Newsdesk Archive

The Lakota Sioux Indians, whose ancestors include Sitting Bull, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from all treaties their forefathers signed with the U.S. government and have declared their independence. A delegation delivered the news to the State Department earlier this week.Portions of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming comprise Lakota country, and the tribe says that if the federal government doesn't begin diplomatic discussions promptly, liens will be filed on property in the five-state region. Here's the news release."We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," said Russell Means, a longtime Indian rights activist. "This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically Article 6 of the Constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land.

Neanderthals probably froze to death in the last ice age because rapid climate change caught them by surprise without the tools needed to make warm clothes, says an Australian researcher.Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University argues his case in the current issue of the journal World Archaeology.By the time some Neanderthals developed sewing tools it was too little too late, says Gilligan.

ESA, NASA and an international team are developing plans and seeking recommendations to launch the first Mars mission to bring soil samples back to Earth. The ability to study soil from Mars here on Earth will contribute significantly to answering questions about the possibility of life on the Red Planet.Returned samples also will increase understanding of the useful or harmful properties of Martian soil, which will support planning for the eventual human exploration of Mars.A task force named the International Mars Architecture for Return of Samples, or IMARS, recently met in Washington to lay the foundation for an international collaboration to return samples from Mars. NASA hosted the meeting. IMARS meeting participants included representatives from more than half a dozen countries and ESA, NASA, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Thankyou to Greg Taylor, from The Daily Grail for joining us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout January, discussing his latest book featured his Forum Article

A jet of highly charged radiation from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy is blasting another galaxy nearby -- an act of galactic violence that astronomers said yesterday they have never seen before.Using images from the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory and other sources, scientists said the extremely intense jet from the larger galaxy can be seen shooting across 20,000 light-years of space and plowing into the outer gas and dust of the smaller one.

A handwritten letter from Princess Diana claiming that Prince Charles was plotting to kill her was shown to her inquest yesterday.In the note, sent to her butler Paul Burrell, Diana suggested that her husband was "planning an accident in my car".She also made the astonishing suggestion that Camilla Parker Bowles was just a "decoy" while Charles's real desire was to marry William and Harry's nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke.

Geology may be a long-overlooked, major factor that created conditions favoring the evolution of modern humans.That's the conclusion of geologists at the University of Utah, who detail their findings in next month's issue of the journal Geotimes.It's fairly well-established that changing climate, and thus vegetation, in East Africa spurred human evolution, but there has been no agreement about what exactly caused that change, said Royhan Gani

A probable active glacier has been identified for the first time on Mars.The icy feature has been spotted in images from the European Space Agency's (Esa) Mars Express spacecraft.Ancient glaciers, many millions of years old, have been seen before on the Red Planet, but this one may only be several thousand years old.

PARIS (AFP) - A tiny deer-like mammal was the forerunner of whales, dolphins and porpoises, according to a study released on Wednesday by Nature, the weekly British science journal.Whales are long suspected to have originated from four-footed mammals called artiodactyls that walked on land in South Asia and gradually adapted to live in the sea.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The light bulb Thomas Edison invented 125 years ago is getting more than a make-over. The government is pulling the plug on it.The landmark energy bill President George W. Bush signed into law on Wednesday will require lighting to use up to 30 percent less energy, which will basically phase out the traditional light bulb because it won't be able to meet the new efficiency standards.Almost 90 percent of the energy used by today's incandescent bulbs produces heat and only 10 percent goes to giving off light.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A few years back, when I was working as part of an archaeological mission in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, I unearthed a slab of white limestone covered in ancient paint smears. More of that later. First, however, I should tell you about the 3000 year-old gold jewelry.I found the jewelry in a tomb known as KV56 (all burials in the Valley of the Kings are designated with a KV number, the most famous being KV62 -- Tutankhamun).

On 28 December, it will be two years since GIOVE-A - the first Galileo satellite - was launched by a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur, in Kazakhstan. This satellite demonstrates the progress Europe has made in setting up its own navigation system.Since January 2006, Galileo signals have been broadcast by GIOVE-A, and received all around the globe. At ESA's research and technology centre in the Netherlands, a laboratory is checking both the instruments on board the spacecraft that generate the signals and the receivers on the ground. This testing and calibration has allowed the specialists to confirm the success of the mission, which is a good sign for the rest of the programme.

