Newsdesk Archive

WASHINGTON - Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, died at his home in Cambridge, Mass., Wednesday. He was 90.He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, something that was explained in a simple example known as the "butterfly effect." He explained how something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes in Texas.

On the big screen, films like Robocop, Universal Soldier and forthcoming release Iron Man show man-machines with superhuman powers. But in Utah they are turning science fiction into reality.We are at a research facility on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, ringed by beautiful snow-capped mountains. Once they held the Winter Olympics here; now they are testing endurance in other ways.

The next phase in physics' great 21st century quest - to detect gravitational waves - has been approved.More than $200m (£100m) is to be spent upgrading the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories.Ligo is hunting for ripples predicted to be seen in the fabric of space-time when extreme cosmic events occur, such as the merger of super-dense stars.

With major implications for long-duration space travel, a study from the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University Medical Center demonstrates that the high-energy radiation found in space may lead to premature aging and prolonged oxidative stress in cells. The findings suggest that astronauts may be at increased risk of colon cancer due to exposure to the high linear energy transfer (LET) radiation found in space.

The Palaviya Jain temple in the walled city here is witnessing an unusual rush of devotees - and art lovers - to catch a glimpse of 35 ancient idols recovered last week during the temple's reconstruction.The idols, said to have been crafted during the 14th century, are of the Jain deities Parshavnath, Adinath, Devendranath and other Tirthankars.

In this interview, conducted at Paisley Five Mile Point Caves on June 13, 2007, by Rick Pettigrew of ALI, Dr. Dennis Jenkins describes the remarkable discovery of human DNA in coprolites dated between 14,000 and 15,000 calibrated years ago. This evidence, reported in the 3 April 2008, issue of the journal Science, strongly supports the proposition that human migrants to North America arrived at least 1000 years before the widespread Clovis complex appeared.

PAGANS from Dorset performed a closing ritual to mark the end of a major archaeological dig at Stonehenge.Members of the Weymouth-based Dolmen Grove order held the ceremony as 10 days of digging finished at the historic site.Tony Jameson, a member of the Grove, said: "It was very good."The whole archaeological team took part and it was really nice."

The driver was taking me from Melbourne airport into the city. As we chatted, it came out that he was deeply worried. He had a wife and child, and a new baby on the way - but what was the use of living, he cried, if the world would end in 2012 as predicted by the Mayan prophecies, when his new baby would be just four years old.Prophecies about the end of the world (or at the very least, civilisation as we know it) have been around forever. There was a flurry of them around 2000 AD, and another bunch for 5 May 2005, when all the planets were supposed to line up. (By the way, they didn't line up and yep, we're still here.)

Sixteen years ago, a heavy package addressed to the nonexistent "Smithsonian Inst. Curator, MezoAmerican Museum, Washington, D.C." was delivered to the National Museum of American History. It was accompanied by an unsigned letter stating: "This Aztec crystal skull, purported to be part of the Porfirio Díaz collection, was purchased in Mexico in 1960.... I am offering it to the Smithsonian without consideration." Richard Ahlborn, then curator of the Hispanic-American collections, knew of my expertise in Mexican archaeology and called me to ask whether I knew anything about the object--an eerie, milky-white crystal skull considerably larger than a human head.

PARIS (AFP) - A black hole slumbering at the centre of our galaxy went into a "feeding frenzy" three centuries ago, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Tuesday.Located around 26,000 light years from Earth, the black hole, known as Sagittarius A-star (Sgr A*), is a monster with a mass four million times that of the Sun.

PARIS (AFP) - A US-European exploration of Saturn that has already been lauded as one of the shining achievements in space history is to be extended by two years, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Tuesday.Quoting sources at NASA, which is the principal funder of the Cassini spacecraft, ESA said the mission's scheduled end of July 2008 had been pushed back by two years.Cassini is one of the most expensive but most successful robot spacecraft ever built.

The Polish and Israeli presidents have led events to mark the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.The main ceremony was held at a monument honouring hundreds of Jewish fighters who resisted German attempts to eradicate the ghetto.Polish President Lech Kaczynski said the world must remain vigilant to prevent a repeat of such horrors.

Some Aboriginal children in Australia were once used for medical tests, it has been claimed.Aborigine rights campaigner Kathleen Mills said she had heard of children being injected with a leprosy treatment and becoming very ill.She said many members of the "Stolen Generations" - Aborigines taken from their homes and raised by white families - had similar experiences.

