Newsdesk Archive

WASHINGTON - As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

WASHINGTON - After years cutting of budgets for tracking global warming, President Bush on Monday proposed more than a $1 billion increase over the next five years for launching more and better Earth-observing satellites.The president's 2009 budget provides money for six new NASA satellites to watch Earth's changes, costing at least $910 million over the next five years.

In the past 100,000 years, modern humans have colonized the far corners of the globe, adapting to new environments as they migrated. Researchers have long assumed that these dramatic transitions resulted in a sort of accelerated evolution in which genes for traits such as skin color and stature changed rapidly to allow humans to survive in their new habitats. Now, a team of French and Spanish researchers has found powerful new evidence to support this idea, identifying 582 genes that have evolved differently in different populations in the past 60,000 years, including a dozen that protect people from obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and other diseases.

NASA is planning a major new mission to the outer solar system, along with three new robotic missions to the Moon, and two new Earth science missions, according to its 2009 budget request.President George W Bush requested a total of $17.614 billion dollars for the agency in fiscal year 2009, up 2.9% over NASA's actual budget for 2008.

Scientists have long agreed that climate change could have a profound impact on the planet; from melting ice sheets and withering rainforests, to flash floods and droughts.Now a team of climate experts has ranked the most fragile and vulnerable regions on the planet, and warned they are in danger of sudden and catastrophic collapse before the end of the century.

My house was burglarized over the holidays, and after the first few days of feeling nothing, I am now full of fear and anxiety, and can't stop talking about it.I've told the entire story to the guy repairing a street lamp across from my house, the city employee pruning bushes down the road and every single solitary person I know, even if I know them only in passing.

Your'e looking at the oldest surviving map of Britain, dating from around 1360.And, give or take a bit of poetic licence north of the border, it's startlingly accurate.There are the Severn, Thames and Humber, the loop of the Wear in Durham and the Thames estuary, all easily recognisable.The Gough Map contains 600 cities and towns and 3,000 miles of roads

A lost city at the bottom of the ocean contains chemical traces that suggests it could have been the cradle of life on Earth.Some believe the right ingredients for life made their way from outer space. Darwin thought it emerged in a "warm little pond" and others have looked for answers on the sea floor.Now evidence to back the latter submarine idea has emerged from the "Lost City" which lies at a depth of 2,600 feet, where creamy white to grey spires, pinnacles and 18 storey chimneys teem with microscopic marine life, as a volcanic system on the Atlantic sea floor that gradually pushes America and Britain apart.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German schools will launch a comic book next week that aims to teach above all underprivileged children about the Nazi era and the Holocaust.Although German schools already make a big effort to give pupils a thorough education about the Nazi era, racist violence remains a problem, and the revival of Germany's Jewish community has brought a rise in anti-Semitism with it.

Want a peek at Saturn as seen from space? A new interactive 3-D viewer that uses a game engine and allows users to travel to Saturn and see it the way the Cassini spacecraft sees it is now online at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/CASSIE and NASA's Cassini page.The Cassini at Saturn Interactive Explorer makes the real Cassini mission data fully available in three colorful, easy-to-use expeditions.

LONDON (AFP) - The defence ministry has raised objections over proposals to ramp up the proportion of the country's energy produced by wind farms, because of concerns over the impact of the turbines on military radar, The Times reported on Monday.A spokesman for Britain's business ministry conceded there had been "issues" regarding potential sites for wind farms, and military radar systems.The Ministry of Defence (MoD), however, insisted that all applications for new wind farms would be assessed on a "site-by-site" basis.

WASHINGTON - The maiden flight of an unmanned European cargo ship is just one of several of tightly-packed arrivals and departures coming up for the International Space Station (ISS).The European Space Agency's (ESA) first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is set to launch toward the space station as early as Feb. 22 between a pair of U.S. shuttle missions hauling new modules to the orbital laboratory.

Chock-full of famous Roman Baths, Celtic kings, Georgian crescents and Jane Austen, the history of Bath already ran to quite a weighty tome.But archaeologists admitted yesterday that two new chapters would have to be written after amazing discoveries made while a new sewer was being dug.

The U.S. Navy yesterday test fired an incredibly powerful new big gun designed to replace conventional weaponry aboard ships. Sci-fi fans will recognize its awesome power and futuristic technology.The big gun uses electromagnetic energy instead of explosive chemical propellants to fire a projectile farther and faster. The railgun, as it is called, will ultimately fire a projectile more than 230 miles (370 kilometers) with a muzzle velocity seven times the speed of sound (Mach 7) and a velocity of Mach 5 at impact.

