Newsdesk Archive

A comedian could be prosecuted by an aquarium after he dived into a shark tank as a publicity stunt and then two days later one of the fish died. Guy Venables dived naked into the tank at the Sea Life Centre in Brighton, East Sussex, about two weeks ago as a £1 bet and to promote a comedy evening he was running at the Komedia Club in the city.

DUNCAN (BC Newspaper Group) - Francis Joe kneels beside a trail of huge footprints crossing the strawberry field beside his home at the end of Boys Road. Joe, 78, was born on the Native reserve south of Duncan and has never seen tracks like these before. He believes they belong to a legendary ape-like creature the Cowichan people call Thumquas and others call a sasquatch or bigfoot.

William Morris is famous for creating beautiful tapestry designs, full of lush green leaves and vines, in the late 19th century. A new study shows that Morris derived the color green from a dangerous source: arsenic. His father owned the processing plant that became the major supplier of arsenic used in green pigments in 1867. Morris made his own fortune from shares in the company, Devon Great Consols, and served on the board.

Liquorice may prove an unlikely ally in the fight against sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). In the lab at least, an extract of the plant's root blocks the SARS virus from growing inside cells, new research reveals1. The study is part of an ongoing search for a treatment for SARS. The flu-like disease has claimed more than 750 lives since it emerged last year in Guangdong Province, China.

Basil, one of the mainstays of Italian cuisine, might one day become a weapon in the battle against dangerous food bugs such as E. coli and listeria. A new plastic food wrapper for meat and cheese which slowly oozes anti-microbial chemicals extracted from the herb has been shown to increase the food's shelf life, and should also cut the risk of food poisoning. And it does not taint the food with basil flavour, either.

Eighty cracks have been revealed in China's colossal Three Gorges Dam, just days after engineers closed the dam's sluice gates and began filling a 640 kilometre long reservoir. Pan Jiazhong, head of the dam's inspection group, said: "If water enters these cracks there could be negative effects, so we are fixing them very carefully. However, he denied that the cracks, up to 10 metres long, mean that the dam is seriously damaged.

Throughout the last century the Chamorro people of Guam suffered alarmingly high incidences of a mystery neurological illness found to be a hundred times more common than in the United States. Last year researchers suggested this sickness is linked to the tradition of feasting on the Mariana flying fox, a type of bat, which accumulates neurotoxins in its diet. Now scientists report in the June edition of the journal Conservation Biology that the recorded increase and decrease in prevalence of the disease was closely mirrored by the rate of human consumption of these bats.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA is trying to identify a small object seen floating outside the International Space Station on Thursday morning that probably came from the station itself. Astronaut Ed Lu spotted the object outside the window of the U.S. laboratory and took pictures of it.

Mating of the spacecraft to the upper stage booster, the Delta's third stage, was completed on Thursday in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF). Today the spacecraft is being placed into its transportation canister in preparation for going to the launch pad. That is scheduled to occur before dawn on Tuesday, June 17. Meanwhile, at Pad 17-B, preparations are under way for the Simulated Flight test of the Delta II launch vehicle to occur sometime within the next few days.

Alexander the Great may not have been so great after all. A University of California, Berkeley-led group of researchers is challenging the common history that credits the Macedonian king with initiating the spread of ancient Greek culture throughout the Middle East during his conquest of the region during the 4th century B.C. Backed by a nearly $234,000 collaborative research grant from the Getty Foundation, the team over the next two years will try to document a thriving Hellenized culture in the city of Dor, Israel, at least 100 years before Alexander marched in.

BAGHDAD, IRAQ--The sacred Vase of Warka, one of the most valuable artifacts of the Iraqi National Museum collection, feared lost forever, was returned unceremoniously Thursday in the trunk of a car. The 5,000-year-old white limestone vase, the world's oldest carved-stone ritual vessel, was handed over with other looted items, U.S.-led coalition forces said in a statement. Three men gave the pieces to security staff at the central Baghdad museum, a gesture that could reassure archaeologists worried about Iraq's ancient treasures.

Cod stocks around the British coast are now so low that fishing should stop until they recover, scientists say. The number of young North Sea cod in early 2003 was the lowest for 20 years. In many areas the fish are even less numerous than the scientists had predicted. They believe it will take several years before there can be any hope of a real recovery.

Norway's insistence on continuing to kill whales contradicts the spirit of the international moratorium on commercial whaling, the UK says. Norway has set itself a catch quota of 711 minke whales for 2003, up from 634 killed last year. Its whaling is legal, because it objected to the moratorium, in force since 1986. But the British say the Norwegian hunt is really for export, and is unsustainable.