Curious gaps in clouds may provide early warning of an earthquake, scientists believe.Researchers spotted unusual cloud formations above an active fault in Iran before two large earthquakes struck the region.It appeared to be more than coincidence, and now scientists are investigating whether clouds can predict major quakes.

A mushroom widely used in oriental medicine may combat breast cancer by slowing the growth of tumours and starving them of blood, a study has shown.Extracts of the fungus, Phellinus linteus, have been used for centuries by eastern healers, who believe it has the power to rejuvenate and extend life.

The fearsome Komodo dragon is the world's largest living lizard and can take very large animal prey: now a new international study has revealed how it can be such an efficient killing machine despite having a wimpy bite and a featherweight skull.A member of the goanna family with ancestors dating back more than 100 million years, the dragon (Varanus komodoensis) uses a combination of 60 razor-sharp serrated teeth, powerful neck muscles and what researchers are calling a "space-frame" skull to butcher prey with awesome efficiency, the study found.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working with a German research firm to open a sustainable energy center near the college, the school announced.MIT President Susan Hockfield said that in conjunction with Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft research group, the school would be opening the MIT-Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, The Boston Globe reported Sunday.

Archaeology and anthropology are two sciences trying to shed light on the lives of ancient civilizations. The main aim of all the research is to find vestiges of lost cultures and civilizations, to decode the code of the universe, and hence, life.Ancient Egypt, with its aura of mystery, is one of the most important civilizations among the cultures of Antiquity and continues to attract the attention of scientists. As the pharaohs refuse to give up their secrets, science takes a further step toward unveiling what has been hidden for millennia.

NASA's new Mars rover aims high. It's bigger, more powerful and more sophisticated than any other robotic vehicle that has landed on another planet. It will try to answer a big question: Has life existed elsewhere in the solar system?Its very ambition has gotten the rover in trouble. Thanks to a mix of technological setbacks and engineering misjudgments, the rover's epic scale is matched by epic problems. Its story offers a cautionary tale as NASA plans to devote large chunks of its science budget in coming years to grand "flagship" missions, including a spacecraft to return Mars rocks to Earth and another that would visit a moon of Jupiter or Saturn.

The seemingly far-fetched theory that Leonardo da Vinci was of Arab descent has been given new backing in a study, published this week, that suggests his mother was a slave.It is known that Da Vinci's parents were not married and that his father was a Florentine notary, Ser Piero. In a tax record dating from 1457, five years after the Italian polymath's birth, his mother is described as one Caterina, who by then was married to a man from the Tuscan town of Vinci. It was assumed she was a local woman.

The progress of medical science in the past 30 years has been so rapid that yesterday's miracles are tomorrow's commonplace procedures.So it has proved with heart transplants, which have become almost routine in hospitals around the world.Yet every once in a while a story emerges which should cause us all to sit up and take note that there is nothing "routine" or "commonplace" about such complex operations.The suggestion, highlighted again this week, that donor patients could not only be acquiring the organs but also the memories - or even the soul - of the donor is surely one such story.

FROM ghosts and goblins to sea monsters and cannibals, Scottish history is littered with tales of the weird and wonderful.While some Scottish legends have become much-loved parts of our culture, other stories have disappeared into obscurity over the centuries.Now Glasgow University is set to revive Scotland's folklore thanks to a new postgraduate course examining mythical creatures, superstitions, beliefs and the storytelling that kept them alive.

The European Space Agency (Esa) has ordered the latest spacecraft in a major global monitoring programme.The agency signed the £240m (305m-euro) contract with industrial partner Thales Alenia Space on Monday to provide the Sentinel-3 Earth observation satellite.There are plans to launch five Sentinel spacecraft to track changes in the land, oceans, weather and climate.

China has already overtaken the US as the world's "biggest polluter", a report to be published next month says.The research suggests the country's greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007.The University of California team will report their work in the Journal of Environment Economics and Management.

In the early hours of Jan. 4, engineers at Raytheon Missile Systems got a call from a U.S. Navy rear admiral that would turn their lives upside down: "OK, guys, this is now Job One for a while."The nation knows the end of the story -- a successful satellite shootdown on Feb. 20 that potentially saved lives -- but few know the sweat and anxiety that went into the cross-continent effort that included Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and a group of government agencies and labs.

