Newsdesk Archive

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Britain's first ever mission into space unveiled its arsenal of technology on Monday, including a huge helium balloon and spacesuits to shield the pilots from cosmic rays. The balloon flight to the limits of the Earth's atmosphere is an attempt to capture the altitude record, which has stood for over 40 years.

Managers at Dounreay have been ordered to stop rabbits from entering radioactive waste pits at the nuclear plant in Caithness. Inspectors from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency spotted the bunnies hopping in and out of solid low level waste pits during a recent routine visit. A subsequent investigation discovered rabbit faeces next to the pits and evidence of burrows through two pit caps. The site's authorisation requires the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) to use the "best practicable means" for preventing the movement of any radioactive waste contained in the pits.

Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history? A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity. It was just before a decisive battle for control of Rome and the empire that Constantine saw a blazing light cross the sky and attributed his subsequent victory to divine help from a Christian God. Constantine went on to consolidate his grip on power and ordered that persecution of Christians cease and their religion receive official status.

A cache of relics that will go some way to explaining ancient Tibetan existence have been unearthed, Chinese state press reported Monday. The haul of 37 groups of relics was found by archeologists along the high-altitude Qinghai-Tibet railway, the Xinhua news agency said. They include stoneware, tombs and military watchtowers, said Huo Wei, director of the Tibet Studies Institute of Sichuan University.

They ran the biggest empire of their age, with a vast network of roads, granaries, warehouses and a complex system of government. Yet the Inca, founded in about AD1200 by Manco Capac, were unique for such a significant civilisation: they had no written language. This has been the conventional view of the Inca, whose dominions at their height covered almost all of the Andean region, from Colombia to Chile, until they were defeated in the Spanish conquest of 1532.

AGRA, India - A state-run company building a tourist complex near the Taj Mahal pulled back its cranes and earth-filling equipment Sunday after the federal government said the project violated laws protecting the 17th-century monument. Federal Tourism and Culture Minister Jagmohan, who visited the white-marble Taj Mahal on Sunday, said the new structure could divert the flow of Jamuna River waters during monsoon rains, flooding a sprawling garden in the area and damaging the monument.

MOUNT VERNON, Virginia (Reuters) - George Washington made whiskey here. As America's first president and one of its canniest early entrepreneurs, Washington liked a sip of cinnamon whiskey -- and he distilled his own. More than that, he started a thriving business selling a raw, clear liquor made from rye and corn. "Two hundred gallons of Whiskey will be ready this day for your call, and the sooner it is taken the better, as the demand for this article (in these parts) is brisk," Washington wrote in a letter to his nephew in October 1799.

MELAKA, June 23 (Bernama) -- The Museum and National Antiquities Department has excavated a Port Santiago tower, used by the Portuguese in protecting Melaka in the 1500s, during archaeological works in Padang Pahlawan here. The department's archaeology director Kamarudin Zakaria said the tower, situated 80 metres south-west of Porto de Santiago, or otherwise known as "A Famosa", was a priceless piece of Melaka Sultanate history.

In the eerie calm half a mile beneath the Mediterranean lies a wreck which could solve the mystery of what happened to a 17th-century British warship containing up to £2.5bn in treasure. But above the surface a tempest is brewing. An agreement between the British government and a US company to excavate the wreck, which it believes is the 80-gun warship Sussex which sank in 1694 carrying up to 10 tonnes of gold, has enraged experts.

President George W Bush has called on Europe to end its moratorium on genetically modified crops. The spread of safe, effective biotechnology should be encouraged, so that the fight against global hunger could be won, Mr Bush told delegates at a biotechnology conference in Washington. A parallel conference on technology in agriculture organised by the US Government is taking place in Sacramento, California.

Doctors and nurses have known for many years that some people are more sensitive to pain than others. Now brain scans of people experiencing the same painful stimulus have provided the first proof that this is so. But the scans also suggest that how much something hurts really is "all in the mind". "We saw a huge variation between responses to the same stimulus," says project leader Bob Coghill of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. "The message is: trust what patients are telling you."

A middleweight black hole, thousands of times heavier than the Sun, is dragging young stars towards the monster black hole known to sit at our galaxy's centre, astronomers suspect. The discovery could help explain how the monster grew so fat in the first place. There is good evidence that most, if not all, large galaxies harbour a supermassive black hole. The one at the centre of the Milky Way is about three million times as massive as the Sun.