UC Davis researchers have dated the earliest step in the formation of the solar system -- when microscopic interstellar dust coalesced into mountain-sized chunks of rock -- to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years.UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Frederic Moynier, Qing-zhu Yin, assistant professor of geology, and graduate student Benjamin Jacobsen established the dates by analyzing a particular type of meteorite, called a carbonaceous chondrite, which represents the oldest material left over from the formation of the solar system.

SCIENTISTS have finally unravelled the meaning of squeaks and whistles that make up dolphin "speech".According to the Australian researchers who have picked up "dolphinese", the language shows the animals are more similar to humans that previously thought.The scientists identified almost 200 different whistles that the dolphins make to communicate, and linked some to specific behaviours.

Space rocks are blamed for a lot of rough times on Earth, from the die-off of most marine animals some 250 million years ago to the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years in the past.A new theory, however, suggests that catastrophic meteorite impacts are linked to an explosion in biodiversity about 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. Within a few million years, the number of trilobite species and scores of other creatures on Earth jumped at least three to four times.

Israeli scientists said on Tuesday they have created the world's smallest Bible, fitting a Hebrew-language version of the holy book on a gold-coated silicon chip smaller than a pinhead.Researchers from Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, were able to pack the 308,428-word Hebrew Bible -- known to most as the Old Testament -- on a 0.5 millimetre square, Ohad Zohar, who directed the project, told AFP."This is the world's tiniest Bible," Zohar said. "The Guinness Book of World Records has a Bible 50 times bigger."The scientists managed their feat by sending focused beams of tiny particles, called gallium ions, onto the surface of the silicon chip.

The world's sea levels could rise twice as high this century as UN climate scientists have previously predicted, according to a study.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposes a maximum sea level rise of 81cm (32in) this century.But in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers say the true maximum could be about twice that: 163cm (64in).They looked at what happened more than 100,000 years ago - the last time Earth was this warm.The results join other studies showing that current sea level projections may be very conservative.

A series of surprising discoveries has been made at the foot of Egypt's famous Temple of Amun at Karnak, archaeologists say.The new finds include ancient ceremonial baths, a pharaoh's private entry ramp, and the remains of a massive wall built some 3,000 years ago to reinforce what was then the bank of the Nile River.

For Italians, the collapse of a 16th-century wall on Rome's Palatine Hill was symbolic. Blaming the 2005 cave-in on budget cuts by the center-right Berlusconi government, many felt that the nation's inability to protect its heritage signaled that the country too was crumbling. That era may be over now, but the practice of exploiting Rome's cultural heritage for political gain is not.

Enchantment has many faces, but few compare with one painted 1,500 years ago on a cave wall in India. To see it, the eyes must first adjust to darkness. Soon it becomes impossible to turn away. The figure is of a bare-chested man; he wears a tall crown and holds a delicate lotus flower in one hand. His torso is curved as if swaying to music only he hears. His face is tranquility itself, eyes half-closed, lips pursed in a faint smile, his whole being absorbed in the sweetest dream possible.

The venerable warp drive is science fiction no longer. Baylor University physicists Richard Obousy and Gerald Cleaver have published a paper outlining the math underlying one possible technique an advanced civilization might to use to create such a Star Trekkie means of scooting around the universe.All it requires is blowing up a hidden, or "compactified" fifth space-time dimension into a big bubble, and using that to pop out to another place in the regular universe.

The final design for a "doomsday" vault that will house seeds from all known varieties of food crops has been unveiled by the Norwegian government.The Svalbard International Seed Vault will be built into a mountainside on a remote island near the North Pole.The vault aims to safeguard the world's agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change.

Globally human populations are growing, trade is increasing, and living standards are rising for many. But, according to the UN's latest Global Environment Outlook report, long-term problems including climate change, pollution, access to clean water, and the threat of mass extinctions are being met with "a remarkable lack of urgency".

A unique "blue hole" is giving expert divers and scientists a chance to travel back in time for a rare glimpse of life in the pre-human Bahamas.The deep underwater cave, known as Sawmill Sink, is filled with a treasure trove of well-preserved fossils, including the remains of tortoises and crocodiles previously unknown to exist in the West Indies.The sinkhole also holds the ancient remains of globally or locally extinct species of lizards, snakes, bats, birds, and plants.

New hi-tech investigations of a Roman town in Norfolk have revealed it to be one of international importance, leading archaeologists have said.A high-resolution geophysical survey was carried out at the buried town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund.It has shown detail never seen before, including a semi-circular building which looks like a Roman theatre.

