Newsdesk Archive

Archeologists recently unearthed a dainty necklace at an archeological site dating back 4,000 to 5,000 years in central China's Henan Province. Unlike today's necklaces of gold or jewelry, or primitive ones of animal teeth, this one was made of white porcelain, said Jin Yindong, director of the cultural heritage bureau in the ancient city of Dengfeng. The necklace was found among several other white porcelain wares and some implements made of stone and animal bones, at Nanwa archeological site in Junzhao village of Dengfeng, Jin said.

A 5,000-year-old settlement that sheds new light on one of Britain's most mysterious prehistoric religious complexes has been unearthed by archaeologists. Excavations in Northumberland have revealed the existence of a previously unknown settlement, which was probably associated with a nearby series of nine prehistoric ritual centres. Although archaeologists have found scores of circular ritual monuments - or henges - all over Britain, they have never discovered the houses where the henge people lived. So far the investigations have revealed three houses from the period of the local henge complex - the largest such complex in Britain. Each building was rectangular and made of timber and possibly thatch. The largest was 13 metres long and 5 metres wide.

Archaeologists have unearthed what is thought to be one of the largest Neolithic settlements in Britain. The discovery, which includes buildings, a human burial pit, tools, pottery and ritual objects, was uncovered at a Northumberland quarry. It is hoped it will boost understanding of the period, which dates back thousands of years. The discovery was made during routine archaeological investigation of the quarry, which is run by Tarmac.

Lions had more than a symbolic association with early English monarchs, according to a study published in the current issue of the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. Appearing on the English monarchy's coat of arms since the reign of Henry II (1133-1189), lions were one of the main attractions at the Tower of London, the massive stone fortress on the Thames that has witnessed the drama of English history for over eight centuries. "The lions were potent symbols of the monarchy at the time of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses, and may have been among the first seen in Britain since they became extinct some 10,000 years before," Hannah O'Regan at Liverpool John Moores University's Research Centre in Evolutionary Anthropology and Palaeoecology, told Discovery News.

The first humans that settled Madagascar around 2,000 years ago likely hunted to extinction giant lemurs and other unusual animals from the Indian Ocean island, such as eleven-foot-tall birds, suggests an upcoming study. While the report does not rule out disease, fire and other factors that could have contributed to the giant lemurs' demise, it adds to the growing body of evidence that modern humans adversely affected the populations of prehistoric animals. The study is part of ongoing research on the life and death of giant lemurs. Today's lemurs are the last living link to ancient primates that have a common link to the lineage that evolved into humans.

Police in Papua New Guinea have arrested 320 people for practicing sorcery and religious cults, the National newspaper reported on Thursday. Belief in sorcery is widespread in this jungle-clad, mountainous South Pacific island nation where some villages only encountered Western civilization in the 1930s. Police raided three villages on Monday near the city of Lae on the north coast and arrested leaders of a "cargo cult" and their followers, the newspaper said. Those arrested were aged between 20 and 70.

Violent volcanic eruptions help to combat some of the effects of global warming by cooling the Earth and keeping a check on rises in sea level, scientists have discovered. Eruptions are known to have a cooling effect on the planet's atmosphere because the fine particles thrown up by the volcanoes linger in the air at high altitudes and reflect sunlight and warming infrared radiation before it can hit the Earth's surface. But the effect of atmospheric ash on sea temperatures had not been properly investigated

CAIRO Egyptian archaeologists, who normally scour the desert in search of treasures of the past, have discovered that one of the greatest caches of antiquities may well be in the basement of the Egyptian Museum. For the past century, artifacts have been stored away in crates there and forgotten, often allowed to disintegrate in the dank, dusty cavern. Forgotten until now. The recent theft and recovery of three statues from the basement have prompted antiquity officials in Egypt to increase an effort already under way to complete the first comprehensive inventory of artifacts in the basement. "For the last 100 years, curators sat down to drink tea, but they did not do their jobs," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. "How many artifacts are in the basement? It was awful."

ZHENGZHOU, Oct. 31 (Xinhuanet) -- A 3,700-year-old antique in the shape of a dragon, made up of over 2,000 pieces of turquoise, is believed by many Chinese scholars as the oldest Chinese dragon totem. The antique was discovered in the Erlitou relics site in YanshiCity of central China's Henan Province. Many Chinese scholars believe that Erlitou is the site of the capital of the Xia Dynasty(2,100 BC-1,600 BC), China's first dynasty. "Although some dragon-shaped relics older than the antique in Erlitou have been uncovered in other places, such as the 7,000-year-old jade sculpture showing a dragon with a pig head anda tight-lipped snout, found in a Neolithic site in Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia, they had no direct connection with the ancient civilization that originated in central China," said Chinese archaeologist Du Jinpeng.

JINAN, Oct. 31 (Xinhuanet) -- It is common sense nowadays that excessive carbon dioxide in the air caused by excessive lumbering leads to global greenhouse effects. But a team of archaeologists from China and the United States is saying that the greenhouse effect started about 5,000 years ago, much earlier than people might expect. This is the conclusion reached by a group of Chinese and US archaeologists based on research on the relics excavated from the ruins of a Neolithic site in Rizhao City, east China's Shandong Province, over the past ten years.

The first people to settle Polynesia went to surprising lengths to honour their dead, archaeologists show.Remains from the oldest cemetery in the Pacific suggest the Lapita people buried their dead in many different ways, some in "weird yoga positions", and removed their skulls for ceremonial purposes.Dr Stuart Bedford and Professor Matthew Spriggs of the Australian National University reported their finds on the Lapita culture in Vanuatu at a recent seminar in Canberra."We found for the first time skulls buried in a pot, sealed by a flat bottomed ceramic dish that had been overturned and used as a lid on top of another pot," says Bedford.