Peak oil spells the end of civilization. And, if it's not already too late, perhaps it will prevent the extinction of our species.M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist employed by Shell Oil Co. described peak oil in 1956. Production of crude oil, like the production of many non-renewable resources, follows a bell-shaped curve. The top of the curve is termed "peak oil," or "Hubbert's peak," and it represents the halfway point for production.

Edward F. Malkowski, author of 'Sons of God: Daughters of Men' will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout May to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

Researchers working at the University of Warwick, with colleagues in Leicester University, ESA and NASA, have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to pin point what remains of what was the brightest naked-eye object ever seen from Earth. It is 7.5 billions light-years away halfway back to the big bang.NASA's Hubble Space Telescope photographed the fading remnants of a powerful gamma ray burst that holds the record for being the brightest naked-eye object ever seen from Earth. For nearly a minute on March 19, this single "star" was as bright as 10 million galaxies.

April 11, 2008 -- In seventh century England, a woman's jewelry-draped body was laid out on a specially constructed bed and buried in a grave that formed the center of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, according to British archaeologists who recently excavated the site in Yorkshire.

A rare 2,000-year-old Roman skull has been returned to the cave beneath the Yorkshire Dales where it was discovered by divers in 1996.Archaeologists were called in after cave divers unearthed human bones in what is believed to be one of the most important cave discoveries ever made.The skull dates to the 2nd Century and is that of a local woman in her 50s.It was stored at Sheffield University for carbon-dating and recently returned to the cave, which has now been sealed.

A CHURCH wall which fell down in storms has revealed a 1,000-year-old Norman monument.St Mary's Parish Church wall crumbled after being weakened in floods earlier this year, revealing the 11th century motte (mound) and bailey (moat) which have been out of sight for hundreds of years.The moat is now a pond containing newts, which church committee members believe may be protected.

Italian police have recovered a rare statue of a Roman emperor, known for his reluctance to sit for portraits, among more than a dozen looted ancient artifacts hidden in a boat garage, officials said Friday.Red-figured ceramic vases stolen from an Etruscan tomb in central Italy were also among the stash recovered last month in the port town of Fiumicino, near Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport, and traced to an antiquities dealer in the capital, police said.

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia will end manned space launches from Kazakhstan's Soviet-era Baikonur cosmodrome by 2020, replacing it with a launch pad in Russia, a top official said Friday, Interfax news agency reported.All cosmonauts will instead take off from the new Vostochny base, planned in Russia's southeast near the Chinese border, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, was quoted as saying."By 2020 all piloted space programmes will be moved to this cosmodrome," Interfax quoted him as saying.Perminov was speaking after President Vladimir Putin urged increased investment in the Russian space programme at a meeting of the Russian Security Council, a top advisory body.

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia will ask its foreign partners in June to extend the exploitation of the International Space Station (ISS) until 2020 as the station's Russian segment would take longer to complete, Russian space officials said."We can do what we planned to do by 2010 only in 2015, and so we will have to appeal to our foreign partners to use the ISS until 2020," the chief of Russia's space RKK Energiya company, Vitaly Lopota, said Thursday as quoted by the Interfax news agency.

MOSCOW - Russian officials on Friday unveiled a monument to Laika, a dog whose flight to space more than 50 years ago paved the way for human space missions.The small monument is near a military research facility in Moscow that prepared Laika's flight to space on Nov. 3, 1957. It features a dog standing on top of a rocket.

With less than two months to go before it is due to land on Mars, NASA's Phoenix probe has been directed towards a specific landing site called Green Valley. The site has few boulders that could potentially endanger a landing and lots of water ice for the lander to study.

Pluto lovers, don't despair: Researchers have not given up the fight for the former ninth planet. Many of them put up a fuss two years ago when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded Pluto to the status of mere dwarf planet. Now they plan to revive the debate, this time under the banner of public understanding of science.Researchers on both sides of the issue are set to gather in August at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., for what's being called "The Great Planet Debate: Science as Process." The goal, says the conference's co-organizer Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., is to teach the public that science is a process of constant revision and refinement. "People should be exposed to that process," he says. "The IAU process gave the impression that science is done by a bunch of scientists voting behind closed doors."

