Newsdesk Archive

A newly uncovered Maya tomb might be the resting place of the first ruler of Waka', an ancient city on what was a major trade route. The tomb, uncovered deep in the jungles of Guatemala (see map), contains a single skeleton lying on a stone bench, jade jewels, and the remains of a jaguar pelt, according to news reports. The structure was discovered on April 29 by archaeologist Hector Escobedo of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and graduate student Juan Carlos Melendez. It lies at the base of the site's largest pyramid, which is about 60 feet (18 meters) tall.

New research shows that pre-historic horses in Alaska may have been hunted into extinction by man, rather than by climate change as previously thought.The discovery by Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, US, David Roberts of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew and Karen Robbirt of the University of East Anglia (UEA) is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The accepted view had previously been that the wild horses became extinct long before the extinction of mammoths and the arrival of humans from Asia - ruling out the possibility that they were over-hunted by man. One theory had been that a period of climate cooling wiped them out. However, the researchers have discovered that uncertainties in dating fossil remains and the incompleteness of fossil records mean that the survival of the horse beyond the arrival of humans cannot be ruled out.

Saturn's moon Titan has huge regions covered with dunes, possibly made out of ice crystals, sand or some other unknown material, international space scientists reported on Thursday. Images of Titan beamed back to Earth from the joint U.S.-European Cassini mission look very much like sand dunes in the Sahara desert, Namibia, Saudi Arabia and Australia, the researchers said."It's bizarre," said Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona, who worked on the study. "These images from a moon of Saturn look just like radar images of Namibia or Arabia. Titan's atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, its gravity is lower, its sand is certainly different -- everything is different except for the physical process that forms the dunes and resulting landscape."

Mexico's president has demanded changes to a bill passed by Congress that would see some drugs decriminalised, a day after saying he would sign it into law. The bill, as it stands, would legalise possession of small amounts of cocaine, marijuana and heroin for personal use. President Vicente Fox has returned the measure to Congress, saying it should make clear that possessing and using drugs will remain a criminal offence. Mr Fox has been accused in the Mexican media of bowing to US pressure. US officials had voiced concern that more lenient policies in Mexico could lead to a wave of drugs-related tourism across the border.

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a neolithic village covering an area of 20,000 square meters in East China's Anhui Province.Archaeologists have found a large number of clay urns, bowls and other utensils, together with some stone axes and implements during an excavation in Nangang Township in the western suburbs of the provincial capital Hefei.The findings are invaluable for the study of the independent cultural system of Huaihe River valley, which is different from those of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River valleys that have been regarded as the cradles of Chinese civilization, said Xi Weiqun, an expert who took part in the excavation.

Somewhere between the lost Incan city of Machu Picchu and mountaintop observatories of Cerro Tololo, Chile, retiree Larry Adkins opened a mysterious e-mail from an old childhood pal. And suddenly, Adkins, 66, of Tustin was solving a 4,000-year-old riddle, wrapped around pyramids, a buried temple, mummies and a dark cloud constellation known as The Fox.The temple just may be the Western Hemisphere's equivalent of Stonehenge, an ancient calendrical device intended to mark the seasons by pinpointing the summer solstice sunrise and the winter solstice sunset. If Adkins and his friend's discovery stands up to academic scrutiny, "It would be the oldest known solstice marker in the hemisphere and one of the oldest in the world," says Dave Dearborn, co-editor of Archeoastronomy journal.

BEIJING - China successfully tested a locally made magnetic levitation train, the first time the country has achieved the feat without using foreign technology, state media reported Monday.The 20-ton test maglev train ran steadily Sunday on a 1,400-foot experimental line in the provincial capital of Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan province, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday.The test train can hold 60 people and travel up to 100 mph, Xinhua reported, citing Zhang Kunlun, deputy director of the School of Electrical Engineering at the Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu.

ROSSLYN Chapel holds many secrets. For hundreds of years experts and visitors alike have puzzled over the carvings in the chapel. Whilst some debate whether they point to hidden treasure, Edinburgh composer Stuart Mitchell thinks he has cracked one part of the enigma.He believes that the ornate ceiling of carved arches, featuring 213 decorated cubes holds a code for medieval music. His father Thomas Mitchell spent 20 years cracking this code in the ceiling and now Stuart is orchestrating the findings for a new recording called The Rosslyn Motet.They hope that the music, when played on medieval instruments in situ, will resonate throughout the chapel unlocking a secret in the stone.

When the French look back, they generally trace the stirrings of national glory to Francois I in the mid-16th century or perhaps to Louis XIV 150 years later.And when Parisians look around, they see mainly the city reshaped into broad avenues by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann in the 19th century.Last week, they were reminded of a far earlier Paris, one that was still called Lutetia. On a Left Bank hillside, which carries the name of Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, French archaeologists have found remnants of a road and several houses dating back some 2,000 years to when Rome ruled Gaul.

Four centuries after King Naresuan the Great died, scholars are still sparring over where exactly the warrior king passed away.It's not an easy quarrel to settle. King Naresuan spent more time on the battlefield than in a palace. But as the scholars continue their dispute they are searching deeper for insights into his thinking as well as making bolder conjectures on just how far his outward-looking foreign policy stretched.Besides the debate on where his remains lie, historians are also debating how much of his outlook was shaped in Burma, where he was held captive during his youth, and how much of his perspective he owed to the influences of the ancient capital Thai capital.It was in Ayutthaya last week, at the commemoration of the 401st anniversary of King Naresuan's death, that Thai historians discussed a novel view about his way of thinking.The way he led his troops into battle was, well, quite Burmese, some said

For the people of Hasankeyf, this sleepy, once-mighty town on the banks of the River Tigris is a historic treasure: for those who want to build a massive dam here, it is a backwater in need of development."We have to stop the dam, our town will be destroyed," said Hasankeyf's mayor, Abdulvahap Kusen, a staunch opponent of the Ilisu dam project, which would swallow up more than 80 villages and hamlets by the time of its planned completion in 2013."Our valley is part of ancient Mesopotamia, where human history began," he said. "When you visit our caves, you get a sense of how people lived millennia ago."

KUALA LUMPUR, April 28 (Bernama) -- The "lost city" of Gelanggi or Linggiu, claimed to have been hidden in the jungles of Johor for more than a thousand years, does not exist, said an archaeologist in the National Heritage Department.Khalid Syed Ali, the curator of archaeology in the department's research and development division, said a team of researchers carried out a study over a month in July last year but found no evidence of the "lost city".The 15-strong team was headed by the Director-General of Museum and Antiquity Datuk Dr Adi Taha, he said in a working paper presented at a forum organised by the National Museum here.The search was launched following a claim made by an independent researcher Raimy Che Ros that he had found evidence of the "lost city" after 12 years of research.

Archaeologists hope to uncover a glimpse of the mysteries of cult worship in Roman Britain by excavating a vast religious complex in Ewell, writes Kevin Barnes. A series of deep shafts found cut into chalk bedrock at Hatch Furlong gave researchers the clue that a ritual site existed there about 1,900 years ago.Over the next fortnight an expert team led by Harvey Sheldon of Birkbeck College, London, intends to unearth the sacred stone building lying near the Ewell bypass. Although similar temple complexes have been discovered in Britain, the dig may provide new evidence about Roman religion.