(AP) In a dramatic finish to a U.N. climate conference, world leaders adopted a plan Saturday to negotiate a new global warming pact by 2009, after the United States backed down in a battle over wording supported by developing nations and Europe.The U.S. stand had drawn loud boos and sharp floor rebukes - "If you are not willing to lead, then get out of the way!" one delegate demanded - before Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky reversed her position, allowing the adoption of the so-called "Bali Roadmap."

BALI, Indonesia - Behind the millions of words at the Bali climate conference, in documents, speeches and slick brochures, lay a set of simple numbers: 2 and 445 and "25 to 40."That's 2 degrees Celsius, 445 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and a 25-to-40-percent reduction in global-warming gases - a formula, some say, to save the planet from climate change's severest consequences.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth.These experts believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon, and they point to reams of data they say supports their assertions.These conclusions are in sharp contradiction to those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reached its conclusions using largely similar data.

They come at night, just when the family is settling down for dinner or sleep. The only warning is an irritating whine, but sometimes there's no sound at all, just a pinch and later an itch. And much later the fevers, shivering, and perhaps death.

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AFP) - World climate negotiators set a 2009 deadline Saturday for a landmark treaty to fight global warming after two weeks of intense haggling led to a climbdown by an isolated United States.UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who flew to the Indonesian island of Bali for a late appeal for flexibility, praised the deal as a "pivotal first step" to confront climate change, "the defining challenge of our time."

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan has closed a road that threatened the foundation of a group of mediaeval minarets which Kabul wants to see listed among the World's Cultural Heritage sites.The minarets, standing at more than 100 feet, are all that remain of what was once a brilliantly decorated complex for Islamic learning and devotion along the Silk Road on the outskirts of the western city of Herat.

The Assyrian Hall at the Iraqi National Museum is breathtaking.Stone panels from the royal palace at Khorsabad run along the walls.The carvings on the friezes depict daily life in the Assyrian royal court, which at its height about 3,000 years ago controlled a region stretching across much of the modern Middle East.

If you are concerned mainly with temperature when you think about climate change, your perspective is too narrow.Think also about other atmospheric changes such as rising ozone pollution. A recent study indicates that its increasing harmful effect on plants could cut the global economic value of crop production by 10 to 12 percent by this century's end. The research projects that regions such as the United States, China, and Europe would become net food importers.Think, too, of how plants respond to a warmer environment. New research shows that a longer growing season is not always beneficial. Or consider new evidence that the tropical zone already is expanding faster than computer-based climate simulations have forecast.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP)--When scientists opened the watch belonging to the H.L. Hunley commander three years ago, they thought they had the key clue to why the Confederate submarine sank off Charleston.But the 18-karat gold watch now seems to raise even more questions even though scientists announced Friday it did not slowly wind down but stopped quickly-perhaps the result of a concussion or rushing water.

A company called MPK is designing a light source that will glow continuously for more than 12 years without any additional energy.The material, dubbed "Litrosphere," can cover a standard sheet of paper for a cost of about 35 cents, and comes in a variety of colors. It´s also flexible, and can take the form of either paint or injection-molded plastic. The material is not affected by the heat or cold, can withstand 5,000 pounds, and stays on constantly.

A successful treatment for Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects 1 percent of the world's population and (an estimated 500,000 people in the U.S.) aged 60 years and over, may be "in our sights now," says Ronald McKay, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).McKay's optimism stems from new research that shows that a gene, known as forkhead box A2 (FOXA2), is responsible for the differentiation and spontaneous destruction of neurons that secrete the neurotransmitter dopamine, a cell population that is progressively lost in Parkinson's disease, which is characterized by tremors, loss of muscle control and speech difficulties.

It might be time to consider traffic lights on the moon. In the past week, governments, space agencies, and even a company from the Isle of Man announced plans to land on the moon.Marking the 35th anniversary of the Apollo programme's last outing, NASA announced on Monday that its next crewed lunar mission is on track for 2020, despite an increasingly constrained budget. Meanwhile, China opened up its lunar programme to private funding last week, planning a lander for 2012 and a crewed mission within 15 years. And Russia will begin a series of uncrewed landings in 2012, after a 30-year break from exploring the moon.

