Newsdesk Archive

A word to the wise men: The world may have plenty of gold and myrrh, but it could run short of frankincense.Trees in the Horn of Africa provide most of the world's supply of the prized incense that was carried to the infant Jesus by the wise men from the East, in the New Testament's Nativity story. But researchers say the trees are failing to reproduce because they are overexploited for the sap that yields the Christmas staple.According to a study co-authored by botanists and ecologists from the Netherlands and Eritrea and published this month in The Journal of Applied Ecology, the more heavily a frankincense tree is tapped, the less likely it is to produce viable seeds.

In one of his detailed accounts of the Essenes, Flavius Josephus (Yosef Ben Matityahu), described one of the many laws that shaped the Jewish sect's way of life during the Second Temple period. While the Essenes sat in a circle, Josephus wrote, it was forbidden for them to spit into its center. Like many other laws outlined by Josephus, the details of this law appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls found in caves along the northern end of the Dead Sea. These scrolls are attributed to the Essenes. The resemblance between the 1st century historian's testimony and the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls does not end with the law forbidding spitting into the center of a circle. Magen Broshi, former curator of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem, where the Qumran scrolls are housed, says there are dozens of parallels between Josephus' writing and the content of the scrolls. One of the main similarities regards purification rituals and the Essenes' meticulous hygiene. Anthropologist Joe Zias, of the Hebrew University Science and Archaeology Department, recently found positive evidence of the Essenes' adherence to these rituals. Together with Dr. James Tabor, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina and parasitologist Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue of the CNRS Laboratory for Anthropology in Marseilles, France, Zias found the latrines that were used by the Essenes in Qumran.Read more ...

SALIMA, Upper Metn: The Al-Lamaa Serail in the town of Salima is considered one of the most important historical sites in Lebanon. But for several years, the Serail has been neglected by authorities and citizens fear this ancient building will one day no longer exist.The Serail still maintains many details which reflect ancient architecture styles that are found in old castles and buildings dating back to the Ottoman era. The Serail is a mixture of ancient Lebanese architecture characterized by arcades and the ancient European Romanesque style. The Beiteddine Castle is known to be an archetype of the latter.Citizens of Salima, a village located in upper Metn, have been calling on relevant authorities to save the Serail, which was built before the beginning of the 17th century and was restored in 1796.

An aborted foetus could one day become the mother of a new baby by "donating" her eggs to an infertile woman, say researchers. The highly controversial idea has been suggested as one solution to a worldwide shortage of women prepared to donate their eggs to help other women become pregnant. It moved a little closer to reality on Monday with the unveiling of research from Israel and the Netherlands which found that the ovarian tissues taken from second and third trimester foetuses could be kept alive in the laboratory for weeks. The ovarian follicles from the foetus - which would eventually mature to release eggs in a fully-grown woman - even developed slightly from their "primordial" state when placed in special culture chemicals.

Scientists have made a breakthrough in their understanding of the genetics behind human eye colour.They found that just a few "letters" out of the six billion that make up the genetic code are responsible for most of the variation in human eye colour. The research, by a team of scientists from Queensland, Australia, will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics. The findings are based on a genetic study of nearly 4,000 individuals.

The deadliest form of skin cancer appears to cheat chemotherapy by disguising itself as a normal cell. Malignant melanoma kills more than 1,700 people each year in the UK, and can be hard to treat even with powerful anti-cancer medication. Researchers found melanoma cells can change shape, spread around the body, then remain dormant for years before developing a new tumour.

India and China have agreed to send an expedition to the Himalayas to study the impact that global warming is having on glaciers there. They fear that melting glaciers could threaten rivers which support the lives of millions of people.Scientists and mountaineers from the two countries are now planning to head for the source of two rivers.Last week a report said that Asia's greenhouse gas emissions would treble over the next 25 years.

A German scientist believes he has resolved a three-decade mystery about why Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, has such a weak magnetic field. One of the four rocky planets in the inner Solar System, Mercury is believed to generate its magnetism in the same way as Earth -- by a dynamo, caused by the rotation of molten iron at its core. But question is why Mercury's magnetic field is so puny, as it amounts to just one percent of the strength of Earth's.If the dynamo theory is right, the planet's magnetism should be 30 times stronger than it is.Ulrich Christensen of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katienburg-Lindau believes the answer lies in the structure of Mercury's core. The core's outer layers are "stably stratified," which means they are largely insulated from the heat of the swirling inner core.

Controversial claims have again emerged that Martian microbes could have established themselves here on Earth after hitching rides on meteorites.A handful of bacteria on Earth today have the ability to survive exposure to extremely high levels of radiation that would kill other organisms.Now, a team of scientists argues that the bugs could only have evolved this unusual ability on a planet like Mars.The claims by a Russian-American team appear in the journal Astrobiology.

Seven sculptures on the Parthenon will be removed to protect them from the ravages of pollution and replaced by facsimiles, a Greek restoration expert said. The metopes, carved into the Doric friezes which extend in a band below the roof and above the structure's columns, are among the temple's few remaining original sculptures. Once removed, the metopes will be exhibited in the new Acropolis Museum, said Maria Ioannidou, director of the Acropolis restoration services. Greek archeologists decided to remove the sculptures to "save the metopes, threatened by acid rain caused by atmospheric pollution and natural erosion," she said. The operation should be completed in 2008, she said.

AN AUSTRALIAN archaeologist has discovered the oldest evidence of occupation by modern humans on the islands that were the stepping stones from South-East Asia to Australia.A cave site in East Timor where people lived more than 42,000 years ago, eating turtles, tuna and giant rats, was unearthed by Sue O'Connor, head of archaeology and natural history at the Australian National University.Dr O'Connor also found ancient stone tools and shells used for decoration in the limestone shelter, known as Jerimalai, on the eastern tip of the island.She said her discovery could help solve the mystery of the route ancient seafarers took to get here from South-East Asia.

A Japanese man has survived for 24 days in cold weather and without food and water by falling into a state of "hibernation", his doctor has said. Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, 35, went missing on 7 October after going with friends to climb Mount Rokko in western Japan. He had almost no pulse, his organs had shut down and his body temperature dropped to 22C (71F) when he was found. Medics say they are still puzzled how he survived because his metabolism was apparently almost at a standstill.

Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 "looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. He and colleague Robert Wilson presented this conclusion last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Their forecast is based on historical records of geomagnetic storms.

