Newsdesk Archive

Seven thousand people died per day in Cairo. Three-quarters of Florence's residents were buried in makeshift graves in just one macabre year. One third of China evaporated before the rest of the world knew what was coming.By the time the tornado-like destruction of the 14th-century bubonic plague finally dissipated, nearly half the people in each of the regions it touched had succumbed to a gruesome, painful death.

The supernatural frogs falling from the sky, mysterious airships, spontaneous human combustion... it all fascinated Charles Fort, whose appetite for the paranormal lives on today in sci-fi, conspiracy theories and that quirky chronicle of the unknown, the Fortean Times.No one knew what to make of The Book of the Damned, which appeared in bookshops across America in January, 1920. At Brentano's Bookstore on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the cardboard cartons containing it had arrived from the publishers Boni & Liveright during the Christmas rush. They were quickly pushed into the storeroom with other new titles, to make room for the illustrated children's picture books and popular romance novels that were displayed as ideal gifts.

For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm - famine, pestilence and a total breakdown of society. I would wait for his lectures to finish, then return to my own interests. I had no time for the end of civilisation. As an editor on a glossy magazine until a few months ago, I was too busy. There was always a new Anya Hindmarch bag to buy, or a George Clooney premiere to attend.But recently, I've wavered. Much of what he has been predicting has come true: global economic meltdown, looming environmental disaster, a sharp rise in oil and food prices that has already led to the rationing of rice in the US, and riots in dozens of countries worldwide.This week, the details got scarier. The UN warned of a global food crisis, like a "silent tsunami", while Opec predicts that oil, which broke through $100 (£50) a barrel for the first time a few weeks ago, may soon top $200.

Parachutes have come a long way in the last few decades. They're easier to steer and a great deal less likely to go wrong.So it takes a certain amount of nerve to plunge 2,000ft relying on a "chute designed more than 500 years ago.However a Swiss daredevil has done just that, trusting to the genius of Leonardo da Vinci.Olivier Vietti-Teppa, 36, jumped at the weekend using a parachute based on sketches made by the Italian Renaissance artist in 1485.

Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as "smarts."Fluid intelligence was previously thought to be genetically hard-wired, but the finding suggests that with about 25 minutes of rigorous mental training a day, healthy adults could improve their mental capacities.

NES TZIONA, Israel - Israel's newest soldier can see at night, never nods off on sentry duty and can carry 660 pounds without complaining.The Guardium, an unmanned ground vehicle commissioned by the Israeli military and shown to The Associated Press on Monday, is essentially a robotic soldier, among the first in the world to be operational. It can replace human soldiers in dangerous roles, cutting casualty rates.

How would you like to have your very own shape-shifter? Perhaps a liquid metal T-1000 Terminator to help around the house. Or a universal tool kit that could reshape itself into any implement at the press of a button. For an astronaut in orbit, an army mechanic in remote terrain or even a homeowner trying to fix a furnace on a cold winter night, it could be just the thing.Well, one day maybe. The traditional approach to building shape-shifting devices has been to use materials based on shape memory alloys, polymer sheets or nanoparticles. But these have proved difficult to control and have other limitations, so researchers have begun taking a different and less exotic tack.

A LEADING scientist has warned a new species of "humanzee," created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting.In an interview with The Scotsman, Dr Calum MacKellar, director of research at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, warned the controversial draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill did not prevent human sperm being inseminated into animals.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Geochronology Center have pinpointed the date of the dinosaurs' extinction more precisely than ever thanks to refinements to a common technique for dating rocks and fossils.The argon-argon dating method has been widely used to determine the age of rocks, whether they're thousands or billions of years old. Nevertheless, the technique had systematic errors that produced dates with uncertainties of about 2.5 percent, according to Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and an adjunct professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley.

Technicians in New Zealand have begun to thaw a rare colossal squid specimen.The operation to defrost the 10-metre (34 feet) long, half-tonne squid began on Monday afternoon in Wellington following a postponement of 24 hours.The animal is now sitting in a bath of salt water. Once it is thawed, scientists will begin to dissect it.Very little is known about colossal squid, which appear to live largely in the cold Antarctic waters and can grow up to 15 metres (50 feet) long."They're incredibly rare - this is probably one of maybe six specimens ever brought up," said Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa centre.

