Newsdesk Archive

Scientists have shown that the bubbles in a pint of Guinness really do move down instead of up. To mark St Patrick's Day, a team of Scottish and US researchers has produced video evidence to show the bubbles being dragged to the bottom of the glass. An earlier study concluded that the phenomenon may only have been an optical illusion. Close examination reveals that as the pint settles, bubbles touching the walls of the glass experience drag that prevents them floating up.

Applications for public funding for the doomed Beagle 2 Mars lander neglected to highlight the dangers of the mission failing, according to a new report. Some £22.5 million of Government money was put into the innovative craft, which is believed to have crash-landed on the surface of Mars on Christmas Day 2003. The danger that the Beagle's protective airbags would fail at the point of impact had been identified early in the project and work was done to reduce the risk, the report by public spending watchdog the National Audit Office found.

A sneeze could destroy the tiny fragments forever, but pieces of an ancient Maori cloak found on Banks Peninsula have major significance. The remnants of the 500-year-old flax cloak were found on Kaitorete Spit, by Lake Ellesmere, along with other artefacts in what archaeologists and local Maori regard as a valuable archaeological and cultural find. Unusually well-preserved albatross bones, tools, kokowai (a red dye), and pieces of a hut, including a segment of carved wood, were also unearthed. Historic Places Trust regional archaeologist Chris Jacomb said the cloak was of particular interest. It was the first evidence of how clothing was made in the first centuries of Maori settlement in New Zealand.

Hanoi - The corpse of a Buddhist monk sitting in a lotus position, which had been uncovered in a Pagoda in northern Vietnam over 280 years after he died, is to be restored a museum official said on Tuesday. The body of the monk, Nhu Tri, who died in 1723 in a tower at the Tieu Pagoda in Bac Ninh province, was covered in a layer of special preservative paint. His internal organs remained intact but one eye socket was damaged and his arms were broken off at the elbow, according to Nguyen Duy Nhat, deputy director of the Bac Ninh Museum.

A Renaissance masterpiece has unveiled startling evidence of what may have been one of the first forms of a multimedia representation, it emerged recently at an art exhibit in Florence. Running until July 11 at Palazzo Strozzi in central Florence, Italy, the show "Botticelli and Filippino: grace and passion in 15th century Florentine painting" displays a little-seen work by Filippino Lippi: "Madonna and Child with Singing Angels."

A series of parallel lines engraved in an animal bone between 1.4 and 1.2 million years ago may be the earliest example of human symbolic behaviour. University of Bordeaux experts say no practical process, such as butchering a carcass, can explain the markings. But many researchers believe the capacity for true symbolic thinking arose much later with the emergence of modern humans, Homo sapiens.

The distant object that some astronomers think could be the Solar System's 10th planet may have a moon. The new planetary candidate, which has been named Sedna, rotates more slowly on itself than expected, suggesting it may have a satellite orbiting it. One of the scientists who found Sedna has been giving further details of its discovery at a news conference.

Researchers are testing technology that could allow a lander to melt through the ice crust of Jupiter's moon Europa to reach the water ocean beneath. Space scientists want to send a craft to the Jovian moon because its ocean might, in theory, harbour life. Once through the 10-30km ice sheet, the probe could take a sample of water, to analyse it for microbial life.

The retrieval of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from four Neandertal fossils from Germany, Russia, and Croatia has demonstrated that these individuals carried closely related mtDNAs that are not found among current humans. However, these results do not definitively resolve the question of a possible Neandertal contribution to the gene pool of modern humans since such a contribution might have been erased by genetic drift or by the continuous influx of modern human DNA into the Neandertal gene pool. A further concern is that if some Neandertals carried mtDNA sequences similar to contemporaneous humans, such sequences may be erroneously regarded as modern contaminations when retrieved from fossils. Here we address these issues by the analysis of 24 Neandertal and 40 early modern human remains. The biomolecular preservation of four Neandertals and of five early modern humans was good enough to suggest the preservation of DNA. All four Neandertals yielded mtDNA sequences similar to those previously determined from Neandertal individuals, whereas none of the five early modern humans contained such mtDNA sequences. In combination with current mtDNA data, this excludes any large genetic contribution by Neandertals to early modern humans, but does not rule out the possibility of a smaller contribution.

William Shakespeare's will is now available to the public to read online, nearly 400 years after the great playwright put quill to paper. The historic document, in which Shakespeare famously bequeathed his "second-best bed" to his wife, has been put on the web by the National Archives. The wills of many other famous figures from the past are also available for the public to see on their computer screens. Among those whose final wishes are posted on the DocumentsOnline website are Sir Francis Drake, Sir Christopher Wren and Jane Austen.