Approximately 6 percent of human and chimp genes are unique to those species, report scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions. The new estimate, reported in the inaugural issue of Public Library of Science ONE (Dec. 2006), takes into account something other measures of genetic difference do not -- the genes that aren't there. That isn't to say the commonly reported 1.5 percent nucleotide-by-nucleotide difference between humans and chimps is wrong, said IUB computational biologist Matthew Hahn, who led the research. IUB postdoctoral researcher Jeffery Demuth is the paper's lead author. "Both estimates are correct in their own way," Hahn said. "It depends on what you're asking. There isn't a single, standard estimate of variation that incorporates all the ways humans, chimps and other animals can be genetically different from each other." By studying "gene families" -- sets of genes in every organism's genome that are similar (or identical) because they share a common origin -- the scientists also provide new information about the evolution of humanness. After surveying gene families common to both humans and chimps, the researchers observed in the human genome a significant increase in the duplication of genes that influence brain functions.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. growers produce nearly $35 billion worth of marijuana annually, making the illegal drug the country's largest cash crop, bigger than corn and wheat combined, an advocate of medical marijuana use said in a study released on Monday.The report, conducted by Jon Gettman, a public policy analyst and former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also concluded that five U.S. states produce more than $1 billion worth of marijuana apiece: California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii and Washington.California's production alone was about $13.8 billion, according to Gettman, who waged an unsuccessful six-year legal battle to force the government to remove marijuana from a list of drugs deemed to have no medical value.

Scientists have found what is thought to be the first example of a two-headed reptile in the fossil record. The abnormal animal, belonging to a group of aquatic reptiles, was unearthed in northeastern China and dates to the time of the dinosaurs. The specimen reveals that it must have been very young when it died and became fossilised, says lead researcher Eric Buffetaut. Details of the fossil appear in the UK Royal Society journal Biology Letters. This animal was a choristoderan, an extinct reptile that reached a length of one metre in adulthood and was characterised by a long neck - two in this case.

LONDON (Reuters) - Flora, a pregnant Komodo dragon living in a British zoo, is expecting eight babies in what scientists said on Wednesday could be a Christmas virgin birth.Flora has never mated, or even mixed, with a male dragon, and fertilized all the eggs herself, a process culminating in parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. Other lizards do this, but scientists only recently found that Komodo dragons do too."Nobody in their wildest dreams expected this. But you have a female dragon on her own. She produces a clutch of eggs and those eggs turn out to be fertile. It is nature finding a way," Kevin Buley of Chester Zoo in England said in an interview. He said the incubating eggs could hatch around Christmas.

US scientists have reconstructed a 40,000-year record of wind conditions at the South Pole. They assembled the climate data by measuring the distribution of dust layers seen in two ice boreholes. A comparison of the layers allowed the University of California-Berkeley team to gauge how rough snow surfaces would have been in ancient times.The researchers then used this "proxy" to assess the probable strength of wind needed to produce those features.The technique needs refinement and works best in the deeper parts of the ice. Nonetheless, scientists are confident it gives at least a broad record of conditions at the pole some 30,000 to 70,000 years ago.

ROSS ICE SHELF, Antarctica (Reuters) - From a distance, the ANDRILL operation appears out of nowhere like a mirage: a white-draped tower amid giant blue boxcars laid out on a frozen sea.But this mammoth venture to drill through ice, ocean and back through time is as real as a science lab and as practical as an oil rig: hard-hatted drillers and scientists work in concert to find clues to a time when Antarctica was warm and wet.Because the researchers are convinced that a warmer age is in prospect as a result of human-spurred global climate change, they want to know what things were like 10 million years ago, when warmer periods tended to wax and wane on the southern continent.

Humans first moved out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, but 30,000 years later some of them moved back. That's according to a new study based on DNA evidence from ancient human remains found in Africa. The study shows that a small group of early humans returned to Africa after migrating to the Middle East.In addition, the research suggests that the humans' return occurred around the same time that another group of humans left the Middle East and moved into Europe.

The idea that comets delivered the chemical "seeds" for life to the early Earth has been given a big boost.Scientists studying the tiny grains of material recovered from Comet Wild-2 by Nasa's Stardust mission have found large, complex carbon-rich molecules.They are of the type that could have been important precursor components of the initial reactions that gave rise to the planet's biochemistry.The first full analysis of the Wild-2 grains is reported in Science magazine

The rare white-flag dolphin, called baiji, has seemingly disappeared from the Yangtze River, its only habitat. If true, the estimated three-million-year-old species is now extinct.A 30-member expedition made up of both Chinese and foreign researchers conducted a nearly month-long survey of the river, but they failed to spot even one of the dolphins, China's Xinhua News Agency said on December 4. The white-flag dolphin, which lives only in the Chinese river, is called a "living fossil'' because it maintains the same appearance as when it came to the Yangtze from the sea an estimated three million years ago. In a 1997 survey, 13 baiji were confirmed to be living in the river.If this dolphin is extinct, it would bear the sad distinction of being the first whale to disappear due to human action. Scientists say that pollution and massive development destroyed the white-flag dolphin's Yangtze River habitat, as well as overfishing methods using poisonous substances and explosives. In addition, noise from ships on the river seemed to disturb the baiji, as porpoises make sound waves as they swim.

Montreal - A Canadian is believed to be the only man alive without a pulse after his heart failed and a new silent pump was embedded in his chest to keep blood gushing through his veins, doctors said on Wednesday. The Quebec man underwent surgery on November 23 after suffering severe heart failure due to a heart attack months earlier, Ian Popple, a spokesperson for McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, told AFP.

Working at the frontier between chemistry and physics, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Xiao Cheng Zeng usually finds his reward in discovering the unexpected through computer modeling. Zeng and two members of his UNL team recently found double helixes of ice molecules that resemble the structure of DNA and self-assemble under high pressure inside carbon nanotubes. This discovery could have major implications for scientists in other fields who study the protein structures that cause diseases such as Alzheimer's and bovine spongiform ecephalitis (mad cow disease). It could also help guide those searching for ways to target or direct self-assembly in nanomaterials and predict the kind of ice future astronauts will find on Mars and moons in the solar system.

Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity, the indomitable mobile science laboratory that has survived 10 times longer than expected, is set to make one final trip before reaching its resting place on the red planet. In September, the rover reached the Victoria crater near the equator after trundling slowly over the barren landscape of the red planet for 21 months.At 800 metres wide and 75 metres deep, the crater has given scientists the most detailed window yet into the sub-surface of the red planet. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator of the Mars exploration rovers, presented the results of the previous three months' observations at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in San Francisco today.The crater's rim is the last stop before Opportunity heads for its final destination. "We're exploring first along the rim of the crater and, in the not too distant future, we hope to go into the crater," said Dr Squyres. This could be a one-way trip: scientists have found a way to get Opportunity into the crater but cannot guarantee it will get out.