Tiny bits of plant material found in the teeth of a Neandertal skeleton unearthed in Iraq provide the first direct evidence that the early human relatives ate vegetation, researchers say.Little is known about diet of Neandertals (also spelled Neanderthals), although it's widely assumed that they ate more than just meat.

Sunflowers were grown as a domesticated crop in Mexico more than 2,000 years ago, according to a new study.The new findings run counter to a theory that sunflower farming began in what is now the U.S. East and then trickled south into Mexico.

A rare visit by archaeologists to a fifth-century imperial tomb offers hope that other closely guarded graves in Japan might soon be open to independent study.This month a group of 16 experts led by the Japanese Archaeological Association released results from their February visit inside Gosashi tomb.

Imagine an extract from a berry that would make sour things taste sweet and help you lose weight. Then imagine not being allowed to take it.The world is getting fatter. One billion people are overweight, and 300 million of those are clinically obese.The search is always on for replacements for those things that, eaten in excess, make us obese - fatty and sugary foods. There is no miracle pill that can replace either. Nearly four decades ago one man came close to providing a tablet that could reduce our love of sugar. In the 1960s, Robert Harvey, a biomedical postgraduate student, encountered the miracle berry, a fruit from west Africa which turns sour tastes to sweet.

Baltimore, Md. - This is about an ancient book called The Archimedes Codex, bought for $2.2 million in October, 1998, at an auction in New York City by an anonymous collector who sent it to the Walters Art Museum, here to be restored, conserved, and probed for its content. It was thought to contain mathematical theses conceived by the genius of Syracuse (287-212 BC), whose name it bears, ideas not found anywhere else in the world.The Walters faced a daunting task: what arrived was a clump of folios, crushed, torn, punctured by worm holes, in the inflexible grip of old carpenter's glue, charred at its edges, and covered with mold and water stains.

VICTORIA -- Sisters Sheila Clark and Pearl Callaghan held hands and blinked back tears Friday as they talked about their ancestor Kwaday Dan Ts'inchi, better known as Long Ago Person Found, a young aboriginal man whose frozen body was discovered nine years ago at the foot of a melting glacier in Northern B.C.Three hunters found the body in 1999 in Tatshenshini-Alsek Park, part of the traditional territory of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations.And earlier this month, 17 aboriginal people from northern B.C., Yukon and Alaska, including Clark and Callaghan, were told that DNA testing has proved they are direct descendants of the 'iceman.'

Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and accidental father of LSD who came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered in 1938 as his "problem child," died April 29 at his home in Burg, a village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack. . . . Lysergic acid diethylamide, thousands of times stronger than mescaline, can give its user an experience often described as psychedelic -- a kaleidoscopic twirling of the mind pulsating with color and movement.

The patient, a woman, was clearly in distress, with persistent sores and pain so fierce it cut like a knife.Dr. W. Benson Harer Jr., of Seattle, recognized the symptoms as "a very good indication of genital herpes." And he would have helped, barring one inescapable fact: He was a few thousand years too late.Harer, an OB/gyn by profession and an amateur Egyptologist by passion, learned about the case from a centuries-old medical text written on papyrus.

The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.Other climate scientists have welcomed the research, saying it may help societies plan better for the future.

CHENNAI: Pottery items including bowls, dishes and urns, from the Megalithic period, have been excavated at Sembiyankandiyur near Kuthalam in Mayiladuthurai taluk of Nagapattinam district by the Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department.An important finding: eight urns aligned in a particular manner, three of them with human bones inside. These might be of members of one family, according to department officials. The pottery included black-and-red ware, black ware and red ware.

A gift exchange between Asian rulers several centuries ago may have inadvertently saved a population of elephants from extinction, according to a new study.Today a small population of unusually placid and genetically distinct elephants lives in the northeast corner of Borneo, a Southeast Asian island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility."The set-up for this summer is disturbing," says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska.

OSLO (Reuters) - Tests of the bones of two Viking women found in a buried longboat have dispelled 100-year-old suspicions that one was a maid sacrificed to accompany her queen into the afterlife, experts said on Friday.The bones indicated that a broken collarbone on the younger woman had been healing for several weeks -- meaning the break was not part of a ritual execution as suspected since the 22-metre (72 ft) long Oseberg ship was found in 1904.