When a lake high in the Andes threatened to flood earlier this year, sending a river of debris on to the town below, there was little that could be to done to avert a humanitarian disaster. Thanks to images taken by a US space agency (Nasa) satellite, authorities were at least able to monitor the situation and make plans to evacuate residents. Hi-tech satellite imagery is increasingly being used by international agencies and governments to help deliver aid when disaster strikes.

Dr Bryn Jones sits at a small desk in room C18 at the University of Nottingham's astronomy department. Surrounded by papers, two calculators and a small box of tapes, the Welshman is helping unlock the secrets of the Universe. Dr Jones is an expert on galaxies - unimaginably massive collections of stars which lie millions of light-years away. His latest discovery, made in collaboration with a team of researchers across the world, is a new type of galaxy dubbed an "ultra-compact dwarf".

There is a little spot on the eastern side of the map of Egypt called Tor Sinai. It might not be as famous as Sharm el-Sheikh, but it does possess a rich potential of breath-taking scenery, monuments, springs for therapeutic tourism, and religious history that would make it a first-rate attraction. But such wealth needs to be developed in order to put Tor Sinai in its proper place on the tourist map. The town of el-Tor, an oasis in the desert of South Sinai and a natural extension of Sharm el-Sheikh, witnessed significant historic events, and includes holy places such as the Monastery of the Valley, which was founded at almost the same time as the Monastery of St Catherine, chairman of el-Tor Council, Farouk Ahmed said.

What do the Owl, the Cat's Eye, the Ghost of Jupiter, and Saturn have in common? They're all planetary nebulae of course, glowing gaseous shrouds shed by dying sun-like stars as they run out of nuclear fuel. Beautiful to look at, the symmetric, planet-like shapes of these cosmic clouds, typically 1,000 times the size of our solar system, evoke their popular names. Flipping through digital pictures made by participants in the Kitt Peak National Observatory Visitor Center's Advanced Observing Program, astronomer Adam Block created this delightful animation. (FOLLOW LINK TO SEE IMAGE)

Chinese archaeologists have opened a 1,000-year-old casket live on national television, revealing what they believe to be the body of an ancient tribal nobleman. The Mystery of the 1,000-year-old Coffin was broadcast across the country on the lunchtime news from a research centre in Inner Mongolia.

When they scuttled the 268-foot steamer Canobie in Lake Erie 80 years ago, everyone assumed her useful life was over. They were wrong. The Canobie and four other shipwrecks, all in a 20-square-mile area in Lake Erie, are the focus of a program announced Wednesday by Mercyhurst College's Archaeological Institute and Erie's Bayfront Center for Maritime Studies to map and record the wrecks.

In the 160,000-year-old fossilized skulls of three Ethiopians - two adults and a child - scientists think they see for the first time the faces of the immediate ancestors of modern humans. Except for a few archaic characteristics, they are as recognizable as Hamlet's poor Yorick. They are longer than those of earlier ancestors or any contemporary Neanderthals in Eurasia. Their midfaces are broad, but the nasal bones are tall and narrow. The brow ridges are less prominent than the glowering visages looking down from earlier branches of the family tree. And the cranial vaults are higher and within modern dimensions.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- THERE'S the derring-do version of underwater exploration - the sea dog with the power saw, cutting through the hull of a ship to find hidden gold. And then there are the deep-sea archaeologists, who want to explore submerged sites while causing minimal damage, making detailed maps that mark each minute change as artifacts are painstakingly removed. David Mindell, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is on the side of the archaeologists. Leaning over his workbench in the basement of his condominium a few blocks from Harvard Square, he is fine-tuning his latest invention to help them do their work more precisely: a wireless sonar system that can map the seafloor thousands of feet below the surface, where divers and global positioning system equipment cannot go.(FREE REGISTRATION)

While considerable attention has been focused on the looting and damage to antiquities in Baghdad, the scale of damage may be far greater in the rest of Iraq, home to some of the most ancient sites of human civilization, according to the most comprehensive survey to date. Tens of thousands of Iraqi artifacts were looted after the war from remote areas in Iraq, and many sites continue to be ransacked, a group of American experts said yesterday after making a systematic assessment of the damage to Iraq's archaeological heritage.

Achernar is one of the most distorted stars ever observed by astronomers. It is shaped like a child's spinning top. Scientists have been able to show the star's equatorial radius is 50% larger than its polar radius. Distorted stars are known in astronomy. They are generally pulled out of shape by the gravity of a companion. Achernar, on the other hand, is distorted because it is spinning rapidly - but this does not fully explain its ovoid shape, say researchers.

About 800 whales, dolphins and porpoises, known collectively as cetaceans, are dying in fishing nets every day, researchers say. They believe as many as 300,000 cetaceans die annually as bycatch, probably the biggest danger they face. Most of the animals drown in the nets, some die of exhaustion, and sharks attack others. The researchers say there are effective ways of reducing bycatch, and these cut deaths significantly.

The Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) was flooded with complaints from Egyptian and foreign archaeologists condemning Queen Nefertiti display at Munich Museum. The museum director broke all rules by mounting the bust of Nefertiti on a nude figure in bronze. SCA Secretary-General Dr Zahi Hawas said that such an act violates international agreements because the exhibit distorts a genuine Egyptian piece that is a source of pride for all Egyptians.

Five years ago, a Japanese art collector traveled to the lush Kenyan township of Meru in search of bargains. On the top of his shopping list: any regalia associated with "Njuri Ncheke," the traditional tribal court of the Meru people. He soon hit the jackpot. A Meru tribal chief had become the sole possessor of almost all the decorations once used by the secretive court's judges: tribal dresses, clubs, and other insignia.

An astronomical calculation has pinned down the date and time portrayed in one of Vincent Van Gogh's famous paintings. What's more, next month's full Moon will reprise the 114-year-old scene. The Dutch master painted Moonrise or Rising Moon during the summer of 1889 while staying in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France. But the exact moment depicted in the landscape has eluded art historians.

A hydrogen economy could create bigger, longer-lasting ozone holes over the poles, a new study claims. If hydrogen catches on as a 'non-polluting' fuel for energy production, leaks from its production and transport could increase the amount of the gas in the atmosphere. This change would worsen ozone depletion, calculate Yuk Yung and co-workers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena1.

About 380 million years ago, a rock from space smashed into the Earth, say geologists. They believe that the impact wiped out a large fraction of life. The idea could strengthen the controversial connection between mass extinctions and impacts. Up to now, the only candidate for a link is the meteor 65 million years ago that some believe helped exterminate the dinosaurs.

Claims do not come much more controversial than the idea that water might retain a memory of substances once dissolved in it. The notion is central to homeopathy, which treats patients with samples so dilute they are unlikely to contain a single molecule of the active compound, but it is generally ridiculed by scientists. Yet a paper is about to be published in the reputable journal Physica A claiming to show that even though they should be identical, the structure of hydrogen bonds in pure water is very different from that in homeopathic dilutions of salt solutions. Could it be time to take the "memory" of water seriously?

A microsecond after the Big Bang, when the exploding fireball of the newborn Universe was only a few kilometres across, all matter existed in a special state. The basic building blocks of matter - quarks and electrons - floated freely in an incredibly hot, dense soup. As the Universe grew and cooled, the quarks bound together into the protons and neutrons that abound today.

The parent of the HIV virus was the product of a union between two monkey viruses, genetic detective work has revealed. This genetic mixing occurred in a chimpanzee at least one million years ago, although it is thought that HIV did not cross into humans until the 1930s. But the discovery has prompted researchers to speculate that chimps may still harbour other HIV-like viruses that could jump to humans. The complex genetic history of HIV viruses came to light when researchers tried to construct family trees connecting the different genomic elements in the viruses. If the viruses shared the same genetic history, you would expect these trees to match up, but they did not.

Abu Dhabi's western island of Marawah is one of the key centres of archaeology in the UAE, according to the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey (Adias), which has just completed mapping of known sites on the island. "More than 40 archaeological sites or groups of sites have now been identified on Marawah," according to an Adias report released yesterday. Some of these sites are individual ones, but many are large groups of archaeological sub-sites or features, the report stated.

Authorities in Italy are conducting a hi-tech, deep-sea treasure hunt to retrieve coins and jewels sunk in a shipwreck off the island of Elba more than 160 years ago. Last month experts used a submarine robot to explore the wreckage of Pollux, a paddle steamer which collided with another and sank in 1841. They found sediment encrusted with gold and silver coins.

LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) - A three-month excavation has found no evidence yet to back nationalist claims of a Hindu temple under the ruins of a mosque in northern India, a dispute that has sparked the worst rioting in the country since independence in 1947. The state-run Archaeological Survey of India has submitted an interim report saying digging so far at the site in Ayodhya town had "not found remains of any structure that remotely resembles a temple," a source at the survey said on Wednesday.

The discovery of a dusty skeleton has revealed one of the most important churches in mediaeval history: a cathedral built by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great in the 10th century. "This is one of the biggest finds in recent years in the history of mediaeval archaeology," said Dr Babette Ludowici, an archaeologist at the Centre of East Central European History and Culture in Magdeburg.

CHENGDU, June 10 (Xinhuanet) -- An archaeological site dating back to the Shu Kingdom 4,000 years ago has been found in Sichuan Province with the recent discovery of finely-ground stoneware and remains of human bone. Named Shiben, thumb-like and knife-edged stoneware, was dug outof ancient tombs located at Pi County's Hongguang Town in Chengdu,the capital city in southwest China's Sichuan.

