun. At its closest approach, it will orbit the Sun from within the outer part of the corona, at a distance of between 8 and 10 solar radii from the centre of the Sun.That is much closer than the previous record holder, the Helios spacecraft, which came within 67 solar radii of the star in the 1970s.

Humble fungi found in most back gardens could help clean up battlefields contaminated with depleted uranium.At present, sites can be partial decontaminated by physically collecting and disposing of fragments from shells. However, radioactive particles and dust from explosions remain in the soil, preventing full reclamation.Now, a research team in Scotland has established that common fungi can grow on and chemically lock away the offending uranium. As their hyphal filaments sprawled across fragments of depleted uranium, the tubules gradually became coated in a yellowy mineral.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Scientists have confirmed that the famed Monte Verde archaeological site in southern Chile is about 14,000 years old, making it the earliest known human settlement in the Americas, the journal Science reported Thursday.The age of Monte Verde has been the subject of controversy over the years, since estimates appeared to conflict with other archaeological evidence related to the settlement of North America

A sabre-toothed cat that sported the fearsome teeth of felines also had the body and gait of a bear, making it a "super-predator".So says a team led by Stephen Wroe at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, which found that the ferocious marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex) shared the same super-predator body plan as Smilodon fatalis, North America's ice age sabre-tooth cat.

Clive Gamble revisits the moment at which archaeologists realized that human prehistory was far longer than biblical scholars had imagined; and links this to today's debates about the antiquity of the human mind with its capacity for self-aware thought. On a spring afternoon in 1859 two successful English businessmen were about to make history in a gravel pit in northern France. Joseph Prestwich, at forty-seven the older by eleven years, had a day job in the wine trade. But his passion was unravelling the geology of northern Europe; tracing the history of glaciations by mapping surface deposits with the evocative name of 'the drift'. His younger companion, John Evans, had tremendous energy and a most impressive set of sidewhiskers. Roman coins were one of his archaeological obsessions and he had earlier bought some found by workmen in this pit on the outskirts of Amiens on the Somme River. He ran the paper company in Hertfordshire that his wife, Harriet Dickinson, had inherited. She had died the year before leaving him with five young children. The eldest, Arthur, would later inherit the family fortune and make his name discovering the Minoan civilization of Crete.

A glimpse into prehistoric fashion has revealed that ancient sea creatures liked to doll themselves up with diamonds imported from outer space.Scientists have discovered that the organisms coated themselves with tiny diamonds made from carbon brought to Earth on the asteroid which may have wiped out dinosaurs.

The secret of Silbury Hill, the most enigmatic prehistoric monument in Europe, isn't the monument but the monumental effort which went into building it, according to the archaeologist who has spent most of the last year slipping around on wet chalk deep in the heart of the hill.On a sunny morning last week a local druid scattered Wiltshire grass and wild flower seed on the summit of Silbury, to mark what engineers and archaeologists devoutly hope is the completion of a project to prevent the 4,500 year old hill from collapsing - 10 months and £1m over budget.

WHAT IF Troy was destroyed by an earthquake? What really brought down the walls of Jericho or the Colossus of Rhodes? These are some of the questions Stanford University geophysicist Amos Nur raises in "Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God" (Princeton University Press: 324 pp., $26.95), a book that posits seismicity -- rather than invaders or social forces -- as the prime dynamic behind the fall of ancient civilizations.

Hidden underneath layers of sediment in a cave in northern Spain was an unassuming but breakthrough scientific find: the jawbone of the oldest-known human ancestor in Europe.The fossil, dated at approximately 1.2 million years old, shatters scientists' previous theories about human migration to Europe, said University of Michigan researcher Josep Pares, who was a member of the team that found the jawbone last summer.

Two decades from now Americans could get as much electricity from windmills as from nuclear power plants, according to a government report that lays out a possible plan for wind energy growth.The report, a collaboration between the Energy Department research labs and industry, concludes wind energy could generate 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030, about the same share now produced by nuclear reactors.

A plan for a manned spacecraft has been announced by the European firm EADS.Its Astrium division has designed a variant of its space station freighter that could also transport astronauts.Limited details were released in Bremen, Germany, on Tuesday; further information and a mock-up are expected at the Berlin Air Show this month.Europe does not currently possess its own human space transportation system and is reliant on the Americans and the Russians to get its people into orbit.

