Newsdesk Archive

A hidden trove of fossilized treasures in cloudy ancient tree sap have been brought to light with a new form of "x ray vision," scientists announced recently.Fossilized tree sap, or amber, is usually transparent but can become murky due to contamination by dirt and other debris.The dirtiest type, called opaque amber, resembles rocks and is a challenge for paleontologists who want to see organisms trapped inside.That is changing with synchrotron imaging, which uses high-energy x-rays generated by accelerated electrons to examine hidden fossils.

An extinct breed of lion from North Africa was held at the Tower of London in medieval times, a new study shows.A pair of skulls unearthed from the tower's moat in the 1930s belonged to Barbary lions, a subspecies that has since died out in the wild.The discovery suggests that descendants of Barbary lions may still survive in captivity, which could help efforts to resurrect the dark-maned breed, researchers say.The lions' North African roots were revealed by analysis of mitochondrial DNA, a genetic marker passed between females.

Evidence has emerged that humans learned the medicinal properties of soil and plants from fellow primates. Roger Highfield reportsWhen we look back at the history of medicine, we think of the clever people who have, over thousands of years, devised ingenious ways of allaying human suffering.But to find the real fathers of the healing arts, we should look millions of years further back - to our hairy relatives.

Popular lore holds that in Cleopatra's last moments, the distraught queen -- who had just lost her kingdom and learned of her lover's demise -- smuggled a poisonous snake into her locked chamber and died, along with two ladies-in-waiting, of a self-inflicted snake bite.Such a scenario is next to impossible, according to Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, who shatters the "snakebite suicide" myth in her new book, Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, just published in Europe and slated for an upcoming U.S. release.

Recent findings by a Russian-American research team suggest that prehistoric cultures were hunting whales at least 3,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than was previously known.University of Alaska Museum of the North archaeology curator Daniel Odess presented the team's findings at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia last week.

NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometres across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing site.In a 2005 report about its exploration plans, NASA said it wanted to set up a base at a fixed location on the Moon after initially returning humans there in 2020.

The spinning of stars was thought to work like a food processor, bringing material from deep inside to the surface and mixing everything in a predictable way. The kitchen-science analogy just broke down.Instead, turning up the spinning speed can yield a layer cake or marbled effect, a team of scientists finds.

It was eerie. Just hours after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, I was in his home with his widow and eldest child, watching TV coverage of his death in awed silence.I felt a strong sense of unreality, being inside the home of the world-renowned civil rights leader at the end of his life. This was because during 18 years as a reporter for The Associated Press, I had been there early in King's courageous crusade that eventually led to his untimely death.

Australia has begun pumping carbon dioxide underground to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, using a technology that locks dangerous gases deep in the Earth.Officials opened a plant in southern Victoria state on Wednesday that they said would capture and compress 110,231 tons of carbon dioxide from industry emissions and then inject it 6,500 feet underground into a depleted natural gas reservoir.

Biofuel production, renewable energy expansion, other mitigation measures uprooting indigenous peoples in many regionsIndigenous peoples have contributed the least to world greenhouse gas emissions and have the smallest ecological footprints on Earth. Yet they suffer the worst impacts not only of climate change, but also from some of the international mitigation measures being taken, according to organizers of a United Nations University co-hosted meeting April 3 in Darwin, Australia.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Using written symbols such as hearts, arrows and hands, the ancient Aztecs maintained an arithmetic system that was far more complex than previously understood, scientists said on Thursday.The Aztecs, an empire in central Mexico toppled by Spanish invaders in 1519, has long been recognized for its sophistication in architecture, engineering, astronomy and other fields. And the new research confirms arithmetic can be added to the list.

Time travel? Teleportation? No problem, says renowned physicist Michio Kaku.Kaku, a professor at the City University of New York, is creating quite a stir in Britain with the release of his new book, "The Physics of the Impossible."On this side of the pond, outlandish claims in books are recognized as, well, a good way to sell books.But in Blighty, Kaku's being treated as if he's Doctor Who informing dim-witted humans about the wonders of the Universe, with front-page treatment Wednesday in both the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. Even the normally staid Economist is chiming in.

ALLEGAN, Mich. - Is fifth-grader Kenton Stufflebeam smarter than the Smithsonian?On a winter break trip with his family to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, the 11-year-old southwestern Michigan boy noticed that a notation, in bold lettering, mistakenly identified the Precambrian as an era.