Hyderabad, April 25: THE Department of Archaeology & Museums has discovered rock-art sites in Warangal and Mahabubnagar districts, priceless stone sculptures in Warangal and a Buddhist settlement in Visakhapatnam.Disclosing to newsmen the discoveries made last month, Director P Chenna Reddy said rock-art sites were found in the reserve forest area near Narsapur and Bandala hamlets in Thadwai mandal of Warangal district and near the Akkamahadevi caves in the Srisialam hill ranges of Mahabubnanagr district by the technical staff of the department.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have focused microwaves to specks 20 times smaller than their wavelength and five times smaller than other devices have achieved.This development could allow advances such as laptop computers that recharge without plugging in, higher-resolution microscopes for observing molecules, and CDs that can store vastly more data.

Imagine a technology that would not only provide a green and renewable source of electrical energy, but could also help scrub the atmosphere of excessive carbon dioxide resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. That?fs the promise of artificial versions of photosynthesis, the process by which green plants have been converting solar energy into electrochemical energy for millions of years. To get there, however, scientists need a far better understanding of how Nature does it, starting with the harvesting of sunlight and the transporting of this energy to electrochemical reaction centers.

An 87-million-year-old praying mantis found encased in amber in Japan may be a "missing link" between mantises from the Cretaceous period and modern-day insects. The fossil mantis measures 0.5 inch (1.4 centimeters) from its antennae to the tip of its abdomen.

A team of scientists from Princeton University has found that one of the most intriguing phenomena in condensed-matter physics -- known as the quantum Hall effect -- can occur in nature in a way that no one has ever before seen.Writing in the April 24 issue of Nature, the scientists report that they have recorded this exotic behavior of electrons in a bulk crystal of bismuth-antimony without any external magnetic field being present. The work, while significant in a fundamental way, could also lead to advances in new kinds of fast quantum or "spintronic" computing devices, of potential use in future electronic technologies, the authors said.

An observatory has opened in an area of Northumberland recognised as having the least light pollution in England.The £450,000 Kielder Observatory will offer astronomers views of the universe uncluttered by intruding light from towns and cities.The timber structure is perched on a hilltop location on Black Fell and was chosen because the area is famous for having the darkest skies in England.It is hoped the observatory will be popular with professional and amateurs.

Scientists have moved a step closer to creating functioning heart tissue for transplants in the lab.They have grown three types of human heart cells from cultures derived from embryonic stem cells.When a mix of the cells was transplanted into mice with simulated heart disease, the animals' heart function was significantly improved.The study, by a team of Canadian, US and UK scientists, features in the journal Nature.

The urge to brand products with images of macho men and curvaceous women is as old as civilisation itself, according to a new analysis.Bottle stops used five millennia ago in ancient Mesopotamia (today's Iraq), the birthplace of cities and writing, carried symbols that marked them out as the earliest evidence of branded goods.A London based archaeologist believes that they were promotional logos, along the lines of those used by Microsoft and Nike

People learning through genetic testing that they might be susceptible to devastating diseases wouldn't also have to worry about losing their jobs or their health insurance under anti-discrimination legislation the Senate passed Thursday.The 95-0 Senate vote sends the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act back to the House, which could approve it early next week. President Bush supports the legislation.

Film director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that contradicts the Bible by suggesting that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary.An Amsterdam publishing house said Wednesday it would publish the Dutch filmmaker's biography of Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait in September.

The photographs from the early 1940s show Paris as sunny, airy, bursting with color. Its inhabitants appear carefree, content and refreshingly unaware of their proclivity for looking très chic. It's all very much at odds with the prevailing image of the French capital suffering and smoldering under the yoke of its Nazi occupiers. Indeed, that very dissonance has made the current photo exhibit "Parisians Under the Occupation" one of the city's most controversial cultural events of late. Was life in Nazi-controlled Paris really as idyllic as these pictures suggest?

A new study of ancient proteins retrieved from a Tyranosaurus rex fossil confirms the long-hypothesized evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and modern birds, experts say.The finding is the first molecular evidence that birds, not lizards or other reptiles, are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, the researchers note.

Cairo, 24 April(AKI) - Archaeologists have revealed plans to uncover the 2000 year-old tomb of ancient Egypt's most famous lovers, Cleopatra and the Roman general Mark Antony later this year.Zahi Hawass, prominent archaeologist and director of Egypt's superior council for antiquities announced a proposal to test the theory that the couple were buried together.

