Newsdesk Archive

Norm Bobczynski drives a gray Honda minivan up to a dormant rocket launch pad at Cape Canaveral and scans his eyes across worn concrete roads and rusting steel towers.Years ago, probes to Saturn and satellites were launched into orbit there for the Air Force."This is our baby now, and it will be a lot of work," says Bobczynski, a rocket engineer with SpaceX, a small, private California rocket company backed by the billionaire founder of PayPal, who wants to make space flight a commercial venture akin to FedEx or Southwest Airlines.

PARIS (AFP) - The greenhouse effect is causing Earth's zone of tropical climate to creep towards the poles, according to a study whose release on Sunday coincided with the eve of a major UN conference on climate change.The poleward expansion of the tropics will have far-reaching impacts, notably in intensifying water scarcity in the Mediterranean and the US "Sun belt" as well as southern Africa and southern Australia, it warns.

They are the factories of the Internet economy. US data centers and servers now consume more electricity each year than the entire state of Colorado. In five years, they could require nearly twice as much juice.And while these data centers don't have smokestacks, many are spewing out greenhouse gases through the electricity they burn. Sensing high-voltage perils to both their public image and bottom line, Google announced Tuesday it will plow $100 million into the research and development of alternative energies.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- One of the most complete dinosaur mummies ever found is revealing secrets locked away for millions of years, bringing researchers as close as they will ever get to touching a live dino.The fossilized duckbilled hadrosaur is so well preserved that scientists have been able to calculate its muscle mass and learn that it was more muscular than thought, probably giving it the ability to outrun predators such as T. rex.

Engineers who want to produce hydrogen for fuel have to think outside the box. Standard processes are too costly and inefficient. A sample of research reported this year illustrates the unexpected possibilities such creative thinking opens up.How about a portable hydrogen generator so compact it could power a lawn mower? Or how about coaxing bacteria to produce hydrogen from plant material with unprecedented efficiency?

It's time to harness the world's virtually inexhaustible supply of solar energy and start building a brighter future. We know that relying on coal, oil and natural gas threatens our future with toxic pollution, global climate change and social unrest caused by diminishing fuel supplies. Instead of relying on unsustainable fossil fuels, we must transform our economy and learn to thrive on the planet s abundant supply of renewable energy.

Coldblooded or warmblooded? Paleontologists have tussled for more than 100 years over which camp dinosaurs belong in. The balance of evidence swings back and forth. "This is Friday, so I'll be on the side of endothermy [warmbloodedness]," says paleontologist David Weishampel of Johns Hopkins University. "But if you ask me on Tuesday, I won't be."

Most of Antarctica's fossils lie buried beneath glaciers, but prime bits of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock jut thousands of feet above the ice. Geologic forces have created mountains where once an ancient river flowed, and it is here intrepid dinosaur hunters, such as William Hammer, come to search out the past. He's made the journey from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, to Antarctica seven times in the last 30 years.

WASHINGTON - Scientists hoping to study the ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man are protesting efforts that they say could block them from examining one of the oldest and most complete set of bones ever found in North America.For the third time in four years, the scientists oppose a Senate bill that would allow federally recognized tribes to claim ancient remains even if they can't prove a link to a current tribe.

It is a scientific icon, which belongs, some claim, alongside E=mc2 and the double helix.Its name - the Keeling Curve - may be scarcely known outside scientific circles, but the jagged upward slope showing rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere has become one of the most famous graphs in science, and a potent symbol of our times.It was 50 years ago that a young American scientist, Charles David Keeling, began tracking CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere at two of the world's last wildernesses - the South Pole and the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - A U.S.-based television channel investigating the existence of the legendary Yeti in Nepal has found footprints similar to those said to be that of the abominable snowman, the company said on Friday.A team of nine producers from Destination Truth, armed with infrared cameras, spent a week in the icy Khumbu region where Mount Everest is located and found the footprints on the bank of Manju river at a height of 2,850 meters (9,350 feet).

Nov. 30, 2007 -- Astronomers have spotted and clocked a star ripping through the Milky Way at more than 3,000,000 miles per hour. That sort of excessive speed -- one of the fastest ever measured -- is certain to kick the star out of the Milky Way.The star itself is a neutron star dubbed RX J0822-4300. It's the dead, very dense remnant of what was once a large star. It has been observed over the last five years by the Chandra X-ray Observatory as the star has shot away from the 3,700-year-old remnant of a supernova, or exploding star, known as Puppis A.

