Newsdesk Archive

As in the calendars of other ancient cultures, the traces of two astronomic and climatic time axes can be found in the Hebrew calendar: the axis of Equinoxes, which connects the Vernal equinox, March 21, and the Autumnal equinox, September 21; and the axis of the Solstices, which connects the shortest day, December 21, and the longest day, June 21. The intersection of the two axes dissects the calendar year into three-month quarters.

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest has surged in the past four months, raising the prospect of 2008 being a disastrous year for the world's most important eco-system, a senior Brazilian government scientist has warned.Dr Carlos Nobre, a scientist with a government agency that monitors the Amazon, said thousands of square kilometres of rainforest had been destroyed since October, after four years in which deforestation rates had begun to slow.

BEAUMONT-HAGUE, France - Thousands of canisters of highly radioactive waste from the world's most nuclear-energized nation lie, silent and deadly, beneath this jutting tip of Normandy. Above ground, cows graze and Atlantic waves crash into heather-covered hills.The spent fuel, vitrified into blocks of black glass that will remain dangerous for thousands of years, is in "interim storage." Like nearly all the world's nuclear waste, it is still waiting for the long-term disposal solution that has eluded scientists and governments in the six decades since the atomic era began.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican on Friday condemned the cloning of human embryos, calling it the "worst type of exploitation of the human being.""This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking," said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican department that helps oversee the Church's position on bioethics issues,.

Rosslyn Chapel, the Scottish church made famous by Hollywood blockbuster The Da Vinci Code , is seeking architects to improve visitor access and provide 'comprehensive conservation of the chapel'.Since featuring in the film, the chapel in Roslin, Midlothian, has seen a dramatic increase in visitors, which has prompted the Rosslyn Chapel Trust to look for designers to redevelop the site.

Cetacean brains, such as those of dolphins (left) and humpback whales (right), have even more cortical convolutions and surface area than human brains do. Does that mean they're smarter?Call me Ishmael for making conjectures unflattering to humankind, but could Moby Dick have been smarter than captain Ahab? Melville certainly seemed to think so. Moby clipped off one of the captain's legs and then, years later, in a brilliant move of cetacean jujitsu, drowned poor Ahab by towing him into the abyss by the harpoon rope tangled around Ahab's remaining leg. "From Hell's heart I stab at thee!" Gulp.

The origins and current genetic relationships of Pacific Islanders have generated interest and controversy for many decades. Now, a new comprehensive genetic study of almost 1,000 individuals has revealed that Polynesians and Micronesians have almost no genetic relation to Melanesians, and that groups that live in the islands of Melanesia are remarkably diverse.

Archaeologists have unsealed the intact burial chamber of an ancient Egyptian official, providing a rare glimpse into the burial customs of the Old Kingdom's middle class.The relatively modest tomb, belonging to a fifth dynasty priest and politician named Neferinpu, was discovered in 2006 at Abusir, the ancient necropolis of the fifth and 26th dynasties, located near modern-day Cairo.

Green groups have accused the European Union of planning for failure in global climate change negotiations.Europe's leaders promised last year to cut greenhouse gases by 20% by the end of the next decade, or by 30% if other big polluters made similar efforts.But a draft document seen by BBC News shows that the European Commission is asking member states to just plan for the lower figure for the time being.Campaigners say the lower target could harm the EU's leadership on the issue.

AP reports that NASA is wrestling with a potentially dangerous problem in a spacecraft. This time in a moon rocket that hasn't even been built yet.According to AP, NASA engineers are concerned that the new rocket meant to replace the space shuttle and send astronauts on their way to the moon could shake violently during the first few minutes of flight, possibly destroying the entire vehicle."They know it's a real problem," Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Paul Fischbeck, who has consulted on risk issues with NASA in the past told AP. "This thing is going to shake apart the whole structure, and they've got to solve it."

The fossil of a dinosaur with a flesh wound has been discovered in northeastern China, offering the most complete view to date of dinosaur skin, a scientist says.The fossil is of a 130-million-year-old Psittacosaurus, or parrot lizard, a beaked reptile about the size of a pig that could walk on either two or four legs.

The first pictures taken by the Messenger probe as it passed Mercury on Monday have started to arrive at Earth.They include images that show parts of the surface missed by the Mariner 10 spacecraft when it flew by the planet in the 1970s.Like the previously mapped portions of Mercury, the new sections appear heavily cratered.Messenger needs to perform another two fly-bys and a number of engine firings to get itself into orbit in 2011.Monday's manoeuvre took the probe to within just 200km (125 miles) of the planet at closest approach.