April 27 (Bloomberg) -- Radiocarbon dating pushes some events in the middle of the second millennium B.C. 100 years back into the past, possibly revising history in the Aegean Sea area near Greece and Turkey, a study in tomorrow's Science said.``A new story may be written on the origins of early classical and Aegean civilization, which effectively becomes much of Western civilization,'' said Stuart Manning, a Cornell University professor of classics.The findings concern a critical time for development of Late Bronze Age cultures in the Aegean, Cyprus, Anatolia and others and may change how cultural relations are viewed in the period, said Manning, the lead investigator, in a telephone interview from London. The conclusion solves one of the big challenges to archeologists in the past 30 years, he said.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Possessing marijuana, cocaine and even heroin will no longer be a crime in Mexico if the drugs are carried in small amounts for personal use, under legislation passed by the Mexican Congress.The measure given final passage by senators late on Thursday allows police to focus on their battle against major drug dealers, the government says, and President Vicente Fox is expected to sign it into law."This law provides more judicial tools for authorities to fight crime," presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar said on Friday. The measure was approved earlier by the lower house.Under the legislation, police will not penalise people for possessing up to 5 grams of marijuana, 5 grams of opium, 25 milligrams of heroin or 500 milligrams of cocaine.

Some of the gaping holes that exist in our understanding of the Earth's atmosphere will be answered by two new satellites launched on Friday.The Cloudsat and Calipso missions will study how clouds and aerosols (fine particles) form, evolve and affect our climate, the weather and air quality. Scientists say knowledge gaps in such areas severely hamper their ability to forecast future climate change. Different types of cloud, for example, can help cool or warm the planet.

The BinaryResearch Institute (BRI) has found that orbital characteristics of the recently discovered planetoid, "Sedna", demonstrate the possibility that our sun might be part of a binary star system.A binary star system consists of two stars gravitationally bound orbiting a common center of mass. Once thought to be highly unusual, such systems are now considered to be common in the Milky Way galaxy.Walter Cruttenden at BRI, Professor Richard Muller at UC Berkeley, Dr. Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana, amongst several others, have long speculated on the possibility that our sun might have an as yet undiscovered companion.Most of the evidence has been statistical rather than physical. The recent discovery of Sedna, a small planet like object first detected by Cal Tech astronomer Dr. Michael Brown, provides what could be indirect physical evidence of a solar companion.

The shapes of letters in all languages are derived from common forms in nature, according to a new hypothesis. The idea, in some ways seemingly obvious and innately human, arose however from a study of how robots see the world.Robots employ object recognition technology to navigate a room by recognizing contours. A corner is seen as a "Y," for example, and a wall is recognized by the L-shape it makes where it meets the floor."It struck me that these junctions are typically named with letters, such as 'L,' 'T,' 'Y,' 'K,' and 'X,' and that it may not be a coincidence that the shapes of these letters look like the things they really are in nature," said Mark Changizi, a theoretical neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology.Changizi and his colleagues think letters and symbols in Chinese, Latin, Persian and 97 other writing systems that have been used through the ages have shapes that humans are good at seeing.

To claim the country's first dinosaur discovery, Norwegians had to dig more than a mile down. An oil drilling operation uncovered the knucklebone of a Plateosaurus. Well, actually, the knucklebone is now crushed. And it's not actually in Norway proper, but below the North Sea.Whatever the case, it's a neat piece of record-setting, accidental paleontology. The fossil is the deepest dinosaur remain ever found. The knucklebone was found in a hollow grave within sediment 1.4 miles (2,256 meters) below the seabed. The area was once dry plains with rivers running through them.

A new giant picture on the Nazca Plateau in Peru, which is famous for giant patterns that can be seen from the air, has been discovered by a team of Japanese researchers. The image is 65 meters long, and appears to be an animal with horns. It is thought to have been drawn as a symbol of hopes for good crops, but there are no similar patterns elsewhere, and the type of the animal remains unclear.The discovery marks the first time since the 1980s that a picture other than a geometrical pattern has been found on the Nazca Plateau.The picture was found by a team of researchers including Masato Sakai, an associate professor at Yamagata University, after they analyzed images from a U.S. commercial satellite. They confirmed it was a previously undiscovered picture in a local survey in March this year. It is located at the south of the Nazca Plateau, and apparently went undiscovered since few tourist planes pass over the area.

Plans to curb food advertising aimed at children have been dismissed as a "total sham", by consumer group Which?. Media regulator Ofcom is consulting on restricting junk food ads but has ruled out banning their broadcast before 9pm.Of 815 parents asked by Which?, 79% wanted the adverts banned at times when children were most likely to watch TV.Ofcom says independent research carried out for it in 2004 indicates only 48% of parents want a pre-watershed ban and 24% want a total ban on junk food ads.

The best long-term solution for the disposal of the UK's nuclear waste should be to bury it deep in the ground, an advisory group has said. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) has released draft recommendations after three years of investigation and consultation.It says the time taken to develop deep facilities means that robust interim storage measures are also needed. CoRWM was not asked to identify places in the UK where disposal should occur.

BRADLEY T. LEPPERAre the footprints of surprisingly ancient Americans preserved in 40,000-year-old volcanic ash in southern Mexico? In December, an article in the journal Science cast a cloud of doubt over that claim. The authors, Michael Waters and Paul Renne, argue that the ash dated to 1.3 million years ago, much too old for humans on this continent, and that the so-called footprints were nothing more than marks made by the tools of modern workers quarrying the stone with crowbars. Now, Silvia Gonzalez, an archaeologist from Liverpool John Moores University, and several members of her research team have published their data and interpretations in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. Based on their results, the case is far from closed.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- An early gravitational dance made the giant planets tilt the way they do -- which is different from the way Earth and the other smaller planets tilt, an astronomer reported on Wednesday.The shift probably happened billions of years ago when the bigger planets in our solar system were closer together than they are now, and the gravity of each one exerted a pull on the others, said Adrian Brunini of the Facultad de Ciencias Astronomicas y Geofisicas in Buenos Aires.This "neutral gravitational interaction" caused Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to have tilted axes that were determined as they moved through the solar system to take their current positions far from the sun, Brunini said in a telephone interview.

An unprecedented salvo of international probes will soon shoot for the Moon, all equipped to signal that a new era of lunar exploration has begun.If schedules hold, spacecraft from India, China and Japan will be moonbound before NASA's own Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter swings into action in 2008. Already on duty, the European Space Agency's SMART-1 is wrapping up its survey work.In the past, having the independent wherewithal to toss a satellite into Earth orbit was a form of space status.That's passé. Times have changed. Now the Moon is where the action is.

El Cairo, Apr 25 (Prensa Latina) A discovery by a group of French and Egyptian archeologists Tuesday revealed that Egyptians enjoyed a public cooking service 3,200 years ago.The traces of that ancient civilization were found in the city of Luxor, where Egyptians prepared meals for workers of the Pharaoh tombs, and where remains of a school for workers' children, a butcher and vegetable stores.Expert Sabri Abdelaziz confirmed they served the workers bread, meat and vegetables.

Antarctica's buried lakes are connected by a network of rivers moving water far beneath the surface, say UK scientists. It was thought the sub-glacial lakes had been completely sealed for millions of years, enabling unique species to evolve in them.Writing in the journal Nature, experts say international plans to drill into the lakes may now have to be reviewed.Any attempts to drill into one body of water risks contaminating others. "What this paper shows is that not only could you contaminate a lake, you could contaminate the whole drainage system," lead author Duncan Wingham, of University College London, told the BBC News website.

