Newsdesk Archive

Images have been obtained of a live Laotian rock rat, the animal science now believes to be the sole survivor of an ancient group of rodents.The kha-nyou, as it is known locally, was trapped by an expedition in May. The pictures show a friendly, furry creature about the size of a squirrel that waddles a bit like a duck. Experts say the kha-nyou can trace its line to a rodent family that initial studies had suggested became extinct more than 11 million years ago.

The ancestors of modern birds may have been waterfowl-like creatures that lived more than 100 million years ago, according to striking fossils to be unveiled by scientists today.Reconstruction of five fossils shows a remarkable inhabitant of a lake in what is now the Changma Basin of Gansu Province in north-west China.The find provides the modern avian family tree with an aquatic trunk. The skeletons, even though they are headless, suggest a bird that could take flight from the water, like a modern duck, while webbed feet, long toes and a large crest on the shin are clear signs that it could swim.Dubbed Gansus yumenensis, after the region of Yumen in Gansu province where it was found, the tern-sized bird is thought to be one of the oldest members of the lineage leading to modern birds, a team reports today in the journal Science.

In biblical lore, Edom was the implacable adversary and menacing neighbor of the Israelites. The Edomites lived south of the Dead Sea and east of the desolate rift valley known as Wadi Arabah, and from time to time they had to be dealt with by force, notably by the likes of Kings David and Solomon.Today, the Edomites are again in the thick of combat - of the scholarly kind. The conflict is heated and protracted, as is often the case with issues related to the reliability of the Bible as history.Chronology is at the crux of the debate. Exactly when did the nomadic tribes of Edom become an organized society with the might to threaten Israel? Were David and Solomon really kings of a state with growing power in the 10th century B.C.? Had writers of the Bible magnified the stature of the two societies at such an early time in history?

AN ANCIENT forerunner of today's crocodiles and alligators has been uncovered in outback Queensland, indicating that Australia might have been the birthplace of the modern species.The new animal, Isisfordia duncani, was uncovered by an international team of scientists, led by Steve Salisbury from the University of Queensland."These are the most complete crocodilian fossils yet discovered in Australia and provide us with valuable new insights into the early evolution of today's crocodilians and their lifestyles as semi-aquatic ambush predators," Dr Salisbury said.Other ancient crocodilian species became extinct, Dr Salisbury said, whereas all the descendants of Isisfordia were alive today.

Thousands of years before screen idols began beautifying themselves with cosmetic dentistry ancient Mexicans were getting ceremonial dentures. Researchers report Wednesday that they found a 4,500-year-old burial in Mexico that had the oldest known example of dental work in the Americas.The upper front teeth of the remains had been ground down so they could be mounted with animal teeth, possibly wolf or panther teeth, for ceremonial purposes, according to researchers led by Tricia Gabany-Guerrero of the University of Connecticut.

A geology team has contradicted claims that bluestones were dug by Bronze Age man from a west Wales quarry and carried 240 miles to build Stonehenge. In a new twist, Open University geologists say the stones were in fact moved to Salisbury Plain by glaciers.Last year archaeologists said the stones came from the Preseli Hills. Recent research in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology suggests the stones were ripped from the ground and moved by glaciers during the Ice Age.

A discovery of ancient jade could shake up old notions of the New World before Columbus. Scientists say they have traced 1,500-year-old axe blades found in the eastern Caribbean to ancient jade mines in Central America 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) away, New York's American Museum of Natural History announced late last month. The blades were excavated in the late 1990s by a Canadian archaeologist on the island of Antigua in the West Indies (see map of Antigua and Barbuda). But the jade used to make the blades almost certainly came from Maya mines in distant Guatemala (see map of Guatemala), says mineralogist George Harlow of the American Museum of Natural History.The find may call into question a once dominant archaeological picture of the pre-Columbian Caribbean.

The invention of the world's first bows and arrows may have played a part in the eventual colonisation of much of the world by Homo sapiens.In a groundbreaking paper published yesterday, Paul Mellars, one of Britain's leading archaeologists and a Cambridge professor, suggests Homo sapiens' dominance of much of the world was triggered by a technological revolution which caused a demographic explosion between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago. As a result, the population of one particular human ethnic group expanded up to 1,000 times over.The dramatic population increase then forced tribes to search for new hunting grounds, first within Africa, and then, by 60,000 years ago, outside it.

SARAJEVO -- Stone blocks believed by Bosnian researchers to be part of Europe's first pyramid are nothing but a natural formation, European experts said on Friday after examining the hillside site near Sarajevo. "My opinion and the opinion of my colleagues is what we saw was entirely geological in nature," said Anthony Harding, head of the European Association of Archaeologists.Harding, a professor of archaeology at the University of Exeter in Britain, was speaking here after a brief visit on June 8 to the hills near Visoko, a town some 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of Sarajevo, where excavation work has been taking place since April. "Further work of the same kind would simply produce the same results. I don't think it would change any view about what the nature of the hill is," he told reporters.

A relaxation technique known as transcendental meditation may decrease blood pressure and reduce insulin resistance among patients with coronary heart disease, according to a report in the June 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.Transcendental meditation, derived from the ancient Vedic tradition in India, is taught through a standard protocol involving lectures, personal instruction and group meetings, according to background information in the article. It has previously been shown to lower blood pressure but its effect on other risk factors associated with coronary heart disease, including those linked to the metabolic syndrome, has not been thoroughly examined. The metabolic syndrome refers to a cluster of symptoms that increase cardiac risk, including high blood pressure (hypertension), abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and insulin resistance, which occurs when the body is unable to use the insulin produced by the pancreas to process sugar into energy.

A massive crater in Antarctica may have been caused by a meteor that wiped out more than 90 percent of the species on Earth 250 million years ago, a geologist said. The 300-mile-wide crater lies more than a mile beneath a sheet of ice and was discovered by scientists using satellite data, Ohio State University geologist Ralph von Frese said.Von Frese said satellite data suggest the crater could date back about 250 million years to the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died, paving the way for dinosaurs.The crater was found in the Wilkes Land region of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

It is set to become one of the key experiments on ExoMars, Europe's next mission to the Red Planet in 2011. The Life Marker Chip (LMC) will test soil samples drilled from below Mars' surface for specific molecules that can be associated with life. The results might not be a definitive proof of the existence of microbes, but they could still provide tantalising evidence for their possible presence. A UK-led international consortium is developing the technology.