(follow link to see image) How smooth is the Sun? The new Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope, deployed in the Canary Islands only last year, allows imaging of objects less than 100-km across on the Sun's surface. When pointed toward the Sun's edge, surface objects now begin to block each other, indicating true three-dimensional information. Close inspection of the image reveals much vertical information, including spectacular light-bridges rising nearly 500-km above the floor of sunspots near the top of the image. Also visible in the above false-color image are hundreds of bubbling granules, each about 1000-km across, and small bright regions known as faculas.

A sixth grader unearthed a ring during a class outing to Borre National Park, where children could try their hands at archeology. The ring was likely part of a larger piece of woman's jewelry and probably over 1,000 years old, Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reports. Magnus Hempel Naess was on a field trip with Galleberg Elementary School from Sande when he made the exciting discovery at the Midgard Historical Center. Magnus was digging near the ship mound where the major Borre find was made.

The weather-battered moai statues on Easter Island, one of the seven mysteries of the world, are getting a complete facelift thanks to a restoration project bankrolled by Japan. As part of the restoration work, six workers carefully took hold of a four-meter-high moai statue that was being hoisted by a crane and guided it into position as it was lowered to the ground.

Mark Grasmueck can see underground and, without hardly anyone noticing, he has been peeking below downtown Miami. Grasmueck, a University of Miami geophysicist, is quietly working with archaeologists on the planned One Miami development in the heart of Miami just north of the Dupont Plaza hotel -- a site that almost certainly harbors ancient treasure.

A Northern Ireland police station could be sitting on a medieval Celtic settlement, according to a leading historian. Dr Eamon Phoneix said Andersonstown police station in west Belfast, which is earmarked for closure, should be given a full archaeological examination. The station has been prominent during 30 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, as one of the most frequently bombed stations. But a delve further into its past could reveal another chapter of history.

Hopes are rising that Europe's marine life may soon start enjoying the better protection it was promised years ago. Environment ministers are expected soon to announce measures to stop the decline of many creatures. They will probably include protection for several bird and fish species, and a network of marine protected areas.

Minister of Culture Farouq Hosni decided to keep account of all stolen antiquities, which were smuggled from Egypt since 1972 and sold by international auction halls or held by museums. All archaeological areas, tombs and storehouses will open to draw up a detailed statement on all stolen pieces. The second step will be making contacts with international parties, which keep these pieces.

Hassan Lamungu had never seen a laundromat before. He knew he must first put his clothes into the washing machine. So he did that. Add quarters into the coin slot. So he did that too. Then he stepped back, waiting. Nothing happened. Someone finally had to point out that he should press the little button that said, "Start." Lamungu looked confused. "Why?" he asked. "They told me it was an automatic washing machine."

A tax on farting, belching livestock to be introduced by New Zealand to help combat global warming is creating a stink among the country's farmers. Methane emissions created by grass-munching cows, sheep, deer and goats are believed to account for about half of New Zealand's emissions of greenhouse gases.

Toward the end of the 13th century, something went terribly wrong among the Anasazi. What awful event forced the people to flee their homeland, never to return? The Anasazi, a civilization that arose as early as 1500 B.C., occupied the region now known as the Four Corners, where Utah Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, for centuries. They built magnificent villages, such as Chaco Canyon's Pueblo Bonito, a tenth-century complex that was as many as five stories tall and contained 800 rooms.

Egyptian antiquities are once again for sale on the international auction scene. Last week in New York, 75 ancient Egyptian artefacts were on display at Christie's auction house and 32 others at Sotheby's. These include a collection of limestone statues, marble pots, sarcophagus lids, reliefs and torsos of the pharaohs Tuthmosis III and Amenhotep III. The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) contacted the Egyptian Embassy in New York in an attempt to postpone both auctions until it can be ascertained whether the 89 prices for sale had been stolen, and if they should be returned to Egypt. Both auction houses confirmed the legitimacy of the auctions, saying they would not sell any object of dubious origin.

Prehistoric 'shoes' made out of bearskin and hay are better for mountain walks than modern hiking boots, claims an expert. Shoe specialist Petr Hlavacek has been studying the shoes found on the feet of a prehistoric iceman whose mummified body was found in an Alpine glacier in 1991. Mr Hlavacek, who reconstructed a pair of the shoes, said they kept the foot at an optimal temperature, allowed sweat to evaporate and dried quickly if they got wet.

Prof. Dr. Marcella Frangipane is trying to convince scientists that Anatolia is the source of civilization on earth, and not Mesopotamia, as historians have claimed. After 13 years of work in the Aslantepe Mound Orduzu, Malatya, Frangipane says the archefacts she uncovered prove that the first civilization was established in Anatolia. According to Frangipane, the swords he found in Aslantepe and the palace, are the oldest in the world. These findings contradict everything in history books. Frangipane held a seminar, accompanied by a slide show, entitled 'Anatolia and Birth of State' for academics at the Turkish Embassy in Rome.