Ancient Egyptians believed in properly equipping a body for the afterlife, and not just through mummification. A new study reveals that King Tutankhamun eased his arduous journey with a stash of red wine. Spanish scientists have developed the first technique that can determine the color of wine used in ancient jars. They analyzed residues from a jar found in the tomb of King Tut and found that it contained wine made with red grapes. This is the only extensive chemical analysis that has been done on a jar from King Tut's tomb, and it is the first time scientists have provided evidence of the color of wine in an archaeological sample. The report appears in the March 15 edition of Analytical Chemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

Found in an outer Solar System survey by the recently launched Spitzer Space Telescope, it has been called Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the ocean. Observations show it is about 2,000 km across, and it may even be larger than Pluto which is 2,250 km across. The Hubble Space Telescope has also seen it. Details will be announced by the US space agency Nasa on Monday.

ADICHANALLUR: (Tamil Nadu) An urn-burial site that dates back to 1000 B.C. is under excavation at Adichanallur, 24 km from Tirunelveli town in Tamil Nadu. The Archaelogical Survey of India (ASI), Chennai Circle, resumed digging there on February 8 after a gap of 100 years. So far, 20 urns, painted pot sherds, black ware and red ware have been unearthed. The burial site is adjacent to a lake on a huge mound on the southern bank of the Tamiraparani. T. Satyamurthy, Superintending Archaeologist and Director of the excavation at Adichanallur, said: "The pottery found near the urns date back to the megalithic period of 1,000 B.C. to 1st century A.D... followed by the early historic period which continued up to 6th century A.D."

Julius Caesar's bloody assassination on March 15, 44 B.C., forever marked March 15, or the Ides of March, as a day of infamy. It has fascinated scholars and writers ever since. For ancient Romans living before that event, however, an ides was merely one of several common calendar terms (see sidebar) used to mark monthly lunar events. The ides simply marked the appearance of the full moon. But the Ides of March assumed a whole new identity after the events of 44 B.C. The phrase came to represent a specific day of abrupt change that set off a ripple of repercussions throughout Roman society and beyond.

After years of belief to the contrary, the once mighty Calusa Indians, who lived centuries ago in Southwest Florida, may not be extinct after all. Nicknamed "The Fierce Ones," the Calusa Indians lived in Southwest Florida from around A.D. 100 to the early 1700s, when they were believed to have been killed off by invading Native American tribes, Spanish soldiers and foreign diseases such as smallpox. Their largest settlement in Florida was on Pine Island at Pineland, now the site of the Randell Research Center, which is conducting archaeological research on the settlement.

Following the archaeological excavations by Iranian and foreign experts in the region, the first villages in the area date to 9,000 years ago. One of the provincial archaeologists says the villages were set up in the province by man after a period of living in caves. Seyyed Hafez Mirkarimi added that a German archaeological team began to excavate the region in 1974 and the importance of the area in the pre-history and early Neolithic era was discovered.

A historical group surveying Isle of Wight County's cemeteries has found a rare slate-covered grave near Windsor Castle, and many are wondering if it is that of Arthur Smith, whose great-grandson founded the town in the 18th century. The grave is surrounded by five others in a small plot on a 186-acre property owned by Anne Betts Hooper. Two graves are marked, but they are much newer, from the 19th and 20th centuries, historians said.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) The state school board Tuesday approved a lesson plan for teaching evolution that includes what critics contend is a religious theory "cloaked as science." Supporters argued the lesson plan offers scientific ways to analyze evolution, but scientific groups objected and critics said they expected a lawsuit.

Ancient and modern war secrets took time detectives by surprise as they probed land around the battered remains of a Northumberland Castle. A team of archaeologists spent three weeks investigating the wild, exposed landscape around the 14th Century coastal castle near Craster. They expected to learn more about the origins of the spectacular ruin and its part in the War of the Roses.

The Spirit rover on Mars took the first picture of Earth ever made from the surface of another planet. It also did a little astronomy, imaging bright stars. It also spotted what could be a Viking Orbiter spacecraft or a meteor -- scientists aren't sure which. The photo of Earth shows the planet as a bright dot above the horizon about an hour before sunrise. The image is not in color, though scientists say if a human stood in the same spot and looked earthward, home would probably appear pale blue.

Chinese education officials have ordered school textbooks be rewritten to remove the myth that the Great Wall can be seen from space. The BBC reports the change of police has been prompted by comments from China's first man in space Yang Liwei. When he returned from his mission last year, Liwei told reporters he was unable to see the Great Wall of China while orbiting the Earth in his craft Shenzhou V.

NEW ORLEANS -- As often happens in other fields, the find of Gabriel Barkay's career as a biblical archaeologist rose at the intersection of careful calculation and happy accident -- provided in his case by a bored 12-year-old helper who whacked the stone floor of an Israelite burial vault with a heavy hammer. His name was Nathan. Too scattered and mischievous to be of much help, he had been dispatched to clean a worked-over corner of Barkay's dig just outside the old city of Jerusalem, a largely overlooked archaeological site that Barkay thought might yield material for his dissertation. But the stone floor turned out to be the ceiling of a concealed void beneath. And Nathan's hammer blow punched through to a repository containing hundreds of vessels of pottery, personal jewelry and other effects untouched for 2,600 years.