VATICAN CITY - Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican's chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

NEW YORK - News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it's a step toward creating "designer babies."But an author of the study says the work was focused on stem cells. He notes that the researchers used an abnormal embryo that could never have developed into a baby anyway.

Lunar dust could be more than a housekeeping issue for astronauts who visit the moon. Their good health may depend on the amount of exposure they have to the tiny particles.To prepare for a return to the moon, researchers with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) are evaluating how dust deposits in the lungs in reduced gravity in order to assess the health risk of long-term exposure to the particles. The findings will influence the design of lunar bases and could also provide benefits for healthcare on Earth, such as improved delivery of aerosol medications to the lungs.

We can forget all the ideas crediting Atlanteans or space aliens with building the Great Pyramid of Giza, and instead imagine ourselves travelling back in time in H G Wells's time machine to try and work out not how the ancient Egyptians built this enormous edifice, because this lies beyond our present understanding, but rather what we can best judge to be its most appropriate proportions. Then, however, there were no electronic calculators, only ropes and rods.

PALENQUE, Mexico (AP) -- There is a legend that the ancient Maya possessed 13 crystal skulls which, when united, hold the power of saving the Earth -- a tale so strange and fantastic that it inspired the latest Indiana Jones movie.Experts dismiss the hundreds of existing crystal skulls as fakes that were probably made by colorful antiquities traders in the 19th century. But Mayan priests worship the skulls, even today, and real-life skull hunters still search for them.EThe true story of the skulls stretches over continents and hundreds of years, and may be even more extraordinary than the tale portrayed in this fourth installment of the Harrison Ford franchise.

LOS ANGELES - Indiana Jones managed to retrieve the trinket he was after in the opening moments of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." He pretty much wrecked everything else in the ancient South American temple where the little gold idol had rested for millennia.Though he preaches research and good science in the classroom, the world's most famous archaeologist often is an acquisitive tomb raider in the field with a scorched-earth policy about what he leaves behind. While actual archaeologists like the guy and his movies, they wouldn't necessarily want to work alongside him on a dig.

Zahi HawassIt is the dream of every archaeologist to dig in the Valley of the Kings, the burial ground of the monarchs of the New Kingdom (ca. 1500-1100 BC). Of all the sites in Egypt, this is one of the most magical. It is hard to believe that, of the 63 tombs found in the valley, not one was officially discovered by an Egyptian archaeologist.For the last two centuries, the valley has been explored by adventurers and tomb robbers as well as archaeologists. The most exciting discovery here, indeed the most fabulous find in the history of Egyptology, was made on November 4, 1922, when British excavator Howard Carter found the intact tomb of Tutankhamun (known as KV 62). The story of this great find, and the magnificent objects that were recovered (over 5,000 of them) still captures the hearts of the world, and overshadows many of the other important discoveries that have been made in the Valley, such as the mostly-intact tomb of Yuya and Tjuya, who were probably the great-grandparents of King Tut, and the tomb of Amenhotep II.

Green Vehicles, a company based in San Jose, California, has recently revealed that it will begin selling two lithium-ion-powered electric vehicles early this summer. The three-wheeled TRIAC is a highway-capable electric car (or oversized covered trike, depending on how you look at it) that can reach speeds of 80 mph. There's also the BUCKSHOT, an electric all-purpose work truck designed for heavy-duty, durable use.

Green Vehicles, a company based in San Jose, California, has recently revealed that it will begin selling two lithium-ion-powered electric vehicles early this summer. The three-wheeled TRIAC is a highway-capable electric car (or oversized covered trike, depending on how you look at it) that can reach speeds of 80 mph. There's also the BUCKSHOT, an electric all-purpose work truck designed for heavy-duty, durable use.

A prototype module for a private space station has passed an orbital milestone after completing its 10,000th trip around the Earth.Genesis 1, an inflatable module built by the Las Vegas, Nev.-based firm Bigelow Aerospace, passed the 10,000-orbit mark as it nears the beginning of its third year of unmanned operations, its builders announced late Thursday.

BILLIONS of years ago, a weaker sun should have made the Earth a chilly place - so why was it balmy instead?The sun that shone on the early Earth was around 25 per cent dimmer than today, so atmospheric temperatures should have been colder by around 25 °C. But ancient rocks show that liquid water existed, proving that temperatures must have been above freezing.This can be explained if greenhouse gases acted as an insulator - but modelling has showed that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would need to have had an implausibly high partial pressure of over 50 millibars to trap the heat.