DAMASCUS, Syria - Syrian archeologists have discovered an ancient glass jar containing an infant's ashes at one of the Mideast's most famous sites from Classical antiquity.The discovery of the 2nd century A.D. jar amid the ruins of Palmyra was the first of its kind, shedding light on previously unknown funeral practices common at the time.

HANGZHOU, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists said Thursday they have discovered the remains of an ancient city in eastern Zhejiang Province, which could better prove the long history of Chinese civilization.The relic was found near Mojiao Mountain between Liangzhu and Pingyao townships in Yuhang District of the provincial capital Hangzhou, said Bao Xianlun, director of Zhejiang Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau.

It can crush ice sideways and stay precisely on station to an accuracy of a metre. It can drill a hole 1,000 metres deep into the seabed while floating above 5,000 metres of ocean and it can generate 55 megawatts of power. So far, Aurora Borealis is the most unusual ship that has never been built, and it represents a floating laboratory for European science, a breakthrough for polar research and a very big headache for international lawyers.

PARIS (AFP) - Buying locally-produced fruit and veg, riding bikes or taking the train instead of using private cars, buying carbon offsets and staging carbon-neutral weddings: all are part of the climate-change awareness taking root in many countries.Individuals keen on reducing their "carbon footprint" -- the dangerous greenhouse gas that each of us emit through our purchases and activities -- can now turn to a multiplying panoply of tools to calculate their pollution, reduce it or compensate for it.

Some early human ancestors may have lived in "harem" societies much like those of modern gorillas and orangutans, a new fossil study suggests.Such an arrangement is known to arise in some modern primate species when males mature later in life than females and become much larger than their mates.In these cases a single dominant male mates with and protects a large harem of females.

JAKARTA (AFP) - Indonesia has lost 24 of its more than 17,500 islands due to natural disasters and environmental damage, a minister said Thursday according to the Antara news agency.Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Freddy Numberi said four islands disappeared when the massive tsunami devastated Aceh on December 26, 2004, the state-run agency reported.Twenty other islands in Sumatra's Riau province and in the Seribu island group in Jakarta Bay had also vanished due to exploitation and environmental damage, Numberi said.

TRAFFIC pollution may increase the risk of breast cancer for women living and working in city centres, research suggests.Scientists found that urban women were far more likely than those from rural areas to have dense breasts.Women with dense breasts are up to four times more at risk of breast cancer than those with fatty breasts.

Located in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii and measuring in at roughly twice the size of Texas, this elusive mass is home to hundreds of species of marine life and is constantly expanding. It has tripled in size since the middle of the 1990s and could grow tenfold in the next decade.Although no official title has been given to the mass yet, a popular label thus far has been "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

Scientists have produced the most detailed map yet of Antarctica.US and UK researchers have stitched together more than 1,000 views of the White Continent to make a stunning new high-definition polar panorama.

Pleasant music works to cultivate one's temperament, to purify one's mind, and to deliver a sense of beauty. But has it ever occurred to you that the creation of music was originally intended as a medicine to cure?The origin of music can be traced back to the creation of Chinese characters by Cangjie (2650 B.C.), a legendary figure in ancient China. The Chinese character "Yao," which means medicine, is derived from the character "Yue," which means music.

Learning your planets used to be a lot easier. There were only nine of them, and they all circled our own sun. With Pluto kicked out of the club for failing to make weight, the local census has dwindled even further. But the sun we know is hardly the only one around, and elsewhere in the cosmos, planets are popping up everywhere.

LONDON (Reuters) - The young building blocks of galaxies similar to the Milky Way have been spotted for the first time by astronomers, giving a tantalizing glimpse of how our stellar backyard may have formed.The discovery of 27 "teenager," or proto-galaxies, is further evidence that galaxies like the Milky Way were created by the clumping of smaller clouds of gas and dust, researchers said on Wednesday.Until now, the light from these adolescent galaxies was so faint that astronomers had struggled to prove their existence.

TOKYO (Reuters) - A pearly white robot that looks a little like E.T. boosted a man out of bed, chatted and helped prepare his breakfast with its deft hands in Tokyo on Tuesday, in a further sign robots are becoming more like their human inventors.Twendy-One, named as a 21st century edition of a previous robot, Wendy, has soft hands and fingers that gently grip, enough strength to support humans as they sit up and stand, and supple movements that respond to human touch.

