Newsdesk Archive

This featured "Dinner with..." series builds on the classic thought experiment: "Which 5 historical figures would you invite to dinner, and how would you seat them?" While the field of astrobiology historically rests on many "shoulders of giants" --too many for one dinner party, the Astrobiology Magazine has selected some initial candidates for our dinner party, and then asks them to introduce their area of expertise in a brief question and answer format. The answers are their own, as gleaned from some of their most famous, controversial, or seminal contributions to science and technology. In many cases, the selection of commentary is driven by the curiousity to understand these great historical figures as one might imagine them as more modern characters, perhaps joining in on table talk or an informal interview. Tonight's dinner introduces Leonardo da Vinci. In particular, Leonardo's notebooks--his private writings or codex to himself and ultimately to posterity-- offer brilliant insights into the daily ruminations of an artist, scientist and inventor. Like most of his contemporaries, when viewed with hindsight, Leonardo had his misconceptions about the universe: the moon had water, the moon had an atmosphere, the moon appeared larger on the Earth's horizon because of distortion of this lunar atmosphere.

TORONTO - Power is returning to pockets of Southern Ontario and parts of New York state, but the enormous blackout that struck the region on Thursday afternoon is far from over. Officials with power companies say the power grid has to be brought back on line slowly and carefully, until then transportation, industry and commerce have ground to a halt. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien released a statement on Thursday evening, saying "the government is working closely with its Ontario and U.S. counterparts to restore power." The blackout is the largest in North America in almost 40 years. At its peak, there was no power from Cleveland to New York, from North Bay to Ottawa.Traffic problems were feared in every major urban centre including, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, New York, and Detroit. But in spite of the lack of traffic lights, police in most centres said traffic was moving fairly well given the circumstances.

A recent discovery that the so-called "fixed" hot spot, which created the Hawaiian Islands, actually drifted southward between 81 and 47 million years ago is causing geologists to revise their descriptions of the interior workings of the Earth. The findings stem from analysis of ancient lava flows found on four seamounts, or undersea mountains, in the Pacific Ocean. Rock samples from the seamounts were gathered during a two-month expedition to the Pacific Ocean in 2001. The project was co-led by John Tarduno, a researcher at the University of Rochester in New York.

Chemical element 110, which was discovered in 1994, will finally get a name tomorrow. A committee will vote at this weekend's General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in Ottawa, Canada. It is expected to approve the element's informal moniker, 'darmstadtium', and give it the chemical symbol Ds. The title honours the Laboratory for Heavy Ion Research (called GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, where the substance was first made. The natural elements run out at number 92, uranium. Several more have been made artificially since 1939, when researchers at the University of California at Berkeley bombarded uranium with a beam of neutrons to create element 93, which they called neptunium.

Say you're on a first date and everything's going fine until he takes off his jacket, revealing an armful of ink. Just what is that thing? And what does it mean? No problem. Now you whip out "The Tattoo Encyclopedia" to decipher what lies beneath the skin. Archaeologist Terisa Green's guide gives an informative history of tattooing plus an A to Z listing of hundreds of tattoo designs, from acorns ("unborn power and fruitfulness waiting to be released") to Zuni fetishes ("a spirit could reside in a fetish, a power that could be used for good or ill.")

High-resolution imaging of an area in the Schiaparelli Basin of Mars on June 3 by the MGS Mars Orbiter camera produced this stunning example of layered formations within an old impact crater. On planet Earth, such structures would be seen in sedimentary rock -- material deposited at the bottom of ancient lakes or oceans and then subsequently weathered away to reveal the layers. With the Sun shining from the left, the central layer appears to stand above the others within the 2.3 kilometer wide crater. The crater could well have been filled with water in Mars' distant past, perhaps resting at the the bottom of a lake filling the Schiaparelli impact basin. Still, such layers might also have been formed by material settling out of the windy martian atmosphere. As satellites continue to examine the martian surface from orbit, NASA's Spirit and Opportunity spacecraft will attempt to land on on Mars early next year to further explore the tantalizing history of water on the Red Planet.

The South Carolina State Museum presents "Tutankhamun: Wonderful Things from the Pharaoh's Tomb" through Jan. 4. The exhibit contains 126 striking replicas of King Tut's original treasures, found among thousands of artifacts when his tomb was uncovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. The beautiful recreations include the spectacular funerary mask of Tutankhamun, probably the most recognizable image in the exhibit, plus a golden chariot, throne, bed, statues and personal items from mirrors to candleholders. And, of course, there's the reproduced mummy, along with its breathtaking mummy case and eye-popping jewelry, among many more items.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have uncovered dozens of skeletons buried beneath the centre of St Andrews, casting fresh light on medieval attitudes to death. Yesterday, they said the graveyard showed medieval Scots were less squeamish about living on top of the dead. The remains were found during refurbishment of the public library next to Holy Trinity Church, in the town centre. The centuries-old bones are believed to belong to people who attended the church, which was established in 1410.

Divers carrying out an archaeological survey in St Kitts have identified the remains of a 1740's troop ship including 5 iron cannon, musketballs and glassware. The Anglo~Danish Maritime Archaeological Team (ADMAT) started work on the site after the remains of a large shipwreck were uncovered in White House Bay on St. Kitts by a hurricane. The project, led by Simon Spooner of Bristol University, was run as a field school for aspiring marine archaeologists, with divers coming from Canada, USA, Mexico, France, Denmark and the UK. The team spent 5 weeks surveying and excavating the site of what is believed to be a 1740s English troop ship, possibly sunk during the Battle of Frigate Bay in 1782. As the team uncovered the wrecks massive timbers, the age and significance of the ship became apparent. The timbers still covered by sand were in excellent condition, stretching for 60 ft, and consisted of the lower hull arrangements of the bow section, going as far as the main mast step. The stern has yet to be found.

The world's oldest ice mummy has been hiding a violent and bloody secret that was only teased out of him by detective work on evidence 5 300 years old. Before dying, Oetzi -- the bronze age man found 12 years ago in the mountains between Italy and Austria -- had killed or injured at least four other people. An analysis of blood traces found on his clothes and weapons, carried out by an Australian molecular biologist, Thomas Loy of the university of Queensland, has revealed four different DNA patterns, none of them Oetzi's.

DUBLIN, Aug 12 (AFP) - Archaeologists said Tuesday they had uncovered the remains of a Viking warrior during excavations on a building site in the Irish capital. A skeleton was found with an iron shield and what appeared to be a dagger in a shallow grave near the centre of Dublin, according to archaeologist Linzi Simpson. The site is near the ninth century settlement of Dubh Linn, a Gaelic phrase denoting "black pool", from which Dublin gets its name. "It is a fantastic find. It is very, very exciting and very rare," Simpson told Ireland's RTE state radio.