A long, slender stream of ancient stars has been discovered racing across the northern sky. The stream is about 30,000 light-years distant from Earth and is flowing high over the Milky Way Galaxy at some 230 kilometers per second, or more than half a million miles per hour. The discovery was made by Dr. Carl Grillmair, of the Spitzer Science Center in Pasadena, Calif. and his colleague Odysseas Dionatos from the Astronomical Observatory of Rome. Grillmair presented his findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in his hometown of Calgary, Canada. "What we can see of the stream is over 30,000 light years long, although it may actually be much longer than that since we are currently limited by the extent of the survey data. I would actually be somewhat surprised if the stream doesn't extend completely around the Galaxy," says Grillmair. The astronomers believe the stars on this cosmic "highway" date back nearly to the beginning of the Universe and are the fossil remains of a star cluster that, in its prime, contained between 10,000 and 100,000 stars. The ancient cluster was torn apart over billions of years by the tidal forces of our Milky Way Galaxy. "The discovery gives new weight to a theory that, while the Milky Way now contains only about 150 such giant star clusters, it may once have been swarming with thousands of them. If this idea is correct, there may be hundreds or even thousands of such stellar streams ringing our Galaxy," says Grillmair.

Nevine El-Aref asks: When I first saw the serenely elegant bust of Queen Nefertiti in Berlin's Egyptian Museum, where a stream of visitors crowds in front of her gleaming showcase, I wondered if this fragile beauty, painted so vividly as if it had been completed only yesterday, would ever return to its homeland? This question is being debated by Egyptologists since it was raised recently in a speech by Zahi Hawass, the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) before presidents Hosni Mubarak and Horst Khöler during the official inauguration of the "Egypt's Sunken Treasures" exhibition in Berlin. Hawass asked the German government to offer the famous bust to Egypt on a three-month loan so that it could go on show at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to coincide with the centenary celebrations of the German Archeological Institute in Egypt in November 2006.In return, Hawass pledged that the SCA would offer another statue on loan to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin for the three months while Nefertiti was in Egypt.Hawass told Al-Ahram Weekly that the SCA was willing to provide the Germans with all the guarantees required to assure the return of the bust after the completion of the exhibition. "However that would not affect or contravene Egypt's request to repossess this key item of the country's cultural heritage which it had been deprived of for almost a century," Hawass insisted.

Archaeologists in the site of Iruña-Veleia have discovered an epigraphic set "among the most important of the Roman world," with a series of 270 inscriptions and drawings from the 3rd century and a representation of a Calvary, "the most ancient known up to this moment."The managers of the archaeological site, located near the Alavan town of Nanclares de Oca, have officially unveiled these findings, identified and analysed last summer.The tools with the inscriptions and drawings, most of them ceramics, were found in a room of the "Domus de pompeia valentina," one of the urban residences of the old city of Veleia, built up in the last quarter of the first century and inhabited until the fifth century.

In a lecture at the Canadian Institute of Archaeology in Cairo last month, Krzys Grzymski of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) described the use of modern technology to uncover the origins and topography, history and development of Meroe, an African kingdom which developed along the upper reaches of the Nile about 200km north of Khartoum between 800 BC and 350 AD."We began our operations in October 1999, and ancient Meroe is slowly coming to light," Grzymski said. "We first carried out a comprehensive survey of the area, and we are doing our work slowly and thoroughly. There is probably no greater danger to the preservation of an ancient site than hasty excavations, and much of our first season was spent walking over the entire area and recording surface material."This exercise produced a number of surprises which included errors in earlier published plans of various buildings, numerous unrecorded inscriptions, some graffiti, and many beautifully carved blocks. "Perhaps the most exciting discovery was a stone block bearing the name of King Anlamani (c. 620-600 BC), one of the earliest datable objects ever found at Meroe," Grzymski said.

FOR decades, researchers have been baffled by the intricate bronze mechanism of wheels and dials created 80 years before the birth of Christ.The "Antikythera Mechanism" was discovered damaged and fragmented on the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny Greek island of Antikythera in 1900.Now, a joint British-Greek research team has found a hidden ancient Greek inscription on the device, which it thinks could unlock the mystery. The team believes the Antikythera Mechanism may be the world's oldest computer, used by the Greeks to predict the motion of the planets. The researchers say the device indicates a technical sophistication that would not be replicated for millennia and may also be based on principles of a heliocentric, or sun-centred, universe - a view of the cosmos that was not accepted by astronomers until the Renaissance.

The first evidence of white wine has been found in Egypt--in the tomb of King Tutankhamen, which was sealed in 1322 B.C. What makes this discovery particularly remarkable is the color of the wine. USA Today reports that wine drinking was relatively common among the Egyptian royal family and the upper classes. It was also thought to be an essential necessity for a good afterlife, which explains why it was found in the tomb. But this is the first time archaeologists have found white wine. Until now, all the dried remnants of wine found inside clay amphora in tombs have been red.

Scientists have recovered DNA from a Neanderthal that lived 100,000 years ago - the oldest human-type DNA so far. It was extracted from the tooth of a Neanderthal child found in the Scladina cave in the Meuse Basin, Belgium. The study, reported in Current Biology, suggests our distant cousins were more genetically diverse than once thought. Their diversity had declined, perhaps because of climate change or disease, by the time early humans arrived in Europe about 35,000 years ago.

LUXOR (AFP) - Egyptologists are holding their breath over the mystery surrounding the first tomb discovered in Luxor's Valley of the Kings since that of the boy king Tutankhamun in 1922. News of the surprise discovery in February by an American team from the University of Memphis has had repercussions far beyond this famous necropolis from the time of the pharaohs.Could the small tomb, designated KV63, hold a royal mummy, perhaps that of Tutankhamun's widow or even his mother?The theory is being openly discussed -- and argued over -- by American and native Egyptologists.

CLAIMS that Aborigines killed off Australia's giant animals are based on faith, not fact, say Sydney scientists whose latest research suggests most of the creatures were long extinct when humans arrived on the continent.Stephen Wroe, of the University of NSW, and Judith Field, of the University of Sydney, criticised other researchers for promoting as scientifically proven the notion that people killed off Australia's megafauna about 46,000 years ago, when no direct evidence was available.The beasts included rhinoceros-sized wombats, flightless birds three metres tall, towering kangaroos and marsupial lions."There is not a single Australian archaeological site demonstrating that humans ever killed megafauna," Dr Wroe said.

A rock carving discovered in Arizona might depict an ancient star explosion seen by Native Americans a thousand years ago, scientists announced today. If confirmed, the rock carving, or "petroglyph" would be the only known record in the Americas of the well-known supernova of the year 1006.The carving was discovered in White Tanks Regional Park just outside Phoenix, in an area believed to have been occupied by a group of Native Americans called the Hohokam from about 500 to 1100 A.D.The finding is being announced today at the 208th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Calgary, Canada.