Mars, now cooled into crusty sphere, once sizzled with oceans of magma for millions of years. New research suggests it was red-hot tens of millions of years longer than previously thought.Rare chunks of Martian rock flung to Earth as meteorites hint at an extended molten status, for which scientists think a thick, early atmosphere was responsible.

Scientists have launched a project aimed at solving the mystery of the giant redwood tree: What allows it to grow so tall and live so long?Arborists from Bartlett Tree Experts recently climbed almost 300 feet up three redwood trees in Roy's Redwoods Open Space Preserve in Marin County, Calif., to collect samples of new growth as part of an effort to clone some of the oldest and biggest redwood trees in the western USA.

Nasa has released details of its strategy for sending a human crew to Mars within the next few decades.The US space agency envisages despatching a "minimal" crew on a 30-month round trip to the Red Planet in a 400,000kg (880,000lb) spacecraft.Details of the concept were outlined at a meeting in Houston, Texas.

Mice carrying a gene which appears to make them invulnerable to cancer may hold the key to safer and more effective treatments for humans.The new breed, created with a more active "Par-4" gene, did not develop tumours, and even lived longer, said the journal Cancer Research.University of Kentucky researchers said a human cancer treatment was possible.

These two images taken by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) show Mars' two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, as seen from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's low orbit around Mars. Both images were taken while the spacecraft was over Mars' night side, with the spacecraft turned off its normal nadir-viewing geometry to glimpse the moons.

Thankyou to Jonathan Black for participating with us on our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout November to discuss his latest book featured in our November Forum Article.

WHEN his cargo ship capsized, perhaps struck by a catastrophic flood, the Roman sailor struggled in vain to free his foot from a rope. Almost two millenniums later, his skeleton was found with an arm outstretched towards the remains of a dog similar to a basset hound.The discovery of the two skeletons, both dating from AD10 when the Roman empire was at its zenith, is among a host of finds, which include 30 ancient ships preserved by their burial in the watery clay silt of an ancient port near the Tuscan city of Pisa.

Italian researcher Siro Trevisanato says he believes the ancient Hittite empire was the first to use biological warfare.Trevisanato says in the Journal of Medical Hypotheses the Hittites "were the first people to wage bioterrorism," using diseased sheep, ANSA reported Monday.He said the Hittites of Asia Minor used tularemia, an animal-borne infection fatal to humans, to aid their expansion campaigns.

Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our very ability to study the heavens may have shortened the inferred lifetime of the cosmos.# Parallel universe proof boosts time travel hopes# Quantum theory and relativity explained# Surfer Dude's Theory of Everything - The MovieThat does not mean the field of astronomy does direct harm. A universe with a truncated lifespan may come hand in hand with the ability of astronomers to make cosmological measurements, according to two American scientists who have studied the strange, subtle and cosmic implications of quantum mechanics, the most successful theory we have.

If you're having trouble getting into the scarf-sporting, cocoa-sipping holiday spirit, don't worry, it's not you. It's the weather.USA Today reports that this year is on track to be the warmest seen in the Northern Hemisphere in the 127 years that scientists have been keeping track of such things, according to the National Climatic Data Center. In the Southern Hemisphere, it's the ninth warmest.Up north, temperatures for January through October averaged 1.3 degrees above the norm. If the trend continues, the year could break the record for warmest set in 2005, the paper reports.

Amputees could "feel" their lost arms and hands after scientists reconnected the nerves to their chests in an experiment that holds promise for providing sensation in artificial limbs, according to a report released Monday.In two patients who had lost arms, scientists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University rerouted to their chests the key nerves that had transferred sensation from the hand to the brain.After several months during which the nerves reestablished themselves in the chest muscles, physical pressure, heat and cold, and electrical stimulus were applied to the areas of the nerves and the patients said they could feel their missing arms and hands.

Richard Hoagland, the controversial New York Times bestselling author will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout December to discuss his latest book featured in our newest Forum Article

Recording numbers and quantities was one of the first requirements of the bureaucracy as soon as hieroglyphs had been invented. Items to be accounted for varied from enemies slain in battle and prisoners to how many jars of beer or bunches of onions were needed to accompany the Pharaoh into the afterlife. Inventories of equipment used in temples were kept meticulously and any damage noted down.

Good news for lunar astronauts who fancy a stroll. Every month brings about seven straight days of relative safety from the flux of energetic charged particles from the sun, as the moon dips through the Earth's magnetic field.