POZZUOLI, Italy (Reuters) - Archaeologists are used to rummaging in the dirt for lost treasures, but they rarely have to do it with an entire city weighing down on them. Yet for 10 years, an Italian team has been beavering away underground to reveal the wonders of Pozzuoli, once the port of ancient Rome, which is buried under a 16th century city. Excavators at Pompeii, entombed in ash and toxic debris by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, were able to remove the volcanic material and expose the city to the open air. But in Pozzuoli, whose beauty was such that the great Roman orator Cicero called it "little Rome," the ancient streets were encased in the foundations of a new city built by the Spanish in the 1500s, when they ruled what was then the Kingdom of Naples.

The dietary supplement creatine - known to improve athletic performance - can also boost memory and intelligence, researchers claim. Creatine is a natural compound found in muscle tissue, and has been popular with athletes looking for ways to increase fitness. However, experts say that it has a role in maintaining energy levels to the brain, and have the theory that taking more creatine might actually improve mental performance. Researchers from the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, both in Australia, tested this by giving creatine supplements to 45 young adult volunteers.

Astronomers have confirmed by a new method one of the saddest stories of the Universe - one day the stars in the sky will all stop twinkling. As old stars die, new ones are born, but, for billions of years, the rate of star formation has been in decline. According to recent estimates, there are 10 times more stars in the visible Universe than all the grains of sand on every beach and desert in the world. The good news is that they should last for a very long time yet. One day, however, the Universe will fade into darkness.

Scientists in India have discovered a new dinosaur species that roamed the Narmada valley The creature, whose fossilised bones were scattered along the Narmada River in the western state of Gujarat, has been named Rajasaurus narmadensis, or the regal reptile from Narmada. Palaeontologist and explorer Paul Sereno, from the National Geographic team who made the discovery, said the beast would have been nine metres (30 feet) long, stocky, carnivorous and a stocky animal with an unusual head crest.

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's heatwave, which has claimed dozens of sunburn and heat exhaustion victims, has now produced its first case of frostbite. A motorist was diagnosed with the condition after driving with his toes too close to the air conditioning vent on the 250 mile journey from London to Manchester. One of his toes started to turn black and another went blue. "It was incredibly hot," Mike Ball, 46, told the Guardian newspaper. "I slipped off my shoe and sock because my car is an automatic and I don't need to use my left foot. "I didn't realize anything was wrong until the next day when my foot was extremely painful." Ball went to his doctor and was prescribed a cure for mild frostbite. He is expected to make a full recovery.

Druids have been brought in to reduce the number of accidents on Austria's worst stretch of autobahn. The Druids have put up huge roadside monoliths to restore the natural flow of "earth energy". After the one tonne pillars of white quartz were erected beside a notorious stretch of road during a secret two-year trial, the number of fatal accidents fell from an average of six a year to zero. Gerald Knobloch, who describes himself as an archdruid, used a divining rod to inspect the 275-metre stretch of the A9 in Styria and restore "earth energy lines". "I located dangerous elements that had disrupted the energy flow," he said. "The worst was a river which human interference had forced to flow against its natural direction. By erecting two stones of quartz at the side of the road the energy lines were restored."

A doctor found guilty of misconduct and disgraceful conduct has defended his treatment and claims experts called at his hearing had no understanding of it. Hamilton doctor Richard Gorringe was found guilty by the Medical Practitioners' Disciplinary Tribunal of two charges of professional misconduct and one of disgraceful conduct in relation to patients Yvonne Short and Ravaani Ghaemmaghamy whom he treated in 1998. The tribunal also found Dr Gorringe exploited Mrs Short for money, and that he knew, or should have known, that the diagnosis and treatments he gave her were wrong. The tribunal said he did not give either woman enough information about their treatments for them to be able to give their informed consent.

Researchers have sequenced the first genomes of bacteria that live in the sea. The DNA readouts hint at the essential apparatus for photosynthesis and provide new insights into Earth's carbon cycle. "We can consider these very close to minimal genomes," says molecular biologist Donald Bryant of Pennsylvania State University. What many of the genes in these token toolkits do is still unknown.

For much of his career, David Alan Harvey, a National Geographic staff photographer from 1978 to 1986, has trained his lens on the Hispanic world. He's traveled and photographed extensively in Spain, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Brazil, and nearly every other country in the Latin American Diaspora. Various assignments have also brought Harvey to Southeast Asia, Germany, France, and Italy, among other places. His work has appeared in a wide array of publications, including National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Life, The New York Times, and Sports Illustrated. Harvey received the National Press Photographer Association's Magazine Photographer of the Year award in 1978 and joined the prestigious Magnum co-operative in 1997. National Geographic News recently spoke with Harvey about his new book, Divided Soul.

The total mass within giant galaxy cluster CL0025+1654, about 4.5 billion light-years away, produces a cosmic gravitational lens -- bending light as predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity and forming detectable images of even more distant background galaxies. Of course, the total cluster mass is the sum of the galaxies themselves, seen as ordinary luminous matter, plus the cluster's invisible dark matter whose nature remains unknown. But by analyzing the distribution of luminous matter and the properties of the gravitational lensing due to total cluster mass, researchers have solved the problem of tracing the dark matter layout. Their resulting map shows the otherwise invisible dark matter in blue, and the positions of the cluster galaxies in yellow. The work, based on extensive Hubble Space Telescope observations, reveals that the cluster's dark matter is not evenly distributed, but follows the clumps of luminous matter closely.

For many centuries the King's Grave, an ancient burial hill near the southern Dutch city of Oss, has been an eery kind of place. The local population had all kinds of ghost stories about it and preferred not to go there at night. But now it looks brand new, in fact it is brand new. A low sandy hill, shaped a bit like a thick pancake, lies directly beside a highway. Roaring traffic thunders by and all thought of anything sacred or spooky quickly disapears. The ceremonial burial hill is now cut in half because the (now non-existent) other half would otherwise cover the highway. In the past, burial mounds like these were not uncommon in this part of the Netherlands. They dated from the Iron Age, approximately 700 BC and some were even a couple of hundred years older, the Bronze Age. As a rule they were left as they were, most of them were not very large, 25 meters in diameter at the most, and since their height was usually no more than 75 centimeters they were really not in the way at all. Cattle, for instance, could easily walk over them and simply grazed on the top.

Of all the major Bronze Age civilizations, only the Inca of South America appeared to lack a written language, an exception embarrassing to anthropologists who habitually include writing as a defining attribute of a vibrant, complex culture deserving to be ranked a civilization. The Inca left ample evidence of the other attributes: monumental architecture, technology, urbanization and political and social structures to mobilize people and resources. Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and the Maya of Mexico and Central America had all these and writing too. The only possible Incan example of encoding and recording information could have been cryptic knotted strings known as khipu. The knots are unlike anything sailors or Eagle Scouts tie. In the conventional view of scholars, most khipu (or quipu, in the Hispanic spelling) were arranged as knotted strings hanging from horizontal cords in such a way as to represent numbers for bookkeeping and census purposes. The khipu were presumably textile abacuses, hardly written documents. (Free Registration)

Archaeologists have uncovered one of the most important holy relics ever found in Ireland. The bronze bell shrine, dating back to between AD1180 and 1200, had been hidden carefully in the ground for safe keeping at the site of a settlement at Drumadoon, near Ballycastle in Co Antrim. Brian Williams, joint excavation director of the environment and heritage service, said it was "a rare and remarkable object". He said: "This is among the most important archaeological objects ever found in the course of an excavation in Ireland." The shrine is made of bronze and would have contained a sacred bell.