Brazilian scientists have made a discovery, which may totally change the opinion that the Amazon area has never been populated by highly developed civilizations, the Globo newspaper said. Amapa archaeologists have found an assembly of stones, nicknamed the Amazon Stonehenge after the famed stone circle in Britain. One hundred and twenty-seven granite blocks are arranged at an equal distance from one another on a flat surface 390 kilometers away from the administrative center of the Amapa state, Macapa. It is yet hard to say when and why the stones might have been arranged in the peculiar manner, but excavations may give an answer. So far, their age is estimated at 500 to 2,000 years. A local archaeologist said that it might have been an ancient astronomic observatory, as one of the stones marked the position of the Sun on the winter solstice day.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Bosnia's mystery pyramid will now be probed and inspected by a team of experts from the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. "We shall send a UNESCO expert team to Visoko to determine exactly what it is all about," UNESCO Secretary General Koichiro Matsuura said in an interview published on Monday in Dnevni Avaz newspaper.Amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagic has caused a stir with his find, although local and European archaeologists denounce it as nonsense.Geologist Aly Abd Barakat, an Egyptian researcher sent by Cairo to assist Osmanagic's team last month, has said that the Visocica hill did appear to be a primitive man-made pyramid of uncertain age.

You'll have read that some card companies and banks are reducing their charges for late payments to £12, a figure mentioned by the Office of Fair Trading. This is great news for future late-payers, but it's gravely misleading to those of us who have already been charged. Many of you will now be asking 'Does this mean I can't reclaim bank and card charges in full?'No it doesn't. The thing is, the Office of Fair Trading made it very clear indeed that it doesn't consider that a charge of under £12 is necessarily fair. It set this level simply to get a swift reaction from the industry. It said that a fair level under current consumer law is just enough for these companies to recover their administrative costs, but no more. As far as I'm concerned, my bank or card company won't incur costs of anything like £12 if it has to send me a letter stating I've not paid on time, or that I've exceeded my overdraft.The banks say that they don't agree with the legal reasoning behind the OFT's recommendation. And yet they're reducing their charges, rather than challenging it with their expensive lawyers, like big financial companies always do. One bank said that it's only reducing charges (i.e. giving up profits) to £12 'in order to remove uncertainty' for its customers. Hmmmm!When it comes down to it, it's not up to me, the OFT, or the banks and card companies to say whether the charges are unlawful. If you can't resolve it between you and the company, it's up to a judge to assess each individual case. But the facts and figures speak for themselves. Mostly, insistent people are being refunded without even going to court. £626,000 has been refunded to 648 people, say the Consumer Action Group.

Few places on Earth are less hospitable, less suited to human life than the Sahara desert. Yet as global warming accelerates and the prospect of profound climate change looms large, we must face the fact that vast areas of our planet will be rendered equally barren. In his powerful new book, Fred Pearce explains how nature can turn paradise into wildernessIf there was a golden age for humans on the Earth - a Garden of Eden that flowed with milk and honey - it was the high point of the Holocene, the era that followed the end of the last ice age. From around 8,000 to 5,500 years ago, the world was as warm as it is today, but there appear to have been few strong hurricanes and few disruptive El Niños; and it was a world in which the regions occupied today by great deserts in Asia, the Americas and Africa were much wetter than they are now. Optimists suggest that such conditions might be what awaits us in a greenhouse world. There are celestial reasons why that might not happen, but that era, and its abrupt ending, may still offer important lessons about our future climate in the 21st century.

A collection of charred scraps kept in a Greek museum's storerooms are all that remains of what archaeologists say is Europe's oldest surviving book - which may hold a key to understanding early monotheistic beliefs. More than four decades after the Derveni papyrus was found in a 2,400-year-old nobleman's grave in northern Greece, researchers said Thursday they are close to uncovering new text - through high-tech digital analysis - from the blackened fragments left after the manuscript was burnt on its owner's funeral pyre. Large sections of the mid-4th century B.C. book - a philosophical treatise on ancient religion - were read years ago, but never officially published.Now, archaeologist Polyxeni Veleni believes U.S. imaging and scanning techniques used to decipher the Judas Gospel - which portrays Judas not as a sinister betrayer but as Jesus' confidant - will considerably expand and clarify that text.

Archaeologists studying an ancient mosaic found by workers laying cable south of Rome have been astonished to discover that it is an optical illusion. Viewed one way up it is a bald old man with a beard, but turned the other way round it is a beardless youth. Roberto Cereghino, a government archaeological official, told the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera that it was "a very beautiful work, of immense significance". He said it appeared to be a depiction of Bacchus.

Scientists are to carry out an underwater search for a supposed kingdom in Cardigan Bay said to have existed more than 5,000 years ago. Legend has it that the low-lying land of Cantre'r Gwaelod disappeared under the waves during a storm or a tsunami.Experts say the remains of an ancient forest seen sometimes at low tide is evidence that Cantre'r Gwaelod existed.Conservation group Friends of Cardigan Bay will begin the three-year project in Ceredigion this summer.

On a crest of Jerusalem's Hill of Tranquility overlooking the Valley of the Cross, the Knesset, the Supreme Court, Hebrew University's Givat Ram campus and the National Library, a model of the Second Temple has been relocated adjacent to the Shrine of the Book on the campus of the Israel Museum, in a spot where history and archeology intersect.The Second Temple Model, which was located for the last four decades since its construction in the mid-1960's on the grounds of Jerusalem's Holyland Hotel, was moved to the Israel Museum this winter due to the construction of a new residential complex on the slopes of the Holyland hill.The model, an exceptional cultural artifact depicting the Jerusalem of two millennia ago, was created before the reunification of the city at a time when Jews could not go to the Old City or the Temple Mount. For the last 40 years, it primarily served as a tourist site, with about 300,000 visitors flocking to see it annually.

Archaeologists fear 1,000 years of history may be shovelled into skips as time runs out on a key site in London. Harvey Sheldon, an officer of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, called the situation at the church of St George the Martyr, in Southwark, where substantial evidence of Roman buildings may be destroyed without being recorded, "a disgrace".Yesterday he made a last ditch appeal to church authorities to give more time for excavation, before heavy machinery moves onto the site.

Eight species of invertebrate animals dating back millions of years that have been previously unknown to science have been discovered in Israel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced Wednesday.The species, which have a "a new and unique ecosystem," were discovered in a cave that was uncovered as a result of excavations in a quarry in the vicinity of the central Israeli city of Ramle. The invertebrate animals found in the cave - four seawater and freshwater crustaceans and four terrestrial species - are related to but different from other, similar life forms known to scientists.

