Newsdesk Archive

CHICAGO: An explosion in genetic research is helping physicians detect and treat deadly diseases like never before, says a collection of studies. The advances could soon lead to genetic pre-screening to assess risk for a range of diseases and personalised preventative treatments.

BRISBANE: Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as MRSA, are a huge and growing threat to our ability to fight infection. But now microbiologists have discovered a weak link in the armour of these dangerous pathogens.Another bacterium, Streptococcus pneumoniae, kills five million children per year worldwide, and is becoming increasingly difficult to treat due to drug resistance. Australian rates of penicillin resistance in S.pneumoniae rose from one per cent to 25 per cent between 1989 and 1997.

LONDON (Reuters) - British explorer Hannah McKeand has called off her attempt to become the first woman to reach the North Pole alone and unaided after falling through ice and injuring herself, her expedition manager said on Sunday.She set out from Canada's Ward Hunt Island on 8 March and by skiing, walking and swimming had hoped to take 60 days to cover the 478 miles to the pole, where temperatures can dip to minus 60 degrees Celsius (minus 76 Fahrenheit).

Archaeologists have found another ancient brick-built structure with floor and artefacts under the basement of the main temple at world heritage site Paharpur.Earlier, two brick-built structures of Gupta dynasty were found during an excavation, according to archaeologists of the Department of Archaeology.

(ANSA) - Rome, March 19 - Scholars worldwide are now able to study precious cuneiform tablets preserved in the National Museum of Iraq thanks to a new Italian-run project to create copies of the fragile clay blocks, researchers said Wednesday.The Baghdad museum holds a rich collection of artefacts bearing inscriptions in cuneiform - the wedge-shaped form of writing invented by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago - but it has been closed to the public after being looted in 2003 during the US-led invasion of Iraq.

It's one of those spine-chilling what-ifs. What if Hitler and his helpers had been successful in their aggressive striving for world power? A new exhibition in Berlin attempts to answer this question in part by looking at the devastating architectural consequences Hitler's success would have had for the German capital.

Two lion skulls found during excavations at the Tower of London originated in north-west Africa, genetic research suggests.The big cats, which were kept by royals during medieval times, have the same genetic make-up as the north African Barbary lion, a DNA study shows.Experts believe the animals were gifts to English monarchs in the 13th and 14th centuries.

There is something amazing, standing at a museum observing exhibits hundreds and even thousands of years old. But how does one top the mystery of a lost civilization?Archaeologists believe they may have discovered evidence of a lost tribe, never before known in Chinese history. The findings come from an excavation in northwest China's Shaanxi province.

Jülich scientists have made an important step on the long road to artificially mimicking photosynthesis. They were able to synthesise a stable inorganic metal oxide cluster, which enables the fast and effective oxidation of water to oxygen.

AREQUIPA, Peru (Reuters) - Officials found the fossil of a giant dinosaur jawbone while investigating a suspicious package on a bus in the mountains of Peru on Tuesday.The fossil, weighing some 19 pounds, was found in the cargo hold of the bus, which was headed for the capital of Lima, and had been sent on the bus company's package service.

NOVY URENGOI, Russia: As Viktor Seliverstov works in his makeshift studio in this hardscrabble Siberian town he is enveloped in a cloud of ivory dust. His electric carving tool whirrs over the milky surface of teeth and tusks, as he whittles them into key fobs, knife handles and scrimshaw figurines.But these are not whale bones or walrus tusks he is working on. The ivory in this part of the world comes from the remains of extinct woolly mammoths, as they emerge from the tundra where they have been frozen for thousands of years. It is a traditional Russian business that had all but gone extinct itself during the Soviet period but is flourishing now.

In 1883, a French army captain stationed in Tunisia, Ernest de Prudhomme, went outside to dig in his garden and happened upon a trove of mosaics. It was quite a find: The mosaics dated to the sixth century, the period known as Late Antiquity. They included images of two menorahs, and a Latin inscription between them read "Your servant, the girl Juliana, paved the holy synagogue of Naro for her own salvation out of her own resources."They came from the floor of an ancient temple.