Archaeological research has produced much information about the historical development of ancient Nicopolis, presented at a second international symposium last week. Fifty archaeologists gathered to discuss recent finds and evidence from excavations of the Roman city, which was founded after the Battle of Actium in AD 31. The first international symposium at the ancient Roman city of Nicopolis, which took place 18 years ago, was significant for its time, but was confined to bibliographical data. Since then, something has happened to jolt the chronic indifference of the Culture Ministry.

OSAKA -- A 400-year-old Japanese translation of biblical literature has been found at a university in the old Polish city of Krakow, a researcher has told the Mainichi. One of the oldest known translations of the bible in Japanese, several paragraphs were translated by a Japanese mission of boys that left the country in 1582 and arrived in Rome three years later to receive an audience by Pope Gregory XIII.

A strain of bacteria has successfully restored 14th-century frescoes belonging to what was once the most extensive cycle of medieval paintings in the world, Italian researchers announced on Friday at a news conference in Milan. The bacteria, known as Pseudomonas stutzeri, degraded the organic compounds present in the frescoes, making it possible to see figures that previously had appeared like ghosts in a thick mist.

The remains of a fourth-century Roman villa have been found on a Bingham farmer's land. Tests were carried out on land at Newton House Farm earlier this year by the Highways Agency, to test if work on the A46 would affect any historical site. The surrounding area already has links with the Romans - as previous excavations have revealed. The land, near the former RAF station on the A46, belongs to James Fisher, who currently farms sugar beet there.

Archaeologists in western China discovered five earthenware jars of 2 000-year-old rice wine in an ancient tomb and its bouquet was still strong enough to perk up the nose, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Saturday. Xinhua said five litres of the almost clear blue-tinged liquor was found, enough to allow researchers their best opportunity yet to study ancient distilling techniques.

Sweden's Commission on Marine Environment has warned that the Baltic Sea is in a "critical" condition and in danger of dying unless pollution from the Russian city of St Petersburg is drastically cut. Half of the fish species in the Baltic are at levels below the critical biological level, while pregnant Swedish women are being warned not to eat herring - a staple diet - because of dioxins.

Experts are studying the "torrid and tangled" sex life of one of the UK's most popular pet fish as they try to learn how the battle of the sexes influences evolution. Researchers at St Andrews University hope that the guppy's mating behaviour can help them unravel the mystery of how new species are formed. They have put Trinidadian guppies under the microscope because the fish is in the process of splitting into two new species.

Mysterious circles and patterns which appear periodically on the wheat fields of Great Britain and other European countries are probably not the signs of aliens, but cunning provocations of some found closer to home, who use some sophisticated technology to create them. This is the opinion of Pavel Poluyan, our researcher in Krasnoyarsk. His latest article 'The Mystery of the Sacral Half Moon' provoked great interest among the readers. Today, Pavel Poluyan tells our correspondent Irina Petrenko about his theory.

Wooden structures unearthed on an archaeological dig in Orkney could be the oldest farm settlements in Britain. The find, off the main road from Kirkwall to Stromness, may also shed light on one of the most disputed subjects in archaeology. For decades, archaeologists have argued about the exact timescale and nature of the so-called farming revolution - when early societies made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming - thousands of years ago.

The statue of King Kanishka - one of the most formidable rulers to reign over what is now Afghanistan - used to stand in the foyer of the Kabul Museum. The king lost his head and arms a long time ago. But Taliban soldiers who arrived one frosty February morning smashed his remaining lower half with hammers and ordered museum staff to collect the fragments. Two years after the Taliban destroyed much of Afghanistan's cultural heritage, attempts are being made to restore what is left.

A BBC Scotland expedition has uncovered a major haul of artefacts from a failed attempt to create a wealthy Scottish empire in the Panama jungle. The 17th century scheme - known as the Darien Venture - cost 2,000 lives, lost about half of the country's wealth and is said to have changed the course of Scotland's political history. Many historians believe it also led many Scots to support the Act of Union and the abolition of the first Scottish Parliament in 1707.

Papua New Guinea's highlands was one of the cradles of farming, where some of the world's staple food plants were first domesticated, researchers have confirmed. The region now joins five others as a core area in which the agricultural revolution - the world's most dominant landuse - had its origins, report a team led by archaeologist Dr Tim Denham of Adelaide's Flinders University in today's issue of the journal Science.