THANE: Two ancient temples were recently discovered by villagers in Gunj village of Wada taluka in Thane district.However, the period to which these temples belong is yet to be known.It was during a visit to Parshuram temple on a nearby hillock that some villagers stumbled upon these two abandoned and ruined temples.

SUPPOSED evidence Australia has been subject to prehistoric tsunamis up to 20m in height over the past 10,000 years could just be the result of Aboriginal occupation, a major conference is set to hear tomorrow.Archaeologists from the Australian National University say the theory about the mega-tsunamis, which has influenced the development of emergency service plans in Western Australia, is not supported by evidence.

New evidence of prehistoric life has been discovered during motorway excavations in Merseyside.A team of archaeologists found flints and burnt hazelnuts during preparations for a new junction of the M62.The archaeological findings date from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age periods - around 5000 to 2000 BC.The pieces were found while the excavations were being carried out for a new link road at Junction six near Huyton.

The final resting place of three German U-boats, nicknamed "Hitler's lost fleet", has been found at the bottom of the Black Sea.The submarines had been carried 2,000 miles overland from Germany to attack Russian shipping during the Second World War, but were scuttled as the war neared its end. Now, more than 60 years on, explorers have located the flotilla of three submarines off the coast of Turkey.

The best birthday present Harry Ettlinger ever got arrived on the frigid morning of January 28, 1945. The 19-year-old Army private was shivering in the back of a truck bound from France toward southern Belgium. There the Battle of the Bulge, raging for most of a month, had just ended, but the fighting continued. The Germans had begun their retreat with the new year, as Private Ettlinger and thousands of other soldiers massed for a counterassault.

Want to spend a few evenings hiding under the covers in abject fear? Might we suggest the new nonfiction book about global warming, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, released last week by National Geographic Books.Author Mark Lynas starts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's official estimate -- that the Earth's average temperature will rise by up to 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100 -- and explains what the world will look like if the temperature rises 1 degree, 2 degrees and up through 6 degrees Celsius (1.8, 3.6 and 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit; all subsequent references in degrees Celsius). It's based entirely on peer-reviewed science; Lynas spent several years combing through academic journals in search of relevant articles, and then put the pieces together for this planet-wide view.

Scientists and space policy experts say they will debate whether President George Bush's call for a return to the moon and voyage to Mars is feasible.Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent the last four years to design, build and test spacecraft in the program dubbed Constellation, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

U.S. and Indian officials have signed an agreement for cooperation in space exploration.The signing ceremony took place Friday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and Indian Space Research Organization Chairman G. Madhavan Nair signed the framework agreement, which replaces a 1997 agreement for research in Earth and atmospheric science.

UN peacekeepers in the disputed African territory of Western Sahara have vandalised ancient rock paintings, a UN official has told a UK newspaper.The Times has published pictures of the paintings, some 6,000 years old, showing them defaced with spray paint.Julian Harston, the UN official responsible for Western Sahara, said he had been shocked by the vandalism.He said funds would now be sought from the UN cultural organisation, Unesco, to remove the graffiti.

CANBERRA, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Research into the common rat has revealed how people and certain diseases migrated around the ancient world, Australian scientists said on Friday.A study of DNA from 165 Black Rat specimens from 32 countries has found six distinct family groups, with each group coming from a different part of Asia.

BEIJING, Jan. 30 (Xinhua) -- China is publishing a cultural encyclopedia that experts believe will be an unprecedented summary of the country's historic works since the founding of the New China.The series, "Zhong Hua Da Dian" ("The Great Encyclopedia of China"), had 49 volumes in print with more than 100 million words as of 2007.

Ohio's Adena culture represents a turning point in state history. Situated between the nomadic hunting and gathering cultures of the Archaic period and the more settled farming cultures of the later Woodland period, the Adena culture represented the dawn of a new way of life for Ohio's ancient people.