Australian archaeologist Royce Richards is among a team preparing to look for the truth behind a theory that Bosnia-Herzegovina has an ancient pyramid. Archaeologists from Australia, Scotland, Ireland, Austria, and Slovenia will begin excavation work in April on the Visocica hill, 32 kilometres north-west of Sarajevo.The hill is quite symmetrical, and the theory that it was once a pyramid is supported by preliminary investigations. If true, it would rewrite world history, putting Europe alongside South America and of course Egypt as homes of ancient pyramids.Bosnian Semir Osmanagic put forward his theory last year that a 100 metre geometrically-shaped hill with evenly shaped sides and corners that point north, south, east and west is an ancient man-made edifice.

VOLOS, Greece (Reuters) -- Shipbuilders in the small Greek port of Volos are struggling with handmade tools and methods used millennia ago to recreate the Argo, the legendary vessel of Jason and the Argonauts.The absence of modern resources such as electricity and machine tools makes it an exhausting task, but authenticity is an essential part of this experiment in ancient shipbuilding."It's extremely laborious work," said builder Stelios Kalafatidis. "We don't have large, proper, modern tools, only our hands and wooden mallets and chisels."

In December 2004, researchers drained a canal in northern Vietnam in search of ancient textiles from graves. They found that and a whole lot more. Protruding from the canal bank at Dong Xa was a 2000-year-old log boat that had been used as a coffin. After a closer look at the woodwork, archaeologists Peter Bellwood and Judith Cameron of Australia National University in Canberra and their colleagues were astounded to find that the method for fitting planks to hull matched that used by the Roman Emperor Caligula and his contemporaries in the 1st century C.E.That shipwright technique was believed to be unique to the Mediterranean, several thousand kilometers to the west."It's very convincing," says Lucy Blue, a maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton, U.K. "They are absolutely correct in their links with comparable material in the Greco-Roman world." It's impossible to say, however, whether the boatmaking method is a case of technology transfer across vast distances or whether it arose independently in East Asia.

In one of the most significant archaeological and anthropological finds in recent history, Robert Benfer, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has discovered the earliest astronomical alignments and sculptures in the round, which is a sculpture designed to be viewed from many directions and angles, in the New World in Buena Vista, Peru.The Temple of the Fox, an ancient structure in the Chillon Valley that dates back to 2200 B.C., contains sculptures of unprecedented artistic style that can be associated with the agricultural calendar and Andean myth. "There hasn't been an archaeological finding like this since the early 1980s," Benfer said. "The Temple of the Fox is 1,000 years older than anything of its kind found before. It's also significant because it suggests people organized their lives around Andean constellations and provides evidence of the beginning of flood-plain agriculture."

These days, we are less and less comfortable about having the monuments of other countries in our museums. When we go to the British Museum, or drive alongside the Thames and notice Cleopatra's Needle, the immediate response is not what it used to be. Fifty years ago, we might have thought: "How wonderful to live in a country with all these wonderful treasures." Now, we are just as likely to speculate as to who stole them, and how long it is going to be before they are handed back.For some, this is uncontroversial. In many cases, such things were not come by honestly; sometimes they were stolen, or seized by force, or bought in dubious circumstances. They were not ours in the first place, never have been truly ours, and the time is fast approaching when we are probably going to have to give them back.National sentiment often runs high in these matters. I remember once going round a temple in Egypt with some Italian friends, and the Egyptian guide remarked of a sarcophagus that its pair had long ago been "stolen" and was now "nel Sir John Soane Museo a Londra", giving me a very accusing glare. The Greek campaign to have the Parthenon marbles - previously the Elgin marbles - returned to be housed in a handsome new museum in Athens seems quite likely to succeed in the end. No one could doubt that they would be looked after very well.

NEW YORK: A stolen 9th century stone idol with carvings of all ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu began its journey back home to be reinstalled in Varaha temple in Mandsour in Madhya Pradesh from where it was chipped off six years ago.A happy Indian Consul-General Neelam Deo and a satisfied Special Agent in charge of investigation at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Martin D Ficke signed the papers at a brief ceremony on Monday, formally handing it over to India.This was one of the two idols stolen, the search for the other is still on. Despite its tortuous journey to New York, the 127 cm tall and 71 cm wide idol is in good condition with only a mark at the back from where it might have been chipped off.

CHANGCHUN, April 23 (Xinhua) -- A Japanese version of the Compendium of Materia Medica, an ancient Chinese medicine masterpiece, has been found in Northeast China's Jilin Province. The Japanese version was translated in 1927 and published in 1929 by a Japanese publishing house, which produced specialist reference publications, said Pi Fusheng, a collector of and experton ancient documents in the province.The book was spotted at a flea market in Jilin city by another collector, Pi said. "It is a rare book even in Japan," Pi said.

CAIRO - The discovery of gold cartouches dating back to 1400 BC sheds new light on the relationship between two ancient Egyptian rulers, Egypt's antiquities department said Friday.A team of French and Egyptian archeologists have discovered two sets of nine solid gold cartouches bearing the name of Thotmusis III (who ruled from 1479-1425 BC) near the pharaoh's stepmother Queen Hatshepsut's temple in Luxor, 700 kilometres south of Cairo."These cartouches... which have the names of Hatshepsut and Thotmusis III have been found near Hatshepsut's obelisk which proves that the obelisk was erected by both rulers," said Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.Thotmusis III, who was Hatshepsut's stepson and co-ruler after the death of his father Thotmusis II in 1479 BC, was widely regarded as having had strained relations with the queen. Thotmusis III was a child when his father died and the rule of the kindgom was initially put in the hands of Hatsheput.

An Ohio antiques dealer claims to be holding fragments of papyrus from ancient Egypt, leading experts to try to determine if they are part of the recently released "Gospel of Judas." Translators in Switzerland are studying photos of the fragments, which were displayed briefly on Wednesday. There also are questions about what the writing on the fragments says. Art and antiquities dealer Bruce Ferrini, of Akron, says he bought the fragments in 1998 but hasn't given any details about the source. The Basel, Switzerland-based Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, which also claims ownership of the fragments, said a number of the pieces clearly came from the volume of papyrus documents whose pages contained the gospel. Note: Option to skip commercial at website.

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.

A "major error" has been discovered in the world's biggest online climate prediction project, backed by the BBC. The fault in a Climateprediction.net model launched in February causes temperatures in past climates to rise quicker than seen in real observations.The program, which runs on users' computers when they are idle, aims to generate forecasts of climate change.The project scientists have now fixed the fault and say the data collected so far is still useful. "At some point in the future, we may have done an experiment like this anyway," Myles Allen, principal investigator of the project told the BBC News website. "People have not been wasting their time."