Days before the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting, a leading animal welfare group says regulating whaling is part of conservation. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) remains implacably opposed to whaling. It says regulating the industry does not necessarily mean any more whales will be killed. But it says conservation does mean regulating how or whether whale populations are exploited, one way or another.

A huge cavern - large enough to house a cathedral - has been dug out beneath the Franco-Swiss border to hold the largest single scientific instrument ever built. The Atlas detection equipment will be five stories tall and weigh 7,000 tonnes. Its task is to search for a crucial sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson, the particle that gives mass to all other particles.

The curtains had been drawn in the conference room, the audience of politicians, scientists and journalists spoke in respectful hushed tones - and on a black velvet cloth on a table in the corner lay one of the 160,000 year old skulls. Dr Berhane Asfaw, one of the team that uncovered the three skulls, had earlier removed it from its casing of hundreds of polystyrene balls, and placed it carefully on the table. He looked at it like a protective father, and was nervously glancing at it throughout the press conference, as photographers edged closer and closer to capture an image of this unveiling of the earliest human remains.

IDABEL, OK. -- An archaeological dig in southeastern Oklahoma has unearthed artifacts from a Choctaw Indian family. The family is believed to have moved to what is now McCurtain County from Mississippi during the 1830s. The site is southeast of present-day Idabel. Searchers found fragments of bowls, plates, platters, personal items, utensils and crockery during the week-long dig. The team also found the sites of two chimneys, a cellar and pits that were dug for, as yet, unknown reasons.

"I HAVE spent longer on the history of the Samians than I should otherwise have done, " writes Herodotus, "because they are responsible for three of the greatest building and engineering feats in the Greek world." There are lots of reasons for visiting Samos - the mountain ranges (Mt Kerkis at 1,434m is the highest in the Aegean), the secluded beaches of the southwest, the mountain villages with their peaceful plateias and panoramic views (Mili is a prime example), the famous local wine, the orchids, the greenery. But on this occasion, it was Herodotus' intriguing claim that drew me to the island.

The US space agency (Nasa) has launched the first of two rovers to explore the surface of Mars. A Delta II rocket carrying the Spirit vehicle lifted clear of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 1758 GMT on Tuesday. It was the third attempt at a blast-off - Sunday's and Monday's efforts were postponed because of stormy weather in the launch area. Spirit is identical to the Opportunity rover which will go into space later this month, probably on the 25th.

Genetically modified (GM) crops can contribute substantially to improving agriculture in developing countries, an independent scientific think-tank has concluded. In a discussion paper out on Tuesday to coincide with a national GM debate in the UK, the influential Nuffield Council on Bio-ethics says the technology has the potential to increase crop yields and improve the livelihoods of poor people.

Formula One drivers turn the natural fear impulses of stress and danger into speed on the circuit. The huge crash suffered by British driver Jenson Button in practice in the last round at Monaco - the BAR driver was prevented by doctors from competing in the race after his 180 mph shunt - highlighted the dangers inherent in the sport. But it is fear of that danger, drivers say, which allows them to maintain their racing edge. "Fear is an emotion that has been given to us over millions of years of evolution to help us in dangerous situations," 1996 F1 World Champion Damon Hill told the BBC World Service's Outlook programme.

Excavation works in Menya led to the unearthing of a church, winery, kitchen, meeting hall and some reliefs. Director of Islamic and Coptic Antiquities in this Upper Egyptian governorate ,Yehya Hassanein, said the mission assigned to excavate in Beni Khaled has conducted a thorough scan of the area and started working near a 30-metre-wide mudbrick cave believed to have been the site to worship Saint Abu Qana.

The Sea Water that separates us is the same, which joins us together. This water brings waves to the Egyptian shores, which soon return quickly to the Saudi shores." I have actually recalled those wonderful words and this spectacular image described by Prince Naief Bin Abdul Aziz, Saudi Interior Minister, when he received us at his office in Jeddah, within the context of a visit of an Egyptian tourist delegation to Saudi Arabia, headed by Tourism Minister Dr. Mamdouh el-Beltagui, in the early nineties.

The end of the world is not so nigh. A Spanish scientist has found a loophole in the suggestion that there might be a Big Rip in the universe about 22 billion years from now1. Earlier this year, US researchers showed how the recent discovery of an accelerating universe raises the possibility that in future everything may rend asunder, starting with clusters of galaxies and ending with the smallest of subatomic particles.

Trying to find Nemo? Follow your ears. That's what young fish do to relocate their home reefs. UK researchers have found that the hubbub of adult fish guides fry in the deep ocean. The discovery could help conservation. Recorded reef racket might attract youngsters to overfished or artificial reefs or to marine reserves. It also suggests that man-made noise may be confusing fish and damaging reef ecosystems. "Boat engines and power plants could be contributing to reductions in recruitment to reefs," comments fish biologist Su Sponaugle of the University of Miami.