The attempt to tunnel out of Stalag-Luft 3 was one of the most audacious episodes of the Second World War, immortalised in the movie The Great Escape. Seventy Allied prisoners toiled for months to get out of the German camp, but only three made it to freedom and 50 were executed as punishment for trying. Now the only remaining tunnel of the three they dug, codenamed Dick, has been found and excavated by archaeologists after lying undisturbed for six decades.

MARANA - An archaeological dig here is reaffirming previous knowledge about the ancient Hohokam and giving new insights into the community that once thrived here. The dig shows that some of the folks who used to live here apparently were of the upper crust; looked down on their neighbors, physically and perhaps figuratively; used the "good china" when dining; and ate better than those in the surrounding area. They looked down on their neighbors from their homes in a walled enclosure atop a man-made, earthen platform mound that rose about 7 1/2 feet above the desert floor. They were leaders of the Hohokam community of about 900 that flourished between about 1200 and 1300.

Police in Papua New Guinea have been ordered to search part of a remote island after locals reported seeing a giant dinosaur-like creature roaming the area. Villagers on the island of New Britain reported seeing a 3m-tall, grey-coloured animal with a head like a dog and a tail like a crocodile. One woman said she saw the creature in a marsh just outside the provincial capital Kokopo on the eastern end of New Britain. "I heard the people talking about it and went there to see for myself. Its very huge and ugly looking animal," she said. A local councillor told The National newspaper that villagers said the creature had been seen by women on several occasions and had reportedly eaten three dogs.

US scientists have created the first glowing butterfly by inserting jellyfish genes into its DNA. The genetically modified African butterfly glows luminous green in the dark, reports the BBC. The research is published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. The researchers used a technique called germ-line transformation to insert a marker gene that codes for the green fluorescent protein that make jellyfish fluorescent.

The bubonic plague, or Black Death, may have originated in ancient Egypt, according to a new study. "This is the first time the plague's origins in Egypt have been backed up by archaeological evidence," said Eva Panagiotakopulu, who made the discovery. Panagiotakopulu is an archaeologist and fossil-insect expert at the University of Sheffield, England.

Cairo - As soon as the fortified gate went up 900 years ago, travellers began wedging human teeth and other items in cracks for good luck. Some left handwritten notes, scrawled in an illegible, mystical script, for a saint long since dead. The offerings were found during a five-year restoration of Cairo's oldest gate, Bab Zuweila, in the lively and historic neighbourhood known as Islamic Cairo.

EDINBURGH (Reuters) - Deep beneath the cobbled streets of the Scottish capital lies a dank and forgotten realm where prostitutes once rubbed shoulders with body snatchers and the light of day never penetrated. The thousands of subterranean citizens moved out long ago leaving the Edinburgh Vaults underneath the city's South Bridge alone with its multitude of ghosts until it was rediscovered in the 1980s and found new life as a tourist attraction. "There are no written records of who lived in these vaults, although there is ample anecdotal evidence that thousands of people lived and died here, some probably never even seeing the outside world," said tour guide Jim Lennie.

A man unearthed a priceless hoard of 20,000 Roman coins as he dug a new fishpond in his back garden. Experts say the money may date from the 4th Century and could be the biggest find of its kind in Britain. The coins were crammed into a ceramic pot which broke up as it was dug out of the ground at Thornbury, South Gloucestershire.

An unusual restoration technique - baking - may be the answer to the expensive and time-consuming process of cleaning chunks of oxidized corrosion from artifacts hauled from the ocean. This week, corrosion was chipped off a cannon that had cooked for two weeks in a 1,400-degree kiln at Dan Finch's pottery shop in Bailey. Finch, who has a background in metallurgy, said when the iron is heated to a high temperature and turns cherry-red, the chlorides that corroded the cannon are driven out of the metal through a process called sublimation.

A innovative fabric jacket is preserving a 14th Century Brecon tower which has been reburied in a road project. The D-shaped tower, found during excavations at the junction of Watergate and Market Street, has also been hand-packed with soft pea gravel by archaeologists. The preservation means work can progress in that area on the third phase of Brecon's £2.4m inner relief road. The 18-month road project has met with controversy from some people who wanted to see the town's ancient finds restored.

A 17th Century coin and the remains of an ancient cobbled street and tower have been found during a road building worked in the mid Wales town of Brecon. Work near Market Street and Watergate Street has been temporarily suspended by Powys County Council while investigations are carried out. The Queen Anne coin was found as work was carried out on the third phase of the town's £2.4m inner relief road.

Korea, China, Russia and Japan have been keenly interested in the history of Balhae (Po-hai), a kingdom that prospered for 229 years from 698 to 926 in the Manchurian region of East Asia. Korea, China and Russia are naturally interested in the history of Balhae because contemporary history continues to unfold across the old territory of Balhae. Japan also continues to maintain its interest in the area as part of studies on the historical records of exchange between ancient Japan and Balhae as well as on the basis of archeological research it has accumulated in the process of installing the so-called "Manchukuo" (in the early 1930s).