BEIJING (AFP) - Chinese archaeologists claim to have found one of the world's oldest observatories, dating back 4,100 years ago. The observatory was uncovered at the Taosi relics site in Shanxi province, He Nu, a research follow with the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency on Sunday.The observatory "was not only used for observing astronomical phenomena but also for sacrificial rites", said He.The remains, in the shape of a semi-circle 40 meters (132 feet) in diameter in the main observation platform and 60 meters (198 feet) in diameter in the outer circle, were made of rammed earth, the report said.

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A supernova could be the "quick and dirty" explanation for what may have happened to an early North American culture, a nuclear scientist here said Thursday. Richard Firestone said at the "Clovis in the Southeast" conference that he thinks "impact regions" on mammoth tusks found in Gainey, Mich., were caused by magnetic particles rich in elements like titanium and uranium. This composition, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist said, resembles rocks that were discovered on the moon and have also been found in lunar meteorites that fell to Earth about 10,000 years ago.

Near the city of Visoko, 30 km north of Sarajevo, there is a stone pyramid of monumental size, claims the Bosnian archeologist Semir Osmanagic, who lives and works in the USA.After several months of geological and archeological research, Mr. Osmanagic concluded that under the present hill of Visocica hides a stairs-like pyramid, about 12,000 years old. Osmanagic, who intensively researched on pyramids in Americas, Asia and Africa for the last 15 years and wrote several books on the subject, says he's quite sure he found the first pyramid in Europe, which is quite similar to ones in the Southern America.He believes that the project would completely change Bosnia's significance in the world of archeology.

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A University of Texas archaeologist opened the highly anticipated "Clovis in the Southeast" conference at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center Thursday by rejecting the premise on which many experts once based their theories on man's North American origins.At the meeting, sponsored in part by the University of South Carolina, Michael Collins called the idea that the first inhabitants traveled by way of a land bridge from Asia "primal racism." Instead, Collins said, they arrived by water, because "the rich marine environments" along the northern Atlantic and Pacific coasts are "very attractive regions for human exploitation."

Archaeologists say they have discovered the site of an ancient temple in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.It is the latest in a series of archaeological discoveries in the area struck by December's tsunami, which desilted large areas of the coastline. The brick temple dates back more than 2,000 years to the late Tamil Sangam period and was discovered on the beachfront near Saluvankuppam, just north of a famous World Heritage site at Mahabalipuram. The discovery lends more weight to growing evidence that a huge tsunami hit the east coast of India during this period, obliterating large habitations along the coastline.

In a nondescript warehouse in Jakarta, treasure-hunter Luc Heymans dips into plastic boxes and pulls out jewels and ornaments that lay hidden at the bottom of the Java Sea for 1000 years. A team of divers, among them three Australians, two Britons, three French, three Belgians and two Germans, excavated the vessel laden with rare ceramics which sank more than 1000 years ago about 130 nautical miles from Jakarta, Indonesia.The rare ceramics were excavated from a sunken ship

The planetary collision believed to have created the Moon may help to explain why scientists can't agree how old the Earth's core is.Professor Bernard Wood of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and Professor Alex Halliday of the University of Oxford in the UK report their research in today's issue of the journal Nature."You basically had two episodes of core formation," says Wood.When the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth was a molten mixture of rock and metal. Over time, as the Earth cooled, the heavier metal gravitated towards the centre, or core.Scientists have worked out when this happened by using 'clocks' based on the decay of radioactive isotopes found in the rocky part of the Earth.The Earth's core was formed in two stages, which could explain why scientists have been coming up with two different dates for its age (Image: Universe Today/NASA)

Internet search engine Google is being sued by a group of book publishers over plans to put millions of titles online. The Association of American Publishers, which includes firms such as Penguin, has filed a suit in New York claiming Google will infringe their copyrights. As part of its Print Library Project, Google plans to index and scan millions of books from five major libraries. Google countered that the lawsuit was "short sighted", claiming its idea will lift exposure and demand for books.

'By the 20th century, scientists had rejected old tales of world catastrophe, and were convinced that global climate could change only gradually over many tens of thousands of years. But in the 1950s, a few scientists found evidence that some changes in the past had taken only a few thousand years.' This site, created by Spencer Wear, has a wealth of information on the science of Global Warming.

Graham Hancock will be giving a one hour lecture followed by a Q&A session on the theme of his new book Supernatural on the evening of Thursday 17 November. Details are as follows:WHERE:Chapel of Sacred Mirrors,540 West 27th Street,NYCWHEN: November 17, 8PM - 10PMADMISSION: $8Just turn up. Tickets will be on sale at the door. Or for more information call: +1 212 564 4253 or click http://cosm.org/supernatural.html

Microsoft has joined a Yahoo-backed effort to digitise the world's books and other works to make them searchable and accessible to anyone online. The software giant said it would work with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), set up by the Internet Archive, to initially put 150,000 works online. The move comes as Google faces growing legal pressure from publishers over its own global digital library plans. Microsoft said it would initially focus on works already in the public domain.

One of the extraordinary possibilities that Graham Hancock explores In his new book Supernatural is that there may be intelligent messages "written" on our DNA which become accessible to consciousness in the "visionary" states long prized by ancient religions.Now Dr Pak Chung Wong and fellow researchers at Pacific National Laboratories have succeeded in implanting a 100-word message into the genome of bacteria: "A whole family of bacteria with the message can be created, and even after hundreds of generations the message is still intact. Wong notes that it would be possible to send a message to the future in a particularly hardy organism -- such as a bacteria or a cockroach -- that would survive a nuclear war."See: Message In A DNA Bottle

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) -- A volcano has begun to erupt on one of the Galapagos Islands known for its diverse flora and fauna, including the archipelago's famed giant tortoises, park officials said Sunday.The 1,500-meter (4,920-feet) Sierra Negra volcano, located on seahorse-shaped Isabela, the largest of the Galapagos Islands, began erupting late Saturday afternoon, producing three lava flows, officials from the Galapagos National Park told The Associated Press in a statement.