Little is known about the Lapita peoples, the first settlers of the Western Pacific, other than their ubiquitous calling card: red pottery fragments with intricate designs. But in what's being hailed as one of the most dramatic finds in years, researchers at the meeting offered a glimpse of the first-known early Lapita cemetery. "This is the closest we're going to get to the first Polynesians," says archaeologist Matthew Spriggs of Australia National University (ANU) in Canberra, a member of the excavation team.The graves on Efate, in the Vanuatu Islands, are estimated to be 3000 years old. That's around the time that the Lapita peoples began hopscotching across the Pacific from New Guinea's Bismarck Archipelago, fanning out as far as Samoa and Tonga. The site reveals unknown facets of their burial customs, and DNA from the bones may offer clues to their origins. "The find has opened a new window on the Lapita people as a biological population as well as an archaeological culture," says Lapita expert Patrick Kirch of the University of California, Berkeley.Since the first Lapita shards came to light a half-century ago, more than 200 sites have been found, but skeletal remains are very rare. Then just before Christmas in 2003, workers quarrying soil for a prawn farm came across a chunk of pottery with a complex pattern. They showed it to a field worker with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Salkon Yona, who luckily had just been trained in Lapita identification. Yona consulted ANU archaeologist Stuart Bedford, who in a second stroke of luck was on the island for a wedding. Bedford confirmed the shard as early Lapita, skipped the wedding ("my friends understood," he insists), and scrambled to protect the site, near Teouma Bay.

Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."

The reconstructed skull of a Mapusaurus roseae -- a meat-eating dinosaur that roamed Argentina.NEW YORK (AP) -- Scientists are learning more about what appears to be one of the biggest meat-eating dinosaurs known, a two-legged beast whose bones were found several years ago in the fossil-rich Patagonia region of Argentina.One expert called the discovery the first substantial evidence of group living by large meat-eaters other than tyrannosaurs like T. rex.The creature, which apparently measured more than 40 feet long, is called Mapusaurus roseae. The discovery of Mapusaurus included bones from at least seven to nine of the beasts, suggesting the previously unknown animal may have lived and hunted in groups.

CASPER, Wyo. -- A preliminary report on an archaeological dig says Hell's Half Acre, west of Casper, was home to prehistoric American Indians at least 1,200 years ago, and perhaps as long as 8,000 years ago.John Albanese, chairman of the Natrona County Historic Preservation Society, told Natrona County commissioners on Thursday that archaeological evidence shows Indians were hunting bison at Hell's Half Acre between 1,200 and 3,000 years ago, and that some evidence appeared to be much older."There could be some older material," Albanese said. "We found a spear point about 8,000 years old."

Pope Benedict XVI is trying to combat efforts to rehabilitate Christianity's most hated villain after the presentation this month of a newly discovered "gospel according to Judas".In his first Easter sermon at St Peter's Basilica, the German pope said the 13th apostle was a greedy liar: "He evaluated Jesus in terms of power and success. For him, only power and success were real. Love didn't count."In Washington this month, the National Geographic Society unveiled a leather-bound papyrus written in around AD300 that gives Judas's side of the story behind the most notorious deception in religious history. The 26-page manuscript says Judas was singled out by Christ from the other apostles and entrusted with revealing his whereabouts to the Romans. "You will exceed all of them," the papyrus quotes Jesus as saying. "For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."

TOKYO (Reuters) - A million-year-old ice sample drilled from 3 kilometres under the Antarctic and unveiled in Tokyo on Tuesday could yield vital clues on climate change, Japanese scientists said. Researchers, showing off the cylindrical samples of what they said was the oldest ice ever to be retrieved, said studying air trapped inside "core" samples taken from various depths under ground could also help predict how the Earth's weather patterns will change in the future."The ice core is made up of snow that fell in the distant past," said project leader Hideaki Motoyama of the National Institute of Polar Research, dressed snugly in a parka after unveiling the gleaming ice in a room kept at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit).

Though Greece and Albania have much in common, Greece has not been officially involved in the burgeoning archaeological excavations and the activities of foreign archaeology schools in Albania in recent years. But the cooperation memorandum signed last year by the Greek Culture Ministry and the Archaeological Institute of the Tirana Academy of Sciences has paved the way.Joint research is being carried out at ancient Antigoneia under the supervision of the institute, headed by Muzafer Korkuti, and the 12th Ephorate, headed by Constantinos Zachos. While they explore the mysteries of the city and its founder, Pyrrhus, king of the Molossians, a group of Albanian students from the universities of Girokaster and Tirana are in training for the future. The Greeks and Albanians will be working on the project together for the next three years.Photo: Greek and Albanian archaeologists are working together to uncover the secrets of ancient Antigoneia and its founder, Pyrrhus, king of the Molossians. Pyrrhus was a descendant of Achilles. He founded a city in 296 BC that was destroyed in the second century BC. The Romans meted out harsh treatment to the Epirote tribes who had been allies of Perseus.

If you think the average scientist ain't misbehavin', think again. A new study has found that scientific misbehavior appears to be endemic and is occurring far more often than just the more egregious, media-hyped examples, such as faking research. "Not all scientific misconduct is these gross violations like falsifications, plagiarism and fabrication," said study lead author Raymond De Vries, an associate professor of medical education and a member of the Bioethics Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor."A lot of us aren't making up data and stealing data," he said. However, he believes that intense competition within the sciences is having a negative effect on researchers.

ZURICH (Reuters) - Long ago, astronauts from outer space visited earth to lay the foundations for human civilization, Erich von Daeniken says.Now, the Swiss writer and businessman hopes for a visitor wealthy enough to save his Mystery Park theme park in Interlaken from financial collapse.The park, set up by the author of bestsellers such as "Chariots of the Gods" and "The Gods were Astronauts," has failed to attract enough visitors and needs 4 million Swiss francs ($3.08 million) in cash to stay in business.The park's attractions -- which showcase giant drawings in the Peruvian desert that may once have been signs for visiting spacecraft, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and more -- may close forever if the group does not find the money.

The world is likely to experience a temperature rise of more than 3C, the UK government's chief scientist warned. That would put up to 400 million people worldwide at risk of hunger, said Professor Sir David King in a report based on computer predictions.He told the BBC the world had to act now to tackle global warming expected to happen over the next 100 years. He said even if international agreement could be reached on limiting emissions, climate change was inevitable.

For the ancient Greeks, the heavens were populated by stick-figured gods, animals and creatures of myth. An active imagination and a human knack for seeking patterns where none existed led them to group pinpricks of light into sword-wielding hunters, menacing lions and centaur archers, among other things. Imagine what they might have seen if they'd had telescopes. From horses and insects to space storms that resemble terrestrial tempests, astronomers peering up at the night skies today are doing with nebulas, galaxies and exploding supernovas what the ancient Greeks did with stars.Last week, NASA released new images of NGC 246, whose ominous look has earned it the nickname "Skull Nebula." The image shows what the outer atmosphere of a dying star can do as it travels swiftly through a thick cloud of interstellar gas.

In Lingjiatan, Hanshan County of Anhui Province in China, archaeologists have discovered a primitive tribal site that was inhabited 5,000 years ago. Superb drilling technology and the world's earliest stone drill bits were found at the site. Archaeology professor Zhang Jingguo said there are still many mysteries in the Lingjiatan ruins waiting to be solved. The Lingjiatan ruins are located in Lingjiatan Village, Tongzha Township of Hanshan County in Chaohu City, Anhui Province, covering about 1.5 million square meters. Archaeologists say the 5,000 year old city was probably a prosperous city with developed construction, animal husbandry and handicrafts. Prior to the discovery of the Lingjiatan ruins, the oldest city in China acknowledged by archaeologists was in Dantu Village in Wulian County at Rizhao City, Shandong Province, which was built more than 4,000 years ago.