WASHINGTON - NASA's Constellation program -- the successor to the aging space shuttle -- faces critical problems and might never work as intended, according to a congressional report set for release today.The report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, ticks off a list of difficult issues, especially with the Ares I rocket, which it said is prone to violent shaking on liftoff and might not have enough power to reach orbit with a capsule full of astronauts.

Today's tax codes are complicated, but the ancient Aztecs likely shared your pain.To measure tracts of taxable land, Aztec mathematicians had to develop their own specialized arithmetic, which has only now been decoded.By reading Aztec records from the city-state of Tepetlaoztoc, a pair of scientists recently figured out the complicated equations and fractions that officials once used to determine the size of land on which tributes were paid.Two ancient codices, written from A.D. 1540 to 1544, survive from Tepetlaoztoc. They record each household and its number of members, the amount of land owned, and soil types such as stony, sandy, or "yellow earth."

Nature may have handed scientists a new clue in a longstanding mystery: how matter beat out antimatter for dominance of the universe. Early data from twin experiments at the Tevatron, the world's reigning particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., suggest an unexpected chink in the hugely successful standard model of particle physics.The twist comes from odd behavior in a particle called the BS (pronounced "B-sub-S"), which flips back and forth between its matter and antimatter forms three trillions times per second. Researchers believe that such a breakdown, known as CP violation, is required to explain why matter is so abundant.

OCANA, Spain (AFP) - US aircraft giant Boeing claimed Thursday a world first in putting into the air a plane powered by a hydrogen-cell battery, a breakthrough that could herald a greener future for the industry."For the first time in the history of aviation, Boeing has flown a manned airplane that was powered by a hydrogen battery," Boeing chief technology officer John Tracy said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An ambitious vision to take people to the moon and Mars may fall apart before it even gets off the ground because of uncertain planning and inadequate funding, several experts said on Thursday.A congressional report said NASA's replacement for the space shuttle, the Constellation Program, is in jeopardy, and members of Congress as well as at least one former astronaut agreed at a hearing on the issue.

The Treasury of Atreus - also known as the Tomb of Agamemnon - is the largest and most impressive of the nine tholos tombs at Mycenae. The location of the Atreus Tomb has intrigued archaeologists for many years but by studying the landscape, the courses of the ancient roads and the various lines of sight at Mycenae, archaeologist David Mason believes he has found out why such an unusual and distinctive site was chosen for the tomb.The Mycenaean tholos (the ancient Greek word for a round building) tomb consists of an entrance passage leading to a circular burial chamber roofed over with a corbel vault shaped like an old-fashioned beehive.

Even though they are among the best-known structures on Earth, the pyramids of Egypt may still hold surprises. This spring, an MIT class is testing a controversial theory that some of the giant blocks that make up the great pyramids of Giza may have been cast in place from concrete, rather than quarried and moved into position.

Astronomers have captured the first footage of a solar "tsunami" hurtling through the Sun's atmosphere at over a million kilometres per hour.The event was captured by Nasa's twin Stereo spacecraft designed to make 3D images of our parent star.Naturally, this type of tsunami does not involve water; instead, it is a wave of pressure that travels across the Sun very fast.Details were reported at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast.

Kalpetta (Kerala), Apr 3 : A re-excavation, conducted after 114 years, by the Kerala State Archeology Department has unearthed 40 odd engravings, artifacts of Neolithic period and some tools used for chiseling these huge engravings at the renowned Edakkal Caves.The Edakkal Caves are situated at Ambukuthi mountain ranges near Ambalavayal, about 12 km from Sulthan Bathery in Wayanad district of Kerala.

There are many fascinating places in our solar system to explore, but space missions are dangerous and expensive. Sending robots instead of people helps reduce these drawbacks. For this kind of exploration, Professor Bernard Foing looks to the moon, Mars and beyond, hoping to discover tantalizing secrets useful to astrobiologists.

Beatrice De Cardi is in little doubt about what has driven her these past nine decades. Travelling to some of the world's most inhospitable places, coping with boiling heat, ruthless bandits and wild animals with a disarming, old world insouciance, it is, she says, her insatiable curiosity that has kept her going.