A robotic submarine designed to explore the oceans thought to lie beneath the icy crust on Jupiter's moon Europa will prove its mettle in an Antarctic lake in 2008. A previous version of the vessel has already mapped the balmier waters of a Mexican sinkhole.The submarine, named Endurance, is set to survey Antarctica's West Lake Bonney in October 2008 and again in 2009, scientists reported on Thursday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California, US. The 4-kilometre-wide lake is 40 metres deep and is capped by a perennial layer of ice about 4 metres thick. The crust has kept the lake's waters pristine and virtually unexplored.

Sixty years after transistors were invented and nearly five decades since they were first integrated into silicon chips, the tiny on-off switches dubbed the "nerve cells" of the information age are starting to show their age.The devices - whose miniaturization over time set in motion the race for faster, smaller and cheaper electronics - have been shrunk so much that the day is approaching when it will be physically impossible to make them even tinier.

The wreckage of a pirate ship abandoned by Captain Kidd in the 17th century has been found by divers in shallow waters off the Dominican Republic, a research team claims.The underwater archaeology team, from Indiana University, says they have found the remains of Quedagh Merchant, actively sought by treasure hunters for years.Charles Beeker of IU said his team has been licensed to study the wreckage and convert the site into an underwater preserve for the public.

Move over Eagle, the Altair has landed.NASA today introduced a new name and logo for its next generation lunar lander, which was previously referred to as the Lunar Surface Access Module, or LSAM for short."That's the name they chose," said Jeff Hanley, NASA's Constellation Program manager, under which Altair falls. "We can stop calling it LSAM or esoteric things like that."

Supercomputers may one day be the size of a laptop thanks to research by IBM.Scientists at IBM have completed work that may make it possible to do away with the copper wires used to couple processing cores to each other.The connector created by the team uses light to pass data between the computational cores that is faster and uses less power than copper wires.

Dec. 14, 2007: The solar physics community is abuzz this week. No, there haven't been any great eruptions or solar storms. The source of the excitement is a modest knot of magnetism that popped over the sun's eastern limb on Dec. 11th, pictured below in a pair of images from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).It may not look like much, but "this patch of magnetism could be a sign of the next solar cycle," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Startling evidence has been found which shows mammoth and other great beasts from the last ice age were blasted with material that came from space.Eight tusks dating to some 35,000 years ago all show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments.The ancient remains come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pregnant women may stand out a mile away with their characteristic backward-leaning stance, but that clumsy-looking position is a unique adaptation that evolved over millennia, anthropologists said on Wednesday.Pregnant pre-humans appeared to have stood the same way. And it may save women from even more back pain than they already have, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Nasa says its Mars rover Spirit has discovered "the best evidence yet" of a past habitable environment on the planet's surface.Nasa's Spirit rover found a patch of silica-rich soil in MaySpirit has been exploring a plateau called Home Plate, where it discovered silica-rich soil in May.Researchers are now trying to determine what produced the patch of nearly pure silica - the main ingredient of window glass.They believe the deposits came from an ancient hot-spring environment or an environment called a fumarole, in which acidic steam rises through cracks.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists searching for fossils high in the Andes mountains in Chile have unearthed the remains of a tank-like mammal related to armadillos that grazed 18 million years ago."It looks different than almost anything out on the landscape today. There really isn't anything that's comparable today in terms of its body form," John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the scientists, said in a telephone interview.

Scientists studying ancient fish bones in Scandinavia have discovered that warm-water species like anchovies and black sea bream that once thrived in Danish waters during a prehistoric warm period are now returning. Some cold-water species, such as cod, were also abundant during this period, having benefited from a lower fishing effort.Through the study of archaeological material, tax accounts, church registers and account books of monasteries, an international group of fisheries ecologists and fisheries/maritime historians have drawn a picture of marine life in the northern European seas (North Sea, Wadden Sea, Baltic Sea, and White Sea) as it looked in the past.

Dec. 11, 2007: NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft, launched less than 8 months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called "substorms" and the source of their power. The discoveries include giant magnetic ropes that connect Earth's upper atmosphere to the Sun and explosions in the outskirts of Earth's magnetic field."The mission is only beginning but THEMIS is already surprising us," says Vassilis Angelopoulos the mission's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Academic conferences tend to be fairly sedate affairs, at least to the uninitiated, and the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) annual meetings are usually no exception. But this year's, held recently in Washington, D.C., was a downright raucous gathering, certainly the liveliest and most intemperate since the divisive days of the Vietnam War, when some anthropologists were attacked for willingly or unwittingly abetting violent counter-insurgencies. There was some serious name-calling ("torture-deniers," even "war criminals") as well as threats to name names, censure or expel certain colleagues.