An archaeology lecturer from the University of Kent in the United Kingdom spoke to UT students, faculty and members of the community Tuesday night about the Minoan Constellations Project.Evangelos Kyriakidis is an author of two books and a wide variety of articles on iconography. His latest book, "Archaeology of Ritual," was published in November 2007.

U.S. scientists have obtained high-resolution images of Mars' wind-driven sand dunes and ridges that might lead to a better understanding of the planet.The pictures were taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The camera is capable of imaging features less than half a meter -- about 20 inches in size.

DALLAS - A Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction. The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder."If it sells, well, then we can come another day," Joe Taylor said. "This is very important to our continuing."

Natural gas distributed throughout the Marcellus black shale in northern Appalachia could conservatively boost proven U.S. reserves by trillions of cubic feet if gas production companies employ horizontal drilling techniques, according to a Penn State and State University of New York, Fredonia, team."The value of this science could increment the net worth of U.S. energy resources by a trillion dollars, plus or minus billions," says Terry Engelder, professor of geosciences, at Penn State.The Marcellus shale runs from the southern tier of New York, through the western portion of Pennsylvania into the eastern half of Ohio and through West Virginia. In Pennsylvania, the formation extends from the Appalachian plateau into the western valley and ridge. This area has produced natural gas for years, but the Marcellus shale, a deep layer of rock, is officially identified as holding a relatively small amount of proven or potential reserves. However, many gas production companies are now interested in the Marcellus.

NEW YORK - Scientists in California say they have produced embryos that are clones of two men, a potential step toward developing scientifically valuable stem cells. The new report documents embryos made with ordinary skin cells. But it's not the first time human cloned embryos have been made. In 2005, for example, scientists in Britain reported using embryonic stem cells to produce a cloned embryo. It matured enough to produce stem cells, but none were extracted.

Glass negatives of Lincoln inauguration were labeled incorrectlyCarol Johnson, a curator at the Library of Congress, noted the misidentificationThe negatives "add to our knowledge of this special event," Johnson said

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes -- visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

Çatalhöyük Research Project Director Ian Hodder says goddess icons do not, contrary to assumptions, point to a matriarchal society in Çatalhöyük. Findings in Çatalhöyük show that men and women had equal social status. According to Hodder, who also has been following the Göbeklitepe excavations in Şanlıurfa, meticulous archaeological excavation in southeastern Anatolia can change all scientific archaeological assumptionsClues as to when mankind really began living in urban patterns lie in the Neolithic layers of Çatalhöyük.

A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday.The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name "Temech" engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig.According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

Archaeologists in Cambridge have unearthed the first hard evidence that an area of the city was occupied during the Bronze Age.The remains were found during a dig at Fitzwilliam College and probably belonged to a 3,500-year-old farmstead.The remains comprise a series of ditches, in which the team found pieces of antler, flint tools, pottery and animal remains.

The fossilised skull of the largest rodent ever recorded has been described by scientists for the first time.The remains of the one-tonne beast, found in Uruguay, indicate that it would have been as big as a bull.It is thought that the three-metre-long herbivore would have roamed estuaries and forests 2-4 million years ago.

The science instruments for the satellite, which is known as LCROSS, departed NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field Calif., for the Northrop Grumman Corporation's facility in Redondo Beach, Calif. to be integrated with the spacecraft. A video file is available on NASA Television. LCROSS is scheduled to launch with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., by the end of 2008.

Using the human mind to control computers could lead to a wide range of applications, such as giving people with limited motion the ability to operate machines. However, translating thoughts into actions is a great challenge for researchers. How can a system determine which thoughts should be acted upon, and which thoughts are merely personal thoughts and therefore should be ignored by the system?

Using satellite microwave data, Martin Sharp, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has successfully mapped the summer melt extent and duration of the summer melt across Greenland for a five-year period stretching from 2000 to 2004."What we're interested in is the problem of explaining why the rates of global sea level rising have more or less doubled since the early 1990s compared with the early part of the 20th century," he said.

MONDAY, Jan. 14 (HealthDay News) -- A new analysis of the genetics of syphilis provides support for the theory that the disease hitched a ride with Christopher Columbus from the New World back to the Old World.But in a new wrinkle, the research suggests the disease may not have been transmitted through sex until it adapted to the environment in Europe."It evolved this whole new transmission mode, and it didn't take very many genetic changes," said study lead author Kristin Harper, a graduate student at Emory University. "What this tells us is that new transmission modes may evolve pretty rapidly. This is important to us today, because we're worried about things like avian influenza going from human to human."