A timber circle dating back 4,000 years which was found in the sea off the Norfolk coast is to return to the county in a permanent display.Seahenge, with 55 oak posts and a central upturned stump dating from the Bronze Age, was found emerging from a beach at Holme-next-the-Sea in 1998.Timbers were studied at the Bronze Age Centre, Peterborough, then preserved at the Mary Rose Trust, Portsmouth.

Two rare gold coins of the rebel Roman emperor Carausius have been discovered on a construction site in the Midlands. Gold coins of Carausius are extremely rare. Only 23 are known, and the last was found as long ago as 1975 in Hampshire.

One of the oldest and most complete skeletons of a prehistoric aquatic reptile in North America has been uncovered, representing an entirely new group of these plesiosaurs, paleontologists say.Plesiosaurs are not classified as dinosaurs, but these reptiles swam in the seas at the same time that dinosaurs roamed the land throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods (about 205 million to 65 million years ago).

Garments that can measure a wearer's body temperature or trace their heart activity are just entering the market, but the European project BIOTEX weaves new functions into smart textiles. Miniaturised biosensors in a textile patch can now analyse body fluids, even a tiny drop of sweat, and provide a much better assessment of someone's health.

Jesus needs saving, once again, from his followers. This time, however, it is not from those he preached to or from one of his most loyal supporters who, the Bible says, betrayed him.It's the Christians who came later.

Judith Herrin was at a loss to answer the two workmen who asked, upon reading a plaque on her door, "What is Byzantine history?"As a result of that 2002 encounter, the King's College professor began writing an intriguing historical look at the widely unknown empire. Now she has finished, and the result is a polished and succinct account of a kingdom that filled the void between the collapse of Rome and the European Renaissance.

A series of discoveries of ancient bison bones on Vancouver Island and nearby Orcas Island in Washington state is fuelling excitement among researchers that the Pacific coast offered a food-rich ecosystem for Ice Age hunters some 14,000 years ago -- much earlier than the prevailing scientific theory pegs the arrival of humans to the New World.

Arthur Hickman's discovery on Google Earth of what is almost certainly a rare meteorite impact crater in remote Western Australia has earned him both bragging and naming rights.Measuring 260 metres wide and up to 30 metres deep, the divot is thought to be between 10,000 and 100,000 years old and was stumbled upon in the rich, rust coloured landscape of the Hamersley Ranges in Western Australia's Pilbara region.

RINCON COLORADO, Mexico (Reuters) - Scientists have discovered a new species of plant-eating dinosaur in Mexico whose large neck frill and three giant horns helped it attract mates and fight predators on a jungly beach 72 million years ago.Mexico's Coahuila desert -- now rocky and cactus-filled -- was once covered by ocean where dinosaurs of all kinds thrived along the coast and hid from a giant relative of the fierce predator Tyrannosaurus rex.

Corn has long been known as the primary food crop in prehistoric North and Central America. Now it appears it may have been an important part of the South American diet for much longer than previously thought, according to new research by University of Calgary archaeologists who are cobbling together the ancient history of plant domestication in the New World.

Three rocks hurtling through space appear to be among our solar system's oldest objects.The ancient asteroids seem to have formed some 4.55 billion years ago, making them older than the oldest meteorites ever found on Earth, said Jessica Sunshine, an astronomer at the University of Maryland who led the team that discovered the objects.

LOS ANGELES - Scientists plan to put one of the twin Mars rovers to sleep and limit the activities of the other robot to fulfill a NASA order to cut $4 million from the program's budget, mission team members said Monday.The news comes amid belt-tightening at NASA headquarters, which is under pressure to juggle Mars exploration and projects to study the rest of the solar system.

A rare fossil discovered in Japan is the oldest known plant-eating lizard, which could shed light on an evolutionary puzzle that Charles Darwin described as an "abominable mystery," scientists say.The 130-million-year-old jaw and skull bones were unearthed in the Ishikawa Prefecture of Japan

Driving along an oil company road in Peru's northern Amazon, Patricio Pinola Chuje looked out the window. He nodded beyond a green wall of rain forest."I don't know if they are in this area, but I know they are farther south in other places," said Pinola, an Achuar Indian. "They come out by the rivers."