Archeologists in western Japan have unearthed the remains of a wooden palace believed to be that of a seventh-century emperor who laid the foundations for the nation's centralised bureaucracy, a member of the team said Tuesday. The discovery in the village of Asuka, about 400km west of Tokyo, revealed new details about the layout and architecture of a complex of palaces and temples that briefly served as Japan's capital in ancient times.

An ancient earthen pot with an ostrich design painted on the body, the first of its kind ever discovered in China, has been unearthed in Linyao City, western China's Gansu Province. The 28-cm-tall pot, discovered by local peasants, has a pair ofasymmetrical handles at the neck and the body respectively. At the lower part of the pot are 10 ostriches of different forms and poses. Some are jumping and some are running, some have two feet while some have only one. Wang Haidong, deputy director of Gansu painted pottery researchassociation, said the painted earthen pot dated back about 3,200 years, belonging to the Majiayao culture type (about 3,300 BC to 2,050 BC).

Archaeologists in western Japan have unearthed the remains of a wooden palace believed to be that of a seventh-century emperor who laid the foundations for the nation's centralised bureaucracy, a member of the team said on Tuesday. The discovery in the village of Asuka, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) west of Tokyo, revealed new details about the layout and architecture of a complex of palaces and temples that briefly served as Japan's capital in ancient times.

"French archaeologists pulled quite a stunt last month by declaring that, contrary to popular belief, Paris wasn't always Paris -- before Roman times, Paris was Nanterre, a rather dull city also located on the Seine. Let me explain, for the confusion lies as much in the nomenclature as in the results of the dig. It appears that the ancient capital of Gaul, called Lutetia by the Romans, is not buried under modern-day Paris after all but under its unremarkable downstream neighbor, Nanterre."

In the low winter sunlight, a Wiltshire hillside fills with the long shadows of an ancient settlement. Twenty years ago these banks and hollows were prominent landmarks; next year or the year after and the last faint echo of this numinous place will have gone. England is an old country, built on bones, a vast archaeological site with more than a million recorded features that could be anything from an interesting smudge in a cornfield to a Saxon shore fort. Resonant with local attachment and deep continuities, it is the historic landscape that gives the English countryside its power, the sense of belonging and identity. In the past 50 years, intensive farming has brought these irreplaceable landscapes to the edge of extinction, so that much of our archaeology survives only on paper.

The Colosseum will come full circle if one septuagenarian Roman gets his way. Architect Carlo Aymonino wants to rebuild the outer wall of the world's most famous amphitheatre, once rocked by earthquakes and quarried to build other glories in the Eternal City. "It wouldn't be an Italian Disneyland. In fact it would be the exact opposite -- a careful scientifically correct reconstruction," the 78-year-old told Reuters in an interview.

Remains of an ancient burial tomb, which have been in a museum for more than 120 years, are being moved back to the Devon moor where they were found. The five stones, which form the Bronze-Age chamber, were discovered near Thornworthy Tor on Dartmoor in 1879. The 4,000-year-old stones were then taken to Torquay Museum by geologist and anthropologist William Pengelly.

Archeologists claimed that they had found a multiplication table at the Gurendi cultural relics ofthe Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) in Zhangjiajie, central China's Hunan Province. Archeologists claimed that they had found a multiplication table at the Gurendi cultural relics ofthe Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) in Zhangjiajie, central China's Hunan Province. The table was discovered on a 22cm-long wooden strip which was broken when it was discovered and the handwriting on it is quite illegible.

When Saladin retook the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem for Islam in 1187,Pope Innocent III declared a new crusade to recapture it. But the crusaders ran into financial difficulties and took advantage of Greek imperial infighting to raise money. The scheme was a disaster, laying Constantinople towaste, gutting its churches and sending many of its citizens into slavery inEurope. The crusaders never went on to Jerusalem, but calcified the mistrustbetween eastern and western Christendom

Scientists at the University of Arizona say that they have the proof that consciousness survives our bodily death. Through detailed research, nicknamed "the afterlife experiments", they believe they can show that the evidence supports this fact. "Almost anyone who sees the data says there's something real here," said one of the researchers. The 'afterlife experiments' investigated the alleged talents of several of the most well-known spiritual mediums in the world, including John Edward and Allison Dubois. While Edward is more famous, lead scientist Dr Gary Schwartz describes Dubois as the 'Michael Jordan' of mediums, due to her amazing 'hit' rate.

Physicists say they have brought light to a complete halt for a fraction of a second and then sent it on its way. Harvard University staff held a light pulse still without taking away all of its energy, the journal Nature reports. Controlling the movement of light particles - so-called photons - to store and process data could lead to the development of quantum computers. In a 2001 experiment, light pulses were briefly stored when particles of light were taken up by atoms in a gas. The Harvard experiment tops that achievement by holding light and its energy at a standstill.