Any Trekkies out there? Remember the tricorder? Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock both carried them, and they came in mighty handy exploring "strange new worlds ...where no one has gone before."On the International Space Station, astronauts are carrying an experimental device that looks strikingly similar: LOCAD-PTS, short for Lab-On-a-Chip Application Development Portable Test System. This handheld biological lab is the first step along the path to developing something akin to Dr. McCoy's medical tricorder.

DNA analysis of residents of Druze villages in Israel suggests these ancient religious communities offer a genetic snapshot of the Near East as it was several thousands of years ago.The Druze harbor a remarkable diversity of mitochondrial DNA types or lineages that appear to have separated from each other many thousands of years ago, according to a new study by multinational team, led by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Rappaport School of Medicine.br>But instead of dispersing throughout the world after their separation, the full range of lineages can still be found within the small, tightly knit Druze population.

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have identified Heme Detoxification Protein, a unique protein encoded in the malaria genome that represents a potential target for developing new malaria drugs.The team, which includes researchers at Washington University School of Medicine, the United States National Institutes of Health, the United States Food and Drug Administration as well as other researchers at Virginia Tech, has characterized heme and demonstrated that it plays a major role in protecting Plasmodium as the pathogen pursues infection of its host. The findings were published April 28, 2008, in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens (Jani D, Nagarkatti R, Beatty W, Angel R, et al. (2008) HDP-A Novel Heme Detoxification Protein from the Malaria Parasite.

Scientists have deciphered the genetic blueprint of the duck-billed platypus, one of the oddest creatures on Earth.The animal comes from an early branch of the mammal family, and like mammals it is covered in fur and produces milk. However, it lays eggs like a reptile.Researchers say this unique mixture of features is reflected in its DNA.

RABAT - Archaeologists have uncovered shells used for finery by prehistoric man 85,000 years ago in a cave in eastern Morocco, the country's heritage institute said today.A research team led by archaeology and heritage institute (INSAP) member Abdeljalil Bouzouggar and Nick Barton from Oxford University found the 20 perforated shells in a cave near Taforalt between March and April this year.

Bonnie Moffet uses her stout walking staff to point toward one of the stick figures carved into the sandstone cliff that is radiating heat out into the prairie afternoon."Don't touch the cliff, but look closely," she says. "Can you see the pink?" I hold my breath and lean in. Sure enough, the rectangular torso of the centuries-old petroglyph, or rock carving, shows a faint rose tinge that's just different enough from the stone to show up, even in the sunlight that's baking southern Alberta's Milk River Valley.

BURIED for more than a 1,000 years, these beautifully cast fragments of a Viking sword could be a once-in-a-lifetime find for two metal detector enthusiasts in the Isle of Man.Only the 13th recorded Viking sword found in the Island, it was unearthed by Dan Crowe and Rob Farrer while metal detecting in the north west of the Island.

TEHRAN -- Piotr Steinkeller, professor of Assyriology in Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University, believes that the prehistoric site of Jiroft is the lost ancient city of Marhashi.He developed the theory in his paper during the first round of the International Conference on Jiroft Civilization, which was held in Tehran on May 5 and 6.

IN my travel kit I am carrying a copy of Lady Hester: Queen of the East by Lorna Gibb. The indomitable Hester Stanhope, an aristocratic trouser-wearing and waterpipe-smoking British virago who dubbed herself Queen of the Bedouin, was not intimately acquainted with the notion of modesty. She grandly described herself as "the oracle of the Arabs" as she moved in influential circles from Constantinople to Jerusalem in the 19th century, apparently swearing madly in various obtuse dialects.

Spanish police have arrested a couple accused of illegally trafficking a "priceless" haul of artefacts from Latin America for resale in Europe.The artefacts, which predate the discovery of the Americas by Columbus, were allegedly destined for France.An Interpol investigation in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador led to the arrest of the Spanish man and Colombian woman.Police searched their Spanish home and luggage to find 700 pieces allegedly looted from archaeological sites.