A team of Australians has constructed a laboratory in one of the most inhospitable places on earth as part of efforts to preserve the ice-encrusted hut built by the Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson in 1911.The laboratory will serve as a base for experts to conserve hundreds of artefacts frozen in ice and snow for nearly a century after being left behind by the young adventurer and his team at the end of their ill-fated expedition.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) - Brazilian paleontologists Thursday unveiled a fossil of a creature that they said is the "missing link" between prehistoric and present-day crocodiles.Called "Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi," the predator measured 1.5-1.7 meters (56-64 inches), weighed about 40 kilograms (88 pounds) and lived in the late Cretaceous Period (80-85 million years ago) in the region of Palo Alto, in Sao Paulo state.

A new species of mammal has been discovered in the mountains of Tanzania, scientists report.The bizarre-looking creature, dubbed Rhynochocyon udzungwensis, is a type of giant elephant shrew, or sengi.The cat-sized animal, which is reported in the Journal of Zoology, looks like a cross between a miniature antelope and a small ant eater.It has a grey face, a long, flexible snout, a bulky, amber body, a jet-black rump and it stands on spindly legs."This is one of the most exciting discoveries of my career," said Galen Rathbun, from the California Academy of Sciences, who helped to confirm the animal was new to science along with an international team of colleagues.

The first consignment of seeds bound for the "doomsday vault" on Svalbard has arrived in Norway.Twenty-one boxes containing 7,000 seed samples from 36 African nations were sent by the Nigeria-based International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.The final leg of the journey will take the seeds to the remote Arctic Island.

Climate change could cause severe crop losses in South Asia and southern Africa over the next twenty years, a study in the journal Science says.The findings suggest southern Africa could lose more than 30% of its main crop, maize, by 2030.In South Asia losses of many regional staples, such as rice, millet and maize could top 10%, the report says.

An asteroid once thought to be on a collision course with Mars passed the Red Planet today without incident.Astronomers first estimated that asteroid 2007 WD5 had as high as a 3.6 percent chance of striking the planet. Newer observations kept lowering the odds for the 164-foot space rock until Jan. 9, when NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) program office effectively ruled out chances of an impact.

You're in your jouncing people-carrier, taking in the agreeable but unremarkable view, and then suddenly it's upon you; a pointy attention-grabber at the side of the road, towering street furniture in the shape of a hazard-warning equilateral. This is crushing historical time expressed in trigonometry.Old Egypt hands could be forgiven for thinking that the terrible shark's fin that I'm talking about is the sort of thing that looms in your windshield as you're driving through the suburbs of Cairo.

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's government is unwilling and unable to halt destruction in the Amazon rainforest despite emergency measures it announced last week to curb rising deforestation, environmental experts say.High commodity prices and increased land use elsewhere in Brazil are driving ranchers and farmers deeper into the Amazon in search of cheap land, environmentalists say.

Nearly a half a billion years ago, tiny horseshoe crabs crept along the shorelines much like today's larger versions do, new fossil evidence suggests.Two nearly complete fossil specimens discovered in Canada reveal a new genus of horseshoe crab, pushing their origins back at least 100 million years earlier than previously thought.Dubbed Lunataspis aurora, the ancient horseshoe crab is estimated to have been just 1.5 inches (4 centimeters) from head to tail-tip.

As the first luxury hotel opens on Easter Island, Michelle Jana Chan reports from a location that's not as isolated as it was.I wondered if the pilot sighed with relief as the wedge of land emerged on the horizon. There is only deep Pacific Ocean blue between Santiago, the capital of Chile, and Easter Island, and, after five hours in the air, the cones of three extinct volcanoes rising from the sea are as welcome as they are dramatic.

KOCHI: An underwater exploration to be undertaken by the Southern Naval Command for tracing the maritime history of the Malabar Coast will begin on Wednesday. K.P. Rajendran, Revenue Minister, will flag off the exploration on February 1 from Kottapuram Fort Junction at 8 a.m.Rear Admiral H.S. Bhaktavatsala; P.J. Cherian, director of the Kerala Council for Historical Research; S. Hemachandran, director of the State Archaeology Department; and Cdr. N.K. Reddy of the Southern Naval Command will attend the ceremony.

(AP) -- Here's a vision of the not-so-distant future:-Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items - and, by extension, consumers - wherever they go, from a distance.-A seamless, global network of electronic "sniffers" will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, "live spam," may be beamed at them.

Scientists could have overlooked a new kind of "stuff," reports Roger HighfieldA radical new proposal to explain one of the enduring mysteries of the universe says we are bathed in an entirely new kind of matter, consisting of "unparticles."