Tiny particles of gold have helped to clean up an important chemical reaction that is used every day to produce tonnes of pharmaceuticals, detergents and food additives.Oxidation is the process by which oxygen atoms are added to carbon-based compounds to create these useful organic products. In principle, this can be done cleanly, using pristine oxygen gas (O2) from the air. But the chemical bond that bind its two oxygen atoms together must be broken so that they are free to react, and this is difficult, explains Graham Hutchings, a chemist from Cardiff University, UK. Instead, most oxidation reactions rely on harsh oxidants such as peracetic acid, which can produce toxic waste products.Now Hutchings's team has discovered a way to make the clean process easier: the researchers found that gold nanoparticles, each just 25 nanometres across, can activate oxygen from the air at relatively low temperatures of 60 to 80 °C and a gas pressure similar to that found in vehicle tyres. Tiny particles of gold can split up oxygen molecules from the air, making oxidation reactions easy.

Archaeologists have excavated a trove of Stone Age human skeletons and artifacts on the shores of an ancient lake in the Sahara. The seven nearby sites include an extensive cemetery and represent one of the largest and best preserved concentrations of ancient skeletons and artifacts ever found in the region, researchers say. Harpoons, fishhooks, pottery, jewelry, stone tools, and other artifacts pepper the ancient lakeside settlement. The objects were left by early communities that once thrived on the former lake's abundant fish and shellfish

Toxic fumes favour the fairer sex, a group of researchers in Brazil has found.Jorge Hallak and his team at the University of Sao Paulo turned up the surprising result by studying babies born in their city. They divided the metropolis of 17 million people into areas of low, medium and high air pollution, using test results from air-quality monitoring stations. They then studied birth registries of children born from 2001 to 2003.Babies born in highly polluted areas are more likely to be girls.

Anne Streiber writes a regular Diary for Whitley Strieber's 'Unknown Country'. In 'My Adventures With the Green Man', she enquires as to just who is the Green Man?Interestingly, she refers to Graham Hancock's account in 'Supernatural' where he tells of seeing a tall, light-skinned man with blond hair and green moldy splotches on his forehead.You will have to read her diary to find out more!

Pterosaurs, the flying lizards of the dinosaur age, ruled prehistoric skies with aerodynamic tricks similar to those found in modern aircraft, according to a fossil study. The first vertebrates to achieve true flapping flight, pterosaurs appear in the fossil record at the end of the Triassic period (220 million years ago). Like their dinosaur cousins, the creatures were affected by the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period (65 million years ago), leaving no descendants.

THE doors of Rosslyn Chapel have shut behind the cast and crew of The Da Vinci Code. But grail tourists will continue to travel to this place of 21st century pilgrimage and walk in the footsteps of the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail.Behind all the fantastical nonsense there are lone voices asking us to put aside the hype, look inside the chapel and open our eyes to what it really is. They don't see heretic knights and ancient secrets but an important remnant of medieval architecture deserving of serious study that has been prostituted on the altar of commercialism.Just in case you've been asleep (or abducted by aliens) you may need a quick re-cap on current "theories" re Rosslyn. Revisionist historians consider Rosslyn to be a grail chapel. Built by Sir William Sinclair in 1446 as a copy of the Temple of Solomon, its intricate carvings hint at secrets passed down to the family since the fall of the Templars in 1307. Depending on your inclination the chapel is the final resting-place for Jesus's head, Templar treasure or any number of outlandish ideas.

An 80-page handwritten manuscript by Beethoven which was missing for 115 years has been put up for auction. The score of Grosse Fuge, which has the composer's changes, was found by a librarian at a US religious school. It is expected to fetch up to £1.5m when it goes on sale at Sotheby's auction house in London on 1 December. Sotheby's says the score, which was last seen at an auction in Berlin in 1890, is "the most important Beethoven manuscript to appear in recent memory".

The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is heftier than thought and rotates at an amazing clip, new research shows. For years scientists said the black hole contained about 2.6 million times the mass of the Sun. They now believe the figure is somewhere between 3.2 million and 4 million solar masses.And a new study suggests all that mass, confined to an area about 10 times smaller than Earth's orbit around the Sun, spins around about once every 11 minutes. The Sun, for comparison, takes about a month to make a revolution on its axis. Earth spins once every 24 hours.

The Wollemi Pine, a Jurassic-age plant that was believed extinct until a hiker stumbled across it near Sydney 11 years ago, is being made to pay its way. To ensure its survival, Australian conservationists have propagated it and plan to auction the next generation at Sotheby's later this month. The little-known tree is now being touted as the latest must-have garden accessory all over Australia. The Wollemi was known only from fossil records until David Noble, a park ranger, discovered a small stand of trees in the Blue Mountains, 125 miles west of Sydney, in 1994. He did not recognise them and took home a branch to show colleagues. His discovery caused a scientific sensation.

Helen of Troy, described in the epic poem The Iliad, was based on a real woman, according to a new book that weaves history, archaeology and myth to recreate the famous ancient Greek beauty's life. According to the new theory proposed by Bettany Hughes, Helen's mythological character was inspired by a wealthy Bronze Age leader from the southern mainland of Greece. Hughes, a former Oxford University scholar who has conducted research in the Balkans, Greece, and Asia Minor, was unavailable for comment.

LIMA, Oct. 14 (Xinhuanet) -- A circular temple was recently unearthed at the Sechin Bajo complex by Peruvian and German archaeologists, which will admit better knowledge of the Peruvian past, said archaeologists on Friday. Archaeologists found a 40-meter-long plastered stone wall in the central building and the frontal part of the Sechin Bajo complex during the excavations, which started in 2003. The plastered wall shows designs that are part of a complex iconography, the meaning and potential importance of which is currently under study.