Britain's own underwater "Atlantis" could be revealed for the first time with hi-tech underwater cameras.Marine archaeologist Stuart Bacon and Professor David Sear, of the University of Southampton, will explore the lost city of Dunwich, off the Suffolk coast.Dunwich gradually disappeared into the sea because of coastal erosion."It's about the application of new technology to investigate Britain's Atlantis, then to give this information to the public," Professor Sear said.

Supermassive black holes spin at speeds approaching the speed of light, new research suggests.Nine huge galaxies were found to contain furiously whirling black holes that pump out energetic jets of gas into the surrounding environment, according to a study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory."We think these monster black holes are spinning close to the limit set by Einstein's theory of relativity, which means that they can drag material around them at close to the speed of light," said Rodrigo Nemmen, the study's lead author and a visiting graduate student at Penn State University.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US space probe soared over Mercury on Monday on a mission to unlock the mysteries of the smallest planet of the solar system which was last visited in 1975, NASA said.The MESSENGER craft flew by Mercury at around 1900 GMT, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the closest planet to the sun, to take up-close pictures of uncharted terrain, the US space agency said.About 55 percent of planet's surface is unknown.

Big dinosaurs, like humans, reached sexual maturity during the messy growth spurts of adolescence, according to a new study.The reproductive strategy of dinosaurs was unlike that of their reptilian ancestors or their bird descendants, the study concludes."They are growing really fast and yet maturing early," said Sarah Werning, a graduate student in paleontology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Photos of "moa" footprints in Fiordland and evidence elsewhere in New Zealand have reignited claims the supposedly extinct birds are still roaming the countryside.New South Wales natural science researcher Rex Gilroy said he was closing in on the colony of the presumed-extinct little scrub moa in the Urewera Ranges.Mr Gilroy, a cryptozoologist, who studies "hidden" animals _ said he had evidence of a small colony in the Ureweras.

RANCHI: In a discovery that could shed more light on the antiquity of Benisagar, the Archaeological Survey of India has discovered two inscriptions in 'shell script' among the remains of a temple in the area in Jharkhand's West Singhbhum district.The inscriptions, possibly dating back to several hundred years, closely resemble those seen on the Ashoka Pillar in Vaishali and Rajgir in Bihar, Ranchi circle Superintending Archaeologist T J Baidya said.

They are the world's oldest human tracks, a set of footprints pressed into volcanic ash that have lain perfectly preserved for more than three-and-a-half million years. Made by a group of ancient apemen, the prints represent one of the most important sites in human evolutionary studies, for they show that our ancestors had already stopped walking on four legs and had become upright members of the primate world.

The effects of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 are only too well known: It knocked the hell out of Aceh Province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, leveling buildings, scattering palm trees, and wiping out entire villages. It killed more than 160,000 people in Aceh alone and displaced millions more. Similar scenes of destruction were repeated along the coasts of Southeast Asia, India, and as far west as Africa. The magnitude of the disaster shocked the world.

From a distance it looks like an island paradise, but get closer and those tall structures that could be palm trees turn out to be wind turbines - and the surf laps against wave barrages instead of sandy beaches. Welcome to "Energy Island", a vision of how humans could help meet our future needs for energy, food and water using the power of nature in the tropics.

Engineering techniques have shown an unusual British dinosaur Baryonyx walkeri fed on fish, despite it looking like a meat-eater.vvThe dino's skull bent and stretched in the same way as the skull of today's fish-eating crocodiles, even though it had clear differences in structure.vvThe early Cretaceous dinosaur was found in Surrey and lived at a time when the area was warmer and had lagoons.

Increasing amounts of ice mass have been lost from West Antarctica and the Antarctic peninsula over the past ten years, according to research from the University of Bristol and published online this week in Nature Geoscience.Meanwhile the ice mass in East Antarctica has been roughly stable, with neither loss nor accumulation over the past decade.

Researchers seeking new treatments for heart disease managed to grow a rat heart in the lab and start it beating."While it still sounds like science fiction, we've hopefully opened a new door in the notion that we can build these tissues and one day provide options for patients with end-stage disease," said Dr. Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota. "We're not there yet, but at least now we have another tool in our tool belt."