A senior US marine officer says he is willing to apologise for the damage caused by his troops to the ancient Iraqi site of Babylon. US forces built a helicopter pad on the ancient ruins and filled their sandbags with archaeological material in the months following the 2003 invasion. Colonel Coleman was chief of staff at Babylon when it was occupied by the First Marine Expeditionary Force. Babylon's Hanging Gardens were among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

New evidence suggests humans are evolving more rapidly -- and more recently -- than most people thought possible. But for some radical evolutionists, Homo sapiens isn't morphing quickly enough."People like to think of modern human biology, and especially mental biology, as being the result of selections that took place 100,000 years ago," said University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn. "But our research shows that humans are still under selection, not just for things like disease resistance but for cognitive abilities."Lahn recently published the results of a study demonstrating that two key genes connected to brain size are currently under rapid selection in populations throughout the globe."The jury is still out on what this means because we aren't entirely sure what these genes do," said Lahn. "It's possible they just control size and shape of the brain, rather than cognition. But the data is pretty compelling that the brain is evolving."

Healthylife.net presents:THE COSMIC INFLUENCE WITH WALTER CRUTTENDENGraham Hancock will be the special guest on the upcoming episode of "The Cosmic Influence with Walter Cruttenden." Listen to the show at 9am Pacific Time on Monday, April 17th at www.healthylife.net. If you are interested in archeo-astronomy, then this show will open your mind to the impact of how the celestial movement of the stars has and IS impacting our lives.In this ground-breaking show, Walter Cruttenden and Geoff Patino explore ancient myth and folklore of cultures throughout the world and its connection to the stars, and specifically the celestial motion known as the precession of the equinox. The hosts and their guests examine evidence that precession is caused by our Sun's interaction with a lost companion star, which the ancients knew of, and how this grand celestial motion causes a great cycle of Ages that has influenced human history on a vast scale and continues to influence our life experience on Earth today.What do the Ancients say about the cycle of the Ages?Is there evidence of past higher ages in the archaeological record?Where is mankind now and what can we expect in the coming years?What are the celestial mechanics involved in the theory and is there scientific support for it?Can human consciousness really be influenced by the cosmic environment?Join Walter, Geoff, and Graham as they set out to answer these questions and more! You will need Windows Media to listen to the Radio Show For More information about the show and Walter Cruttenden, visit www.loststarbook.com

Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus may be the best place to look for life elsewhere in the Solar System. That is the view of a senior scientist working on the Cassini spacecraft, which has been studying Saturn and its moons for nearly two years.Dr Bob Brown told a major conference in Vienna, Austria, Enceladus contains simple organic molecules, water and heat, the ingredients for life. He raised the possibility of future missions to probe inside the moon.

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

Scientists are studying the violent outburst of a dead star as it tries to fire back into life.The white dwarf star in the Ophiuchus constellation has exhausted its own nuclear fuel but is now stealing it from a neighbouring giant. Every 20 years or so, it gathers sufficient material to explode with enough intensity to be seen from Earth with the naked eye.The so-called recurrent nova event has now flared up six times in 108 years.

The Swift telescope is about to break the boundaries of our cosmic vision, to see the most distant objects ever recorded, its chief scientist believes. The Nasa space observatory has already looked nearly 13 billion light-years across the Universe to record the light from a cataclysmic star explosion.But Dr Neil Gehrels expects Swift to see even more distant events. The investigator says the telescope has the ability to observe perhaps the very first stars to shine in the cosmos.

Despite the wealth of information we now have about ancient Egypt, we really know very little of what we could know. "We have found only 30 percent of what is there," says Dr. Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist for the pyramids, who oversees all archaeological excavations in Egypt.Seventy percent of ancient Egypt, then -- pyramids, tombs, mummies, art, and artifacts -- still lies hidden beneath the desert sands.....Read more at the 'PBS - Secrets of the Pharaohs' website.

Two intact tombs from the first dynasty period, clay models of granaries and the oldest "writer's palette" are among the most recent discoveries made by Polish archaeologists in Tell el-Farcha in the Eastern Nile Delta.The golden-plated figurines from before 5 thousand years found recently have been transported to the Eyptian Museum in Cairo. Further excavations resulted in unearthing two tombs, archaeologist Piotr Ko³odziejczyk said. The excavations are carried out by Polish Expedition in cooperation with the Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology.

CLEWISTON -- Prehistoric bones believed to belong to ancient sloths have been discovered by construction crews working on the massive Everglades restoration project.The bones were found April 1 by workers with the South Florida Water Management District constructing a 2,000-acre storm water treatment area about 50 miles northwest of Miami, district spokesman Roberto Fabricio said Monday.The plant-eating animals the size of elephants became extinct at least 4,000 years ago.Scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville planned to begin excavating the site and collecting the bones on Tuesday.

TEHRAN -- A team of archaeologists working at the ancient site of Jiroft recently discovered a second royal inscription at the Konar Sandal Ziggurat, the Persian service of CHN reported on Thursday. Team member Nader Soleymani said that the discovery provides further evidence that Jiroft dates back to the third millennium BC.The inscription is on an 11x7 centimeter piece of brick which bears five lines with each line containing 12 words, Soleymani added.

Even as the evolution wars rage, on school boards and in courtrooms, biologists continue to accumulate empirical data supporting Darwinian theory. Two extraordinary discoveries announced this week should go a long way to providing even more of the evidence that critics of evolution say is lacking.One study produced what biblical literalists have been demanding ever since Darwin -- the iconic "missing links." If species evolve, they ask, with one segueing into another, where are the transition fossils, those man-ape or reptile-mammal creatures that evolution posits?In yesterday's issue of Nature, paleontologists unveiled an answer: well-preserved fossils of a previously unknown fish that was on its way to evolving into a four-limbed land-dweller. It had a jaw, fins and scales like a fish, but a skull, neck, ribs and pectoral fin like the earliest limbed animals, called tetrapods.Discovered in 2004 on Canada's Ellesmere Island by Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the 375-million-year-old Tiktaalik roseae "blurs the boundary between fish and land animals," said Prof. Shubin. It "is both fish and tetrapod," showing how life made the transition to land, evolving four limbs from fins.

CAIRO -- An Egyptian archaeological team has discovered a series of structures in the southwestern town of Fayoum that could yield vital data as to how a Middle Kingdom temple was built, the culture minister said on Thursday. Farouk Hosni said that the structures included administrative buildings, granaries and residences believed to have belonged to priests of the temple, which was dedicated to Renenutet, the goddess of harvest, as well as the crocodile-god Sobk and falcon-deity Horus, Hosni added. "This find can be considered one of the most important discoveries in Fayoum, as it unveiled remnants of all architectural elements making up the Medinet Madi temple," according to Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). He noted that Medinet Madi, completed during the rule of the 12th dynasty Pharaoh Amenemhat IV (1808-1799 BC), was "the only intact temple still existing from the Middle Kingdom". The find, he said, had already shed light on how ancient Egyptians placed limestone tiles on the monument's floor - flanked on each side by statues resembling the Sphinx - and constructed the temple from mud bricks.