CAIRO -- Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosni ordered a probe on Tuesday into reports about mysterious damage to a Pharaonic statue during restoration work at the Egyptian Museum. He asked Attorney General Maher Abdel Wahid to investigate the matter, the official MENA news agency reported, only hours after the country's top antiquities official dismissed the reports as being unfounded. The Egyptian press, quoting museum officials, had reported that a statue of Khafre (2576-2551 BC), the fourth dynasty king and builder of the second pyramid at Giza, had been found damaged in the basement.

Greenpeace has lost its High Court attempt to overturn a government ban aimed at protecting dolphins.The case centred on the decision to ban "pair" trawling for sea bass within 12 miles of the Devon and Cornwall coasts. The environmental campaigners claimed the ban forced fishermen into deeper waters, where there are more dolphins.

Psychological stress early in life may lead to memory loss and mental decline in middle age, research suggests. A study on rats suggests infant stress has a negative impact on the way brain cells communicate with each other. The researchers believe parental loss, abuse or neglect may contribute to a type of memory loss in middle age more normally seen in the elderly. The study, by the University of California, Irvine, features in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The following article first appeared in the October 2005 issue of the Watkins Review and can be found highlighted at Graham's 'Supernatural' page on this website.The Articles subsection on that page leads to the reproduced article, or go directly to it here:Supernatural - Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind

The remains of the world's oldest noodles have been unearthed in China. The 50cm-long, yellow strands were found in a pot that had probably been buried during a catastrophic flood. Radiocarbon dating of the material taken from the Lajia archaeological site on the Yellow River indicates the food was about 4,000 years old.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt will send a robot up narrow shafts in the Great Pyramid to try to solve one of the mysteries of the 4,500-year-old pharaonic mausoleum, Egypt's top archaeologist said on Monday. Zahi Hawass told Reuters he would this week inspect a robot designed to climb the two narrow shafts which might lead to an undiscovered burial chamber in the pyramid of Cheops at Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo. Hawass said the shafts and stone panels which block them could mark the location of the burial chamber of Cheops, also known as Khufu. That would mean none of the chambers already discovered in the pyramid were the pharaoh's real tomb.

GRAHAM HANCOCK is breathless. He's telling me about his first hallucinogenic trip in the Amazon jungle, and he just can't get the words out fast enough. The former journalist and now bestselling science writer spent five weeks living with indigenous Indian shamans in Peru, where he ingested a sacred plant drug known as ayahuasca. We pick up the story just after the shaman began the ritual ceremony by singing the icaros, ancient chants which draw the spirits around the circle. Hancock then took a sip of the plant drug, which he describes as a "vile-tasting liquid, so strong and bitter-sweet and salty, so dark and concentrated as to be repellent". His muscles involuntarily relax, he closes his eyes and then the visions begin. Read more of the full article by Anna Smyth

HATRA, Iraq - Over 2,000 years ago this thriving Mesopotamian oasis city welcomed caravans of camels carrying travelers between East and West, twice held back Roman invaders, and was famous for its tolerance of different religions.Now Hatra sits in ruins in a vast desert. Parts of its giant temples, columns and arches are still standing under the incessant sun but its city center is probably visited by more rabbits than people. Around it stands a nation still struggling to heal ancient grievances between feuding religious and ethnic groups, hoping to revisit high points in its history where the roots of civilization once sprouted.The United Nations has declared it a world heritage site, but few people these days risk journeying to the ruins, 200 miles north of Baghdad.Most visitors are guests of the U.S. military, and a handful of Iraqi guards protect the site. Most of the wire fence surrounding it has collapsed, but a girl in a bright dress is still on hand to dutifully raise a gate for a visiting convoy of Humvees.

Radar tracking stations are searching for Europe's missing Cryosat spacecraft, amid concerns it has broken up over the ocean.The European Space Agency probe lifted off at 1902 local time (1602 BST) from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia. Russian space officials said the flight broke up and crashed into the sea, but ESA has not yet confirmed it. The £90m (135m euro) mission was designed to monitor how climate change was affecting the Earth's ice masses.Cryosat was the first of Esa's so-called Earth Explorer missions. These are relatively low-cost projects that seek quick answers to some important environmental questions. In the case of Cryosat, the quest was for some definitive data on the behaviour of polar ice.

Unprecedented research on metallic pieces found in the cemetery of indigenous peoples of Chorro de Maita, in the eastern region of Holguin, Cuba, has revealed their European and South American origins. The investigation, one of the most complete of this type in the Caribbean, was carried out in the laboratories of the Archaeology Institute of London, in the United Kingdom. Latest technology equipment was used for the analysis of samples which have proven that the objects were created with European brass while others are the results of a gold, copper and silver alloy, possibly originating from Colombia. That conclusion points out that the chronology of the Chorro de Maita cemetery, one of the most important archaeological sites on the island and in the Caribbean, and indicates that part of the burials occurred after the Spanish conquest at the beginnings of the sixteenth century.

Aliens are probably common. Because there are billions of trillions of stars in the cosmos, many astronomers think it would be highly improbable for Earth to be the only rock to harbour life. Whether ET is intelligent is still hotly debated. But no one doubts that the receipt of a signal from another civilisation would be Earth-shattering. "It would surely be the greatest discovery of all time, eclipsing the findings of Newton, Dawin and Einstein combined," says Prof Paul Davies, a British cosmologist from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University."The knowledge that we are not alone would affect people's psyche, and totally transform our world view," he said during a visit to Britain last week. "The mere fact alone would be disruptive. But imagine if we got some serious information from ET. Then all bets are off about what our future would be."

The fossilized last meals of two giant marine reptiles show the ancient animals used their long necks to trawl for clams, snails, and crabs along the seabed, according to a new study.The discovery, based on the remains of two plesiosaurs unearthed in Queensland, Australia, challenges the long-held idea that these impressive ocean predators targeted only fish, squid, and other free-swimming prey.Study co-author Alex Cook, assistant curator of fossils at the Queensland Museum, says the team was surprised by the fossilized sea creatures' last meals, eaten between 100 and 110 million years ago.

The White House has dismissed as "absurd" allegations made in a BBC TV series that President Bush claimed God told him to invade Iraq. "He's never made such comments," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. The comments were attributed to Mr Bush by the Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath in the upcoming TV series Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs. Mr Shaath said that in a 2003 meeting with Mr Bush, the US president said he was "driven with a mission from God".

US scientists have found that all modern varieties of potatoes can be traced back to a single source - a spud grown in Peru over 7,000 years ago. It had been believed potatoes had a much wider region of origin, stretching from Peru to northern Argentina. The team, led by Dr David Spooner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analysed the DNA of about 360 potatoes, both wild and cultivated

Astronomers have long theorized that merging neutron stars produce massive explosions capable of wiping out nearby solar systems for thousands of light-years around. But no data was available to prove it one way or the other because the evidence -- incredibly short bursts of gamma rays -- was too ephemeral for systematic observation. Now a flurry of research is coming to a head that offers the first detailed view of the origin of so-called short gamma-ray bursts, revealing a picture that is consistent with the merging neutron star theory. That means the universe could be far more hazardous than previously thought, given the number of known and probable neutron star pairs in relative proximity to Earth.

Graham Hancock will be giving a lecture on Sat 5 Nov entitled:Supernatural: 'The ancient teachers of mankind'at the 'World Mystery Forum', which will take place at the theme park of Erich von Däniken Interlaken, Switzerland, starting Friday, 4 November 2005. Further details can be found here:NEW: WORLD MYSTERY FORUM 2005:www.worldmysteryforum.chTheme Park 'Mysteries of the World':www.mysterypark.chArchaeology, Astronautics & SETI:www.legendarytimes.com(featuring DAILY RESEARCH NEWS)

An amateur British archaeologist says he has located Ithaca, the homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus. Robert Bittlestone - backed by two experts - claims the rocky island depicted in The Odyssey is part of Greek tourist destination Cephalonia. He used satellite imagery to match the area's landscape with descriptions in the poem about the return of the man behind the wooden horse of Troy. Many experts had stated Homer was referring to the island of Ithaki.

There is an interview with Graham Hancock by Greg Taylor to coincide with the launch of his new book 'Supernatural'. It is in The Daily Grail's 'Sub Rosa' Ezine magazine.Issue 2 of the PDF format publication covers such controversial topics as shamanic hallucinogens, Intelligent Design and alien abductions.'Sub Rosa' can be viewed or downloaded at: www.subrosa.dailygrail.comThe article is now reproduced at the Supernatural>Articles section of this website - See here

BEIJING, Sept 25 (Reuters) - China set new regulations on Internet news content on Sunday, widening a campaign of controls it has imposed on other Web sites, such as discussion groups. "The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest," the official Xinhua news agency said in announcing the new rules, which took effect immediately. The news agency did not detail the rules, but said Internet news sites must "be directed towards serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests."

An excavation on the island of Crete has discovered life-sized marble statues of the goddesses Athena and Hera. The statues date from between the 2nd and 4th centuries A.D., a period of Roman rule in Greece, archaeologists said Friday."They are in very good condition," said archaeologist Anna Micheli, from the Italian School of Archaeology. She added that the statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom, was complete, while Hera -- long-suffering wife of Zeus, the philandering king of gods -- was headless. "But we hope to find the head in the surrounding area," Micheli said.A team of Italian and Greek archaeologists discovered the statues Tuesday while excavating the ruined theatre of Gortyn, about 45 kilometres south of Iraklion in central Crete.

LOS ANGELES - The astronomers who claim to have discovered the 10th planet in the solar system have another intriguing announcement: It has a moon. While observing the new, so-called planet from Hawaii last month, a team of astronomers led by Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology spotted a faint object trailing next to it. Because it was moving, astronomers ruled it was a moon and not a background star, which is stationary.The moon discovery is important because it can help scientists determine the new planet's mass.

There is a two page spread review on Graham Hancock's forthcoming book, Supernatural by Adrian Lee in todays UK newspaper, the Daily Express. 'An extraordinary new book claims that bizarre cave drawings and drug-induced experiences of Amazonian 'shamans' are evidence that our world has been guided by supernatural powers for 30,000 years'Readers are led to consider: 'Could aliens and spirits be the same thing?' and that 'Jesus Christ was so obviously a shaman'

Central America, that narrow land bridge between North and South America, represents less than 0.5 percent of Earth's land mass. But it is home to 7 or 8 percent of the world's species of plants and animals.That rain forest home, however, is assaulted by both nature and man: earthquakes, hurricanes, illegal logging and ranching, and deforestation from slash-and-burn agriculture. Now, NASA scientists are helping Central America keep watch on its biological treasures and stop environmental depredations through SERVIR, an acronym standing for the Spanish words meaning Mesoamerican Regional Visualization and Monitoring System.If only the Maya had had SERVIR. The system is able to monitor deforestation, drought and much more. This kind of environmental monitoring is important to a region that has seen the collapse of at least one grand civilization, that of the Maya.

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year, according to new data released by US scientists. They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century. The Arctic climate varies naturally, but the researchers conclude that human-induced global warming is at least partially responsible. They warn the shrinkage could lead to even faster melting in coming years.

A supernova blast 41,000 years ago started a deadly chain of events that led to the extinction of mammoths and other animals in North America, according to two scientists. If their supernova theory gains acceptance, it could explain why dozens of species on the continent became extinct 13,000 years ago. Mammoths and mastodons, both relatives of today's elephants, mysteriously died out then, as did giant ground sloths, a large-horned bison, a huge species of armadillo, saber-toothed cats, and many other animals and plants.

A First-Temple period seal has been discovered amidst piles of rubble from Jerusalem's Temple Mount, an Israeli archaeologist said Tuesday, in what could prove to be an historic find.The small - less than 1 cm - seal impression, or bulla, discovered Tuesday by Bar-Ilan University archaeologist Dr. Gabriel Barkay amidst piles of rubble from the Temple Mount would mark the first time that an written artifact was found from the Temple Mount dating back to the First Temple period.The 2,600 year old artifact, with three lines in ancient Hebrew, was discovered amidst piles of rubble discarded by the Islamic Wakf that Barkay and a team of young archaeologists and volunteers are sifting through on the grounds of a Jerusalem national park.

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - A Mayan city whose fabulous art has beguiled collectors for decades but whose true location was until now a mystery has been pinpointed in the jungles of northern Guatemala, scientists said on Tuesday.'Site Q' has been a Holy Grail of archaeology ever since an exquisite set of Mayan artworks from the period A.D. 600 to 900 showed up in U.S. and European museums and galleries in the 1970s.Now researchers have found a sculpture at ruins long known as La Corona in Guatemala that matches the mysterious gallery pieces, said Salvador Lopez, Guatemala's head of historical monuments.International researchers had increasingly speculated that La Corona was Site Q, and the recent find leaves no doubt, Lopez said.

This cave was first excavated in 1950 and indicated an occupation starting about 21,000 years ago by a population physically different from Morocco's earlier inhabitants.Luckily for the archaeologists, these people buried their dead in the cave. More than 200 individuals have been revealed during the long-standing excavations, including nearly 100 children.New research, taken up in 2003, has pushed back the dates of the early occupation of the cave to more than 100,000 years. But the fresh discovery adds an unusual dimension to the burials: one of the skeletons had been buried with the horns of a Barbary sheep.

Just days after NASA announced its intention to put people back on the moon by 2018, some seismologists have announced a new discovery made with Apollo-era data that could dictate what equipment to take on that trip, and beyond. A re-examination of lunar seismic data brought back by Apollo astronauts in the 1970s has proven that a newly developed method that uses seismic static (as opposed to distinct loud quakes) to see buried geological structures inside the Earth works off-world as well.For decades earthquakes have served like floodlights into the Earth's interior, with different geological structures being revealed by how they predictably reflect, scatter, speed-up or slow down powerful earthquake vibrations passing through the planet, all of it collected by seismic stations worldwide.

When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans' closest cousins. But decoding chimpanzees' DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests. If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes.

China's second manned space mission will blast off on 13 October at the earliest, Chinese news sources claim. The Shenzhou-6 spacecraft will launch from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Base, in the Gobi desert of northern China. Reports say the Chinese will send two astronauts into space for a mission lasting about five days. China's first manned launch in October 2003 made it only the third country to send a human into space on its own, after Russia and the US.

A large metal shelter collapsed at one of Greece's most important archaeological sites on the resort island of Santorini on Friday, killing one person and injuring at least six, authorities said. Rescuers freed two tourists who were pinned under the debris at the prehistoric site of Akrotiri, Greece's deputy fire brigade chief, Andreas Kois, told The Associated Press. ``We don't know whether there are other people still trapped under the roof,'' Kois said. ``We are still looking.''

The archipelago is named after Robinson Crusoe, but perhaps it should have been called Treasure Island. A long quest for booty from the Spanish colonial era appears to be culminating in Chile with the announcement by a group of adventurers that they have found an estimated 600 barrels of gold coins and Incan jewels on the remote Pacific island."The biggest treasure in history has been located," said Fernando Uribe-Etxeverria, a lawyer for Wagner, the Chilean company leading the search. Mr Uribe-Etxeverria estimated the value of the buried treasure at US$10bn (£5.6bn).

(AGI) - Rome, Italy, Sept 24 - There is a star attraction at the International Conference of Experimental Archaeology which opened today in Anguillara.It's a dug out canoe built 8,000 years ago by primitive people who had set up camp along the shores of Lake Bracciano. 9.5 m long, according to initial studies, the canoe will enable us to understand the naval construction techniques of this type of craft which, in those days, could also go out into the open sea.

The images are vivid, capturing the essence of exploration. Archaeologists digging up the remains of long lost civilizations. Anthropologists encountering exotic cultures with strange languages. But do archaeologists and anthropologists have anything to teach the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), where encounters are at the distance of light-years, and a round-trip exchange could take millennia?

It was once believed that dinosaurs were simply oversized crocodiles, huge lumbering reptiles that took decades to reach full maturity. Over the past decade, work at UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology has contributed to the transformation of this perception. Dinosaurs are now thought to have been warm-blooded, active creatures with bird-like structure and growth that outpaces today's mammals. But it was an interest in evolution and how the major changes in evolution had occurred, not dinosaurs, which launched UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology Kevin Padian on his current path. Twelve years later, his research has helped to reshape many core beliefs about the kings of the Mesozoic era, while furthering understanding of evolution.

Scientists are to present new evidence that the tiny human species dubbed "The Hobbit" may not be what it seems. The researchers say their findings strongly support an idea that the 1m- (3ft-) tall female skeleton from Indonesia is a diseased modern human. Their claims have been aired in a BBC Horizon programme screened on Thursday. The Hobbit's discoverers are adamant it is an entirely separate human species, which evolved a small size in isolation on its remote island home of Flores.

Egyptian reliefs dating back thousands of years could disappear within a decade, archaeologists said on Thursday. As Egypt's population grows, agricultural land moves closer to ancient temples and funeral monuments. Water for irrigation is weakening temple foundations and eroding the carvings. "We've seen it. We have photographic evidence of something we took a picture of 10 years ago and we go and take a picture of the reliefs now and they are simply not there," said Nigel Hetherington, an archaeological conservation manager."What's happened is that farming land now stretches out into the desert and into (the Nile's west bank at) Luxor, which was once considered the realm of the dead in the pharaonic period," he said.

SALTA, Argentina - Their facial features are clear and their muscles are firm. The blood remains frozen in their veins, and the vivid clothes they wore the day they died are intact.The three Incan children -- thought to be victims of a mountaintop sacrifice 500 years ago -- are among the best-preserved mummies ever found, and Argentine officials hope to display them this fall in a museum in this city in the far north. But not everyone is looking forward to the public unveiling of human remains that look anything but ancient. Members of an Argentine indigenous organization are trying to legally block the display, saying it dishonors their "little brothers and sisters." Rival museum officials in Buenos Aires dismiss the exhibit as morbid. And the explorer who discovered the bodies six years ago worries that they could be permanently damaged.

A relief image carved approximately 2,050 years ago on an ancient Egyptian stone slab shows Cleopatra dressed as a man, according to a recent analysis of the artifact. The object is only one of three known to exist that represent Cleopatra as a male. The other two artifacts also are stelae that date to around the same time, 51 B.C., at the beginning of Cleopatra's reign. Researchers theorize that the recently discovered 13.4 x 9.8-inch stela probably first was excavated in Tell Moqdam, an Egyptian city that the ancient Greeks called Leonton Polis, meaning "City of the Lions."

Stone Age settlement uncovered in the North Downs is being hailed as an important archaeological find. The site at Bletchingly, Surrey, is undisturbed and could show where people gathered in Mesolithic dwellings. Archaeologist Becky Lambert said: "We are plotting the exact location of the flint, so we might even be able to see patterns of where people were sitting." Flint is often found during ploughing - this undisturbed site may reveal hearths and where food was made.

Our prolonged childhoods make us Homo sapiens unique among primates. Scientists have a theory to explain this lengthy maturation process: Our brains need many years of learning and physical growth before we're equipped for the complexities of human living.Now a new study says we weren't the only humans who took their time growing up. Analysis of Neandertal teeth suggests that the extinct species had similarly lengthy childhoods. Our prolonged childhoods make us Homo sapiens unique among primates. Scientists have a theory to explain this lengthy maturation process: Our brains need many years of learning and physical growth before we're equipped for the complexities of human living.The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, compared growth rates of Neandertal front teeth with those of three modern human populations: Inuit (Eskimo), English, and southern African.

Latest technology proved an unexpected aid to unearthing the past when an Italian man decided to look at internet maps of his home. Computer programmer Luca Mori found the remains of an ancient Roman villa when he browsed Google Earth maps showing satellite images of his local area. His curiosity was sparked by unusual shading by his home in Sorbolo, Parma. He contacted local archaeologists who investigated and confirmed it was once the location of a Roman villa.

Dublin has been added to the list of venues where Graham will give an illustrated public lecture linked to his new book Supernatural. The Dublin event will take place on Wednesday 26 October at 7 pm. at Eason's, 40-41 O'Connell St., Dublin 1.For full tour and lecture details See hereFor more information on the new book, 'Supernatural' See here

The rapid advancement of our understanding of human genes is set to open a window on an individual's ancestral heritage, spanning centuries. A number of firms claim that for less than £300 and a bit of spittle, they will unlock the secrets of a person's past.As the genealogical craze continues to grow, private DNA tests are being launched in Britain to cash in on a seemingly insatiable desire to search for our ancestors.

Teams are excavating an ancient theater in Patara, a port city in what is now southern Turkey that was once the center of the Lycian League. Alexander the Great was here, and so was Saint Paul, on his way to Ephesus.The discovery has excited the archaeologists, and some others as well."It blew my mind to find out that the parliament building of the first federation in history, which served as an inspiration for the framers our own Constitution, was being excavated 15 minutes from my house on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey," said Stephen J. Solarz, the former congressman from Brooklyn.

The US space agency Nasa has announced plans to return to the Moon by 2020. Nasa administrator Dr Michael Griffin said four astronauts would be sent in a new space vehicle, in a project that would cost $104bn (£58bn). "We will return to the Moon no later than 2020 and extend human presence across the Solar System and beyond," Dr Griffin said on Monday.

Improved technologies for extracting genetic material from fossils may help us find out more about our ancient ancestors. Scientists in Israel have just developed a new technique to retrieve better quality, less contaminated DNA from very old remains, including human bones. It could aid the study of the evolution and migration of early modern humans, as well as extinct populations such as our close relatives, the Neanderthals.

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- Earth's crust pulsates up and down in the center of the Amazon basin, new research suggests, according to researchers in Brazil and United States.A global positioning system station, located next to the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers in Brazil, recorded the station's altitude from 1995 to 2002. During that period the station oscillated up and down within a range of about 75 millimeters, or 3 inches, which was 3 to 9 times larger than observed at GPS stations around the world.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to examine restrictions on the profits that pharmaceutical firms make from sales of drugs to the NHS.The OFT inquiry is meant to check whether safe and effective branded prescription medicines are being provided at reasonable prices.The NHS spends about £7 billion a year on such medicines.

Records for the past 35 years show that hurricanes have got stronger in recent times, according to a global study. This fits with mounting evidence which suggests the biggest storms around the world - hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones - are intensifying.Some US scientists say that greenhouse warming may be driving the most severe events, such as Katrina, although more research is needed to be sure. Their assessment of hurricane activity is published in the journal Science.

Two NASA satellites, planned for launch no earlier than Oct. 26, will give us a unique view of Earth's atmosphere. CloudSat and Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (Calipso) are undergoing final preparations for launch from Vandenberg Air Force BaseCloudSat and Calipso will provide a new, 3-D perspective on Earth's clouds and airborne particles called aerosols. The satellites will answer questions about how clouds and aerosols form, evolve and affect water supply, climate, weather and air quality.CloudSat and Calipso employ revolutionary tools that will probe Earth's atmosphere. Each spacecraft carries an "active" instrument that transmits pulses of energy and measures the portion of the pulses scattered back to the instrument.

NASA Announces Media Teleconference for Mars DiscoveriesNASA's Mars Global Survey orbiter has observed some interesting changes at Mars. Researchers will announce and discuss the discoveries at a listen-and-logon news briefing at 1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Sept. 20. Participants:-- Dr. Michael Meyer, Mars Exploration Program chief scientist, NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington -- Dr. Michael Malin, principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, Calif. -- Dr. Jack Mustard, Associate Professor of Geological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, R.I.

NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion and the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.The space agency now expects to roll out its lunar exploration plan to key Congressional committees on Friday and to the broader public through a news conference on Monday, Washington sources tell SPACE.com.U.S. President George W. Bush called in January 2004 for the United States to return to the Moon by 2020 as the first major step in a broader space exploration vision aimed at extending the human presence throughout the solar system.

For the third time in as many years, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has returned from an Andean ice field in Peru with samples from beds of ancient plants exposed for the first time in perhaps as much as 6,500 years. In 2002, he first stumbled across some non-fossilized plants exposed by the steadily retreating Quelccaya ice cap. Carbon dating showed that plant material was at least 5,000 years old. Then in 2004, Thompson found additional plant beds revealed by the continued retreat of the melting ice and when tested, these proved to be carbon-free, suggesting that they might date back more than 50,000 years. If true, that would suggest that the climate in that region may not have been as warm as it is today in more than 500 centuries.

ATHENS -- Greek archaeologists have discovered the "well-preserved" remains of a large Bronze Age town dating from at least 1,900 BC on the Cycladic island of Andros, the culture ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. Archaeologists found at least four "well-preserved" buildings - one of them retaining its ground floor walls - in the remains of a quarter, and a graded road believed to lead to a square. A variety of mainly ceramic objects was discovered inside the buildings, including large decorated storage jars, pots and vessels, and stone tools, many of them intact.Researchers also found a number of rock drawings on the edge of the town, which lies on the southwestern Cape Plaka near the fortified site of Strofilas, a Neolithic settlement that dates from 4,000 BC.

TOKYO - Bringing Japan's most complex space mission near its climax, a probe is within 12 miles of an asteroid almost 180 million miles from Earth in an unprecedented rendezvous designed to retrieve rocks from its surface.The Hayabusa probe, launched in May 2003, will hover around the asteroid for about three months before making its brief landing to recover the samples in early November. The asteroid is located between Earth and Mars.."The mission is going very smoothly and proceeding as planned," Atsushi Wako, a spokesman for JAXA, Japan's space agency, said Tuesday.

A hidden Roman road has helped archaeologists uncover some of the county's oldest past inhabitants. The road is just one of several finds unearthed during work to lay a £12 million gas pipeline. Other archaeological remains found nearby have included a 23ft-deep stone well and pots dating from Bronze Age settlements, about 2,500 years ago. The remains, found between Thurcaston and Ashby Folville, were discovered by teams of archaeologists working for gas supplier Transco, which is laying 10 miles of pipe.

The discovery of a carved obsidian spear point indicates that the earliest humans in what is now Idaho apparently spent time in the area's mountains as well as its canyons.The spear point, believed to be 11,000 years old, was found last year just west of the Idaho-Montana border in the Beaverhead Mountains southeast of Salmon. If proved to be that age, it would be the oldest example of humans in that area, said Lane Allgood, a spokesman for North Wind, a company hired to help the Bureau of Land Management to investigate the cultural resources of the area.

The crew of a reed boat which sank after leaving Oman en route for India say they plan another attempt to recreate the Bronze Age-era voyage. The 12-metre (40ft) sailboat took in water shortly after it set sail from Sur in Oman on Wednesday, bound for the Indian port of Mandvi 1,000km away.One of the crew said the bitumen used to waterproof the boat did not cover the whole of its hull. The Omani Culture Ministry has said it will help to finance another boat.

Scientists are only now starting to recognise the astonishing size reached by pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that lived at the time of the dinosaurs. New discoveries in the Americas suggest some had wingspans of 18m (60ft). But there was nothing ugly about the way they moved through the air, according to expert Dr David Martill, of the University of Portsmouth. Their ability to utilise air currents, thermals and ground effects would astonish aeroplane designers, he said. "Pterosaurs were beautifully engineered," he told BBC News.

Scotland's first Geopark has been launched in the north west Highlands. The park is centred around Knockan Crag Nature Reserve which has helped geologists to understand rock formations around the world. It contains the ancient sea stack, the Old Man of Stoer, as well as the Smoo Cave and is the first area in Scotland to win the European accolade. It also features limestone bone caves where the ancient remains of reindeer, polar bears and wolves were found. Geopark status is recognised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

A new management strategy setting out plans for the Avebury World Heritage site (Wiltshire, England) has been launched. It aims to protect the site for future generations and balance the needs of the local community and the 350,000 visitors who visit every year. The plan also deals with issues such as traffic, nature conservation and archaeological research.An English Heritage spokesman said the plan shows how the site's monuments and landscape will be preserved. The action plan for site includes the improvement of the management of archaeological sites within the site and the reduction of visitor erosion at key monuments; the implementation of a long-term solution to repair Silbury Hill; the establishment of safe pedestrian crossing points in the Henge monument and at other key locations.

Earth and Saturn's moon Titan show striking similarities because both occupy "sweet spots" in our Solar System, researchers have said. Many processes that occur on Earth also take place on this moon, say scientists participating in the US-European Cassini-Huygens mission. Wind, rain and volcanism and tectonic activity all seem to play a role in shaping Titan's surface. One scientist even sees a way that life could survive on the freezing world.

Humans were influencing the climate long before the Industrial Revolution, new research suggests. Levels of methane rose steadily in the atmosphere in the first millennium, according to an analysis of gases trapped in ice beneath Antarctica. Much of the greenhouse gas came from huge fires lit by humans as they cleared land for settlements and farming, researchers report in Science. But natural climate change would have contributed to the emissions, they say.