PARIS (AFP) - In a surprising reversal of roles, nanotechnology scientists outrival the general public in seeing a cause for concern in some aspects of their work, according to a study published Sunday.Nanotechnology -- the science of making things measured in units 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair -- holds spectacular promise in virtually every sector.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese leaders hailed images sent back from the country's first lunar satellite on Monday, saying they showed their nation had thrust itself into the front ranks of global technological powers.Premier Wen Jiabao, visiting the scientists who have guided the lunar probe Chang'e 1 into space and around the moon, proclaimed the mission a complete success."The full success of our country's first lunar exploration mission is helping to turn the Chinese nation's 1,000-year old dream of reaching the moon a reality," Wen said.

SCOTTISH scientists are developing an artificial liver that could save the lives of hundreds of patients by avoiding the need for an organ transplant.Researchers have created a 'bioartificial' liver using living cells in a machine that can filter blood and take over the functions of the natural organ.They believe the artificial liver - which works outside the body in a way similar to kidney dialysis - could help patients suffering from acute liver disease such as hepatitis or those who have taken a paracetamol overdose, by giving their own liver the chance to 'rest' and heal itself.

A lack of "big thinking" by politicians has stifled a scheme to distribute laptops to children in the developing world, a spokesman has said.Walter Bender of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) said politicians were unwilling to commit because "change equals risk".

TOKYO (AFP) - An ambitious international project to dig deeper into the Earth's surface than ever before has made a good start with scientists saying they have gained clues about how large earthquakes and tsunami occur.The experiment, using the Japanese government's 57,500-tonne, 60-billion-yen (550-million-dollar) deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu, is probing a trench in waters off the Pacific coast of Japan where two tectonic plates meet.

HOUSTON - A pair of spacewalking astronauts wired the international space station's newest room on Saturday, crossing the last major task off their to-do list before the next shuttle mission early next month.Commander Peggy Whitson and Daniel Tani hooked up more electrical and fluid connections linking the space station and the Harmony compartment that was delivered by the shuttle Discovery last month.

British engineers have been asked to build the payload for what will become one of the biggest commercial telecoms satellites ever launched.London-based Inmarsat has signed a contract with industrialists to construct the Alphasat I-XL mission.The six-tonne satellite will deliver high-bandwidth services, such as mobile internet, to Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

A series of frescos dating back to the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911) were found in an assembly hall in Wafang Village in Ziyang County, Shaanxi Province. The entire area of these frescos covers about 220 square meters, which is very rare in China.The frescos are exquisite. Experts said that the frescos remain valuable as historical studies because they depict ancient business assembly halls, buildings, paintings and folk cultures. The local government is salvaging and protecting them. Experts noted that these frescos encompass all four walls of the assembly hall.

New solutions to the ancient problem of maintaining a fresh water supply is discussed in a special issue of the Inderscience publication International Journal of Nuclear Desalination. With predictions that more than 3.5 billion people will live in areas facing severe water shortages by the year 2025, the challenge is to find an environmentally benign way to remove salt from seawater.Global climate change, desertification, and over-population are already taking their toll on fresh water supplies. In coming years, fresh water could become a rare and expensive commodity. In the latest issue of the journal IJND, research results presented at the Trombay Symposium on Desalination and Water Reuse offer a new perspective on desalination and describe alternatives to the current expensive and inefficient methods.

New research led by a University of St Andrews astronomer has found evidence for what might be the raw material for the beginning of shrunken versions of our solar system - miniature worlds in the making.In their study Dr Alexander Scholz, SUPA Advanced Fellow at the University of St Andrews, and Professor Ray Jayawardhana, from the University of Toronto, challenge the assumption that other planetary systems in the Universe would necessarily look like our own solar system.

Mars was covered in an ocean of molten rock for about 100 million years after the planet formed, researchers from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, UC Davis, and NASA's Johnson Space Center have found. The work is published in the journal Nature on Nov. 22.The formation of the solar system can be dated quite accurately to 4,567,000,000 years ago, said Qing-Zhu Yin, assistant professor of geology at UC Davis and an author on the paper. Mars' metallic core formed a few million years after that. Previous estimates for how long the surface remained molten ranged from thousands of years to several hundred million years.

The next time you take a moonlit stroll, or admire a full, bright-white moon looming in the night sky, you might count yourself lucky. New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that moons like Earth's - that formed out of tremendous collisions - are uncommon in the universe, arising at most in only 5 to 10 percent of planetary systems."When a moon forms from a violent collision, dust should be blasted everywhere," said Nadya Gorlova of the University of Florida, Gainesville, lead author of a new study appearing Nov. 20 in the Astrophysical Journal. "If there were lots of moons forming, we would have seen dust around lots of stars - but we didn't."

