Newsdesk Archive

ARCHAEOLOGISTS say they have unearthed the remains of a giant cathedral in eastern Germany known to have been built by Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great in the 10th Century. "This is one of the most important finds on the history of the early Middle Ages in Europe," said dig leader Rainer Kuhn of the State Office for Archeology in Magdeburg. The researchers uncovered a stone crypt last week, and closer analysis confirmed their hunch that the grave site might be part of Otto the Great's cathedral, which a millennium ago was one of Europe's most opulent churches.

BHOPAL: An ancient idol of Goddess Durga, belonging to 11th or 12th century, was recovered during the digging of Betwa River through people's participation. The goddess is depicted killing Demon Mahishasur in the idol. Vidisha Collector Ms Sudha Chaudhary handed over the idol to Dr DK Mathur of Archaeological Museum on Tuesday. Earlier ancient statue of Bhairavnath was found in village Gyaraspur of Vidisha district. Ancient coins were also found in Betwa.

BEIJING, June 4 (Xinhuanet) -- A group of stone sculptures believed to be up to 600 years old have been found buried near Beijing's famous Lugou Bridge. Sources with the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Cultural Relics said that a host of sculptures depicting animals and people, and stone columns, were found in an area 100 meters long and eight meters deep. They were probably made during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), said Zhu Zhigang, a prestigious researcher with the institute.

LAHORE, June 2: The federal archaeology department has failed to follow Unesco's terms and conditions required to put three new Pakistani archaeological sites on Unesco's World Heritage List this year. The three new archaeological sites - Harappa (Punjab), Mehrgarh (Balochistan) and Rehman Dheri (NWFP) - were recommended by Unesco, Pakistan, to be put on the WHL.A committee, which was constituted to collect necessary information required by Unesco (Paris), has also been dissolved.

In a telling indictment of US marine policy, a group of influential Americans say their country has lacked the imagination to care properly for its oceans. It has undertaken the first review of US ocean policy since 1969. It paints a picture of ignorance, neglect and short-term attempts at policy-making. And it presents a detailed plan for protecting the seas long into the future.

When global positioning systems (GPS) were invented, they were seen primarily as tools for the military and navigators. However, GPS is now being used in ways its creators may never have imagined, such as predicting storms, measuring sea levels and monitoring continental drift. At the forefront of these new applications is a team of scientists in Nottingham, UK. They work in a world where a millimetre's movement can be as important as a kilometre.

Several wetland birds which used to be abundant across much of England and Wales are undergoing "alarming" declines, researchers say. They say numbers of wading birds like the lapwing, redshank and snipe have fallen sharply since 1982. They believe the problem is the long-term effect of land drainage in the lowlands. But careful management by farmers and land-owners can help the birds to recover.

A 3D scanning technique being tested at the British Museum could pave the way for virtual museum displays. The museum is making digital copies of fragile clay tablets from ancient Iraq using a new laser scanning method. "It's a bit like a photocopier but a million times more powerful," explained Dr Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper in the Department of the Ancient Near East. After scanning the object, a 3D image is created, which could be published on a website.

Each year about 100 million people head for the Mediterranean with leisure on their minds. It is the world's biggest tourist movement but it could soon be a thing of the past. "The Mediterranean will become too hot for summer tourism," says environmental economist Bas Amelung of the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. In 2002 there was a heatwave in Greece and there were forest fires in southern France, and 2003 has already been unusually warm and dry.

It sounds like a trick better suited to military aircraft. Dragonflies can fly without appearing to move at all. A male dragonfly (Hemianax papuensis) locked in a breakneck territorial dogfight with another adjusts his flight path so that to his rival he seems stationary. This impressive feat is called motion camouflage.

How does a busy hornet keep cool? Its skin is an electrical heat pump, claim Israeli researchers - the first suggestion of such a mechanism in an animal. The idea has stung insect specialists. Hornets are unlikely to have a heat pump, and don't need one anyway, they argue. It's a bold proposal, admit Jacob Ishay and colleagues at Tel Aviv University, who came up with it. But a pump could answer a lot of questions about how hornets, wasps and even other insects stop themselves overheating during a day's work.