Scientists have produced further evidence to support the idea that a miniature species of human, nicknamed "the hobbit", lived on a remote Indonesian island until becoming extinct more than 10,000 years ago. The latest study suggests the one metre-high creatures could make fairly sophisticated stone tools despite having brains no bigger than grapefruits.Specialists are divided over ancient bones found in a cave on the island of Flores which seem to suggest that another human species lived alongside Homo sapiens as recently as 12,000 years ago.Skeletal remains of the creature - formally named Homo floresiensis - suggested that adults walked upright, were about 3ft tall and, unlike modern-day pygmies, had a small head in perfect proportion to the rest of the body.

Archaeologists from Israel and the United States say the find suggests Stone Age humans may have been cultivating fruit trees a thousand years before the domestication of cereal grains and legumes, such as peas and beans.Previously, the oldest cultivated fruits were thought to be olives and grapes found in the eastern Mediterranean that were dated at about 6,000 years old. Researchers behind the new study discovered the ancient figs at the Gilgal archaeological site in the Jordan Valley near the city of Jericho (see map of Israel.) The nine carbonized figs were small but ripe and showed signs of having been dried for human consumption.The finding adds a new twist to the story of agricultural origins.

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island -- An underwater explorer who found the Titanic and a team of international scientists will soon survey waters off the Greek island of Crete for clues to a once-powerful Bronze Age-era civilization.The expedition about 75 miles northwest of Crete aims to learn more about the Minoans, who flourished during the Bronze Age, and seeks to better understand seafaring four millennia ago, the scientists said.U.S. researchers say the Minoans were engaged in broad-based trade with other civilizations, such as the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece and perhaps with peoples as far away as the present-day Middle East. "No one knows who the Minoans were," said Robert Ballard, an oceanography professor at the University of Rhode Island who discovered the Titanic in the North Atlantic in 1985.

Archaeologists have discovered artefacts in central Bangladesh that resembles traits of the Chalcolithic culture, which is around 4,000 years old, and believe the finds are the earliest signs of settlement in the region, The Daily Star reported Sunday.The excavators, led by Sufi Mostafizur Rahman, Chairman of the Department of Archaeology at Jahangirnagar University, traced a pit-dwelling, one of the primary means of living, at Wari-Bateswar in central Narsingdi district, some 70 km from the capital. This is the first discovery of the Chalcolithic occurrence in the country

Ralph von FreseCOLUMBUS, Ohio -- Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica, south of Australia -- also suggest that it could have begun the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent by creating the tectonic rift that pushed Australia northward.

CAIRO -- On May 19 The Da Vinci Code, with all its controversy, was released to theaters worldwide. Middle Eastern countries, however, have been quick to pull the plug on the film. In Egypt, the film based on Dan Brown's international bestseller did not make it to its planned release on May 23, as censors did not give the go ahead. Many in the country speculate that the reason behind this decision is that the government does not want to upset the Coptic population following incidents of sectarian strife and violence over the past year.

By Michael RoddyREADING (Reuters) - It was a dark and stormy night, and in a cave in what is now southern France, Neanderthals were singing, dancing and tapping on stalagmites with their fingernails to pass the time.Did this Ice-Age rave-up happen, perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, on a cold night in the Pleistocene Epoch? Or is it purely a figment of the imagination of Steven Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading in England? Impossible to know, Mithen, 45, readily admits, but in his book, "The Singing Neanderthals," he has built a strong case that our hominid ancestors had a musical culture, and a rudimentary form of communication that went with it, that has left traces deeply embedded in modern mankind.Why else, for example, would music have universal appeal and such a strong pull on the human psyche? Why, when we hear music, do we feel the need to tap our feet, or dance? Why do we think some passages of music paint pictures, or instruments have "conversations" with each other? Why indeed.In the book, published last year in Britain and this year in the United States, Mithen attempts to re-create -- against all odds -- a "soundscape" of pre-history and plug what he thinks is a huge gap in human knowledge -- the link between language and music.

Ben Elton has described UK drugs law as the "number one sponsor of organised crime" in a speech in which he called for the legalisation of drugs. The comedian and author told MSPs that UK drugs policies have failed and have only benefited a criminal underclass. He said that through liberalisation the criminals' income and means of influence could be tackled. Elton was invited to the Scottish Parliament after hearing about drugs problems in the north east of Scotland. Addressing the parliament's cross-party group on alcohol and drug abuse, he highlighted the recent case of model Kate Moss's use of cocaine and what he described as hypocritical attitudes. He said: "The real problem is not the drugs, it's the criminalisation of the community." .....

A once-prosperous city, unseen for 2,200 years and buried beneath the shifting sands of the Taklimakan Desert, has been discovered in Northwest China by a team of archeologists. Chinese and French archeologists claim to have discovered the ruins of an ancient city which disappeared in the desert in Northwest China more than 2,200 years ago. The ancient city, shaped like a peach, is located in the center of the Taklimakan Desert, the second-largest shifting desert in the world, covering a total area of 337,600 square kilometers, in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The perimeter of the city walls is 995 meters long, with the height ranging from three to 11 meters. Archeologists have found traces of city gates and passages at the southern and eastern walls. The city walls were built from branches of poplar trees and branches of Chinese tamarisk (a kind of willow). A protective slope was created outside the city walls and filled with branches, reeds, silt and the dung of domesticated animals. The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Regional Archeological Research Institute and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France jointly launched an archeological program in 1993. They aimed to explore the Keriya River Valley area, a river that originates in the glaciers on the northern slopes of the Kunlun Mountains and flows more than 860 kilometers before disappearing in the sand in the Taklimakan Desert.

A peer has compared an ancient monument to the pyramids in a row over the government's right to roam laws. Lord Avebury says he is "stunned" the Countryside Agency's wants to label Silbury Hill in Wiltshire as "unimproved chalk grassland". The move could lead to ramblers having free access to the hill, which opponents fear may cause damage. However, the agency says it took the decision because the 4,700-year-old hill is a "man-made structure".

In 1974 a young Italian naval engineer, Flavio Barbiero, published a ground-breaking book, Una Civilta sotto Ghiaccio (A Civilisation Under the Ice ) which proposed for the first time that the remains of a lost civilisation may lie under the ice of Antarctica. He suggested that there had been a cataclysmic and almost instantaneous pole shift which had moved Antarctica from temperate into frozen latitudes - a suggestion that has never been accepted by science.In this paper, specially written or our Forum, Dr Barbiero explains why he continues to be convinced that instantaneous pole shifts can and do occur - with devastating consequences for all life on earth.+++

Concerning the grand, megalithic structures of antiquity, we may wonder: would the units of measure there used have been in proportion to the size of the earth? Dr Nick Kollerstrom investigates.Mother Earth was clearly the source of the Greek stade, though the ancient Greek philosophers do not seem to have been aware of this fact. Specifically, ten Greek feet, times the fourth power of 60, equals the mean circumference of the Earth.Our most accurate source of the Greek 'Olympian' foot was the Acropolis - it was called the Hecatompedon, which meant 100 feet, and its length and breadth were in a 4:9 ratio, 100 Greek feet by 225. Precise measures of these two lengths were obtained by Francis Penrose, the architect and scholar of the history of architecture, in 1882; from which we obtain two closely-agreeing values of the Greek foot, and their average is 12.164 inches.