People were wearing shoes at least 40,000 years ago, a new study published today suggests.Scientists made the discovery while examining toe bones from a 40,000-year-old skeleton in a Tianyuan cave near Beijing in China.

Storm is arguably the world's most sustained and successful computer malware campaign, writes Linton Chiswick. Named after the freak weather buffeting Europe through mid-January 2007, it appeared in the form of an email headed '230 dead as storm batters Europe'.Hundreds of thousands of Storm emails were sent across the globe in an eight-hour period on Thursday, January 18, each containing a file that ­ if clicked ­ surreptitiously infected the recipient's PC, turning it into a part-time zombie member of the Storm botnet, a network of machines that could be controlled from afar.

MANILA (AFP) - The Philippine government should seriously consider other sources of energy such as nuclear, solar and geothermal rather than rely on oil, an energy summit in Manila was told Wednesday."We must have a common and sustainable programme of energy development from a variety of available and indigenous sources... at a cost which will make us more competitive in the world market," congressman Juan Miguel Arroyo, chairman of the congressional committee on energy told the summit.

PARIS (AFP) - Astrophysicists believe they are closing in on one of the cosmos' great mysteries: why the expansion of the Universe, triggered by the Big Bang, is accelerating.The answer could be tantalisingly within reach, according to their study, released on Wednesday by the British weekly science journal Nature.A decade ago, astronomers were stunned to learn that the Universe was expanding more quickly than in the past.

Climate experts from 16 of the world's largest economies are in Hawaii for the second in the series of President Bush's Major Economies Meetings.They will be looking to forge common ground between "old" emitters like the US and Europe and the "new" polluters, such as China and India.The meeting aims to feed ideas into the UN climate negotiations process.The EU had threatened to boycott the talks unless the US offered specific proposals rather than general talks.

A fly-by by a Nasa unmanned space probe has revealed evidence of "widespread" volcanism on the planet Mercury.The US Mercury Messenger spacecraft made a close pass of the first planet from the Sun on 14 January.Evidence from the Mariner 10 probe launched in the 1970s had provided only tenuous evidence for volcanic activity.In addition, only 45% of Mercury's surface had previously been mapped; Messenger has already covered a further 30% of the planet.

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq has formally ratified the UN's Kyoto Protocol on climate change, according to a government statement seen by AFP on Saturday."The presidential council ratified in its session on January 23 a law according to which the Republic of Iraq will join the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol," the statement said.The Kyoto Protocol legally commits industrialised countries which have signed and ratified it to trim their output of six carbon gases seen as being responsible for global warming.

Two giant plumes erupted recently on Jupiter, moving faster than any other Jovian feature and leaving global streaks of red cloud particles in their wake.New analyses of the March 2007 outbursts suggest internal heat plays a significant role in generating such weather patterns.

CARBONDALE -- An ancient Egyptian artifact is leaving Little Egypt behind, and will be sent back home.When officials at the University museum at SIU first received this bronze cat object, they knew it was probably something they would have to return. Museum officials contacted the Egyptian embassy, and learned the artifact is a sacred item.

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, California -- As Southern California faces a worsening water crisis, Orange County has implemented a $480 million microfiltration system so advanced it can turn waste water into drinking water. The Groundwater Replenishment System, which started pumping purified water on Jan. 10th, is the largest of its kind in the world and will provide water to more than 100,000 Orange County families for the same or less than buying it wholesale. And because sewage is diverted to the purification system, less waste is dumped into natural water supplies.

Humans have altered Earth so much that scientists say a new epoch in the planet's geologic history has begun.Say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene.Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch:Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns.Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature.Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns.Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain.

A Purdue University archaeologist discovered an intact ancient iron ore mine in South America that shows how civilizations before the Inca Empire were mining this valuable ore."Archaeologists know people in the Old and New worlds have mined minerals for thousands and thousands of years," said Kevin J. Vaughn, an assistant professor of anthropology who studies the Nasca civilization, which existed from A.D. 1 to A.D. 750. "Iron mining in the Old World, specifically in Africa, goes back 40,000 years. And we know the ancient people in Mexico, Central America and North America were mining for various materials. There isn't much evidence for these types of mines.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Black Death that decimated populations in Europe and elsewhere during the middle of the 14th century may not have been a blindly indiscriminate killer, as some experts have believed.An analysis of 490 skeletons from a London cemetery for Black Death victims demonstrated that the infection did not affect everyone equally, two U.S. scientists said on Monday.