ROME, Italy (AP) -- Archaeologists on Tuesday unveiled an underground grotto believed to have been revered by ancient Romans as the place where a wolf nursed the city's legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus.Decorated with seashells and colored marble, the vaulted sanctuary is buried 52 feet inside the Palatine hill, the palatial center of power in imperial Rome, the archaeologists said at a news conference.

Some come to dig the Tel Aviv University-directed archeological site at Tel Megiddo because they are enchanted by ancient stories of King Solomon. Others come because they believe in a New Testament prophecy that the mound of dirt will be the location of a future Judgment Day apocalyptic battle. Hence the second, rather more chilling name for the site: "Armageddon."Tel Megiddo has been the subject of a number of decisive battles in ancient times (among the Egyptian, Hebrew and Assyrian peoples) and today it holds a venerated place in archaeology, explains site co-director and world-renowned archeologist Prof. Israel Finkelstein.

CHICAGO (AFP) - Transplantable hearts grown in petri dishes and the regeneration of amputated limbs were once the things of science fiction.But a major breakthrough brought those dreams closer to reality Tuesday after researchers announced they were able to turn the clock back on skin cells and transform them into stem cells, the mutable building blocks of organs and tissues.

HYDERABAD, India (AFP) - Scientists will discuss ways to protect crops from climate change and boost farm produce when they gather in this Indian city this week, organisers of the meet said Wednesday.Experts from 15 international agricultural research centres will discuss how to "climate-proof" crops, at the three-day meet starting Thursday, said Gopikrishna Warrier, spokesman for the International Crops Research Institute.

Giant-sized telescopes such as Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra offer unprecedented views of the cosmos, but astronomers are eager to put more powerful tools into orbit around the Earth.Without the extra help, said Rachel Somerville, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, it may be impossible to resolve some of the universe's greatest mysteries.

1905: The Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics) publishes Albert Einstein's paper, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" It is the last in a series known collectively as Einstein's "annus mirabilis," or "extraordinary year," papers. Taken as a whole, they represent his basic theory of relativity and help form the basis of modern physics.Einstein's final 1905 paper (.pdf) solidifies his theory of special relativity (E = mc²), demonstrating that radiation converts mass to energy.

The European Mars Science & Exploration Conference: Mars Express and ExoMars concluded on November 16 at ESA's Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. The conference covered a range of topics concerning Mars exploration, including results from the Mars Express satellite after almost four years in orbit and preparations for Europe's upcoming ExoMars mission. Here we present interviews with selected experts on some hot topics concerning Mars.

1963: President Kennedy is assassinated as his motorcade passes through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Texas Gov. John Connally, riding in the same car as Kennedy, is seriously wounded.The Warren Commission, set up by order of President Johnson to investigate the assassination, concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, firing from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Although the report was widely accepted at first, skepticism grew as more information concerning possible conspiracies leaked out.

The government is under renewed pressure to abandon plans to allow cloning of embryos, after revolutionary research published yesterday revealed a way to transform ordinary human skin cells into embryonic stem cells.Scientists in the USA and Japan announced they have found a way to create the stem cells - which have the potential to grow into almost any tissue type - without resorting to the highly controversial step of cloning human embryos.

More sightings of a huge flying creature, originally reported by KENS, have prompted an investigation to determine if it is a monster or myth."Even though it was dark, the thing itself was black. The blackest I'd ever seen," said Frank Ramirez.Years ago, Ramirez thought he was after a prowler in the back of his mother's Southwest Side home. But what greeted him on the garage rooftop still gives him goosebumps now.

The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers.The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a German quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports.The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp.

REUTERS - Italian archaeologists believe they have found the cave where a wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome, according to legend.Here are a few facts on Romulus and Remus:* The twins were said to have been born around 771 BC and appear in Roman mythology as the twin sons of the priestess Rhea Silvia, fathered by the god of war, Mars.

Dordrecht, Netherlands - The Dutch enjoy a hard-earned reputation for building river dikes and sea barriers. Over centuries, they have transformed a flood-prone river delta into a wealthy nation roughly twice the size of New Jersey.If scientific projections for global warming are right, however, that success will be sorely tested. Globally, sea levels may rise up to a foot during the early part of this century, and up to nearly three feet by century's end. This would bring higher tidal surges from the more-intense coastal storms that scientists also project, along with the risk of more frequent and more severe river floods from intense rainfall inland.