Papyrus scrolls, one of the most ancient of communications media, is seeing new life thanks to the internet. The University is at the forefront of a project to make the nation's largest papyrus collections available to both researchers and the general public online. According to a written statement from the University, the National Endowment for the Humanities recently granted the University $350,000 to continue and expand the 20,000 entry Advanced Papyrological Information System database.

A leading astrophysics laboratory in Italy has closed down all but one of its experiments over concerns that toxic pollutants could leak from the underground lab into the local water supply. Scientists and environmental watchdogs both agree the shut-down is necessary, but it is not clear when it re-open. "Total closure would strike a blow to progress in particle and nuclear physics for at least a generation of scientists," warns Todd Haines, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory at the University of California.

Smoke is clouding our view of global warming, protecting the planet from perhaps three-quarters of the greenhouse effect. That might sound like good news, but experts say that as the cover diminishes in coming decades, we are in for a dramatic escalation of warming that could be two or even three times as great as official best guesses. This was the dramatic conclusion reached last week at a workshop in Dahlem, Berlin, where top atmospheric scientists got together, including Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, former chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins, 75, died suddenly on May 26 doing what he loved: flying his remote-controlled model airplanes in the fields at his Rappahannock farm, Hawkridge. Neighbors found him in the tall grass, the remote control still in his hands at the home which is between Woodville and Boston. Hawkins's wife, Julia, said he died of a heart attack. She said he had requested in his will that there be no obituary or memorial service.

If the Moon's apparent diameter is not quite large enough to cover the Sun during a solar eclipse, an annular eclipse can be the result -- a spectacle of silhouetted Moon surrounded by a solar "ring of fire". Just such a view was possible for observers in the far northern hemisphere as the new Moon slid across the solar disk on May 31st. Still, for astronomical adventurers at Cape Wrath on the northwestern coast of Scotland, the eastern sky was cloudy on eclipse day. (click on link to see image)

MADRID, Spain - A chest containing the supposed remains of Christopher Columbus was exhumed Monday for DNA and other tests to determine whether the bones are really those of the famed explorer. The test aims to settle a long debate over where Colombus is buried: in Spain's Seville Cathedral or in a sprawling monument in the Dominican Republic's capital, Santo Domingo.

I remember seeing a National Geographic cover, a diver coming out of a sinkhole off the Yucatan. The diver was holding an intact urn, the sediment curling off his wrist, off the urn. It was just bewitching. I was about 9. I was always hooked on the discovery. You find something neat, you're touching the past. You have a sense of a place in the world. You think, "Hey, I'm the first person to touch this in 300 years." There's a sense of wonder. There's a great advantage to underwater archaeology. There's a lot more organic preservation than you can see on the land. You find fabric, clothing, human tissue, wooden buttons, basketry, food remains.

The Indiana Jones moment, just like in a good script, arrived late and came as a complete surprise. Sixteen-year-old Butler Evers was closing out his day at the Topper archaeological site in Allendale County by digging a skinny channel to guide expected overnight rain away. Clank. His shovel hit something hard. He slipped the shovel out of the dirt, stuck his hand in and pulled out a projectile point. Archaeologist Al Goodyear hustled over to examine it and found tell-tale cross-cuts sculpted into the stone by the Clovis-era people 13,000 years ago.

Hormoheb's tomb, the longest at the Valley of Kings in el Bar el-Gharbi (West Bank) in Luxor (140 members), will be inaugurated following one-year restoration works at a cost of L.E. 1 million within a project by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). SCA Secretary General Zahi Howas said the upcoming period will see more major projects in Luxor, including a project to manage the site at the Valley of Kings, to be launched in early October at a cost of L.E. 100 million.

Liquid water, not anything else, carved the canyons, valleys and outflow plains of Mars, according to the latest research. A rival theory, that liquid carbon dioxide or rocks supported by CO2 gas could have made the surface features, does not work, according to Dr Neil Coleman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It could put an end to the "White Mars" hypothesis that favoured CO2 and made the prospect for life on Mars more remote. Vast lakes of water accumulating under sheets of ice until they overflowed crater and canyon walls is the way many Martian features formed, says Dr Coleman.