Scientists planned to run tests on the rover Opportunity on Monday after it failed to grind a hole in Martian rock, NASA officials said. The rover tried Sunday, unsuccessfully, to use one of its many tools to grind away at an outcropping dubbed "Flat Rock," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement on its Web site. Scientists hope to learn more about the rock's chemical composition from scrapings off of its exterior. Tests on the rover were planned for Monday and the rover could take another shot at Flat Rock later in the week, officials said.

No one knows for sure what caused an anomalous signal. There is a slight possibility that it just might originate from an extraterrestrial intelligence. The bright colors on the blue background indicate that an anomalous signal was received here on Earth by a radio telescope involved in a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

European scientists said Monday they are examining an image of its Beagle 2 Mars lander, taken moments after it separated from its mothership and later was lost, that also shows an unidentified object. The mysterious blot on the photograph is being scrutinized as one of several potential reasons for the failure of the mission, Europe's first attempt to land a probe on the Red Planet.

"It was 5:15 p.m. on January 13 when Timothy Spahr received the daily batch of observations from the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) telescope in Socorro, New Mexico. The telescope searches the skies for new asteroids. Spahr, an astronomer at the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was heading out for dinner with a colleague visiting from Hawaii. He quickly sifted through the data." "What Spahr didn't realize was that for one of the five objects, he projected an orbit that showed a direct impact with Earth the next day."

A short strand of DNA could become the sunscreen of the future, according to US researchers. Scientists at Boston University School of Medicine found a DNA fragment called pTT can help repair and prevent skin damage caused by UV radiation. PTT triggers a protein, called p53, that suppresses the growth of tumours, and helps repair damaged DNA. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A walker has discovered a mysterious stone inscribed with 1200-year-old Viking graffiti which could provide the first tangible evidence that the fearsome Norse raiders gave up raping and pillaging to live alongside native Scots. Experts believe the palm-sized slate unearthed in a rabbit burrow and carved with runes, an alphabetic script used by the peoples of Northern Europe from the first century AD, could be the work of a Viking raider or a first generation Danish settler. The find in Dalgety Bay in Fife sheds light on Scotland's long-lost links

Thornborough is the only triple henge complex in the world and the only one to share the same astronomical alignment as the pyramids at Giza in Egypt. A recent theory is that the henges' alignment may follow that of Orion's Belt in the constellation of Orion. The site, which may have been chosen because of its proximity to the River Ure, was first used about 3500BC and it continued to be a centre for religious ritual worship, drawing pilgrims from across the North, at least until 2500BC.

About 800 previously undiscovered archaeological features and sites were documented on Kahoolawe during the 10-year cleanup that officially ended last year. The findings give archaeologists greater insight than ever before about what life was like on the island before westerners arrived in Hawaii, said Hallett Hammatt of Cultural Surveys Hawaii, the U.S. Navy's archaeological contractor.

BUCHAREST, Romania - Experts analyzing remains of a man, woman and teenage boy unearthed in Romania last year are convinced that the 35,000 year-old fossils are the most complete ever of modern humans of that era, a U.S. scientist said Saturday. International scientists have been carrying out further analysis to get a clearer picture on the find, said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis. But it's already clear that, "this is the most complete collection of modern humans in Europe older than 28,000 years," he told The Associated Press.

Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval in cooperation with Penguin UK are pleased to announce the launch of the 'Talisman the Book' web site. Talisman is officially due for release on 27, May 2004. From this site, readers can access an overview of the book and monitor the countdown to the release date. "Talisman is a roller-coaster intellectual journey through the back streets and rat runs of history to uncover the traces in architecture and monuments of a secret religion that has shaped the world. The story takes us from Heliopolis to Luxor, Alexandria, Toulouse, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, Washington DC, New York, and finally to the global pandemonium following 9/11/2001. It is a tale filled with romance and intrigue, heroism and faith, peopled by ancient Egyptian astronomer priests, Christian Gnostics, Hermetic sages, learned Jews, Arab savants, Occitan Counts, Cathar "perfecti", Knights Templar, Renaissance magi, Rosicrucian "invisibles", Bavarian Illuminati and Freemasons."

OSLO, Norway (AP) - Archaeologists in western Norway found the remains of a harbor complex built by the Vikings 1,000 years ago - the first of its kind discovered in the country. The ancient harbor complex at Faanestangen, near the west coast city of Trondheim and some 250 miles north of Oslo, was discovered when a local landowner started work on a small boat dock on the same spot selected by his ancestors a millennium earlier. ``This is very special,'' district archaeologist Lars Forseth said Friday.``Archaeologically, it is a sensation.'' The Vikings were renowned for daring voyages as far as North America in open longboats. Those longboats also provided essential transport along this northern country's long coast and required the construction of port facilities.

Archaeologists in Peru have uncovered an Inca burial site intact outside Lima containing adult and child mummies dating back to the 15th Century. A team working on the site on a barren hill outside the capital located 26 tombs containing an unknown number of mummies and funereal artefacts. It was allowed to search the area, part of a known ancient cemetery, ahead of the construction of a new road.