Nearly two centuries after a Frenchman decoded hieroglyphs on an ancient granite stone, opening the proverbial door into the arts, language and literature of Egypt's 3,000-year-old civilization, the allure of the Rosetta stone has yet to fade. Egyptologist John Ray of Cambridge University, the author of a new book, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt, explains why.

Israeli archaeologists say that ancient remains from the era of Solomon's Temple were discovered last month for the first time on the holiest site for Judaism, reigniting a historical and political debate over an area that also is holy to Muslims. While doing renovation at the famed Temple Mount, Israeli archaeologists discovered a sealed layer containing fragments of ceramic table vessels and animal bones.

The Sun may be smaller than we thought, a new study argues.If correct, then other properties of the Sun such as its internal temperature and density may be slightly different than previously calculated. Understanding the Sun's interior is important as it might help scientists make predictions about space weather and answer questions about the solar system.The Sun has no solid surface. Its atmosphere merely gets thinner and more transparent farther from its centre.

PARIS: British scientists have been able to slow and then stop a 'squirt' of light in what they described as a key step towards the future of ultra-fast computing.The technique, called "trapped rainbow," would help optical data storage, with light replacing electrons to store information, according to their paper, released by the U.K. journal Nature.Controlling light would also help engineers control major nodes where billions of optical data "packets" arrive at the same time. By slowing some packets to let others through, rather like a traffic congestion scheme, the flow of data can be boosted.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Over 100 ancient jade artifacts in museums across southeast Asia have been traced back to Taiwan, shedding new light on sea trade patterns dating back 5,000 years, researchers said.Using X-ray spectrometers, the international team of scientists analyzed 144 jade ornaments dating from 3,000 BC to 500 AD and found that at least 116 originated from Fengtian in eastern Taiwan.

Martin Himel wants to first stress that he and Simcha Jacobovici are friends.In fact, when Jacobovici's controversial film The Lost Tomb of Jesus was released last March, Himel was invited to the premiere. That's when the trouble started."It was a point-of-view documentary," the Canadian-born filmmaker says in an interview from Tel Aviv, where he is based. "I felt the picture was quite limited."

In colonial America, slaves from west Africa made many a plantation owner rich by growing a particular high-quality variety of rice. Now, genetic research suggests the slaves not only supplied the labor and the agricultural skills they'd gained in their home countries but also may have brought the valuable crop with them.When slaves were brought to the American colonies from west Africa, they often grew various kinds of rice in small gardens to feed themselves. Rice became a cash crop for plantation owners, however, with the advent of a high-quality variety of rice in 1685. The variety came to be known as Carolina Gold, and for good reason. By 1720, rice was South Carolina's most valuable export. But from where did the key cash crop come?

Egypt announced Sunday 18/11/2007 the discovery of a Pharaonic sarcophagus dating back to the 13th Dynasty.The announcement was made by Chief of the Supreme Council for Antiquities, Zahi Hawass who added that the discovery was made by a team of German archaeologists.The sarcophagus that carries hieroglyphic inscriptions in colorful hues, has been repaired and will be put on display at a special show due to open at the Egyptian Museum Monday, he told a press conference held on the occasion of celebrations of the centenary of the establishment of the Deutsche Arehaologishes Institute in Cairo.

Climate change and conflict have gone hand-in-hand for the past 500 years, a study reveals.It is the first time that a clear link between war and changing global temperatures has been identified in historical data, according to the researchers involved. The results are also significant because some experts predict that current and future climate change may result in widespread global unrest and conflict.Most recently, the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki- Moon, wrote in an article published in The Washington Post that the on-going conflict in Darfur, Sudan was "a conflict that grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation, and a scarcity of resources".

The evolution of our earliest human ancestors was driven by wild swings in eastern Africa's ancient climate, scientists claim today.The rapidly changing climate reshaped the landscape, leaving once plentiful food and water resources in scarce supply and placing enormous pressure on early humans to adapt.The sustained upheaval drove some species to the brink of extinction, while other better-suited relatives emerged and flourished, the scientists believe.

Using supercomputers to compare portions of the human genome with those of other mammals, researchers at Cornell have discovered some 300 previously unidentified human genes, and found extensions of several hundred genes already known. The discovery is based on the idea that as organisms evolve, sections of genetic code that do something useful for the organism change in different ways.