Scientists have developed a new way of determining the size and frequency of meteorites that have collided with Earth.Their work shows that the size of the meteorite that likely plummeted to Earth at the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary 65 million years ago was four to six kilometers in diameter. The meteorite was the trigger, scientists believe, for the mass extinction of dinosaurs and other life forms.

Bhubaneswar: From under the ruins of an ancient fort on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar, archaeologists have dug out the remains of a 2,500-year-old city which they believe was bigger than classical Athens.Eighteen pillars were found among the remnants of the grand city at Sishupalgarh, a ruined fortification first discovered 60 years ago. The findings include debris of household pottery and terracotta ornaments, pointing to an advanced lifestyle led by the people who lived there. The polished potteries even have ownership marks on them.

TEHRAN -- The name of Farnaka, who was the uncle of Darius I, has been identified in a newly discovered Old Persian Achaemenid inscription for the first time.Written in cuneiform, the stone inscription bears the names of Darius the Great and his uncle, Farnaka, the Persian service of CHN reported on Friday.

BERLIN - Thousands of Berlin residents waited in line for up to four hours on Sunday to see an exhibit pulled on a train commemorating Jewish children sent by the Nazis to death camps.The "Train of Commemoration" has been winding its way across the nation since November, carrying photos and archive materials that trace the fate of individual children who were deported from across the country during World War II.

ATHENS (AFP) - A senior Greek archaeologist warned this week that the last original sculptures still adorning the Parthenon, Athens' iconic ancient temple, face a major pollution threat and must be removed to a museum."There are still 17 original metopes (sculpted plaques) which must be protected because they can no longer endure atmospheric conditions," Acropolis site supervisor Alexandros Mantis told AFP on Friday.

In the old Aesop fable, wind and sun battle over which is the stronger. The wind blows hard, but the sun shines hot. They both do their best to get a traveler to remove his jacket.In the fable, sun wins. But in real-life policy questions over solar power and wind energy -- over which provides the more cost-effective source of clean energy -- it appears that wind has sun on the ropes. At least for the moment.

LIMA (Reuters) - Peru says Yale University researchers took more than 40,000 artifacts from the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu in the early 1900s, or 10 times the original estimate, the state news agency reported on Sunday.A team from Peru's National Institute of Culture traveled to the U.S. university in March to take an inventory of the pieces of pottery, jewelry and bones housed there, as part of an agreement to repatriate the relics.

The family tree of the largest living land animal may have its roots deep in the water, a new study suggests.Chemical signatures from fossil teeth reveal that at least one species of proboscidean, an ancient elephant relative, lived in an aquatic environment.

The U.S. space agency announced the start of a new Web site designed to provide information about its scientific endeavors and achievements.The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's science mission directorate said the site will provide in-depth coverage of NASA's past, present and future science missions, along with features that include:-- Iteractive tables and searches for Earth, heliophysics, planetary and astrophysics missions.

New geological evidence indicates the Grand Canyon may be so old that dinosaurs once lumbered along its rim, according to a study by researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the California Institute of Technology.The team used a technique known as radiometric dating to show the Grand Canyon may have formed more than 55 million years ago, pushing back its assumed origins by 40 million to 50 million years. The researchers gathered evidence from rocks in the canyon and on surrounding plateaus that were deposited near sea level several hundred million years ago before the region uplifted and eroded to form the canyon.

n a world without human-produced pollution, biological productivity controls cloud formation and may be the lever that caused supergreenhouse episodes during the Cetaceous and Eocene, according to Penn State paleoclimatologists."Our motivation was the inability of climate models to reproduce the climate of the supergreenhouse episodes of the Cetaceous and Eocene adequately," said Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences. "People have tried increasing carbon dioxide in the models to explain the warming, but there are limits to the amounts that can be added because the existing proxies for carbon dioxide do not show such large amounts."

A new study mapping the evolutionary history of animals indicates that Earth's first animal--a mysterious creature whose characteristics can only be inferred from fossils and studies of living animals--was probably significantly more complex than previously believed.The study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is the cover story of the April 10, 2008 issue of Nature. Using new high-powered technologies for analyzing massive volumes of genetic data, the study defined the earliest splits at the base of the animal tree of life. The tree of life is a hierarchical representation of the evolutionary relationships between species that was introduced by Charles Darwin.