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) -- Two Chilean scientists said on Thursday they had discovered a new species of dinosaur, a long-necked plant eater that roamed the region 70 million years ago. Paleontologists David Rubilar, 28, and Alexander Vargas, 26, named their find "Domeykosaurus chilensis" after 19th Century Chilean scientist Ignacio Domeyko. They said it is unlike any other specimen found so far.

How much damage does cosmic radiation do to frequent flyers? Is depleted uranium from shells causing cancers in former war zones such as Kosovo and Iraq? The discovery that certain kinds of radiation leave a distinctive pattern of damage in our cells could help answer these questions. "If this works, we'll be able to take a measurement and see the lifetime exposure in that person," says David Brenner of Columbia University in New York. "Often there is no other reliable record of individual exposure." It is this uncertainty about radiation exposure that makes it hard to pin down the health risks.

Environmental organizations working with scientists, the business community, and governments, have proposed an "achievable agenda" to reverse the decline in health of the world's ocean. The plan was announced today at the conclusion of a five-day Defying Ocean's End (DOE) conference in Los Cabos, Mexico. It offers these preliminary recommendations: Promote a World Ocean Public Trust: Sixty percent of the world's ocean falls in international waters, outside any country's jurisdiction. International waters, largely open to uncontrolled exploitation, must be proactively managed. This marks a major reversal in thinking in ocean policy, since the ocean has for centuries been available for open access and exploitation.

For a bird, the bleak midwinter wouldn't seem an ideal time to go about the precarious business of starting a family. But recent winters haven't been particularly bleak in Britain, and last Christmas scores of fluffy owlets grew fat on mice, voles, and baby rats caught by parents that spotted a breeding opportunity too good to ignore. Scientists at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) say 2002's mild temperatures and an explosion in rodent numbers sparked an unseasonal baby boom in the country's barn and tawny owl populations.

The guests nibbled on Red Planet tartlettes and chewed Beagle 2 brochettes. It took a Mars biologist to interpret the menu but thankfully there were plenty at this event. With the steppe of Kazakhstan off limits for many, supporters of the Beagle 2 project gathered in London to watch a live transmission of the launch. Lead scientist Professor Colin Pillinger sat on the front row next to the British science minister Lord Sainsbury for the final minutes of the countdown. They smiled broadly as the white-nosed rocket on the launchpad became a tiny dot in the night sky.

Under French tricolor flags, the remains of 3,000 French soldiers who froze or starved to death two centuries ago during Napoleon's catastrophic invasion of Russia were laid to rest Sunday in Lithuania. Guns from an honor guard echoed through the pine trees during the burial of the remains, discovered two years ago in a nearby mass grave seen at the time as a major archaeological find.

An ancient Indian burial ground believed to contain hundreds of skeletal remains was inadvertently discovered by a backhoe operator in Midland, Ont., while digging beside a tourist attraction of a recreated native village. Police, the local coroner, archeologists and First Nations elders were called to the site beside Huron Village after the previously unknown grave site, from about 1500 AD, was uncovered on Thursday during construction of a community arena.

MILWAUKEE - (KRT) - One regime falls in Iraq and another begins to form. This isn't only a military scenario - it's a small-scale version of how civilizations rise and fall over millennia. After decades of studying how societies end and begin, archaeologists have turned their attention to a poorly understood intermediate step: what happens after collapse. Some societies manage to regroup and grow even stronger after a catastrophic end. Others sputter out and are never heard from again. Learning why some groups manage to regenerate - and why others don't - was the subject of a well-attended symposium at a recent Society for American Archaeology meeting.

HONOLULU -- The grave robbery occurred nearly a century ago, a brazen incursion into a burial cave of ancestral Hawaiians. But its legacy of intrigue and deceit still haunts Hawaii today, and has ignited a renewed struggle over the fate of the stolen artifacts. The artifacts, considered sacred by some Hawaiians, were taken from the cave by an antiquities buff in 1905. Among them were bowls studded with human teeth, deity carvings, cloth scraps and a priceless statuette of a woman with human hair.