IMAGINE if the sun's energy increased by 3400 times: Earth's oceans would instantly boil away. Yet a newly discovered exoplanet is subjected to such heat, making it one of the hottest in our galactic neighbourhood.Planet HAT-P-7b, spotted about a thousand light years away by a network of small telescopes called HATNet, orbits at only 5.6 million kilometres from its star - around one-tenth of the distance between Mercury and our sun

MALMSTROM AIR FORCE BASE, Mont. - On a wind-swept air base near the Missouri River, the Air Force has launched an ambitious plan to wean itself from foreign oil by turning to a new and unlikely source: coal.The Air Force wants to build at its Malmstrom base in central Montana the first piece of what it hopes will be a nationwide network of facilities that would convert domestic coal into cleaner-burning synthetic fuel.

Srinagar, Mar 21: The department of Archeology and Museums has made some important archeological discoveries in the past 12 years, but not a single discovered site has been declared as State Protected, thus threatening the security of hundreds of rare statues, sculptures, coins, terracotta tiles, and other artifacts.

It was an ordinary morning at Hammamat Pharaon (Pharaoh's bath), the mini-resort south of Ras Sedr on the west coast of Sinai where for centuries locals and travellers have enjoyed the spa waters of the natural hot spring. The water, smelling slightly unpleasantly of sulphur, bubbles from the rock inside a cave and flows down into the sea. In the cave, where the darkness is heavy with steam, clients were enjoying a soak in the rock bath, or else waiting their turn for a therapeutic treatment for rheumatism, skin diseases or other ailments.

COLWOOD -- Oblivious to the mud-covered construction machinery rumbling in the background, dirt-smeared archeologists and Songhees Nation members have been chipping away at a 2,850-year-old aboriginal site, one of the oldest to be found on Vancouver Island, experts say.

LUXOR, Egypt (AFP) - Egyptian and European archeologists on Saturday announced they had discovered a giant statue of an ancient pharaonic queen on the spectacular south Egypt site of the Colossi of Memnon.The statue represents Queen Tiy, the wife of 18th dynasty Pharaoh Amenhotep III, and stands 3.62 metres high (almost 12 feet).

Designers of artificial cognitive systems have tended to adopt one of two approaches to building robots that can think for themselves: classical rule-based artificial intelligence or artificial neural networks. Both have advantages and disadvantages, and combining the two offers the best of both worlds, say a team of European researchers who have developed a new breed of cognitive, learning robot that goes beyond the state of the art.

Like so many well-meaning but busy citizens, I learned of China's brutal crackdown on Tibetan dissidents haphazardly, in quickly-glimpsed headlines and overheard fragments of television news.I finally had a chance to read up on the conflict yesterday. A description of Tibetan grievances written by Jim Yardley, veteran China correspondent at the New York Times, caught my eye.

A recently declassified US Army report on the biological effects of non-lethal weapons reveals outlandish plans for "ray gun" devices, which would cause artificial fevers or beam voices into people's heads.The report titled "Bioeffects Of Selected Nonlethal Weapons" was released under the US Freedom of Information Act and is available on this website (pdf). The DoD has confirmed to New Scientist that it released the documents, which detail five different "maturing non-lethal technologies" using microwaves, lasers and sound.

European colonisation of South America resulted in a dramatic shift from a native American population to a largely mixed one, a genetic study has shown.It suggests male European settlers mated with native and African women, and slaughtered the men.But it adds that areas like Mexico City "still preserve the genetic heritage" because these areas had a high number of natives at the time of colonisation.

Restorers and archaeologists have been working on the Roman necropolis to clean, consolidate and restore the tombs, which are embraced within a rocky, table-top mound. The 300 tombs are gouged out of the rock, all unpainted tombs except for two. These, the tombs of Petosiris and Sadosiris, are certainly the most interesting, with walls vividly- painted with scenes combining ancient Egyptian and Roman deities at one time. The tombs were discovered in 1972 by Egyptian archaeologist Ahmed Fakhry, who because of the paintings called them Al-Muzawaka.

The most powerful blast ever observed in the universe detonated on Wednesday. That day, a record four gamma-ray bursts were detected by NASA's Swift telescope.If you knew exactly when and where to look, you could have seen the bright burst with the naked eye, despite its enormous distance of 7.5 billion light years. "This burst definitely has an 'oh wow' flavour," says astrophysicist Ralph Wijers of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

In science there are a number of words that begin with the prefix palaeo- (English) or paleo- (North American) such as palaeomagnetism, palaeontology, palaeoclimate, and paleoseismology. Synonyms of palaeo- are old, ancient and pre-historic. Palaeoseismology is the science of finding past earthquakes, the art of literally uncovering when and where ancient earthquakes occurred and the likely magnitudes of the events.