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) -- Archeologists said Wednesday they have discovered a massive 6th-century Indian pyramid beneath the site of a centuries-old re-enactment of the crucifixion of Christ.Built on a hillside by the mysterious Teotihuacan culture, the pyramid was abandoned almost 1,000 years before Catholics began re-enacting the crucifixion there in the 1800s, unaware they were celebrating one of the holiest moments of their faith on a site originally dedicated to gods of earth, wind and rain.While residents around the hillside in Iztapalapa, on the east side of Mexico City, express pride at the discovery, it illustrates the difficulty of preserving the many layers of Mexican history: archaeologists have decided not to fully excavate the site so as to avoid disturbing the Christian rites.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Proving prehistoric man's ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday's journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought -- and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Scientists think they have solved the mystery of how planets form around a star born in a violent supernova explosion, saying they have detected for the first time a swirling disk of debris from which planets can rise.The discovery is surprising because the dusty disk orbiting the pulsar, or dead star, resembles the cloud of gas and dust from which Earth emerged.Scientists say the latest finding should shed light on how planetary systems form."It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It's a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments," said lead researcher Deepto Chakrabarty, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fossil animals found in Arctic Canada provide a snapshot of fish evolving into land animals, scientists say. The finds are giving researchers a fascinating insight into this key stage in the evolution of life on Earth. US palaeontologists have published details of the fossil "missing links" in the prestigious journal Nature. The 383 million-year-old specimens are described as crocodile-like animals with fins instead of limbs that probably lived in shallow water.

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient pyramid buried under a hill on the outskirts of Mexico City. The pyramid is said to be 1,500 years old and was built by the same ancient people who constructed the Teotihuacan complex, known as the City of the Gods. Parts of the structure have been badly damaged as the hill has been used for decades to stage re-enactments of the crucifixion of Christ during Holy Week. The religious celebration is attended by as many as one million devotees. Measuring 150m (492 feet) on each of its four sides, the 18-metre (59-foot) tall pyramid was carved out on a natural hillside around 500 AD. It was abandoned in about 800 AD, when the Teotihuacan culture collapsed for unknown reasons.

Before 1960s' Flower Power, LSD was a medical wonder drug - a supposed treatment for mental illness. Then it became outlawed and discredited. But now a new generation is researching the medical benefits of psychedelic drugs. "You realise that your feelings are beginning to change. You have to understand these drugs don't put things into your mind. You're very aware and in a subtle way this drug begins to change your perception - you're able to look at your same problem and feelings in a very different way." Pam Sakuda, 58, is dying of cancer. Last year she took part in a controversial pilot project which uses psilocybin (pronounced sil-o-cybin), which comes from magic mushrooms, to help patients cope with the anxiety of being terminally ill. "It became paralysing," she says of the stress caused by confronting her mortality. "It came to the point where you feel that you don't have anything left to do. And I was hoping in this study to be able to get some relief from that."

Shortly after sunset Friday, April 13, 2029, if the sky is clear enough, people across Europe and North Africa will see an asteroid appear as a bright point of light flying 19,400 miles overhead before it disappears silently below the western horizon.A short time later, if astronomers' worst fears are realized, the asteroid will pass through a region of space less than 2,000 feet across. At that place, the gravitational pull of Earth will yank the asteroid into a new orbit around the sun - and on a collision course with Earth seven years later. It all sounds like the premise of "Armageddon," "Deep Impact" or some other blockbuster Hollywood film. But the asteroid, named 99942 Apophis, is science fact, not science fiction. In December 2004, astronomers caused a brief stir when their calculations estimated that the newly discovered asteroid - named after the ancient Egyptian god, Apep, the Destroyer - might collide with Earth in 2029. Additional tracking data quickly ruled out the possibility of a 2029 collision. But the potential for a strike in 2036, should the asteroid enter that crucial gravitational space, places it at the top of NASA's list of 3,800 near-Earth asteroids the agency has identified.

Cancer in dinosaurs and illnesses in other animals are being studied in a groundbreaking new program that combines medical school with the study of natural history.Educators hope the effort will produce doctors with a better understanding of why we get sick.Despite being millions of years removed from our time and our own species, illnesses in animals like the dinosaurs can shed light on the evolution of human disease, says Christopher Beard, curator and specialist in vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

BEIJING, April 3 (Xinhua) -- China will borrow Egyptian techniques used to preserve the murals in the pyramids to save China's ancient books."China's ancient books may be destroyed by acidification within a hundred years if repair techniques are not improved," said Zhang Zhiqing, director of the rare book department of the National Library of China. Zhang made the remarks at a forum on cooperation between China and Egypt on ancient book protection techniques held recently in Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu Province.China has a large number of ancient books and many are in very rough shape. About one third of them are in urgent need of repair, Zhang said.

When the RRS Discovery set out to sea, the crew was expecting stormy weather. Meteorologists had predicted a violent storm, and the scientists -- a team from Britain's National Oceanography Center -- wanted to observe it from up close. What they ended up experiencing went far beyond anything they could have imagined -- and could have cost them their lives.Near the island of Rockall, 250 kilometers (155 miles) west of Scotland, enormous waves came racing toward the vessel. When they checked their measuring instruments later, the scientists discovered that the tallest of these monster waves had hit nearly 30 meters (98 feet) at wind force 9. And it didn't come alone. "We were shaken up these waves for 12 hours," said Naomi Holliday, the leader of the expedition. Entire sets of giant waves hammered the ship.After the adrenaline levels of the scientists had fallen somewhat, astonishment spread among the crew. The standard computer programs had predicted stormy weather for February 8, 2000, but not such a tempest. Even more astonishing, the giant waves had not appeared individually, but in a group. Previously waves of such size were assumed to only appeared alone.

Bones from a four-tonne meat-eating dinosaur have been uncovered on the Chatham Islands. Australian palaeontologist Jeffrey Stilwell, of Melbourne's Monash University, found a 2km-long deposit of bones, teeth and claws and has already uncovered more dinosaur fossils in the Chathams than have been unearthed in New Zealand over the past 25 years. One of the few previous finds of a land dinosaur was a single bone - also from a theropod - found by New Zealand amateur palaeontologist Joan Wiffen, of Havelock North. Until her first find of a fossil bone at the Mangahouanga Stream site in Hawkes Bay, it was widely thought that New Zealand probably had not had dinosaurs. At least three kinds of carnivorous dinosaur, three kinds of herbivorous dinosaur, one kind of flying reptile and marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and elasmosaurs have been found at the Chathams site.

Physicists have confirmed that neutrinos, which are thought to have played a key role during the creation of the Universe, have mass. This is the first major finding of the US-based Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (Minos) experiment.The findings suggest that the Standard Model, which describes how the building blocks of the Universe behave and interact, needs a revision.Neutrinos are believed to be vital to our understanding of the Universe. But scientists know frustratingly little about these fundamental particles. The findings build on work carried out by Japanese physicists.

Evidence for what may be a large and relatively recent impact crater has been found off the coast of Antarctica. Scientists say the evidence, if correct, points to a space rock some 5km across having crashed into the Ross Sea about three million years ago. This could have generated a huge tsunami, according to a member of the team investigating the collision. Details were reported at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

By Sharon Begley, The Wall Street JournalIn Steven Mithen's imagination, the small band of Neanderthals gathered 50,000 years ago around the caves of Le Moustier, in what is now the Dordogne region of France, were butchering carcasses, scraping skins, shaping ax heads -- and singing. One of the fur-clad men started it, a rhythmic sound with rising and falling pitch, and others picked it up, indicating their willingness to cooperate both in the moment and in the future, when the group would have to hunt or fend off predators. The music promoted "a sense of we-ness, of being together in the same situation facing the same problems," suggests Prof. Mithen, an archaeologist at England's Reading University. Music, he says, creates "a social rather than a merely individual identity." And that may solve a longstanding mystery.Music gives biologists fits. Its ubiquity in human cultures, and strong evidence that the brain comes preloaded with musical circuits, suggest that music is as much a product of human evolution as, say, thumbs. But that raises the question of what music is for. Back in 1871, Darwin speculated that human music, like bird songs, attracts mates. Or, as he put it, prelinguistic human ancestors tried "to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm."