Perhaps it was not Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern that sparked the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed the downtown area and claimed 300 lives. New research lends credence to an alternative explanation: The fire, along with less-publicized and even more deadly blazes the same night in upstate Wisconsin and Michigan, was the result of a comet fragment crashing into Earth's atmosphere.

Chinese archeologists have confirmed a 1,200-year-old scholar tree in the northern port city of Tianjin is probably the oldest in the entire north China region. The ancient tree is growing in a small courtyard in Xizui village of the centuries-old town of Yangliuqing. It is more than 20 meters tall and 1.5 meters in diameter. Archeologists believe the tree must have been planted in the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907).

Iraq, torn apart by years of war and sanctions, remains so rich in hidden ancient wonders that a leading expert believes the world's archaeology books will have to be rewritten over the next decade. As security improves to allow excavation, evidence may emerge that advanced societies existed in the area much earlier than previously thought, said Dr. John Russell, professor of archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

The Church of England has announced the creation of its first "virtual parish". In an advertisement in the Church Times, the Diocese of Oxford invites applicants for the post of 'web pastor' to build and oversee a groundbreaking Internet parish community.The successful applicant, who will answer to the Bishop of Oxford, will need to be as familiar with the Information Superhighway as they are the Road to Damascus. The advert reads: "We are looking for a dynamic, confident Christian (lay or ordained) who is able to build this new community, lead its core members, and be available to visitors to the site.

A German scientist says ants can teach humans how to regulate traffic. Dirk Helbing, of Dresden University, studied ant colonies to see how they dealt with heavy insect traffic. In a scientific test, Helbing and colleagues from two other universities studied how ants crossed a bridge between their nest and a food source when they had a choice between two equally long paths.

The American archaeological expedition working in cooperation with the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) in Al-Kharga Oasis discovered a rocky inscription north of the oasis including a royal name dating back to pre-dynastic era (32nd century B.C). The SCA Secretary-General Dr Zahi Hawass said that the name was unknown and the rocky inscription discovery came during the survey actions by the archaeological teamwork in Al-Kharga oasis region. The chairman of the US archaeological expedition Dr Solima Al-Harram pointed out that the discovery would reveal new information about the Egyptian royal presence in the western desert in the pre-dynastic era.

An "exceptional" hoard of buried treasure has been found in Wrexham just two years after another major find of Bronze Age treasure there. The 14 pieces of priceless gold and bronze jewellery and pottery, dating back more than 3,000 years, were found by three metal detector enthusiasts in the last few weeks.

A 6 million-year-old creature that lacked sharp canines for fighting may be the first pre-human to have branched off from the ape line, researchers said on Thursday. The short, small-brained creature may provide a good hint of what the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans looked like, the researchers said. Fossil remains of the early hominid were found in Ethiopia three years ago, and it seemed to be a subspecies of a known pre-human, Ardipithecus ramidus. But the scientists have found more teeth from a group of the hominid, re-classified it as a distinct species and named it Ardipithecus kadabba.

A fossilised louse that lived in the plumage of birds 44 million years ago has been found with the preserved remains of feathers in its gut. The specimen from Germany is in superb condition and may be the first example of a fossil bird louse on record.

An anthropological autopsy of 70 gladiators found the Romans to be overweight vegetarians who fought barefoot, according to University of Vienna scientists. Dietary analysis of the bones of more than 70 gladiators recently found near Ephesus, the Roman capital of Asia Minor, in modern western Turkey, dispels traditional Hollywood images of macho, muscular carnivorous fighters, London's Telegraph reported Tuesday.

Experts in the effects of space travel on the human body told a presidential commission on Wednesday that there were challenges but no "showstoppers" in building a permanent moon base, then sending astronauts to Mars. Aerospace medical experts Stanley Mohler and Mary Ann Frey, both longtime researchers in the field, identified a number of health risks future astronauts could face, from radiation poisoning to meteoroid collisions, but said NASA was developing plans for every known contingency. "From the medical standpoint, there is further research to be done, but we don't see any ... showstoppers out there," Mohler told the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond.

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Archaeologists studying human origins in eastern Ethiopia said on Wednesday a wealth of new finds meant they could hope to discover even older and more complete specimens than the famous fossil "Lucy." The scientists excavating fossils in Ethiopia's eastern region of Somali for the last two years said they had unearthed 1,000 specimens of archaeological finds which included stone tools, fauna remains and elephant tusks. Also uncovered were 400 fauna and primate remains in Galile, a village 215 miles east of the capital Addis Ababa. "Our goals for the future are to find more complete hominid specimens probably from an older time frame than that of Lucy," Gerhard Weber, professor of Anthropology at University of Vienna, Austria, said in a statement.

One of the most riveting detective stories of the last century supposedly ended in 1998, when the Russian government declared that bones excavated from a Siberian mass grave seven years earlier indeed belonged to the Romanovs, Russia's last royal family, who were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. A new study, however, is reopening the book.