Scientists are recreating the human body on a microchip - using clumps of cells from different organs linked by fluid-filled channels - to reduce the amount of animal testing for drugs. The "human-on-a-chip" mimics the body's physiology on a miniature scale, including how each organ reacts to drugs and other chemicals.The chips will not be a substitute for extensive clinical trials, or even many animal tests, say the researchers, but they believe they will help identify potentially dangerous drugs early in development.

Giant clouds of dust whipped up by desert storms in Africa can carry infectious organisms to other continents, scientists claim today.Despite being blown more than three miles high and exposed to radiation from the sun, strains of bacteria and fungi survived and were able to grow when they returned to Earth, researchers found.Among 40 tests of air samples taken in the mid-Atlantic, 24 revealed living microbes, including 26 colonies of bacteria and 83 fungi. They included strains capable of causing disease in humans, animals and plants. A typical gram of Sahara soil contains up to 1bn bacteria, and estimates suggest 2bn tonnes of soil particles are blown around the planet each year.

Fans of J.K. Rowling will recall that everyone's favorite boy magician can vanish at will. Potter just ducks under his magic cloak and swoosh . . . he is gone.Last week a prestigious journal published two reports from scientists who have discovered how to achieve the same effect without breaking the laws of physics. Invisibility, they argue, is a matter of diverting light around an object so all the light continues on its way instead of reflecting off the object. The reports suggest using a thick shell of high-tech transparent material to do this. Even when looking directly at the object, an observer would see only what was behind it.While Harry Potter's cloak relies on supplies found only in magic marketplaces like Diagon Alley -- the pelt of a ``Demiguise" is apparently crucial -- the scientists' cloaking device would use newly developed materials that can bend light in unexpected ways. Scientists not involved in the work said the plans appear feasible but that they would require more-advanced substances than currently exist. Still, scientists said that the work represents an important theoretical advance likely to inspire new ideas in the booming field of materials science.

EVANSVILLE, Ind. -- An archaeological dig at southern Indiana's Angel Mounds complex has uncovered a pottery-making operation that reveals the artistic skills of the Indians who lived there hundreds of years ago.Indiana University researchers believe they've uncovered remains of a potter's house once used by the Indians who inhabited the area overlooking the Ohio River from 1100 to 1450 A.D.Excavations have revealed pottery tools and masses of prepared but unfired clay awaiting shaping into bowls, jars or figures which suggest that the structure that once stood there was used to make the pottery now found in shards across the site."This is the best collection of pottery tools ever found here," Chris Peebles, director of IU's Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, told Evansville Courier and Press.

It could be the oldest, not to mention the messiest, break-up in history. When humans and chimpanzees split up along the path of evolution, they carried on having sex for as long as 4m years, geneticists claim today. The revelation suggests that the history of humanity may be far more complex than scientists appreciated.A comparison of snippets of DNA from humans, chimps and other primates shows that after parting company up to 10m years ago early humans and chimps continued to swap genes by interbreeding, until a final split much later. The study suggests the species split for good probably less than 5.4m years ago.Geneticists believe the interbreeding theory is the best explanation of why the X chromosomes of humans and chimps remain so similar to this day.

About 1.7 million years ago, a leggy human ancestor, Homo erectus, began prowling the steamy swamps and uplands of Java. That much is known from the bones of more than 100 individuals dug up on the Indonesian island since 1891. But the culture of early "Java Man" has been a mystery: No artifacts older than 1 million years had been found--until now.At the meeting, archaeologist Harry Widianto of the National Research Centre of Archaeology in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, wowed colleagues with slides showing stone tools found in sediments that he says were laid down 1.2 million years ago and could be as old as 1.6 million years. The find, at a famous hominid site called Sangiran in the Solo Basin of Central Java, "opens up a whole new window into the lifeways of Java Man," says paleoanthropologist Russell L. Ciochon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.Although hominids apparently evolved in Africa, Indonesia is a Garden of Eden in its own right, with a wealth of H. erectus fossils. The startling discovery 2 years ago of "hobbits"--the diminutive H. floresiensis of Flores Island--added a controversial new hominid to the Indonesian menagerie.

The recent earthquake on Indonesia's island of Java badly damaged the famous Prambanan temple complex, sending intricate stone carvings crashing to the ground and destroying years of restoration work in less than a minute.Recognized as a U.N. World Heritage Site, the ninth-century temple and the nearby Borobudur Buddhist complex are reminders of the rich Hindu and Buddhist past of what is now the world's most populous Muslim nation.

A delegation of European members of Parliament was last month refused access to Djulfa, in the Nakhichevan region of Azerbaijan, to investigate reports that an ancient Armenian Christian cemetery has been destroyed by Azerbaijani soldiers.According to witnesses, as quoted in Armenian reports, in a three-day operation last December, Azerbaijani soldiers armed with sledgehammers obliterated the remnants of the Djulfa cemetery (known as Jugha in Armenian). Until the early 20th century it contained around 10,000 khachkars, dedicatory monuments unique to medieval Armenian culture. They are typically carved with a cross surrounded by intricate interlacing floral designs.

Is it a royal Egyptian tomb, a glorified supply room for ancient embalmers, or something in between? A year after the discovery of a chamber that had lain hidden in the Valley of the Kings for millennia, archaeologists are still asking themselves exactly what they've found.When the find was announced in February, it was portrayed as the first tomb to be uncovered in the pharaonic city of the dead since the discovery of King Tutankhamun's treasures in 1922. But a month later, top Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass said the chamber was merely a "room for mummification" rather than a royal resting place.

On Friday 25 August, at 6am, when Cairo traffic is at its quietest, the colossus of the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramses II will begin its journey from outside Bab Al-Hadid train station to its new home at the site of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) overlooking the Giza Plateau.The decision was announced two days ago by Culture Minister Farouk Hosni. Delaying the move until the completion of the museum's first phase would, he said, leave the statue exposed to unacceptable levels of threat given that the square is scheduled for massive redevelopment by the Cairo Governorate.Hosni added that archaeological, geological, architectural and geophysical studies have now been completed and a special storehouse is under construction to house the statue until the GEM's first phase is complete.

According to ancient Inca mythology the sun sent his son, Manco Capac, and the moon sent her daughter, Mamo Ocllo, to surface from Lake Titicaca to create the Inca Empire, Ashvee Nangia writes of this pristine lake in South America.