A new "landmark" series will explore how most humans descend from a tiny group of men and women, tracing the beginnings of the human story and its epic adventures.Dr Alice Roberts will explore where we came from, how our ancestors colonised the world, and how their journeys changed us in The Human Journey, for BBC2.

Advanced ground and space-based telescopes are discovering new planets around other stars almost daily, but an environmental scientist from England believes that even if some of those planets turn out to be Earthlike, the odds are very low they'll have intelligent inhabitants.

Two bacterial species have apparently been caught in the act of merging back into one. This case of de-speciation may be a consequence of the two species being thrown together within domestic animals.Campylobacter coli and C. jejuni are the most common causes of bacterial food poisoning worldwide. The two species differ in 13.5% of the nucleotide bases that spell out their genomes.

PARIS (AFP) - Scientists have located the coldest brown dwarf star ever observed, an important "missing link" among these celestial bodies that are half-planet, half-star, according to a study released Thursday.A team of French and Canadian astronomers made the discovery using two powerful telescopes in Hawaii and one in Chile, according to the study, to be published this month in the European journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali's facial features are duplicated - she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

What was lost tens of millions of years ago is now found.A fossil animal locked in Lebanese limestone has been shown to be an extremely precious discovery - a snake with two legs.Scientists have only a handful of specimens that illustrate the evolutionary narrative that goes from ancient lizard to limbless modern serpent.

The meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs might have been less than half the size of what previous models predicted.That's the finding of a new technique being developed to estimate the size of ancient impactors that left little or no remaining physical evidence of themselves after they collided with Earth.

Rome, 10 April (AKI) - The remains of hundreds of victims, believed to have been killed in a plague that swept Italy 1500 years ago, have been found south of Rome.The bodies of men, women and children were found in Castro dei Volsci, in the region of Lazio, during excavations carried out by Lazio archaeological office.News of the extraordinary discovery was reported in the magazine, "Archeologia Viva".

ATHENS (Reuters) - Ancient open-air theatres across Greece are crumbling due to neglect and need swift government intervention to rescue them, archaeologists said on Thursday.Greece, where Classical drama was born in the 5th century BC, boasts scores of theatres that form a key part of the country's classical cultural heritage. But while about 30 are in a state to host cultural events, 76 are in need of urgent repair, they said.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian scientists say they have obtained the most detailed pictures so far of the insides of a prehistoric animal, with the help of a baby mammoth called Lyuba found immaculately preserved in the Russian Arctic.The mammoth is named after the wife of the hunter who found her last year. The body was shipped back to Russia in February from Japan, where it was studied using computer tomography in a process similar to one doctors use to scan patients.

Twelve years ago Sean Solomon put a proposal in front of NASA to develop the first probe to orbit Mercury. His tenacity has finally paid off. Three months ago his spacecraft, named Messenger (Mercury surface, space environment, geochemistry and ranging), made its first flyby of Mercury, recording never-before-seen images of the mysterious planet.Mercury could be called the planet of extremes. It is the smallest, the densest, has the oldest surface, and the largest daily variations in surface temperature, which fluctuate by as much as 600 degrees Celsius. It is also the least explored.

MADRID (AFP) - Spanish astronomers Wednesday announced the discovery of the smallest planet discovered to date outside the solar system, located 30 light years from earth.The planet, "GJ 436T", was detected through a new technique which "will allow us to discover in less than 10 years the first planet resembling earth in terms of mass and orbit," said Ignasi Ribas of Spain's CSIC scientific research institute.

An ancient burial site in Mexico contains evidence that Mixtec Indians conducted funerary rituals involving cremation as far back as 3,000 years ago.The find represents the earliest known hints that Mixtecs used this burial practice, which was later reserved for Mixtec kings and Aztec emperors, according to researchers who excavated the site.

The oldest arched gate in the world, located in Ashkelon, has been restored, nearly four thousand years after it was first built.The Canaanite gate, which was constructed around 1,850 BCE as part of the port city's fortifications, is believed to be the most ancient arched gate in the world. The mostly brick and limestone gate is 15 meters long, more than 2 meters wide and almost 4 meters high.Its base was uncovered in 1992 during a Harvard University archeological dig led by Prof. Lawrence Steiger, said Ra'anan Kislev, director of conservation at the Antiquities Authority.