New research into the Bristol dinosaur Thecodontosaurus suggests it lived on subtropical islands around the city and not in a desert.A microscopic study of marine algae and fossil pollen revealed the dinosaur lived just before the Jurassic Period in lushly vegetated islands.It had been thought the dinosaur lived in the arid uplands of the late Triassic Period.

BERKELEY -- There is a legend at UC Berkeley that human bones are stored in the landmark Campanile tower. But university officials say that's not true.The human bones are actually stored beneath the Hearst Gymnasium swimming pool.The remains of about 12,000 Native Americans lie in drawers and cabinets in the gym's basement. Most of them were dug up by university archaeologists and have been stored under the pool since at least the early 1960s.

In 1856, American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne hired a carriage for a 10-mile journey from the rural town of Salisbury to Stonehenge. Of the great megaliths he wrote, "There never was a ruder thing made by mortal hands as if Nature and man had worked upon it with one consent, and so... all the stranger and more impressive from its rudeness."

A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is racing towards a collision with the Milky Way, astronomers have announced.Dubbed "Smith's Cloud", it may set off spectacular fireworks when it smacks into our galaxy in 20-40 million years.It contains enough hydrogen to produce a million stars like our Sun, researchers believe.When it does fully interact with our galaxy, the cloud could indeed set off a new burst of star formation in the Milky Way.Details of the work, by a team at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, were unveiled at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

Global warming and rocketing oil prices are making nuclear power fashionable, drawing a once demonized industry out of the shadows of the Chernobyl disaster as a potential shining knight of clean energy.Britain is the latest to recommit itself to the energy source, with its government announcing support Thursday for the construction of new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants produce around 20 percent of Britain's electricity, but all but one are due to close by 2023.However, some countries hopping on the nuclear bandwagon have abysmal industrial safety records and corrupt ways that give many pause for thought.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Sheets of ice existed during very hot periods of Earth's history when there were alligators living in the Arctic, a new international study has found.Ice sheets were present 91 million years ago during one of the hottest periods of life on earth, experts said in a study in the January 11 issue of Science.

WASHINGTON - The deeper astronomers gaze into the cosmos, the more they find it's a bizarre and violent universe. The research findings from this week's annual meeting of U.S. astronomers range from blue orphaned baby stars to menacing "rogue" black holes that roam our galaxy, devouring any planets unlucky enough to be within their limited reach."It's an odd universe we live in," said Vanderbilt University astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann. She presented her theory on rogue black holes at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas, earlier this week.

The late astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," in reference to reports of alien visitations. Generating low-cost commercial fusion power, isolating antimatter and tracing reverse-time causality aren't as far out there as UFOs, but a similar rule might well apply: Extraordinary science requires extraordinary effort.With that in mind, here's a progress report on three extraordinary science projects that have popped up in the news:Reverse-time causality

The broken skeletons were scattered like random pottery shards, rediscovered where they had fallen centuries ago.Were these ancient people cut down in some long-forgotten battle? Did European-introduced diseases cause their demise? Were they casualties of some apocalyptic reckoning at this great walled citadel?

The true rule in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it has any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded. - Abraham Lincoln, June 20, 1848In defiance of his circumstances as an unpopular, lame duck president with a minority party in Congress, George W. Bush pursues a sharply autocratic tone. He has intimidated both parties in Congress and violated the Constitution. Through dissimulation and delay, he has forced the nations of the world to conclude they must wait until his term ends to negotiate any serious treaty on the imminent perils of climate change.

MOSCOW: Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 2500-year-old advanced civilization at the bottom of Lake Issyk Kul in the Kyrgyz Mountains in Russia.According to a report in RIA Novosti, the team consisted of Kyrgyz historians, led by Vladimir Ploskikh, vice president of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences, and other Russian colleagues, like historian Svetlana Lukashova.The expedition resulted in sensational finds, including the discovery of major settlements, presently buried underwater.

Planting extra-reflective crops that bounce sunshine back into space is the latest proposal to help cool our warming world.The notion of modifying Earth's climate with sunshades or a blanket of reflective aerosols to counteract global warming - known as geoengineering - has been around for years. But climate models suggest that this would significantly reduce rainfall.

A protein found in human hair shows promise for promoting the regeneration of nerve tissue and could lead to a new treatment option when nerves are cut or crushed from trauma.In the current issue of Biomaterials, scientists from Wake Forest University School of Medicine reported that in animal studies the protein keratin was able to speed up nerve regeneration and improve nerve function compared to current treatment options.