A dig near Malmesbury town walls has uncovered a substantial stone-fronted defensive rampart and a deep ditch which could date to the Iron Age.Archaeologists believe the prehistoric hill fort would have had impressive multiple defences rising above the valley of the River Avon.English Heritage said the results were very exciting and showed how important the town's defences were.The work was said to bring a new dimension to the story of Malmesbury.

Direct information concerning the first 500 million years of Earth history - the Hadean Eon - is very limited, since practically no crustal rocks from that time have survived. We do know that the Earth collided much more frequently than it does today with asteroids and comets, as witnessed by the heavily cratered highlands of the Moon.

Seven international parties involved in an experimental nuclear fusion reactor project have initialled a 10bn-euro (£6.8bn) agreement on the plan. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) will be the most expensive joint scientific project after the International Space Station.

NEWPORT BEACH, CA- Organizers for the 3rd annual "Conference on Precession and Ancient Knowledge" (CPAK) have selected the University of California, Irvine as the location for this year's gathering of some of the most well known authors in alternative history and science.Speakers at this year's event include explorer Graham Hancock, author of Fingerprints of the Gods, archaeoastronomer Walter Cruttenden, author of Lost Star of Myth and Time, Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins, author of Maya Cosmogenisis 2012, rebel Egyptologist John Anthony West, author of Serpent in the Sky, and megalithic investigator John Burke, author of Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty. Other presenters include world-renowned astronomer Geoff Marcy, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, advanced cultures physicist John Dering, paranormal investigator Dr. Claude Swanson, author of The Synchronized Universe, nanotechnology and Sanskrit specialist Boris Fritz from Northrop Grumman, and famed geologist Robert Schoch, author of Voices of the Rocks, known for re-dating the Sphinx.

Think of the ozone layer as Earth's sunglasses, protecting life on the surface from the harmful glare of the sun's strongest ultraviolet rays, which can cause skin cancer and other maladies.People were understandably alarmed, then, in the 1980s when scientists noticed that manmade chemicals in the atmosphere were destroying this layer. Governments quickly enacted an international treaty, called the Montreal Protocol, to ban ozone-destroying gases such as CFCs then found in aerosol cans and air conditioners.Today, almost 20 years later, reports continue of large ozone holes opening over Antarctica, allowing dangerous UV rays through to Earth's surface. Indeed, the 2005 ozone hole was one of the biggest ever, spanning 24 million sq km in area, nearly the size of North America.

Scientists are to carry out an underwater search for a supposed kingdom in Cardigan Bay said to have existed more than 5,000 years ago. Legend has it that the low-lying land of Cantre'r Gwaelod disappeared under the waves during a storm or a tsunami. Experts say the remains of an ancient forest seen sometimes at low tide is evidence that Cantre'r Gwaelod existed.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Scientists at Duke and Rutgers universities have developed a mathematical framework they say will enable astronomers to test a new five-dimensional theory of gravity that competes with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Charles R. Keeton of Rutgers and Arlie O. Petters of Duke base their work on a recent theory called the type II Randall-Sundrum braneworld gravity model. The theory holds that the visible universe is a membrane (hence "braneworld") embedded within a larger universe, much like a strand of filmy seaweed floating in the ocean. The "braneworld universe" has five dimensions -- four spatial dimensions plus time -- compared with the four dimensions -- three spatial, plus time -- laid out in the General Theory of Relativity.

More than half of Britons believe in psychic powers such as mind-reading and premonitions, a survey suggests. Of 1,006 adults polled for Readers Digest Magazine, 43% reported reading others' thoughts or having theirs read. More than half had had a dream or premonition of an event before it happened and 26% said they had sensed when a loved-one was ill or in trouble. A fifth said they had seen a ghost and 29% believed near-death experiences were evidence there was an afterlife. Of those questioned, 43% claimed to have tapped into other.

A Nasa satellite mission will be launched this year to study the highest and most mysterious clouds on Earth. Noctilucent, or "night-shining", clouds appear as thin bands in twilight skies, some 80km (50miles) above the surface. Recent records suggest they have become brighter, more frequent and are being seen at lower latitudes than usual. Scientists cannot say for sure but they suspect human activity may be altering the conditions in the mesosphere that drive the clouds' formation.

A former Nazi scientist who was linked to experiments on prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany has been ousted from the International Space Hall of Fame.

Spanish researchers said Friday they have resolved a century-old mystery surrounding Christopher Columbus's burial place, which both Spain and the Dominican Republic claim to be watching over. Their verdict: Spain's got the right bones. A forensic team led by Spanish geneticist Jose Antonio Lorente has compared DNA from bone fragments that Spain says are from the explorer, and are buried in a cathedral in Seville, with DNA from remains that are known to be from Columbus' brother Diego, who is also buried in the southern Spanish city.

A US-British team of scientists has challenged the idea that the tiny skeleton from Indonesia dubbed the "Hobbit" is a new human species. Writing in Science magazine, the team presents an alternative theory that the remains could be those of a modern human with a brain disorder.

SARAJEVO (AFP) - An Egyptian geologist who has joined Bosnian researchers unearthing what are thought to be Europe's first pyramids believes they bear similar hallmarks to the ancient structures in his homeland, an official said. Aly Abd Alla Barakat, of the Egyptian Mineral Resources Authority, believes large stone blocks found near Sarajevo were man-made and polished in the same way as the pyramids of Giza, said the Bosnian Pyramid Foundation's Mario Gerussi.

The first sequences of nuclear DNA to be taken from a Neanderthal have been reported at a US science meeting. Geneticist Svante Paabo and his team say they isolated the long segments of genetic material from a 45,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil from Croatia.

OTTAWA, May 16 /CNW Telbec/ - Today, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) announced an investment of $2.5 million in a research project that will investigate the link between climate change, human genetics and the disappearance of an entire culture from the Boreal forest region of Siberia between 7,000 and 6,000 BC.

(SPACE.com) -- Three medium-sized planets of roughly the same mass as Neptune have been discovered around a nearby sun-like star, scientists announced today. The planets were discovered around HD 69830, a star slightly less massive than the sun located 41 light-years away in the constellation Puppis (the Stern), using the ultra-precise HARPS spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter La Silla telescope in Chile.

A joint venture between American and Peruvian archaeologists has revealed the undisturbed mummified body of a what appears to be a high ranking Moche female, bearing many distinctive tattoos. The discovery at El Brujo near Trujillo in Peru also revealed the remains of what appears to be a female servant, ritually killed and placed in the tomb.