Fancy owning a piece of space history? A US classic-car dealer is selling what he claims is an original version of the Soviet Sputnik 1 satellite. It's a souvenir from the dawn of the space age, says George Stauffer, who is asking US$39,000 for the item on his website, staufferclassics.com. Sputnik 1 was the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth.

The team that cloned Dolly the sheep have been granted the UK's first stem cell research licence allowing the creation of human embryos from unfertilised eggs. This process is called parthenogenesis - Greek for "virgin birth" - and occurs naturally in some reptiles and insects. It allows females to reproduce without males, as their eggs are prompted to develop into embryos without being fertilised by sperm.

For every fourth or fifth generation of monarch butterflies that summer in the U.S. east of the Continental Divide, the pull of high-altitude Oyamel fir forests in central Mexico is irresistible. By the millions each fall they point south and flutter up to 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) to reach the forests on a few small mountain peaks in an approximately 60-square-mile (155-square-kilometer) area in the volcanic highlands that serve as the butterflies' winter retreat.

Three fossilised skulls unearthed in Ethiopia are said by scientists to be among the most important discoveries ever made in the search for the origin of humans. The crania of two adults and a child, all dated to be around 160,000 years old, were pulled out of sediments near a village called Herto in the Afar region in the east of the country.

LONDON (Reuters) - Plans to build the world's largest offshore wind farm on the site of the Battle of Trafalgar sailed into controversy Monday after claims they could destroy archaeological evidence and desecrate a war grave. The proposal for up to 500 wind turbines off southwestern Spain's Cape Trafalgar aims to use the area's high winds to generate enough electricity to power 750,000 homes.

A 1,800-year-old barge that once sailed along the borders of the Roman Empire will rise to the surface again this month in the Netherlands. The vessel is currently being excavated by archaeologists from the bottom of Heldammer Stroom, an offshoot of the old course of the River Rhine near the city of Utrecht. First discovered in 1997, it is said to be beautifully preserved.

The secrets of El Niño, one of the most mysterious and destructive weather systems, could be unlocked by hundreds of thousands of ancient clay tablets now feared lost or damaged in the chaos of Iraq. Researchers believe the tablets, written using a cuneiform text, one of the earliest types of writing, form the world's oldest records of climate change and could give vital clues to understanding El Niño and global warming.

Humans may have come close to extinction about 70,000 years ago, according to the latest genetic research. The study suggests that at one point there may have been only 2,000 individuals alive as our species teetered on the brink. This means that, for a while, humanity was in a perilous state, vulnerable to disease, environmental disasters and conflict. If any of these factors had turned against us, we would not be here.

The US space agency (Nasa) has postponed the launch of its latest Mars mission for a second time. Storms at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida caused Sunday's planned lift-off to be rescheduled. With thunderstorms still looming, mission controllers now have to wait until Tuesday to try to get the first of two Mars Exploration Rovers off the ground. The rover, Spirit, is due to blast-off on a Delta II rocket. Its twin, Opportunity, will follow later this month.

An expedition from the Kosmopoisk scientific organization found an area of about 100 square kilometers covered with burnt trees and pieces of the meteorite 60 kilometers from the village of Mama, Alexander Bogun, deputy head of the district administration, told Interfax on Friday. The meteorite fell in the early hours of September 25, 2002, between the town of Bodaibo and the village of Balakhninsky near the Vitim River. The incident caused strong tremors in the region, similar to those of an earthquake. Sporadic flashes of light were seen over the crash site.

HOLBROOK, Ariz. -- At least twice a week Larry Baldwin will hop into his canary yellow Ford Ranger and zigzag through the eastern Arizona desert, bouncing along bumpy gravel roads in search of poachers. He's certainly not trying to sneak up on anyone. The truck is a sure sign of that, and most times he won't come across a single person all day. But to his trained eye it's obvious they've been there. For a little over two years, Baldwin, a 49-year-old private investigator, has been monitoring a privately owned parcel of land bordering the Blue Mesa area of Petrified Forest National Park.

The uniquely preserved medieval frescos found in the crypt beneath Siena Cathedral have gone on show for the first time. Only four people in the world had seen the cycle of vibrantly coloured frescos until last week. They are believed to have been painted in 1285, possibly by the influential Sienese artist, Duccio di Buoninsegna. Art historians have been astounded by the condition of the frescos. They are so well preserved that they appear much as they would have looked when first painted.

For the past four years a multinational team of archaeologists under the direction of one of the authors has been excavating the site of the Roman city of Grumentum, in the province of Baslilitcata, Italy, a few kilometres from the city of Viggiano. This project has two main goals: firstly to gain an insight into the spatial evolution of a Roman city, and secondly, to excavate and restore certain buildings under the auspices of the Italian government for the further development of Grumentum as an archaeological park.