The people of Fiji have launched an ambitious attempt to save their magnificent coral reefs from uncontrolled development. The reefs attract thousands of tourists, yet the impact of tourism is one of the main threats they face. Another is chemical run-off from intensive agriculture, which is making increasing inroads in Fiji. The Fijians hope their approach will work for other islands facing similar problems.

Britain's birds face a mixed future, with some species showing heartening increases and others sunk in an apparently inexorable decline. The State Of The UK's Birds 2002 says some scarce breeding species are continuing to increase in number. Birds of prey continue to recover, with climate change a possible boost for several species. But woodland birds have undergone a moderate setback, while farmland species are declining steeply. The report is published jointly by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, and the British Trust for Ornithology.

MURDOCK, Fla. (Wireless Flash) -- It sounds mind-blowing but a man in Murdock, Florida, has thought up a way to make telekinesis a reality. James Conrad says he's spent the last 20 years studying how to move objects with the mind and has devised a mathematical equation, he says explains the phenomenon. In order for telekinesis to occur, Conrad claims there has to be an ample amount of iron circulating in the brain's blood supply. Also, direct visual contact with the object being moved is essential. Conrad says it's important for the telekinetic person get plenty of sleep and have no excess Vitamin E in their system.

BOULDER, Colo. -- Engineers at Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. are getting ready to test equipment they have built to propel a spacecraft into a comet. The team hopes the craft will be able to hit Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005 in a spot 80 million miles from earth. The craft will be about 2 feet high and 4 feet wide with a large copper nose that will be able to smash into the comet, traveling at 22,000 mph, creating a crater. Another spacecraft will record the image of the collision using two high-powered telescopes. The idea of the $300 million project sponsored by NASA is to see what kinds of chemicals are released from the comet after the impact and what they reveal about the origins of the universe. Infrared imaging technology will help scientists to identify which chemicals are in the debris.

Heat generated by the most dangerous nuclear waste could be exploited to bury it permanently and irretrievably in the Earth's crust, geologists are claiming1. But waste-management experts warn that sound science is not enough to bring about the safe disposal of high-level waste. High-level waste packed into boreholes drilled 5 km deep in solid granite would generate so much heat that it would melt the surrounding rock, which would then engulf it. As the deadly waste cools, the rock would eventually re-solidify, encasing it, suggests Fergus Gibb of the University of Sheffield, UK.

The blast waves from exploding stars called supernovae are egg-shaped not spherical, new observations suggest. Correcting for this small asymmetry should make supernovae even better tools for measuring cosmic distances and for inferring the presence of gravity's mysterious counter force, dark energy2. "It will be very important for the next generation of supernova experiments, which aim to measure whether dark energy changes with time,'' says team leader Lifan Wang from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, California.

One hundred years ago today two chemists found the crucial clue that alpha particles are helium atoms. The finding helped reveal the structure of atoms and paved the way for the exploitation - for better or worse - of nuclear energy. The Scottish chemist William Ramsay and Englishman Frederick Soddy reported in the 13 August 1903 issue of Nature that helium gas is produced by the radioactive decay of radium1. At that point they had no explanation for how one chemical element seemed to emanate from another.

Tornadoes are nature's most spectacular storms: A funnel of wind, spinning at speeds greater than 200 miles per hour, leaps from the bottom of a thunderstorm and cuts a swath of destruction, shredding farmhouses, uprooting trees and picking up automobiles and hurling them a quarter-mile. Despite their frequency -- more than 800 tornadoes occur in the United States each year -- scientists know relatively little about them and how they do the damage they do. Tornadoes are short-lived, erratic and violent. They can be extremely unkind both to instruments and the researchers who operate them.

Arthur Koestler, an iconoclastic thinker who could always be counted on for a catchy title, called his history of cosmology "The Sleepwalkers." The way mankind lurched and stumbled toward the truth reminded him "more of a sleepwalker's performance than an electronic brain's." Obsessions and fixations were as common as brilliant chains of reasoning, and every step forward seemed to be countered by two steps sideways and a half step back. The most erratic of the somnambulists on this zigzag trail was the man often called the father of modern science, Galileo. Far from being the selfless hero of popular legend who championed scientific truth over blind religious faith, he comes off in Koestler's book, published in 1959, as a vainglorious self-promoter spoiling for a fight.

A rare fragment of a bronze military-service document belonging to a Roman soldier who may have lived out his retirement in Norfolk has been unearthed in the county. The small artefact was found recently on mid-Norfolk farmland by an archaeologist working with a metal detector in the area, currently the scene of inquiries into its Roman past. Dated 98AD, it is a piece of a bronze, postcard-sized certificate awarded to auxiliary Roman soldiers at the end of their 25-year service, bestowing upon them full citizenship rights such as protection under law, and land ownership. Scrutiny by staff at Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service has revealed the original certificate was awarded to a soldier recruited in Pannonia, a province in the Balkans.

Have you seen Mars lately? As Earth and Mars near their closest approach in nearly 60,000 years on August 27, the red planet has begun to appear dramatically bright and show interesting details through telescopes and binoculars. Although not yet visible at sunset, Mars can be seen rising increasingly earlier in the evening. Once above the horizon, Mars is easy to spot, as it sports a distinct orange-red hue and it is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun, the nearby Moon, and Venus. After Earth overtakes Mars in their respective solar orbits, Mars will be visible right from sunset, although its historic brightness will then begin to fade. Pictured above, Mars was captured rising in the south east next to Poodle Rock in Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada, USA.

Strange flashing lights above the sky in Worcestershire has caused speculation the county was visited by aliens. A BBC cameraman spotted three bright lights in the sky over the Malverns near the village of Hanbury on Tuesday and filmed them with a video camera. Some thought it could have been flares. But cameraman Tom Hines, who works on the BBC drama series Doctors, said he is convinced it was a UFO. "I kind of saw two bright lights and thought they were stars at first," he said. "I pointed out where they were and started filming. They started disappearing and reappearing and at one point there was three bright lights.

As students across the country prepare for their A-level results this week, archaeologists have uncovered the earliest examination certificate ever found in Britain. Fragments of two bronze sheets, which had been threaded together, were unearthed by metal detector enthusiasts in Norfolk. The diploma was awarded in AD98 to a garrison soldier whose name has not survived but who was recruited in the imperial province of Pannonia, now the Balkans. Lettering inscribed on the eroded metal shows that he served in the legions from AD73, most of the time in Britain.