A new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK has been given formal backing by the government.Business Secretary John Hutton told MPs they would give a "safe and affordable" way of securing the UK's future energy supplies while fighting climate change.He said any plants would be built at or near existing reactors by private firms and said he hoped the first one would be completed "well before 2020".Critics say new reactors will be expensive, dirty and dangerous.

Astronomers have weighed the biggest known black hole in the Universe.The monster celestial object is 18 billion times more massive than our own Sun, says a team from Finland - six times larger than the previous record.The object, called OJ287, is orbited by a smaller black hole, which allowed its mass to be measured very accurately.The finding also enabled the researchers to test Einstein's theory of gravity for the first time in a strong gravitational field.

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first climber to scale the world's highest peak, Mount Everest, has died aged 88.New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark described the explorer as a heroic figure and said all New Zealanders would deeply mourn his passing.Sir Edmund's health had reportedly been in decline since April, when he suffered a fall while visiting Nepal.He was the first man to climb the 8,850m (29,035ft) peak, with Tenzing Norgay, on 29 May 1953.Returning to Everest's South Col camp, he famously greeted another member of the British expedition group with the words: "Well, George, we've knocked the bastard off."

New research indicates glacial ice existed on earth during intense period of global warming.New research challenges the generally accepted belief that substantial ice sheets could not have existed on Earth during past super-warm climate events. The study by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego provides strong evidence that a glacial ice cap, about half the size of the modern day glacial ice sheet, existed 91 million years ago during a period of intense global warming. This study offers valuable insight into current day climate conditions and the environmental mechanisms for global sea level rise.

LAUREL, Md. - On Monday, Jan. 14, a pioneering NASA spacecraft will be the first to visit Mercury in almost 33 years when it soars over the planet to explore and snap close-up images of never-before-seen terrain. These findings could open new theories and answer old questions in the study of the solar system.The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft, called MESSENGER, is the first mission sent to orbit the planet closest to our sun. Before that orbit begins in 2011, the probe will make three flights past the small planet, skimming as close as 124 miles above Mercury's cratered, rocky surface. MESSENGER's cameras and other sophisticated, high-technology instruments will collect more than 1,200 images and make other observations during this approach, encounter and departure. It will make the first up-close measurements since Mariner 10 spacecraft's third and final flyby on March 16, 1975. When Mariner 10 flew by Mercury in the mid-1970s, it surveyed only one hemisphere.

CHICAGO (AFP) - Hundreds of rogue black holes may be roaming around the Milky Way waiting to engulf stars and planets that cross their path, US astronomers said Wednesday.The astronomers believe these "intermediate mass" black holes are invisible except in rare circumstances and have been spawned by mergers of black holes within globular clusters -- swarms of stars held together by their mutual gravity.

PARIS (AFP) - Thirty years ago, scientists exploring the depths of the ocean came across jets of hot water, spewing from the sea floor, that hauled up flecks of gold and other minerals from Earth's interior and nurtured weird, resilient microbial lifeforms.In a paper issued on Wednesday, marine seismologists looking at a site in the East Pacific say they have gained insights into how this unique plumbing system of hydrothermal vents works.

Another Da Vinci code is emerging from Leonardo's masterpieces, according to a forthcoming book by group of Da Vinci theorists who believe that biblical images are hidden within the master's artworks.Worthy of a Dan Brown novel, the claim identifies Leonardo's mirror writing as the key to unlocking the code.The Renaissance genius, who lived between 1452 and 1519, filled thousands of manuscript pages with a unique handwriting that flowed from right to left and reversed all the letters.

For the first time astronomers are able to see indirect evidence of dark matter and how this invisible force impacts on the crowded and violent lives of galaxies. University of British Columbia researcher Catherine Heymans has produced the highest resolution map of dark matter ever captured before.Scientists believe that dark matter is the invisible web that houses galaxies. And as the universe evolves, the gravitational pull of this unseen matter causes galaxies to collide and swirl into superclusters.

Robert Bauval, author of The Orion Mystery will be with us in our GHMB Author Of The Month messageboard throughout February to discuss his most recent book, The Egypt Code, featured in our latest forum article. The US edition can be pre-ordered before its August release here.

China plans to launch its third manned space mission that will feature its first-ever space walk during 2008, state media said Tuesday.China will also send up 15 rockets and 17 satellites, Huang Qiang, secretary general of the Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defense, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.He described Shenzhou 7, which will carry three astronauts into space, as a priority for this year.

China will contribute 1.4 billion dollars to an international nuclear fusion project that aims to emulate the power of the sun to provide limitless clean energy, state press said Tuesday.The 10 billion yuan (1.4 billion dollars) would make up about 10 percent of the cost of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) to be built in France and expected to go online by 2016, the China Daily said.

Britain will press ahead with outlawing the production of battery-farmed eggs by 2012, the government has confirmed.Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said he had been under pressure to postpone the proposed EU ban. Some farmers say they need more time to adjust.Animal welfare groups such as the RSPCA say each battery hen is crammed into a space which is often smaller than an A4 sheet of paper.

Nasa has announced details of a challenging mission to "rescue" the Hubble Space Telescope.Without the mission, the multi-billion dollar orbiting observatory is likely to fail in 2010 or 2011.The upgrade will provide a massive boost to Hubble's capabilities, giving it greater sensitivity and a larger field of view.The mission, by space shuttle Atlantis, will make Hubble 90 times more powerful than its original version.

A £1m competition to find the brightest ideas to help fight climate change is being launched.The Big Green Challenge is looking for people's best "Eureka moments" for reducing carbon emissions.The top 10 finalists will be given funding to help to turn their ideas into reality.The group with the most imaginative and successful idea will receive the lion's share of the £1m prize money, which will be awarded next year.

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Scientists have known for some time that most major groups of complex animals appeared in the fossils record during the Cambrian Explosion, a seemingly rapid evolutionary event that occurred 542 million years ago. Now Virginia Tech paleontologists, using rigorous analytical methods, have identified another explosive evolutionary event that occurred about 33 million years earlier among macroscopic life forms unrelated to the Cambrian animals.They dubbed this earlier event the "Avalon Explosion."

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia is leading the race to complete a manned mission to Mars and could land a Russian on the Red Planet by 2025, a leading scientist was quoted as saying on Tuesday."We have something of a head start in this race as we have the most experience in piloted space flight," the director of the prestigious Space Research Institute, Lev Zelyony, told Interfax news agency on Tuesday.The goal of becoming the first country to land a human on Mars is "technically and economically achievable" by 2025, he said.

OSLO, Norway - The next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should deal with the "frightening" possibility that both Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets start melting at the same time, the chief U.N. climate scientist said Tuesday.The panel, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, has released four climate assessment reports, including summaries for policymakers that are approved by government representatives.

Astronomers have spotted small galaxies near the beginning of time that resemble ancestors of our own galactic home.The tiny galaxies are about one-tenth to one-twentieth the size of the Milky Way and have 40 times fewer stars. Light from the ancient clusters was emitted about 2 billion years after the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning to the universe that occurred about 13.7 billion years ago. So the galaxies are seen as they existed in a very young universe.

The chances of an asteroid smacking into Mars this month are slipping away as astronomers continue to refine its course toward the Red Planet.The space rock, an asteroid called 2007 WD5, is now expected to miss Mars by about 18,641 miles (30,000 kilometers), according a Tuesday report by NASA's Near Earth Object (NEO) program office.

A new study released Monday reports that 15% of the manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere comes from cars, trucks, airplanes, trains, and ships. This is the first study to specifically measure the impact of transportation on global greenhouse gas emissions.The remaining 85% of atmospheric CO2 comes from industry, buildings and agriculture, the report said.

The reality of the US budget cuts to particle physics has hit home. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, US, has just announced a trio of painful consequences: the end of work on the International Linear Collider, the imminent closure of its BaBar antimatter experiment, and the layoff of 125 workers.SLAC and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois are the main US institutions involved in the International Linear Collider (ILC), a future $6.7 billion particle accelerator designed to recreate the conditions of the early universe.

An explosive star within our galaxy is showing signs of an impending eruption, at least in a cosmic time frame, and has for quite some time. From 1838 to 1858, the star called Eta Carinae brightened to rival the light of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and then faded to a dim star. Since 1940 it has been brightening again, and scientists think Eta Carinae will detonate in 10,000 to 20,000 years.

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Brazil's first government auction of commercial logging rights in the Amazon, part of an effort to end illegal deforestation, lured eight bidders.The Environment Ministry will start reviewing the bids today from companies seeking to explore 96,360 hectares (238,100 acres) of national forestland over 40 years, said Tasso de Rezende Azevedo, head of Brazil's National Forestry Service. The forestry service expected the rights to sell for a minimum of 2.8 million reais ($1.6 million) a year.