KHUTSE, Botswana (CNN) -- For years, Maswe Gkiiwe has felt like a man without a country. Gkiiwe is a Basarwa or a bushman of the Kalahari, an ethnic group that for centuries was spread across the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in southern Africa. Gkiiwe is a hunter and a gatherer, still doing things in the old way, like his ancestors. Several years ago, the government of Botswana decided to relocate Gkiiwe and his fellow bushmen from the reserve. The bushmen insist they were removed because of the discovery of diamonds. They sued the government."I really miss my home and my ancestors," Gkiiwe said recently from his new village, "This is not my home. I think the ancestors are angry that we left them behind."His dismay turned to happiness Wednesday when a court in Botswana ruled 2-1 that the bushmen should be allowed to return to their homes. According to The Associated Press, the judges ruled the relocated bushmen were "wrongly deprived of their possessions," but the government will not have to provide basic services in the game reserve.Read More ...

Aboriginal languages may be much older than people think, argues a linguistic anthropologist who says they originated as far back as the end of the last ice age around 13,000 years ago.This challenges existing thinking, which suggests Aboriginal languages developed from a proto-language that spread through Australia 5000 to 6000 years ago.The key to the new hypothesis is prehistoric Australia's single land mass 13,000 to 28,000 years ago, when New Guinea and Tasmania were still attached, says Dr Mark Clendon in the journal Current Anthropology.Clendon says the continent, known as Sahul, was relatively densely populated on the land bridge connecting northern Australia to New Guinea, now separated by the Arafura Sea.

Images of Mars's surface show evidence that as recently as a few years ago, liquid water, possibly in the form of a debris-filled sludge, may have poured down mid-latitude gullies, leaving bright tracks in the martian dirt.The notion that liquid water once flowed on ancient Mars is well accepted. Some scientists, noting apparent runoff channels in relatively young craters, have suggested that water could have flowed much more recently: at some point from a million years ago to the present.But now, scientists have the most tantalizing evidence yet for that recent flow scenario. Some of the final images taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor before it went silent last month and displayed at a press conference on Dec. 6 show features that weren't there when the spacecraft scanned the same areas in 1999.Out of images of tens of thousands of martian gullies, Michael C. Malin, Kenneth S. Edgett, and colleagues at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego and colleagues found two several-hundred-meter-long patches in gullies inside craters in the southern hemisphere. At the press conference, Malin and Edgett outlined evidence they believe strongly suggests that the features were caused by a "flash flood" of some water-bearing substance and not merely by a dust slide or other dry geological event. The results have just been published in Science (2006, 314, 1573).

LOBATSE, Botswana (Reuters) -- Botswana's High Court ruled on Wednesday that hundreds of Bushmen had been wrongly evicted from ancestral hunting grounds in the Kalahari desert and should be allowed to return.The court ruled 2-1 for the Bushmen in the key issues of the case, which saw Africa's last hunter-gatherers take on one of the continent's most admired governments in a dispute over diamond-rich land and development priorities.Judge Mpaphi Phumaphi, who delivered the swing vote in the case, said Botswana had been wrong to force the Bushmen out of the Kalahari reserve by cutting off their livelihood."In my view the simultaneous stoppage of the supply of food rations and the stoppage of hunting licenses is tantamount to condemning the remaining residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to death by starvation," he said.

Treatments for diabetes, smoking, Alzheimer's disease and lung cancer are just a few of the potentially lifesaving cures Scientific American has chosen to highlight in this year's roundup of drugs you've never heard of, despite their potentially huge impact on global health. These 10 treatments, all of which could significantly impact global health and wellness, are currently running the last gauntlet a pharmaceutical must run before it becomes available to the public--the clinical trial. During this trial researchers test the drug on humans, carefully observing its side effects as well as its overall effectiveness.

Following news that archaeologists in Rome have discovered a sarcophagus containing what they believe to be the mortal remains of St. Paul the Apostle, we offer a few tips on how to get in on the world of excavation.Forget the bull whipIt might have got Indiana Jones out of a scrape or two, but then Indiana Jones has little if anything to do with real archaeology. Excavators these days are far more likely to be armed with a theodolite and laptop than a whip and pistol, so if you are working on the assumption that archaeology = glamour you're going to be sorely disappointed. Mind you, if you find yourself digging somewhere hot then an Indiana Jones Fedora might come in useful.Read more ...

As the climate warms near Earth's surface, the upper atmosphere is getting less dense, a change that will mean less drag on satellites, scientists announced today.Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will cause a 3 percent reduction in air density in the outermost layer of the atmosphere by 2017, the researchers predict.Among the affected satellites: The International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope."We're seeing climate change manifest itself in the upper as well as lower atmosphere," said Stan Solomon of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "This shows the far-ranging impacts of greenhouse gas emissions."

ZURICH, Switzerland - Engineers halted an experiment to extract geothermal heat from deep below ground because a small earthquake occurred during the test in the nearby city of Basel, the Swiss news agency SDA said Saturday.The tremor late Friday measured magnitude-3.4 and caused widespread fear, prompting about 1,000 calls to emergency services, but caused no injuries or serious damage, the agency said.Managers apologized for any fears aroused by the mishap, which occurred after water was injected at high pressure into a 16,000-foot-deep (5-kilometer-deep) borehole, but said the experiment posed no danger, SDA reported.

MCMURDO STATION, Antarctica (Reuters) - For scientists at this ice-encircled outpost, global warming is not a matter of debate. It is a simple fact and crucial research questions center on what its consequences will be.Antarctica is a prime place for this research because it serves as an early warning system for climate change and is a major influence on global weather.Because about 90 percent of the world's ice volume and 70 percent of its fresh water is on the southernmost continent, any substantial warming could cause a rise in sea levels around the globe.

Do the universal myths of humanities fall from grace contain an accurate diagnosis relating to the onset and progression of a complex neurological condition? Were the origins of ancient religious practice an attempt to treat the symptoms of that condition and do those various practices offer specific insights into its nature? Are there any anomalies or evidence in modern neurology, psychology, consciousness research and other disciplines that would support such a scenario?These questions have been central to Tony Wright's research for the last 12 years, the answer to these questions in his opinion is yes on all counts. More importantly if such a condition is proven to exist then it may be possible to both treat it and prevent its further occurrence.The following article provides a basic introduction to a new theory that may shed light on a number of apparently unrelated mysteries.Read more of this newly added Forum article ...

Everybody knows a few strong cups of coffee can turn some otherwise pleasant people into crabby bundles of anxiety, whose jitters give way to lethargy in the span of a few hours.In others, the opposite is true -- a cup of coffee seems to chase away the grumpiness of the morning.Less well known, even by scientists, are caffeine's mental effects in the longer term as a possible cause of psychological disorders.

TOKYO (Reuters) - A team of Japanese scientists have found a gene closely linked to nicotine addiction, which could lead to more effective ways for smokers to kick the habit, a Japanese daily said on Wednesday.The team at Osaka University found that among heavy smokers -- defined as those who light up as soon as they get up in the morning -- a gene responsible for producing an enzyme that breaks down nicotine is more active than others, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported.