The history of medicine in Iran is as old and as rich as its civilization. In the Avesta, science and medicine rise above class, ethnicity, nationality, race, gender and religion.Some of the earliest practices of ancient Iranian medicine have been documented in the Avesta and other Zoroastrian religious texts.During the Achaemenid era (559-330 BCE), the 21 books of Avesta encompassing 815 chapters were an encyclopedia of science consisting of medicine, astronomy, law, social science, philosophy, general knowledge, logic and biology.

In old lhasa, holy city of Tibet, stands the sacred Jokhang Temple. Inside Jokhang is a golden statue of Buddha, the most revered statue in Tibet. It was brought as a dowry from China in the 7th century, when a Chinese princess married a Tibetan king. The statue marks not only the wide-scale introduction of Buddhism to Tibet but a crucial union in a long history of alliances and wars between two nations.Pilgrims by the thousands arrive daily in Lhasa, masses of them walking in the same sacred direction around Jokhang. The fact that the statue is still there to worship is a surprise. Tibet, like so many places, has been scraped out like a gourd, its antiquities smuggled away.

A 2,500-year-old tomb containing nearly four dozen victims of human sacrifice has been excavated in eastern China, yielding a treasure trove of precious artifacts and new insights into ritual customs during the era of Confucius, archaeologists say.The tomb was discovered in January 2007 after police caught looters plundering the site in the province of Jiangxi (see map), said Xu Changqing, who heads the excavation team.

Tokyo - Forget Renaissance Europe. The world's first oil paintings go back nearly 14 centuries to murals in Afghanistan's Bamiyan caves, a Japanese researcher says.Buddhist images painted in the central Afghan region, dated to around 650 AD, are the earliest examples of oil used in art history, says Yoko Taniguchi, an expert at Japan's National Research Institute for Cultural Properties.

It's only natural that the Sunshine State Archaeological Society decided on the Alachua Women's Club as the site of its first annual Alachua Stone Age Fair.The building's exterior is made entirely out of chert, a fine-grained sedimentary rock similar to flint that was often used by native peoples to carve tools for hunting and fishing."When I saw this building, I knew it was the perfect place, because it's so appropriate," said Bob Knight, an amateur archaeologist and SSAS president.

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - U.S., New Zealand and Italian marine scientists began a two-month voyage to Antarctica's northern coast Tuesday as part of the first-ever census of Antarctic marine biodiversity, Prime Minister Helen Clark said.The census of Antarctic marine life is a multinational research project "involving 23 countries and 11 coordinated voyages to survey marine ecosystems and habitats in waters surrounding Antarctica," she said.

The commercial rocket company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is one step closer to creating a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle after its Falcon 9 rocket passed a multi-engine test earlier this month.The test was conducted on 18 January at the company's trial facility outside McGregor, Texas, US. Two Merlin 1C engines operated at full power during the test while attached to a rocket that was strapped to the launch pad.

Miniature "airbags" that deploy explosively to protect micro sensors during planetary exploration are being tested by Swiss and German researchers.Space agencies around the world are exploring ways to distribute large numbers of compact sensors or "motes" on the other planets.

BAGHDAD - He works as a blacksmith in one of Baghdad's swarming Shiite slums. But at least once a month, Abu Saif tucks a pistol into his belt, hops into a minibus taxi, and speeds south.His goal: to unearth ancient treasures from thousands of archaeological sites scattered across southern Iraq.Images of Baghdad's ransacked National Museum, custodian of a collection dating back to the beginning of civilization, provoked an international outcry in the early days of the war in 2003.

BEIJING (AFP) - Don't tell the thousands of Chinese stuck at railway stations or airports, but the chaos caused by a vicious cold spell afflicting much of China could be just a taste of things to come, experts say.The inclement weather and ensuing problems merely highlight the country's increasing vulnerability to the extreme weather swings characteristic of global climate change, experts say, and is likely to be repeated in future years.

PARIS (AFP) - Claims that microbial life began on Earth billions of years ago have been given support from a French team which drilled into mysterious layers of spongey rock in Western Australia.Researchers from the Institute for Global Physics in Paris used a technique called nanospectroscopy to pore over cores drilled from an enigmatic rock formation in the Pilbara region.