An archaeologist digs deep in his pocket to find a medieval town, reports Jonny BeardsallThat an amateur archaeologist was prepared to pay £32,000 for 4.5 unremarkable acres at Trelleck, Monmouthshire, must mean Welsh sons of the soil are salivating with glee. But so convinced is Stuart Wilson that the field is the site of a lost medieval town, he still insists it was money well spent a year after he bought the land. Mr Wilson, 27, and friends at the Monmouth Archaeological Society, have a strong hunch that, 700 years ago, Trelleck was not only the industrial heart of Wales, specialising in the manufacture of iron, but also its largest and most prosperous town. So in an attempt to confirm this, they have, for three years, been burrowing in fields to the south of the present day village.Last year, Mr Wilson pricked up his ears when a tenant farmer mentioned that his landlord, Monmouth County Council, had asked him to move his sheep from an adjacent field as it was soon to be sold at auction. "Although we hadn't dug there yet, we'd always looked at this particular field as an area of archaeological significance because it has a road frontage, which is a good clue when looking for a settlement," he says. "It was old pasture land, which implies that the earth is stony for some reason and too difficult to plough."

New Discoveries Point to "Cave of John the Baptist" as Important Site in the Time of Isaiah Recently completed digging at Israel's Suba Cave, an archaeological site that is possibly connected with John the Baptist, or Jewish groups of his time has revealed features that deepen the mystery of the site's ancient origins, according to University of North Carolina at Charlotte archaeologist James D. Tabor, associate director of the excavation.The site was brought to international attention in 2004 with the publication of The Cave of John the Baptist, a controversial book by Israeli archaeologist Shimon Gibson, the site's director. The initial connection with John the Baptist was based on some of the earliest Christian drawings related to John on the cave walls as well as the location of the cave near Ein Kerem, John's birthplace. In particular, the most recent excavations point to the possible existence of a second, still unexcavated cave at the site, suggesting that the location may have been a major complex of uncertain function during the Iron Age

BEIJING, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists are studying the DNA samples extracted from the bones of horses unearthed from ancient sites to probe the origin of domestic horses in China. It's still a mystery to archaeologists when and where horses were first tamed in China, said Cai Dawei, a researcher with the center of archaeological research for China's border area under the Jilin University in Northwest China. The DNA research will offer valuable clues on the study of migration, spread and domestication of horses, Cai said. A large number of remains of domestic horses and carriages havebeen found in the relic sites dating back to the late Shang Dynasty (1600 BC-1100 BC) in China.

Dutchman Johan Huibers is building a working replica of Noah's Ark as a testament to his Christian faith. The 47-year-old from Schagen, 45km (30 miles) north of Amsterdam, plans to set sail in September through the interior waters of the Netherlands. Johan's Ark is a fifth of the size of Noah's and will carry farmyard animals. Mr Huibers, who plans to open the vessel as a religious monument and zoo, hopes the project will renew interest in Christianity in the Netherlands. Although Mr Huibers has tried to remain true to the ark described in the Bible, Johan's Ark is constructed with American cedar and Norwegian pine, rather than "gopher wood".

A last-minute deal has been struck to stop a "lost" science manuscript from the 1600s - which charts the birth of modern science - being auctioned. The hand-written document, by Dr Robert Hooke, contains the minutes of the Royal Society from 1661 to 1682. It is thought to have lain hidden in a house in Hampshire for about 50 years. The script was expected to fetch £1m at Tuesday's auction, but an agreement was made for it to be sold to an anonymous bidder on behalf of the Royal Society. It was discovered in a cupboard in a private house where other items were being valued by an antiques expert.

ATHENS, Greece - Among the ruins of a 3,200-year-old palace near Athens, researchers are piecing together the story of legendary Greek warrior-king Ajax, hero of the Trojan War.Archaeologist Yiannis Lolos found remains of the palace while hiking on the island of Salamis in 1999, and has led excavations there for the past six years.Now, he's confident he's found the site where Ajax ruled, which has also provided evidence to support a theory that residents of the Mycenean island kingdom fled to Cyprus after the king's death."This was Ajax' capital," excavation leader Lolos, professor of archaeology at Ioannina University, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

A major physics lab in the U.S. has found a particle, far smaller than any atom, that switches itself back and forth between being a piece of matter and a piece of anti-matter 17 trillion times each second. It has taken 700 people in 20 countries, millions of dollars' worth of custom equipment, vast amounts of energy, and 20 years of work to find this.The back-and-forth switching appears to be one of the fastest processes in nature. One of the big mysteries in physics is why the universe is practically all matter, and not anti-matter. The universe once had equal amounts of both, scientists believe. So where did the anti-matter go?And while the physics world has been buzzing since Thursday's announcement of the latest anti-matter find, outsiders have barely noticed. Why?The experiment illustrates the difficulty in publicizing work in this abstract world of concepts unknown to most people -- quarks, muons, particle accelerators, and anti-matter itself.

A shrimp-like creature may have to forfeit its claim to be the longest abstainer from sex in the animal world. The discovery of three living male specimens casts doubt on the idea that the Darwinulidae family has been female and asexual for 200 million years. Darwinulids produce eggs which do not need to be fertilised by sperm. But a team of scientists, writing in a Royal Society journal, cannot say yet whether the newly found males actually perform a sexual function. If they do not, if researchers can show the males are just some evolutionary hangover that is really no longer needed for reproduction - then the creatures will retain their famed celibacy status.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Scientists in northeastern Ethiopia said Saturday that they have discovered the skull of a small human ancestor that could be a missing link between the extinct Homo erectus and modern man. The hominid cranium - found in two pieces and believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old - "comes from a very significant period and is very close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human," said Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia.Archaeologists found the early human cranium five weeks ago at Gawis in Ethiopia's northeastern Afar region, Sileshi said.

A Roman graveyard has been dug up in York. The skeletons all belonged to tall, strong men - and most are headless. Were they gladiators killed in the arena or victims of a deranged dictator? Richard Girling reportsLike nobody else before or since, Caracalla had it coming. On April 8, AD217, four days after his 29th birthday, appropriately on his way to a Moon Temple in modern-day Turkey, this irredeemable lunatic dismounted from his horse, pulled down his breeches and surrendered to the demands of diarrhoea. It was one of his own bodyguards who stepped forward and stabbed him to death.Even for an emperor of Rome, it took some doing to inspire that kind of loyalty. The sculptors of his portrait busts found him as difficult to idealise as historians have done since, his face fixed in a stony scowl, prematurely aged by a lifetime of hate. He is chiefly remembered now for the Baths of Caracalla, the opulent bathhouse outside Rome that so inspired the imagination of the Victorian painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. To confront the true, unique awfulness of the man, however, it is necessary to do as Caracalla himself did in AD208, and make the journey northwards to York. It was here, in August 2004, that archeologists made one of the most disturbing finds in the entire Roman world. Beneath the former garden of an 18th-century mansion in Driffield Terrace, in the exclusive Mount area just outside the city wall, they dug up a large Roman cemetery of early 3rd-century date.