A new report led by an ANU archaeologist on the first evidence of death by spearing in Australia has been published in the prestigious British journal Antiquity.The paper outlines the collaborative detective work that took place following the discovery of the skeletal remains of an Aboriginal male in the Sydney suburb of Narrabeen during excavations for gas works in 2005. A number of stone tools, interpreted as spear barbs, were also discovered at the site.

As if scanning the moon's surface for impact blemishes were not enough, NASA now plans to visualize its internal imperfections to solve longstanding mysteries about the moon's insides.NASA said this week that it selected the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission from two dozen proposals. GRAIL's twin spacecraft are slated to launch around Sept. 6, 2011 and, after a few weeks of settling into orbit, map the lunar gravity field for 90 days.

Fossils of a massive dinosaur unearthed a decade ago in the Republic of Niger, Africa, have been recognised as belonging to a new species.Scientists say Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis was one of the largest meat-eaters that ever lived, rivalling T. rex in size and ferocity.The 95-million-year-old fossils have been kept in a Chicago laboratory for several years, awaiting classification.

Scientists have gathered more evidence that suggests flowing water on Mars -- by comparing images of the red planet to an otherworldly landscape on Earth.In recent years, scientists have examined images of several sites on Mars where water appears to have flowed to the surface and left behind a trail of sediment. Those sites closely resemble places where water flows today in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica , the new study has found.The new study bolsters the notion that liquid water could be flowing beneath the surface of Mars. And since bacteria thrive in the liquid water flowing in the Dry Valleys, the find suggests that bacterial life could possibly exist on Mars as well.

As the United Nations climate negotiations proceed in Bali, Indonesia, researchers have taken a first step toward quantifying the "socioclimatic" exposure of different countries to future climate change.The research team from Purdue University and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, found that China, India and the United States - major greenhouse gas-emitting nations that are currently unbound by the Kyoto treaty - face substantial exposure relative to other nations, but that every area of the world faces high exposure in at least one category.

LOS ANGELES - New observations from NASA's long-running Voyager 2 spacecraft show the solar system is asymmetrical, likely from disturbances in the interstellar magnetic field, scientists reported Monday.The discovery came after the 30-year-old unmanned probe sailed near the edge of the solar system this past summer following its twin, Voyager 1, which reached that part of space in 2004.

NEW YORK: With some modification, the same ultrasound technology that allows parents to see their children in the womb could one day allow surgeons to operate inside the body without making a single cut.The technique, called 'histotripsy,' is being developed by biomedical engineer Charles Cain and his team at the University of Michigan in the U.S., and was detailed this week at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

A year ago, George Smoot won the Nobel Prize for physics. He used $500,000 of his award to finance a dream, and on Tuesday it came to life: the $8.1 million Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics."All I did was have a vision and state what I wanted to do," said Smoot, a UC Berkeley astrophysicist who was awarded almost $700,000 in Nobel money for his studies of cosmic microwave background radiation.

After years of delays, NASA hopes to launch a European-built laboratory this week that will greatly expand the research capability of the international space station.But while some call it a milestone, the launch has focused new attention on the space agency's earlier decision to back out of plans to send up a different, $1.5 billion device - one that many scientists contend would produce much more significant knowledge.

An ancient doctor's surgery unearthed by Italian archaeologists has cast new light on what a trip to the doctor would have been like in Roman times. Far from crude, the medical implements discovered show that doctors, their surgeries and the ailments they treated have changed surprisingly little in 1,800 years.Sore joints were common, patients were often told to change their diets, and the good doctor of the seaside town of Rimini even performed house calls.

OUAGADOUGOU (AFP) - The growing promotion of environmentally-friendly biofuels is raising questions for Africa: are such fuels a threat to food security or a golden opportunity to cut down on fossil fuel bills.Some 300 experts from the continent and further afield in the Americas and Europe, gathered earlier this month in the impoverished capital of the non-oil producing west African nation of Burkina Faso to debate the pros and cons of biofuel generation on the continent.

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AFP) - Delegates at a key climate change summit feeling guilty about exhaust-spewing taxis have another solution -- call a solar taxi that has travelled over land to Asia all the way from Switzerland.Cheery Swiss national Louis Palmer fulfilled a childhood dream when he set off from his home country on July 3, travelling over desert, city and sea in 17 countries to reach the conference in Bali, Indonesia.