A multinational team of researchers has shown for the first time that the immune system can stop the growth of a cancerous tumor without actually killing it.Scientists have been working for years to use the immune system to eradicate cancers, a technique known as immunotherapy. The new findings prove an alternate to this approach exists: When the cancer can't be killed with immune attacks, it may be possible to find ways to use the immune system to contain it. The results also may help explain why some tumors seem to suddenly stop growing and go into a lasting period of dormancy.The study appears today in the advance online publication of Nature.

It's kind of like SETI@home, but with PS3s instead of PCs and molecules instead of aliens. In the latest volunteer scientist program, called PS3GRID, anyone who owns a Sony PlayStation3 can donate their system´s downtime to compute enzymatic reactions and ion conductivity to help an international team of biomedical researchers.PS3GRID is coordinated by researchers at the Research Unit on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) at the Instituto Municipal de Investigación Médica and the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. The distributed infrastructure enables any PS3 to do computations on atomic and molecular simulations

VALENCIA, Spain (AFP) - The Nobel-winning IPCC group of climate scientists on Saturday issued their starkest warning yet on global warming, prompting a UN demand for politicians to smash the deadlock on tackling the worsening threat.In a panorama of the evidence, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that the impact of global warming could be "abrupt or irreversible" and no country would be spared.UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appealed to political leaders to push for "a real breakthrough" at a key conference running on the Indonesian island of Bali from December 3-14.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States hopes to fill American roads with hydrogen-powered cars in two decades, but the clean fuel must be cheap and practical to make before it can replace oil, US experts say.President George W. Bush unveiled a 1.2-billion-dollar initiative in 2003 to reverse US dependence on foreign oil and make hydrogen, which emits zero pollution, the fuel that drives the US economy.

LONDON (Reuters) - An ancient flood some say could be the origin of the story of Noah's Ark may have helped the spread of agriculture in Europe 8,300 years ago by scattering the continent's earliest farmers, researchers said on Sunday.Using radiocarbon dating and archaeological evidence, a British team showed the collapse of the North American ice sheet, which raised global sea levels by as much as 1.4 meters, displaced tens of thousands of people in southeastern Europe who carried farming skills to their new homes.

So here, as Australians say, is "the big ask".You have a global economy that depends on fossil fuel use.Our economies grow primarily by increasing fossil fuel use, particularly coal, the most polluting form.And you have a decade to turn it around without letting economic growth slide away.This, in a nutshell, is the challenge set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) synthesis of its 2007 global assessment.

Britain has launched Skynet 5B - the latest spacecraft in a sophisticated new military communications system.The satellite rode into orbit atop an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Kourou spaceport, in French Guiana.Over the course of the next month, 5B will take up a position over the Indian Ocean and begin handling secure traffic for UK forces around the world.The £3.6bn Skynet project is the UK's single biggest space venture and is designed to operate until 2020.

The scientist who led the team that controversially created Dolly the sheep is abandoning the cloning of human embryos in stem cell research.Professor Ian Wilmut, of Edinburgh University, believes a rival method developed in Japan holds the key to curing serious medical conditions.The new method creates stem cells from fragments of skin and could remove the need to use human embryos.Pro-life groups opposed to the use of embryonic cells have welcomed the move.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has challenged governments to act on the findings of a major new report on climate change.Launching the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said real and affordable ways to deal with the problem existed.The IPCC states that climate change is "unequivocal" and may bring "abrupt and irreversible" impacts.Mr Ban urged politicians to respond at a UN climate change conference in Bali.

CHICAGO (AFP) - Rising sea levels could swallow up to 40 percent more potable groundwater than previously thought because of tricks of topography, a new study has found.Many current predictions about the impact of global warming look at how much land would be lost to rising sea levels.But researchers at Ohio State University have found that in many coastal regions sea water will leach into the water table and contaminate groundwater well beyond the shoreline.

College and high school students are helping MIT scientists develop an open source development kit for biological systems that could do for cells what Linux has done for computers.As part of the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week, Peking University students created tiny assembly lines out of bacteria. Their entry, "Towards a Self-Differentiated Bacterial Assembly Line," won them the grand prize among 50 teams from around the world.

Not content to push the edge in cloning, architecture and geological engineering, China's also leaving the rest of the world behind when it comes to controlling the weather.A few years ago, Australian journalist John Taylor reported,It's uncanny living in Beijing how it rains on the eve of major events. Be it a big domestic event, or a visiting foreign politician, the rain has usually fallen the day before, making for temporary blue skies free of the normal haze.Chinese officials say cloud seeding has helped to relieve severe droughts and water shortages in cities. In Shanghai officials are considering the measure to cool the daytime temperature, easing demand for electricity.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Small, rocky planets that could resemble the Earth or Mars may be forming around a star in the Pleiades star cluster, astronomers reported on Wednesday.One of the stars in the cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, is surrounded by an extraordinary number of hot dust particles that could be the "building blocks of planets" said Inseok Song, a staff scientist at NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology.

Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating into words the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak, after a pioneering experiment.Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been "locked in" - conscious but paralysed - since a car crash eight years ago.These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in speech.

Most people can tell the difference between some types of berries, or bugs or trees, but much of the planet's life remains unnamed and unseen.A stunningly egotistical Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, tried long ago to set humanity on track to remedy that.His book, "Systema Naturae," first published in 1735 at 13 pages long, proposed a hierarchical system for classifying plants, animals and minerals (we later chipped away minerals into the domain of geology) and launched an effort to identify and inventory all the world's living things.Now 250 years after publication of the book's latter editions, scientists still have discovered as few as 10 percent of the species now living on Earth.

A weird-looking dinosaur with a muzzle resembling a vacuum cleaner suggests long-necked plant-eaters such as the well-known Diplodocus didn't always have their heads in the trees.The findings are based on fossil analyses of a 110-million-year-old dinosaur found in the Sahara region of Africa by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

Ancient Maya rulers devastated big game in Central America and Mexico by bingeing on deer meat and flaunting jaguar fur in an early example of poor resource management, new research shows.The Maya built soaring pyramids and elaborate palaces in Central America and southern Mexico before mysteriously abandoning their cities around 900 A.D.A population explosion in the elite class just as the Mayan culture began to decline increased the demand for big game meat, especially white-tailed deer seen as a status symbol for nobles, said Kitty Emery, a curator at Florida Museum of Natural History.

TOKYO (AFP) - Archaeologists have found female skeletons buried with metal swords in Cambodian ruins, indicating there may have been a civilisation with female warriors, the mission head said Thursday.The team dug up 35 human skeletons at five locations in Phum Snay in northwestern Cambodia in research earlier this year, said Japanese researcher Yoshinori Yasuda, who led the team."Five of them were perfect skeletons and we have confirmed all of them were those of females," Yasuda told AFP. The skeletons were believed to date back to the first to fifth century AD.

One of Western Europe's earliest known urban societies may have sown the seeds of its own downfall, a study suggests.Mystery surrounded the fall of the Bronze Age Argaric people in south-east Spain - Europe's driest area.Data suggests the early civilisation exhausted precious natural resources, helping bring about its own ruin.

The Amazonian wilderness is at risk of unprecedented damage from an ambitious plan to improve transport, communications and power generation in the region, conservationists warned yesterday.Development plans have been drawn up to boost trade links between 10 economic hubs on the continent, but threaten to bring "a perfect storm of environmental destruction" to the world's oldest rainforest, according to a report from Conservation International.

Nov 13th 2007 - CNN piece on the Nov 12th 2007 National Press Club UFO disclosure press conference.Longer version with lower quality here

Experts have for the first time created cloned embryos from an adult monkey - a technical breakthrough that could bring efficient human cloning a step closer.A team in the US created dozens of cloned embryos from a 10-year-old male macaque, the journal Nature reports.This could make it easier to clone human embryos for use in research.

The Japan Space Agency's (JAXA's) Kaguya spacecraft re-created one of the most memorable photos from space--an Earth-rise from lunar orbit. But this one was taken for the first time with a high-definition camera.

Comet Holmes, the oddball comet that erupted into naked-eye visibility almost three weeks ago, now appears in photo imagery to have grown a tail. It's not much as comet tails go. (Here are some photos of Comet McNaught, one of the most spectacular tailed comets in recent years, but hard to see from here when it peaked.) Holmes' tail is not apparent to the naked eye, and can't readily be seen in binoculars. But long-exposure photography does show a stubby ion tail. It's stubby because it is being blown away from the comet's nucleus - and away from the sun and Earth. So, from our perspective, it looks very short.

A weird glow is visible in the night sky right now, and astronomers don't know what to make of it.It's an obscure and very faint comet that suddenly blazed into astonishing brilliance and is growing larger but dimmer - and while it's still clearly visible all night long, astronomers are puzzling over the unexpected outburst."It's really bizarre," said Joseph Miller, a UC Santa Cruz astronomer and former director of the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose. "That thing started out only a few miles in diameter, and suddenly it expanded at a thousand miles an hour until it was as big as the Earth within only a couple of days."