CAIRO (AFP) - A team of US archaeologists has discovered the ruins of a city dating back to the period of the first farmers 7,000 years ago in Egypt's Fayyum oasis, the supreme council of antiquities said on Tuesday."An electromagnetic survey revealed the existence in the Karanis region of a network of walls and roads similar to those constructed during the Greco-Roman period," the council's chief Zahi Hawwas said.

The World Bank has acknowledged a series of "omissions" in reforms it supported to promote the sustainable exploitation of the Congo rainforest, the world's second largest after the Amazon.In a document obtained by the FT, the bank defends an overall policy against the claim of environmental activists that it is encouraging uncontrolled logging which could damage irreversibly the world's second lung.The document was produced in response to an independent inquiry triggered by indigenous Pygmy communities in the forest who complained they were not consulted and that their livelihoods were threatened. The findings are due to be discussed at a World Bank board meeting on December 20.

THE Arctic ice cap has shrunk by an area twice the size of France over the past two years, the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research said.September measurements showed ice covering 4.13 million sq km, down from 5.3 million in 2005."The year 2008 promises to be a critical year on every level," said Jean-Claude Gascard, the body's research director and co-ordinator of a European scientific mission monitoring the effects of climate change across the Arctic.

IRBIL, Iraq - Towering above the modern streets and buildings of Irbil, the citadel's narrow alleyways and dusty courtyards stand almost deserted. Its mud-brick houses, built atop layers of ancient civilizations stretching back through millennia, are crumbling.Irbil's citadel, claimed to be one of the longest continuously inhabited urban areas on Earth, with a history of more than 8,000 years, is in danger. Its slopes are eroding and its buildings are collapsing.

A boat that was deliberately trapped in the Arctic ice in an effort to monitor the region's changing climate has broken free after more than 500 days.Tara sailed into the pack-ice in September 2006 and has been allowed to drift with the ocean currents and wind.The two-masted manned vessel is crammed full of sensors to monitor the ocean, atmosphere and ice.The ice-strengthened boat is now making its way to the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean.

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil on Thursday unveiled measures to slow deforestation of the Amazon region including one that calls for the army to help carry out inspections.The steps came one day after Brazilian officials said Amazon destruction had surged during the last five months of 2007. Deforestation rose from 94 square miles in August to 366 square miles in December."Our aim is to establish institutional mechanisms to prevent deforestation," Justice Minister Tarso Genro told reporters after an emergency meeting between Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his ministers.

NICOSIA, Cyprus - Marine archaeologists will begin work in June to uncover the sand-buried hull of a 2,300-year-old ship thought to have been ferrying wine when it sank off the coast of Cyprus, researchers said Thursday.The ship, dating from the fourth century B.C., is one of only a few to have been found so well-preserved, and it may shed light on the nautical and economic history of the period in the east Mediterranean, said Stella Demesticha, a University of Cyprus visiting marine archaeologist.

Australia's duck-billed platypus has been around much longer than previously thought, according to a new fossil study that found the egg-laying mammal's origin traces back to the dinosaur days.Platypuses and their closest evolutionary relatives, the four echidna species, were thought to have split from a common ancestor sometime in the past 17 million to 65 million years.

An important step has been taken in the quest to create a synthetic lifeform.A US team reports in Science magazine how it built the entire DNA code of a common bacterium in the laboratory using blocks of genetic material.The group hopes eventually to use engineered genomes to make organisms that can produce clean fuels and take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.Publication of the research gives others the chance to scrutinise it. Some have ethical concerns.

Deir Al-Banat necropolis, which lies in the southern Fayoum, comprises a series of rock hewn tombs dating from the Graeco-Roman period through to early Christian times. To the north is a well preserved ruin of a mediaeval monastery with a fired brick church at its centre, a mud brick residential area and a refectory where the monks would have communal meals.

FORT WORTH, Texas - U.S. military officials said Wednesday that fighter jets were training in a rural area the night of Jan. 8 when dozens of people reported seeing a UFO.Although officials at the Naval Air Station Reserve Base in Fort Worth initially said none of their planes were in the area of the UFO reports, they changed their story Wednesday, saying that 10 F-16 fighter jets built by Lockheed Martin Corp. were training near Stephenville, about 70 miles (112 kilometers) southwest of Fort Worth, about the time of the sightings.

A British scientist has found evidence linking the catastrophic collapse of a glacial ice dam in Canada more than 8,000 years ago and the rapid spread of agriculture across Europe around the same time.The dramatic discharge of freshwater from prehistoric Lake Agassiz - which covered much of Central Canada at the end of the last ice age - has long been blamed for altering global climate patterns and raising sea levels around the world by at least a metre in a matter of months.