The preacher in him would have continued speaking out against injustice, war and maybe even pop culture. He would likely not have run for president. He probably would have endured more harassment from J. Edgar Hoover.Four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin's bullet, colleagues and biographers offer many answers to the question: What if he had lived?

ROME, April 3 (UPI) -- Archaeologists in Rome say some of the city's ancient monuments have been pillaged by tourists seeking souvenirs from the ancient empire.The archaeologists said Trajan's Forum, a site that up until recently contained many statue fragments and amphorae shards, has lost all of its artifacts to greedy tourists, The Telegraph (Britain) reported Thursday.

The accuracy of computer models that predict climate change over the coming decades has been the subject of debate among politicians, environmentalists and even scientists. A new study by meteorologists at the University of Utah shows that current climate models are quite accurate and can be valuable tools for those seeking solutions on reversing global warming trends. Most of these models project a global warming trend that amounts to about 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years.

The Y chromosome retains a remarkable record of human ancestry, since it is passed directly from father to son. In an article published online today in Genome Research scientists have utilized recently described genetic variations on the part of the Y chromosome that does not undergo recombination to significantly update and refine the Y chromosome haplogroup tree. The print version of this work will appear in the May issue of Genome Research, accompanied by a special poster of the new tree.

A NASA-funded researcher has discovered that solar flares -- explosions in the atmosphere of the sun -- get much hotter when they stay "focused"."A flare typically divides its energy between directly heating the solar atmosphere and accelerating particles," said Dr. Ryan Milligan of the Oak Ridge Association of Universities, Tennessee, who is stationed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "This flare seemed to focus on one task, devoting all its energy to heating, allowing it to become millions of degrees hotter than its multi-tasking cousins." The result will be presented Wednesday, April 2 at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2008 at Queen's University, Belfast, United Kingdom.

Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey have just returned from one of the most ambitious projects of the season: to drill an ice core from the top of a mountain high on the Antarctic Peninsula."The Peninsula is the fastest warming place in Antarctica and one of the three fastest-warming in the world," explained team leader Dr Robert Mulvaney.

Images of a tsunami blasting its way through the sun's lower atmosphere have been taken for the first time.NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft captured one of the massive solar waves in action May 19, 2007, as it moved through four layers of the solar atmosphere. These images and videos, released today, have helped astronomers to revise estimates of the waves' speeds.

The 19th-century physicist Michael Faraday famously offered a young scientist three words of advice: "Work, finish, publish."This admonition still applies, but for archaeologists, at least, it's incomplete. You must add "curate" to the list of fundamental scientific responsibilities.

Cliff paintings in northern China that date back to prehistoric times face severe damage from natural erosion and human destruction, according to a Chinese archaeological expert.About 80 percent of ancient cliff or rock paintings in Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Qinghai have sustained damage through the forces of erosion and human activity, combined with a lack of protection, said expert Zhou Xinghua.

London, April 1: Archaeologists working in the Russian Arctic have unearthed a remarkably detailed 3,000-year-old ivory carving that depicts groups of hunters engaged in whaling, which pushes back direct evidence for whaling by about 1,000 years.According to a report in Nature News, the ancient picture implies that northern hunters may have been killing whales 3,000 years ago and commemorating their bravery with pictures carved in ivory.

ANTHONY, Texas (CNN) -- Texas may be best known for "Big Oil." But the oil that could some day make a dent in the country's use of fossil fuels is small. Microscopic, in fact: algae. Literally and figuratively, this is green fuel."Algae is the ultimate in renewable energy," Glen Kertz, president and CEO of Valcent Products, told CNN while conducting a tour of his algae greenhouse on the outskirts of El Paso.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA scientists have identified the smallest black hole ever found -- less than four times the mass of our sun and about the size of a large city.But the mini-black hole, dubbed J1650, could still stretch a person into a "strand of spaghetti" with its pull, the researchers told a meeting in Los Angeles.

JAKARTA (AFP) - Once a golden promise in the fight against climate change, biofuels are fast losing their lustre as high demand for essential crops drives land clearing and pushes up the price of food.Biofuels made from food crops such as corn, sugar, soybeans and oil palm burn cleaner than fossil fuels, but experts say high demand is sending ripples through the world economy, and could be doing the environment more harm than good.

