Newsdesk Archive

Spinner dolphins work hard to earn their name. In one astounding leap into the air, they can spin around up to seven times. With underwater movie footage and a mathematical model, scientists can now explain just how dolphins manage the acrobatic feat.Before takeoff, the animal begins its spin underwater.Using its flippers like wings, it starts a gentle barrel roll. The movement is slow because the dolphin's fin and flippers drag against the water, which adds a lot of resistance.

This is to announce a Forum article'Martian Cataclysm: Impact energy analysis in support of the origin of multiple anomolies on Mars'...by Gary R. Spexarth.Full details can be found here and you are invited to discuss this at The Mysteries board on this thread

US experts claim that bones alleged to belong to a founder of the country are authentic and a skeleton buried in the UK, thought to be his sister, is not.The archaeologists in Virginia are arguing with UK experts over American founding father Bartholomew Gosnold, born in Grundisburgh, Suffolk.DNA tests revealed a skeleton buried in Suffolk is not related to the US bones.US experts claim they have the real Gosnold while UK scientists believe the Suffolk skeleton is authentic.

During a routine excavation to inspect the site of Souk El-Khamis in Matariya, an Egyptian- German team uncovered the remains of a sun temple dating back to the reign of King Ramses II. This site is believed to be an important part of the ancient city of Iunu (ancient Heliopolis), which was one of ancient Egypt's three main cities. In addition to being the city of sun worship, Iunu was an astronomical centre and a literary hub, where intellectuals, including Greek philosophers, studied.Among the unearthed artifacts were a pink granite colossus, weighing five tonnes, whose features resemble those of Ramses II, and a 1.5 metre sandstone headless statue of a Pharaonic figure, whose back is engraved in hieroglyphic text. While brushing the sand off, three cartouches of Ramses II were also uncovered, scattered on the temple ground, along with an unidentified pink granite royal head wearing a nemes (head dress).Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Al-Ahram Weekly that further excavations revealed a number of talatat (small painted stones) bearing the name of Queen Nefertiti. "This suggests that the monotheistic King Akhenaten once built a temple or a shrine in this area," he said, adding that archaeological evidence of massive constructions of sun temples had been carried out much earlier that the 19th Dynasty.

Carbon dating has shown that a controversial map drawn in 1763 by a Chinese cartographer is real, and not a modern forgery, it was claimed yesterday. The map could have an important influence on a re-evaluation of Chinese and Western maritime exploration.The map was originally unveiled in Beijing on January 16, attracting interest from across the globe. The owner, Liu Gang, a Chinese lawyer and map collector, said at the time that it was an authentic 1763 copy of a 1418 Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) original. The original map has not been found, but if real, the 1763 copy could be proof that it existed. If so, it gives credence to the theory that Chinese sailors traversed the globe long before their European counterparts. The carbon dating on the 1763 map's paper, undertaken by University of Waikato in New Zealand, showed that the most likely probability of a date, 42.4 per cent, was between 1730 and 1810. The second most likely result was between 1640 and 1690.

While members of the Cassini science team pore over results of their first radio wave study of Saturn's largest moon Titan, the probe's camera operators have released new images of some of the planet's sister moons, including the crater-pocked face of Mimas.Cassini flew behind Titan last weekend to beam radio waves through the moon's thick atmosphere before they reached receiving stations on Earth. The experiment, a first for Cassini, was expected to reveal details about atmospheric temperature, structure and winds.A similar experiment was conducted in 1980 with the Voyager spacecraft.

Stylish clothing, jewelry, makeup and textiles, all dating to 5,000 years ago, have been unearthed in Iran, according to recent reports issued by the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies and the Cultural Heritage News Agency of Iran.Archaeologists there suspect that a state-of-the-art textile industry thrived in ancient Iran, allowing men and women to wear trend-setting, colorful, designed pieces, which may have influenced the clothing styles of other regions. Many related artifacts were found in women's graves located at a site called Burnt City, in the Sistan va Baluchistan province of southeastern Iran.

To learn if Mars ever supported life, researchers should look underground, a scientist presenting results of the Mars Express mission said at a conference this week. The European Space Agency's orbiter has mapped almost the entire planet for minerals that bear chemical fingerprints of past encounters with water. Less than 1 percent of the planet's surface bears signs of hydrated minerals, said Jean-Pierre Bibring, the lead investigator for the Mars Express Omega instrument, which splits and analyzes visible and near-infrared light radiating from the planet's surface. "We initially thought hydrated minerals would be everywhere," Bibring said in an interview. "That turned out to be not the case."

Indigenous Australians dug underground water reservoirs that helped them live on one of the world's driest continents for tens of thousands of years, new research shows.The study, which is the first of its kind, indicates Aboriginal people had extensive knowledge of the groundwater system, says hydrogeologist Brad Moggridge, knowledge that is still held today.Some 70% of the continent is covered by desert or semi-arid land, which meant its original inhabitants needed to know how to find and manage this resource if they were to survive."Aboriginal people survived on one of the driest continents for thousands and thousands of years," says Brad Moggridge, who is from Kamilaroi country in northern New South Wales."Without water you die. They managed that water sustainably."

WARI, Bangladesh (Reuters) - Archaeologists in Bangladesh say they have uncovered part of a fortified citadel dating back to 450 B.C. that could have been a stopping off point along an ancient trade route. So far, a moat round the citadel has been uncovered along with parts of an ancient road at Wari, 85 km (53 miles) northeast of the capital Dhaka."The citadel and a raft of artifacts may help redefine history of India," said Sufi Mostafizur Rahman, head of the department of archaeology at Jahangirnagar University, near Dhaka."The well-planned road with even manholes proves that the citadel was managed by a very efficient administration," Mostafizur added. "I am confident further excavation will lead us to residue of a palace," he said.

WASHINGTON (March 15) - Cosmic nebulae usually look like blobs in space, but astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope reported on Wednesday they have found a nebula twisted like the double helix of DNA.Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm," said Mark Morris of the University of California, Los Angeles. Most nebulae are "formless, amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas," Morris said in a statement, adding that this one "indicates a high degree of order."The discovery of the twisted nebula, which stretches across 80 light-years at the center of the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes Earth, was reported in the current edition of the journal Nature.A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

James Abbot is not having a good day. A massive thunderstorm called a supercell is heading towards Dallas, Texas and Abbot, a member of the city's Emergency Management team, has just made the difficult decision to sound the city's tornado-warning sirens.The supercell spawns several small tornadoes, and then after a brief lull, swells to massive size and unleashes a mega-tornado with wind speeds of over 350 mph. The 1.5-mile-wide twister promises to be the most devastating in history and it's heading straight for downtown Dallas, where Abbot's wife and child are stranded.This is the setup for "Super Tornado," the first episode of a new Discovery Channel television series called "Perfect Disaster." The series examines what might happen if some of Nature's most destructive storms were unleashed on some of the world's most populous cities.

(CBS) As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn't want you to hear but he's going to say them anyway.Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.But he didn't hold back speaking to Pelley, telling 60 Minutes what he knows. Asked if he believes the administration is censoring what he can say to the public, Hansen says: "Or they're censoring whether or not I can say it. I mean, I say what I believe if I'm allowed to say it."

James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago. Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore. "This is real," he says.

Graham Hancock's new book Supernatural focuses attention on the remarkable properties of Ayahuasca, the sacred brew of the Amazon. For those interested in learning more there is a limited opportunity (only four places remaining) to join Graham and Santha in Brazil this July where they will be participating in a two-week seminar at Wasiwaska - the Research Centre for the Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Arts, and Consciousness. Wasiwaska is located in Florianópolis, on the beautiful island of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. It was created by Luis Eduardo Luna, Ph.D to promote research on the use of sacred plants in the fields of anthropology, ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, pharmacology, neuropsychology and consciousness, as well as their cultural and artistic manifestations. Wasiwaska is the site of a developing botanical garden with a variety of species of sacred and medicinal plants.Wasiwaska also houses a small but growing specialized library.Special emphasis is given at Wasiwaska to the documentation and study of Ayahuasca, the sacred brew of the Amazon, used in the past and the present by numerous indigenous groups of the Upper Amazon, by the mestizo riverine population of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, and regarded as a sacrament by several contemporary Brazilian religious organizations.July 4-17: "Altered States of Consciousness, Psychointegrator Plants, Art and Religion.".Invited participants: Graham Hancock, author of Fingerprints of the Gods, and other books on ancient civilizations, and recently of Supernatural, Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, on rock art and altered states of consciousness. Santha Faiia, an outstanding photographer, Hancock´s wife.Clark Heinrich , author of Forbidden Fruit , Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, and with Carl Ruck and Blaise Daniel Staples of The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist.Lectures by Clark Heinrich: Hidden In Plain Sight: Decoding the Symbols of Myth, Religion, and Alchemy; Finding God Without Religion: The Art of Passing In (lecture and workshop).Lectures by Graham Hancock (photography by Santha Faiia): Shamanistic consciousness, the exploration of the Supernatural and its role in human evolution; As above, so below: traces in myth and architecture of an ancient spiritual adventure.For specific information on the July 4-17 seminar please contact Dr Luis Eduardo Luna, [email protected] and cc: Graham Hancock, [email protected] further information on Wasiwaska and its programme of seminars and workshop, follow the article link below

One of the most fascinating natural phenomena on Earth is the flipping of its magnetic field, which has occurred hundreds of times in the last 160 million years. When the magnetic field flips, the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa. The last time this happened was some 780,000 years ago, so we could be heading for another reversal soon. Now, physicists in Italy have found that the frequency of these polarity reversals is not random as previously thought but occurs in clusters, revealing some kind of "memory" of previous events (physics/0603086).Although a full geomagnetic polarity reversal can take thousands of years to complete, the implications could be enormous. As well as affecting the migration trajectories of birds and other animals, the disruption to the Earth's magnetic field could expose the Earth to hazardous cosmic rays -- a scenario that some researchers have linked to mass extinction events like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago. Geoscientists believe that our planet's internal magnetic dynamo is responsible for pole reversals, but the actual mechanism is not well understood. Previous analyses assumed that the number of times the poles have reversed over last 160 million years follows a Poisson distribution, implying that the events are random. The Poisson distribution tells you the probability of a number of events occurring in a fixed time if the events are independent and the average rate is known. A good example of the Poisson distribution in physics is the likelihood of unstable radioactive nuclei decaying in a certain period.

A new study of Earth's bouts of global warming two to five million years ago show more evidence than ever that the fluttering climate patterns of today can settle into a very long El Niño pattern. If so, the rather predictable global climatic effects known to accompany El Niño have a chance of becoming the norm as the planet heats up. "People assume that the current temperature pattern we have in the tropics is really stable over long time periods," said paleoclimatologist Christina Ravelo of the University of California at Santa Cruz. She was referring to today's rather regular oscillations among "normal" El Niño and La Niña wind and ocean temperature patterns. "We're showing that, in fact, it's not stable. It can't quite decide which way to be," she said.

TULUM, Mexico (Reuters) - The ancient Maya once believed that Mexico's jungle sinkholes containing crystalline waters were the gateway to the underworld and the lair of a surly rain god who had to be appeased with human sacrifices.Now, the "cenotes," deep sinkholes in limestone that have pools at the bottom, are yielding scientific discoveries including possible life-saving cancer treatments.Divers are dipping into the cenotes, which stud the Yucatan peninsula, to explore a vast underground river system.Hefting air tanks, guidelines and waterproof lamps, they have so far mapped 405 miles of channels that form part of a huge subterranean river delta flowing into the Caribbean sea, and they are only just starting.Scientists investigating the network of caverns and galleries, formed by rainwater passing through porous limestone, have found a wealth of early archeological relics and prehistoric animal bones.

By Jaideep Sarin, Chandigarh: A 32-acre area that was under cultivation until recently is being touted as the first discovery of a sprawling Harappan city in Haryana that might take months or even years to unravel.Archaeologists exploring the ruins - found under three metres of a mud hillock in the Meham area of Rohtak district - said that an ancient city dating back to the 5,000-year-old Harappan civilisation was being traced. It could be of the Rig Veda era, one official said.Further exploration at the site - referred to as Daksh Khera and located about 100 km from New Delhi - is on. Said state archaeology department director S.N. Roy: "The new site would be fully protected."So far only towns and villages - namely Banawali, Bhirdana, Rakhigarhi and Kunal - dating back to the Harappan civilisation had been found in Haryana. No ancient city had been discovered.Archaeologists made the discovery following a media report that a very old skeleton had been found near Farmana Khas village, 12 km from Meham town.

They were in the wrong place, but Steve Webb's archaeology class decided to stay anyway. A colleague had mistakenly taken them to a site they'd never visited before, a nondescript-looking claypan lost among the pale dunes in the Willandra Lakes region of far western New South Wales. Luckily, Webb thought it would still make good practice fieldwork for his Aboriginal students after a week of classes in the nearby town of Mildura. He was walking behind one of them, 26-year-old Mary Pappin Jr., when she called out that she'd seen something. What she'd spotted on the wind-blown surface looked like a footprint. "We'd all been walking over it," her mother Mary says proudly. "But that little one saw it." What she'd chanced upon is still hard to believe - not only the first Ice Age fossilized human footprints found in Australia, but the largest collection ever found anywhere. "You just don't get this sort of archaeological signature," says Michael Westaway, executive officer of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area. "This is a story, really, for everybody."Today the prints look as sharp as if their makers had just hurried over the top of the nearest dune. "Almost as good as a footprint in wet sand," Webb says. Since the 2003 find, which was announced last December, his team has uncovered around 460 human prints crisscrossing the site like the traces of a peak-hour crowd, many deeply impressed in the sediment, clearly showing where mud once squished between toes.

Image courtesy of University of Liverpool)An archaeologist at the University of Liverpool is examining more than 1,000 Roman silver coins from museums around the world in order to establish their true economic value. Dr Matthew Ponting, from the University's School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, is investigating the chemical composition of the coins to further understanding of how and where they were made. Dr Ponting believes that analysis of the coins will also shed more light on the political and economic issues of the Roman Empire. Dr Ponting and his colleague Professor Kevin Butcher from the American University of Beirut, are using unique analysis techniques to examine the make-up of the coins and establish their silver content. The analysis will also identify particular chemical elements which will help the archaeologists establish where and how the coins were made.

Kimberley archaeologist involved in the research for a controversial book on the northern Western Australian region's rock art has defended the publication.Lee Scott Virtue guided author Ian Wilson to rock art sites while he was researching his book Lost World of the Kimberley, which provides theories on the Gwion Gwion paintings, also known as "Bradshaws".The author has been criticised by the Kimberley Land Council and traditional owner Donny Woolagoodja for not consulting native title holders.But Ms Scott Virtue believes the author does not deserve the flak he is wearing."I do think that the Kimberley Land Council and Donny need to speak with Ian and they need to have a look at what he's written. I think that what they will read should make them very happy," she said.

Conservationists have created a map of potential extinction hotspots, highlighting where humans are set to trigger dramatic declines in animal populations over coming decades.The map pinpoints 20 areas, ranging from the Siberian tundra to the Patagonian coast, where mammals are particularly at risk from human activity, such as deforestation and hunting. The survey was designed to reveal areas where land mammals are thriving but are expected to suffer disproportionately from expected increases in the local human population and changes in habitat.The arc of fertile islands that runs from Indonesia to the South Pacific, the Bahamas, and the vast expanses of Greenland were among the most fragile regions marked, with the musk ox, Seychelles flying fox, brown lemur and North American reindeer topping the list of threatened species.By constructing the map, the scientists hope to help conservation organisations identify regions where they can prevent declines before it is too late.

A large and previously unknown reservoir of water ice may have been found below the surface of Mars, new radar observations suggest.Gaping canyons and river-like channels attest to the fact that large amounts of water once flowed on Mars. But today most of that water has disappeared, and finding out where it went is one of the main aims of research on the Red Planet.Scientists are using the radar antenna onboard Europe's Mars Express spacecraft as a divining rod to scout for any water that may have seeped underground.

The end of the world will come on Dec. 21, 2012. Or not.While some New Age authors and teachers are touting that date as an apocalypse, a Stetson University professor is challenging the reasoning behind it.At a public lecture at the Volusia County Library Center on City Island today, Robert Sitler plans to discuss "The 2012 Phenomenon: A New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar," an article he wrote last month for Nova Religio, the Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.Sitler, an associate professor of Spanish language and literature, has been studying and teaching Mayan culture since arriving at Stetson in 1994. He contends the Mayan calendar has long been the subject of "gross misinterpretation" on several hundred Web sites and in a continuous stream of books.

US climate scientists have recorded a significant rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, pushing it to a new record level.BBC News has learned the latest data shows CO2 levels now stand at 381 parts per million (ppm) - 100ppm above the pre-industrial average. The research indicates that 2005 saw one of the largest increases on record - a rise of 2.6ppm. The figures are seen as a benchmark for climate scientists around the globe.

Hamsters blinded following damage to their optic nerve have had their vision partially restored with the help of an implanted nanoscale scaffold that has encouraged nerve tissue to regrow.The technique, likened by its inventors to the way a garden trellis encourages the growth of ivy, holds out the hope that people with diseased or injured optic nerves might one day recover their sight.The optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain, can be severed by traumatic injuries such as those suffered by people in car crashes. It can also be damaged by glaucoma, when excessive pressure in the eyeball causes tissue at the back of the eye to collapse, pulling nerve fibres apart and so causing progressive loss of vision.

SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil's plans to dam two rivers in the Amazon basin to generate power threaten a treasure trove of animals and plants in a region with one of the world's richest arrays of wildlife, environmentalists say. The government wants to harness the vast hydroelectric potential of the Madeira and Xingu rivers in multibillion dollar projects meant to boost electricity supply and ward off a repeat of a power crisis that crippled growth in 2001. The government's plans run counter to advice from experts at the World Commission on Dams (WCD), an independent body of international experts, who say dams should be avoided in areas rich in species -- like the Amazon which is home to an estimated 30 percent of the world's animal and plant species. "The Amazon, Congo, Nile, Parana and Yangtze watersheds are the most species-rich, with the Amazon far ahead," WCD specialists said in a report.

An Interview with Jacques ValleeHunt for the SkinwalkerTimothy Leary and Aleister Crowley Margaret Starbird on Mary Magdalene Loren Coleman Profiler Plus: Cameron Gray, Alan AlfordDownload your free copy here(Note: File size appx. 12Mb)In this issue there is an exclusive interview with a legend of ufology, Dr Jacques Vallee.Also, an insider look at the "Skinwalker Ranch", bought by billionaire Robert Bigelow as part of a research project for his NIDS Margaret Starbird gives us an insight into the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, and John Higgs shares a great essay on Timothy Leary's affinity with Aleister Crowley (and our Adam's illustration for the piece is unbelievable).Beyond that, we have a beautiful showcase of artist Cameron Gray's work, and the usual columns, news and reviews.

A 2000-year-old carving of a so-called "northern god", adopted by the Romans for protection and good luck, has been uncovered in Northumberland. The 40cm high figure, holding a shield in one hand and spear or sword in the other, was discovered near Chesters Fort on Hadrian's Wall. Experts say the find is exciting as it helps shed light on how people used local idols for protection. The carving is thought to be that of Cocidius, a Romano-British warrior god. Rock art expert Tertia Barnett said: "This is a completely unexpected discovery.

LONDON, (CAIS) -- The oldest observatory was discovered in Gur city, Fars province, along with frescos of Sasanid princes.The Iran-Germany archaeological team, headed by Professor Dietrich Hoff, in its excavations first reached a circular structure which led to the Iranian observatory, dating back to the first Islamic century. Similar buildings have previously been found in the Indian cities of New Delhi and Jaipur, ISNA reported.The adobe structure is in excellent condition. Its diameter is about 5.65 meters and there are 12 zodiac signs on the structure.

New evidence has been found linking underwater catastrophic sand avalanches to rapid sea-level changes in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, according to marine geologists affiliated with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP).By analyzing sediment cores, IODP scientists are reconstructing the history of a sea-floor area formed approximately 20,000 years ago, when sea level fell so low the Texas shoreline shifted almost 100 miles to the south. The data are important to reconstructing climate change history and gathering insights into the development and placement of natural resources."These new results will help scientists better understand the processes that occur with shifts in sea level," said Rodey Batiza, program director in NSF's division of ocean sciences, which supports IODP. "What is preserved in ancient ocean sediments can shed light on sea-floor processes going on today."

VESUVIUS, the volcano that obliterated Pompeii in AD79, has the capacity to make that event look like a sideshow, volcanologists have found. early 4,000 years ago it erupted far more violently, destroying the area of present-day Naples and sending a Bronze Age population fleeing for their lives. Michael Sheridan, of the University of Buffalo, and a group of Italian colleagues investigated the remains of the eruption, called the Avellino catastrophe after a village that bore the brunt of it.They studied the well-preserved remains of Nola, another village about ten miles (16 km) northeast of Vesuvius, where volcanic deposits overwhelmed the settlement 3,780 years ago. They also found evidence that thousands of people fled as the eruption began, leaving footprints solidified in cooling ash.

The sun is in a relatively quiet period now, but is expected to get more active soon, scientists said. However, there is disagreement as to whether the active period will start within months -- late 2006 or early 2007 -- or years, with the first signs in late 2007 or early 2008.Whenever it begins, the new forecasting method shows sunspot activity is likely to be 30 percent to 50 percent stronger than the last active period. The peak of the last cycle was in 2001, the researchers said, but the period of activity can span much of a decade.The strongest solar cycle in recent memory occurred in the late 1950s, when there were few satellites aloft, no astronauts in orbit and less reliance on electrical power grids than there is now.

Footprints preserved in ash show speed of destruction when Mount Vesuvius erupted 3,800 years ago.WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bronze-age farmers escaping a volcanic eruption abandoned their homes in and around what is today the Italian city of Naples, leaving food and cooking implements on their tables as they fled.Others were trapped and died where they had lived, their bodies a warning that the modern city needs to consider the threat from Mount Vesuvius in planning for the future, said Michael Sheridan, a geology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo."Scenes of everyday life, frozen by the volcanic deposits, testify that people suddenly left," Sheridan and co-authors report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rare manuscripts dubbed the "dead sea scrolls of Buddhism" have been carbon dated to the first and fifth centuries AD by Australian scientists, and could be the missing link in Buddhist history, a local scholar says.Mark Allon, a University of Sydney research fellow, commissioned the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANTSO) to carry out tests on two international collections of birch bark scrolls.The scrolls, written in an ancient language derived from Sanskrit and known as the Senior collection and the Schoyen collection, are privately owned.They were discovered in Afghanistan during the war-torn country's post-Soviet upheaval, making their way into the antiquities market in the period of Taliban rule.

Archaeologists working on a housing development found a prehistoric milling site estimated to be 8,000 years old, officials said.Large, chunky arrowheads, stone slabs used to grind seeds and acorns, hearths and scorched rocks were among the items found at the site at the base of the Angeles National Forest. No human or animal bones were discovered, according to archeologists from Cogstone Resource Management Inc.The Santa Ana consulting firm was hired by Azusa Land Partners, the company that's developing 1,250 homes on the 520-acre site. Workers removed and catalogued about 100 tools and implements used by the Tongva, or "People of the Earth," who lived in the area before Europeans arrived.I'm very happy the proper steps are being taken in the preservation and recording of this very integral part of local and regional history," said Jeffrey Cornejo, chairman of the Azusa Cultural Preservation Commission. "I hope it will be celebrated and enjoyed by the public and used as a learning tool."

March 9, 2006: NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about this mysterious moon."We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms." Left: Icy fountains shoot out of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It has the face of a rat and the tail of a skinny squirrel -- and scientists say this creature discovered living in central Laos is pretty special: It's a species believed to have been extinct for 11 million years.The long-whiskered rodent made international headlines last spring when biologists declared they'd discovered a new species, nicknamed the Laotian rock rat.It turns out the little guy isn't new after all, but a rare kind of survivor: a member of a group until now known only from fossils.

Stone tools found at one of the South's most important early prehistoric sites could date back 250,000 years, archaeologists claim.The historic finds were uncovered at a former gravel quarry on the Isle of Wight during digs last summer.Flint axes found near Great Pan Farm, Newport, are thought to be of the sort used by Neanderthal man. Elephant teeth from the same period were also found.Specialists are now to carry out further investigations of the site.

March 10, 2006: It's official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet. Like the quiet before a storm.This week researchers announced that a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.That was a solar maximum. The Space Age was just beginning: Sputnik was launched in Oct. 1957 and Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) in Jan. 1958. In 1958 you couldn't tell that a solar storm was underway by looking at the bars on your cell phone; cell phones didn't exist. Even so, people knew something big was happening when Northern Lights were sighted three times in Mexico. A similar maximum now would be noticed by its effect on cell phones, GPS, weather satellites and many other modern technologies.

This is to announce a Forum article'The Orion Zone: Ancient Star Cities of the American Southwest'...by Gary A. David.Full details can be found here and you are invited to discuss this at The Mysteries board on this thread

Five siblings from Turkey who can only walk on all fours could provide science with an insight into human evolution, researchers have said. The three sisters and two brothers could yield clues to why our ancestors made the transition from four-legged to two-legged animals, says a UK expert. But Professor Nicholas Humphrey rejects the idea that there is a "gene" for bipedalism, or upright walking.A BBC documentary about the family will be shown on Friday 17 March. Professor Humphrey, from the London School of Economics (LSE), says that our own species' transition to walking on two feet must have been a more complex process that involved many changes to the skeleton and to the human genetic make-up. However, a German group says a genetic abnormality does seem to be involved in the siblings' gait.

The New York TimesProviding the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny. Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance.

Warsaw - Five of Europe's most ancient graves, dating back 10,000 years, have been unearthed in the village of Dwreca, central Poland. Archaeologist Marian Marciniak found the graves on the site of ancient post-glacial dunes, the Rzeczpospolita daily reported. In them, a young woman, believed aged 18 to 21, was put to rest with a baby, a child aged 5 to 7 and another aged 7 to 11. An adult male found at the site was buried sitting upright, as if on a throne or chair.

Is the big bang of immunology a big mistake? A new study of DNA from the lowly purple sea urchin now threatens to spoil, or at least modify, a popular explanation for how the complex immune system of people and other vertebrates originated.Almost all multicellular animals have an arsenal of cells or molecules that broadly target potentially dangerous microbes. But jawed vertebrates, such as sharks and humans, also possess a so-called adaptive immune system that tailors the body's defenses to thwart a specific pathogen. As part of this system, two enzymes called Rag1 and Rag2 cut apart and rearrange DNA within immune cells, helping to create the body's millions of unique antibodies and T cell receptors--each specific for a particular microbe.But just where the genes for these enzymes came from has been a mystery. They had never been found in unjawed vertebrates or invertebrates, so some scientists speculated that Rag genes must have somehow "jumped" into the genome of a jawed vertebrate about 450 million years ago (ScienceNow, 19 August 1998:).

A giant crater made by a meteorite impact millions of years ago has been discovered in Egypt's western desert. Boston University experts found the 31km (19 mile) wide crater while studying satellite images of the area. It is more than twice the size of the next largest Saharan impact depression and more than 25 times the size of Arizona's famous Meteor Crater.The American team that found it says its sheer size may have helped it escape detection all these years.

TEHRAN -- The team of archaeologists working at historical sites of Zanjan Province recently discovered several dishes and a brass arrowhead dating back to the Iron Age, the Persian service of CHN reported on Saturday.The discoveries were made at the historical sites of Abhar and Khorramdarreh.The archaeologists were surprised to discover Iron Age artifacts in Zanjan Province.

Divers have found timbers they believe to be remains of the world's oldest known ship off Hayling Island near Portsmouth, England. Radiocarbon dated to 6,431 years ago, the timbers were discovered in 30 feet of water by a team led by British sport diver Don Boullivant. "We have been searching the area for quite some time, looking for Roman wrecks," says Boullivant. "When we came across the worked oak timbers, we were certain that we had finally found one. To our great surprise the wood is older by 4,000 years."If the find is confirmed, the ship will predate the earliest known depictions of boats from predynastic Egypt, which date to the mid-fourth millennium B.C., by more than 1,000 years, and the earliest known Northern European ship by 3,000 years. Until now the oldest vessel from Northern Europe has been a 3,300-year-old, 50-foot-long boat discovered at Dover, England, in 1992.

THE ISLAND of Iona off the west coast of Scotland is steeped in ancient lore and mystery. Known internationally as the monastic birthplace of Scottish religion, it is a place of pilgrimage and deep spirituality.St Columba landed there in 563 AD with 13 followers and established a monastery. This isolated island, off the south-western tip of Mull, was soon to become the intellectual powerhouse of the medieval world.There are those who say that Columba didn't choose this island by accident, but that it is a place which has magnetically attracted spiritual seekers since before the birth of Christ. To them this island is a special place thought to have been the repository of many ancient items and many ancient mysteries.They believe that Iona once housed an incredible library and held the most extraordinary books known to man. Think Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or the recent international best-seller The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason and consider that a hunt for hidden knowledge and elusive manuscripts could actually be very real.

IS it simply a coincidence or do certain laws of nature lie behind the phenomenon? A new mystery has recently been uncovered on the 30 degrees Northern Latitude, following upon other great mysteries such as the pyramids, Noah's ark and the Bermuda Triangle. The new finding on this mysterious latitude is to do with the ancient Mystical Caves at Huashan, near the famous Huangshan Mountain in China's Anhui Province. Although tests on chiselled stones showed that the caves have existed for at least 1,500 years, it was only about 15 months ago that they were first discovered by a local farmer, by accident. The neatly chiselled walls and roofs, the big pillars and stone stairs, indicate that the caves were dug by men. Yet nobody knows for what purpose the ancient people excavated them. Not a single word about the caves has ever been found among China's numerous ancient records although their size has already ranked them as the biggest ever discovered so far in China.

Archaeologists announced Sunday that they have discovered an ancient sun temple containing large statues of the pharaoh Ramses II under an outdoor marketplace in Cairo, Egypt. The temple was found in a suburb of Cairo called Ain Shams. The site was once part of the ancient city of Heliopolis, which served as the center of sun worship in ancient Egypt. The chief sun god, Re, was the patron sun god of Heliopolis.Ramses II, who is believed to have ruled Egypt from around 1279 to 1213 B.C., is known for his military exploits and monumental building projects. To celebrate his victories, he erected statues and temples to himself all over Egypt."The area where we are excavating now is where Ramses II of the 19th dynasty [1320 to 1200 B.C.] built an enormous temple for Re, the largest temple of Ramses II ever found," said Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo.

ANSA) - Palermo, February 28 - An ancient Phoenician temple unearthed in Sicily is "unique" in the West, the head of the Italian dig team claims."You have to go all the way to Amrit in Syria to find a similar one," said Lorenzo Nigro of the Rome University team .The temple came to light last year after a portion of a lagoon surrounding the Phoenician city of Motya (present-day Mozia) was drained.The pool began to fill up again and a fresh-water spring was found - a fact Nigro believes proves it was used as a holy place.

Europe's "Little Ice Age" may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study.Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands, says. The Little Ice Age was a period of some 300 years when Europe experienced a dip in average temperatures.

A geometrical figure commonly attributed to Archimedes in 300 BC has been identified in Minoan wall paintings dated to over 1,000 years earlier.The mathematical features of the paintings suggest that the Minoans of the Late Bronze Age, around 1650 BC, had a much more advanced working knowledge of geometry than has previously been recognized, says computer scientist Constantin Papaodysseus of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and his colleagues.The paintings appear in a building that is still being excavated and restored in the ancient Minoan town of Akrotiri on the island of Thera. A catastrophic eruption of the volcano on Thera, now known as Santorini, around 1650 BC, is thought to have dealt a fatal blow to the Minoan culture. The blast covered Akrotiri, on the island's southern coast, in a thick layer of ash that preserved many buildings and artefacts.

A group of German scientists has deciphered the meaning of one of the most spectacular archeological discoveries in recent years: The mystery-shrouded sky disc of Nebra was used as an advanced astronomical clock. The purpose of the 3,600 year-old sky disc of Nebra, which caused a world-wide sensation when it was brought to the attention of the German public in 2002, is no longer a matter of speculation. A group of German scholars who studied this archaeological gem has discovered evidence which suggests that the disc was used as a complex astronomical clock for the harmonization of solar and lunar calendars."This is a clear expansion of what we knew about the meaning and function of the sky disc," said archeologist Harald Meller.

On the walls of dozens of caves in southern France and northern Spain lie some of the most majestic works of art ever painted. Drawn 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, the paintings have puzzled anthropologists since they were discovered more than four decades ago.Where did this astonishing display of talent come from? Why did these prehistoric societies decide to paint these scenes in such remote locations? And what inspired them to paint the strange array of bisons, horses and therianthropes (part animal, part man)?A scientific consensus of sorts has finally emerged on one of those questions: Although there are still dissenters, a majority of anthropologists now champion the theory that the paintings in Europe were the work of shamans, and in part the product of trance states, likely induced by psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in some species of mushrooms).Similarly, South African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams maintains that the remarkable rock art of the San people of southern Africa, also painted at least 25,000 years ago, is the result of shamanic trances created by drumming and ritual ecstatic dancing.In his new book, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, published by Random House, British writer Graham Hancock has taken Prof. Lewis-Williams's research as a point of departure to posit a theory as fascinating as it is provocative: If it's true that cave art derives from altered states of consciousness, then it constitutes a watershed moment in human history, marking the first visible encounter with the supernatural, the first expression of spiritual myth.

A claim that Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code copied the ideas of two other authors has gone before London's High Court. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh say Mr Brown stole "the whole architecture" of research that went into their 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Both books contain the idea Jesus had a child. They are suing publisher Random House, which denies the allegation. Mr Brown attended the court on Monday as a judge heard initial submissions.

Workmen have unearthed 1,000 years of history on a County Down building site. They have come upon an underground stone-built tunnel in Raholp, where our ancestors might have hidden from the Vikings or from warring neighbours. Archaeologist Ken Neill said that with chambers off from the main tunnel it was a quite complicated souterrain, and probably built by better off farmers. The opening that led to the tunnel - which leads into the hillside - will be sealed and the passage left alone. "It was really somewhere for you to get down and hide when your area was being attacked by your neighbours or Vikings," he said. "You would get down into this and you would be relatively safe.

A 260,000-year-old partial skeleton excavated in northwestern China 22 years ago represents our largest known female ancestor, according to a new analysis of the individual's extensive remains. This ancient woman puts a modern twist on Stone Age human evolution, say Karen R. Rosenberg of the University of Delaware in Newark, Lü Zuné of Peking University in Beijing, and Chris B. Ruff of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. The fossil individual's large size and the apparent adaptation of her body to cold conditions are "consistent with the idea that patterns of human anatomical variation that we see today have deep evolutionary roots," Rosenberg asserts. Although the woman belonged to the Homo genus, her species is uncertain. Now known as the Jinniushan specimen, she stood roughly 5 feet, 5-1/2 inches tall and tipped the scales at 173 pounds, the three anthropologists estimate. The only Stone Age Homo woman known to have approached that size weighed an estimated 163 pounds. Her partial skeleton came from a 100,000-year-old Neandertal site in France.

THE mystery of why nature favours the left-handed - at least when it comes to amino acids - may have a simple answer. It could all be down to an obscure property of water. When amino acids are made in the lab, they come in mirror-image pairs. Though both forms behave identically in most chemical reactions, biological processes use only the left-handed (L) variety. In an attempt to explain this puzzling bias, Uwe Meierhenrich at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis in France suggested last year that circularly polarised radiation may have preferentially destroyed right-handed (D) amino acids arriving from space, leaving behind L-amino acids to form the building blocks of life.Now Meir Shinitzky at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, has suggested the answer may lie here on Earth.

By David Keys, London:THE ancestors of modern Europeans arrived on the continent up to 3500 years earlier than first thought and colonised it much more rapidly than once believed.A combination of dating breakthroughs analysed in the latest issue of the science journal Nature is enabling archaeologists to push back the date for Homo sapiens' entry into Europe from 43,000 years to between 44,000 and 46,500 years ago.The developments also reveal how modern humans crossed the continent from the Balkans to the Atlantic in 2500 years rather than 3500 years, as previously believed.They would have met stiff resistance from the indigenous Neanderthal population as, generation by generation, they pushed westward as climatic conditions improved, said Paul Mellars, the author of the article.

Remains of the ancient Maya culture, mysteriously destroyed at the height of its reign in the ninth century, have been hidden in the rainforests of Central America for more than 1,000 years. Now, NASA and university scientists are using space- and aircraft-based "remote-sensing" technology to uncover those ruins, using the chemical signature of the civilization's ancient building materials.NASA archaeologist Tom Sever and scientist Dan Irwin, both from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., are teaming with William Saturno, an archaeologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, to locate the ruins of the ancient culture."From the air, everything but the tops of very few surviving pyramids are hidden by the tree canopy," said Sever, widely recognized for two decades as a pioneer in the use of aerospace remote-sensing for archaeology. "On the ground, the 60- to 100-foot trees and dense undergrowth can obscure objects as close as 10 feet away. Explorers can stumble right through an ancient city that once housed thousands -- and never even realize it." Sever has explored the capacity of remote-sensing, the science of collecting information about the Earth's surface using aerial or space-based photography, to serve archaeology. He and Irwin provided Saturno with high-resolution commercial satellite images of the rainforest, and collected data from NASA's Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar, an instrument flown aboard a high-altitude weather plane, capable of penetrating clouds, snow and forest canopies.

Working late in the developmental biology lab one night, Matthew Harris of the University of Wisconsin noticed that the beak of a mutant chicken embryo he was examining had fallen off. Upon closer examination of the snubbed beak, he found tiny bumps and protuberances along its edge that looked like teeth--alligator teeth to be specific. The accidental discovery revealed that chickens retain the ability to grow teeth, even though birds lost this feature long ago. The finding also resurrected the controversial theory of one of the founders of comparative anatomy, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire. In the early 19th century, Saint-Hillaire observed that developing parrots have tiny bumps on their beaks that resemble teeth, something he ascribed to modern animals deriving from more basic primitive forms. But due to his developing battles with Georges Cuvier over evolution, the finding was forgotten until Harris, a graduate student, rediscovered it nearly 200 years later.

Kunming, Feb. 21 (Xinhuanet) -- A group of dinosaur fossils, dating back 120 million years, has been excavated in the Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Yunnan Province.Archaeologists in the province found an almost intact a set of dinosaur fossil which is more than 10 meters long and 2.3 meters high. Also found were dozens of fossils of dinosaur limb bones, claws and backbones in Anlongbao Town of Shuangbai County in the past two months.Based on initial research, these herbivorous dinosaurs were believed to live in the late Trias or early Jurassic periods, saidWang Guofu, a research fellow with Chuxiong Museum, which houses the unearthed dinosaur fossils.Wang said there was the possibility that a new dinosaur species would be found among the fossils

THE Roman arena may have played host to appalling brutality in the name of entertainment, but at least the gladiators who fought there maintained certain standards. A forensic analysis of remains from a gladiator cemetery at Ephesus in Turkey reveals that unlike the gory free-for-all depicted in films like Ridley Scott's Gladiator, real gladiators stuck to strict rules of combat and did not resort to the savage violence and mutilation typical of battlefields of the era.The forensic work may also confirm what historians had previously suspected - that gladiators whom the crowd condemned to death were often still alive when dragged from the arena, and were in fact dispatched by a final hammer blow to the head from a backstage executioner.Much of what we understand about gladiatorial combat comes from Roman artwork, which suggests that gladiators were well matched in their capabilities, and followed sets of rules enforced by two referees.

Scientists have recreated Martian conditions in test tubes, producing a "disinfectant" that may help explain the planet's rusty red color and why life and organic material have not been found on the surface.The chemical is superoxide; a "free radical" or oxidant like those implicated in human cell damage from cigarette smoking, radiation and diseases like heart disease and cancer."You would not expect life to exist at the immediate surface of Mars because production of these oxygen radicals will destroy organic molecules," said planetary geochemist Albert Yen of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "If life exists on Mars, it needs to be in a place where these chemicals dont exist."That means microbial life would have to hide more than four inches (10 centimeters) underground, in cracks in rocks, in groundwater or near the polar caps, he said

WASHINGTON - A small branch of a South American religious sect may use hallucinogenic tea as part of a ritual intended to connect with God, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.In its first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court said the government cannot hinder religious practices without proof of a "compelling" need to do so."This is a very important decision for minority religious freedom in this country," said lawyer John Boyd, who represents about 130 U.S. members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal who live in New Mexico, California and Colorado.The tea, which contains an illegal drug known as DMT, is considered sacred to members of the sect, which has a blend of Christian beliefs and South American traditions. Members believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea, which is consumed twice a month at four-hour ceremonies.

The huge, ferocious North American Tyrannosaurus rex was a rigid and stiff beast with razor-sharp sensory skills, according to new research presented Friday at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis.CT scans allowed Lawrence Witmer, from Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, to explore the inside of a four-foot-long T. rex skull and look for regions that were unusually developed. Several 3-D visualizations of the brain cavity, nerve and vascular trunks, and the labyrinth of the inner ear, revealed that the beast had surprisingly well-developed smell, hearing and balance, normally features typical of smaller and more agile animals.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- The commander of the next space shuttle said Friday that NASA has taken the right steps to reduce the amount of potentially lethal foam that falls off during launch."We will lose foam on this flight, just like every other," said commander Steven Lindsey, who could lead a crew into space as early as May. "The key is to make sure that the foam we do lose is a small enough size so it can't hurt us if it hits the vehicle."NASA had redesigned the external fuel tank after a large piece of insulating foam hit the wing of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, sparking the disaster that killed seven astronauts.

New research on an excavated Bronze Age burial mound in south Wales has revealed links to funeral sites as far away as the Orkney Islands. The burial mound on the Black Mountain in Carmarthenshire was unearthed by Cambria Archaeology in 2004 after it was feared that the weather and visitors to the area were causing permanent damage to the site. Archaeologists discovered a large rectangular stone cist at the centre of the mound containing the cremated bones of a young child, a pottery urn, a bone pin and several flint tools. The cist also contained the cremated bones of two pigs and what is though to be a dog. Research revealed that second later burial took place at the site, which was added to the side of the mound.

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon portrays the pagan emperor Maxentius as a licentious youth and "a tyrant as contemptible as he was odious." Historians have long assumed that the reviled Roman emperor lived part-time at an 80-acre suburban villa complex until he was killed by his rival Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in A.D. 312. But a University of Colorado-led archaeology team has uncovered evidence that the villa's main hall was never occupied. Instead, it appears to have been abandoned before completion, said CU archaeologist Diane Conlin, co-director of the Maxentius project, a five-year excavation that began last summer.

At grahamhancock.com we are used to being at the receiving end of vile and intemperate attacks by archaeologists accusing us of being "pseudo-archaeologists", pseudo-scientists, etc., and of advocating "fringe", "cult" or "fantastic" ideas about history and prehistory. It is refreshing to discover, however, that not all archaeologists share this knee-jerk hostility towards alternative ideas about the past. Assistant Professor Cornelius Holtorf, criticises some influential figures within mainstream archaeology for attempting to form "a special state police force dedicated to eradicating interpretations that are considered false or inappropriate by a self-selected jury." Holtorf goes on to argue that "modern society might benefit more from inquiring minds than from passive students to whom factual knowledge is taught, however much that knowledge consists of 'pure truth'." Join in discussion here

An ancient North Yorkshire monument has been recognised as being almost 1,000 years older than the pyramids of Giza. Researchers at Newcastle University have found the Thornborough Henges are one of the earliest major monuments aligned to the constellation Orion. The 5,500-year-old earthworks, north of Ripon, and the Egyptian pyramids are thought to have been built to mirror Orion's belt for its religious focus. The research will be published in 2007 in a new report on the henges complex.

Life on Earth was unlikely to have emerged from volcanic springs or hydrothermal vents, according to a leading US researcher. Experiments carried out in volcanic pools suggest they do not provide the right conditions to spawn life. The findings are being discussed at an international two-day meeting to explore the latest thinking on the origin of life on Earth. It is taking place at the Royal Society in London.

The Mars rover Spirit has hit a home run by landing in a rugged plateau dubbed "Home Plate," but scientists are still trying to decipher its geology.The six-wheeled Spirit reached the northern edge of the broad mesa last week about four months after climbing down from a Martian hill as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Scientists believe "Home Plate," which stands about 6 feet high, holds important geologic clues to the Red Planet's past.So far, scientists say they are puzzled by what they have seen. Unlike other areas of Gusev Crater that Spirit has analyzed, "Home Plate" is made of a highly layered rocks that are coarse at the bottom and fine at the top."It's stunning ... by far the best layering we've ever seen at Gusev," principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University recently posted on his Web site.

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) -- Archaeologists have unearthed a massive tomb in the northern Greek town of Pella, capital of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia and birthplace of Alexander the Great.The eight-chambered tomb dates to the Hellenistic Age between the fourth and second century B.C., and is the largest of its kind ever found in Greece. The biggest multichambered tombs until now contained three chambers.The 678-square-foot (63-square-meter) tomb hewn out of rock was discovered by a farmer plowing his field on the eastern edge of the ancient cemetery of Pella, some 370 miles (595 kilometers) north of Athens, archaeologists said."This is the largest and most monumental tomb of its kind ever found in Greece," said Maria Akamati, who led the excavations.

WEST COLUMBIA - An archaeological dig in one of Texas' oldest cemeteries Saturday failed to find the mass graves of 248 Mexican War soldiers that local lore has long said were buried there.The dig did, however, uncover some other historical mysteries. "I knew we would find some answers," said Texas A&M archaeologist Alston Thoms, "and I was fairly sure they wouldn't be the answers we were looking for."Generations of local residents have grown up hearing stories of 248 Mexican War soldiers who died in an epidemic being buried in a mass grave of the old Columbia Cemetery, said Sands Weems III, a director of the association that operates the cemetery. Sixteen Civil War soldiers also were said to have been buried there, Weems said.

NASA's top climate scientist has accused the Bush administration of trying to stop him from speaking out after he called for swift cuts in emissions of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming in a recent lecture.James Hansen, director of the US space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his forthcoming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard website and requests for media interviews, the New York Times reported on Sunday."They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," said Hansen, who told the paper he would ignore the restrictions.Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA, denied that there was any effort to silence Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."

The ashes of an ancient chief or priest who lived three centuries before the legendary founding of Rome have been unearthed in the heart of the city, archaeologists report. The remains were discovered late January inside a funerary urn at the bottom of a deep pit, along with bowls and jars, all encased in a hutlike box. The artifacts date to about 1000 B.C. The size and richness of the tomb suggest that the ashes are the remains of a high-ranking individual, said the researchers who made the discovery.A team of archaeologists with the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Rome Municipality discovered the prehistoric tomb under the sprawling ruins of ancient imperial forums that still lie in the center of modern Rome. (See photos of Rome.)Between 1999 and 2000 the researchers had found two smaller, barer graves near this latest pit that date to the same period

Some 10,000 years after the last of their kind wandered the North American and Eurasian wilderness, woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) remain a fascinating subject of study for scientists, with implications for understanding the evolutionary origins of present day mammals. Mammoths and elephants belong to one of the most ancient mammalian groups and various recent studies have debated the genetic relationships between them. Now, scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences have weighed in on the issue, with results supported by the oldest mitochondrial genome sequence determined to date from the remains of a mammoth that died approximately 33,000 years ago.In "Complete mitochondrial genome and phylogeny of Pleistocene mammoth Mammuthus primigenius," published in the February 7 issue of PLoS Biology, a publication of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Evgeny I. Rogaev, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at UMass Medical School and professor of genetics at the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, with colleagues from the Brudnick Neuropsychiatric Research Insitute at UMass Medical School, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University and the University of California-San Diego, report the sequence of the complete mitochondrial genome (16,842 base pairs) of a woolly mammoth extracted from permafrost-preserved remains from the Pleistocene epoch, a period of time usually dated from between 1.6-1.9 million to about 10,000 years before present. Their study demonstrates that the woolly mammoth and the Asian elephant are a sister species that diverged soon after their common ancestor split from the lineage of the African elephant.

The same genes that give sharks their sixth sense and allow them to detect electrical signals are also responsible for the development of head and facial features in humans, a new study suggests.The finding supports the idea that the early sea creatures which eventually evolved into humans could also sense electricity before they emerged onto land.The study, led by Martin Cohn and his lab at the University of Florida, is detailed in the current issue of the journal Evolution & Development.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- A Russian astronomer has predicted that Earth will experience a "mini Ice Age" in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity. Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory in St. Petersburg said Monday that temperatures will begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reaches its peak, RIA Novosti reported. The coldest period will occur 15 to 20 years after a major solar output decline between 2035 and 2045, Abdusamatov said.

In Egyptian myth, Apophis was the ancient spirit of evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness.A fitting name, astronomers reasoned, for a menace now hurtling towards Earth from outerspace. Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere. And, scientists insist, there is actually very little time left to decide. At a recent meeting of experts in near-Earth objects (NEOs) in London, scientists said it could take decades to design, test and build the required technology to deflect the asteroid. Monica Grady, an expert in meteorites at the Open University, said: "It's a question of when, not if, a near Earth object collides with Earth. Many of the smaller objects break up when they reach the Earth's atmosphere and have no impact. However, a NEO larger than 1km [wide] will collide with Earth every few hundred thousand years and a NEO larger than 6km, which could cause mass extinction, will collide with Earth every hundred million years. We are overdue for a big one."

One of the last great mysteries of the history of the independent Welsh nation was apparently solved yesterday by a group of English historians working for the BBC.For centuries, people living in and around the chicken farm called Pen y Bryn on top of a hill overlooking the Menai Straits in Caernarvonshire have been convinced that it is a royal place.More than that, they all firmly believed that the 36-acre farm was the last remnant of the palace of Llywelyn, the first and last prince of a "free" Wales, who died in 1282.

Some of the world's most precious archaeological treasures - the ancient Egyptian tombs and temples at Luxor - are being devastated by salt water that is eating their foundations, scientists have discovered.The temples of Amun, Luxor and Karnak, designated World Heritage Sites, have survived 4,000 years of arid desert heat but are now being destroyed by rising ground water.The threat has been uncovered by American Egyptologists, who have warned that urgent action is now needed. Their view has been backed by Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. 'When I found out the Temple of Luxor and the Temple of Karnak were going to completely fall apart because of the rising water table, I was shocked,' Hawass said in an interview in Science.

Antarctica has at least 145 small lakes buried under its ice and one large one called Vostok. Now scientists have found the second and third largest known bodies of subsurface liquid water there. xotic ecosystems frozen in time may thrive in the lakes, untouched for 35 million years, scientists said.Vostok has a surface area of 5,400 square miles. One of the newfound lakes measures 770 square miles in size, or roughly the size of Rhode Island. The other is about 620 square miles. Both sit under more than 2 miles of ice and are about a half-mile deep based on observed differences in gravity."Over the lakes, the pull of gravity is much weaker, so we know there must be a big hole down there," said Robin Bell, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Malcolm Bell III, an archaeology professor at the University of Virginia, was walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York one spring day in 1987 when his eye caught a display of two small silver horns, dated to the third century B.C.As chief archaeologist at an excavation at Morgantina, site of an ancient Greek colony in eastern Sicily, Bell had heard whispered reports that two such horns had been looted from the site in the early 1980s. "They had to be the same," he recalled in an interview on Dec. 1. "I just put two and two together."Seventeen years later, his hunch has been proved right. The Metropolitan Museum has offered to return 15 pieces of Hellenistic silver, including the horns, to Italy, where government officials for years have charged that the set was stolen.Met representatives made the proposal to return the silver, as well as a 2,500-year-old vase painted by the Greek artist Euphronius, to the culture minister in Rome. If the proposal is accepted, the museum would receive long-term loans for art from Italy of "equivalent beauty and importance," the Met said in a statement Thursday.

(ANSA) - Tivoli, February 3 - Hadrian's Villa has unveiled its latest secret, a monumental staircase complete with huge columns and a giant sphinx.Archaeologists said the stairway, found in an area known as the Gymnasium, was probably the original entrance to the sprawling complex.A statue of an athlete and a huge theatrical mask, both in marble, were also found at the site."These are extraordinary finds," said the archaeologist who made the discoveries, Zaccaria Mari ."The coloured marble on the columns is simply superb while the sphinx is an amazing work." Mari said the 8.5m wide staircase and the statuary were probably made around the end of the villa's construction, towards 130 AD, but the 2.5m long sphinx might be even older.

OVER THE NORTHERN GULF COAST (AP) -- Last year's record hurricane season didn't just change life for humans. It changed nature, too.Everywhere scientists look, they see disrupted patterns in and along the Gulf of Mexico. Coral reefs, flocks of sea birds, crab- and shrimp-filled meadows and dune-crowned beaches were wrapped up in -- and altered by -- the force of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Dennis."Nothing's been like this," said Abby Sallenger, a U.S. Geological Survey oceanographer, during a recent flight over the northern Gulf Coast to study shoreline changes.For him, the changes are mind-boggling: Some barrier islands are nearly gone; on others, beaches are scattered like bags of dropped flour.

Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday. Despite accelerated movement over the past century, the possibility that Earth's modestly fading magnetic field will collapse is remote. But the shift could mean Alaska may no longer see the sky lights known as auroras, which might then be more visible in more southerly areas of Siberia and Europe. The magnetic poles are part of the magnetic field generated by liquid iron in Earth's core and are different from the geographic poles, the surface points marking the axis of the planet's rotation. Scientists have long known that magnetic poles migrate and in rare cases, swap places. Exactly why this happens is a mystery. "This may be part of a normal oscillation and it will eventually migrate back toward Canada," Joseph Stoner, a paleomagnetist at Oregon State University, said Thursday at an American Geophysical Union meeting.

ATHENS, Greece -- A well-preserved underground tomb belonging to a prominent Roman-era family has been unearthed on the island of Crete, archaeologists said Wednesday.The large first or second century A.D. structure beside one of the main gates to the walled city of Aptera was looted during Christian times, archaeologist Vanna Niniou-Kindeli said.It still yielded a wealth of finds, including 10-inch pottery statuettes of the ancient Greek love deity Eros, glass and pottery vases and lamps.Built of large stone blocks, the grave is reached by a flight of steps. It has an antechamber and a main room measuring three by two yards that was the site of four burials.

Oetzi, the prehistoric man frozen in a glacier for 5,300 years, could have been infertile, a new study suggests. Genetic research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, also confirms that his roots probably lie in Central Europe. Oetzi's body was found in the melting ice of the Schnalstal glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991. Examination of his remains has already revealed the Copper Age man almost certainly died as a result of a fight.

A gene thought to influence perception and susceptibility to drug dependence is expressed more readily in human beings than in other primates, and this difference coincides with the evolution of our species, say scientists at Indiana University Bloomington and three other academic institutions. Their report appears in the December issue of Public Library of Science Biology. The gene encodes prodynorphin, an opium-like protein implicated in the anticipation and experience of pain, social attachment and bonding, as well as learning and memory. "Humans have the ability to turn on this gene more easily and more intensely than other primates," said IU Bloomington computational biologist Matthew Hahn, who did the brunt of the population genetics work for the paper. "Given its function, we believe regulation of this gene was likely important in the evolution of modern humans' mental capacity." Prodynorphin is a precursor molecule of the neurotransmitters alpha-endorphin, dynorphin A, and dynorphin B, collectively called opioids because their action is similar to stimulatory effects caused by the drug opium.

CNN) -- German astrophysicists have concluded a space body located in the outer reaches of the solar system has a diameter 435 miles (700 kilometers) larger than Pluto, the smallest planet. Their research puts more pressure on the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to classify the object as the 10th planet in our solar system."UB313 is decidedly larger than Pluto," said University of Bonn Professor Frank Bertoldi, whose team's findings will be published in Thursday's journal Nature.The object, tentatively named 2003 UB313, is an icy body that lies beyond the planet Neptune.

One of the most extensive surveys of the earliest known dog burials suggests humans domesticated canines much later than other studies show. The survey, which suggests domestication occurred between 13,000 and 17,000 years ago, counters some earlier theories based on gene changes that distinguish dogs from their wild wolf counterparts. A few of those theories held that domestication occurred anywhere between 40,000 and 135,000 years ago, much earlier than the new study suggests. The new study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, suggests that the bond between humans and dogs coincides with canine burials.

Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases may have more serious impacts than previously believed, a major scientific report has said. The report, published by the UK government, says there is only a small chance of greenhouse gas emissions being kept below "dangerous" levels. It fears the Greenland ice sheet is likely to melt, leading sea levels to rise by 7m (23ft) over 1,000 years. The poorest countries will be most vulnerable to these effects, it adds.

Cairo - The remains of a ship used by ancient Egyptians for commercial trips to the fabled land of Punt have been discovered in five caves engraved in a port on the Red Sea. The find, in the Marsa Gawasees area near the Red Sea resort of Safaga, dates back to the Middle Kingdom and was excavated by a joint American and Italian team from Boston University and East Naples working in the area for five years, it was reported Thursday. Higher Antiquities Council Secretary-general Zahi Hawwas called the find one of the most important marine excavations that confirms that Punt lay to the south of Egypt and not in Sinai as previously believed. As early as the third millennium BCE, Egyptian inscriptions indicate that they traded with people from the land of Punt, which sometimes they also called 'Gods' Land'.

NORTH PORT -- Watching Casey Coy and Rick Gomez prepare to dive into Little Salt Spring is like observing a pilot getting ready for takeoff. Step by step, the two divers painstakingly review their equipment, instruments and procedures before taking the plunge into the prehistoric underwater site.They say such meticulousness is imperative: When you're 242 feet underwater, there's no time for mistakes or miscommunication. "Is it dangerous? It could be, if we didn't go through the checks," said Gomez, diving safety officer for the University of Miami.Coy, who works for the Florida Aquarium, and Gomez are the first divers to explore the bottom of Little Salt Spring, a sinkhole in North Port that contains wooden stakes, stone tools and other artifacts used by Florida's earliest inhabitants, the Paleoindians.

Latest archeological excavations in Jiroft, known as the hidden paradise of world archeologists, resulted in the discovery of a bronze statue depicting the head of goat which dates back to the third millennium BC. This statue was found in the historical cemetery of Jirof where recent excavations in the lower layers of this cemetery revealed that the history of the Halil Rud region dates back to the fourth millennium BC, a time that goes well beyond the age of civilization in Mesopotamia"One of the reasons the archeologists and historians give for Mesopotamia to be the cradle of civilization is that the most ancient historical evidence and relics which have been discovered in Jiroft so far date back to the third millennium BC or nearer, and therefore they argue that this region could not have been the place where civilization began. However, some cultural evidence and ancient artifacts belonging to the fourth millennium BC were traced while digging a trench beneath the Matot Abad cemetery which gave proof to the fact that the history of this region goes back to the sixth millennium BC. Aside from these ancient articles found so far, archeologists were able to unearth a bronze statue of the head of a goat from one of the graves of Jiroft cemetery which raised new questions about the history of this region and whether or not the civilization that lived here is older than that of Mesopotamia," said Yousof Majidzadeh, head of excavation team in Jiroft.