Two whirling dust devils towering nearly a kilometre high have been seen at the exact spot where the Phoenix Mars lander is due to touch down in a few weeks. The dust vortices should pose no threat to the landing, but could provide dramatic views from the probe when it alights on the flat, relatively barren landscape.Phoenix is due to land in an oval-shaped region dubbed "Green Valley" in Mars's northern polar region on 25 May. In preparation for the landing, other spacecraft already at Mars, including NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), have been monitoring the site.

PARIS (AFP) - Curbing a notorious form of industrial pollution may ironically harm Amazonia, one of the world's natural treasures and a key buffer against global warming, a study released Wednesday has found.Its authors see a strong link between a decrease in sulphur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants and a rise in sea temperature in the northern Atlantic that was blamed for wreaking a devastating drought in western Amazonia in 2005.

PARIS (AFP) - An orbital X-ray telescope has found a chunk of matter in the universe whose existence had long been theorised but evidence for which had been lacking, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Wednesday.The discovery made by ESA's XMM-Newton telescope is part of so-called baryonic matter, which comprises less than five percent of the cosmos.

SAN FRANCISCO - A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation's commercially managed hives lost since last year.Last year's survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America found losses of about 32 percent.As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it's clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.

In the wake of a thousand-year drought in Australia and last weekend's lethal cyclone in Burma, the world's climate modellers are drawing up plans for a global supercomputing centre that would provide detailed local forecasts of future climate change.Meeting at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, the scientists liken the billion-dollar project to CERN, the international particle accelerator near Geneva, and to the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. They hope to present their plan to the G8 meeting in Japan this summer.

When superhero Tony Stark isn't donning his Iron Man armor to personally rough up villains, he's pitching the U.S. military on new gadgets to fight the War on Terror."They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire," Stark tells a group of military officers in the Iron Man film that opened last week. "I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once."

When paleoclimatologists met in 1972 to discuss how and when the present warm climate would end, termination of this warm climate we call the Holocene seemed imminent and it was expected that rapid cooling would lead to the coming ice age. These ideas were based on the 1M year analogue for climate transitions first proposed by Milankovitch over 60 years ago, which has been demonstrated to show the correlation of glacial and interglacial climate with solar insolation as it is is modulated by our changing distance from the sun. These data sets may be used to serve as a signal for the coming ice age. Orbital geometry was approaching similar conditions to those of the previous transitions to ice.PDF file link

A spidery fungus with a voracious appetite for military uniforms and canvas tents could hold the key to improvements in the production of biofuels, a team of government, academic and industry researchers has announced.In a paper published today in Nature Biotechnology, researchers led by Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute announced that the genetic sequence of the fungus Tricoderma reesei has uncovered important clues about how the organism breaks down plant fibers into simple sugars.

CHALEUNSOUK, Laos (AP) -- The rice fields that blanketed this remote mountain village for generations are gone. In their place rise neat rows of young rubber trees - their sap destined for China.All 60 families in this dirt-poor, mud-caked village of gaunt men and hunched women are now growing rubber, like thousands of others across the rugged mountains of northern Laos. They hope in coming years to reap huge profits from the tremendous demand for rubber just across the frontier in China.

FREDERICK, Md. (AP) The writings of an 81-year-old man who died in February may someday help future archaeologists. Spencer Geasey, who spent much of his life digging for artifacts of early local inhabitants and writing about his findings, amassed a large library of those writings and other rare archaeology books.

BERLIN - Who is buried in Friedrich Schiller's tomb? Several people, apparently, but none of them the famous poet and playwright, according to new research.After two years of painstaking DNA research, experts have determined that none of the remains billed as those of Schiller belong to the German writer, who died in Weimar in 1805, Germany's MDR television reported. The study, dubbed the Friedrich-Schiller Code, was undertaken by the television station, the Foundation of Weimar Classics and an international team of scientists.

Six years ago the area around Samboja in Borneo was like much of the world's tropical rainforest: denuded. The trees had been cut for timber, the land burnt, and in place of what should be some of the richest biodiversity on the planet were thousands of acres of grass.But from this ruined landscape a fresh forest has been grown, teeming with insects, birds and animals, and cooled by the return of moist clouds and rain. It is a feat that has been hailed by scientists and offers hope for disappearing and ruined rainforests around the world.