That's the controversial conclusion reached by physician and amateur historian Dr. John Sotos, who says that President Abraham Lincoln was suffering from a lethal genetic cancer syndrome when he was shot at Ford's Theatre 143 years ago."Lincoln was a rare man with a rare disease," said Sotos. He has self-published a 300-page book and 400-page database to support his conclusion, based on an exhaustive analysis of Lincoln photographs and historical eyewitness descriptions of the president's health. "This solves a puzzle."

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Radical proposals to inject sulfur particles into the Earth's stratosphere to cool it down and battle global warming could instead badly damage the ozone layer, a study warned Thursday."Our research indicates that trying to artificially cool off the planet could have perilous side effects," said researcher Simone Tilmes from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

CHANTHABURI, April 24 (TNA) - Chanthaburi-based archeologists found scattered household utensils and pottery belonging to the pre-historic period in a cave in this eastern Thai province bordering Cambodia.Lt. Niran Yano accompanied by archeologists on Thursday explored a cave on Chanthaburi's Khao Noi mountain near the Thai-Cambodian border and reported the discovery of archeological objects dated back 4,000 years.

Troy, one of the nine world heritage sites in Turkey determined by UNESCO, is a significant culture and tourism spot in Çanakkale province. Troy urgently needs a museum to attract more tourists and to increase tourism potential of the city, experts sayA museum established in the ancient city of Troy would draw more tourists to the area and further increase the tourism potential of Çanakkal province that lies at the narrow entrance of the Dardanelles, according to experts.

A team of researchers at New York Medical College has discovered why birds, unlike mammals, lack a tissue that is specialized to generate heat. A paper published April 21, 2008 in the online peer-reviewed journal BMC Biology contains the surprising implication that the same lack of heat-generating tissue may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.

The world was in shock when in 2001 the Talibans destroyed two ancient colossal Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan. Behind those statues, there are caves decorated with precious paintings from 5th to 9th century A.D. The caves also suffered from Taliban destruction, as well as from a severe natural environment, but today they have become the source of a major discovery.

While much of the attention in the world of high-energy physics is focused on the Large Hadron Collider nearing completion at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, other physicists, including some from UC Davis, are working on a much lower-budget experiment that will sit in an abandoned South Dakota goldmine.

The 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru had a global impact on human society, according to a new study of contemporary records by geologists at UC Davis.The eruption is known to have put a large amount of sulfur into the atmosphere, and tree ring studies show that 1601 was a cold year, but no one had looked at the agricultural and social impacts, said Ken Verosub, professor of geology at UC Davis.

The end of the Pleistocene Epoch was marked with steadily warmer temperatures and the great ice age glaciers that covered vast areas of North America were in retreat.Except for a 1,000-year period when things once again suddenly got remarkably colder, the cause of which is a mystery that researchers of the period have argued over for years.

Cultural exchange between Korea and Persia goes back more than a thousand years. Some historians say through the Silk Road, Muslim traders put the name, Shilla, Korea's ancient dynasty, on the world map.To open a window into this intriguing past, the National Museum of Korea is hosting an exhibit of Persian artifacts. "Glory of Persia" showcases the history of Persia over a span of twelve centuries when it was one of the world's biggest empires.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - During the space race, engineers such as German scientist Wernher von Braun were treated like celebrities in this former cotton town nicknamed "Rocket City" because it is where the nation's first moon rockets were designed.Four decades later, the Huntsville phone book still lists 37 businesses with "rocket" in their name, including a motorcycle dealer, a chiropractor and a meat processor.

They call it flammable ice, and it could be the world's last great source of carbon-based fuel - assuming we can mine methane hydrates, crystal lattices of ice that trap methane beneath ocean beds and permafrost.One problem with extracting this methane is that you have to melt the ice to bring the gas to the surface. In 2002, a team of geologists from Canada and Japan tried injecting hot water into the ice beneath the delta of the McKenzie river in northern Canada. While this released some hydrates, it used a lot of energy.

Many animals can sense the Earth's magnetic field, so why not people, asks Oleg Shumilov of the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems in Russia.Shumilov looked at activity in the Earth's geomagnetic field from 1948 to 1997 and found that it grouped into three seasonal peaks every year: one from March to May, another in July and the last in October.Surprisingly, he also found that the geomagnetism peaks matched up with peaks in the number of suicides in the northern Russian city of Kirovsk over the same period.