The plunder of the Median era site Zarbolagh is continuing unabated.The ancient site is frequently excavated by smugglers searching for artifacts which are bought by Iranian and foreign collectors, the Persian service of CHN reported on Tuesday.Zarbolagh is located in central Iran near the city of Qom and the border of Tehran and Qom provinces in a remote region, thus it is difficult to safeguard the site against the smugglers, said Mehrdad Malekzadeh, who was the head of the archaeological team that conducted the last excavation of the site in 2005.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - An experimental drug helped protect mice and monkeys from the damaging effects of radiation, researchers said on Thursday, in a finding that may lead to less toxic cancer treatments or an emergency treatment for radiation exposure.They said the drug protected animals' bone marrow and cells in the gut from being destroyed by radiation without interfering with radiation therapy's ability to fight cancer.

LONDON (AFP) - Archaeologists conducting a major excavation at England's Stonehenge said they had made a key breakthrough that may help explain why the site was built, the BBC said Wednesday.According to the broadcaster, which is funding the dig as part of a special programme to be broadcast in the autumn, the team of archaeologists has reached a series of sockets that once held bluestones, smaller stones, most of which are now missing, that made up Stonehenge's original structure.

PESHAWAR: Hazara University is going to submit a plan to federal and NWFP governments as well as Wapda authorities, urging them to make steps to preserve the ancient heritage and centuries-old remains of the Silk Route while constructing Diamer-Bhasha dam.A spokesman for the varsity told The News that the plan was being mapped out by a team of experts headed by Prof Dr Ihsan Ali, Vice-Chancellor Hazara University with renowned archaeologists like Prof Dr Habib Ahmad, Dean Faculty of Sciences and other faculty members from Department of Cultural Heritage & Tourism Management.

A lower jawbone with a haggle of teeth.That's all there was.But its discovery in a limestone cave in northern Spain could be the holy grail long sought by anthropologists.The fossil is by far the oldest skeletal evidence of a human presence in Europe. Dated at 1.3 million years, the find is not only exceptional in itself, but for the light it will shed on a question that's long been controversial: When did the earliest humans reach Europe?

Israelis and Palestinians may not be able to agree right now on their present or future, but, if a pair of Los Angeles archaeologists have their way, they soon will see eye to eye on their past.Working tirelessly for the past five years, Ran Boytner, a University of California, Los Angeles archaeologist and Lynn Swartz Dodd, an archaeologist at the University of Southern California, have guided a team of prominent Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists to arrive at the first-ever agreement on the disposition of the region's archaeological treasures following the establishment of a future Palestinian state.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed a "mini-Stonehenge"... on the moors of Rochdale.The two nearby sites - an oval made up of collapsed slabs, and a 30-metre circle of rounded stones - are believed to be ancient burial sites dating back as far as 5,000 years.They were spotted by archaeologist Stuart Mendelsohn during a walk on the hills in December and could now become a major tourist attraction.

A research team from the Department of Genetics, Physical Anthropology & Animal Physiology in the Faculty of Science and Technology at the Leioa campus of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), and led by Ms Concepción de la Rúa, has reconstructed the history of the evolution of human population and answered questions about history, using DNA extracted from skeleton remains.

The Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31, making it the highest powered laser in the world, Todd Ditmire, a physicist at The University of Texas at Austin, said.The Texas Petawatt is the only operating petawatt laser in the United States.Ditmire says that when the laser is turned on, it has the power output of more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States. (A petawatt is one quadrillion watts.) The laser is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun, but it only lasts for an instant, a 10th of a trillionth of a second (0.0000000000001 second).

Archaeological studies on semi-precious stone beads and other artefacts found in Wari-Bateshwar indicate people of this land have a rich history of craftsmanship as old as around 2,500 years.Plenty of semi-precious stone beads are found and unearthed from Wari-Bateshwar and some of those are even identical to the artefacts found in Southeast Asia and other parts in the Indian subcontinent. This suggests that the place was a rich trade centre, which was also one of the second earliest urbanisation sites in the subcontinent.

COLLINSVILLE, Ill. (Map, News) - It's so much a part of the landscape that metro-east residents often don't even notice it, except when a visiting relative notices: "Look, there's the mound."Rising from what once was an endless grass sea parted by the Mississippi River, Monks Mound isn't even named after the Native American Indians who built it centuries ago, but the Trappist monks who lived there for only five years in the 19th century.