You know Earth's schematic: core, mantle, crust, right? Sorry, not so simple.Like the gooey center of a chocolate morsel harboring peanut butter and honey, inner Earth is far more nuanced than outward appearances would suggest. A new model is proposed in the May 2 issue of the journal Science.Earth is made up of several layers, once thought to be pretty distinct.

If the weather is clear in your area on Saturday, be sure to check out the fat crescent moon in the southwestern sky with binoculars or a small, low-power telescope as darkness falls. On that evening, the moon will be positioned within the dim constellation of Cancer the Crab.One of my astronomy mentors, the late Ken Franklin of New York's Hayden Planetarium, used to refer to Cancer as "the empty space" in the sky. Indeed, it's the least conspicuous of the 12 zodiacal constellations and quite frankly, aside from being in the zodiac, it's probably noteworthy only because it contains one of the brightest star clusters in the sky. It is Praesepe, better known as the Beehive Cluster, which contains a myriad of small stars.

The ancient catastrophe that gave birth to the Moon may have produced additional satellites that lingered in Earth's skies for tens of millions of years.A new model suggests moonlets may have once occupied the two Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, regions in space where the gravitational tug of the Earth and the Moon exactly cancel each other out. Objects trapped in these points are called Trojans and can remain stationary forever if left undisturbed.

No matter how quiet we try to be now it's too late to prevent alien invaders. So says Alexander Zaitsev of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics in Moscow, Russia, who points the finger at astronomers.For 40 years, astronomers have fired microwaves off objects to chart near-Earth space and track the movement of close asteroids - and these signals are traceable back to us.

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Delays in producing space shuttle fuel tanks, which were substantially redesigned after the 2003 Columbia disaster, will postpone NASA's final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope by a month or longer, officials at the U.S. space agency said on Thursday.Originally due to launch on August 28, the space shuttle flight to the telescope will be postponed four to five weeks, shuttle program manager John Shannon said.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - In another sign pointing to an inherited component to autism, a study released on Monday found that having a schizophrenic parent or a mother with psychiatric problems roughly doubled a child's risk of being autistic."Our research shows that mothers and fathers diagnosed with schizophrenia were about twice as likely to have a child diagnosed with autism," said Julie Daniels of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who worked on the study.

LAGOS (AFP) - In his office in Lagos, Alain Salleras, a Frenchman of about 50 for whom biofuels are something of a crusade, is working away at his pet project -- producing ethanol from sweet sorghum in Nigeria.Salleras, executive director of Global Biofuels Ltd, which has partnered with India's Praj Industries and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for its project, is at pains to pre-empt any questions on the growing controversy over the alleged impact of biofuels on agriculture.

KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia (AFP) - Malaysia is promoting its controversial palm oil industry as a model of eco-friendliness, but activists warn forests are still being destroyed to make way for vast plantations.As palm oil prices boom, Malaysia has mounted a campaign to counter allegations that the crop is responsible for habitat destruction, air pollution from slash-and-burn farming, and pushing orangutans towards extinction.

PARIS (AFP) - Researchers in China have pinpointed an elusive gene that plays a linchpin role in determining the harvest potential of rice, according to a study released on Sunday by the journal Nature Genetics.The productivity of a rice plant is determined by several traits -- the number and size of its grains; the height of the plant; and its flowering time, which reflects its response to the prevailing climate.

When Euro-Americans settled in Lyon County during the 1850s, they weren't the first humans to call the area home. Archeological evidence indicates Native American's shared a primitive culture for at least 8,000 years before Caucasians encroached on their territory.A favorite 19th Century local story is of Numaga, a Paiute Indian war chief with the northern Pyramid Lake tribe. Most historians believe he was the son of Paiute leader Chief Winnemucca, and grandson of Chief "Captain" Truckee. While many Paiutes opposed smoking a peace pipe with settlers, these chiefs disagreed. Numaga took an active stand for peace before the Indian War of 1860.

It is perhaps the most remarkable archaeological site in the world and more than 3 million visitors stampede through it every year. But if the new tourism councillor for Campania has his way, the numbers visiting Pompeii will be drastically cut, and the site will be thrown open to multinationals for private events to rake in the money needed to maintain the ruins."If we cap the number of visitors it will be easier to allow businessmen within the ruins to make money and hold events without being hampered by cultural fuddy-duddies," Claudio Velardi told a press briefing.