How will life on Earth end? The answer, of course, is unknown, but two new studies suggest a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years.The studies suggest that the solar system's planets will continue to orbit the Sun stably for at least 40 million years. But after that, they show there is a small but not insignificant chance that things could go terribly awry.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - New Mexico's plan to promote space tourism took a major step forward as voters approved a tax for a launch complex where billionaire Richard Branson aims to operate the world's first "spaceline," officials said on Wednesday.Two-thirds of voters in the Southwestern U.S. state's Sierra County on Tuesday backed an 0.25 percent sales tax to fund New Mexico's $198 million Spaceport America, said the project's executive director, Steve Landeene.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Papayas have extra copies of genes that make them sweet and nutritious, researchers reported on Wednesday in a study that can help shed light on how flowering plants evolved.They published the complete genetic sequence of the "SunUp" papaya, a tree genetically engineered to be virus resistant.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Using powerful radio telescopes, scientists have captured a supermassive black hole just as it was belching out a jet of supercharged particles, offering a first look at how these cosmic jets are formed, they said on Wednesday.Supermassive black holes form the core of many galaxies and astronomers have long believed they were responsible for ejecting jets of particles at nearly the speed of light.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The irregular landing of a Russian space capsule last week is not a "major problem," a top NASA official said, despite reports that the astronauts on board could have died."I don't see this as a major problem, but it is clearly something that should not have occurred," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations.

MONTREAL (AFP) - Arctic sea ice is melting "significantly faster" than predicted and is approaching a point of no return, conservation group the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned in a new study released Wednesday.The volumes of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ice in the Arctic Ocean were estimated at 2.9 million and 4.4 million cubic metres respectively in September 2007 -- the lowest ever levels recorded, the organization said.

Hundreds of prehistoric dogs found buried throughout the southwestern United States show that canines played a key role in the spiritual beliefs of ancient Americans, new research suggests.Throughout the region, dogs have been found buried with jewelry, alongside adults and children, carefully stacked in groups, or in positions that relate to important structures, said Dody Fugate, an assistant curator at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

1184 B.C.: During the Trojan War, the Greeks depart in ships, leaving behind a large wooden horse as a victory offering. It is hauled inside the walls of Troy, and Greek soldiers descend from the horse's belly after dark to slay the guards and commence destruction of the city.Whether this actually happened, and whether the traditional date given is true, archeological evidence has established that a Trojan War did occur in Asia Minor around 1200 B.C. You can debate how much of the accounts in Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid and elsewhere is legend. But it is in no way mere legend. The war and its lore are a firm part of Western culture and have enriched our language.

Physicists in Italy claimed last week to have seen particles of dark matter. Their announcement has got their rivals riled and raises questions about what constitutes evidence of a new particle.Rita Bernabei of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Rome presented her team's latest results on 16 April at an international meeting of particle physicists in Venice, Italy. Their detector, DAMA/LIBRA (Dark Matter Large Sodium Iodide Bulk for Rare Processes), located deep under the country's Gran Sasso mountain, seems to be observing dark matter, Bernabei says.

It's a Strangelovian scenario that only the Pentagon could dream up: North Korea, in the throes of a military coup, launches a nuclear weapon that explodes 120 kilometres above the Earth. The blast fills the atmosphere with 'killer' electrons that would within days knock out the electronics of all satellites in low-Earth orbit. It would cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, and affect military, civilian and commercial space assets.If this doomsday scenario sounds outlandish, then the possible response may sound even more improbable: injecting radio waves into the atmosphere to force these energetic electrons out of orbit. Yet this is exactly what the US Department of Defense is looking at in a major ionospheric research facility in Alaska.

The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday.The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age."This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history," said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence.

The prevailing thinking is that Mars is a planet whose active climate has been confined to the distant past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Red Planet had extensive flowing water and then fell quiet - deadly quiet. It didn't seem the climate had changed much since.Now, in a research article that graces the May cover of Geology, scientists at Brown University think Mars' climate has been much more dynamic than previously believed. After examining stunning high-resolution images taken last year by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers have documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars' mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years - akin to the day before yesterday in Mars' geological timeline.

"Forget any ideas you've got about lost cities, exotic travel and digging up the world," the professor tells his adoring students. "We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and X never, ever marks the spot."True enough, at least in that professor's day job. Teaching at a swanky college, Indiana Jones wears tweed and a bow tie.During his "field work," however, it's leather jackets, a pistol, a fedora, and of course, the bullwhip.