Tehran, 6 December 2006 (CHN Foreign Desk) -- Experts of Ayapir Cultural Heritage Research Center have requested urgent budget support to finance restoration of bas-reliefs and inscriptions of the historic sites of Eshkaft-e Salman and Kul-Farah, currently in a critical condition.The two sites are located in the city of Izeh in the Iranian southwestern province of Khuzestan and feature many historic evidence mostly belonging to the Elamite civilization (3400 BC-550 BC). Eshkaft-e Salman, otherwise known as Tarisha Temple, is home to the largest neo-Elamite inscription ever found in Iran. The inscription was spoiled recently by unidentified persons who poured paint on its bas-reliefs.

Geologists have uncovered evidence in the oil fields of Oman that explains how Earth could suddenly have changed 540 million years ago to favor the evolution of the single-celled life forms to the multicellular forms we know today. Reporting in the December 7 issue of the journal Nature, researchers from MIT, the California Institute of Technology, and Indiana University show that there was a sudden change in the oxygenation of the world's oceans at the time just before the "Cambrian explosion," one of the most significant adaptative radiations in the history of life. With a increased availability of oxygen, the team speculates, single-celled life forms that had dominated the planet for the previous three billion years were able to evolve into the diverse metazoan phyla that still characterize life on Earth. "The presence of oxygen on Earth is the best indicator of life," says coauthor John Grotzinger, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology at Caltech and an authority on sedimentary geology. "But it wasn't always that way. The history of oxygen begins about two and a half billion years ago and occurs in a series of steps. The last step is the subject of this paper."

Natural selection argues against cooperation. If all organisms, including humans, are pitted in a ceaseless struggle for survival and sex, those who help others would quickly find themselves swamped in a rising tide of selfishness, especially if those they helped bore no relation to them. Yet, most humans reflexively help another person in need even if there are no family ties or a direct benefit to be gained. This conundrum has puzzled evolutionary biologists since the time of Darwin, but a new study shows how internecine warfare among early humans might have allowed for the spread of a dominant group of altruistic tribes.New research argues that the human instinct for cooperation arose from vicious competition for resources in our prehistoric past

Rivals for lunar conquest four decades ago, Russia hopes to join the U.S. moon exploration program with technology and know-how, a Russian space agency spokesman said Thursday.Russia was conducting talks with NASA and voiced hope that a deal could be reached within months, said the spokesman, Igor Panarin."We want the agreement to reflect Russia's status as a great space power," he told The Associated Press, adding that Russia plans to contribute technology rather than money to NASA's project.

Eating green, leafy vegetables may be as important as wearing hats and sunscreen in the prevention of skin cancer.An 11-year study by the Queensland Institute of Medical Research involving 1,000 people in Nambour, on the Sunshine Coast, found those who ate at least three serves of green leafy vegetables a week reduced their risk of skin cancer by up to 55 per cent.Doctor Jolieke van der Pols says green vegetables such as spinach contain a crucial cocktail of nutrients that can boost the skin's natural defence against sun damage.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian archaeologists have discovered the funerary remains of a doctor who lived more than 4,000 years ago, including his mummy, sarcophagus and bronze surgical instruments.The upper part of the tomb was discovered in 2000 at Saqqara, 20 km (12 miles) south of Cairo, and the sarcophagus came to light in the burial pit during cleaning work, state news agency MENA said on Tuesday, quoting Egyptian government antiquities chief Zahi Hawass.The doctor, whose name was Qar, lived under the 6th dynasty and built his tomb near Egypt's first pyramid. The 6th dynasty ruled from about 2350 to 2180 BC.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- New photographs from space suggest that water occasionally flows on the frigid surface of Mars, raising the tantalizing possibility that the red planet is hospitable to life, scientists reported Wednesday.The new images, taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor before it lost contact with Earth, do not actually show flowing water. Rather, they show changes in craters that provide the strongest evidence yet that water coursed through them as recently as several years ago, and is perhaps doing so even now."This is a squirting gun for water on Mars," said Kenneth Edgett, a scientist at San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems, which operates a camera on the Global Surveyor.

The discovery of carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads nearby has dramatically pushed back the earliest evidence for ritual behavior, or what could be called religion. The finding, which researchers have yet to formally publish, comes from a cave hidden in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, a mecca of sorts for the local people, who call it the Mountain of the Gods."It's very big news," says Sheila Coulson, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo in Norway and leader of the study. Prior to the discovery, researchers had identified signs of ritual practice going back at most 40,000 years from sites in Europe.

There are biological brain differences that mark out psychopaths from other people, according to scientists. Psychopaths showed less activity in brain areas involved in assessing the emotion of facial expressions, the British Journal of Psychiatry reports. In particular, they were far less responsive to fearful faces than healthy volunteers. The Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London team say this might partly explain psychopathic behaviour.

Four hundred and seventy years ago, England's King Henry VIII travelled on the surface of the River Thames -- by horse Legend has it that the monarch was pulled all the way from central London to Greenwich on a sleigh on the icy surface of the river, which had frozen from bank to bank that winter because of bitter cold. London's so-called Frost Fairs, in which carnivals were occasionally held on the thickly frozen river, were a hallmark of the "Little Ice Age" that gripped Northwestern Europe from around 1200 to 1850. And a new study, published on Thursday in the British scientific journal Nature, explains why this phenomenon occurred. It puts the blame on a weakening of the Gulf Stream, the current which takes warm water from the tropical mid-Atlantic up to Europe's western coastline and provides those countries with balmy weather even though they are on the same latitude as chilly Labrador.

HOUSTON - NASA announced Monday its strategy and rationale for robotic and human exploration of the moon, determining that a lunar outpost is the best approach to achieve a sustained, human presence there.The base would be built in incremental steps, starting with four-person crews making several seven-day visits. The first mission would begin by 2020, with the base growing over time, beefed up with more power, mobility rovers and living quarters.The moon base would eventually support 180-day lunar stays, a stretch of time seen as the best avenue to establish a permanent presence there, as well as prepare for future human exploration of Mars.

The emergence of humans in the universe might not tell us anything concerning the fundamental constants of nature as scientists have speculated, new theoretical findings argue. The idea known as the anthropic principle states that human existence is possible only if fundamental constants such as the speed of light or the strength of gravity are not higher or lower than what is observed.Scientists who support anthropic reasoning suggest they can understand fundamental properties of the universe by determining what conditions intelligent beings such as humans need to exist. For instance, if gravity was too strong, black holes would form too often and suck up all matter before humans could evolve, but if gravity was too weak, it could not attract matter to form stars or planets.

Archaeologists look over a mosaic discovered at Shiloh Archaeologists claimed yesterday to have uncovered one of the world's first churches, built on a site believed to have once housed the Ark of the Covenant.The site, emerging from the soil in a few acres in the hills of the Israeli occupied West Bank, is richly decorated with brightly coloured mosaics and inscriptions referring to Jesus Christ.According to the team, led by Yitzhak Magen and Yevgeny Aharonovitch, the church dates to the late 4th century, making it one of Christianity's first formal places of worship.