"Restoring Bab Zuweila was for me a challenge, fun and a thrilling experience," said Nairy Hampikian, director of Bab Zuweila restoration project. "This southern bab was the principal gate of the Fatimid city. It was partially demolished in the 15th century when Sultan Al-Mu'ayyad built his mosque next to it on the site of a notorious prison in which he had been incarcerated. He erected the two tall minarets on the gate towers, and for more than 900 years, this was the main thoroughfare leading into the city, a centre of commerce, religious devotion, celebration and executions."

As a pioneer in the field of underwater archaeology, George F. Bass has spent more than four decades conducting research across the world. A cofounder of the Institute for Nautical Archaeology (INA) and professor emeritus at the nautical archaeology program at Texas A&M University, Bass is the recipient of the National Medal of Science and the Archaeological Institute of America's gold medal, and is a National Geographic Society Centennial Awardee. Recently retired, the man often heralded as the "father of underwater archaeology" talked to ARCHAEOLOGY about the future of the field.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (Soho) is experiencing communication problems with the Earth. The antenna it uses for high data-rate communication with the Earth is malfunctioning. Unless the problem is solved, its continuous transmission of scientific data to the Earth will suffer interruptions.

An academic who has studied the legends of Robin Hood for 20 years claims the hero of Sherwood Forest never existed. Professor Stephen Knight has amassed a library of books and videos and lectures on two university courses about the noble outlaw who famously robbed the rich to give to the poor. But his conclusion shoots a poison arrow through the belief in a real-life Robin - with a band of merry men - who fell for Maid Marion. Instead he claims the Robin Hood "myth" is reinvented when people feel they are being oppressed by their own version of the Sheriff of Nottingham.

A Nepalese Sherpa who last month broke the record for the fastest ascent of Everest has been accused of cheating - by the man who made the second quickest climb. Lakpa Gelu Sherpa reached the summit of the 8,848-metre peak from Base Camp in a time of 10 hours, 56 minutes on May 26. He clipped almost two hours off the record of 12 hours, 45 minutes that had been set just three days before by Pemba Dorje Sherpa, 25.

A new survey of Y chromosomes in the British Isles suggests that the Anglo-Saxons failed to leave as much of a genetic stamp on the UK as history books imply1. Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain repeatedly between 50 BC and AD 1050. Many historians ascribe much of the British ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons because their written legacy overshadows that of the Celts.

Whether you are a morning or an evening person could depend on a single gene, a study of extreme sleeping habits has revealed. Understanding the body clock's genetic basis may help people to make the most of their day. Night owls and early birds tend to carry different versions of a gene called Per3, says Simon Archer of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. This difference may make their preferred sleep cycles longer or shorter than 24 hours.

First contact with the UK's Beagle 2 Mars lander, which set off for the Red Planet on 2 June, has been delayed by a week. The postponement is required to allow engineers time to decipher an unexpected message from an instrument on Beagle's mother ship, Mars Express. Engineers had planned to boot-up and test Beagle 2's on-board computer systems on Friday. This would show how well the lander's electronics survived the rough and tumble of lift-off.

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP)--It was 372 years ago that a Muslim emperor built the Shish Mahal, or mirror palace, as a residence for his beloved wife, filling its high-domed ceilings with tens of thousands of tiny blue, red and brown mirrors. But the woman, Mumtaz Mahal, died before it could be completed, and her forlorn husband, Emperor Shahjahan ordered another structure built to her memory--the far-more famous Taj Mahal in the Indian city of Agra.

Ramses I mummy, currently in the US Atlantis Carlos Musseum, will return to Egypt in October, said the Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) on Wednesday. Zahi Hawas added that an agreement had been reached with the director of the Museum to hand over Ramses I mummy to the south Egyptian city of Luxor after being verified as a royal mummy.

At a press conference held this morning in Jerusalem, officials from the Israeli Antiquities Authority announced that an ancient stone box with the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," was a fake. The authority also determined that the "Joash inscription," a stone tablet with fifteen lines of ancient Hebrew detailing improvements at the Temple, was a forgery. Israel Insider reported details proving the ossuary a fake last November.

Yang Jiechi (L), Chinese Ambassador to the United States, shakes hands with Martin Ficke, special agent in charge of the New York office of the Department of Home Security, at a handover ceremony in the Chinese Consulate General in New York on June 17. Six ancient Chinese terracotta figures smuggled to the United States were returned to China by the US Customs on Tuesday. The six terracotta figures dating back to the Western Han Dynasty (B.C. 206--A.D. 25) were stolen from an ancient tomb in Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi Province in March 2002.

Who is the man in the iron coffin? Most of his headstone disappeared some time ago, and the place where he and his family were buried became overgrown with trees and brush. The cemetery became a farm and the farm became an industrial park, and descendants didn't even know it was there. It's strange and sad how the dissolutions of time can make a real live man who once swaggered across the earth worse than dead: forgotten.

SAN LUIS OBISPO - Encrusted with rust and clay, a cannon that could date from the late 18th or early 19th century was unearthed Wednesday morning by workers replacing sewer and water lines along Monterey Street in downtown San Luis Obispo. "This is a major discovery," said Bob Rowe, an archaeologist with TRC, a New Mexico-based archaeological consulting firm working with contractors on the project. "This is the first (cannon) I've seen out here on the West Coast."

A Japanese space craft is making a close approach to the Earth as it attempts to gather speed for its journey to Mars. The probe, Nozomi, which means hope in Japanese, was damaged by a solar flare soon after launch and may not reach its destination. Its heating system is not working and must be fixed somehow to stop the space craft missing Mars and getting lost in space.

Scientists have found an organelle - an enclosed free-floating specialised structure - inside a primitive cell for the first time. Prokaryotic cells are relatively simple cells, without nuclei, such as bacteria. It is believed they evolved first then absorbed other prokaryotes and became eukaryotes - complex cells that have nuclei and structures like the energy-producing mitochondria.

The world's whales seem little safer, despite all the work and expense involved in the four-day-long International Whaling Commission's meeting. The International Whaling Commission has ended its annual meeting here, leaving many delegates with a resounding sense that nothing has changed. The meeting cost close to £500,000 ($840,000) and got through 750,000 photocopied documents. It proclaimed itself firmly in favour of the conservation of whales.

Egyptologists are heatedly debating the identity of a mummy thought to be that of the beautiful Queen Nefertiti. If this is true, the discovery will be the greatest since the opening of Tut Ankh Amuon's tomb in l922. Nefertiti was the wife of King Akhenaton, whose reign (l353 -l363 BC) is known as the Amarna Period. He rebelled against the established cults and called for the worship of Aton, whose symbol was the sun disc.

It is almost certain that Earth will be hit by an asteroid large enough to exterminate a large percentage of our planet's life, including possibly over a billion people, according to researchers. But as such cataclysmic collisions occur on average only once in a million years or so, are they really worth worrying about? At some point in the geological future a large chunk of rock and ice will smack into Earth and destroy life as we know it. This is a cold, sober, scientific fact, according to Andrea Milani, a researcher at the University of Pisa in Italy.

For centuries astronomers have trained their gaze on the matter that brightens the universe: the moon, the planets, the stars, and the galaxies. But these bright spots only comprise four percent of the cosmos. The rest is seemingly a void, nothing but darkness. But the darkness is not empty: It is filled with dark matter and dark energy that has, over the course of the 14 billion years since the big bang, molded the universe into the dynamic structure and shape it holds today. The big bang is the name given to the theory that the universe started with a single cosmic explosion.

The first map known to have named the great landmass of the Western Hemisphere "America" has been acquired by the Library of Congress for U.S. ten million dollars. Described as "one of the greatest finds of the modern age" after it was lost for more than two centuries, the 1507 map of the entire world included data gathered by explorer Amerigo Vespucci. "This is the most impressive acquisition, without a doubt," said John Hebert, chief of the geography and map division at the Library of Congress.

Forgeries. That's the verdict of a scientific panel established by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) to examine the James Ossuary and the Jehoash Inscription. Announced today at a press conference in Jerusalem, the panel's findings--summarized below--show that these two artifacts are modern fakes, not ancient relics of the Bible. A media frenzy followed last October's announcement that André Lemaire of the Sorbonne University in Paris had found an inscription--James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus--on a light brown limestone box of the type commonly used for burials in first-century A.D. in Jerusalem.

CAIRO, Egypt - They were together only a few hours. But that brief union of a celebrated, 3,000-year-old bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti with a modern bronze nude body touched off a furor. Some Egyptians are calling the art project at Berlin's Egyptian Museum an insult to their culture and demanding the return of the ancient bust, charging it isn't safe in German hands.

A Pair of Keynsham brothers believe they have finally solved the 3,000-year-old mystery of Moses' exact route from Egypt. Peter and Mark Elmer had never been diving before they heard attempts were being made to find the exact place that Moses parted the Red Sea for the fleeing Israelites. They were alerted by a video made by American archaeologist Ronald Wyatt. The Biblical tale dating back to 1446BC has always been the subject of much debate with countless diving expeditions to the Gulf of Suez in the hope of finding artefacts.

New scientific evidence challenges a common perception that Neandertals -- a close evolutionary relative to modern humans that lived 230,000 to 30,000 years ago -- possessed exceptionally long faces. Instead, a report authored by Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shows that modern humans are really the "odd man out" when it comes to facial lengths, which drop off dramatically compared with their ancestral predecessors.

Scientists in the US have published the results of their detailed scrutiny of the genetic sequence of the human Y chromosome. This DNA bundle - one of 24 distinct chromosomes found in human cells - holds the crucial information to make the male of our species.

A huge database covering every aspect of the UK's foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001 has been compiled by government scientists. The electronic record of the £8bn disaster - accessible on the web - is intended for use by researchers worldwide wanting to understand better how diseases can spread through a nation's livestock herds.

GERMAN police are investigating the discovery of a headless body near Castle Frankenstein in Germany, a ruin many see as the inspiration for the novel about the mad scientist who made a monster from body parts. Police said yesterday the naked male corpse was found by a couple in a car park in the south-west town of Darmstadt two miles from the castle. They said it had probably been moved. The castle was the birthplace in 1673 of Johann Konrad Dippel von Frankenstein, an alchemist famous for his interest in the creation of artificial life.

Historians are drawn to gaps in the historical record like bears to honey or, sometimes, like cats to mood-enhancing catnip. Why, in fall and winter 1805, did Meriwether Lewis keep no journal (as Thomas Jefferson directed him to) when he and William Clark traveled up the Missouri River and through the Rocky Mountains to search for a way to the Pacific? Was Lewis in one of his depressions? Was he afraid to tell Jefferson there was no easy water route to the great ocean?

The devastating impact that terrorism has on tourism and the economies of developing countries became strikingly obvious to me during lunch recently at the Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya. The landmark eatery, which borders a game park, serves every barbecued meat imaginable: wildebeest, zebra, gazelle, even giraffe and crocodile. Normally it's teeming with European and American tourists.

New pictures from the Sun's edge have revealed a rugged landscape of mountains, valleys and walls of fire. The photos were taken over the past year by the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma, and are the first to show three-dimensional structures on the Sun's surface. Previous shots of the sun showed bright and dim spots1, but researchers were unable to determine whether they were raised or flat.

Herbal medicine's favorite tree, the Gingko, is a living fossil. Newly found specimens that grew more than a hundred million years ago are remarkably similar to present-day plants1. Extracts of the Gingko or maidenhair tree, a distant relative of the conifer, are believed to improve concentration and stave off dementia. Some specimens in Chinese monastery gardens are over three thousand years old. Others, such as those in Utrecht and Kew Gardens, are approaching three hundred. Wild specimens are extinct.

Britain's Mars lander Beagle 2, currently speeding towards the Red Planet, will be activated on Friday for the first time since its launch. "This will tell us whether we survived launch," says Jim Clemmet, engineering manager for Beagle 2 at prime contractors Astrium. "It is also one of the few occasions [during the voyage] when we'll be able to check that it's healthy."

The village of Herto, in the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia, is surrounded by sparse patches of dry, scrubby vegetation, barely enough to sustain the sheep, cattle and goat herds of the seminomadic Afar people who live there. But 160,000 years ago, conditions were far different: a shallow lake sat here, teeming with hippos, crocodiles and catfish. The lush grasslands that surrounded its pebble-strewn shores were filled with lions, zebras and antelopes as well as another creature, which traveled on two legs rather than four. Our distant ancestors had walked the earth for millions of years by this time, and although they stood upright, many looked more like apes than like us.

A cluster of rare flint tools unearthed at Norwich City's football ground could date back 12,000. Archaeologists have found flint artefacts on the site of a new stand at the club's Carrow Road ground. Experts believe the tools could be from the Upper Palaeolithic era. Archaeologists have found a sand island surrounded by peat which extends under the riverside ground.

Seeds may be a bigger danger than pollen in allowing GM crops to escape into the countryside. A French study has found seeds can be carried long distances on farm machinery to cross with wild relatives. Genes from commercial sugar beet turned up in wild plants growing more than 1.5 kilometres away, according to scientists at Lille University.

A comet collision with Earth around 55 million years ago may have kick-started a crucial early phase of mammal evolution. The impact could have triggered the greenhouse warming thought to have encouraged primitive mammals to disperse across the world and diversify into three important groups still with us today.

It has long been known that dolphins use sonar to hunt and avoid obstacles, even in the dark. Yet despite this sophisticated navigation system, via sound waves and echoes, thousands die each year when they become entangled in fishing nets. Marine biologists in the United States now have an explanation for the paradox. They believe dolphins only get trapped in nets when they make a mistake with their navigation. They become distracted, much as motorists have accidents when they lose concentration at the wheel.

New building blocks can interlock without cement, and stay strong when damaged. Large versions of the bricks could give flexible foundations to buildings in earthquake zones, says one of the team that designed and patented them, Yuri Estrin of Clausthal University of Technology, Germany. Flat ones could be linked to make armour plating, and microscopic ones could give metals a protective crystalline coating.

THE mystery of the flooded amphitheatre has puzzled historians and scientists for almost 2000 years. But now an Edinburgh engineer has come up with a theory for how Emperor Titus flooded the Colosseum in Rome at its opening in 80AD. A crowd of 87,000 cheering citizens and slaves had watched gladiators battle to the death in the arena that stood at the heart of the Roman empire. More than 5000 animals had been killed for sport.

Energy pioneers have launched the world's first offshore tidal energy turbine off the Devon coast. The £3m turbine has been built into the seabed about a kilometre and a half (one mile) offshore from Lynmouth. The single 11 metre-long rotor blade will be capable of producing 300 kilowatts of electricity and will be a test-bed for further tidal turbines.

A new coral reef has been found off the coast of Australia. Its 120 square kilometres sit in murky waters 30 meters below the surface, leaving researchers rethinking their understanding of the world's reefs. In May, researchers cruised into Queensland's Gulf of Carpentaria to study the transport and dispersal of sediments from coastal rivers. Instead they found themselves charting a previously unknown reef. "We were quite surprised," Peter Harris of Geosciences Australia. "Initially I thought it was an old relic reef."

The development of colour vision may have lead to Old World primates, and hence their human descendants, to lose their ability to detect pheromones, suggests a new genetic study. Pheromones are highly specific scent molecules that many animals rely upon to find and assess a potential mate. But humans appear to make little, if any, use of pheromone signals, says Jianzhi George Zhang, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

When Channel 4 announced its plans for a mass-participation archaeology event, the archaeological establishment went into fits. Rumours started to circulate about the scale of the event (there would, it was claimed, be 10,000 holes across the country). Concerns were raised about the pillaging of our heritage; reckless spades could rip through contexts that needed to be lovingly explored with tweezers and brush. There was much tutting about the dumbing down of archaeology by people who presumably look down their noses at Time Team. In short, the profession was in a huff.

The 14th Century boat was found during the construction of a new arts centre in Newport in June 2002. Ambitious plans to put the reconstructed ship on display in the basement of the arts centre with an interactive visitor experience are being discussed by Newport Council. Experts predict that the project will take at least 10-years to complete and are concentrating on the next phase of the conservation which has had £4m of funding allocated from Newport Council.

ERIE -- The sea grass was growing thick and long last week when a trio of divers visited the wreck of the Canobie, a 260-foot wooden steamer scuttled in 1921 about three miles east of Presque Isle Bay. The long, green strands, undulating in the Lake Erie current, gave the old girl an unusual appearance. Her 12-foot-diameter propeller, for instance, seemed downright hairy when diver Scott Say captured it in the frame of his video camera.

Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known example of prehistoric cave art in Britain. It consists of 12,000-year-old engravings of birds and an ibex carved into the stone walls at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. The identification was made by Paul Bahn and Paul Pettitt, with Spanish colleague Sergio Ripoll.

A South African private company has said that it has plans to take over a string of national parks throughout Africa. Sub-Saharan countries said to benefit from the plan are Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya and Mozambique. The scheme, which is the brainchild of a Dutch multi-millionaire and nature conservationist, Paul van Vlissingen, has won the support of an extraordinary range of groups and individuals, including former South Africa president Nelson Mandela, the US State Department and even the World Bank.

At the end of a rancorous first day, the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) here has declared itself squarely for conservation. The anti-whaling nations proclaimed a resounding victory, hailing a move away from the commission's traditional role of managing whaling. They believe it will make all the world's whales safer.

A semi-pornographic royal seal, discovered in a field in East Anglia, is providing historians and archaeologists with vital clues to the life of one of the Dark Ages' most bizarre celebrities. Queen Balthild is now thought to have been born an Anglian aristocrat, who was then sold into slavery. She married the King of the Franks, became a ruthless ruler and murderer, but was finally made a saint before she died.

Cairo - Archeologists in Egypt discovered three mummies after stumbling across an underground burial chamber during a routine inspection of a field, a local expert said on Saturday. The discovery was made in the Minya region, 200 kilometres south of Cairo, as archeologists were examining the terrain in order to grant a farmer permission to use it, said Adel Hussein, director of antiquities for the region.

Three major Portuguese archeological sites dating back to the medieval era, were unearthed near the city of El-Jadida (some 100 km south Casablanca). The sites, discovered in searches on sites dating back to Portuguese presence in Morocco in 16th century, are Assaiss Fortress (14th century), Moukrouss (early 16th century) and the Aougar fortification.

MONTREAL - With its tattered and darkened edges, the animal skin covered in indecipherable writing hardly looks like one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of modern times. Yet museum workers donned white gloves and spoke in reverential tones last week as they unveiled the centerpiece of an exhibit that opens in Montreal this week: pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Britain could soon be sending further missions to Mars and other planets, according to the UK's science minister. Lord Sainsbury says projects like the UK's Mars lander Beagle 2 will become a priority in the future. And he indicated Britain would take a full role in the European Space Agency's new project, Aurora. Aurora is the ESA's 20-year programme of planetary space exploration.

As the International Whaling Commission starts its annual meeting here, Japan says it has almost lost patience with the organisation. In an unprecedentedly bitter attack, the senior Japanese delegate said the US, the UK and their anti-whaling allies were "liars". He said Japan might decide to walk out this week. Sources say Japan will end its IWC subscriptions unless there is progress towards resuming whaling.

Even with the best telescopes, the most powerful computers, Pluto is a tiny, distant blur. Its moon, Charon, discovered in 1978, was initially thought to be a bump, or just noise in a grainy photograph. The scientific paper describing the discovery carried the tentative title: "Charon: Defect or Moon?" So far away, and reflecting only a feeble light from the sun, Pluto and Charon are simply hard to see. Even at its closest, Pluto is still nearly 2.7 billion miles from Earth.

The first APOD appeared eight years ago today, on 1995 June 16. To date, we estimate that APOD has now served over 100 million space-related images. We again thank our readers and NASA for their continued support, but ask that any potentially congratulatory e-mail go to the folks who created the great pictures -- many times with considerable effort -- that APOD has been fortunate enough to feature over the past year.

June 13, 2003 Knobel, Arkansas - Long shadows were pointing across crop fields late Saturday afternoon, June 7, when Bruce Catt and his daughter, Caleigh, were flying over farmer Todd Young's 150-acre wheat field. Caleigh had a camera and took four photographs of ten circles crisply laid down in clockwise swirls amid the standing wheat. It is a fractal pattern similar to one in Canada a couple of years ago and reported at Earthfiles, which had eleven circles instead of ten.

A centuries-old fortress is to be opened to the public following a £1m improvement scheme. Major restoration has been carried out on Carmarthen castle over the last two years and structural work has now been completed. The work has been finished in time for the school summer holiday and Carmarthenshire council hopes it will help attract tourists to the town.

GLOUCESTER, VA.--Lynn Ripley is on a beaten path near the York River explaining why she no longer searches for artifacts when something catches her eye. "I spoke too soon," she says as she bends down to retrieve a fingernail-size piece of creamware. Holding it to the light, she guesses it's 18th century, maybe 1760s. "But don't quote me," she says. "I'm a novice."

SAITAMA -- A precious 5,000-year-old earthenware bowl has been stolen from a museum in Fujimi, Saitama Prefecture, it was learned Saturday. Police believe the 20-centimeter tall bowl was swiped from the Fujimi Municipal Mizuko Kaizuka Museum by a visitor during opening hours, as there was no sign of a thief breaking into the facility.

A FRENCH university professor who used a secret passage to steal more than 1,000 ancient books from a medieval monastery appeared in court yesterday charged with "theft involving cunning". For two years, Stanislas Gosse, 32, from Illkirch in eastern France, used the passage to let himself into the library of the Mont Sainte-Odile monastery in Alsace. He smuggled out 1,100 historical and religious books, including "priceless" works from the 15th and 16th centuries.

Miles of government records, including those pertainingto the events at Roswell, are kept in this temperature-controlled vault. Knowing that old military records often contain startling revelations, we were eager to see what surprises awaited us in the latest disclosure from the Roswell files. For decades, UFO researchers had clamored for the National Archives to come clean about a "flying disc" that supposedly crashed during the Fourth of July weekend in 1947.