Long before Homer wrote the Iliad, the real-life progenitors of the epic poem's characters might have visited a small outpost on the Greek coast.Archaeologists have discovered a spectacularly preserved ancient harbor town of the Mycenaeans, the civilization on which many ancient Greek legends were based. Though the settlement was built 3,500 years ago, hundreds of walls are still standing.

A team led by two Texas A&M University anthropologists now believes the first Americans came to this country 1,000 to 2,000 years earlier than the 13,500 years ago previously thought, which could shift historic timelines.The team's findings are outlined in a review article in the journal Science entitled "The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas," which synthesizes new data suggesting the migration from Alaska started about 15,000 years ago.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Oceangoing sailing rafts plied the waters of the equatorial Pacific long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, and carried tradegoods for thousands of miles all the way from modern-day Chile to western Mexico, according to new findings by MIT researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Prehistoric cave sculptures never seen by the public will be revealed today thanks to the most advanced, computerised techniques of laser-copying and visual display.A museum to open near Poitiers, in western France, will span one-a-half millenniums of human image-making, from stone chisels to computers. The star of the show, at Angles-sur-L'Anglin, in the départementof Vienne, will be a 60ft-long frieze of bison, horses, cats, goats and erotic female figures, carved into the limestone of western France 15,000 years ago.

For some, the Isle of Thanet is an area of great economic potential and a new hub for culture vultures. Others see it as a poor shadow of its glory days as a thriving 1950s seaside resort.But the dramatic discovery of a Bronze Age skeleton has resurrected considerable historical interest in the district and may just prove that a long-forgotten definition of its name is not merely based on myth and legend.

For more than half a century, the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica has provided researchers with the data needed to study everything from local amphibian and reptile populations to global warming. To meet a growing demand for La Selva's treasure trove of biological and environmental data, the main facilities are getting a $785,000 high-tech makeover that includes wireless access to measurement systems that collect and transmit data and provide a dynamic 3-D analysis of the rainforest canopy.

The ability to see requires healthy eyes, but it also requires that signals can get from the eyes to the parts of the brain involved in vision. A Boston neuroscientist hopes to deliver a ray of hope to the blind by bypassing eyes and optic nerves damaged by illness or head trauma and sending image information directly to the regions of the brain that process them.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sexual reproduction may be nearly as old as animal life itself, according to researchers who discovered a new species of organism that lived 540 million years ago.The tube-like creatures called Funisia dorothea anchored themselves in abundant flocks onto the shallow, sandy seabed of what is now the Australian outback.

LONDON (Reuters) - Gas-belching volcanoes may be to blame for a series of mass extinctions over the last 545 million years, including that of the dinosaurs, new evidence suggested on Thursday.A series of eruptions that formed the Deccan Traps in what is now India pumped huge amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere 65 million years ago, with likely devastating repercussions for the Earth's climate, scientists said.

GENEVA (AFP) - The United Nations has long enjoyed the glorious view of Lake Geneva from its offices here, but will now turn its setting to a practical advantage by using its water to heat its buildings.The UN will invest 35 million Swiss francs (35 million dollars, 22 million euros) in the project which also involves other international organisations, the head of Geneva's chief utility company SIG told journalists on Wednesday.

PARIS (AFP) - A world without fresh water would be a world bereft of humans, and yet one in five people lacks regular access to this most basic of life-sustaining substances.By 2025, fully a third of the planet's growing population could find itself scavenging for safe drinking water, the United Nations has warned ahead of World Water Day on Saturday.

OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada on Thursday delayed approval of the sale of its leading space firm MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates to a US defense contractor as opponents of the deal feared a major setback in Canada's space capabilities.Industry Minister Jim Prentice decided to take 30 more days to review the purchase of MDA, builder of the robot Dextre attached to the International Space Station, by US firm Alliant Techsystems for 1.3 billion dollars (Canadian, US).