Scientists investigating the reasons why early humans -- the so-called hominins -- began walking upright say it's unlikely that the need to carry children was a factor, as has previously been suggested.Carrying babies that could no longer use their feet to cling to their parents in the way that young apes can has long been thought to be at least one explanation as to why humans became bipedal.

ISLAMABAD, Apr 23 (APP): A high level meeting was held on Wednesday between the elected representatives and officials of Northern Areas and the Federal Government to review rock/archaeological carving being impacted by the proposed Basha Dam.Reportedly thousands of Rock Carvings have been discovered so far in the areas like Chilas, Hodar, Thaplan etc. during the last three decades by German scholars in collaboration with the Department of Archaeology, Government of Pakistan, said a press release issued here.

When a strong Germanic signal was discovered in the Y-chromosome of British men, geneticists at University College London suggested that enslavement and apartheid imposed by Saxon invaders was responsible.It was an idea that, given 20th-century European history, had a particular resonance.

It is a theory that gives indigestion to mainstream archaeologists. Namely, that some of the immense blocks of the Great Pyramids of Egypt might have been cast from synthetic material - the world's first concrete - not just carved whole from quarries and lugged into place by armies of toilers.Such an innovation would have saved millions of man-hours of grunting and heaving in construction of the enigmatic edifices on the Giza Plateau.

Among those who've started to worry and maybe do something in their lives about global climate change, James Hansen is not exactly a household name. Not like, say, Al Gore.But as one of the leading scientific experts and public Jeremiahs on the subject, the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York has been in the thick of it for many years.

WHAT would it take to jam a planet's tectonics? It seems that a huge rise in atmospheric temperatures would do the trick, causing continents to grind to a halt, mountains to stop growing and earthquakes to cease.On Earth, the motion of magma in the mantle pushes continental plates around on the surface, but if the magma became too hot and runny it would lose the grip needed to do this.

Three sites in Texas have been discovered and at least partially excavated in the past 15 years yielding evidence of at least one culture older than Clovis. Most of the Clovis sites have been firmly dated to around 12,500 to 13,000 years ago. Not only did these Clovis sites yield projectile points of the very distinct Clovis type, the sites also yielded true blades and very large well- made thin preforms diagnostic of only the Clovis people.

Pressure for international action to combat the "silent tsunami" of the global food crisis intensified amid warnings that spiralling prices meant more than 100 million people could be plunged into hunger.A Downing Street food summit called by Gordon Brown heard calls for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to bring forward aid payments to countries worst hit as the first step towards a co-ordinated action by the G8 industrialised nations to tackle the worst food crisis for a generation.

China's terracotta army, a collection of 7000 soldier and horse figures in the mausoleum of the country's first emperor, was covered with beaten egg when it was made, scientists say.According to German and Italian chemists who have analysed samples from several figurines, the egg was as a binder for colourful paints, which went over a layer of lacquer."Egg paint is normally very stable, and not soluble in water ... This makes it less sensitive to humidity and moisture," says German co-author Catharina Blaensdorf, a scientist at the Technical University of Munich.

URFA, Turkey - As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, as a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable."This place is a supernova," said Mr. Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of the Syrian border.

In Egypt's ancient city of Alexandria, waves from the Mediterranean Sea send foam crashing over the sea wall and onto hundreds of concrete barriers built to protect the city from the rising waters.The crumbling barriers of Alexandria's Eastern Harbor, however, are no match for a sea that scientists say will rise between one and three feet by the end of this century. They predict that rural towns and urban areas along Egypt's northern coast will be flooded, turning millions of people into environmental refugees and threatening some of the country's ancient landmarks.

A 'bionic eye' may hold the key to returning sight to people left blind by a hereditary disease, experts believe.A team at London's Moorfields Eye Hospital have carried out the treatment on the UK's first patients as part of a clinical study into the therapy.The artificial eye, connected to a camera on a pair of glasses, has been developed by US firm Second Sight.It said the technique may be able to restore a basic level of vision, but experts warned it was still early days.

The shrinking expanse of Arctic sea ice is increasingly vulnerable to summer sunshine, new research concludes. The study, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Colorado State University (CSU), finds that unusually sunny weather contributed to last summer's record loss of Arctic ice, while similar weather conditions in past summers do not appear to have had comparable impacts.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking called Monday for a new era of space conquest akin to Christopher Columbus' discovery of the new world, in a speech on the 50th anniversary of NASA space agency."In a way, the situation is like Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase," the British scientist said at Georgetown Washington University."Yet the discovery of the new world made profound difference to the old. Just think, we would not have a Big Mac or KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken)," he added referring to the ubiquitous US fast food outlets.