In the days following the conquest of Baghdad the Iraq Museum was looted. Reports on the damage vary--the number of lost or stolen objects varies between 50,000 to 200,000. Irrespective of numbers, the losses not only to the world of a archaeology but to mankind in general are tremendous. This site contains Oriental Institute images of objects from the Iraq Museum, sorted by categories. Other images were scanned from books and are posted here with permission of the publishers.

A team of Japanese and German experts will enter Afghanistan in July on a mission to preserve and restore cultural artifacts in Bamiyan, including ancient statues of Buddha that were blasted apart by the Taliban in March 2001. The preservation and restoration mission is expected to last for as long as a decade, according to a Japanese scholar, and could lead to the discovery of a giant reclining Buddha statue that has long been rumored to exist somewhere in the mountainous region.

Two rare pieces of the eagle-shaped God Horus, son of Isis, and the head of a statue of Akhenaton arrived Sunday at Cairo Airport in the company of ambassador Mahmoud Allam, Egypt's Consul General in New York, after restoring them from an antiquities merchant who stood trial in the United States. Allam said there was intensive cooperation throughout a period of three years between the Foreign Ministry and the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) on one hand and the US authorities on the other to retrieve stolen artifacts.

Hannibal Lecter couldn't imagine a more cunningly macabre way to dress for dinner - a tiny insect parasite cloaks itself in its host's skin to avoid detection, researchers have found. Fooled into thinking that the parasite is part of its own body, the host leaves the intruder to feast in peace. "The host thinks: 'It's my tissue so I won't do anything about it'," says entomologist Jeyaraney Kathirithamby of the University of Oxford, who discovered the bizarre tactic. The trick is unique to a group of tiny insects called twisted-wing parasites (Strepsiptera), she thinks.

The mammoth 2,000-year-old statues located atop Mt. Nemrut in southeastern Turkey will reportedly be removed to a museum and replaced by copies. The switch is planned within the framework of a joint project conducted by the International Nemrut Foundation and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and financed by Akbank. Professor Herman Brijder, team leader of the project from the University of Amsterdam, said they had decided to exhibit the artifacts, which have been worn down by the ravages of time, in a museum to be built at a future date at the termination of the project, which was envisioned to continue for a total of 10 years.

Archeological task forces armed with little scoops and brushes are sweating away in southwest China, racing against the clock to rescue cultural relics facing submersion under the Three Gorges Reservoir. These special forces, consisting of archeologists from two thirds of China's archeological institutions, have turned the reservoir area into the world's biggest archeological worksite.

THE AEGEAN is a sea that unites rather than separates places - and its islands are like stepping stones," claims Nicholas Stampolidis, professor of classical archaeology at the University of Crete and Director of the Museum of Cycladic Art (NP Goulandris Foundation). Due to be inaugurated by President Costis Stephanopoulos on June 3, the museum's upcoming archaeological exhibition Sea Routes: From Sidon to Huelva will present various interconnections between Mediterranean countries from the 16th to the 6th centuries BC, via 1,211 artefacts, from 90 museums of Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Malta and Turkey.

Archaeological digs being carried out by the Antiquities Authority in the old city of Tiberias have revealed impressive remains of the gate and wall of the city's 12th century Crusader fortress. The digs are part of a tourism development project initiated by the Tourism Ministry. The digs are underway along the Lake Kinneret promenade, close to the Rabbi Haim Abulafiya ancient synagogue, with the assistance of the Tiberias Municipality and the Avnei Derekh and Rushrush companies.

The race to find life on Mars is set to begin on Monday with the launch of Europe's first voyage to another planet. Three probes are leaving Earth this summer, starting with the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission. It carries the Beagle 2 lander, which, if all goes well, will become the first British-built craft to touch down on another world. The launch marks the start of a new golden age in Mars exploration.