DRESDEN, Maine - Archaeologists and volunteers will visit a site along the Kennebec River this week in search of clues about a group of American Indians who set up camp there 9,000 years ago. The dig is a cooperative effort involving the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and the Friends of Merrymeeting Bay. "The process is a long, slow one; and part of the business of an archaeologist is learning how to be bored and patient," said Arthur Spiess, a senior archaeologist with the commission. Uncovered thus far were small shards of rock that probably chipped off while Indian hunters were making knives and spears. A dense type of quartz known as chert, the shards are no bigger than a fingernail.

The first Christian baptistry built onto the sumptuous mosaic of the dining room of an opulent 4th century Roman villa has been uncovered by archaeologists under the playing fields of a school in Wiltshire. The archaeologists have also discovered what appears to be a sham palatial twin villa. The twin villas, aligned on a hilltop and identical in plan would have been a stunning sight: built with metre thick stone walls, high on hill above Bradford-on-Avon and near a much older Iron Age hill fort. However while one is a conventionally splendid Romano British villa, with the beautiful dolphin and wine cup mosaic in the dining room, the other is emerging the most bizarre ever uncovered.

ROME (Reuters) - For centuries scholars have debated whether Caligula, the Roman empire's eccentric third ruler, was a megalomaniac who dared to defy the gods or a maligned emperor whose caprices were exaggerated after his death. Now a group of archaeologists digging up Caligula's ancient palace say they have finally found concrete evidence that he was indeed a "maniac" who turned one of Rome's most revered temples into the front porch of his residence.

The reputation of the Titanic was destroyed long ago, not least on that very night in the spring of 1912 when the supposedly "unsinkable" luxury liner hit an iceberg and slipped beneath the waters of the North Atlantic in less than three hours. Since then, the memory of the Titanic and the 1,500 crew and passengers who died have been assailed by films, books and Hollywood blockbusters, each bearing a varying degree of accuracy in what happened. But now the substance of the vessel itself - on the ocean floor, two miles down - is threatened in an unprecedented manner. Ironically, the problem is partly caused by those people trying to preserve the Titanic and gauge its destruction. Experts who have been visiting the wreck of the liner over the past decade have reported that its decay is accelerating year by year, largely as a result of scientists and wealthy tourists who visit the site by mini-submarines. In the past 10 years, the ship's crow's nest where a lookout warned in vain, "Iceberg right ahead!" has vanished and the foremast has crumbled. The captain's cabin, where he was resting when the ship struck the iceberg at 11.40pm on the night of 12 April, has all but disappeared.

Explosive devices designed for space rockets are being used to provide an emergency capsize-recovery system for an adventurer attempting to windsurf across the Pacific Ocean. Raphaëla Le Gouvello's custom-built windsurfer weighs more than half a tonne and includes a watertight sleeping compartment. But righting such a hefty board in difficult conditions could be very hard to do. So, in a crisis, the pyrotechnic charges could be detonated to rapidly inflate a large airbag and tip the board back over again.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A big galaxy is gobbling a tiny one, just as astronomers have long suspected, and for the first time there is photographic evidence of this kind of galactic cannibalism, snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope. The orbiting telescope captured the image of the gorging galaxy as part of a much larger picture of a long-tailed galaxy that has become known as the Tadpole. This photo was one of the first to be released last year after a new advanced camera was installed aboard Hubble.

Stephan's Quintet is a picturesque but clearly troubled grouping of galaxies about 300 million light-years away toward the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Spanning over 200,000 light-years at that distance, this composite false-color image illustrates the powerful nature of this multiple galaxy collision, showing x-ray data from the Chandra Observatory in blue superposed on optical data in yellow. The x-rays from the central blue cloud running vertically through the image are produced by gas heated to millions of degrees by an energetic shock on a cosmic scale. The shock was likely the result of the interstellar gas in the large spiral galaxy, seen immediately to the right of the cloud, colliding with the quintet's tenuous intergalactic gas as this galaxy plunged through group's central regions. In fact, over billions of years, repeated passages of the group galaxies through the hot intergalactic gas should progressively strip them of their own star forming material. In this view, the large spiral galaxy just seen peeking above the bottom edge is an unrelated foreground galaxy a mere 35 million light-years distant.

HAMDAN (Saba) - A team of archeologists has discovered Sana'a an ancient cave containing animal bones and stone arrow or spearheads dating back to pre-historic era in Al-Mazbad, Hamdan. Minister of Culture and Tourism Khaled Al-Rowishan ordered the concerned authorities to take quick measures to protect the objects found in the cave, according to an official source. The source added: "International experts and some Sana'a University professors have been authorized by the General Organization for Antiquities and Museums (GOAM) to conduct immediate and extensive research of the discovered objects, believed to have originated tens of thousands of years ago."

The building of a new terminal at Heathrow Airport is providing an unexpected trove of information about the people inhabiting this expanse of land, going back to the hunter-gatherers of the Stone Age some 8,000 years ago. A team of about 80 archaeologists has been working alongside the construction teams preparing the 100-hectare (250-acre) site, where Heathrow airport's fifth terminal will be built. The archaeologists have found Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Saxon, medieval and later remains, as well as traces of Stone Age culture.

A medieval ship older than the Mary Rose may have been a Portuguese vessel captured by pirates, an expert said today. The 15th century ship was discovered in June last year during the construction of a theatre and arts centre on the banks of the River Usk in Newport, South Wales. Now the mystery of who the ship belonged to and why it was in Newport may be close to being solved. Bob Trett, chairman of the trustees of Glamorgan Gwent Archaeological Trust, believes it may have been part of a fleet belonging to the Earl of Warwick.

POSTRELMOV, North Moravia, (CTK) - Archaeologists have found a unique about 6,000-year-old statuette of a human head from the Neolithic period near Postrelmov, archaelogists' team head Vladimir Gos said. The statuette, which probably served ritual purposes, was discovered during the archaeological exploration before a planned construction of a highway in the area, Gos added. "We have uncovered a number of valuable findings, but the statuette is definitely the most important one. It proves that people from the local Neolithic settlement devoted their time to spiritual life," Gos explained. He said that he expected the statuette to be a part of a vessel, used for cult practices, which had probably belonged to the village shaman.

Beneath what is now Leetsdale Industrial Park, early industrialists made bricks in a sprawling complex begun in the 1850s. About 7,000 years earlier, on the same site, American Indians had a settlement on what was then the high area of an island in the Ohio River. Archaeologists found hundreds of artifacts and clues to the area's history at the 12-acre dig along the bank of the Ohio River in the Industrial Park. The dig was undertaken as a result of construction of a fabrication site for the new Braddock Dam, which was completed and floated down the Monongahela River last year.

Britain's academy of science is to set up an inquiry into how scientific research is made public after rows about the reliability of research. The controversial and unsubstantiated claims earlier this year by a cult that it had successfully cloned humans was one of the announcements that gained worldwide coverage. And the row over conflicting research findings into the possible risks posed by genetically modified food has also raised concern. A working party for the Royal Society will look at how research information that could influence public opinion and policy is checked.

One of the most unusual weddings in history has taken place as planned with the groom orbiting the Earth and the bride on the ground in Texas, USA. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, 41, has married his American girlfriend, Russian-born Yekaterina Dmitriyeva, by video link between the International Space Station and Nasa space control centre in Houston. The bride, in an ivory wedding dress, was at the space centre with her bridesmaids and wedding guests, while the groom wore a bow tie with his blue space suit. He was accompanied by his best man, fellow astronaut Edward Lu, who had the additional duty of playing the wedding march on a portable keyboard.

One million pages of documents from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals will be made available on the internet if Boston's Harvard University can find the necessary money. Harvard's Law School has already posted 7,000 pages on one of its own web sites but it says it needs as much as $7m to make the entire Nuremberg archive available. The massive project to put the one million pages of transcripts from the Nuremberg trials onto the internet is likely to take 10 years to complete.

Prehistoric fire starters may have unwittingly killed off the big beasts that once roamed Australia. Analysis of ancient eggshells suggests that the animals suddenly became extinct about 50,000 years ago because people burned up their habitat. Australia's giant carnivorous kangaroos, seven-metre-long lizards, marsupial lions and enormous flightless birds all died off between 45,000 and 55,000 years ago. Most scientists agree that people arrived in Australia somewhere between 50,000 and 55,000 years ago.

A radical new theory of time and motion has some of the world's physicists doubting the claim while others laud the 27-year-old college dropout who came up with it, an unknown big thinker named Peter Lynds. Lynds says he's no Einstein. In fact, he is not a fully trained theorist. He has no real academic credentials. But he does appear to have a new career, now that one other theorist compared his work to the groundbreaking ideas of Albert Einstein. In a paper published in the August issue of Foundations of Physics Letters, Lynds claims to see time and motion with unprecedented theoretical clarity. Lynds refutes an assumption dating back 2,500 years, that time can be thought of in physical, definable quantities. In essence, scientists have long assumed that motion can be considered in frozen moments, or instants, even as time flows on.

David Quillin, a surfer from Maryland's Eastern Shore, knows what cold seawater feels like: It makes exposed flesh feel like it's burning, sets hands and feet to tingling, numbs the body and, after repeated dunkings, produces a painful "ice cream" headache. The 38-year-old architect expects all of this when he surfs the frigid waters off Ocean City in January. He didn't expect it in the middle of summer. But it's just what Quillin encountered when he paddled his board into the surf two weeks ago.

IT was a bleak few days for Otzi the iceman. During a routine hunting trip, he and his companion were caught in a territorial skirmish on a high alpine pass. Both were injured and Otzi was soon to die a painful death, lying knife in hand in the shelter of a rock face. Previously, scientists knew that Otzi had been shot by an arrow, but they knew nothing of his companion or the circumstances. The new version of Otzi's death 5300 years ago in the Italian Alps comes from archaeologist Tom Loy, an expert in prehistoric tools and director of the University of Queensland's Institute of Molecular Bioscience in Brisbane.

The author of a book on rebuilding Iraq was charged yesterday with smuggling some of its looted national treasures into the United States. Joseph Braude, 28, of Cambridge, Mass., was released on $100,000 bond after a preliminary appearance in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. The charge stems from the discovery of three ancient stone seals - each marked "IM" and bearing a serial number - in Braude's suitcase when he arrived at Kennedy Airport June 11 on a flight from London. Braude, author of "The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World," published earlier this year, initially told officials he had traveled only to England and Kuwait, not Iraq, according to Roslynn Mauskopf, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District.

In the depths of the dark clouds of dust and molecular gas known as M17, stars continue to form. Also known as the Omega Nebula and Horseshoe Nebula, the darkness of M17's molecular clouds results from background starlight being absorbed by thick filaments of carbon-based smoke-sized dust. As bright massive stars form, they produce intense and energetic light that slowly boils away the dark shroud. Colors in the above image were picked to highlight specific elements that emit nebular light: red indicates emission from sulfur, green from hydrogen, and blue from oxygen. The Swan Nebula is visible with binoculars towards the constellation of Sagittarius, lies 5000 light-years away, and spans 20 light-years across.

Distillery. Is a business I am entirely unacquainted with; but from your knowledge of it and from the confidence you have in the profit to be derived from the establishment, I am disposed to enter upon one.... (George Washington, June 1797) With those words, written to his plantation manager James Anderson, Washington entered into the whiskey distilling business. Now our team of archaeologists from Historic Mount Vernon, the Virginia plantation Washington called home for 45 years, embarks on an unknown venture just as the first American president did over 200 years ago. Together with interns and volunteers, we'll work this summer to discover and interpret the archaeological remains of George Washington's eighteenth-century whiskey distillery.

Archaeologists have less than a week to complete their work on the site of a mediaeval monastery it took 20 years to locate. The foundation stones of St Guthlac's Priory, which dates back to the 12th Century, were recently discovered underneath land at Hereford County Hospital. About 20 skeletons, believed to be of mediaeval monks, were also uncovered. But archaeologists must complete their research at the site before a new access road through the hospital is built next week.

China is paying a heavy environmental and social price for its spectacular economic growth. Water is running short, with some areas experiencing a fall of several metres in groundwater levels. The government has now banned the draining of wetlands and the logging of forested watersheds. And up to a million people may be moved from their homes as the wetland restoration programme gathers pace. The delicate balancing act Beijing is having to perform is described in Wetting The Appetite, a film made by Television Trust for the Environment (TVE) and shown on BBC World.

GREENVILLE, Mich. -- Librarians and clergy at other churches expressed mixed emotions after learning that members of the Jesus Non-denominational Church burned "Harry Potter" books and copies of the Book of Mormon and non-King James Version Bibles. Other books, magazines, posters, compact discs and movies that members believe do not promote God also went up in smoke Sunday, as more than 50 people gathered outside the church for the fiery display. Among the incinerated items were Shania Twain's album "The Woman in Me" and the Dan Aykroyd movie "Coneheads." Church members who sporadically shouted "Hallelujah," "Thank you, God" and "Burn, devil, burn" said the fire was divinely inspired. "This was definitely by the Holy Spirit," said Bonnie Conran, a member and office executive at the church. "It's important for children to know that Harry Potter is witchcraft," said Jill Turner, the bishop's wife. "It really afflicts their minds."

It's not every day you get to watch a planetary ice cap melt, but this month you can. All you need are clear skies, a backyard telescope, and a sky map leading to Mars. Actually, you won't need the sky map because Mars is so bright and easy to find. Just look south between midnight and dawn on any clear night this month. Mars is that eye-catching red star, outshining everything around it. It's getting brighter every night as Earth and Mars converge for a close encounter on August 27th.

A mathematician claims to be able to predict which newly wed couples will get a happy marriage by using algebra. Professor James Murray says that the formula he has developed has a 94 percent success rate when it comes to predicting whether or not a couple will stay married, according to the Daily Telegraph. The formula was developed after the Professor studied 700 couples in the US over a period of 10 years. Murray works as a maths professor at the Washington University in Seattle and he presented his results at a conference in Dundee, Scotland on Thursday.

Smokejumpers are the troubleshooters of wildfire-fighting efforts. There are roughly 370 wildfires currently burning in the United States. Smokejumpers are dispatched to the fires that are too remote, the terrain too rugged, or the heat and flames too intense to reach otherwise. The work is back-breaking and dangerous and the hours are exhausting. You have to love it to do it, and smokejumpers are nothing if not passionate about their work. "Discovering fire fighting for me was like discovering the job I had been meant to do but didn't know it existed," said smokejumper Lori Messenger. She'll describe a fire as "cooking pretty good," or "messy" and speak of flaming fronts and walls of fire as matter-of-factly as most of us speak of a harrowing day at the office when the computers went down.

Traditional conservation efforts to protect the Scottish wildcat and Australian dingo may be misguided. The two have been interbreeding with their domestic cat and dog relatives for so long it no longer makes sense to preserve them as separate pure-bred animals, say two researchers. Instead, wildcats and dingoes should only be protected if they play an important role in the local ecosystem or economy. Domestic cats appeared in Britain at least 2000 years ago and have interbred with their wild relatives ever since. As a result, there are now two groups of wildcats. In one, cats resemble their domesticated cousins. The others have the typical wildcat features of bushy ringed tails and stripes, although no one knows how close they are to their pure-bred ancestors.

Communicating with spacecraft at Mars always involves a wait. Depending on how far apart the planets are, it can take up to 21 minutes to get a signal from Earth to the red planet, resulting in a round-trip time of more than 40 minutes. The lag can be agonizing for an engineer trying to steer a surface probe or debug a software problem. On Aug. 27, when Mars is closer to Earth than ever in human history, the one-way travel time of light and radio signals will be just 3 minutes and 6 seconds. Astronomers love to measure cosmic distances in light-years. In this case, you can think of the distance between the two planets as being 186 light-seconds.

Our Moon's appearance changes nightly. This time-lapse sequence shows what our Moon looks like during a lunation, a complete lunar cycle. As the Moon orbits the Earth, the half illuminated by the Sun first becomes increasingly visible, then decreasingly visible. The Moon always keeps the same face toward the Earth. The Moon's apparent size changes slightly, though, and a slight wobble called a libration is discernable as it progresses along its elliptical orbit.

Nicolas Jarquin was cutting trees in preparation for constructing a warehouse on the property of a Nicaraguan agricultural company when he noticed several large mounds exposed by the activity, some with building foundations on their surface. Before disturbing the mounds, he called in Spanish and Nicaraguan archaeologists working at the nearby prehistoric village of Karoline to have a look. What they found surprised everyone involved: evidence of a poorly known, complex civilization that existed in the tropical forest just before the Maya began to dominate regions to the north.

The building of a new terminal at Heathrow airport is providing an unexpected trove of information about the people inhabiting this expanse of land, going back to the hunter gatherers of the stone age 8,000 years ago. A team of about 80 archaeologists has been working alongside the construction teams preparing the 100-hectare site, where Heathrow airport's fifth terminal will be built. The archaeologists have found Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Saxon, medieval and later remains as well as traces of stone age culture. The researchers have identified 80,000 archaeological objects including 18,000 pieces of pottery, 40,000 pieces of worked flint and the only wooden bowl found dating to the Middle Bronze Age, more than 3,000 years ago.

A US rover despatched to investigate the surface of Mars has a glitch in one of its instruments. The problem in a spectrometer on the Spirit vehicle was picked up during a routine checkout. But officials at the American space agency's (Nasa) Jet Propulsion Laboratory say they are not unduly concerned at this stage. They believe the rover instrument will still be able to do its job of gathering data about iron in Martian rocks - even if scientists have to play around with the information to make the best sense of it. Spirit was launched by a Delta II rocket from Florida on 11 June and has already travelled more than 150 million kilometres to its destination.

Steve Nichols has a way with birds. The founder of the UK's National Parrot Sanctuary connects with them in a way few people can understand. Strolling through the centre at Friskney, in Lincolnshire, he can individually name most of the 414 parrots under his care. And like a horse whisperer who can "break" troublesome equines, Mr Nichols has the ability to bond with the worst behaved birds. He says: "I have got a natural affinity with parrots... they actually relate to me."

Measles is making a comeback in Britain. And a public that shuns the combination measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination is to blame, a new report finds. The discovery highlights parents' confusion about the actual risk of measles compared with the perceived, but probably non-existent, threat of the jab. Fear of the MMR vaccine - accused but exonerated as an autism trigger - is risking measles' permanent return to Britain. "An increase in the number of susceptible children could lead to measles re-establishing itself," says epidemiologist Mary Ramsay of Britain's Health Protection Agency in London, who took part in the study.

A man-made mini iceberg at a Scottish tourist attraction is reported to be growing in size as a result of the recent hot weather. The iceberg, which features as part of a polar exhibit at Edinburgh's Dynamic Earth attraction, usually measures just over 14ft. The room and the iceberg is kept at a cooling 12C. But, with visitors making more than one trip to the polar room to escape the sizzling summer sun, moisture in the room has been rising. Experts at the attraction say the moisture build-up is clinging to the iceberg and freezing, making it grow slowly in size throughout the day. As a result, they are having to melt the organic iceberg down every night to ensure it is back to the correct size for the next busy day.

Local archaeologist Gary Johannsen believes the remains found at the "Cove on the Bay" development could date back thousands of years and may include dozens of partial skeletons or more. One local find, known as the Libben site near the Portage River, he said, turned up evidence of more than 2,000 remains. It was discovered in 1982. Also discovered that year was a burial ground near Erie Island Resorts. The bones tell the story of migratory Native Americans, too, he said. From the remains, experts can tell what they ate and deduce what era they lived in. Some of the remains could date back to 600 A.D., while others could be newer. This site, too, appears to be a missing link between a path along Lake Erie -- there have been burial grounds found along Muddy Creek and the Portage River as well.

Just after the Moon set but before the Sun rose in the early morning hours of 2000 August 12, meteors pelted the Earth from the direction of the constellation Perseus, while ions pelted the Earth from the Sun. The meteors were expected as sub-sand grains long left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle annually create the Perseids Meteor Shower. The aurorae were unexpected, however, as electrons, protons, and heavier ions raced out from a large Coronal Mass Ejection that had occurred just days before on the Sun. In the foreground is Hahn's Peak, an extinct volcano in Colorado, USA. The Perseid meteor shower peaks this year over the next few days, with as much as one bright meteor per minute visible from some locations.

While researchers periodically hail new finds as the earliest examples of human writing, few scientists have systematically peered into the other end of the process -- the fall of a culture's written symbols. Writing systems, like cultures, have come and gone throughout human history. Brigham Young University anthropologist Stephen Houston and other colleagues studied several dead script systems from around the globe to look for similarities and differences in their respective demises. "What's interesting is why people choose, or are forced, to drop something that had been enormously important to their society," Houston said from his current field site in Guatemala. "This is an enormous step. And since it is such a big shift, it points to even larger changes in the societies that use and transmit such forms of writing."

Researchers from Israel have developed a new way to date archaeological objects that is based on superconductivity. The new technique relies on measuring the magnetic signal from lead - which was widely used in antiquity - in samples that have been cooled to cryogenic temperatures. The method could be used to date pipes, coins, bottles and other objects (S Reich et al. 2003 New J. Phys 5 99) Lead is stable in many environments and corrodes only very slowly into lead oxide and lead carbonate. It becomes a superconductor when cooled below 7.2 Kelvin, whereas the corrosion products do not. This means that the magnetization of the lead will be several orders of magnitude higher than that of the corrosion products when the sample is placed in an applied magnetic field at temperatures below 7.2 Kelvin. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the magnetic signal from the sample is coming from the lead only.

A maverick supernova could provide new clues to the mysterious origins of these exploding stars. Mario Hamuy of the Carnegie Observatories in California and colleagues in Chile and the US have detected hydrogen emission from the vicinity of a type 1a supernova known as SN2002ic. According to the team, the discovery lends weight to the theory that white dwarf stars explode into 1a supernovae after gathering material from a companion star (M Hamuy et al 2003 Nature 424 651). Astronomers believe that a supernova occurs when a star explodes at the end of its life. Supernovae are widely used as "standard candles" in cosmology, and observations of type 1a supernovae provided the first evidence that the expansion of the universe was accelerating - one of the most important advances made in physics in the past decade. However, astronomers disagree about the exact origins of these outbursts.

LONDON (Reuters) - A strand of spider web silk about 130 million years old has been found preserved in Lebanese amber, a Swiss scientist said Wednesday. The 0.1575-inch strand, the world's oldest, was discovered in amber beds near Jezzine in Lebanon. Tiny glue droplets produced by the spider's glands are found on the strand. "This specimen not only demonstrates the antiquity of viscid (sticky) silk...but is also some 90 million years older than the oldest viscid spider thread previously reported in Baltic amber," Samuel Zschokke, of the University of Basel, said in a report in the science journal Nature. Scientists had known from fossil samples that spiders dating back 410 million years ago had silk producing glands but they did not know when they began to produce webs. The ancient strand gives them a better indication of when it started.

Archaeologists on the site of the old Athens airport survey a group of 2,300-year-old marble sculptures that adorned a family enclosure at a cemetary. Other finds included some 250 pottery vases and three large bronze vessels. A tram depot will be built on the site. Excavations on the site of the old Athens airport at Hellenikon have uncovered a large ancient cemetery with richly furnished graves that include an ornate family enclosure decorated with relief sculptures.

Lucknow: The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has appealed to the three-judge special bench of the High Court hearing the Ayodhya case to allow its team to enter the excavated area in the Sri Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid disputed site between August 7 and August 22 even after completion of excavation. Today was the last day of excavation. After seeking several extensions the ASI informed the court that it shall complete the excavation today. The ASI shall submit its final report to the High Court on August 22. The report would unravel whether or not an ancient temple was demolished to build mosque by Zahir-ud-din Mohammad Babur's General Mir Baqi in 1528. The ASI sought permission to enter the disputed site up to August 22 for finalising drawings and to check the drawings and measurements already recorded.

The Kyoto treaty on cutting greenhouse gas emissions will not stop climate change, a leading think tank has warned. The report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which has close links to the government, comes as some experts cite Britain's heat wave as further evidence of global warming. Even if the Kyoto agreement is fully implemented, greenhouse gas emissions worldwide will still increase by 70%, says the IPPR. The think tank wants a new approach instead of the "horse trading" over emissions allowed under the treaty, which the government stresses is the only agreement in place.

Scientists have discovered a "smoking" volcano 3,000 metres below the surface of the Indian Ocean. The team on board the research vessel RRS Charles Darwin made the find when they detected a huge, dark plume of water, 600 metres thick and over 30 kilometres wide, rising hundreds of metres above a lava-strewn valley on the Carlsberg ocean ridge. "Black smokers", often teeming with exotic lifeforms, are known to exist in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans but their discovery in the Indian Ocean is very recent. "The source of the plume is comparable to a suite of power stations churning out vast amounts of heat and smoky water," said Dr Bramley Murton, the scientist leading the research cruise.

BALTIMORE (AP) - A clogged pipe at the Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Library sent water seeping through five floors of books, damaging as many as 8,000 volumes from the 17th through the 19th centuries. The damaged books are a cross-section of the library's 318,000-volume holdings, said Hopkins library curator Cynthia H. Requardt: history, literature, art and architecture studies, periodicals and more. Hopkins officials discovered the damage Monday. University spokesman Glenn Small said officials suspect the leaking air-conditioning drainage pipe may have become clogged with calcium buildup, a risk in older pipes. The damage occurred along the eastern wall of the library, famous for its five levels of stacks and cast-iron balconies, which ascend to a skylight 61 feet above the floor. The library was built in the 1870s to house a collection bequeathed by philanthropist George Peabody.

Green tea's ability to fight cancer is even more potent and varied than scientists suspected, research suggests. Scientists already know that green tea contains anti-oxidants which may have a protective effect against cancer. But now they have discovered that chemicals in the tea also shut down a key molecule which can play a significant role in the development of cancer. The molecule, known as the aryl hydrocarbon (AH) receptor, has the ability to activate genes - but not always in a positive way. Tobacco smoke and dioxins, in particular, disrupt the functioning of the molecule and cause it to trigger potentially harmful gene activity.

British and American archaeologists digging in the Roman Forum said yesterday they had uncovered evidence to suggest that the emperor Caligula really was a self-deifying megalomaniac, and not the misunderstood, if eccentric, ruler that modern scholars have striven to create. For several decades historians have been lifting their eyebrows at the Latin authors' portrait of Caligula as a madman who came to believe he was a god. But Darius Arya of the American Institute for Roman Culture said a 35-day dig by young archaeologists from Oxford and Stanford universities had reinstated a key element in the traditional account. "We have the proof that the guy really was nuts," said Dr Arya as he sat in the shade of a clump of trees a few metres from the excavation.

In our neck of the Galaxy stars are too far apart to be in danger of colliding, but in the dense cores of globular star clusters star collisions may be relatively common. In fact, researchers have evidence that the closely spaced blue stars near the center of the above image taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope were formed when stars directly collided. Pictured is the central region of NGC 6397, a globular cluster about 6,000 light-years distant, whose stars all formed at about the same time. NGC 6397's massive stars have long since evolved off the main sequence, exhausting their central supplies of nuclear fuel. This should leave the cluster with only old low mass stars; faint red main sequence stars and brighter blue and red giants.

Seahenge could go on public display for the first time in the summer of 2005, it emerged last night. The future of the 4000-year-old Bronze Age timber circle has been the subject of fierce debate since its controversial excavation from the beach at Holme, near Hunstanton, in 1999. County councillors have now decided the internationally-important find should form the focal point of a £800,000 redevelopment of Lynn Museum at King's Lynn. Norfolk's museums and archaeology service is making a bid for Lottery cash towards the scheme and, if all goes to plan, work could start towards the end of next year.

The ongoing renovation of the local Ferozeshah Kotla cricket stadium has created controversy with allegations being levelled that several historical graves there, dating back to the Mughal Empire, have either been destroyed or damaged beyond recognition. The Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA), which started renovation of the stadium to create a world-class cricketing venue in place of the dilapidated stadium, deny the allegation asserting there are no graves and none have been damaged.

LOS ANGELES -- An auction featuring thousands of antiquities recovered off the coast of the Philippines has been delayed until it can be determined whether a deep sea explorer had the right to excavate there, officials said Tuesday. The collection, which includes pieces of Chinese porcelain and pottery 2,000 years old, was to be auctioned off next month at Guernsey's in New York. Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's, said the auction house decided to suspend the event after receiving letters questioning whether deep sea explorer Phil Greco had the necessary permits from the Philippine National Museum in Manila. "It only seems reasonable that we look into some of these claims and some of these comments that people have been making," Ettinger said. He declined to give further details.

Italian scientists have succeeded in creating the world's first horse clone. The foal, called Prometea, was born 10 weeks ago and appears to be perfectly healthy. To create Prometea, scientists took a skin cell from an adult mare which was fused with an empty equine egg. The mare then acted as a surrogate mother for Prometea - so giving birth to a carbon copy of herself. The development is reported in the journal Nature. It means scientists have now cloned sheep, mice, cattle, goats, rabbits, cats, pigs and mules. The mule, called Idaho Gem, was born earlier this year in the US.

Scientists have developed a robotic insect which walks on water. The team, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, were testing out a theory about how one family of foraging insects performs the same trick. Previous theories put forward to explain how water striders (Gerridae) manage to propel themselves across the surface of ponds and lakes had one major problem. They predicted that young water striders should be too weak to move, while nature shows clearly that they are not. Surface tension explains why water striders do not sink below the surface as they stand on water. But a careful experimental study was needed to explain how they propel themselves forward. "What we did was to apply some conventional techniques of flow visualisation in fluid dynamics," MIT's John Bush told BBC News Online. "You basically sprinkle dye or tiny particles into the water and record what happens with a high-speed camera."

The Egyptian Red Crescent Society (ERCS) yesterday discussed the dispatch of humanitarian aid to the flood-ravaged region of Kassala, east Sudan. Under the chairmanship of Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, the ERCS Relief Committee agreed to sending LE250,000 worth of food and medicine to the disaster area. The ERCS has also offered pensions to some Sudanese residents of squatter areas in Greater Cairo. The committee met at the request of the Sudanese Ambassador to Egypt and the Sudanese Red Crescent.

Working with new evidence and a trove of re-examined relics, many of them recovered from the basement of a museum in Connecticut, archaeologists have revised their thinking about the significance of Macchu Picchu, the most famous ``lost city'' of the Inca. The new interpretation comes more than 90 years after the explorer Hiram Bingham III bushwhacked his way to a high ridge in the Andes of Peru and beheld a dreamscape out of the pre-Columbian past. The expression ``lost city,'' popularized by Bingham, was the magical elixir for rundown imaginations in the summer of 1911, evoking the romanticism of exploration.

From Pravda: The principle suggested by David Stevenson is an exact antithesis of volcano eruption. A New Zealand planetary scientist David Stevenson caused turmoil in the geological society as he offered to probe not the space but the core of the planet. According to Le Monde, the fantastic project is not yet thoroughly developed. "At first the idea was declared ridiculous, now it is said to be unfeasible. This is quite a progress!" Planetary scientist David Stevenson, who is working in Pasadena, is satisfied with the effect the suggestion produced. On May 15 the Nature journal published the suggestion of the scientist to send a probe in a bubble of molten iron to the Earth core.

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- A young man climbs from bed, stares into a mirror and glimpses his future. He has just turned 34. His body is trim, his hair thick and dark. But what's that around his eyes? Those crow's-feet are getting harder to ignore. And do his teeth look a bit ground down by decades of chewing, or is it his imagination? He will probably repeat the same check tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow -- about 16,000 more times if he, like the average American, dies at around 80. "I don't think 80 years is long enough. There's a lot of things I want to do," he laments. But what can he -- or anyone -- do about getting old? He can't stop it, any more than he can dispel rain clouds roiling on the horizon, any more than ancient alchemists could distill a real elixir of immortality.

High-speed vaccines could help to contain unexpected outbreaks of disease, say US researchers who have developed a fast-acting vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus. The new vaccine, reported in this issue of Nature1, gives macaque monkeys protection from Ebola infection only four weeks after a single jab. Previous Ebola vaccines took six months and multiple boosters to confer immunity. Should the vaccine prove safe and effective in humans, this would be fast enough to stop Ebola outbreaks, says lead author Gary Nabel, head of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. It could also form a template for developing emergency vaccines against unexpected outbreaks of disease, Nabel says.

SHERMAN OAKS - Deep-sea adventurer Phil Greco declares he is no Indiana Jones, but the vast collection of Chinese antiquities stuffed into every nook and cranny of his Sherman Oaks home would turn any archaeologist green with envy. In 11 years of self-financed exploration off the coast of the Philippines, Greco has uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts spanning 2,000 years of Chinese history. "Sixteen sites in the last 11 years; 23,500 pieces of porcelain, big jars of four-feet high to five-feet high to thousands of Ming dynasty plates 10- to 12- to 25-inches in diameters, some weighing 100 pounds per plate,' said Greco, who unveiled his collection for the first time Tuesday. "It's wall-to-wall, literally. We live in a museum, literally.'

SUNDAY AUG. 3 The first six daily journal entries represent the exciting findings of our archaeological dive teams, and what's happening underwater is truly impressive. But this field project involves far more than what may appear as scuba diving. What is most exciting here is that an integrated scientific team, for the first time, is creating a comprehensive likeness of the Frolic as an ocean-going, cargo-carrying sailing ship and then a dramatic and historic shipwreck. On this project, I apply my experience with "material culture" the science of examining and interpreting material clues that survive from historic cultures. We make sense of artifacts by literally grounding them, first providing accurate portraits of what happened, then proposing what it all means, for then as well as for now.