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said every UK home could be supplied by wind power alone by 2020 by making full use of its wind-swept seas but denied it was backing away from thoughts of more nuclear power.The target was greeted with wide skepticism, including from the Renewable Energy Foundation, which accused the government of "green exhibitionism."

ROME, Dec 10 (Reuters Life!) - Four frescoed rooms in the eastern wing of the house of Augustus, where he lived before becoming Rome's first emperor, will open to the public for the first time next year after three decades of restorations.Italian archaeologists said on Monday the rooms dated from around 30 B.C. and had been buried -- which may explain why some of the paintings are so well preserved -- after Augustus moved to another residence on a higher level of the Palatine Hill.

ATHENS (AFP) - The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday.After more than five years of analysis of human remains culled from the pit, also called an apothetes, researchers found only the remains of adolescents and adults between the ages of 18 and 35, Athens Faculty of Medicine Anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios said.

Experts have carried out a CT scan on an ancient Egyptian mummy in a bid to unravel its secrets.Radiographers at University College Hospital carried out a whole-body computerised tomography on the 3,000-year-old body on Sunday.Nesperennub, a male priest, is enclosed in a linen and plaster case within a one and a half metre-long coffin.

(AP) Science fiction writers have suggested a future Earth populated by a blend of all races into a common human form. In real life, the reverse seems to be happening.People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say."I was raised with the belief that modern humans showed up 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and haven't changed," explained Henry C. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. "The opposite seems to be true."

Ancient dinosaur remains found at the site of a proposed $3.1 billion desalination plant in East Gippsland will not derail the project, Water Minister Tim Holding has said.Fossilised dinosaur bones dating back 115 million years have been found on a rock shelf on the beach at Wonthaggi in south-east Victoria.

CHICAGO (AFP) - New observations of the Sun gathered by a Japanese probe may finally explain why its outer atmosphere burns white-hot in contrast to its relatively cool surface, scientists said Thursday.The riddle of the star's white-hot atmosphere, which at several million degrees kelvin is 200 to 300 times warmer than the surface, has intrigued solar physicists for more than 50 years.

University of Texas at Austin astronomer and Hubble Fellow Seth Redfield has used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at McDonald Observatory to make the first ground-based detection of the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system."It's a remarkable pioneering discovery," said McDonald Observatory Director David L. Lambert.The work is an incremental step in finding life in the universe, falling between the initial detections of planets around other stars (known as "extra-solar planets" or "exoplanets"), and the anticipated discovery of planets similar to Earth.

Sloping slightly sideways on the grassy hills beneath the Ranu Raraku volcano, a giant stone head known as a moai shows the wear and tear of time on this triangular 64-square-mile island.On the right side of the oblong rectangular face with male features, the rock is lighter in color and its long, carefully sculpted ear and nostril are clearly visible. But on the statue's left side, the sun and wind have eroded the nose, lip and ear.

German archaeologists claim to have found traces of a glue they say was made by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago and used to mount silver laurel leaves on legionnaires' battle helmets.Researchers at the Rhineland historical museum in Bonn said they had found remnants of the glue on a legionnaire's iron helmet unearthed near the town of Xanten. It had lain on what was once the bed of the Rhine for at least 1,500 years.

SYDNEY (AFP) - A 25-million-year-old fossil has revealed that a predecessor of Australia's iconic hopping kangaroo once galloped on all fours, had dog-like fangs and possibly climbed trees, scientists have reported."This is really the great, great, great, great grandfather of modern kangaroos," a member of the Australian team that analysed the bones, La Trobe University paleontologist Ben Kear, told The Age newspaper.The near-complete skeleton of the prehistoric kangaroo was found in Queensland state in the 1990s and represents a new species called nambaroo gillespieae, Kear said.

LONDON (Reuters) - Plans to build a road tunnel under Stonehenge have been scrapped, the government said on Thursday, raising fears that nearby traffic could damage the ancient World Heritage Site.After years of argument over how to ease congestion around the stone circle in Wiltshire, ministers said they had decided that a tunnel would cost too much.

For years scientists have wrestled with a puzzling fact: The universe appears to be remarkably suited for life. Its physical properties are finely tuned to permit our existence. Stars, planets and the kind of sticky chemistry that produces fish, ferns and folks wouldn't be possible if some of the cosmic constants were only slightly different.Well, there's another property of the universe that's equally noteworthy: It's set up in a way that keeps everyone isolated.