NEW YORK (AFP) - More than 60 teams chasing 10 million dollars in prize money have entered a competition designed to inspire the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles, organizers said Thursday.The Progressive Automotive X PRIZE will test the vehicles in a cross-country race from September 2009 in which they are expected to achieve fuel efficiency of at least 100 miles per gallon (no more than 2.3 liters per 100 kilometers).Unveiling the competition at the New York International Auto Show, city Mayor Michael Bloomberg described the initiative as "an excellent example of how the private sector can spur solutions to our most complex challenges."

Macedonian archeologists unearthed today a skeleton of a human dating from 7,000 B.C., suspected of being the oldest neolithic inhabitant on the Balkans.The skeleton has been uncovered at the archeological site Grncarica, at the Stip's nearby village of Krupiste."Having in mind that the settlement is one of the oldest on the Balkans, it is only normal to assume that the oldest man that lived on the Balkans is in question," said the archeologist Trajanka Jovcevska.

SOUTH PENDER ISLAND. The ancient remains of 45 First Nations people were finally laid to rest in a traditional reburial ceremony at Poets Cove Resort and Spa Tuesday morning.As the box containing the crumbled bones of their ancestors was covered with the red-brown soil of Pender Island, overlaid with sword ferns, members of Saanich First Nations and supporters from other southern Vancouver Island bands prayed that laying the spirits to rest will mean a better future for their communities and for Poets Cove.

Almost 700 years after the Pope burned their leader at the stake, the Knights Templar are back. Or are they? Patrick Barkham tries to find out why the long-vanished order of Crusaders might suddenly be advertising in the press

Among the many unintended and unforeseen consequences of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that began five years ago this week was the wholesale looting of Iraq's museums and archaeological sites. Iraq has been called the cradle of civilization. Starting with the Sumerian civilization, which more than 5,000 years ago produced what may be the world's first examples of writing and math, the area centered on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and known as Mesopotamia has been home to a succession of cultures -- Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. Many believe southern Iraq was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. But within weeks of the first American airstrike, the cradle of civilization had been robbed. Baghdad's National Museum of Iraq, among the globe's premier repositories of antiquities, was ransacked over the course of a week in April 2003. Statues were dragged down the steps, artifacts six millennia old were carried off in plastic bags. American soldiers were not dispatched to protect the museum until the thieves were long gone.

An analysis of six-million-year-old bones from an early human ancestor that lived in what is now Kenya suggests that the species was the earliest known hominin to walk, a new study says."This provides really solid evidence that these fossils actually belong to an upright-walking early human ancestor," said study lead author Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Evidence of a dense brine that once oozed on Mars could bring new vigor to the search for salt-loving life-forms on the red planet.Mikki Osterloo of the University of Hawaii and colleagues have discovered hundreds of small depressions that appear to be filled with the kinds of salt deposits that form on Earth when water evaporates.

A "dry fog" that muted the sun's rays in A.D. 536 and plunged half the world into a famine-inducing chill was triggered by the eruption of a supervolcano, a new study says.The cause of the sixth-century global dimming has long been a matter of debate, but a team of international researchers recently discovered acidic sulphate molecules, which are signs of an eruption, in Greenland ice.This is the first physical evidence for the A.D. 536 event, which according to ancient texts from Mesoamerica, Europe, and Asia brought on a cold darkness that withered crops, sparked wars, and helped spread pestilence.

Melting snow appears to have formed a large number of Martian gullies sometime in the past few million years, according to a new study.Gullies were first discovered on Mars eight years ago, and experts have been debating since then about what created them.Despite initial theories that they might be proof of liquid water on modern Mars, the most recently formed gullies appear to have been made by dry landslides.

A powerful supernova hundreds of years ago sent light bouncing off neighboring dust clouds, and that "echoed light" is just now reaching Earth, providing clues to the spectacular event.The massive blast took place 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.New images of the light echoes, taken at Chile's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, provide the best look yet of a supernova explosion long after it was first visible from Earth.

CAIRO (AFP) - Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass threatened on Wednesday to withdraw archeological items on show in Switzerland because of a parallel picture exhibition he deemed offensive to Egypt.Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told AFP he had sent a letter of protest to the Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland.

Scientists at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in collaboration with the Technical University of Braunschweig (TUBS), Germany have completed the first ever series of flights by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Antarctica. This is the first time that unpiloted UAVs have been used in the Antarctic and the successful flights open up a major new technique for gathering scientific data in the harshest and remotest environment on Earth.

A group of volunteer engineers are finishing the design for a home-brewed wind turbine that will bring electricity to off-the-grid Guatemalan villages by this summer.After the U.S. engineers finish the design, local workers in the town of Quetzaltenango will manufacture the small-scale turbine. It will produce 10-15 watts of electricity, enough to charge a 12-volt battery that can power simple devices like LED lights.

New technologies seem to make almost everyone's job easier, and archaeology is no exception. One of the newest and most exciting tools in the archaeologist's kit is aerial laser scanning, sometimes referred to as Light Detection And Ranging, or LiDAR. It works a bit like radar, but instead of using radio waves, it uses infrared laser pulses. The echoes can "see" through trees and shrubs, revealing the precise contours of the ground surface.

Neanderthals and humans once shared a common ancestor, but we split from the stocky, hairy hominid group as long as 400,000 to 350,000 years ago, concludes a new study.That estimate matches prior DNA studies, putting a date to the time when human beings first emerged on the planet. But would these first humans have been anatomically just like us? Probably not, suggests lead author Timothy Weaver, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis.

The discovery of silver punch-marked coins of the pre-Mauryan period dating back to 600 BC to 400 BC in Wari-Bateshwar reveals that the place was a Mahajanapada, one of the earliest kingdoms or states in the Indian subcontinent.The silver coins and artefacts unearthed and collected so far and geographical positioning of the place both are apparently leading archaeologists to an astonishing discovery.

A new study of a "hobbit" skull found in Indonesia scores a point for those who believe that tiny hominids who once lived there should be classified as their own species. The study concludes that the 18,000-year-old skull from the island of Flores is unlikely to be a shrunken or diseased Homo sapiens, as some have argued, and that its ancestry may instead trace back to ancient Homo species in Africa.The Indonesian hobbits have been a source of controversy since their bones were published in 2004. Some researchers have argued that the hominids were so unusual--with chimpanzee-sized brains, 1-meter-tall stature, and other peculiarities--that they deserve to be classified as their own species, H. floresiensis. Others contend that the hobbits are merely H. sapiens who evolved small stature because they lived on an island and that the one tiny skull belonged to a diseased individual

Scientists have detected water vapor in the spinning disks that surround two newly formed stars, where planets are born.A team of researchers spotted the water molecules in disks of dust and gas around DR Tau and AS 205A, which are around 457 light-years and 391 light-years, respectively, away from Earth.The spinning disks of particles may eventually coalesce to form planets.

In the Spring of 2005, Canadian divers conducting a project in MacDonald Lake at the Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve, came upon an ancient stone structure - 40 feet below the present lake level. Initially the structure was considered to have been ferried by glaciers created during the last ice age, thousands of years ago and dumped where they happened to melt at the end of one of the more recent cold-freezes

If physicists are right, most of the matter in the universe is made up of exotic stuff you can't see, called dark matter.Usually, people think of dark matter as existing only on the far edge of galaxies, posing such a deep, dark mystery that only the professionals can understand it. But that would be wrong on two counts: First, there's probably some dark matter zipping through you right now. Second, the mystery of dark matter is now explained in an education kit that has been designed for high-schoolers - and is freely available over the Web.

Saturn: jewel of the solar system, taker of breaths, ringed beauty. Even veteran astronomers can't help but gasp when they see her through a small telescope.Red Alert: Saturn's rings are vanishing.Around the world, amateur astronomers have noticed the change; Saturn's wide open rings are rapidly narrowing into a thin line."The rings have narrowed considerably in the last year," Efrain Morales Rivera reports. "The Cassini division (a dark gap in the rings) is getting hard to see."

The Arctic is losing its old, thick ice faster than in previous years, according to satellite data.The loss has continued since the end of the Arctic summer, despite cold weather across the northern hemisphere.The warm 2007 summer saw the smallest area of ice ever recorded in the region, and scientists say 2008 could follow a similar pattern.Older floes are thicker and less saline than newly-formed ice, meaning they can survive warm spells better.

British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at the age of 90.The Somerset-born author achieved his greatest fame in 1968 when his short story The Sentinel was turned into the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.His visions of space travel and computing sparked the imagination of readers and scientists alike.