Climate change is about more than endangered polar bears in the Arctic or melting ice sheets in the Antarctic.The flowers and plants in your own backyard or neighborhood park also may have a role in this global drama.Project BudBurst, a national field campaign for "citizen scientists," is designed to help record how the planet is warming by tracking the dates that 60 plant species leaf and flower this spring and summer.Students, gardeners and interested residents of the 50 states enter their observations into an online database.After a trial run in 2007 that included reports from 26 states, the project is in full swing this year with thousands of people signed up.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in grayingJapan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks.Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (Reuters) - Revenues from worldwide government and private spending on space projects rose to $251 billion last year, up 11 percent from 2006 despite slowing growth in many countries, an analysis released on Tuesday said.More than half of global space economic activity stemmed from purchases of commercial satellite-based products and services. Another 25 percent came from U.S. government spending, according to The Space Report 2008 released by the Space Foundation, a Colorado Springs, Colorado, nonprofit advocacy group

More discarded plastic is finding it way onto beaches than ever before, an annual survey has revealed.Plastic debris in the form of bottles, bags and lids made up almost 60 per cent of all litter found on beaches.The latest Marine Conservation Society (MCS) check revealed that plastic litter has increased by 126 per cent since the annual survey began in 1994.The survey found big rises in the amount of drinks bottles, plastic bags and cigarette butts dumped or washed up by the tide.

A stream of debris across the sky is the result of intergalactic cannibalism, researchers from The Australian National University conclude, and it is the not the first time our galaxy has had one of its neighbours for breakfast.Astronomers from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU have identified a huge swathe of debris that has been wrenched from a neighbouring galaxy to our Milky Way. Their findings are published in the April issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Some of the most massive stars might not explode as supernovae, a new study suggests. Rather, researchers speculate, they simply collapse into black holes or, if they do generate explosions, they're not as intense as the deaths of less massive stars.The claim has been questioned by some astronomers, however.

It is common for professional archaeologists and paleoanthropologists working in Africa to populate western museums with foreign artifacts by excavating and permanently removing them from history rich communities in Africa. University of Calgary researcher Julio Mercader, along with University of Boston PhD student Arianna Fogelman are doing their part to stop this dated trend.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Three Rhine barges are hauling a former Soviet space shuttle on a roughly 600 km (375 miles) journey up the river to a museum in western Germany because the spacecraft is too unwieldy to be transported in any other way.The sight of the 36 meter-long, black and white shuttle, which weighs nearly 100 tonnes, contrasts with the usual pleasure boats which cruise up and down Germany's longest river.

PEENEMUENDE, Germany (Reuters) - Few Germans know the global space race started on a remote and sandy island off the Baltic coast, an unremarkable place with wide open skies and a carpet of pine trees.But it was at the Peenemuende testing site in 1942 that a team of engineers under Wernher von Braun laid the foundations for sending man to the moon and the Cold War missile race. They were testing the world's first long-range ballistic missiles for the Nazis.

WILMINGTON, Delaware (AFP) - Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA's top climate scientist says."We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," James Hansen, 67, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told AFP here.

GENEVA (AFP) - British scientist Peter Higgs, whose work is the cornerstone of modern physics, said Monday he is putting champagne on ice in the hope a new experiment confirms his theories on how the universe works.Higgs, a veteran professor at Edinburgh University, told journalists in a rare interview that he hopes a vast experiment in the tunnels deep underground the CERN laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border could finally prove the existence of an elusive and unstable particle to which he has lent his name.

Fears are growing that a form of cloning that is easier to carry out than the technique used to create Dolly the sheep may be used on human embryos to produce "designer" babies. Scientists have already used the procedure to create mice. It saw them inserting the skin cells of an adult animal into existing embryos. Some of the offspring were 100 per cent genetically identical to the adult animal.The breakthrough was lauded last year by the Catholic Church and President George Bush as a morally acceptable way of producing embryonic stem cells without having to create or destroy human embryos.

A new study lends weight to the controversial theory that Earth became massively imbalanced in the distant past, sending its tectonic plates on a mad dash to even things out.Bernhard Steinberger and Trond Torsvik, of the Geological Survey of Norway, analyzed rock samples dating back 320 million years to hunt for clues in Earth's magnetic field about the history of plate motions.The researchers found evidence of a steady northward continental motion and, during certain time intervals, clockwise and counterclockwise rotations.