Sediments extracted from the Antarctic seafloor show the world's largest ice shelf has disintegrated and reappeared many times in the past. Fluctuations in the Ross Ice Shelf are revealed by an early look at cores drilled from the seabed underneath the giant ice slab. The investigation is being carried out by scientists drilling near the US and New Zealand bases on Ross Island. The team wants to link the data to what is already known about past climate.

Archaeologists have unearthed what they say are the only existing imperial insignia belonging to Emperor Maxentius _ precious objects that were buried to preserve them and keep them from enemies when he was defeated by his rival Constantine.Excavation under Rome's Palatine Hill near the Colosseum turned up items including three lances and four javelins that experts said are striking for their completeness _ digs usually turn up only fragments _ and the fact that they are the only known artifacts of their kind. Clementina Panella, the archaeologist who made the discovery, said the insignia were likely hidden by Maxentius' people in an attempt to preserve the emperor's memory after he was defeated by Constantine I in the 321 A.D. battle of the Milvian Bridge _ a turning point for the history of the Roman empire which saw Constantine become the unchallenged ruler of the West.

The remains of an ancient Jewish and Christian settlement, which later became Muslim, dating back to the Early Islamic period and the Crusader Period have been uncovered between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Sunday. The large six-dunam settlement, which was found in Mishmar David, located between Rehovot and Latrun, was discovered during an archeological salvage excavation in the area ahead of planned construction work at the site. The archeologists digging at the site discovered the remnants of residential buildings, villas, public buildings, streets and alleys, as well as an industrial zone, which housed agricultural installations.

Famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey is giving no quarter to powerful evangelical church leaders who are pressing Kenya's national museum to relegate to a back room its world-famous collection of hominid fossils showing the evolution of humans' early ancestors. Leakey called the churches' plans "the most outrageous comments I have ever heard." He told The Daily Telegraph (London): "The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind. The collection it holds is one of Kenya's very few global claims to fame and it must be forthright in defending its right to be at the forefront of this branch of science." Leakey was for years director of the museum and of Kenya's entire museum system.

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Giant kangaroos and wombats bigger than cars which once roamed Australia were killed by climate change and not human hunters, Australian scientists said on Thursday. The report comes as the country struggles with what could be its worst drought in 1,000 years, affecting more than half its farmlands.Known as megafauna, the huge animals were driven into extinction by a steady warming of Australia's climate, which in turn saw a once-lush outback region turn to red desert and grasslands."For about the last half-million years it's been consistently getting drier in Australia," Dr Gregory Webb told Reuters after studying fossil-rich areas of south-east Queensland state.

A startling discovery of 70,000-year-old artifacts and a python's head carved of stone appears to represent the first known human rituals.Scientists had thought human intelligence had not evolved the capacity to perform group rituals until perhaps 40,000 years ago. But inside a cave in remote hills in Kalahari Desert of Botswana, archeologists found the stone snake that was carved long ago. It is as tall as a man and 20 feet long.Read more

THE SUPERNATURAL WORLD OF GRAHAM HANCOCKThe best selling author talks about his exploration in a new domain and shares his personal trip with Glen Kreisberg in ISSUE 61 of Atlantis Rising Magazine due out on news stands in Mid December.You can download the free sampler PDF file but for the full read you can subscribe today and download the issue with a 50% discount ($2.95)

Visitors to the Segedunum Roman Fort in Wallsend will come face to face with an ancient Egyptian mummy this week, as a 3-dimensional digital image of her head is put on display at the Museum for the first time. The mummy, known as Bakt Hor Nekht, has never been seen before; her intricately decorated coffin sealed out of respect and to preserve her remains. However, a CT scan carried out by Newcastle General Hospital this summer has now been used to create an accurate, detailed digital reconstruction of her head.

The smallest creatures on the planet may help solve one of the world's biggest problems, according to a new report from a distinguished panel of scientists.Microorganisms, better known as bacteria, could be used to convert various materials into fuel to run our cars, heat to warm our homes, and even electricity to power our toys. A cell phone that never loses power because its "battery" consists of millions of tiny bugs chomping on lunch, cranking out electrons for a continuous flow of electrical current.

IN 2004, a grazier found a human skull jutting out of the sand in the vast dunefields of the Willandra Lakes of south-western NSW, home of the famous 40,000-year-old Mungo Lady and Mungo man remains.When traditional owners and Australian National University dating specialist Rainer Grun visited the site some months later, they found that wind and rain had reduced the delicate bones to fragments.One elder was "shocked and nearly in tears", Grun told the recent Legacy of an Ice Age conference, held at Lake Mungo as part of celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the World Heritage listing of the region.

Scientists have known for years that meteorites and comets contain organic matter, bolstering theories of a cosmic origin for life. Now, they may have discovered what could be the transport system.After cutting into and thoroughly analyzing samples from a freshly fallen meteorite, researchers found tiny hollow spheres made of organic material that predates the birth of the solar system."It is not a new idea that a lot of organic matter on Earth originally came from meteorites and comets," said Scott Messenger, a NASA scientist at the Johnson Space Center in Houston who studies the isotopic chemistry of extraterrestrial materials.

Nevada's state fossil, the giant ocean-roaming fish-reptile known as the ichthyosaur, will have to share the scientific stage after researchers this week unveiled the first fossils of land-based dinosaurs ever found in Nevada. The discovery expands the known range of the prehistoric beasts and offers a new understanding of life in the state some 100 million years ago.Put on display for the first time Thursday were the femur of the raptor, dromaeosaur, the teeth of a sauropod, a tyrannosauroid and an iguanodont and unidentified dinosaur eggshell fragments.The remnants, found at secret excavation sites in southern Nevada, pushed the known range of the ancient reptiles about 250 miles farther west, said Joshua Bonde, a graduate earth science student at Montana State University who is leading the dig.

New genetic evidence suggests Australia may have been populated by two separate groups of humans, one arriving via Papua New Guinea, the other via Indonesia, a researcher says. But more work is needed to confirm the idea. And not all scientists agree that these latest results shed new light on the long-standing debate on how humans colonised Australia.Dr Sheila van Holst Pellekaan, a molecular anthropologist from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, will present her research at a Australian Archaeological Association conference in Melbourne next month.Previous genetic analysis shows that modern humans took two migration routes out of Africa 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, she says.

A Roman sarcophagus discovered near Trafalgar Square could lead to the map of Roman London being redrawn. The limestone coffin containing a headless skeleton was found during excavations at St-Martin-in-the-Fields Church, central London.The find, which dates from around 410AD, lies outside what were the city walls of Roman London.Archaeologists previously thought Westminster possibly contained Roman roads but not sacred buildings.Taryn Nixon, director of the Museum of London Archaeology Service, said: "It means that perhaps St-Martin-in-the-Fields has been a sacred site for far, far, far longer than we previously thought.