Astronomers from Queen's University Belfast (QUB) have helped to discover 10 new planets.The discovery was announced at the Royal Astronomical Society's largest ever National Astronomy Meeting at Queen's.The extrasolar planets - which orbit around other stars - were found by an international team using cameras in the Canary Islands and South Africa.The Queen's astronomers are using cameras designed and manufactured by Belfast company Andor Technology.

Does the human species have mammoth blood on its hands? Scientists have long debated the relative importance of hunting by our ancestors and change in global climate in consigning the mammoth to the history books. A new paper uses climate models and fossil distribution to establish that the woolly mammoth went extinct primarily because of loss of habitat due to changes in temperature, while human hunting acted as the final straw.

The Rev. Bernard LaFayette Jr. was resting at his Chicago, Illinois, home one autumn weekend in 1967 when the phone rang. The caller didn't identify himself, but LaFayette immediately recognized the baritone voice."Bernard, I need you," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said. "This may be my last campaign. We're going for broke."Most Americans think of King as the "I Have a Dream" preacher at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. But the man who made his final trip to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 had become radical, scholars and activists say. King was gambling his legacy on a final crusade that was so revolutionary, it alarmed many of his closest advisers. Some became concerned about his emotional stability.

FBI wiretaps have "given us the most powerful and persuasive source of all for seeing how utterly selfless Martin Luther King was," as a civil rights leader, according to a leading civil rights scholar."You see him being intensely self-critical. King really and truly believed that he was there to be of service to others. This was not a man with any egomaniacal joy of being a famous person, or being a leader," said Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar David Garrow in a recent interview with CNN.Hoping to prove the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was under the influence of Communists, the FBI kept the civil rights leader under constant surveillance.

SEATTLE - The FBI says a parachute found buried in southwestern Washington is not connected to famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper. FBI agent Laura Laughlin said Tuesday that the agency came to its conclusion after speaking with parachute experts. It also dug where children found the parachute early last month

LONDON (Reuters) - Climate change could bring malaria and other diseases to Britain and trigger more frequent heatwaves that will have huge health impacts, doctors said on Thursday.With the exception of Lyme disease, insect-borne diseases are largely unknown in Britain. But global warming could change that in a few decades, according to a report from the British Medical Association (BMA).

The official body which advises the government on drugs policy has decided cannabis should remain a class C drug, the BBC understands.The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs' decision appears to go against the view of Gordon Brown, who seems to favour returning the drug to class B.The government asked the council to review cannabis's legal status amid concerns over stronger forms of it.Downing Street said the council was some way from making a final decision.

CHICAGO (AFP) - Archeologists have unearthed a nearly 4,000-year-old necklace which shows that gold was being used as a status symbol in the Americas much earlier than previously thought, according to a study released Monday.The necklace is the oldest gold artifact discovered in the Americas to date and was found in the remains of a burial site in the Lake Titicaca basin of southern Peru.

The first excavation inside the ring at Stonehenge in more than four decades gets under way on Monday.The two-week dig will try to establish, once and for all, some precise dating for the creation of the monument.It is also targeting the significance of the smaller bluestones that stand inside the giant sarsen pillars.

The origin of Pacific Islanders has been a mystery for years. Now archaeologists believe they have the answer. As Heidi Chang reports, they found it in China.China had a sea-faring civilization as long as 7000 years ago. Archaeologist Tianlong Jiao says, one day, these mariners sailed their canoes into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, and stayed. He points out, "Most scientists, archaeologists, historical linguists and human biologists agree that today's southeast China, Taiwan and Northern Philippines, the whole region is the ultimate homeland of the Austronesian people." The Austronesians include today's Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian, and the indigenous people in Philippines, in the Southeast Asia archipelago, and in Taiwan.

Europe's "Jules Verne" freighter has demonstrated its ability to make extremely fine movements right next to the International Space Station (ISS).The 20-tonne cargo ship edged up to within 12m of the back of the platform and then moved away to a safe distance.The dress rehearsal was demanded by the station partners to prove the truck has the necessary control to make an automatic docking on Thursday.Jules Verne is carrying food, water, air, fuel and equipment for the ISS.