WASHINGTON - Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has been thinking a lot about the cosmic question, "Are we alone?" The answer is probably not, he says.If there is life elsewhere in the universe, Hawking asks why haven't we stumbled onto some alien broadcasts in space, maybe something like "alien quiz shows?"

We've all heard about the space missions that are DOA when NASA engineers lose touch with the spacecraft or lander. In other cases, some critical system fails and the mission is compromised.Both are maddening scenarios because the spacecraft probably could be easily fixed if engineers could just get their hands on the hardware for a few minutes.

The powerful antenna system that will enable NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST) to communicate with stations on Earth has been successfully connected to the spacecraft in the Astrotech payload processing facility near NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla.The Ku Band system is used to downlink science and engineering telemetry. The Ku band system includes a Ku antenna, an antenna pointing mechanism that steers the antenna, and two Ku band transmitters. The Ku band (K-under band) is a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in the microwave range of frequencies that is used to transmit data.

One steamy afternoon 50 years ago on a bluff top in Benton County, Ray Wood was digging in a pile of dirt and rocks. The autumn sun beat down as he cleared away earth from the sides of stones. It was a hot day for digging.Wood lifted a rock and turned it over. In a few moments, he would uncover an ancient object, no bigger than a coaster, that would perplex archaeologists and would become, arguably, the most unique thing ever dug up in Missouri.

Particles of invisible "dark matter" have been detected deep inside a mountain in Italy, a collaboration of Italian and Chinese physicists claims. But others remain sceptical of the result, because other experiments have failed to detect any dark matter at all.On Wednesday 16 April, at a workshop in Venice, Italy, the Dark Matter (DAMA) collaboration announced the results of the 4-year second phase of its experiment. DAMA scientists claimed to see dark matter back in 2003, but some scientists believed the result was a quirk of statistics. Now the evidence is stronger.

THE future of one of China's most important cultural sites is the focus of a high-level meeting of international conservation and heritage experts in NSW this week.The meeting is discussing how to protect the Mogao Caves, a network of 500 fresco-filled grottoes in the Gobi Desert, from the growing impact of tourism.

And you thought Frodo had it hard. In what is shaping up to be a battle of Tolkienian proportions, the tiny remains from Flores, Indonesia--paleoanthropology's hobbit--have once again come under attack.Most paleoanthropologists believe that the hobbit belongs to a new species of human, Homo floresiensis. But now comes word that the specimen used to define the species--a largely complete female skeleton known as LB1--appears to have had some dental work. If so, it would mean that, rather than being an 18,000-year-old representative of a new species, the hobbit was just a modern human with a growth disorder that left it with a brain the size of a grapefruit, among other odd traits, which is what critics have argued all along.

A remote drilling rig high in the Mackenzie Delta has become the site of a breakthrough that could one day revolutionize the world's energy supply.For the first time, Canadian and Japanese researchers have managed to efficiently produce a constant stream of natural gas from ice-like gas hydrates that, worldwide, dwarf all known fossil fuel deposits combined."We were able to sustain flow," said Scott Dallimore, the Geological Survey of Canada researcher in charge of the remote Mallik drilling program. "It worked."

Scientists with the European Space Agency (Esa) say the day when flowers bloom on the Moon has come closer.An Esa-linked team has shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food.Some see growing plants on the Moon as a step towards human habitation.But the concept is not an official aim of Esa, and one of the agency's senior officials has dismissed the idea as "science fiction".

LUXOR, Egypt (AFP) - Towering like sentries above the necropolis of Ancient Thebes in southern Egypt, the world-famous Colossi of Memnon will see their number double from two to four from next year.The painstaking work of 12 archaeologists and hundreds of workers is about to redefine the way visitors see and understand this mysterious site that has cast its spell over travellers for more than 2,000 years.

The odds of intelligent life arising on another Earth-like planet are low, a British scientist has calculated.He argues that humans evolved via a series of four "critical steps" and that the likelihood of all these occurring elsewhere is less than 0.01%.Discoveries of new planets outside the Solar System, has boosted the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Tip-of-the-tongue states arise when we know the word we're searching for but can't quite bring it to mind. People of all ages experience these frustrating states, but they occur with greater frequency as we age. In the hands of a cognitive psychologist, the tip-of-the-tongue state and its resolution provide insight into the way that human brains execute the processes that translate nonverbal concepts into spoken language.