He gave new meaning to the phrase "world-class celebrity," but like Garbo, Christopher Columbus had little interest in talking about himself and dismissed queries about his origins with a rhetorical shrug: " Vine de nada" -- "I came from nothing." It was never enough. For centuries, scholars have wondered about this enigmatic mariner whose compulsion to travel east by traveling west altered the course of Western civilization and effectively ended the Middle Ages.

Masada is one of the most renowned symbols of Jewish endurance. Rising 230 meters above the Dead Sea valley, the site of a mass suicide of Jewish Zealots in 73 CE, it is, next to Jerusalem, Israel's most popular tourist site. Elite units of the Israel Defense Forces hold ceremonies atop its heights, pledging, "Masada shall not fall again."

Discovery of remains of a gigantic palace in Bolaghi Gorge and its similarity to the constructions of the time of Darius I, Achaemenid King, in Persepolis show that it was built during the same period of time.

Two laboratories at Penn State set out to show how an obscure undersea microbe metabolizes carbon monoxide into methane and vinegar. What they found was not merely a previously unknown biochemical process -- their discovery also became the inspiration for a fundamental new theory of the origin of life on Earth, reconciling a long-contentious pair of prevailing theories.

Neptune's moon Triton used to be paired with another object, but was torn from its companion during capture by the eighth planet's gravitational field.

In 2004, archaeologists announced they had found a cave where they believe John the Baptist anointed many of his disciples, offering extraordinary proof of a central New Testament figure and his theology. Now new secrets and mysteries have emerged from this cave, known as the Suba Cave.

AGRA, India (AFP) - An Indian archaeologist is praying for a respite from a heat wave engulfing the Taj Mahal town of Agra, warning that heavy dust in the dry air could permanently scar the marble monument to love. Temperatures hovered this week at 45 Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit) in the city, 200 kilometres (124 miles) south of New Delhi, as a heat wave that has killed 60 people nationwide in the past week dragged on.The Yamuna River, which runs behind the 17th-century white Mughal tomb, was dry and Agra's chief archaeologist Doraiswamy Dayalan said he was worried that dust from the nearby desert and factories would turn the marble yellow."The dry river allows dust and suspended particulate matter to rise and flow in the air and slam into the monument's surface," said Dayalan, of the Archaeological Survey of India which cares for the Taj.

A survey of British skulls from the early part of the New Stone Age, or Neolithic, shows societies then were more violent than was supposed.Early Neolithic Britons had a one in 20 chance of suffering a skull fracture at the hands of someone else and a one in 50 chance of dying from their injuries. Details were presented at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology and reported in New Scientist magazine.

Brazilian archaeologists have found an ancient stone structure in a remote corner of the Amazon that may cast new light on the region's past. The site, thought to be an observatory or place of worship, pre-dates European colonisation and is said to suggest a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy.Its appearance is being compared to the English site of Stonehenge. It was traditionally thought that before European colonisation, the Amazon had no advanced societies.

Astronauts are stomping around Mars without ever leaving Earth in Canada, where filming is underway for an ambitious new documentary and mini-series that blur the line between science fact and fiction.

As soon as darkness falls these evenings, step outside and look skyward. What is the most prominent and easiest star pattern to recognize? If you live in the Northern Hemisphere you only need to look overhead and toward the north where you will find the seven bright stars that comprise the famous Big Dipper.

From the first two failed Soviet missions in October 1960 to Britain's ill-fated Beagle 2 that crash-landed on Christmas Day 2003, Mars has a history of devouring space missions for breakfast.But despite its cursed reputation, British scientists are vying for funding to unlock the secrets of the red planet.This summer three British projects will compete for money from the European Space Agency to send an unmanned mission into space to garner data on the planet that has fascinated astronomers for decades because of its potential to harbour rudimentary life.

While sailors plied the Seven Seas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, little did they know that their ships' logs would one day help scientists to reconstruct the history of the Earth's magnetic field. Geophysicist David Gubbins and his co-workers at the University of Leeds in England have used old navigational data, combined with records taken from archaeological artefacts, to figure out how the direction and strength of the magnetic field changed between 1590 and 1840, roughly the time between Francis Drake's voyages on the Golden Hind and Charles Darwin's journey on the Beagle.Systematic records of the geomagnetic field only exist from around the middle of the nineteenth century, when physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss devised a method to measure it. These measurements show that since that time the strength of the field has fallen gradually by around 0.05% per year.

(ANSA) - Rome, May 12 - An ancient king's war chariot found in a tomb near Rome has helped rewrite the history of the Romans and their Sabine rivals."This chariot is an exceptional find," said archaeologist Paola Santoro. "It shows that the city of Ereteum remained independent long after the Sixth Century BC." "In other Sabine cities like Custumerium, conquered by the Romans, the custom of putting regal objects in king's tombs had died out by that time"."We can say that Eretum kept its independence until the Fourth Century BC." Santoro said her team had recovered all the metal parts of the bronze-and-iron decorated chariot and had used echo-soundings to trace the imprints of the long-decayed wooden parts. "This will enable us to reconstruct the whole chariot," she said.

Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the country's top Muslim religious authority, last month issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, condemning the display of statues in Egypt. Gomaa said he based the edict on texts in the Hadith, a record of the sayings or customs of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The hadith declare the exhibition of statues in homes to be un-Islamic. The fatwa did not specifically mention statues in museums or public places. But many academics and art lovers were outraged. Critics say the ruling could encourage militant Muslims to attack Egypt's thousands of ancient statues, which are a mainstay of the country's tourist industry.

The U.S. Department of Interior has designated Nebraska's Ashfall Fossil Beds as a national natural landmark, the first such landmark to be designated in almost two decades. The site, near the town of Neligh (see Nebraska map), is home to hundreds of skeletons of extinct rhinos, camels, three-toed horses, and other vertebrates that were killed and buried by ash from a huge volcanic eruption some 12 million years ago. It is the only place on Earth where large numbers of fossil mammals have been found as whole, three-dimensionally preserved skeletons. "Ashfall has tremendous value for science and education and great inspirational value," said Margi Brooks, the National Natural Landmark (NNL) Program manager, who is based in Tucson, Arizona. "It clearly qualifies as a natural landmark."

New findings suggest that an ongoing, epic whodunit may actually be a whatdunit. That is, climate change, not humans, may be what killed off Ice Age mammoths, horses, and other large animals in North America.Dale Guthrie, a researcher at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, has spent some 20 years examining more than 600 bones of large mammals from Alaska and the Yukon Territory. His analysis points toward climate as the culprit. Guthrie's data, published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature, shows that increases in moisture and warmer temperatures 13,500 to 11,500 years ago allowed for edible plants to migrate north.This plant exodus provided more food sources for horses, mammoths, bison, and elks living in the far north, he suggests.But then the milder climate backfired on the big mammals. It paved the way for trees, which eventually outshaded and outcompeted the low-lying plants the animals depended on, Guthrie says.