Could part of the answer to saving the Earth from global warming lie in the earth beneath our feet?A team from Newcastle University aims to design soils that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, permanently and cost-effectively. This has never previously been attempted anywhere in the world. The research is being funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.The concept underlying the initiative exploits the fact that plants, crops and trees naturally absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) during photosynthesis and then pump surplus carbon through their roots into the earth around them. In most soils, much of this carbon can escape back to the atmosphere or enters

Astronomers have spied a faraway star system that is so unusual, it was one of a kind -- until its discovery helped them pinpoint a second one that was much closer to home.In a paper published in a recent issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Ohio State University astronomers and their colleagues suggest that these star systems are the progenitors of a rare type of supernova.They discovered the first star system 13 million light years away, tucked inside Holmberg IX, a small galaxy that is orbiting the larger galaxy M81. They studied it between January and October 2007 with the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mt. Graham in Arizona.

MANITOWOC, Wis. - Excavators have unearthed what are believed to be some of the oldest prehistoric bones discovered in a cave in Wisconsin, according to a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor.The bones have been dated to between 5,600 and 5,800 years old, said Dr. John Luczaj, an earth science professor. They were discovered in New Hope Cave at Cherney Maribel Caves County Park in January and February.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cosmic rays are so dangerous and so poorly understood that people are unlikely to get to Mars or even back to the moon until better ways are found to protect astronauts, experts said on Monday.And NASA is not properly funding the right experiments to find out how, the National Research Council committee said.

A new medical imaging technique can reveal the chemical make-up as well as the shape of structures inside the body. It provides a non-invasive way to get information about tumours or other disease sites normally only accessible by biopsy.That information can be crucial to knowing the nature of disease, for example, the aggressiveness of a tumour.

A Drexel University chemical engineering professor Yossef Elabd is exploring a way to increase battery life with an environmentally friendly alternative. Consumer demands are requiring lithium-ion batteries currently used to power devices such as cell phones and laptops to increase their efficiency and reduce environmental impact.A possible replacement for lithium-ion batteries, and a solution for the current demand in power density, is fuel cells. These fuel cells use liquid as a source of protons and electrons. They could take the form of an ink cartridge the size of AA batteries made of bio-degradable materials and last more than twice as long as lithium-ion batteries.

In the near future, soldiers may be using maps that are more akin to long-range but highly accurate security cameras: the maps will enable troops to see both the exterior and interior of buildings, as well as streets and larger areas, as they appeared just minutes ago.The technology, designed by General Dynamics UK Limited, is called Masthead and is part of the company's UrbanISTAR concept. The company plans to debut the urban intelligence system this week at the SOFEX 2008 exhibition in Amman, Jordan.

Scientists at Newcastle University have created part-human, part-animal hybrid embryos for the first time in the UK, the BBC can reveal.The embryos survived for up to three days and are part of medical research into a range of illnesses.It comes a month before MPs are to debate the future of such research.The Catholic Church describes it as "monstrous". But medical bodies and patient groups say such research is vital for our understanding of disease.

3-D images are not only useful in medicine; the observation of internal structures is also invaluable in many other fields of scientific investigation. Recently, researchers from the Hahn-Meitner-Institute (HMI) in Berlin in cooperation with University of Applied Sciences have succeeded, for the first time, in a direct, three-dimensional visualisation of magnetic fields inside solid, non-transparent materials. This is announced by Nikolay Kardjilov and colleagues in the current issue of the journal Nature Physics.

One of the biggest questions about climate change is: What will it cost to fix? Figuring that out is a huge challenge.While most scientists believe that global warming already is happening and that human activity is a main reason, predicting future temperature trends decades, if not centuries, from now remains controversial.

Isle of Eigg, Scotland - On the Isle of Eigg, the arrival of the ferry always elicits a flurry of activity. Islanders crowd the pier to greet friends and family or collect letters and parcels from the mainland, some 10 miles away.At the cozy tearoom by the jetty, kettles boil water for hot drinks and bacon sizzles on the grill.In the old days, dealing with the sudden rush of customers required careful calculation. A limited power supply produced by the tearoom's diesel generator meant the oven couldn't be switched on at the same time as the dishwasher. The small freezer was switched off at night.

The last time any excavation was allowed inside its ancient sarsen stone pillars was in 1964 but now the first archaeological excavations at Stonehenge in almost half a century are attempting to solve, once and for all, the mystery of how and why the stone circle was built.The enigma of Stonehenge, famed for its orientation in relation to the rising and setting sun, has puzzled and divided experts for decades. Some say the ancient stones were built as a temple used to worship ancient earth deities. Others say it was a prehistoric astronomical observatory; others claim it was a sacred burial site for people of high birth. Arthurian legend even has it that the stones were put there by the magician Merlin.