Nasa says its Mars rover Opportunity has shown unequivocally that the Red Planet had the right conditions to support life some time in its history. The rover has revealed the rocks at its landing site were once in contact with substantial amounts of liquid water.

In 1997, cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, and John Preskill made a bet about what happens to a black hole when material is sucked into it. Do the characteristics of the particles somehow change the black hole so that a record of information is maintained? Or is all the information destroyed? A new solution based on string theory predicts that material sucked into the black hole is preserved as a tangle of strings, which fills its core to its surface. In theory, a black hole could be traced back to its original condition by following the trail of material consumed. Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne need to pay up.

Molecules could be super-cooled to within a whisker of absolute zero, suggest physicists who have for the first time chilled atoms in a fridge made of mirrors. A rash of breakthroughs in physics stemmed from the invention of a technique to reduce the temperature of atoms. Called "laser cooling", this led to more accurate atomic clocks and even created new forms of matter.

A Roman tale of love and romance that took place in Kent in about 200 AD has been unearthed during an excavation. Archaeologists working at the site in Canterbury uncovered the secret of the romance in a grave just as they were about to pack up their equipment.

Europe's ambitious 12-year mission to chase a comet through space and land a probe on its surface is successfully under way after a perfect launch. An Ariane 5 rocket carrying the European Space Agency's Rosetta craft blasted off successfully from ESA's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 7.17am GMT, after the launch was delayed twice last week. The £600 million project, in which British scientists and engineers played a leading role, will be the first time a spacecraft has ever landed on a comet.

Archaeological digging might soon unveil the mystery surrounding a sword buried in a Gothic abbey in Tuscany, Italian researchers announced. Known as the "sword in the stone," the Tuscan "Excalibur" is said to have been plunged into a rock in 1180 by Galgano Guidotti, a medieval knight who renounced war and worldly goods to become a hermit.

A team led by the Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, has read through the DNA of the red jungle fowl, the ancestor of domestic chickens. The genetic variations of three types of domestic chickens have also been mapped by an international team at China's Beijing Genomics Institute. The work will be useful for scientists as they probe the causes of disease and could help them combat avian flu.

Close-up pictures taken by Europe's Mars Express probe of a volcano on the Red Planet reveal water could have flowed on its flanks in the past. Images of the 5,300m-high mountain, Hecates Tholus, taken 275km above Mars, also show signs of cratering on the slopes caused by volcanic activity. The caldera, a circular depression from which magma erupts or is withdrawn, can be seen in detail in the pictures. Scientists say numerous collapses have re-shaped the caldera over time.

Scientists have cast doubt on the well-established theory that a single, massive asteroid strike killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. New data suggests the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, supposedly created by the collision, predates the extinction of the dinosaurs by about 300,000 years.

NASA's press conference at 2 pm EST today will announce "significant findings" about Mars, based discoveries by the Opportunity Mars rover. "It's going to be the most significant science results that we've had from the rovers, and it's bearing on their primary mission," says NASA's Don Savage told. The rovers were sent to Mars primarily to determine if there was enough water there to support life.

We're very pleased to announce that Sir Laurence Gardner will be joining us at the Mysteries discussion forum in April. Sir Laurence will be available to to discuss his latest book "Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark". Watch for further announcements regarding his appearance towards the end of March!

Nowadays, it would be called empowering women. But back then, centuries ago, it was just a way for the sworn sisters of this rugged and tradition-laden Chinese countryside to share their hopes, their joys and their many sorrows.

Archaeologists are examining the items found in the ancient burial place of a Viking woman in downtown Pskov. In the last days of 2003 in Pskov during archaeological research of the construction site, burial place related to X century, was discovered. At the depth of 4 meters in the burial chamber the remains of a woman were found along with decoration of bronze and silver, bronze scales, glass beads and several dozens of other items.

If ancient Romans observed Family Day, their celebrations would have included wet nurses, slaves and possibly many others who had no blood relationship, according to new University of Calgary research. A landmark analysis by classicist Dr. Hanne Sigismund Nielsen of more than 4,500 inscriptions on Roman tombstones shows that our concept of the Roman family needs to be broadened to include much more than just parents, grandparents and children.

The Moche ceramics, popular tourist attractions at fine museums, explore sexual values in pre-Columbian Peru. Nearly 40 years ago, historian Maximo Terrazos descended narrow stairs into a tomb-like chamber where, he says, he experienced a sexual awakening of sorts.

In the winter of 1854, the commune of Meilen took advantage of exceptionally low water levels to start building a harbour on the shore of Lake Zurich. Quite by chance, the excavations unearthed a number of odd-looking, superbly preserved ancient artefacts, and a series of wooden poles embedded in the mud. The diggers had found a prehistoric lake village.

The Thracian treasure from Rogozen is said to be Bulgaria's archaeological find of the previous century or as many archaeologists say "the horn of plenty was poured out over Bulgaria once again in 1986 when that great treasure was found". Its uniqueness gave the archaeologists much material to work on as it revealed some ancient secrets unknown by now. The exclusive finding is now strictly guarded in the Vratsa History Museum that offers its visitors a rare journey through the ancient world of the Thracian art.