Lead in your lipstick? Mercury in your mascara? Recent headlines about harmful ingredients hiding in beauty products are enough to make even the vainest among us want to go back to the good old days of rubbing strawberries on our lips to make them red.But women (and men) have plastered a lot more than berry juice onto their skin in the never-ending quest to look hot (or extremely pallid, as was usually the case back in the day). Some beauty products of yesteryear contained high concentrations of lead, mercury, arsenic, even radiation, thanks to ignorance, indifference and narcissism.

BEIJING, Jan. 1 -- The Yungang Grottoes, one of the three largest major cave complexes in China, is facing a life or death situation, with humans as the judges deciding its fate.The legal information Website efaw.cn reported that Yungang Grottoes, located on the southern foot of Wuzhou Hill, 16 kilometers west of Datong in Shanxi province, has been severely damaged by human activities and natural influences."If we do not take action, the grottoes will be gone forever," a researcher from the Yungang Grottoes Research Institute said.

A group of scientists and academics today condemns as undemocratic and possibly illegal the government's plans to force through a new generation of nuclear power stations to meet Britain's energy needs for the next 30 years.They warn that questions about the risks from radiation, disposal of nuclear waste and vulnerability to a terrorist attack have not been addressed - even though the government was ordered last February to repeat a public consultation on energy supply, after its exercise was declared unlawful by a high court judge.

To the untrained eye, it looks like a sports hall half filled with neatly arranged burgundy Ikea storage units. But the series of heavy, clunking security doors that must be navigated to get inside, and the staff's insistence on secrecy about its precise location, indicate that this is a place of national importance.Meet the University of Edinburgh's HECToR, Britain's newest and faster supercomputer, which scientists and engineers plan to use for modelling everything from climate change to financial markets. The £113m publicly funded project, the full name of which is High-End Computing Terascale Resource, will be opened officially later this month by the chancellor, Alistair Darling.

A DNA breakthrough may unravel ancient mysteries, reports Roger HighfieldA new DNA technique could provide a revolutionary insight into the lives of the Ancient Greeks - using jars that have lain on the seabed for millennia.These amphoras were the cargo containers of the ancient world, used for shipping all kinds of things, from wine to olive oil.

Spinal cord damage blocks the routes that the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. Until now, doctors believed that the only way for injured patients to walk again was to re-grow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. For the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganize itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement.Published in the January edition of Nature Medicine, the discovery could lead to new therapies for the estimated 250,000 Americans who suffer from traumatic spinal cord injuries. An additional 10,000 cases occur each year, according to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which helped fund the UCLA study.

Claims that tropical forests are declining cannot be backed up by hard evidence, according to new research from the University of Leeds.This major challenge to conventional thinking is the surprising finding of a study published today in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences by Dr Alan Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Geography and one of the world's leading experts on tropical deforestation.

A TEAM of Scottish scientists has produced an artificial arm that is more powerful than the real thing.The superhuman arm, for patients who need an artificial limb, can lift heavier weights than the average person is capable of and will only fatigue when its batteries run out.The i-Limb System arm has been developed by researchers at prosthetics firm Touch Bionics, which last year launched the most advanced artificial hand in the world.

The word "big" doesn't do justice to whales. Humpback whales can weigh up to 40 tons. Fin whales have been known to reach 80 tons. Blue whales, the biggest animals to have ever lived, reach 160 tons - the same mass as about 2,000 grown men or 5 million grown mice.It takes a lot of food to build such giant bodies, but how exactly the biggest whales get so much has long been a mystery. "We don't have much of a sense of these animals in their natural environments," said Nick Pyenson, a biologist at UC Berkeley. For decades, whale experts had only indirect clues. "It's primarily from dead animals or from a few people standing on a ship seeing whales come to the surface," he said.

Beijing, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) - The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has recently given a green light for the construction of an advanced science research vessel for deep sea exploration.The Chinese Academy of Sciences' (CAS) Institute of Oceanology was expected to oversee construction of the new vessel. It would have a weight of about 4,000 tons and would be the biggest of its kind designed and built by domestic scientists and manufacturers, the CAS said on its website, www.cas.ac.cn, on Monday.

Cars that drive themselves - even parking at their destination - could be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say.GM, parts suppliers, university engineers and other automakers all are working on vehicles that could revolutionize short- and long-distance travel. And Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner will devote part of his speech to the driverless vehicles."This is not science fiction," Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview.

A proposal for the UK to join the International Space Station (ISS) project has been put forward by a group of scientists and engineers.Their idea is for Britain to build and launch two modules that greatly enhance living conditions on the platform.The Habitation Extension Modules would increase meeting and bunk space; and allow the UK to fly some dedicated science experiments.The proposal is being supported by the British Interplanetary Society.