It was the biggest climate event of the last 10,000 years and caused the most dramatic change in the weather since humans began farming. And it may yet hold important lessons about climate change in the 21st century.Just over 8000 years ago, a huge glacial lake in Canada burst, and an estimated 100,000 cubic kilometres of fresh water rushed into the North Atlantic. Researchers now say they know for sure that this catastrophic event shut down the Gulf Stream and cooled parts of the northern hemisphere by several degrees for more than a hundred years.

Volcanoes were active on the Moon's surface soon after it was formed, a new study in the journal Nature suggests.Precision dating of a lunar rock that fell to Earth shows our satellite must have had lava erupting across its vast plains 4.35 billion years ago.This is hundreds of millions of years earlier than had been indicated by the rocks collected by Apollo astronauts.

Tuberculosis may have infected human ancestors much earlier than previously thought, according to scientists who have discovered traces of the disease in a hominin fossil about 500,000 years old.Researchers say the findings could provide a better understanding of the roles of climate, health, and evolution in ancient human migration.The fossilized Homo erectus, an extinct branch of early human ancestors, was discovered in a block of travertine rock mined from a quarry near Kocabas in western Turkey.

A radio antenna made of electrified gas could lead to stealthy, jamming-resistant transmitters, research now reveals.Electrified gas, or plasma, makes up stars and lightning and is what sheds light in fluorescent bulbs. Sealed glass, ceramic or even flexible plastic tubes of plasma can behave just like conventional metal antennas.

JERUSALEM - Israeli archaeologists say they have unearthed a wall beyond Jerusalem's old boundaries, showing that the city built by biblical King David may have been much larger than previously thought.The Israel Antiquities Authority said it believed the 16-foot-high (5-meter-high) wall was part of a two-story structure demolished in A.D. 70 when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the second Jewish temple built by King Herod."According to our findings, ancient Jerusalem ... was much larger than previously thought," Doron Ben-Ami of the authority told a news conference near the excavation site.

Scientists in Pennsylvania are reporting development of a fuel cell that uses pollution from coal and metal mines to generate electricity, solving a serious environmental problem while providing a new source of energy. They describe successful tests of a laboratory-scale version of the device in a new study.

For the first time, more than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists, losing their patience, urged government leaders to take radical action to slow global warming because "there is no time to lose."A petition from at least 215 climate scientists calls for the world to cut in half greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It is directed at a conference of diplomats meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate the next global warming treaty. The petition, obtained by The Associated Press, is to be announced at a press conference there Wednesday night.

Transplanting genetically engineered cells into the heart may help protect people who have survived a heart attack from developing life-threatening heart rhythm problems later on, scientists said on Wednesday.The researchers showed the approach worked in mice, protecting them from arrhythmia -- an irregularity in the heart's natural rhythm -- after the animals' hearts were damaged in a way similar to a heart attack.

PARIS (AFP) - The plains of solidified lava that give the Moon its quirky human-like face as seen from Earth were created more than four billion years ago, according to a paper appearing on Thursday in Nature, the British science weekly.The evidence comes from an unearthly silvery-grey stone that was blasted off from the face of the Moon, perhaps by an impacting asteroid, and was then captured by Earth's gravity, prompting it to fall to ground in Botswana.

BERLIN (AFP) - A floating wind turbine that its makers claim could significantly boost the renewable energy sector was officially launched at a trade show in the German capital on Wednesday.Dutch company Blue H Technologies said its invention, which adapts technology used in offshore oil rigs, was a world first.It will soon go into operation off the coast of Puglia in southern Italy.

PARIS (AFP) - An extraordinary episode of global cooling hundreds of millions of years ago that some experts say caused Earth to completely freeze over has been miscalculated, a new study says.Instead of "Snowball Earth," the planet really became "Slushball Earth," its authors suggest.The great chill -- the longest and deepest ice age in Earth's known history -- happened during the late Neoproterozoic era, 850 to 542 million years ago.

Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists.The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen, and correctly recalling the sequence.

Canadian paleontologists have unearthed the world's largest known horned dinosaur with the discovery of an early relative of Triceratops that measured around 30 feet in length, or the size of an enormous SUV.The previous record-holder was Pentaceratops sternbergi, which hailed from what is now New Mexico.