Archaeologists excavating near the edge of Trafalgar Square in London have found evidence of early Christianity in England, suggesting the area has a much older religious significance than was originally believed.A team from the Museum of London has discovered a hoard of what is almost certainly royal treasure, buried in a mysterious, empty human grave laid out in the traditional Christian manner - east to west."Our excavations demonstrate the position as a significant and important place at an earlier date than we thought," said Alison Telfer, the senior archaeologist in charge of the dig.The finds are among the most remarkable discoveries ever made in London and are likely to shed new light on the very early stages of the introduction of Christian ideas into the Anglo-Saxon world 1,400 years ago.

BALTIMORE: An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating insights into Athenian law and social history."This helps to fill in critical moments in ancient classical Greece," said William Noel, the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum here and the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Hyperides "is one of the great foundational figures of Greek democracy and the golden age of Athenian democracy, the foundational democracy of all democracy."

In 73 CE, the Roman governor of Judea, Flavius Silva, laid siege to Masada with Legion X Fretensis. When the walls were broken down by a battering ram, the Romans found the fortress' defenders had set fire to all the structures and preferred mass suicide to captivity or defeat.Masada has since become part of Jewish mythology, as has the name Silva, who Josephus Flavius mentions in his writings.It is therefore no great surprise that Hungarian archaeologist Dr. Tibor Grull, studying in Israel three years ago, was excited to discover a stone tablet during a visit to the Temple Mount with a Latin inscription of the name of Masada's destroyer.

Dead men don't tell tales, but dead pharaohs might.CT scans of King Tutankhamun's mummy may put the world's oldest "cold case" to rest, refuting the notion that the ruler's enemies bludgeoned him to death.Instead, a festering leg wound may have led to the boy-king's early demise at 19, more than 3,300 years ago, researchers say.The scans, the first ever performed on an identified royal Egyptian mummy, "finally lay to rest this rather loosely based conjecture about a murder plot. I don't think that anyone who reads the findings as they are written can believe that any longer," said Dr. David Mininberg, a New York City physician who also holds a degree in Middle Eastern Art and is an expert in the medicine of ancient Egypt.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Humpback whales have a type of brain cell seen only in humans, the great apes, and other cetaceans such as dolphins, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.This might mean such whales are more intelligent than they have been given credit for, and suggests the basis for complex brains either evolved more than once, or has gone unused by most species of animals, the researchers said.The finding may help explain some of the behaviors seen in whales, such as intricate communication skills, the formation of alliances, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage, the researchers report in The Anatomical Record.

SPACE.com) -- The stellar baby boom period of the Milky Way sparked a flowering and crashing of life here on Earth, a new study suggests.Some 2.4 billion years ago when the Milky Way started upping its star production, cosmic rays -- high-speed atomic particles -- started pouring onto our planet, causing instability within the living. Populations of bacteria and algae repeatedly soared and crashed in the oceans.The researchers counted the amount of carbon-13 within sedimentary rocks, the most common rocks exposed on the Earth's surface. When algae and bacteria were growing in the oceans, they took in carbon-12, so the ocean had an abundance of carbon-13.Many sea creatures use carbon-13 to make their shells. If there is a lot of carbon-13 stored in rocks, it means life, the origin of which is still unknown, was booming. Therefore, variations in carbon-13 are a good indicator of the productivity of life on Earth.The researchers found that the biggest fluctuation in productivity coincided with star formation, which had an affect on Earth's climate and therefore on the productivity of life on our planet.

Drought-stricken Australia should heed a warning from a new study that shows a series of massive droughts killed giant kangaroos and other "megafauna" in south-east Queensland 40,000 years ago, according to researchers from the Queensland University of Technology.Scientists Dr Gilbert Price and Dr Gregory Webb believe understanding how the prehistoric big dry caused extinctions could help predict how and if animals battling current climate change will survive.The QUT research into the giant Australian marsupials and reptiles and the impact of climate change will be published in the December issue of the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences. Dr Price and Dr Webb studied the fossil-rich Darling Downs area of south-east Queensland with the help of palaeontologists from the Queensland Museum and an amateur local fossil hunter, Ian Sobbe.

GENEVA, Switzerland - A global competition to name the new seven wonders of the world is attracting widespread interest, with more than 20 million people voting so far, organizers say.The Egyptian pyramids are the only surviving structures from the original list of seven architectural marvels. Long gone are the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria. Those seven were deemed wonders in ancient times by observers of the Mediterranean and Middle East.Candidates for the new list have been narrowed down to 21, including the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Taj Mahal and Peru's Machu Picchu. The public can vote until July 6 by Internet or phone. The seven winners will be announced July 7 in Lisbon, Portugal.

GENEVA (AFP) - The world's largest superconducting magnet passed a critical test with flying colors, powering up to its nominal operating conditions at first try, the European Organization for Nuclear Research announced. The magnet will provide a magnetic field for a giant particle detector, the Geneva-based organization said in a statement.The detector will collect data for a particle accelerator known the Large Hadron Collider (LCH), which is scheduled to be turned in November 2007.

When Father Jorge Villa shut up his workshop for the night in La Compañía Jesuit church in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, he left with a proud glance at the painting of the Virgin he had meticulously restored. The next morning, July 27, he opened up again to find nothing but an empty frame where the Nuestra Señora del Popolo had been.The thieves knew what they were taking," said the priest, who trained as a restorer in Madrid. "It is a particularly fine work."Despite it being a historic work painted in 1570 on the orders of the Jesuit general Francis Borgia, the theft of the Popolo caused only a minor stir. In the last few years the looting of colonial-era religious art from churches around Mexico has become so common it barely counts as news. The loss of lesser pieces receives no press attention at all.The National Institute of Anthropology and History, the government agency responsible for looking after Mexico's ancient and colonial heritage, has counted close to 1,000 pieces stolen since 1999. Magdalena Morales, the official in charge of theft prevention, said most were probably smuggled out of the country and sold in the United States, Europe or Japan.

Satellite images captured a large patch of glowing water off the coast of Somalia. The area is about the size of Connecticut, and researchers think billions of glowing bacteria are the source.

TYRE: The Italian contingent of the newly expanded United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) stumbled upon the unexpected this week. Rather than cluster bombs or other sinister detritus resulting from this past summer's 34-day Israeli bombardment, the troops found a cache of antique earthenware and ancient human remains.The Italian team made the archaeological discovery while it was in the process of building new roads in the area surrounding its headquarters in the Southern village of Tebnin.Captain Magistreti, media officer for the Italian contingent, said the troops will deliver the antiquities to the Lebanese Directorate General of Antiquities with help from the Lebanese Army.

Turning on a gene found in wheat could boost levels of protein, iron and zinc, scientists have discovered.The gene occurs naturally in wheat, but has largely been silenced during the evolution of domestic varieties. Researchers found evidence that turning it back on could raise levels of the nutrients in wheat grains. Writing in the journal Science, they suggest that new varieties with a fully functioning gene can be created through cross-breeding with wild wheat. "Wheat is one of the world's major crops, providing approximately one-fifth of all calories consumed by humans," said project leader Professor Jorge Dubcovsky from the University of California at Davis.

The largest extinction in Earth's history not only wiped out 95 percent of sea creatures and 70 percent of land animals, it also gave the oceans a fundamental "face lift," according to a new study.Before the end-Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago, the seas were home to a balance of both ecologically simple communities and complex ones. Following the extinction, complex communities displaced simple ones, coming to outnumber them three-to-one, a pattern that prevails today [image]. It reflects the current dominance of complex, mobile organisms, such as snails and crabs, and the decreased diversity of simple, stationary organisms such as sea lilies, which filter nutrients from the water.

Intelligent life is likely abundant in the cosmos, and we will find evidence of it soon, according to one of the world's top experts on the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life.Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., gave a pair of talks in Athens last week about what his organization does to search for alien life, why he believes it is out there, and what might happen when we find it.SETI is a general acronym for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" that can apply to any group that does such work, and does not exclusively refer to Shostak's institute."The bottom line is we will find E.T. in the next two dozen years," Shostak said. "I'll bet you all a cup of Starbucks on that." "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," of course, was the name of Steven Spielberg's popular 1982 film about a lovable alien.

Music therapy for psychiatric in-patients with schizophrenia can improve some of the symptoms of the disorder, according to a new study by researchers at Imperial College London and therapists at the Central and North West London Mental Health Trust.The preliminary research, published today in the British Journal of Psychiatry, is the first time music therapy for people with acute schizophrenia has been evaluated.For this small study, 81 in-patients at four hospitals in central and inner London were randomised to receive music therapy or standard care alone. Those people receiving music therapy had between 8 and 12 sessions, once a week, for up to 45 minutes.

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Air pollution may be just the thing to fight global warming, some scientists say. Prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate, said a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere could act as a "shade" from the sun's rays and help cool the planet.Reaction to the proposal here at the annual U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some resignation to such "massive and drastic" operations, as the chief U.N. climatologist describes them.The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself "not enthusiastic about it.""It was meant to startle the policymakers," said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. "If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this."

You may one day be able to recharge your laptop or mobile phone without having to plug it into the wall, says a US physicist. But others say there are many hurdles before such transfer of energy means we can say goodbye to wires.Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will present his team's work at the American Institute of Physics forum in San Francisco this week.Today's wireless transfer of energy, such as the transfer of light energy from the Sun for solar power or the transfer of microwaves from transmitters for communication, involve relatively low levels of energy.But recharging devices like laptops requires a much higher level of energy. And if this was routinely zapped through the air it could 'fry' any living organisms that get in the way.But Prof Soljacic says he has found a way of transmitting energy so that only the devices that it is recharging will pick it up, so it will not affect humans. Instead of using traditional radiation, he wants to use the part of the electromagnetic field that is 'non-radiative'.

Five hundred years ago a stricken ship, the Victoria, limped into the port of Seville. Its crew of 18 were all that was left of the 265 men that started out three years earlier.Magellan never planned to, wanted to, or indeed did, sail around the world.When he set off on this voyage, the plan was to get to the Spice Islands and then return the same way back.Yet, still today in many countries, it is Magellan who gets the credit for being the first person to circumnavigate.But the reality - as I found out in Spain while making the BBC's Voyages of Discovery series - is that it was another great man, Juan Sebastian Elcano, who has the honour of being the first circumnavigator.

PARIS (AFP) - New investigations into the code for life suggest the assumption that humans are genetically almost identical is wide of the mark, and the implications could be resounding. Current thinking, inspired by the results five years ago from the Human Genome Project, is that the six billion humans alive today are 99.9 percent similar when it comes to genetic content and identity.But major research work, published on Thursday, suggests we are genetically more diverse -- and the repercussions could be far-reaching for medical diagnosis, new drugs and the tale of human evolution itself.Until now, analysis of the genome has focussed overwhelmingly on comparing flaws, or polymorphisms, in single "letters" in the chemical code for making and sustaining human life.

A well-known Japanese archaeologist said Tuesday a team he is leading has found further evidence of a little-known ancient civilization in the Bolivian Amazon.Katsuyoshi Sanematsu, a professor of anthropology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, completed an excavation in August of a massive man-made mound, or "loma," in Bolivia's northeastern Beni state.Such mounds mark settlements of the Mojos civilization, which is thought to have flourished in the Amazon region for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish.The excavation is the second stage of a three-year study by Japanese and Bolivian researchers called Project Mojos that began in 2005.Sanematsu, author of numerous books on ancient Central and South American cultures, said the main objective of this year's work was to gather more data on the loma, one of some 20,000 in the flood plain of the Bolivian Amazon called the Llanos de Mojos.

CLANWILLIAM, South Africa (Reuters) -- In the caves of South Africa's Cederberg mountains, an ancient people left a legacy of rock art that could teach modern man a valuable lesson or two about living in harmony with nature.That is the view of John Parkington, professor of archaeology at the University of Cape Town, who has spent 40 years in the Cederberg and neighboring areas researching rock paintings and other artifacts left by the pre-colonial hunter-gatherers who once roamed southern Africa.The Bushmen, or San, left tens of thousands of paintings in ochre and clay, most depicting humans or three or four key animal species, and some showing men with the heads of animals.Parkington launched the Living Landscape Project in the Cederberg town of Clanwilliam, about 250 km (155 miles) north of Cape Town, five years ago to increase understanding of the region's archaeological assets and use them to attract tourists.

Two Swiss scientists said on Wednesday they had been able to identify a part of the brain that may be responsible for the "out-of-body" experiences of patients who came close to death. Neurologists Olaf Blanke and Margitta Seeck said in a joint statement they had been able to make the observation during exploratory experiments for treatment of severe forms of epilepsy. Electrical stimulation of a key area of the brain near the temple upset the mind's perception of the body, according to the team from the University of Geneva's medical school and the Neuroscience institute at the Swiss federal technical college in Lausanne (EPFL).

The face of Jack the Ripper has been pieced together by Scotland Yard experts from evidence left by the Victorian killer. Modern profiling techniques have been used to form the most accurate portrait ever of the murderer, whose identity has remained a mystery for 118 years.The clues also suggest that police at the time were probably searching for the wrong kind of man. The Ripper, who strangled and butchered five prostitutes in East London in seemingly motiveless attacks in 1888, is thought to have been aged between 25 and 35, about 5ft 6in (1.68m) tall and stockily built.