A 4,000-year-old Bronze Age skeleton has been unearthed by archaeologists working on a site in east Kent.Canterbury Archaeological Trust said the curled-up skeleton was an example of a "Beaker" burial because of the pottery vessel placed at its feet.Education officer Marion Green said the "beautifully decorated" pot could have been "a type of beer mug".

Aerospace giant EADS says it will need a production line of rocket planes to satisfy the space tourism market.The European company's Astrium division, makers of the Ariane rocket, has plans for a commercial vehicle to take ticketed passengers above 100km.Its market assessment suggests there would be 15,000 people a year prepared to part with some 200,000 euros (£160,000) for the ride of a lifetime.

Ayvali , Turkey -- Night descends on this desolate valley as the yatsi - the final Muslim prayer call from the muezzin - ricochets across the gorge.A donkey brays, its hooves giving off a staccato clop-clop as it heads for home. Otherwise the village is serene except for the locals sharing a feast on a stone deck nearby, chattering away in what is, to our ears, indecipherable Turkish. The light casts eerie shadows upon holes in the cliff where villagers made their homes for thousands of years.

Mars and Venus, those seemingly contrasting planets of self-help book fame, have more in common than you might think. Two nearly identical spacecraft around Mars and Venus have compared the two worlds' atmospheres and found them to be surprisingly similar.The ESA's Mars Express and Venus Express are currently in orbit around the planets taking measurements of their atmospheres as they interact with solar radiation. The data show that charged particles from the gas layers around both planets are being scavenged by solar wind and storms.

Modern humans are known to have left Africa in a wave of migration around 50,000 years ago, but another, smaller group -- possibly a different subspecies -- left the continent 50,000 years earlier, suggests a new study.While all humans today are related to the second "out of Africa" group, it's likely that some populations native to Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia retain genetic vestiges of the earlier migrants, according to the paper's author, Michael Schillaci.

PARIS (Reuters) - Horst Rippert, an 88-year old former pilot of Germany's Luftwaffe, has said in a forthcoming book that he may have killed French writer and war pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery in 1944.Saint-Exupery, who achieved worldwide fame with his fairy-tale-like book "The Little Prince," died in mysterious circumstances when his plane came down near Marseilles while on a reconnaissance mission. His body has never been found.

Sharjah: An exhibition displaying six skeletal castings 7,000 years old was opened to the public on Sunday, offering an insight into the Stone Age period in the region.The exhibition was inaugurated by His Highness Dr Shaikh Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah, at the Sharjah Archaeological Museum.

HAMAMATSU, Shizuoka -- An ancient wooden tablet indicating that a local county office loaned silk thread to peasants has been recovered from an archeological site dating back to the Nara Period (710-794).The tablet, dating back to 724, has gathered attention as the first piece of historical data to show that county offices were deeply involved in the production and administration of silk products, which were exacted in lieu of taxes.

NEW YORK: Using multi-coloured spray paint, researchers have shown how rock-structures similar to the 'stromatolites' that scientists think are among the earliest fossils on Earth can form in the absence of life.Stromatolites are chalky mounds built up of layers of microbial secretions and trapped sediments. Fossilised stromatolites discovered in Western Australia have been dated to 3.4 billion years ago, to the so-called Precambrian era.

Paul Ehrlich rocketed to fame in 1968 with The Population Bomb, a dire forecast of imminent global famine. It might have seemed odd for such predictions to come from someone trained as an entomologist, but Ehrlich, now head of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology, has always had a knack for seeing the big picture, even if his specific predictions haven't always panned out. In the past four decades Ehrlich has become renowned for his work on population genetics and has won enough awards to fill a small room.

It's one of the great mysteries of the history of Western art: A mural by Leonardo da Vinci that has not been seen for 500 years. The vast painting of the fury of war is said to have been one of the landmarks of Renaissance art.Now, an Italian engineer has joined his scientific knowledge with his passion for art in an Indiana Jones-type quest. He believes the mural is hidden behind another frescoed wall, and he says he can prove it.

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

A team of U.S. researchers has proposed a new "working model" for when and how humans came to the New World.Their research adds credence to a controversial theory that ancient seafarers, travelling by boat along the ice-fringed British Columbia coast, launched the peopling of the Americas about 15,000 years ago.