Microscopic specs of lead are offering clues about the enormous cultural changes that swept across northern Africa a thousand years ago.At The University of Arizona in Tucson, a young archaeologist is analyzing lead traces in artifacts to shed light on the relatively little-understood archaeology of Africa, especially the period marked by the spread of the new religion of Islam.Thomas R. Fenn, a doctoral student in the UA anthropology department, is unraveling evidence of centuries-old trade patterns across the Sahara Desert by identifying smelted metal artifacts, mainly copper, found in the continent's sub-Saharan regions.

The true mummy of ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut was discovered in the third floor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Secretary General of Supreme Council for Antiquities Zahi Hawwas revealed on Thursday.The mummy was missing among thousands of artifacts lying in the museum, he said during his lecture at the New York-based Metropolitan Museum of Arts. He said for decades archaeologists believed that a mummy found in Luxor was that of the Egyptian queen. It was a streak of luck, he said, to find this mummy.

Iran had a fruitful year in terms of its archeological achievements as the number of archeological excavations show a stunning increase compared to the previous years.Tehran, 26 March 2006 (CHN) -- The year 1384 (Iranian calendar) which finished on March 20 this year, was full of ups and downs for Iran in archeological fields. Not only the number of archeological excavations increased during last year compared to the previous years, Bolaghi Gorge Salvation Project was also a big job on the shoulders of Iran's Archeology Research Center.Iran archeological sites witnessed important seasons of excavations with the presence of Iranian and foreign archeologists. The excavations in the Burnt City in Sistan va Baluchistan province, in the historical city of Gour in Fars province, in Tool Talesh cemetery in Gilan Province, Gohar Tepe historical site in Mazandaran province and many more all led to some important archeological discoveries.However, among all of these excavations and archeological activities, the Bolaghi Gorge Salvation Project was the most prominent projects which attracted the attention of public opinion both inside and outside the country. The rush of several international archeological groups from Japan, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and other countries alongside with Iranian archeologists to rescue the Bolaghi Gorge historical site in Fars province turned the project into an international one.

Winter air temperatures over Antarctica have risen by more than 2C in the last 30 years, a new study shows. Research published in the US journal Science says the warming is seen across the whole of the continent and much of the Southern Ocean. The study questions the reliability of current climate models that fail to simulate the temperature rise. In addition, the scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) say the cause of the warming is not clear. It could be linked to increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or natural variations in Antarctica's climate system.Scientists are keen to understand the change in temperatures over the continent as the region holds enough water in its ice to raise sea levels by 60 metres.

A new study of a fossil-rich region in the Himalayas confirms that mountain building started there far, far earlier than thought, along a long-lost storm-tossed coastline, perhaps a billion years ago.Rocks of the Parahio Valley in the Spiti region of India contain the remains of a half-billion-year-old river delta filled with shallow coastal marine fossils and debris washed out of a very early mountain range.The findings are another blow to the general impression that the first mountain building involving the rocks of today's Himalayas began just 50 million years ago.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS claim to have unearthed the remains of the 3,500-year-old palace of Ajax, the warrior-king who according to Homer?s Iliad was one of the most revered fighters in the Trojan War.Classicists hailed the discovery, made on a small Greek island, as evidence that the myths recounted by Homer in his epic poem were based on historical fact.The ruins include a large palace, measuring about 750sq m (8,000sq ft), and believed to have been at least four storeys high with more than thirty rooms.Yannos Lolos, the Greek archaeologist who made the discovery, said he was certain that he had come across the home of the Aiacid dynasty, a legendary line of kings mentioned in the Iliad and the Classical Greek tragedies. One of the kings, Ajax (or Aias), was described by Homer as a formidable fighter who, at one point in the Trojan campaign, held off the Trojans almost singlehandedly while his fellow Greek Achilles sulked in his tent because his slave-girl had been taken away from him.

CHENNAI: Several artefacts have been unearthed from the ruins of a Muruga temple that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has been excavating since July 2005 on the beach at Salavankuppam close to the Tiger Cave, near Mamallapuram.The ASI's discoveries this year include a terracotta plaque that depicts five women performing `kuravai koothu,' a folk dance; a six-foot `vel' (spear held by Lord Muruga) hewn out of granite; three inscriptions in Tamil of the Pallava, Rashtrakuta and Chola kings; a tiny, beautiful terracota Ganesha; and the remnants of a furnace and crucibles for melting and moulding metals. The ASI has exposed the outer and inner `prakara' walls with standing pillars on all four sides of the temple. ASI officials called it "the earliest structural temple discovered in Tamil Nadu."The big bricks of the sanctum sanctorum of the Muruga temple showed that it dated back to the late Sangam age or the pre-Pallava period of circa second century A.D, they said.

ANSA) - Rome, March 28 - Italian archeologists working in Iraq have found a trove of ancient stone tablets from the fabled civilisation of Ur. The tablets bear around 500 engravings of a literary and historical nature, according to team leader Silvia Chiodi."This is an an exceptional find," she said, noting that the area in question had previously only yielded prehistoric artefacts. She said the tablets, made of clay and bitumen, were discovered by chance at an archaeological site not far from the location of the ancient city. "I was looking for a wall structure spotted by an airborne photo when I spotted a small inscription on bitumen and then realised it wasn't the only one". An expert on Sumerian civilisation, Giovanni Pettinato, said the finds probably dated back to one of Ur's most prosperous periods.

NORFOLK, Va. -- The site of the village where Jamestown leader Capt. John Smith met the powerful Indian chief Powhatan -- and where Smith said the chief's daughter, Pocahontas, saved his life -- has been approved for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, officials said Monday. Werowocomoco, on Purtan Bay along the York River in Gloucester County, was Powhatan's headquarters when Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was founded in 1607. Powhatan ruled over a native population of about 15,000. "Werowocomoco is a place of native history that becomes part of American history during the Colonial period," said Martin Gallivan, assistant professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg and a member of the Werowocomoco Research Group, which has been studying the site.

This is no ordinary computer virus. Using a real-life virus as a model, researchers have built a virtual version using more than a million digital atoms.Scientists have previously simulated small pieces of living cells, but researchers say this is the first digital simulation of an entire life form.The achievement could lead to a better understanding of the inner workings of viruses and improvements in human health, the researchers say. It could also be used to help build nanomachines surrounded by shells similar to the protein capsid shell that protects viruses and helps them determine when to latch onto potential host cells.

The infamous dino-killer meteor was nothing of the sort, according to a story told by melted glass spheres ejected from the Yucatan's Chicxulub impact crater that landed as far away as Texas and Haiti. The ages and chemical signatures of the glass spherules from northeast Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Texas, and Haiti all indicate that the giant Chicxulub meteorite impact came 300,000 years too early to have been the culprit in one of the Earth's biggest mass extinction events 65 million years ago. "The original spherule layer is not at the K-T boundary," said Chicxulub researcher Markus Harting of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

KING WILLIAM -- Archaeologists will launch one of the biggest investigations of its kind in Virginia history when they begin to explore thousands of acres on the Middle Peninsula this summer.The complex of sites promises such a rich potential for discoveries that one archaeologist likens it to a research park.The thinly settled patchwork of fields and forests abounds with stone tools and other traces left by centuries of Indian inhabitants at places that could be imperiled by a reservoir approved for construction last year.The area also is home to three modern-day Indian tribes that strongly opposed the reservoir.

The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together.The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons.To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size.They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive.