Newsdesk Archive

ALTERED REALITY. Mystical experiences triggered by the drug psilocybin yield lasting, positive changes in people's lives, a new study finds.Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, psychopharmacologist Roland R. Griffiths and his colleagues have taken psilocybin out of its traditional context and far from the black-light milieu of its hippie-era heyday. Griffiths' team is investigating the drug's reputed mind-expanding effects in a rigorous, scientific way with ordinary people.

What Makes us Different? Not very much, when you look at our DNA. But those few tiny changes made all the difference in the world.Read this front Time Magazine cover story now as an 8 page online article.

MEXICO CITY (Oct. 5) - Mexican archeologists have found what may be the most significant Aztec ruin in decades, with the unearthing of an altar and a monolith in the busy heart of Mexico City, Mayor Alejandro Encinas said on WednesdayThe 15th century altar, part of the Aztec empire's main temple, was uncovered last weekend near the city's main Zocalo square along with the 11-foot (3.5-m) stone slab, most of which is still buried under earth."It is a very important discovery, the biggest we have made in 28 years. It will allow us to find out a lot more," Encinas told reporters.

Genome Research's cover story for Oct. 2 tells a tale of "genome archaeology" by genetic researchers who dug deeply into the long history of maize and rice. Their resulting insights into plant genomic evolution may well fuel the fires of the genetically modified organism (GMO) controversy.Our findings elucidate an active evolutionary process in which nature inserts genes much like modern biotechnologists do. Now we must reassess the allegations that biotechnologists perform 'unnatural acts,' thereby creating 'Frankenfoods,'" said Professor Joachim Messing, project leader and director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Bulgarian archaeological expedition discovered an ancient Thracian man's skull, which had undergone cranium surgery.The skull was found near the Southeast Bulgarian city of Svilengrad, where archaeologists make rescue excavations.The trepanation was done for medical reasons and it is the first one believed to be from Thracian times, chief archaeologist Georgi Nehrizov commented. The find is dated year 2500-1800 BC.

The unwritten story of the native people who Christopher Columbus first met is now being recorded by IU researcher Charles Beeker and his team of graduate students.Though many people know about the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria -- the three ships Columbus used in his famous voyage -- few have heard of the Taíno, the ancient tribe Columbus stumbled upon when he arrived in the Caribbean.Beeker, director of the IU Office of Underwater Science and Educational Resources, and his students will travel to the Dominican Republic in November to continue researching the Taíno's lost culture.Last summer Beeker and 10 of his students studied underwater caves near the Dominican Republic, which Beeker said might have been dwelling areas of the Taíno, pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean.

DAMASCUS (AFP) - Archaeologists said they have discovered an 11-millennium-old building with on the banks of the Euphrates River in northern Syria."A remarkable discovery has just been uncovered of a large circular building dating back to 8,800 BC near (the locality of) Ja'de," the head of the French archaeologal team that made the find told AFP.The building, much larger than normal houses, "had a collective use, probably for all of the village or a group," Eric Coqueugniot said."A part of this community building takes the shape of the head of a bull and retains painted decorations, the oldest known in the Middle East," he said.

In Bosnia's Valley of the Pyramids, only one man is king. Semir Osmanagic, new-age philosopher and amateur archaeologist, splits his time between Texas and Sarajevo, but these days is mostly to be found scraping away at a hillside 40 minutes north of the Bosnian capital.It is here that he claims to have made the most extraordinary discovery of the millennium: Europe's only pyramids, dating back to the late Ice Age, exceeding in scale and perfection those of ancient Egypt or Latin America. "This is the most magnificent construction complex built on the face of the planet," he said. "These pyramids are so old and so unique, it's hard to compare them to anything else in the world."The experts strongly dispute his claims. Mr Osmanagic, 46, says they are jealous. And at Visoko, an army of amateurs is busy digging up the hillsides to uncover traces of man-made structures that the Houston Bosnian insists date from a prehistoric cycle of civilisation rich in its sophistication and washed away "in the flood".The locals love it. Farmers are turning fields into car parks. Coach tours are arriving from all over Bosnia and beyond. Cafes, bars, and hotels are doing booming business in what was a severely depressed Muslim town on the frontline of a war that ended 11 years ago.

Sudden decreases in temperature over Greenland and tropical rainfall patterns during the last Ice Age have been linked for the first time to rapid changes in the salinity of the north Atlantic Ocean, according to research published Oct. 5, 2006, in the journal Nature. The results provide further evidence that ocean circulation and chemistry respond to changes in climate.Using chemical traces in fossil shells of microscopic planktonic life forms, called formanifera, in deep-sea sediment cores, scientists reconstructed a 45,000- to 60,000-year-old record of ocean temperature and salinity. They compared their results to the record of abrupt climate change recorded in ice cores from Greenland. They found the Atlantic got saltier during cold periods, and fresher during warm intervals.

DAMASCUS, Syria A team of Syrian and French archaeologists has discovered a Neolithic temple in northern Syria that could be the oldest in the Middle East, Syria's official news agency reported Saturday.The discovery of the temple, dating to the ninth century B.C. during the Neolithic Age, was made by a joint Syrian-French archaeological team at Jaadet al-Maghara on the Euphrates river some 450 kilometers (270 miles) north of Damascus, the agency said. It did not say when the temple was unearthed.

SCIENTISTS are attempting to extract DNA for the first time from the fossilised bones thought to be of a Neanderthal man who roamed Britain 35,000 years ago.Experts plan to use a tooth from an upper jaw to establish whether the closest relative of modern humans lived on the British Isles later than it was once thought.The fragment of an upper jaw, which was found in 1926 at Kent's Cavern in Devon, was originally thought to be human, but experts now think it could date back even further.

Archaeologists have discovered a goat statuette and a bas relief of a lizard buried along a skeleton of a woman in a cemetery in Narges Tappeh, an ancient site near Gorgan in Golestan province, reported Tehran Times on Monday."The goat statuette was located under the left arm of the woman, who was buried in a squatting position. The bas relief of the lizard has been carved on the handle of a stick-like artifact, the likes of which have never been seen at any ancient Iranian site. The skeleton dates back to the first millennium BC," the archaeological team's director, Qorban-Ali Abbasi, explained. A bird has been depicted on the curved horns of the goat and a number of other artifacts such as a necklace, earrings, a hairpin, and several bracelets connected to a ring worn by the woman have been found in her grave.

The Oracle at Delphi in central Greece was a major religious center for more than 1000 years. Citizens and rulers alike made pilgrimages there to get advice on everything from mistresses to military conquests. The officiant at the oracle was always a woman, referred to as the Pythia, who perched on a tripod above a chasm in the bowels of the Temple of Apollo and inhaled fumes from the earth that would induce a prophetic, often crazed, trance during which she would relay the wisdom of the gods.he story was dismissed as a myth during the first half of the 20th century, when excavation of the temple and studies of the area by archaeologists turned up no sign of a chasm or a large fissure of any sort. But in the late 1990s, geologist Jelle de Boer of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, suggested that two faults crossing directly under the temple could have been the source of the chasm and the vapors. De Boer's group found traces of ethylene, a central-nervous stimulant that can produce euphoria, in a local spring and concluded it was the likely source of the oracle's frenzied trances.

Scientists are to begin work on the second phase of a project aimed at piecing together the history of human colonisation in Britain.Phase one of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB) discovered people were here 200,000 years earlier than previously thought. Phase two has now secured funds to the tune of £1m and will run until 2010.Team members hope to find out more about Britain's earliest settlers and perhaps unearth their fossil remains.

For nearly 40 years Neil Armstrong has been accused of fluffing his lines during his first steps on the Moon.On tapes of the Moon landings, he appears to drop the "a" from the famous quote: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." But new analysis of the tapes has proved Mr Armstrong right after all.Computer programmer Peter Shann Ford used audio analysis software to show that the missing "a" was blotted out by transmission static. Even Mr Armstrong has never made up his mind about whether he got the quote right.

The second phase of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB) has started thanks to a grant of a £999,000 from the Leverhulme Trust. AHOB, which started in October 2001, brought together archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists to build a calendar of human colonisation in Britain during the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 12,000 years ago).The project has made groundbreaking discoveries dating human occupation of Britain back as far as 700,000 years, 200,000 years earlier than previously thought.

TEHRAN, Sept. 27 (Mehr News Agency) -- The director of an archaeological team working at the Chehrabad Salt Mine in the Hamzehlu region near Zanjan said that a group of Oxford University archaeologists is interested in participating in the study on the salt men found at the mine. "A group of Oxford University archaeologists has prepared a plan, asking to participate in the study, and the Center for Archaeological Research is investigating the plan," Abolfazl Aali told the Persian service of CHN on Wednesday "The archaeologists will be invited to the project if their plan is approved by the center. The collaboration would be a good experience for both sides," he added.Last year, pieces of clothing and DNA samples from three of the four ancient salt men were sent to Oxford University for carbon-14 dating.

ir Richard Branson has unveiled a mock-up of the rocket-powered vehicle that will carry clients into space through his Virgin Galactic business. The Virgin spaceships are designed to carry six passengers and two pilots to an altitude of about 140km on a sub-orbital space flight.Tickets on a Virgin Galactic flight are expected to cost £100,000 ($190,000).The mock-up of the spacecraft was unveiled at the Javits exhibition centre in New York on Thursday.

Just as we near the end of the hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, winds whirl and clouds churn 2 billion miles away in the atmosphere of Uranus, forming a dark vortex large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United States.Astronomers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the first definitive images of a dark spot on Uranus. The elongated feature measures 1,100 miles by 1,900 miles (1,700 kilometers by 3,000 kilometers).This three-wavelength composite image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on August 23, 2006. The research team found the dark spot again on August 24. The inset image shows a magnified view of the spot with enhanced contrast. Uranus's north pole is near the 3 o'clock position in this image. The bright band in the southern hemisphere is at 45 degrees south.

Scientists have discovered a novel genetic repair process that allows a hardy desert microbe to die and resurrect over and over again. The finding, detailed in the Sept. 28 issue of the journal Nature, could lead to new forms of regenerative medicines and might even allow scientists to one day bring dead cells in our own bodies back to life.Deinococcus radiodurans is a so-called extremophile bacterium that can survive intense bouts of heat and UV radiation that shatters its genome into hundreds of DNA fragments. Without a genome, the microbe is effectively dead because it can't synthesize the proteins necessary for life.

Known as the 'devil's architect', Hawksmoor was a mysterious freemason who loved pagan symbols. The restoration of his Bloomsbury church clears away the shadows.It has taken nearly 250 years for Nicholas Hawksmoor to emerge from the shadows of his more famous collaborators, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and despite his ascent up the league of great British architects, there is still something of the night about him. Hawksmoor's churches, in particular, have always seemed better suited to funerals than weddings. In modern times, he has become a poster boy for occultists, studious goths and historical conspiracy theorists - he has even been labelled "the devil's architect".

French and Belgian archaeologists say they have proof Neanderthals lived in near-tropical conditions near France's Channel coast about 125,000 years ago.In a dig at Caours, near Abbeville, France, archeologists found evidence of a Neanderthal "butcher's shop" to which animals as large as rhinoceros, elephant and aurochs, the forerunner of the cow, were dragged and butchered, The Independent reported Wednesday. Jean-Luc Locht, a Belgian expert in prehistory at the French government's archaeological service, told the newspaper: "This is a very important site, a unique site. It proves Neanderthals thrived in a warm northwest Europe and hunted animals like the rhinoceros and the aurochs, just as they previously, and later, hunted ice-age species like the mammoth and the reindeer." Scientists said the animal bones showed signs of having been sawn, crushed or stripped of their meat by flint tools.

French researchers have found a hair dye developed 2,000 years ago relied on nanotechnology to change graying hair into a youthful black color. Philippe Walter and colleagues at the French Museums Restoration Research Center in Paris studied a hair-dyeing recipe first described in Greco-Roman times. The recipe, Walter said, is also the basis of modern hair dyes that gradually darken gray or white hair.The researchers found the ancient dye worked by causing formation of nanocrystals of lead sulfide. That chemical compound forms inside hair shafts and colors hair black without damaging it

NASA got a first-hand look at China's secretive space program this week, spawning enough goodwill for follow-up technical discussions, the agency's administrator said Wednesday."We've agreed that it's a good idea to talk again," Griffin said in a teleconference from Shanghai, the last stop on a five-day tour to meet with top Chinese space officials."We need to look for things that we have in common, that we share and that we can do together. That's what this trip was about," he said.The first NASA administrator to visit China, Griffin said it was far too early to talk about specific programs for cooperation. Accompanying him is a small entourage including associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier and Shanghai-born veteran astronaut Shannon Lucid.

ONASA's Mars Rover Opportunity has arrived at the rim of a crater approximately five times wider than a previous stadium-sized one it studied for half a year. Initial images from the rover's first overlook after a 21-month journey to "Victoria Crater" show rugged walls with layers of exposed rock and a floor blanketed with dunes. The far wall is approximately one-half mile from the rover."This is a geologist's dream come true," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for NASA's twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit. "Those layers of rock, if we can get to them, will tell us new stories about the environmental conditions long ago. We especially want to learn whether the wet era that we found recorded in the rocks closer to the landing site extended farther back in time. The way to find that out is to go deeper, and Victoria may let us do that."

Scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research present new evidence that ocean surface temperatures varied as much as 6 degrees Celsius (about 11 degrees Fahrenheit) during the Aptian Epoch of the Cretaceous Period 120 million years ago.The finding is relevant to the ongoing climate change discussion, IUB geologist Simon Brassell says, because it portrays an ancient Earth whose temperatures shifted erratically due to changes in carbon cycling and did so without human input. "Combined with data from the Atlantic, it appears clear that climate changes were taking place on a global scale during this time period," said Brassell, who led the study.

When describing paper, the following probably never comes up: flame-retardant, bacteria-resistant, rewritable and pathogen-decomposing.But those words describe the kind of unusually tough paper that researchers at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville have developed.The product could be used in a wide range of applications, say the researchers, from reusable bacteria filters to flame-retardant wallpaper that automatically decomposes airborne toxins to rewritable, erasable, heat-resistant billboards along highways.

Scientists of the CDF collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today that they have met the exacting standard to claim discovery of astonishingly rapid transitions between matter and antimatter: 3 trillion oscillations per second.Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy, congratulated the CDF collaboration on the result. "This remarkable tour de force details with exquisite precision how the antiworld is tied to our everyday realm," Dr. Orbach said. "It is a beautiful example of how, using increasingly sophisticated analysis, one can extract discovery from data from which much less was expected. It is a triumph for Fermilab."

The evolution of miniature or 'dwarf' versions of animals like elephants and hippos on islands is caused by lack of competition for food and the absence of predators, and not just because they are too large for their habitats, new research claims today.The evolution of miniature or 'dwarf' versions of animals like elephants and hippos on islands is caused by lack of competition for food and the absence of predators, and not just because they are too large for their habitats, new research claims today.

Human Evolution: An exclusive interview with the man who discovered the oldest child in the world

Human hands glow, but fingernails release the most light, according to a recent study that found all parts of the hand emit detectable levels of light.The findings support prior research that suggested most living things, including plants, release light. Since disease and illness appear to affect the strength and pattern of the glow, the discovery might lead to less-invasive ways of diagnosing patients.Mitsuo Hiramatsu, a scientist at the Central Research Laboratory at Hamamatsu Photonics in Japan, who led the research, told Discovery News that the hands are not the only parts of the body that shine light by releasing photons, or tiny, energized increments of light.

Canadian scientists named a new species of ancient marine reptile Ping Pong Ichthyosaur for the spot where the prehistoric fossil was stored for 25 years. It was pretty amazing to realize this valuable discovery had sat under a Ping Pong table for 25 years, said Michael Caldwell, a University of Alberta paleontologist. But I suppose that after 100 millions of years in the dirt, it's all relative. Embryos found within the marine fossil's pregnant body also mark the most recent record of a live birth and the physically smallest known ichthyosaur embryos.

LONDON (Reuters) - World Heritage sites such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef or Kathmandu in Nepal could be taken off the tourism map by 2020 due to the effects of climate change and too many visitors, a think tank said on Friday.In a report prepared for UK insurance company Churchill, the Center for Future Studies (CFS) listed 10 popular destinations that could be either permanently closed or have a visitor cap within 15 years."I'm reasonably confident we're going to see an increasing climate degradation that is going to impact on various places in the world with increasing severity," CFS director Frank Shaw told Reuters."Floods, storms, droughts, increasing and erratic temperatures will combine to bring about changes in destination choice for tourists."

The earliest known bird had flight feathers on its legs that allowed it to use its hindlimbs as an extra pair of wings, a new study finds.The finding, detailed in the current issue of the journal Paleobiology, supports the theory that early birds learned to glide and parachute from trees before achieving full-fledged flight."This paper puts forward some of the strongest evidence yet that birds descended from arboreal parachuters and gliders, similar to flying squirrels," said study author Nick Longrich, a doctoral student a the University of Calgary in Canada.

A tuberculosis pandemic among an ancient mammoth-like creature probably contributed to the great beasts' demise, a new study suggests.Scientists examining mastodon skeletons found a type of bone damage in several of the animal's foot bones that is unique to sufferers of tuberculosis. The disease would have weakened and crippled the animals, making them more vulnerable to humans and climate change, two factors that scientists have long speculated were behind their extinction in North America.Mastodons were ancient elephants that resembled mammoths, but were shorter and less hairy. Both species lived in North America and disappeared mysteriously, along with other large mammals, around the time of the last major Ice Age about 10,000 years ago.

Scientists have high hopes for Japan's Solar-B mission which has been launched from the Uchinoura spaceport. The spacecraft will investigate the colossal explosions in the Sun's atmosphere known as solar flares. These dramatic events release energy equivalent to tens of millions of hydrogen bombs in just a few minutes. The probe will attempt to find out more about the magnetic fields thought to power solar flares, and try to identify the trigger that sets them off.

ADDIS ABABA (AFP) - "Lucy," the celebrated skeletal remains of a female hominid who lived 3.2 million years ago will leave Ethiopia next year for her first-ever foreign exhibition, officials said. Beginning in September 2007, Lucy will enjoy top billing among 200 other Ethiopian exhibits that will tour museums in 10 US cities for four years, they said Wednesday."Lucy has been in Ethiopia over the last 30 years," said Gezahgen Kebede, Ethiopia's honorary consul in Houston in the US state of Texas, where the exhibition begins at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences."It is time for us to share her with the whole world because she is the origin of mankind," he told AFP.

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region. The female Australopithecus afarensis bones are from the same species as an adult skeleton found in 1974 which was nicknamed "Lucy". Scientists are thrilled with the find, reported in the journal Nature. They believe the near-complete remains offer a remarkable opportunity to study growth and development in an important extinct human ancestor. The juvenile Australopithecus afarensis remains vanishingly rare. The skeleton was first identified in 2000, locked inside a block of sandstone. It has taken five years of painstaking work to free the bones.

Hidden in a wooden chest in the heart of a monastery in Udupi, India, an ancient Hindu manuscript has been deteriorating bit by bit over the last 700 years. Now with the help of modern imaging technologies, scientists are illuminating the seemingly invisible Sanskrit. Once they have brought to light the holy words, the researchers will close the book forever.The project is led by P.R. Mukund and Roger Easton, both of Rochester Institute of Technology. They are digitally preserving the original Hindu writings known as the Sarvamoola granthas. This collection of 36 works was written by Shri Madvacharya (1238-1317), a philosopher whose ideas had a far-reaching impact on the Indian society. ....Read more.

Three thousand years ago precursors of the Aztecs built the first large-scale water management systems in the New World.The prehistoric farmers of southern Mexico must have longed for a miracle. A tropical climate made their fertile valleys nearly ideal for planting, despite elevations approaching 2,000 meters, and heavy rains ensured bountiful crops during the six-month monsoon season. Under such favorable conditions, this region became the cradle of New World agriculture and the birthplace of corn. Yet these early agriculturalists faced one crucial limitation: during half the year, the weather was too dry for farming. With a year-round water supply, their hand-tilled fields might yield two or even three harvests annually. But how could the farmers get more water?

This appears to have been the motto of ancient humans trying to inhabit the British Isles. These settlers were beaten back by ice sheets at least seven times before managing to permanently establish themselves, researchers say. Scientists have managed to piece together much of the human history of the British Isles as part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project, a collaboration among archaeologists, paleontologists, and geologists that has been running for the past five years.Those researchers have unearthed a wealth of new findings. Humans, it appears, came to the British Isles at least 700,000 years ago, 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, but began to establish permanent residence only around 12,000 years ago. The director of the project, Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, England, outlined the project's key findings at the British Association Science Festival in early September.

Ötzi the Iceman, the world's oldest and best-preserved mummy, died in just a few minutes following the rupture of a major artery, a CT scan of the 5,300-year-old mummy has revealed.Eduardo Egarter Vigl, Ötzi's official caretaker at the South Tyrol Archaeological Museum in Bolzano, where the mummy attracts around 300,000 visitors a year, told Discovery News that the Iceman died after an arrowhead hit his left subclavian artery.This is a vital artery below the collar bone that arises from the aorta and branches to supply blood to the left arm. The discovery was made thanks to a multislice CT scan, which allows the analysis of extremely thin tissue layers."We could detect a blood layer around the artery. A wound like that causes a hemorrhagic shock and a rapid death. According to this scenario, Ötzi died of blood loss just after the arrowhead hit him," Egarter told Discovery News.

Scientists could generate a black hole as often as every second when the world's most powerful particle accelerator comes online in 2007.This potential "black hole factory" has raised fears that a stray black hole could devour our planet whole. The Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to safeguarding humanity from what it considers threats to our existence, has stated that artificial black holes could "threaten all life on Earth" and so it proposes to set up "self-sustaining colonies elsewhere."But the chance of planetary annihilation by this means "is totally miniscule," experimental physicist Greg Landsberg at Brown University in Providence, R.I., told LiveScience.

Kenyan evangelical Christians have hopped on the anti-evolution bandwagon, and are demanding that all reference to the theory be dropped from an exhibition of hominid fossils in Nairobi's National Museum.The museum houses Louis and Richard Leakey's collection of hominid fossils, one of the most extensive in the world. The collection includes the famous Turkana boy, an almost complete fossilised skeleton of a young hominid who lived approximately 1.6m years ago, and is arguably one of the best illustrations of the origins of our species.However, Bishop Boniface Adoyo, chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, says that the exhibition does not represent scientific evidence of human evolution. He says evolution is still a theory, and that the fossils cannot be called as evidence to support it.Adoyo said he would be satisfied if the exhibition merely renamed itself and worded its material to avoid giving the impression that the fossils were in any way connected with humanity.

Researchers plan to announce on Monday that they have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams. The advance will make it possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips, removing the most significant bottleneck in computer design. As a result, chipmakers may be able to put the high-speed data communications industry on the same curve of increased processing speed and diminishing costs--the phenomenon known as Moore's law--that has driven the computer industry for the last four decades.

With a steady stream of bleak predictions that "water wars" will be fought over dwindling supplies in the 21st century, battles between two Sumerian city-states 4,500 years ago seem to set a worrying precedent.But the good news, many experts say, is that the conflict between Lagash and Umma over irrigation rights in what is now Iraq was the last time two states went to war over water.Down the centuries since then, international rivals sharing waters such as the Jordan River, the Nile, the Ganges or the Parana have generally favored cooperation over conflict.The simple explanation is that water is simply too important to fight over," said Aaron Wolf, a professor at Oregon State University. "Nations often go to the brink of war over water and then resolve their differences."

A radically different way to reach outer space -- the space elevator -- may finally be getting off the ground floor thanks to recent huge advances in technology. Traveling thousands of miles into the cosmos up a length of super-strong material, it is believed that the space elevator could revolutionize space exploration by providing an affordable means of transporting satellites, space station supplies, and one day even tourists into space. The concept of the space elevator was first mooted by Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov in the 1960s, and until recently has remained more familiar to fans of science fiction, such as Arthur C. Clarke's1979 novel, "The Fountains of Paradise." Previous ideas, such as lassoing one end of the elevator cable to an asteroid in geo-stationary orbit, haven't helped the concept to be accepted as a serious project. However there is a growing recognition that what once seemed a starry idea is not merely feasible but probable.Dr Edward's vision of the space elevator would travel 62,000 miles into space along a carbon nanotube ribbon

Oilsands activity has uncovered vast wealth of a different kind -- a 10,000-year-old quarry rich with tools and weapons from some of the first Albertans, including a pristine spearpoint still smeared with the blood of a woolly mammoth."It's got this echo of the Ice Age world," said Jack Ives, Alberta's provincial archeologist, who described the find in a hearing before the province's energy regulator yesterday."There's quite a rich concentration of artifacts."The so-called Quarry of the Ancestors, which scientists suspect may be one of the first places where humans put down roots in northern Alberta after the retreat of the glaciers, is found on an outcrop of hard, fine-grained sandstone adjacent to the Albian Sands oilsands lease about 75 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.An archeological field worker shows a 10,000-year-old spear point later found to have traces of woolly mammoth blood on it. The artifact was uncovered at an ancient stone quarry in northern Alberta.

A shadowy rodent has potential to shed light on human genetics and the mysteries of evolution.Purdue University research has shown that the vole, a mouselike rodent, is not only the fastest evolving mammal, but also harbors a number of puzzling genetic traits that challenge current scientific understanding."Nobody has posters of voles on their wall," said J. Andrew DeWoody, associate professor of genetics in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, whose study appears this month in the journal Genetica. "But when it comes down to it, voles deserve more attention."

Forty-four years after starting work at a children's psychiatric ward in Wisconsin, Dr. Darold Treffert still struggles to explain how the human brain is capable of producing the remarkable feats he witnessed there.One boy had memorized Milwaukee's bus schedule and could say where all the buses were at any moment in the day. Another could put together complicated puzzles without hesitation -- even if the pieces were upside down. A third boy could list world events that happened on any given day.Treffert came to realize these boys have savant syndrome, and thus began a lifelong quest to understand how people with sometimes severe mental disabilities could exhibit what he calls "islands of genius."Treffert says a savant's brilliance generally falls into a single category: lightning-fast math skills or calendar calculating or spatial skills or near picture-perfect memory or musical ability.

Both Lebanon and Israel have signed the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the 1972 Paris Convention concerning the Protection of World Cultural Heritage, Tyre and Baalbek were recently subjected to rigorous Israeli bombardments during the recent conflict in Lebanon. Fortunately no damage occurred, but the bombardments which targeted adjacent areas provided a real threat.Such action has infuriated the Lebanese Minister of Culture Tareq Mitri who, shortly after the war broke out, sent a desperate plea to UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura asking his immediate intervention to stop the situation before a catastrophe occurred...............Concerned about recent events in Lebanon, Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), also wrote to Matsuura expressing his profound concern over archaeological sites in Lebanon.

The distant world whose discovery prompted leading astronomers to demote Pluto from the rank of "planet" has now been given its own official name.Having caused so much consternation in the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the object has been called Eris, after the Greek goddess of discord. Eris is larger than Pluto, which put scientists in the fix of having to call them both planets - or neither. Both bodies have now been put in the new classification of "dwarf planets". Eris' discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, told the Associated Press that the name was an obvious choice, calling it "too perfect to resist".

By studying how beetles can trap air to keep from drowning, researchers suggest artificial gills that mimic such a trick could help people breathe underwater.Scientists in England investigated super-water-repellant surfaces. These possess infinitesimally tiny structures that rise like trees in a forest, on which water droplets rest. The structures trap air between the surface they jut up from and the water on top of them.

U.S. astronomers have discovered a planet unlike any other known in the universe. Smithsonian scientists say the new planet was discovered using a network of small automated telescopes known as HATl. The planet -- designated HAT-P-1 -- orbits one member of a pair of distant stars 450 light-years away in the constellation Lacerta. "We could be looking at an entirely new class of planets," said Gaspar Bakos, a Hubble fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. With a radius about 1.38 times that of Jupiter, HAT-P-1 is the largest known planet. But, in spite of its huge size, its mass is only half that of Jupiter. "This planet is about one-quarter the density of water," Bakos said. "In other words, it's lighter than a giant ball of cork! Just like Saturn, it would float in a bathtub if you could find a tub big enough to hold it."

They are the thinking of a genius, the 500-year-old notes and drawings that reveal the extraordinary creative imagination of Leonardo da Vinci. But these are not preparatory works for his famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper. They are the notebooks that demonstrate the great Renaissance master's other life as an inventor, engineer and scientist centuries ahead of his time.A new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, is to show more than 60 precious leaves of da Vinci drawings, including works from the British Library, the Royal Collection and the V&A itself. Visitors to the show will be able to puzzle over sheets so fragile they rarely see the light of day.Martin Kemp, a professor of the history of art at Oxford University who has curated the exhibition, admitted many were "difficult" in comparison with da Vinci's better known works. But if the artist's explorations in geometry, anatomy and engineering prove daunting, highlights have been brought to life with animations commissioned from Cosgrove Hall, the company better known for creating Dangermouse.

As the sun begins its next 11-year cycle, scientists expect to have a much better view of the massive explosions of solar particles that can shut down power grids, short-circuit satellites and threaten the health of astronauts orbiting Earth.Their hopes rest aboard a rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida that is being prepared for liftoff Sept. 18.The ship will carry a pair of nearly identical spacecraft called the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, which will add another perspective to our view of the sun.Just as we can sense depth because of the slight offset of our eyes, the STEREO satellites will look at the sun from different positions in space to produce three-dimensional images.

An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the "double pulsar", a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein's theory of general relativity - the theory of gravity that displaced Newton's - is correct to within a staggering 0.05%. Their results are published on the14th September in the journal Science and are based on measurements of an effect called the Shapiro Delay.

The planet-wide dust storms that periodically cloak Mars in a mantle of red may be generating a snow of corrosive chemicals - including hydrogen peroxide - that would be toxic to life, U.S. researchers say.Based on field studies on Earth, laboratory experiments and theoretical modeling, the researchers argue that oxidizing chemicals could be produced by the static electricity generated in the swirling dust clouds that often obscure the surface for months.If these chemicals have been produced regularly over the last 3 billion years, when Mars has presumably been dry and dusty, the accumulated peroxide in the surface soil could have built to levels that would kill "life as we know it," said Gregory T. Delory of the University of California, Berkeley, lead author of one of the papers, published in the U.S. journal Astrobiology."If true, this very much affects the interpretation of soil measurements made by the Viking landers in the 1970s," said Delory.

NASA data shows that Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrunk abruptly by 14 percent between 2004 and 2005. According to researchers, the loss of perennial ice in the East Arctic Ocean neared 50 percent during that time as some of the ice moved from the East Arctic to the West.The overall decrease in winter Arctic perennial sea ice totals 280,000 square miles--an area the size of Texas. Perennial ice can be 10 or more feet thick. It was replaced by new, seasonal ice only about one to seven feet thick that is more vulnerable to summer melt.The decrease in the perennial ice raises the possibility that Arctic sea ice will retreat to another record low extent this year. This follows a series of very low ice-cover years observed over the past four summers from active and passive microwave satellite data.

Our evolutionary cousin the Neanderthal may have survived in Europe much longer than previously thought. A study in Nature magazine suggests the species may have lived in Gorham's Cave on Gibraltar up to 24,000 years ago. The Neanderthal people were believed to have died out about 35,000 years ago, at a time when modern humans were advancing across the continent. The new evidence suggests they held on in Europe's deep south long after the arrival of Homo sapiens.The research team believes the Gibraltar Neanderthals may even have been the very last of their kind.

Scientists are warning that Siberia could be a far larger source of greenhouse gases than we had ever thought.Follow David Shukman's (BBC science correspondent) progress as he investigates this distant front-line in climate change.

A Japanese legend claims that Jesus escaped Jerusalem and made his way to Aomori in Japan where he became a rice farmer. Christians say the story is nonsense. However, a monument there known as the Grave of Christ attracts curious visitors from all over the world. To reach the Grave of Christ or Kristo no Hakka as it is known locally, you need to head deep into the northern countryside of Japan, a place of paddy fields and apple orchards. Halfway up a remote mountain surrounded by a thicket of bamboo lies a mound of bare earth marked with a large wooden cross. Most visitors peer at the grave curiously and pose in front of the cross for a photograph before heading off for apple ice cream at the nearby cafe. But some pilgrims leave coins in front of the grave in thanks for answered prayers. The cross is a confusing symbol because according to the local legend, Jesus did not die at Calvary. His place was taken by one of his brothers, who for some reason is now buried by his side in JapanThe Grave of Christ has become an international tourist attraction

ANSA) - Rome, September 11 - Archaeologists have unearthed the largest Neolithic female figurine ever found in Italy, according to a press report .The 7,000-year-old stone statuette, discovered during excavations of a burial site near the northern Italian city of Parma, is over 20 centimetres tall, the archaeological monthly Archeo reported .It depicts a woman with an oval face, slit eyes, a prominent nose and long hair. Her arms are bent at her elbows, sticking out at right-angles to her body .Although such statuettes are fairly common, it is rare to find figurines this old in Europe, and the majority represent a mother earth divinity with a swelling belly symbolizing fertility .

MASHANTUCKET -- What looks like a simple, small black stain on a sandy hill at the Mashantucket Pequot reservation has changed the way archaeologists in this region look for dig sites.Archaeologists are excavating dozens of pit houses -- structures built into a hill and supported by timbers -- on a hill next to the Great Cedar parking garage behind Foxwoods Resort Casino. The find wouldn't be all that unique, except these houses were built about 8,000 years before researchers thought people settled into semi-permanent structures."Usually we see (native people) as wandering around the landscape (9,000 years ago)," said Kevin McBride, director of research at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. "You don't check hillsides, because who's going to live on a hillside? This is probably the most important site in East North America."

The use of coloured pigments in early forms of body art may have begun many tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought, according to a study of artefacts found at an ancient archaeological site in Africa. Scientists working at the Twin Rivers hilltop cave near Lusaka in Zambia have found evidence for the use of colours - possibly for body painting - as early as 300,000 years ago.This would predate the known use of coloured pigments in cave art by more than 200,000 years and, if confirmed, mark the point when humans began to experiment with paint.

A team of Discovery Channel has commenced filming the royal palace at Perperikon - ancient sanctuary believed to be more respected than Delphi Oracle. The world-popular travel channel has sent its team for the first time in Bulgaria, intrigued by the yet not completely known world of ancient Thracians. The team including a producer and a photographer is to tour all the sites related to the history and culture of Thracian tribes. Besides Perperikon, located in the bosom of the Rhodopes mountain, Discovery's audience will see also Tatul, where the tomb of Orpheus is believed to be, and the Valley of Thracian Kings locating some of the most fabulous Thracian treasures."The world knows a lot about ancient Greeks and Romans, but few of achievements made by the Thracian civilisation have been displayed," a team member told state-run BTA news agency.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (Reuters) - Experts are examining the ruins of a pre-Columbian culture in an area of Honduras where there had been no previous evidence of major indigenous civilization.The site, discovered earlier this year, consists of 14 mounds that form part of what are believed to be ceremonial grounds, the Honduran Institute of Anthropology said."They are part of a very important site, a governing center of a pre-Columbian civilization," Oscar Neils, the institute's head of research, told Reuters. "We had no idea that there was a pre-Columbian culture in this area."The findings so far include an impressive carved stone monument, called a stela, as well as necklaces and grinding stones.

Neanderthals are often thought of as the stray branch in the human family tree, but research now suggests the modern human is likely the odd man out."What people tend to do is draw a line from our ancestors straight to ourselves, and any group that doesn't seem to fit on that line is divergent, distinct, unusual, strange," researcher Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience today. "But in terms of evolution of our family tree, the genus Homo, we're the outliers and the Neanderthals are more toward the core."Humans are not at the inevitable end of a sequence, Trinkaus said. "It just happens that we happen to be alive today and Neanderthals are not.

A half-mile below the surface of the New Mexico desert, the federal government is interring thousands of tons of monstrously dangerous leftovers from its nuclear weapons program --plutonium-infested clothing, tools and chemical sludge that will remain potentially lethal for thousands of years to come.It may be safely secured now, but how to keep our descendants centuries in the future from accidentally unearthing it?To address it, the Department of Energy convened a conclave of scientists, linguists, anthropologists and sci-fi thinkers to develop an elaborate system intended to shout "Danger!" to any human being for the next 10,000 years -- regardless of what language they speak or technology they use.

Nasa's robotic Mars rover Opportunity is closing in on what could be the richest scientific "treasure trove" of its mission so far. Within the next two weeks, Opportunity should reach the rim of a crater wider and deeper than any it has visited in more than two-and-a-half years on Mars. Rocks exposed in the walls of Victoria Crater could open a new window into the geological history of the Red Planet. Opportunity has been exploring Mars' Meridiani Plains since January 2004.

The Peruvian government has reversed a decision to allow flights over the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu after an outcry from environmental groups. Peru's Transport and Communications ministry has declared the area around the site a no-fly zone.Environmentalists said a number of rare animals and plants would have been severely affected by the low-flying helicopter tours. Machu Picchu, a world heritage site, is Peru's biggest tourist attraction.

OUR early human ancestors may have been smarter than we have given them credit for. Archaeologists have found evidence that language developed at least 100,000 years before the evolution of modern-day Homo sapiens, the supposedly wise version of human-like species. According to findings in a cave complex at Twin Rivers in Zambia, Homo heidelbergensis, believed to be a common ancestor of both modern humans and Neanderthals, made and used a range of colours. These included red, yellow, brown, pink, black and a "sparkling" purple. This is believed to be strong evidence that colours had symbolic meanings and, if they were dealing with such abstract concepts, language must also have been used to express them.

Men need threats, rivalry and war for them to work together the most effectively, according to a study of the "male warrior effect".The issue of why men start wars has been investigated in a series of experiments by Prof Mark van Vugt of the University of Kent. They reveal that conflict is part of male bonding."We all know that males are more aggressive than females but with that aggression comes a lot of co-operation," Prof van Vugt said yesterday. While male co-operation lies at the heart of democracy and leadership, and men work better in hierarchical groups than women, it is a double-edged sword.

Sofia, Bulgaria - Archaeologists in southern Bulgaria have located remains of a completely preserved Thracian domed tomb decorated with murals, the daily Trud reported on Monday.The tomb, near the town of Haskovo, 234km southeast of Sofia, is made of big stone blocks and has two chambers forming a dome at the top. There are paintings of horses and Thracian armed warriors on the walls.The Thracians were Bronze Age people, whose civilisation thrived in the Balkans from 2000 BC until the invasion of the Slavs in the sixth century AD.This is only the second Thracian tomb with murals of humans discovered in Bulgaria and one of the most significant in Thracian archaeology in this century, experts say.The first Thracian tomb of this kind was unearthed in 1944 in the town of Kazanlak, 200km east of Sofia.

Experiments aimed at unlocking secrets of time travel are being led by Aberdeen University. Researchers are examining the fabric of space time and what science fiction authors refer to as the fourth dimension.Dr Charles Wang will study the microscopic movement of atoms, which can be affected by the earth spinning.He said: "This is a very interesting possibility which cannot entirely be ruled out by physics."

Scientists are gearing up for a fresh look at Saturn's large and eerily Earth-like moon Titan from the Cassini spacecraft, which is making a close flyby on Thursday.The pass is the first since the discovery in July that Titan is covered with liquid lakes, probably made of methane and other organic compounds. The moon has been a primary focus of the Cassini mission to Saturn, which began two years ago.As Cassini flies to within about 620 miles of the moon's surface on Thursday, researchers expect to get more details about the thick, hazy brew that fills Titan's skies and probably falls to the ground as rain.

Planetary systems beyond the solar system that contain Jupiter-sized planets close to their suns have a good chance of spawning habitable earthly worlds, a new study concludes.Computer models suggest massive planets that orbit their mother stars closer than Mercury circles our sun churn up raw material as they migrate inward, setting the stage for rocky planets like Earth to form in their wake.The baby Earths could be bathed in oceans that have been delivered by small icy bodies traveling from the outer edges of dust discs from which solar systems are formed, researchers with the University of Colorado at Boulder, Pennsylvania State University and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., conclude in a study published in this week's issue of the journal Science.

On the morning of October 18, 2004, after a drenching rain, caretakers entered the Maya site of Tazumal in western El Salvador and found what they thought was a catastrophe. Nearly an entire flank of one of the site's two main pyramids had collapsed. On the pyramid's south face, a sloping concrete wall erected in the 1950s and intended to resemble the structure's original contours, had loosened in the rain, slipped off, and lay in a heap of rubble. Where concrete had stood, the caretakers could now see only exposed mud. By the following evening, el colapso de Tazumal had become a national scandal. News media accused government authorities of neglecting Tazumal, the country's best-known archaeological site, which had appeared on Salvadoran postage stamps and the 100-colón bank note. Politicians demanded the resignation of the director of the state cultural institute, Concultura, which owns and operates it ...

Severe climate change was the primary driver in the development of civilisation, according to new research by the University of East Anglia.The early civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia, China and northern South America were founded between 6000 and 4000 years ago when global climate changes, driven by natural fluctuations in the Earth's orbit, caused a weakening of monsoon systems resulting in increasingly arid conditions. These first large urban, state-level societies emerged because diminishing resources forced previously transient people into close proximity in areas where water, pasture and productive land was still available. In a presentation to the BA Festival of Science on September 7, Dr. Nick Brooks will challenge existing views of how and why civilisation arose. He will argue that the earliest civilisations developed largely as a by-product of adaptation to climate change and were the products of hostile environments. "Civilisation did not arise as the result of a benign environment which allowed humanity to indulge a preference for living in complex, urban, 'civilized' societies," said Dr. Brooks."On the contrary, what we tend to think of today as 'civilisation' was in large part an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilisation was a last resort - a means of organising society and food production and distribution, in the face of deteriorating environmental conditions."

Ukraine may be thousands of miles away from Egypt, but archaeologists there say they have found pyramids. It is claimed that the monuments have been uncovered in the east of the country and that they predate the pyramids in Egypt. But the claim that there is evidence of pyramids is being disputed. The prestigious Academy of Sciences has sent its own expert to the dig. It believes that this could be the Ukrainian version of Stonehenge. This could be one of the most exciting archaeological discoveries in recent years.

Eight times humans came to try to live in Britain and on at least seven occasions they failed - beaten back by freezing conditions. Scientists think they can now write a reasonably comprehensive history of the occupation of these isles. It stretches from 700,000 years ago and the first known settlers at Pakefield in Suffolk, through to the most recent incomers just 12,000 years or so ago.The evidence comes from the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project.

Archaeologists have been digging ancient sites around Stonehenge to find clues about when they were first built.The dig, being conducted by archaeologists from several universities, is part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which is investigating Woodhenge, Stonehenge Cursus and Durrington Walls, to learn more about their connection to the famous stone monument.Joshua Pollard, senior lecturer in Archaeology in Bristol University, who is in charge of the dig at Woodhenge, where a timber circle once stood, said: "The timber is associated with the living and may have been used for feasting or linked with the solstice whereas stone is connected with the ancestors."The people in the Neolithic era often felt their day to day lives were just transitory but they put more effort into sacred monuments for their ancestors. The stone may be a version of the timber monuments."

The human brain is hard-wired to be susceptible to supernatural beliefs as a result of tens of thousands of years of evolution, a British psychologist said today.Religion and other forms of magical thinking continue to thrive, in spite of a lack of evidence and the advance of science, because people are naturally biased to accept a role for the irrational in their daily lives, according to Bruce Hood, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol.This evolved credulity suggests that it will be impossible to root out belief in ideas such as creationism and paranormal phenomena, even though they have been refuted by evidence and are held as a matter of faith alone.People ultimately believe in them for the same reasons as they attach sentimental value to inanimate objects like wedding rings or teddy bears, and recoil from artefacts linked to evil, as if they are pervaded by a physical "essence".

Find out more by following the Article Link below leading to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire where you can hear a radio interview.Dr. Sheldrakes website is at: www.sheldrake.orgDo you think about someone you've not thought about for a while only to have them ring you on the phone? Ex-Cambridge grad, Dr Rupert Sheldrake has been investigating... and shown that telepathy works."I've done a whole series of surveys to find out which kinds of telepathy occur most often in the modern world and the commonest situation is in the connection with phone calls. What happens is people think of someone that they haven't thought of in a while, then the phone rings a minute or two later and it's that person on the phone. And they say 'that's amazing, I was just thinking about you' - it's a very common experience and about 80% of the population have had that kind of experience with phone calls."

Children returning to school today after the summer holiday will be offered a range of healthier menus free from sugary, fried and fatty foods.Guidelines from the Department of Education, published earlier this year, banned meals containing high amounts of salt and fat.Instead, pupils will get a minimum of two portions of fruit and vegetables with every meal, while "high-quality" meat, poultry and oily fish is set to feature more in school dinners.

One in six Londoners admits moving seats on the bus or Tube to avoid a passenger they believe may be Muslim.According to an Evening Standard/YouGov poll more than a third (35%) of those questioned admitted they had felt uncomfortable while travelling near a person of Asian or north African appearance. Of those, 47% said they had moved seats or deliberately sat away from them.The poll also revealed that Londoners support tough measures to catch terrorists following the 7/7 attacks and last month's alleged airline bomb plot.

BBC NewsReuters NewsABC News OnlineAustralian environmentalist and television personality Steve Irwin has died during a diving accident. Mr Irwin, 44, was killed by a stingray barb to the chest while he was filming an underwater documentary in Queensland's Great Barrier Reef. Paramedics from the nearby city of Cairns rushed to treat him at the scene but were unable to save him. Mr Irwin was known for his television show The Crocodile Hunter and his work with native Australian wildlife.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. (Sept. 4) - Although just 100 miles off the New Jersey-New York coast, the features of the Hudson Canyon are have been largely hidden beneath hundreds of feet of water.Created by the Hudson River centuries ago, parts of the massive, undersea region rival the Grand Canyon in scale. Now, for the first time, scientists have a vivid picture of what the mysterious region looks like.A four-year study using high-tech tools has produced maps of an undersea region the size of Connecticut. Scientists said the maps will allow them to study many things, including whether methane gas trapped in frozen sediment below the sea floor is escaping and exacerbating global warming.Also of interest is whether gas releases could spark undersea landslides that produce tsunamis.

An underground chamber undisturbed since the Iron Age was revealed on North Uist when a 10ft hole opened beneath the wheel of a tractor. Archaeologists assessed the find at Port nan Long at the north of the island, which has been sealed off from the public.Dr Mary MacLeod, Western Isles Council's archaeologist, was delighted to declare the hole an Iron Age souterrain, or underground chamber. She said: "It is particularly exciting because it is so well preserved. "It has lain undisturbed for 2000 years . . . I think there has been a very large pre-historic settlement on this site, possibly over thousands of years."

Insect bite marks in ancient leaf fossils are shedding new light on how nature bounced back after an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs and much of life on Earth 65 million years ago.Plant and insect biodiversity is strongly linked today: Where there are many types of plants, there are many insects to eat them. But after the mass extinction, the devastated plant and insect populations might not have been so in sync, according to a new study."The recovery from a mass extinction was more interesting and chaotic than we thought," said study leader Peter Wilf, a paleontologist at Pennsylvania State University.

What If...? An alternative history of the world What if the dinosaurs had survived? Or Hitler won in 1945? Or the aeroplane had been invented 1,000 years earlier? Would there even be life on earth if the moon had failed to form? Science fiction writer Stephen Baxter canvasses the possibilities.

One of America's top scientists has said that the world has already entered a state of dangerous climate change. In his first broadcast interview as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren told the BBC that the climate was changing much faster than predicted. "We are not talking anymore about what climate models say might happen in the future. "We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we're going to experience more," Professor Holdren said.He emphasised the seriousness of the melting Greenland ice cap, saying that without drastic action the world would experience more heatwaves, wild fires and floods.

NASA takes a first step toward remaking its future with the selection on Thursday of Lockheed Martin to build new spaceships to travel to the moon and beyond.The aerospace giant won a contract estimated to be worth more than $8 billion over the next decade to design, manufacture and test spacecraft, named Orion, that will carry astronauts to space after the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010."We think we're picking the right contractor. We know we are," said Doug Cooke, NASA's exploration deputy administrator. "The competition was fierce and the proposals were strong."

Imagine a shift in the Earth so profound that it could force our entire planet to spin on its side after a few million years, tilting it so far that Alaska would sit at the equator. Princeton scientists have now provided the first compelling evidence that this kind of major shift may have happened in our world's distant past. By analyzing the magnetic composition of ancient sediments found in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, Princeton University's Adam Maloof has lent credence to a 140-year-old theory regarding the way the Earth might restore its own balance if an unequal distribution of weight ever developed in its interior or on its surface. The theory, known as true polar wander, postulates that if an object of sufficient weight -- such as a supersized volcano -- ever formed far from the equator, the force of the planet's rotation would gradually pull the heavy object away from the axis the Earth spins around. If the volcanoes, land and other masses that exist within the spinning Earth ever became sufficiently imbalanced, the planet would tilt and rotate itself until this extra weight was relocated to a point along the equator.

LIMA, Peru - Peru's famed "Ice Maiden," the frozen mummy of an Inca girl sacrificed to the gods 500 years ago, might be at risk from humidity, Peru's leading newspaper reported Wednesday.Dampness was detected inside the mummy's glass-enclosed refrigeration compartment by an expert from the U.S. Smithsonian Institution who was vacationing in the southern Andean city of Arequipa, where the mummy is kept, daily newspaper El Comercio reported.Teodoro Nunez Medina, Arequipa's regional director of Peru's National Institute of Culture, told the newspaper that the unnamed expert notified Peruvian authorities that the mummy could deteriorate beyond repair within five years if the problem is not corrected.

30-mile maze canyons in Antarctica was carved out of bedrock by the catastrophic draining of subglacial lakes during global warming between 12 million and 14 million years ago, according to university researchers who warn a similar event today could have serious environmental consequences.Although scientists have previously theorized that the Labyrinth region in southern Victoria Land was created by water released from lakes that had formed under glaciers, researchers at Syracuse University and Boston University say they found geological evidence to bracket the timing of the last major flooding and link it to a global warming trend at the time.The scientists pinpointed the timing of the last subglacial flood by dating volcanic ash preserved on bedrock surfaces, said Laura Webb, a professor of earth sciences at Syracuse who took part in the study.

BISHKEK, August 30 (RIA Novosti) - Possibly the world's most ancient gold coin has been discovered in a high mountain lake in Kyrgyzstan, the chief of an archeological expedition said Wednesday. Academic Vladimir Ploskikh said an expedition from the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University found a 70-gram octagonal gold artifact on the northern side of Lake Issuk-Kul. "This is probably the earliest form of metal money found in Central Asia, and may have served as an archetype for later gold coins," he said. "If this [hypothesis] is confirmed, the find will have a unique worldwide historical and cultural significance as a prototype for gold money."The archeologists also recovered from the lake bronze daggers, sickles and hatchets, as well as household implements and jewelry dating back to approximately 1,000 BC. Ploskikh said the finds could mark a "new page in history."

The Polynesians had trouble reaching remote South Pacific islands, according to a new study that dents their reputation as great seafarers. An archaeological study shows they settled Rapa, an island southeast of Tahiti, more recently than anyone thought.Professor Atholl Anderson, of the Australian National University, and international colleagues publish their research in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.Dating of charcoal from archaeological sites on the 20 square kilometre island suggests the first settlers arrived at Rapa as late as around 1200 AD, Anderson says. The findings come after dates for the settlement of nearby Easter Island were recently revised to around the same time.

Astronomers say they have witnessed a stellar explosion - or supernova - unfolding in real time. Supernovae occur when a huge, mature star effectively runs out of fuel and collapses in on itself. Their observations, outlined in the journal Nature, offer the most detailed picture yet of these cosmic explosions. An initial release of energy from the star was picked up by the Swift satellite in February, allowing experts to train their telescopes on the event.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Biotechnology might be used to boost the energy output of crops used in making renewable fuels, a U.S. Agriculture Department advisory committee said on Wednesday, noting the sharp rise in demand for the fuels.The rapidly growing U.S. fuel ethanol industry has the capacity to distill 4.8 billion gallons of the motor fuel this year, mostly from corn (maize). Federal law sets a target of using 7.5 billion gallons (28.4 billion liters) of renewable fuels annually by 2012."Crops with energy-specific traits may be developed to help meet the growing demands for renewable alternative fuels," said USDA's Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture in a report looking at possible paths for genetically modified crops in the coming decade.