The wax is still melted on to the chalk pillar which served as an Easter Sunday altar for the men of the Suffolk Regiment more than 90 years ago.Old helmets are scattered around the floor. A heap of cans, including a tin of Turnwrights Toffee Delight, lies alongside a collection of old stone jars - flagons of rum, perhaps, to numb the fear of the battle ahead.

Hanging Rock's famous Ruataniwha image is probably derived from an Asian-Pacific culture more than 4000 years old, according to geographer, ecologist and planner Haikai Tane.Prof Tane is an expert in traditional Dao iconography, thetransfer of knowledge through symbols.He recently discovered a link between early Asian-Pacific people's iconography and cave pictographs found in New Zealand.

An Egyptian mummy kept on display in a provincial museum for nearly 80 years has been identified as a son of the powerful pharaoh Ramesses II.The 3,000-year-old relic was thought to have been a female temple dancer, but a hospital CT scan showed features so reminiscent of the Egyptian royal family that experts are 90 per cent sure it is one of the 110 children Ramesses is thought to have fathered.

The head of Nasa has been outlining its new strategy at a major conference in Houston, Texas.The US space agency will concentrate more on exploring the outer Solar System and a little less on exploring Mars.Dr Mike Griffin tried to reassure the community of scientists who study the Red Planet, but also warned them to be prepared for change.

Scientists have measured the composition of oxygen at the birth of the Solar System.The discovery is a vital piece of data for reconstructing the evolution of our cosmic neighbourhood.Nasa's Genesis spacecraft spent more than two years collecting oxygen from the outermost layers of the Sun.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Two astronauts worked outside the International Space Station early Sunday, attaching mechanical arms to a Canadian-made robot that will take over human tasks and help reduce the need for risky spacewalks.But the task before Mission Specialists Richard Linnehan and Mike Foreman got slightly more difficult when they encountered trouble releasing a couple of fasteners on one of the robot Dextre's arms.

ZURICH, Switzerland - Glaciers are shrinking at record rates and many could disappear within decades, the U.N. Environment Program said Sunday.Scientists measuring the health of almost 30 glaciers around the world found that ice loss reached record levels in 2006, the U.N. agency said.

Thousands of people have joined demonstrations in London and Glasgow, to mark the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.Demonstrators called for troops to be withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan and for Gaza's borders to be re-opened.Organisers said 40,000 people took part in London but police said 10,000. A Stop the War spokesman said Iraq had made the world a more dangerous place.

Shapwick, in Somerset, is in many ways a typical English village, but it it has been laid out on a very distinctive 'ladder pattern'.This air photo shows the pattern, with two parallel roads running top to bottom, and a series of rungs of the ladder running between them. Most of the houses are set along the 'rungs' of the ladder. Note the church at the centre, and the Manor house at the top.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - With Dextre the robot's power problem solved, astronauts ventured outside the international space station on Saturday to put together the bulk of the gigantic walking and working machine.The robot's hands were attached to its 11-foot arms during the first spacewalk of Endeavour's space station trip. This time, astronauts aimed to connect the arms to the shoulders. First, though, the robot was going to sit up on its transport bed, rising like Frankenstein as one astronaut put it.

Europe's space freighter, the ATV, has demonstrated its last-gasp emergency stop and retreat ability.This Collision Avoidance Manoeuvre is what the truck will initiate if it suffers a major failure just as it is about to dock with the space station.The practice manoeuvre was demanded by Europe's partners before they would let ATV approach the platform on 3 April.

A pair of meteorites discovered in Antarctica are in a class all of their own, a major space conference has been told.Studies of the extra-terrestrial rocks have revealed qualities that set them apart from any meteorites previously known to science.Researchers are pondering where in our Solar System the meteorites could have originated.An origin on Planet Venus has been discussed, but now looks unlikely.

A group accused of operating clandestine mines across an important but sparsely guarded complex of neolithic Chinese culture is now facing criminal trial, Chinese government officials say.The illicit iron-ore mines, accompanied by crude on-site refining facilities, seriously defaced the Niuheliang site, which holds some of China's earliest known temples, altars, sacred sculptures, and stargazing structures, according to the officials.