SUNDANCE, Wyo. -- Driving in his pickup from Sundance on U.S. 14, Gene Gade points out the site's location, virtually invisible from a distance to the untrained eye. "You don't get the feeling that there's a big hole over there," said the bearded, stocky man, pointing along the ridge that forms just along Interstate 90. After a few more minutes of driving, Gade stops his truck and gets out, passing a couple of ragtag signs that show and tell the tale of the site.

Sunday's scheduled launch of a new United States mission to Mars has been postoned due to bad weather at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Delta II rocket had been due to blast off just after 1800 GMT carrying Spirit, the first of two Rover robots designed to explore the surface of the Red Planet. The launch - the first of two planned for this month - has reportedly been rescheduled by the US space agency (Nasa) for Monday afternoon.

A new Pyramid Studies Department was recently opened within the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). Three expeditions are currently at work on digs on the Pyramids Plateau under the supervision of Dr Zahi Hawas. One team is working on the pyramid of Teti, the first king of the 6th dynasty (2324-2200 BC). In this area are the pyramid of Queen Khuitt, the tomb of Teti's son, it is also here that artefacts dating back to the New Kingdom have been unearthed.

Archaeologists have finished their dig at an ancient Tequesta Indian village in downtown Fort Lauderdale, and construction of a luxury high-rise has resumed in full. A private archaeological firm from Gainesville unearthed animal bones and pottery from a portion of the construction site and, after a review that may take up to six months, will return the artifacts to Broward County.

Times Online - Looted antiquities are being smuggled from Afghanistan by the lorry-load, with huge quantities of objects making their way to Britain, experts said yesterday. Scotland Yard has just seized several hoards of recently illegally excavated ancient treasures worth millions of pounds. They include sculptures in stone, bronze and terracotta that may have come from temple sites, and that range in date from the third millennium BC to the 5th century AD.

The last phase of digging up a ship, estimated to be over 1,000 years old, at the sleepy hamlet of Kadakkarapalli near Thykkal in Alappuzha district has just been completed. This has raised hopes that the ancient vessel would help shed light on Kerala's centuries-old link with Arabs, Jews and Europeans. The delicate excavation work by the Kerala Archaeology Department and the Kochi-based Centre for Heritage Studies (CHS) was stopped after the vessel's 20-metre-long and 4-metre-wide surface was bared and soil around the vessel was removed in depth to ascertain that there was no more parts left at the bottom.

XI'AN, June 9 (Xinhuanet) -- Chinese archaeologists have unearthed a pit believed to be used for ancient ritual sacrifice at the largest and best-preserved primitive village in China. The pit was discovered at the new Banpo Site Museum, and alterations will be made to protect the site. Named Jisikeng, the pit is expected to reveal the sacrifice activity of the Banpo people who lived 5,000 years ago. It has been dug out beneath the planned new site's eastern wall, two meters lower than the horizontal floor.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Almost all of the priceless items feared stolen from the Baghdad Museum when it was ransacked by looters have been found safe in a secret vault, the U.S.-led administration for Iraq said on Saturday. A special team of U.S. investigators working at the museum to check the extent of the looting has concluded that around 3,000 items were still lost or stolen, compared with initial estimates of up to 170,000. Most of the missing items were used for research, rather than exhibition.

What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes representing the letters N, E, I and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The six inch cruciform brooch is among one million artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. Dominic Powlesland, the archaeologist leading the excavation team, said: "This could well be the earliest example of written English we know of.

BABYLON, Iraq - In the shadowy lion's den where Daniel's godliness earned him salvation and biblical immortality, a fetid smell rises from the trash, blankets, and filth that now mix with remains of a more ancient variety, circa 1800 BC. ''Squatters were sleeping here recently - you can tell from the food,'' US Marine Captain Neil F. Murphy Jr. said as he poked through the ruins. '' Watch out for the bats. They're the only things left behind.''

In the course of renovations, workers at the University of Toronto have accidentally thrown away a centuries-old collection of Ontario artefacts. In late April, workers at the Scarborough campus cleared out a storage area in an underground tunnel that administrators said was unsafe. Several locked cages in the tunnel held 280 boxes of pottery, stone tools and other items once used by native people and colonists in the Markham and Pickering area. The artefacts dated as far back as the 15th century and are the last vestiges of sites that have since been paved over by developers.

Berlin museum director Detrisch Weldong installed the head of queen Neferiti statue on a bronze-made naked woman, a step provoked the Egyptian archaeologists and artists. "The Bronze made statue would hurt the head of Nefertiti," said Zahi Hawas, Supreme Council of Antiquities Secretary General.