Australia's tallest tree on the island of Tasmania has been devastated by a routine fire which went out of control, forestry officials have said. Standing at 260 feet (79m) the massive hardwood - known as El Grande - stood unharmed by man for almost four centuries. Forestry Tasmania has said it is too early to be sure that the tree has been irreparably damaged, although it admitted that the tree's base and much of its interior had been severely charred.

The government's handling of the national debate on genetically modified (GM) crops, which opens on Tuesday, has been criticised as a potential facade. An alliance of eight consumer and environmental organisations says a series of failings could mean the public has little chance to have its say. That could leave the way open for the widespread growing of GM crops against most Britons' wishes. The debate, to be called "GM Nation?", involves a series of six regional debates- in Birmingham, Swansea, Glasgow, Belfast, Taunton and Harrogate.

Imagine this: an organic pill that kills the appetite and attacks obesity. It has no known side-effects, and contains a molecule that fools your brain into believing you are full. Deep inside the African Kalahari desert, grows an ugly cactus called the Hoodia. It thrives in extremely high temperatures, and takes years to mature. The San Bushmen of the Kalahari, one of the world's oldest and most primitive tribes, had been eating the Hoodia for thousands of years, to stave off hunger during long hunting trips.

Good news for time travellers - it just got cheaper. The amount of material needed to build a window through time is infinitesimally small, new research shows. To travel through time, all you need to do is open a wormhole in space-time and step through it. And to do that you need a magic ingredient called 'exotic matter', which is repelled rather than attracted by gravity. The hitch is that no one has the remotest idea how to make exotic matter. But don't despair, say Matt Visser, of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and his colleagues. They have shown that when we do figure out how to make the stuff, we won't need very much of it1.

Mammal species that stay true to just one partner are more likely to go extinct than those that play the field, according a study of Ghanaian nature reserves. The finding is the first to link mating behaviour to extinction, and could change conservation priorities. "Many species that we assumed we didn't need to worry about are getting hammered as a result of their behaviour," says ecologist Justin Brashares of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who carried out the study.

fifth-fourth-century B.C. necropolis found along the sandy banks of the Aisne River may be the final piece of the puzzle for archaeologists trying to identify a Celtic tribe in the Picardie region of northern France. Containing forty tombs, it appears to be the burial grounds for one or more villages in the area. Male burials contain weapons--swords, lances, and javelins--as well as some bronze personal items such as tweezers and razors. Women were buried with torques, bracelets, bronze earrings, and amber or colored glass beads. One large torque was decorated with coral, an exotic material that must have come from the Mediterranean.

A daredevil flight might soon end a decades-long diplomatic dispute between Italy and Ethiopia over a looted obelisk. Carrying 160-ton granite blocks, the plane would land on a small airstrip in Ethiopia, returning to its original country a 78-foot-high granite stele that now stands at the center of Rome's Piazza di Porta, near the Colosseum. The monument is one of a group of six obelisks erected at Axum when Ethiopia adopted Christianity in the 4th century A.D. It was stolen by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1937 and turned into a symbol of fascist power during his short-lived efforts to revive the grandeur of imperial Rome.

Years of research and excavation have shown that a building in the Asclepium of Epidaurus, which archaeologists had long believed to be the Stoa of Kotyos or a palaestra, was the temple of the Egyptian deities. In a dig he conducted in 1892, P. Kavvadias identified the building as the stoa, based on finds of ceramic artifacts bearing the name of Antoninus. There was also a remark by Pausanias that the Stoa of Kotyos had been repaired by Senator Antoninus. But the phase of the building which showed no signs of later work was of Roman construction, and Georges Roux believed it might be the Temple of the Egyptian gods.

An archaeological site in Tyre is to be filled in eight years after its discovery due to a lack of funding for continued excavations. In 1995, when land owner Mahmoud Qaafarani was laying foundations for a new building, an old basilica was discovered. When the antiquities department at the Tourism Ministry heard of the find, they bought the land from Qaafarani for $200,000 to transform it into a heritage site.