Pre-historic Vietnamese people possibly lived in the southern Central Highlands, archaeologists said, after discovering a collection of stone artifacts in Lam Dong province. The evidence on which archaeologists made the assumption were 12 stone bars of the same design, used in stone musical instruments typical of the prehistoric period, found at the Tan Nghia hill in Di Linh district. The site is, however, not yet fully excavated.

An explosion in numbers of a species of giant crab is causing concern amongst environmentalists. Millions of Kamchatka or Red King Crabs have already spread around 400 miles south from northern Norway. The monster crustaceans, which were introduced to Europe by Stalin in the 1930s, have a claw span of more than three feet and can weigh in at 25 lb.

A village in Ayrshire has discovered that it could be the oldest continuously-occupied settlement in Scotland, dating back 5,500. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of stone age houses in the middle of Dreghorn near Irvine. They are having to re-write their local history in Dreghorn. Archaeologists have discovered that people may have been living here since 3500 BC - and it might make the village unique. They found evidence of occupation dating back to the Stone Age, through the Bronze Age to the medieval period. Archaeologist Tom Addyman said: "People have always lived here, and have wanted to live here. Can't think of any other site that has that depth and layering of occupation."

Around 480 B.C., during a period when the Earth was thought to be a flat disk, a Greek philosopher named Parmenidies proposed that the planet was spherical. Haven't heard of Parmenidies? That doesn't surprise Daniel Graham. Graham, the A.O. Smoot professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University, says that while the public recognizes the name of Socrates and other famous Greek philosophers, there were other Western thinkers, like Parmenidies, who have been largely forgotten by history.

A star only 33 light years away may be giving birth to new planets, and we are close enough to see it happen, U.S. astronomers said on Thursday. They have seen evidence of a disk of dust orbiting the star -- a disk like the one our own solar system is believed to have formed from. And within the disk is a clear swathe, which suggests a planet has started to form and has scooped up some of the dust in the process. The star, called AU Microscopium or AU Mic, is dimmer and redder than our own Sun, so any planets orbiting it are likely to be cold.

Two new species of dinosaur, one a quick-moving meat-eater and the other a giant plant-eater, have been discovered in Antarctica, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. The 70 million-year-old fossils of the carnivore would have rested for millenniums at the bottom of an Antarctic sea, while remains of the 100-foot-long (30 meter) herbivore were found on the top of a mountain.

That, at least, is the vision of Jeff Brinker, a materials scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Brinker and his team have devised a way to transform the loathed insects into stealthy environmental sentinels to detect chemical or biological agents.

Almost-fossilized remains, believed to belong to a primitive pithecanthropus man who lived over 10,000 years ago, have been discovered in a cave in central China's Hunan Province. Before this discovery, archeologists unearthed the stone tools two kilometers from the cave, and they were digging to find out the possible users of the ancient stone tools.

One would hardly imagine that the vast rock-hewn galleries of the Apis tombs at Saqqara would ever suffer from environmental damage but, as Nevine El-Aref learns, their plight is serious and calls for a large-scale rescue operation Since 1986 one of the main tourist attractions at Saqqara has been closed to the public. No tourists have been able to wander awestruck through the splendid rock-hewn galleries flanked by tomb chambers each with a huge sarcophagus that once held the remains of the sacred Apis bulls. One began to wonder when, if ever, the Serapeum, as it is called, would reopen and it would be possible to meander along its 200 metre-long corridors flanked by 24 vaulted burial chambers.

The historic Paris - the Gallic town of Lutetia captured by Julius Caesar in 52 BC - lay not on the island in the centre of the modern French capital but in a suburb 10 kilometres (six miles) to the west, according to archaeological evidence published on Thursday. Recent excavations at a building site in the suburb of Nanterre have brought to light a pre-Roman settlement that far outstrips in density and sophistication traces discovered on the Ile de la Cite - until now regarded as the main base of the Parisii tribe.

NASA scientists believe they are days away from concluding whether or not Mars once had water using data from the Mars rover Opportunity, they revealed on Thursday. Opportunity, which has been roaming inside a 20-metre crater on a plateau called Meridiani Planum for nearly five weeks, has been focusing its attention for the past three on a 30-metre outcrop of bedrock and its immediate environs. It has taken microscopic images and spectroscope data and ground portions of the rock surface to peer beneath its coating of dust.

The length of an instant has just become shorter, according to scientists. Researchers in Austria and Germany measured the smallest time interval recorded, and found it lasted a ten million billionth of a second. It's about ten times shorter than the previous shortest measured interval, which lasted about one femtosecond or a million billionth of a second.

Workmen digging up a city street in preparation for a new bus route have uncovered an Iron Age structure. The remains of the 3000-year-old stone enclosure were discovered in the Broomhouse area. Archeologists believe the 130ft by 100ft structure dates back to around 1000BC, making it from the late Bronze or early Iron Age.