Attempts to locate an ailing Mars-orbiting spacecraft which provided the first evidence of past water on the planet's surface have been unsuccessful, dimming prospects the craft can be recovered, NASA managers said Tuesday."We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Explorations Program at NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters.NASA on Monday used its newest Mars probe to try to take a picture of the Mars Global Surveyor, which has not checked in with its ground control team in nearly three weeks. Surveyor fell silent after a problem positioning one of its solar arrays on Nov. 2.

Volcanic eruptions on Iceland generated a cascade of events that led to record low levels of water in the Nile River in Africa and brought famine to the region more than two centuries ago, a new study concludes. The findings will inform climate forecasting related to future volcanic activity.From June 1783 through February 1784, a series of 10 eruptions from the Laki Craters on this European island in the North Atlantic changed atmospheric conditions in most of the Northern Hemisphere. Unusual temperature and precipitation patterns peaked in the summer of 1783, causing below normal rainfall in most of the Nile drainage basin and therefore record low levels in the mighty river for up to one year following the eruptions.

A man with a metal detector who came across a hoard of prehistoric bronze tools and weapons has handed over his find to the National Museum Wales. Phil Smith came across the Bronze Age haul on land in Llanbadoc in Monmouthshire and reported his find. Dating between 1,000 and 800 BC, the haul contains axes, fragments of swords and a spearhead as well knives and harvesting tools.The 3,000-year-old pieces are being studied by experts.

The Early Bronze Age temple was initially discovered at Tel Megiddo a decade ago. When part of it was first unearthed in 1996, the researchers realized this was a very impressive structure. Since then, evidence accumulated supporting the estimated dimensions: In 2000, two large column bases were excavated.Then last summer, most of the structure was excavated, and the researchers were surprised. The temple, it emerged, was built on a larger area than had been previously assumed, and is an artful construction of excellent materials.Based on pottery shards and carbon-14 dating of olive pits found on the temple floor, the building was constructed shortly before the year 3000 B.C.E., during the Early Bronze Age. To date, it is the largest and most splendid structure of its sort to be found in the Near East.

The Peruvian government declared an emergency for the archaeological site of Chan Chan. The largest Pre-Columbian city in South America, Chan Chan is located in the Peruvian region of La Libertad, 5km west of Trujillo, 570 kilometers north of Lima. Covering an area of approximately 20 km², Chan Chan was constructed by the Chimor (the kingdom of the Chimú), a late intermediate period civilization which grew out of the remnants of the Moche civilization. The vast mud city of Chan Chan was built between 850 and 1470 a.d. and was the imperial capital until Chimor was conquered by the Inca in the 15th century. It is estimated that 30,000 people lived in the city of Chan Chan.However, these efforts have become increasingly difficult. In order to face the potential damages, Peruvian authorities today declared a state of emergency for the next 120 days during which a specific preservation plan will be developed and applied.

A Christian pendant of the Jesuit sect, with the design of the Holy Grail, dated by archaeologists to the 19th century, which was discovered in Jerusalem, is seen in this photo made available by the City of David Foundation, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006.The pendants and other findings came from underneath one of the world's most fascinating and explosive holy places: The Temple Mount, or Haram el-Sharif, is the holiest place in the world for Jews, who venerate it as the site of two ancient temples, and the third-holiest site for Muslims, who believe it is the place where Mohammed ascended to heaven during a nighttime journey recounted in the Koran.

Stonehenge was a major international healing centre, according to a leading British archaeologist.Up till now, most scholars have accepted that the 4,600-year-old stone circle was used mainly for ritual purposes but new research suggests that it was a prehistoric version of Lourdes packed full of pilgrims from all over the ancient world.Professor Timothy Darvill, who has just published the most detailed study of the area ever carried out, says it is much more associated with water sources, traditionally imbued with healing properties, than thought.

Near one of modern Jerusalem's most exclusive residential projects and largest shopping mall, an archeological dig is shedding light on the living, shopping and eating habits of the residents of a Bronze Age city. A newly discovered ancient burial site in Bayit Vagan has proved to be an invaluable find. Atop the hill where the Holyland Park Project is being expanded, the cemetery is believed to have belonged to the Canaanite settlement situated where the Malha mall now stands. Research archeologist Dr. Ianir Milevski, who has overseen the excavations since the outset, believes the cemetery dates back to the Middle Bronze Age IIB period, around 1750-1550 BCE. "The site appears to have been a burial ground in the Early Bronze Age IV (2200-2000 BCE) but was then reused by the locals 300 years later," he says.

Rocks with step-like cuttings, a wall and carved blocks have been found under the sea in the southern coast near the heritage site of Mahabalipuram.The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) came across the remains while recently conducting excavations underwater at the site in Tamil Nadu."Mahabalipuram is a historical place. We started detailed excavation 500 metres from the shore in the sea and recently came across different types of rocks, which indicate human activity," said Alok Tripathy, Superintending Archaeologist of ASI's Underwater Archaeology Wing."We have also found a wall running from the shore into the sea," he added.The rocks, which were covered with a lot of vegetation were examined by experts and the cuttings on them were found to have many similarities with carved rocks on the shore, he said."There are rocks having step-like cuttings and holes on them. All these designs are similar to the rock cuttings found on the shore near the main existing temple which is famous for its rock art," he said.

Sometimes, the best survival instincts can be deadly. According to intriguing new research by an international team of Biblical scholars, the religious sect associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls may have been done in by its own scrupulous toilet habits. The Essenes, who established an ascetic community at Qumran on the north-western shores of the Dead Sea, rejected the common Bedouin practice of relieving themselves in the open. Instead, they assigned a dumping ground about half a mile from their community and buried their waste there, believing the practice to be more hygienic.

It may not be language as we know it, but whales have no shortage of ways to make themselves understood.So broad is their vocal repertoire, in fact, that whales can call to their young, woo potential mates and even express emotions, according to researchers who have identified 622 social sounds in humpback whales.Their work will be presented at the upcoming joint meetings of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and the Acoustical Society of Japan in Hawaii.Social sounds are brief, unpatterned sounds that are distinct from lengthier, complex whale songs. The new research adds to a growing body of evidence that whales convey more meaning through vocalizations than previously thought.

Humans and their close Neanderthal relatives began diverging from a common ancestor about 700,000 years ago, and the two groups split permanently some 300,000 years later, according to two of the most detailed analyses of Neanderthal DNA to date.Using different techniques, two teams of scientists separately sequenced large chunks of DNA extracted from the femur of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen found in a cave [image] 26 years ago in Croatia. One team sequenced more than one million base pairs and the other 65,000 pairs of the genome.The achievements could help shed light on the evolution of our own species, and it paves the way for building a complete library of the Neanderthal genome, the scientists say.