PERRYTON - The University of Oklahoma Department of Archaeology will send a team of archaeologists to "The Buried City" in Ochiltree County to conduct another excavation in a class for advance fieldwork in August. OU archaeologist Susan Vehik, an associate professor and one of the course instructors, said the group will attempt to establish a political link with a nearby site at Elmwood, Okla., located in Beaver County.

Astrology is rightly maligned, but the position of the planets has some predictive power. Every 26 months, Mars and Earth come into an alignment that minimises the fuel needed to journey between the two. That alignment is upon us now, and three new spacecraft will take off in June. Here, Nature introduces these missions with interactive graphics, features, and an archive of articles on the red planet.

A big party is to be held in October to celebrate the return of the mummy of King Ramses I, which went AWOL over half a century ago. The return of the royal mummy from the Michael Carlos Museum in the US comes as a result of the enormous efforts made by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) to have Egyptian antiquities returned to their country of origin, whether they were smuggled out or ended up abroad for other reasons.

Fantasy books are filled with stories about two-headed dragons and two-headed monsters, but who has ever heard of a two-headed tortoise? This is exactly what Noël Daniels, a welder of Wellington, Western Cape, South Africa, discovered when he went into his backyard and found this strange newcomer hatched from an egg amongst his pet tortoises.

A new study suggests that such fear has been shaped by evolution, stretching back to a time when early mammals had to survive and breed in an environment dominated by reptiles, some of which were deadly. "Their brains certainly had to be effective in identifying reptiles in the world around them," said Arne Öhman, a psychologist at the Karolinska Institute and Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.

In 1989 photographer Lynn Abercrombie and her husband, former National Geographic staff writer Tom Abercrombie, went to Iraq to do a story on that country. While in Baghdad, Lynn made dozens of photographs of the exquisite antiquities housed in the Iraq Museum. Ultimately, National Geographic's editor held the story, awaiting more coverage, and it was never published in the magazine. Lynn Abercrombie still lives in the Washington area and recalled her experience in the museum some 14 years ago in a conversation today with National Geographic News:

In rolling farm country 280 miles southwest of Paris, Bruno Maureille, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux, oversees the excavation of a site called Les Pradelles, where for three decades researchers have been uncovering, fleck by fleck, the remains of humanity's most notorious relatives, the Neanderthals. Studded with fossilized reindeer bones and other relics, the site, Maureille tells Smithsonian contributor Joe Alper, was probably a butchery where Neanderthals processed the results of what appear to have been very successful hunts.

Saria Mohamed Hassan's dream of becoming a doctor was interrupted for a year when she left the United States to conduct a brief malaria workshop in Dakar, Senegal, and then found herself stranded in a bureaucratic no-man's land. Her international student visa had expired while she was away, and her bid to renew it quickly became mired in a massive, ever-growing backlog of cases under review. Faced with a seemingly impenetrable firewall of post-9/11 security procedures, the Sudanese medical student eventually lost a year's worth of classes at Harvard.

In a book entitled Mysterious 30 Degrees North Latitude, the author has made a mystery of this special area by depicting a series of dangerous and supernatural phenomena such as the disappearance of planes and ships in Bermuda and the magical curses from Pharaoh in the Pyramids. These occurrences happened at 30 degrees north latitude, turning this area into a black hole in human knowledge. Thirty degrees north latitude crosses the Wuling Mountains of China, which span several provinces and autonomous regions and are the habitat to many people from the Tujia ethnic group. The area, with dense forest and roaring water, is believed to be the last home of the ancient Ba people. It is evident that the present Tujia people still share many customs from their Ba ancestors.

A group of Chinese archeologists have discovered 13 sites of prehistoric stone tools during a field survey on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. They indicate that human activity had reached the plateau area at an average altitude of 4,000 meters, an environment of low temperatures, harsh weather conditions, and an acute shortage of oxygen.

Archaeologists have uncovered a 14th century gravestone which marks the final resting place of a Coventry monk. It is hailed as one of the most exciting discoveries found thanks to the £50 million Phoenix Initiative. Contractors digging a trench for a wall behind the newly-built JFK House discovered part of the exciting find. They immediately called in the archaeological team working for the Phoenix Initiative who uncovered the complete grave slab, which is in several pieces.