The sight of small blonde girls watching television is guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of anyone who has watched the movie Poltergeist.We're right to be terrified, say physicists. Children generate poltergeist activity by channelling energy into the quantum mechanical vacuum.Pierro Brovetto, whose last known address was the Instituto Fisica Superiore, in Cagliari, Italy and his colleague Vera Maxia wanted to explain the origin of poltergeist phenomena, characterised by objects flying around the room "of their own accord".

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Scientists in Japan have designed artificial molecules that when used with rats successfully reversed liver cirrhosis, a serious chronic disease in humans that until now can only be cured by transplants.Cirrhosis is the hardening or scarring of the liver, and is caused by factors such as heavy drinking and Hepatitis B and C. The disease is especially serious in parts of Asia, including China.

SYDNEY (AFP) - Tens of millions of people switched off lightbulbs this weekend as part of a global campaign to throw the spotlight on climate change, organisers of the Australian-led 'Earth Hour' initiative said.From Sydney to Asia, Europe, Canada and the US, "many tens of millions" of people flicked the switch on Saturday night, plunging cities, towns and homes into darkness, chief of environmental group WWF-Australia Greg Bourne said.

KHUN SAMUT CHIN, Thailand (AFP) - Crabs scuttle across the wet floor of the near-deserted Khun Samut temple, the only building left in a Thai village that has disappeared beneath the rising and advancing sea.Waging a battle against an encroaching tide that has sent all the villagers fleeing inland, a monk in orange robes and faded tattoos meant to ward off evil spirits stalks the newly-built sea wall, planting mangrove shoots.Somnuek Atipanya points 20 metres (65 feet) out to sea, where electricity pylons poke out of the water, now useful only for resting marine birds.

Archaeologists in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal have discovered small weapons made of stone which are around 15,000-20,000 years old.The artefacts - dating to the Stone Age - were found during excavations in Murshidabad district, near Bangladesh.Archaeologists say the find is potentially significant as it suggests man's presence in the area dates back much earlier than previously believed.Finds such as this on the floodplains of the River Ganges are very rare.

The heat wave that hit Egypt last Sunday did not deter Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif from going ahead with his planned two-day tour of Luxor to view the progress achieved so far with the project to develop the whole area, including the town itself, into an open air museum. The plans include more facilities and easier access for tourists.

Dhaka: Archaeologists in Bangladesh have found an ancient brick-built structure with floor and artefacts under the basement of the main temple at the World Heritage site Paharpur in Dinajpur.Earlier, two brick-built structures of the Gupta dynasty were found during an excavation, according to archaeologists of the Department of Archaeology.

Bright gray, crater-pocked mountains taller than Mount McKinley. Abyssal craters that could swallow several Grand Canyons whole.Recent radar maps of the Moon's southern pole revealed a dramatic, jagged landscape that astronauts could someday call home. But unfortunately, these radar images didn't provide any new information about something that would make living at the lunar pole much easier: frozen water.

A new physics discovery explores why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. The latest research findings, which involved significant contributions from physicists at the University of Melbourne, have been recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.The paper reveals that investigation into the process of B-meson decays has given insight into why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.

An MIT and Columbia University team has successfully tested a novel reactor that could chart a new path toward nuclear fusion, which could become a safe, reliable and nearly limitless source of energy.Begun in 1998, the Levitated Dipole Experiment, or LDX, uses a unique configuration where its main magnet is suspended, or levitated, by another magnet above. The system began testing in 2004 in a "supported mode" of operation, where the magnet was held in place by a support structure, which causes significant losses to the plasma--a hot, electrically charged gas where the fusion takes place.

HILO, Hawaii - The University of Hawaii at Hilo and the Colorado School of Mines said they will jointly research supporting human life in outer space."The number of Hawaii students interested in space exploration is rapidly growing," University of Hawaii at Hilo Chancellor Rose Tseng said in a statement Thursday.

To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.

In the ancient Greek poem "The Odyssey," the story's hero, Odysseus, tells the Cyclops that his name is "Nobody." When Odysseus instructs his men to drive a fiery iron spit into the monster's single eye, the Cyclops yells out in vain, "Friends, Nobody is killing me now," so no one comes to help.This action-adventure humor, dating to around 800 B.C., is one of the first recorded jokes, according to the classics scholar Owen Ewald, who recently presented his findings on "Humor in the Ancient World" at Seattle Pacific University.