A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked "secret" and "sensitive", is intended to replace the existing UN mandate and authorises the US to "conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security" without time limit.

A 2,000-year old Roman city will rise again in Tiberias as part of a new archeological park, Mayor Zohar Oved and the Antiquities Authority announced this week.The Berko Archeological Park honors former Finance Ministry official Ozer Berkowitz, a longtime community leader in Tiberias who died last year. It will extend across approximately 100 dunams, or about 25 acres, and include a Roman bathhouse frequently mentioned in Rabbinic literature and a Byzantine city wall. Planners hope to complete the park this summer.

In ancient times the Appian Way, which links Rome to the southern city of Brindisi, was known as the regina viarum, the queen of the roads. But these days its crown appears to be tarnished by chronic traffic congestion, vandalism and, some of its guardians grumble, illegal development."Look at this!" bristled Rita Paris, the Italian state archaeological official responsible for the Appian Way, peering through a weathered bamboo screen lining the road while bumpily maneuvering her car through a patch of uneven ancient stones. "You can bet that it was once a canopy that was walled in and transformed into a home."

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Japanese cell phone users will test a new service that allows them to download fragrances, major telecommunications company NTT Communications Corp. said Monday.Twenty participants using "Mobile Fragrance Communications" can download files of specific scents accompanied by music or video clips, the company said in a statement.Scent playlists can be downloaded from "i-mode" mobile Web site run by the company's affiliate, NTT DoCoMo.The service uses a handset's infrared port to transfer the "fragrance data" to a dedicated device similar to a plug-in air freshener that is loaded with a cartridge of base fragrances. The device then mixes them to create the chosen smell, which it then wafts out.

When the cargo ship Beluga SkySails left the port of Bremen, Germany, in January, it carried with it a high-tech version of an ancient means of propulsion.During its 11,952-nautical-mile voyage to Venezuela and back, the ship launched a giant kite from its bow, sending it hundreds of feet into the air to capture the stronger and more consistent winds found above. The 1,720-square-foot kite, controlled by onboard electronics, exerted enough pull on the ship to provide about 20 percent of the engine power required for the journey.

A new study reported Friday found that just $1.2 billion in targeted government investments in dietary supplements and education on infant nutrition could create significant advancements toward ending hunger in developing nations.The study said such investments could help a billion of the poorest people in Africa and Asia, saving millions of lives and delivering annual economic benefits of more than $15 billion from lower health bills and longer, more productive lives.

A controversial theory of physics may explain some aspects of galaxy behaviour better than rival, but more widely accepted, ideas.That is the claim of an astronomer who studied eight so-called dwarf galaxies.Modified Newtonian Dynamics (Mond) is proposed as an alternative to the widely accepted theory of dark matter to explain the dynamics of galaxies.Garry Angus, from St Andrews University, said Mond effects could be very important for small galaxies.

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought.And he told a major meeting that astronomers were on the brink of finding many more of them.

Global temperatures for 2008 will be slightly cooler than last year as a result of the cold La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.But this year's temperatures would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

Tiny shifts that make our days milliseconds longer may be due to forces under our feet, a new study has found.It has long been known that natural phenomena on Earth's surface, such as tides and winds, affect its rotation speed.

Swedish archaeologists have discovered a rare hoard of Viking-age silver Arab coins near Stockholm's Arlanda airport.About 470 coins were found on 1 April at an early Iron Age burial site. They date from the 7th to 9th Century, when Viking traders travelled widely.There has been no similar find in that part of Sweden since the 1880s.Most of the coins were minted in Baghdad and Damascus, but some came from Persia and North Africa, said archaeologist Karin Beckman-Thoor.

Islamabad, April 4 (ANI): Archaeologists have discovered rare Buddha relics from the Diamer-Bhasha dam site in Pakistan.According to a report in The International news, the relics include rare stone carvings, sculptures and statues of the Buddha.At least 1,000-1,500 different kinds of rock carvings, sculptures and statues have been found during the technical work, and the archaeology department expects huge consignment when full-fledged reservoir building is started, sources reported.

Scientists from around the world who have been studying the centuries-old human remains that melted out of a glacier in northwestern British Columbia in 1999 will gather for the first time in Victoria later this month to talk about what they've learned from the unnamed "iceman."The Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchi Symposium will be held April 24-27 at the University of Victoria.It is being held in conjunction with the Northwest Anthropology Conference.