MIAMI (AFP) - NASA wants astronauts who will return to the moon to take one long step for mankind.The US space agency hopes to build moon bases that can house astronauts for stays of up to six months, with an intricate transportation and power system, Carl Walz, director of NASA's Advanced Capabilities Division, said Friday.

DUBLIN (AFP) - The European Union's new treaty will help tackle climate change, an EU chief told students Friday in Ireland, which is preparing for a crunch vote on the accord.On the second day of a two-day visit, European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso told a meeting in the southern city of Cork that the Lisbon Reform Treaty would help turn the EU from a regional into a global player.He said the treaty "will also offer the tools to tackle climate change," according to a text of his speech given out by his office.

HANOI (AFP) - US researchers have found a rare giant turtle in northern Vietnam after a three-year hunt -- a find sure to thrill both scientists and locals, who consider the animal a mythical creature.The Swinhoe's soft-shell turtle was believed to be extinct in the wild. Only three of the turtles are known to exist in captivity -- two are at zoos in China, and one is in Hoan Kiem Lake in downtown Hanoi.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Teams of university scientists backed by U.S. government funds hope to grow new skin, ears, muscles and other body tissue for troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department said on Thursday.The $250 million effort aims to address the Pentagon's unprecedented challenge of caring for troops returning from the war zones with multiple traumatic injuries, many of which would have been fatal years ago.

THE collision that formed our moon may have defined the length of our planet's day and set the direction in which it spins.The moon is widely thought to have formed after an object roughly the size of Mars crashed into the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, throwing up a cloud of debris that eventually coalesced into a rocky sphere. Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, wanted to find out if this process was influenced by the spin of the Earth at the time - something previous models of the moon's formation did not take into account.

NASA has completed the first full-scale rocket motor test for the Constellation Program's Orion spacecraft, a test of a solid rocket that will be used to jettison the craft's launch abort system.Now under development, Orion will be America's next human spacecraft, designed to fly to the International Space Station and be part of a space flight system to return humans to the moon. The Orion jettison motor will separate the craft's launch abort system from the Orion crew module during launch.

Tolkien's hobbits walked an awful long way, but the real "hobbit", Homo floresiensis, would not have got far.Its flat, clown-like feet probably limited its speed to what we would consider a stroll, and kept its travels short, says Bill Jungers, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook."It's never going to win the 100-yard dash, and it's never going to win the marathon," he says.

Aircraft or submarines covered with an undulating skin able to change at a flick of a button would experience 50% less drag than conventional vehicles. This trick, which naturally occurs in dolphins, is now being tested by human engineers.Turbulence is the bane of engineers' lives. Chaotic air flow sets up unstable vortices and patterns in gases and liquids, increasing friction and drag.

Melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warming water could lift sea levels by as much as 1.5 metres by the end of this century, displacing tens of millions of people. That's the conclusion of a new prediction of sea level rises that for the first time takes into account ice dynamics.Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, UK, says a new, more accurate reconstruction of sea levels over the past 2000 years suggests that the prediction of a an 18-59 centimetre rise by 2100 made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is wildly inaccurate.

An important new exhibition, From the Land of the Labyrinth: Minoan Crete, 3000-1100 B.C., has just opened at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York. It brings more than 280 artifacts from Crete--from a miniature gold double-ax to a four-foot-tall storage jar, from wall paintings to carbonized figs--most of which have never been shown abroad before and some being displayed for the first time ever. On loan from the archaeological museums of Herakleion, Khania, Rethymnon, Haghios Nikolaos, Ierapetra, Siteia, and Kissamos in Crete, the artifacts are arranged in 11 thematic sections intended "to reveal aspects of daily life in the Minoan civilization--including social structure, communications, bureaucratic organization, religion and technology--during the third and second millennia B.C." The first solely Minoan exhibition in the United States, From the Land of the Labyrinth is a great overview of the civilization and its achievements.

LONDON (Reuters) - The first draft of Charles Darwin's "On The Origin Of Species" is among a wealth of papers belonging to the intensely private man who changed science being published on the Internet on Thursday for the first time.Comprising some 20,000 items and 90,000 images, the release on http://darwin-online.org.uk is the largest in history, according to the organizers from Cambridge University Library which holds all the Darwin papers.