One of the U.K.'s top nuclear officials said today that she was told the U.S. will okay plans to build the first nuclear power plants since the accident at Three Mile Island nearly three decades ago. Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, chair of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, said that the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission informed her that the NRC will approve three applications for new nuclear reactors that it's currently considering.

CHICAGO -- This must be what torture feels like, Jamie Nieto thought during six weeks in 2003 of physical therapy for burns covering more than half his body. He bore the pain by telling himself that every day he inched closer to going home.Unlike Nieto, who could only close his eyes to cope, patients at Loyola University Medical Center's burn unit in Maywood, Ill., in the next few weeks will be able to distract themselves by gliding through a world of snowy canyons, launching snowball fights with snowmen and watching penguins cartwheel across icy plains.

Europe's "Jules Verne" freighter is about to start practice docking manoeuvres at the space station.The cargo truck will test its systems with two close approaches and retreats before finally linking up with the orbiting platform next Thursday.The ship, which is carrying just under five tonnes of supplies for the station's astronauts, flies under the control of autonomous computers.The vehicle's performance so far has been exemplary, say space officials.

According to Hollywood, Earth is surely one of the galaxy's "top places to visit before you die." Cinema aliens come here often enough that the State Department should probably set up passport control.Of course, that's fiction. But in the last hundred years, Homo sapiens has been flamboyantly belching clues into space that could alert technically savvy extraterrestrials of our presence. Radar and television, odd chemical compounds in the atmosphere, and even the occasional spacecraft sent beyond the heliopause are all messages in bottles that could conceivably wash up on the shores of ET's planet.

CAIRO (Reuters) - New evidence of a sick, deprived population working under harsh conditions contradicts earlier images of wealth and abundance from the art records of the ancient Egyptian city of Tell el-Amarna, a study has found.Tell el-Amarna was briefly the capital of ancient Egypt during the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who abandoned most of Egypt's old gods in favor of the Aten sun disk and brought in a new and more expressive style of art.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Anthropologists have exhumed the graves of Friedrich Schiller's family in an attempt to positively identify the skull of the German dramatist and poet and end a 180-year-old debate."The remains of the bodies were in good enough condition for a DNA examination," said Egon Moehler, a spokesman for the German city of Stuttgart, where the bodies of three relatives who died in the 19th century were unearthed.

LOS ANGELES - An international spacecraft that dove through geysers erupting from the surface of a Saturn moon has sampled an organic soup from the lunar interior, scientists said Wednesday.The presence of the organic brew excited mission team members, who say it's a marker for further research into whether the icy satellite Enceladus possesses an environment that could be hospitable to extraterrestrial life.

LOS ANGELES - A California aerospace company plans to enter the space tourism industry with a two-seat rocket ship capable of suborbital flights to altitudes more than 37 miles above the Earth.The Lynx, about the size of a small private plane, is expected to begin flying in 2010, according to developer Xcor Aerospace, which planned to release details of the design at a news conference Wednesday.

Scientists have detected the faint genetic traces left by medieval crusaders in the Middle East.The team says it found a particular DNA signature which recently appeared in Lebanon and is probably linked to the crusades.The finding comes from the Genographic Project, a major effort to track human migrations through DNA.Details of the research have been published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

For the first time, physicists have been able to identify individual returning photons after firing and reflecting them off of a space satellite in orbit almost 1,500 kilometres above the earth. The experiment has proven the possibility of constructing a quantum channel between Space and Earth.Research published on Friday, 28 March, in the New Journal of Physics, discusses the feasibility of building a completely secure channel for global communication, via satellites in space, all thanks to advances in quantum mechanics.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song -- the oldest-known audio recording -- made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph."It's magic," audio historian David Giovannoni said on Thursday. "It's like a ghost singing to you."

Even as creatures become complex, evolution doesn't get any harder.The findings, published yesterday in Nature, shed doubt on a creationist criticism of evolution: that adaptation must rapidly slow as creatures grow more complicated, making them less able to adapt to changing conditions.

So you'd like to spend a few hundred years in dreamland and awake in a transformed world. Who wouldn't?Unfortunately, the means of doing so are a little inconvenient. You -- or at least your head -- could be shot full of antifreeze and suspended in liquid nitrogen. If that seems a little radical, you could try being drained of blood and then frozen: You might not make it more than a few hours into the future, but to a zombie that'll be plenty.

BEIJING, March 27 (Xinhua) -- Architects have urged that a big awning be built to protect an archaeological site in suburban Beijing where the world-famous skulls of Peking Man were found in the early 20th century.Architects from a Liaoning design institute and Qinghua University have separately offered plans for such a structure, whose main frame would be steel and glass, at Zhoukoudian, 80 kilometers southwest of Beijing, the Beijing Youth Daily reported on Thursday.

The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they're bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.

Many wonder how the Dalai Lama can retain his kindness and magnanimity, even as his homeland is torn apart by violence. New neuroscience research may help explain the exiled Tibetan leader's unremitting compassion for all people.Meditation may increase a person's ability to feel empathy and benevolence for others, according to a study published March 26 in the journal PLoS ONE.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The moon could become a final resting place for some of mankind thanks to a commercial service that hopes to send human ashes to the lunar surface on robotic landers, the company said on Thursday.Celestis, Inc., a company that pioneered the sending of cremated remains into suborbital space on rockets, said it would start a service to the surface of the moon that could begin as early as next year.

Early humans may have roamed Europe as much as 1.2 million years ago, far earlier than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday, based on fossils they found in northern Spain.Researchers excavated a jaw bone, teeth and simple tools in a cave near the city of Burgos dated around 400,000 years older than the previously oldest-known remains found at a nearby site 14 years ago, a paper published in the journal Nature said.

Robert Schoch, the associate professor of Natural Science at the College of General Studies and renowned geologist will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout April to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

A deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly two billion years.Dr Simon Poulton, Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University, was part of an international team of biogeochemists who took part in the University of California-led study.

A Finnish tourist was detained after allegedly stealing a piece of volcanic rock from one of the massive Moai statues on Easter Island. Marko Kulju, 26, faces seven years in prison and a fine of $19,100 if convicted of stealing pieces of the right earlobe from a Moai, one of numerous statues carved out of volcanic rock between 400 and 1,000 years ago to represent deceased ancestors.A native Rapanui woman told authorities she witnessed the theft Sunday at Anakena beach and saw Kulju fleeing from the scene with a piece of the statue in his hand.

Giant flowers found on Australia and New Zealand's sub-Antarctic islands are probably survivors of lush forests that covered Antarctica before the beginning of the last ice age nearly 2 million years ago, scientists say.The flowers, known to researchers as megaherbs, grow abundantly on the tiny windswept islands such as the Snares, Auckland and Campbell island groups.

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - A fossil of a new marine crocodile species found in Brazil shows the reptiles survived the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, researchers said on Wednesday.Brazilian paleontologists said the discovery of the fossil of Guarinisuchus munizi, dubbed "Sea Warrior," also engendered a new theory on the migration of prehistoric crocodiles from Africa to South and then North America.

Billions of yeas ago on Mars, a river suddenly burst to the surface from underground and flooded a large crater, only to disappear again within a few decades, according to a new study. Although the water was short-lived on the surface, it may have been present for longer underground, potentially creating conditions favourable to life.Many ancient river channels are among the evidence that liquid water was once present on Mars, but in many cases it is difficult to know just how long that water was around.

Teachers have voted to oppose military recruitment activities in schools if they employ "misleading propaganda".Young people must be given a true picture of Army life, not a "marketised version", the National Union of Teachers conference heard.The Ministry of Defence (MoD) denies actively recruiting in schools but says it does visit to raise awareness when invited in by head teachers.Some teachers complain the Army uses sophisticated methods of recruitment.

NEW YORK: A new particle-smashing experiment has uncovered surprising evidence that nature treats matter and antimatter differently.The findings, detailed today in the U.K. journal Nature, suggests that a complete solution to the mystery of why the observable universe is dominated by matter, and not antimatter, may have to await the discovery of novel particles or the invention of new physics.

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified a language feature unique to the human brain that is shedding light on how human language evolved. The study marks the first use of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a non-invasive imaging technique, to compare human brain structures to those of chimpanzees, our closest living relative. The study will be published in the online version of Nature Neuroscience.