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia plans to participate in a European mission to investigate Jupiter's moon Europa and search for simple life forms, the Interfax news agency reported on Monday, quoting a senior researcher.The head of the Space Research Institute, Lev Zelyony, said a project to explore the giant gaseous planet Jupiter would shortly be included in the programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) for the years 2015 to 2025."The main task is to explore its satellite Europa, on which under a thick layer of ice a liquid water ocean has been detected," said Zelyony.

What inventions will change our lives this year?How about a revolutionary computer screen? Cars powered by hydrogen? Books we can read electronically? Better football helmets? More efficient buildings?With the Consumer Electronics Show getting underway in Las Vegas, this seemed like the perfect time for a high-tech look-ahead to the new year.

Research on a treasure trove of amber has yielded evidence that France once was covered by a dense tropical rainforest with trees similar to those found in the modern-day Amazon. The 55-million-year-old pieces of amber was discovered in the Oise River area in northern France.In the new study, Akino Jossang and colleagues used laboratory instruments to analyze the fossilized tree sap in an effort to link specific samples of amber to specific kinds of trees. The amber remained intact over the ages, while the trees from which it oozed disappeared. Efforts to make such connections have been difficult because amber from different sites tended to have very similar chemical compositions.

Gone are the days of a fearless Indiana Jones battling through the jungle in search of ancient treasures. Today's archaeologists are using high-tech tools - from NASA satellites to Google Earth - to do the hard work for them.If they haven't been destroyed or dismantled, many ancient structures were long ago enveloped by soil, water, sand, volcanic ash, or thick vegetation. Though they might not be obvious to the naked eye, archaeologists are learning how to spot them.Since the World War I, aerial photography from low-flying aircraft has been widely used. These images can help to pick out relics betrayed by unusual mounds, lines or disjointed landscapes. In other places, buried structures are completely invisible to the naked eye. But they still reveal clues to their whereabouts - just not with visible light.

A range of complementary therapies such as homeopathy and aromatherapy are to be regulated by a new body.The Natural HealthCare Council is due to begin work in April. Currently, anyone can offer a complementary medicine service.The watchdog will set standards and have the power to strike off those deemed incompetent, although membership of the body will be voluntary.The Patients Association said the move to regulate was "welcome and overdue".

The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.

WASHINGTON - A new solar cycle is under way. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday that the first sunspot of a new 11-year cycle has appeared in the sun's northern hemisphere.The frequency of sunspots rises and falls during these cycles, and the start of a new cycle indicates they are likely to begin increasing.Sunspots, areas of intense magnetic activity on the sun, can affect Earth by disrupting electrical grids, airline and military communications, GPS signals and even cell phones, the agency said. During periods of intense sunspot activity, known as solar storms, highly charged radiation from the sun may head toward Earth.

GREAT FALLS, Mont. - A mummified dinosaur discovered on the Hi-Line is heading to the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, where it will be studied and displayed for more than a year.The 77 million-year-old duckbill, complete with fossilized skin and organs, was discovered in the badlands north of Malta during the summer of 2000.

Here's another reason to go back to the moon: it may help settle a climate change controversy.Climate modellers use ice cores, tree rings and sunspot data to see how much solar energy reached Earth centuries ago and whether it affected global temperatures. Such methods are far from reliable, though: sunspot data is incomplete, while conditions on Earth can skew results.

ANYONE looking for lessons in the history of censorship and propaganda need look no further than Pompeii.For the past 200 years the real story of this ancient town, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, has been kept from public view.Our image of Roman life has been censored, sanitised and sanctified.For anyone raised on the white marble and white toga version of Rome, the latest offerings on Roman life will come as a shock.

Where the Champs Elysee, the Eiffel Tower and sprawling vineyards now stand, there might once have been an Amazon-like jungle.A new analysis of amber fossils collected in France suggests that the country was once covered by a dense tropical rainforest.The 55-milllion-year-old pieces of amber (fossilized tree sap) were found near the Oise River in northern France. The trees that once oozed them are long gone.

An Atomic Adam could have lurked at the dawn of creation, according to Roger HighfieldThe birth of the first life on Earth took place in a "quantum cradle" on the bed of an ocean, according to a provocative new theory of creation.New research on the mother of all birthdays suggests that the genesis of life could be explained in part by quantum theory, the framework that governs the subatomic world which is deeply counterintuitive, mathematical and highly baffling, even to most physicists.