A row of artisans and laborers - one with a saw in his hand, another with a chisel, and others with various sized hammers - are depicted on the mosaic floor recently uncovered in a Roman- or Byzantine-era synagogue at Khirbet Wadi Hamam, on Mount Nitai in the Lower Galilee. The workers appear next to a very large building, which they seem to be constructing.

DAMASCUS, Syria - Syrian archaeologists have unearthed two Bronze-era cemeteries dating from the 18th century B.C., the third set of ancient graveyards found in less than a month, the head of the Archaeological Department said Tuesday.Mahmoud Hamoud said the circular limestone cemeteries that were discovered Monday in the village of Heina, south of the capital Damascus, contained skeletons of both adults and children, more than 120 pieces of pottery, jars and precious stones.

ROME - Remnants of the first known surviving Roman throne have been discovered in the lava and ash that buried the city of Herculaneum in the first century, archaeologists said Tuesday.Decorated with ivory bas-reliefs depicting ancient deities, two legs and part of the back of the wooden throne were dug out between October and November. They were found 82 feet below ground near Herculaneum's Villa dei Papiri, a first century country home that is believed to have been the residence of Julius Caesar's father-in-law.

Stars like the Sun may drift into space like ghosts when they die, Hubble Space Telescope observations reveal. But what propels them is still a mystery.Relatively low-mass stars like the Sun do not explode as supernovae when they die. Instead, they bloat up into red giant stars before shedding their outer layers and becoming dense embers called white dwarfs.

NASA's Mars rover Spirit has freed itself from the loose soil it had been stuck in for about two weeks, but over the next month it will have to navigate similarly treacherous terrain to reach a safe spot to ride out the coming Martian winter.Spirit got stuck in the sandy soil, nicknamed "Tartarus" after an underworld dungeon in Greek mythology, in mid-November.But on 28 November, it clambered out, after a series of short drives in which rover managers drove it first in one direction and then in another, "switchbacking" out of the troublesome spot.

Scientists in France are reporting for the first time that sculptors from the fantastically wealthy ancient Empire of Mali -- once the source of almost half the world's gold -- used blood to form the beautiful patina, or coating, on their works of art. Pascale Richardin and colleagues describe development of a new, noninvasive test that accurately identifies traces of blood apparently left on ancient African artifacts used in ceremonies involving animal sacrifices.

Remains of a bus-sized prehistoric "monster" reptile found on a remote Arctic island may be a new species never before recorded by science, researchers said Tuesday.Initial excavation of a site on the Svalbard islands in August yielded the remains, teeth, skull fragments and vertebrae of a reptile estimated to measure nearly 40 feet long, said paleontologist Joern Harald Hurum of the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.

An extremely rare and intricately carved "death vase" has been discovered in the 1,400-year-old grave of an elite figure within the Maya Empire, scientists say.The vase is the first of its kind to be found in modern times, and its contents are opening a window onto ancient rituals of ancestor worship that included food offerings, chocolate enemas, and hallucinations induced by vomiting, experts say.

It might seem as if astronomers and astrophysicists have had enormous success at unlocking the mysteries of space.Impressive evidence has been gathered to support the theory that our universe was created about 13.7 billion years ago with an explosion of energy that eventually formed the innumerable galaxies still spinning away from one another to uncharted expanses of space.We've discovered distant planets that might be friendly to life as we know it and have estimated distances to remote pulsing stars to help map the universe. We've assessed the power of black holes and remain awestruck by the extraordinary beauty of images of distant galaxies, young and old, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers.Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?

CAIRO, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- Remains of an ancient dam dating back some 4,000 years have been discovered in Upper Egypt, local English daily The Egyptian Gazette reported Sunday.Secretary-General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass said Saturday that the ancient dam was found a few meters away from the Karnak Temple in Luxor, some 500 km south of Cairo.The finding was made by an Egyptian-French archaeological team, which has been working in Luxor since March, Hawass was quoted as saying at a press conference.

Delegates and scientists from around the world opened the biggest-ever climate conference Monday, aiming to build a new international pact by 2009 to combat global warming, or risk economic and environmental disaster caused by rising temperatures.Some 10,000 conferees, activists and journalists from nearly 190 countries gathered on the resort island of Bali for two weeks of U.N.-led talks that follow a series of scientific reports this year concluding that the world has the technology to slow global warming, but must act immediately.