Digital cameras and image-enhancing computers have revealed prehistoric art invisible to the naked eye, a team of Australian archaeologists have found, a technique that could revolutionise the study of rock art. One of the team involved in the discovery, Dr Bruno David of Melbourne's Monash University, expects whole new realms of some of the most ancient human art will be uncovered this way.

Another Mars probe - the second of a series of three spacecraft designed to explore the Red Planet's surface - is due to lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, US, on Sunday. A Delta II rocket will carry the rover - the first of a pair of identical Nasa vehicles - first into Earth orbit and then onwards to Mars.

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (AP) -- Zipping along U.S. 1, it's easy to overlook planet Mars. After all, it's only 3 inches in diameter, perched atop a pole next to the "Welcome to Presque Isle" sign. But it's hard to miss Jupiter, which is 5 feet in diameter and weighs close to a ton, next to a potato field. What unfolds along a stretch of a highway through the rolling farm country of northern Maine is billed as the world's largest scale model of the solar system.

Bird-lovers are celebrating the rediscovery in Burma of a bird last seen there almost 90 years ago. The bird is the Gurney's pitta, a strikingly coloured species described as "teetering on the brink of extinction". The only other known survivors are about 30 birds living in a small part of southern Thailand. The long-term prospects of the Burmese group are clouded by forest clearance plans.

Humans may have lost their body hair to reduce their vulnerability to fur-loving parasites and therefore attract the opposite sex, a new evolutionary theory proposes. The nakedness of the human species is extremely rare among the 3000 or so living mammal species. Other naked mammals include elephants, walruses, pigs, whales and the bizarre naked mole-rat.

The Culture Ministry will put together a plan to develop the ancient ruins of the Angkor-style Phanom Rung sanctuary and eight satellite historical sites in Buri Ram province as a centre for education and tourism. Under the plan, local agencies including tambon administration organisations would for the first time play a role in the conservation and development of the 12th-century sanctuary, said archaeologist Pises Jiajanpong.

Archaeologists are carrying out one of their most delicate projects to date - the careful restoration of 1200-year-old human faeces. Measuring 20cm by 5cm, the exhibit is thought to be the largest fossilised human excrement ever found. But despite surviving for well over 1,000 years, the Viking relic was broken into three pieces during a recent school visit to its home, the Archaeological Resource Centre (Arc) in York.

Emory Kristof couldn't believe his eyes. Crammed into a nondescript house in suburban Los Angeles were roughly 10,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain and pottery, some up to 2,000 years old, so densely packed that any movement threatened to send them crashing to the floor. Some were still encrusted with coral, evidence of their hidden life for centuries under the sea.

Excavating at the ancient town of Gilund in southern Rajasthan, India, one of the largest sites of the little-known Ahar-Banas culture, archaeologists led by teams from the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Deccan College, Pune, India have discovered a bin filled with more than 100 seal impressions (many shown here on the left) dating to 2100-1700 B.C. The existence of the seals, and their particular styles, offer surprising new evidence for the apparent complexity of this non-literate, late and post-Indus Civilization-era culture, according to Dr. Gregory Possehl, UPM curator and excavation co-director.

Emory Kristof could not believe his eyes. Crammed into a nondescript house in suburban Los Angeles were 10,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain and pottery, some 2,000 years old, so densely packed that any movement threatened to send them crashing to the floor. Some were encrusted with coral, evidence of their hidden life for centuries under the sea. "It blew my socks off," Mr. Kristof, an undersea explorer and photographer, said. "It was absolutely incredible, the mother of all treasure."

SUNGAI PETANI: Thousands of beads of various colours and shapes have been unearthed at the Sungai Mas archaeological site, leaving the researchers with the mammoth task of beading up its history and pride of place in ancient history. Situated about 21km from here, the two-hectare site along Sungai Mas or "Gold River" has yielded almost 207,000 beads, the highest number found at a place in Southeast Asia, since excavation work started in 1980.

Nasa is launching the first of a new generation of robots destined to search for water on Mars. The US space agency is making use of the neighbouring planet's close approach to Earth this month to send two space craft to the Red Planet. The first mission, set to lift-off on Sunday 8 June, comes within a week of the despatch of Europe's first Mars mission. The US is sending two rovers to different sites on Mars to study the geology of rocks.

In its lifetime, the museum has acquired some of the most important archaeological objects, including the Rosetta Stone and the world's oldest glass - Egyptian, dating from 1460 BC. And as the home of the British Library, which grew out of the royal library and now receives a copy of every book published in the UK, it has nourished the minds of Charles Dickens, Karl Marx and Lenin, to name a few. The museum has also been at the forefront of chemical research into ancient objects. It set up a scientific laboratory in 1920, and had one of the UK's first radiocarbon dating facilities. The museum now uses many hi-tech methods to work out the composition, age and origins of objects, and how best to conserve them. These include electron microscopy, crystallography and spectroscopy.