Use more psychedelic drugs," is not advice you would expect from your GP, but that is the call from an influential UK medical journal to researchers.An editorial in the Lancet says that the "demonisation of psychedelic drugs as a social evil" has stifled vital medical research that would lead to a better understanding of the brain and better treatments for conditions such as depression.The journal's editor Richard Horton said he was not advocating recreational drug use, but championed the benefits of researchers studying the effects of drugs such as LSD and Ecstasy by using them themselves in the lab."The blanket ban on psychedelic drugs enforced in many countries continues to hinder safe and controlled investigation, in a medical environment, of their potential benefits," said the editorial, "...criminalisation of these agents has also led to an excessively cautious approach to further research into their therapeutic benefits."

A joint UK-US team has put forward an alternative theory of cosmic evolution. It proposes that the Universe undergoes cycles of "Big Bangs" and "Big Crunches", meaning our Universe is merely a "child of the previous one". It challenges the conventional view of the cosmos, which observations show to be 12-14 billion years old. The new ideas, reported in the journal Science, may explain why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, the researchers say. "At present the conventional view is that all of space, time, matter and energy began at a single point, which then expanded and cooled, leaving the Universe as it is today," said Professor Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, New Jersey.

BEIJING, May 4, 2006 (AFP) - Chinese scientists have warned a 2.5-million-square-kilometer (one-million-square-mile) ozone hole may be forming over the Tibetan plateau, state media reported Thursday. While it does not yet qualify as a regular ozone hole, like the ones over the two poles, the area has seen a dramatic drop in ozone density in recent years, the Xinhua news agency said, citing China's Scientific Report journal. The decrease in ozone over the plateau was caused by atmospheric air movements rather than the global greenhouse effect, Xinhua quoted the journal as saying. "When low-ozone air currents in the lower layer enter the upper air layer, the overall ozone density is reduced." Scientists have known about the thinning of the ozone density in the area at least since early this decade, but the report in the journal offers the most solid scientific evidence so far.

MACHU PICCHU · Darwin Camacho, tour guide and denizen of this place for a quarter century, gestures toward gaps in the famously precise stonework of an Incan wall."The stones are separating," he says, pointing to the fissures separating blocks once snugly fit together by craftsmen toiling without wheel or cement. "Something needs to be done about this." Camacho proceeds to the granite pillar known as the Intiwatana, or "hitching post of the sun," a one-of-a-kind sacred artifact chipped in undignified fashion when a 1,000-pound mechanical arm crashed on it during the filming of an ad for Peru's preferred "cerveza.""A beer commercial!" Camacho exclaims, pointing his umbrella at the damage like an accusing finger. "How irresponsible is our government to have allowed this!"

MEXICO CITY - A carved monolith unearthed in Mexico may show that the Olmec civilization, one of the oldest in the Americas, was more widespread than thought or that another culture thrived alongside it 3,000 years ago.Findings at the newly excavated Tamtoc archaeological site in the north-central state of San Luis Potosi may prompt scholars to rethink a view of Mesoamerican history that holds its earliest peoples were based in the south of Mexico."It is a very relevant indicator of an Olmec penetration far to the north, or of the presence of a new group co-existing with the Olmecs," said archaeologist Guillermo Ahuja, who led a government team excavating the site for the past five years.

MONTEREY, California (Reuters) -- The record Atlantic hurricane season last year can be attributed to global warming, several top experts, including a leading U.S. government storm researcher, said on Monday."The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it's no longer something we'll see in the future, it's happening now," said Greg Holland, a division director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.Holland told a packed hall at the American Meteorological Society's 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology that the wind and warmer water conditions that fuel storms that form in the Caribbean are "increasingly due to greenhouse gases. There seems to be no other conclusion you can logically draw."

The Ministry of Defence has admitted that there are unidentified flying objects in our skies, but has concluded that they are not alien craft but examples of a bizarre and little-understood atmospheric phenomenon.A secret report studying all UFO sightings across Britain, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region, was compiled over four years by the MoD's Defence Intelligence Staff.Released under a Freedom of Information Act (FoI) request, it states that the glowing lights in the sky that have long puzzled ufologists are "buoyant plasmas".

Bulgarian archaeologists discovered near the town of Rousse a stone with an engraved Latin inscription, once part of a defence wall.The stone is in the region of Stulpishte near the Danube River, Darik Radio reported. The defence wall is part of the Trimamium castle, renovated by archaeologists. The urgent repair operations started a month ago. They were necessary because of the frequent raids of treasure-hunters.

It's been the curse of the USS Enterprise and the Klingons' favoured weapon. But back on Earth, mathematicians claim to have worked out how to make a cloaking device to render objects invisible. An outline for the device is described in a scientific paper published today in which the authors reveal how objects placed close to a material called a superlens appear to vanish.Even in the world of science fiction, the technology is not perfect, and nor is the device proposed by Graeme Milton at Utah University and Nicolae-Alexandru Nicorovici at Sydney University of Technology. According to their calculations, the device would only work at certain frequencies of light, and only if the object is within close range of the superlens.The cloaking device relies on recently discovered materials used to make superlenses that make light behave in a highly unusual way. Instead of having a positive refractive index - the property which makes light bend as it passes through a prism or water - the materials have a negative refractive index, which effectively makes light travel backwards. It's light, but not as we know it.Prof Milton's team calculated that when certain objects are placed next to superlenses, the light bouncing off them is essentially erased by light reflecting off the superlens, making the object invisible.

ELLENSBURG, Wash. - Behind two locked doors at Central Washington University, what might be called Son of Kennewick Man sits inside a cardboard box.The faceless skull dates back 9,000 years - just 400 years younger than the superstar skeleton unearthed from the banks of the Columbia River. While Kennewick Man ignited a legal battle over the control of ancient bones, the skull at CWU has barely raised a ripple."It just misses the mark in terms of people's interest," said CWU anthropology professor Steven Hackenberger.Nicknamed "Stickman" for the mythical beings some tribes believe once inhabited the Columbia plateau, the skull ranks among the continent's most-ancient human remains.

Over the past few years, Luxor has seen elaborate conservation projects led and financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The first 10 sites are now restored and open to the public."USAID is financing conservation of Egyptian antiquities through four grants, two of which have been completed while the other two are still ongoing, in addition to two endowments," Francis Ricciardone, US ambassador to Egypt, said during a two-day visit to Luxor early this month.One of the most significant projects has been the reconstruction of the sarcophagus of Ramses VI, which is displayed in the burial chamber of the tomb where Ramses was originally buried in the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank. The project reflects the successful partnership between the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and the American Research Centre in Egypt (ARCE), which received a grant from the USAID to conclude the project.