CANBERRA (Reuters) - An Australian teenage girl has become the world's first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a "one-in-six-billion miracle."Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years old and her own liver failed."It's like my second chance at life," Brennan told local media, recounting how her body achieved what doctors said was the holy grail of transplant surgery. "It's kind of hard to believe."

When doctors want to see a body's organs they use an magnetic resonance imaging machine (MRI) to view beautifully clear images of what's inside.When archaeologists want to see what's below the surface of the earth they are now beginning to use a similar technology called computer-assisted radar tomography (CART).

The new designs for Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane and WhiteKnightTwo mothership were unveiled in New York today, and they include some unexpected twists. In fact, you could be excused if you think you're seeing double, or even triple.Today's event was the most detailed look yet at the craft that will carry on the legacy of SpaceShipOne, the first commercially developed spaceship and winner of the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004.

Perched on a rock, she could be waiting for a bus.But if so, she could be in for an awfully long wait.This photo of what looks remarkably like a female figure with her arm outstretched, was taken on Mars.Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has set the Internet abuzz with claims that there really is life on the red planet.Others may well feel that it is simply an optical illusion caused by a landscape.

Dinosaur doomsday was wetter than scientists have thought, according to new images of the crater where the space rock that likely killed the dinosaurs landed.Sixty-five million years ago the asteroid struck the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, and most scientists think this event played a large role in causing the extinction of 70 percent of life on Earth, including non-avian dinosaurs.

Asteroid 2007 TU24, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on October 11, 2007 will closely approach the Earth to within 1.4 lunar distances (334,000 miles) on 2008 Jan. 29 08:33 UT. This object, between 150 and 600 meters in diameter, will reach an approximate apparent magnitude 10.3 on Jan. 29-30 before quickly becoming fainter as it moves further from Earth. For a brief time the asteroid will be observable in dark and clear skies with amateur telescopes of 3 inch apertures or larger.

In a world of climate change and general environmental degradation, it was one ecological disaster that had apparently been averted.After decades of steady obliteration, the tide appeared to have turned against the illegal deforestation that has disfigured the world's largest tropical rainforest. Brazil's president, Lula da Silva, went on the radio in August to trumpet the breakthrough. His environment minister, Marina Silva, hailed "a great achievement for Brazilian society".

A compulsory identity card system for British citizens looks as if it will be deferred beyond the next election, according to documents leaked to the Conservatives.As recently as December the Home Office said the ID card system for UK citizens would be phased-in on a voluntary basis from 2009, but a national identity strategy paper, marked restricted, clearly shows the UK-citizens phase of the scheme will now not start until 2012. A voluntary scheme is due be introduced for those renewing passports from 2009.

PARIS (AFP) - A powerful volcano erupted under the icesheet of West Antarctica around 2,000 years ago and it might still be active today, a finding that prompts questions about ice loss from the white continent, British scientists report on Sunday.The explosive event -- rated "severe" to "cataclysmic" on an international scale of volcanic force -- punched a massive breach in the icesheet and spat out a plume some 12,000 metres (eight miles) into the sky, they calculate.Most of Antarctica is seismically stable. But its western part lies on a rift in Earth's crust that gives rise to occasional volcanism and geothermal heat, occurring on the Antarctic coastal margins.

The government of Abu Dhabi has announced a $15bn (£7.5bn) initiative to develop clean energy technologies.The Gulf state describes the five-year initiative as "the most ambitious sustainability project ever launched by a government".Components will include the world's largest hydrogen power plant.

The full recovery of ecological systems, following the most devastating extinction event of all time, took at least 30 million years, according to new research from the University of Bristol.About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, a major extinction event killed over 90 per cent of life on earth, including insects, plants, marine animals, amphibians, and reptiles. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were restructured and organisms were left struggling to recover. This was the nearest life ever came to being completely wiped out.

BERLIN (AFP) - German farmers attending a week-long agricultural fair -- dubbed Green Week -- are divided on their level of responsibility for the environment and the best methods to fight global warming.The image of a farmer in harmony with nature has long prevented a hard look at the sector's contribution to climate change, notably when farming is compared with much more visibly polluting activities such as the chemical and steel industries and their iconic smokestacks.Farmers are also often considered victims of global warming and the appearance of voracious parasites or chemical-resistent crop diseases.

BRISBANE: They're already masked beneath the waves, but soon these silent killers could be harder to detect - even using sonar.American scientists have proven that a cloaking device which would render submarines and ships invisible to sonar is theoretically possible."We've devised a recipe for an acoustic material that would essentially open up a hole in space and make something inside that hole disappear from sound waves," said Steven Cummer, an electrical and computer engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The victims of human sacrifice by Mexico's ancient Mayans, who threw children into water-filled caverns, were likely boys and young men not virgin girls as previously believed, archeologists said on Tuesday.The Maya built soaring temples and elaborate palaces in the jungles of Central America and southern Mexico before the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s.Maya priests in the city of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula sacrificed children to petition the gods for rain and fertile fields by throwing them into sacred sinkhole caves, known as "cenotes."

An almost complete human skull fossil that could date back 100,000 years was unearthed in Henan last month, Chinese archaeologists announced Tuesday."It is the greatest discovery in China after the Peking Man and Upper Cave Man skull fossils were found in Beijing early last century, and will shed light on a critical period of human evolution," said Shan Jixiang, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.

The world's first commercial cargo ship partially powered by a giant kite is setting sail from Germany to Venezuela.The designers of the MS Beluga Skysails say the computer-controlled kite, measuring 160sq m (1,722sq ft), could cut fuel consumption by as much as 20%.They also hope the state-of-the-art kite will help reduce carbon dioxide emissions, as it tugs the ship.

One thousand people are to have their genomes mapped in a major effort to understand how genes influence disease.To date, only a handful of humans have had their genes analysed in this way, including scientists Craig Venter and James Watson, and anonymous volunteers.Teams in the UK, US and China say the project will create the most useful catalogue ever of genetic variation.

British architect Lord Norman Foster has produced a design for the world's first zero-carbon, zero-waste, car-free city to be built in the United Arab Emirates.Located in the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, Masdar City is designed to eventually house 1,500 businesses and some 50,000 people, The Daily Telegraph reported Monday.Britain's Prince Andrew was among those on hand in the UAE Monday for the formal unveiling of the model for Masdar City.

MORE secrets of the Mayan civilisation are being revealed via groundbreaking research into paint pigments used on a temple at one of the culture's most significant sites: Copan, in Honduras.Brisbane physical and chemical sciences PhD student Rosemary Goodall used an infrared analysis technique, FTIR-ATR spectral imaging, never before applied in archeology.It revealed a map of the painted surfaces of stucco masks that adorn the corners of the Rosalila temple, built in about AD550.

BAGHDAD -- He works as a blacksmith in one of Baghdad's swarming Shiite slums. But at least once a month, Abu Saif tucks a pistol into his belt, hops into a minibus taxi and speeds south.His goal: to unearth ancient treasures from thousands of archaeological sites scattered across southern Iraq.

Two old stars appear to be gearing up for a second generation of planet formation, a phenomenon astronomers say they have never seen before."This is a new class of stars, ones that display conditions now ripe for formation of a second generation of planets, long, long after the stars themselves formed," said UCLA astronomy graduate student Carl Melis, who reported the findings at a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of the United States' first satellite to orbit the Earth.Explorer 1 lifted off Jan. 31, 1958 -- slightly more than a year after the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik. The White House had asked the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency to launch a satellite as quickly as possible. JPL designed and built the satellite, the upper stages of the rocket and a tracking system. The Army's Redstone Arsenal produced the liquid-filled rocket.

Using a mobile phone before going to bed could stop you getting a decent night's sleep, research suggests.The study, funded by mobile phone companies, suggests radiation from the handset can cause insomnia, headaches and confusion.It may also cut our amount of deep sleep - interfering with the body's ability to refresh itself.The study was carried out by Sweden's Karolinska Institute and Wayne State University in the US.

British scientists have launched an ambitious conservation project to protect some of the weirdest and slimiest creatures on the planet from extinction.The Zoological Society of London's Edge project has identified 100 species of amphibians that have the fewest living relatives, making them evolutionary rarities and precious examples of Earth's biodiversity. The project will focus on the 10 most endangered, including the Chinese giant salamander, which can grow to the size of a human, the Malagasy rainbow frog that inflates itself when threatened, and the Kenyan Sagalla caecilian, a limbless amphibian with a tentacled head..