Inspired by the population studies that found a link between smoking and lung cancer, reef scientists have compiled what could be the most compelling evidence yet that farming is harming the Great Barrier Reef. There has been a vitriolic debate about whether or not Queensland's farms are damaging the reef. Conservationists argue that the increased run-off of agricultural sediments, nutrients and chemicals has reduced coral cover and biodiversity in recent years.

An excavation of one of Norfolk's ancient monuments has shed new light on life in medieval times. The dig at Greyfriars Tower at King's Lynn has revealed the sprawling layout of the former Franciscan friary, as well as medieval artefacts. Greyfriars Tower, in St James Street, is the best example of only three such towers left in England and the only one of the four friaries in Lynn in 1300 to survive.

After nearly three years of digging, the excavation is finished at a Leetsdale site that is revealing how people labored 8,000 years ago. Now the analysis of the uncovered artifacts and data begins. The site, a section of Leetsdale Industrial Park that once was a sandbar in the Ohio River, contains "the deepest stratified dig of its kind in Pennsylvania," said Frank Vento, a geology professor at Clarion University.

Ankara - An international team of archaeologists will soon start restoration work on the summit of Mount Nemrut in eastern Turkey where colossal two-thousand-year-old statues of the ancient gods have suffered from airborne pollution, the head of the project said on Wednesday. Hermen Brijder, a Dutch archaeologist, told AFP that the project, which will include restoration, rescue and conservation work, was expected to take up to eight years.

Experts are hunting for ancient tablets in Iraq that may hold the key to understanding global warming. Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell told the Commons that the Government was taking steps to identify and protect the nearly 5,000-year-old Sumerian Tablets. Experts say they constitute "the longest single, largely-unbroken climate record known on earth". The fate of the artefacts - thought to be the oldest scripts in the world - was raised by Father of the House Tam Dalyell in a short debate.

Huge herds of mammoth, wild horses and bison once roamed the land bridge between North America and Siberia, new evidence suggests. Plant fossils have shown that 24,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, dry grassland covered much of region. The vegetation would have allowed large populations of mammals to survive all year round on the now-submerged landmass known as Beringia or the Bering Strait. Scientists writing in the journal Nature said the animals would have been sustained by a diet rich in prairie sage, bunch grasses, and other grass-like plants.

THE discovery of an ancient Aboriginal skeleton at a West Australian building site has sparked a probe into whether the area is a traditional burial ground. The bones were unearthed by a bulldozer yesterday at the building site of a Centrelink call centre in Bunbury, 180km south of Perth. The skeleton was found about 40 metres from where a skull was dug up last month, registrar of Aboriginal sites Warren Fish said.

A glass eye maker is just one of the craftsman plying his trade at the National Museum for its latest exhibition, Rare Trades. The collection tells the stories of 24 people from across Australia who maintain the tools and traditions of ancient crafts.

New observations of Mars obtained in unprecedented geological detail show the planet to have experienced dramatic change in the past - and these changes continue to this day. This conclusion comes from studying images sent back by the Themis (Thermal Emission Imaging System) instrument on board Mars Odyssey, the US probe in orbit around the Red Planet.

Possibly the largest mass poisoning in history may be underway in India and Bangladesh. Pollution is not to blame. The culprit is arsenic in the drinking water, a natural phenomenon in several parts of the world, but which is particularly severe in South Asia. Arsenic in ground water is caused naturally mainly by minerals dissolving from weathered rocks and soils. Exposure to high levels of the toxic element can cause cancers of the skin, bladder, kidney, and lung, and diseases of the blood vessels of the legs and feet, as well as possibly diabetes, high blood pressure, and reproductive disorders.

For most of the world's plant life, the effect of the pace of climate change over the past two decades has been productive, according to an analysis of climate and satellite data collected between 1982 and 1999. The research, reported in the June 6 issue of Science, addresses the question of how global vegetation has responded to changes in precipitation, temperature, and cloud cover patterns. Such climate factors determine how vegetation grows.

Expectant mothers have bigger appetites on average if they are carrying a boy rather than a girl, suggests a study of pregnant US women. The eating habits of 244 pregnant women attending a Boston hospital revealed that those who gave birth to baby boys had a 10 per cent higher daily calorie intake than those who bore girls. Boys tend to be about 100 grams heavier than girls at birth, but no study has really explained why, says the team of international researchers.

Engineers working on the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express breathed a collective sign of relief June 5. Clamps that held the Beagle 2 lander tight to the Mars Express orbiter during blastoff from Earth have been released. The clamps were necessary to ensure the lander remained perfectly fixed to its mother spacecraft - despite all the rumble, roar and vibration as the attached payloads shot skyward atop the Russian Soyuz/Fregat booster.