Britain is making digital replicas of 1,000 ancient cuneiform tablets and sending them back to Iraq in a ground-breaking programme to help bolster the rich but vulnerable Iraqi cultural heritage. The request for the replicas came last year from the University of Mosul, but it has become especially relevant today in the light of the pillaging of Iraq's historical treasures at the end of the war last month.

A retired lawyer has told how he found a 4,000-year-old mud brick wrapped in a paper bag in the back of a wardrobe. Paul Morrison, 48, of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, was helping clear his cousin's house in Cambridge when he found a package in a cardboard box. Experts have examined the brick, about the size of a large biscuit tin, and confirmed that it came from Ur - modern-day Iraq - and dates back to about 2300BC.

An annular eclipse of the Sun occurs this Saturday. The event, which will see the Moon slip in front of the Sun's disc, will throw a dark shadow on the North Atlantic region. It is timed to last from 0345-0431 GMT (0445-0531 BST). Annular eclipses are not quite as spectacular as total solar eclipses because the sky never goes completely black

The final resting place of HMS Beagle, the ship on which Charles Darwin made early discoveries about evolution, could soon be uncovered. St Andrews University's Dr Robert Prescott, who has led the team retracing the ship's final fate, said sensor equipment was to be used at an undisclosed site in the Essex marshes this summer.

The massive project to rebuild three bridges across the Danube that were destroyed in the 1999 Kosovo conflict is finally bearing fruit. Nato missiles struck the bridges in the city of Novi Sad, in northern Serbia, in an attack on the country on 2 April 1999. All three collapsed into the Danube, causing great problems to the residents, the country and also internationally.

Claims have re-emerged that the US space agency (Nasa) did find signs of life on Mars during the historic Viking landings of 1976. Dr Gil Levin, a former mission scientist, says he now has the evidence to prove it, just days before the US and Europe send new expeditions to the Red Planet. The United States and Russia have spent billions since the 1960s on a handful of space craft designed to land on Mars. Only three have succeeded so far: the two Viking probes in the 1970s and Mars Pathfinder in 1997.

Barcelona - Spanish archaeologists on Tuesday announced that they had discovered the remains of about 160 early humans killed in a battle which raged more than four millennia ago. Dolmens formed the entrance to a cave serving as a tomb which contained more than 25 000 human bones near Dosrius in the east of the country.

AFAK, Iraq The meeting took place as planned, in a battered van on the side of the highway. Closing the curtains on the windows facing the road, Khalil quickly got down to business. Opening a cigarette pack, he extracted a wad of cotton and then unwrapped a small polished stone cylinder engraved with the icons of ancient Mesopotamia: Ishtar, the warrior goddess; Adad, god of weather, and Ea, god of water.

NORWAY - Students at Napp School in Lofoten had a field trip out of the ordinary when one alert 11-year-old spotted what turned out to be a human skull that may be between 5,000-6,000 years old. Archeologists from the Viking Museum in Borg were examining the find on Tuesday. "Under a stone I saw something white. So I started to dig. I hit it a bit. It didn't sound like a stone. When I got it out I saw it was a skull," Aleksander Johansen told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK).

Pompeian frescoes show startling evidence of what may have been a primitive form of virtual reality, according to British researchers who have uncovered elaborate three-dimensional wall paintings depicting theater scenes. Frozen in time by the eruption that nearly 2,000 years ago covered Pompeii and the nearby towns of Herculaneum and Stabiae with nine to 20 feet of hot ash and pumice, the lavish Roman villas feature extravagant frescos filled with tricks of perspective to impress guests.

ABERDEENSHIRE Council's archaeology service, which is part of planning and environmental services, has launched the first online version of a sites and monuments record in Scotland with a view to making the archaeology of the North-east more accessible to the general public. It is hoped it will be used by a variety of people ranging from schoolchildren and students to historians and tourists.

OUTRAGED Fetcham residents claim an historic archaelogical site will be lost forever if developers bulldoze the site for homes. Fetcham Residents' Association is fighting to save the Anglo-Saxon burial ground site in the grounds of Hawks Hill House in Guildford Road. Millgate Homes wants to build an eight-flat development and create a new road. The residents' association insists the area must be preserved, but Millgate says an independent archaelogical study it commissioned found nothing of note and now wants to press ahead with the scheme.

Where the great sands of the Sahara meet the savannas of North Africa, lies the fabled city of Timbuktu. A mythical destination, Timbuktu is but a mirage of the imagination for most people. But since the 12th century, Timbuktu has been a forbidden place and one of the most august centers of Islamic learning and trade within Muslim society. Yet since the late 1800s, the city's importance had declined, drifting to the sandy edges of the Sahara desert and into the imaginations of the New World's folklore. Beginning in the 12th century, Timbuktu was becoming one of the great centers of learning in the Islamic world. Scholars and students traveled from as far away as Cairo, Baghdad, and elsewhere in Persia to study from the noted manuscripts found in Timbuktu. Respected scholars who taught in Timbuktu were referred to as ambassadors of peace throughout North Africa.

The excavation team from the German Institute for Oriental Studies working in el-Ekab area, in the town of Abydos, Sohag, has discovered two pots each 40-cm-long, in the tomb of the 1st Dynasty Pharaoh Den, who ruled for 50 years sometime between 3200 to 3050 BC. The team also found bronze statues, colored stones and gold chips. Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosni, paid a visit to the new discovery site yesterday, as part of a ministerial group on an inspection tour of the national projects in the area, which included work on the new Cairo-Aswan road.

MULTAN, May 27: A Bahauddin Zakariya University PhD intern has discovered an archaeological site at Vohawa in Dera Ghazi Khan. The intern, Zubair Shafi Ghauri, is doing research on 'Early and mature Harappan settlements along the dry bed of Bias'. The site that he claims to have discovered is Bugiwala in Basti Kutani, some 4km away from the ruins of Dhera in Mauza Dagarwali. The ruins of Dhera are already on the list of Federal Archaeological Department as belonging to a period around 5000BC. The pottery found in the ruins is identical to that found in Mehargarh in Balochistan

Human beings may have made their first journey out of Africa as recently as 70,000 years ago, according to a new study by geneticists from Stanford University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers estimate that the entire population of ancestral humans at the time of the African expansion consisted of only about 2,000 individuals. "This estimate does not preclude the presence of other populations of Homo sapiens sapiens [modern humans] in Africa, although it suggests that they were probably isolated from one another genetically, and that contemporary worldwide populations descend from one or very few of those populations," said Marcus W. Feldman, the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor at Stanford and co-author of the study.

The remains of a long-buried town that once housed early Hispanic settlers have risen to the light again at an archaeological site on the Arizona State University campus. And beneath the little town of San Pablo are the remains of an ancient culture dating back perhaps 2,000 years. Denise To, 29, a doctoral student in the department of anthropology, is director of excavation on the site at University Drive and College Avenue. She and her crew are working to document the site before construction begins on ASU Foundation offices.

The shortlist for the prestigious Aventis Prize for Science Books has been announced. The winner will be revealed at a gala dinner at London's Science Museum on 25 June. The author Margaret Drabble, who is chairing the judging panel, told BBC News Online that they were looking for books that were "accessible, exciting and made us think".

A team of scientists led by the University of Bristol has discovered a new class of galaxy - the first such discovery since the 1930s. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to study the seven new galaxies, which have been named ultra-compact dwarfs (UCDs). The galaxies - in a cluster 60 million light years away - are so small that on ordinary photographs, they look like individual stars. Dr Steve Phillipps, joint team leader and an astrophysicist at the University of Bristol, said: "The UCDs contain tens of millions of stars, which are contained in volumes not much more than 100 light years across.

For centuries ornithologists denied the importance of birds' sense of smell, looking more to birdsong and flashy plumage as typical means of communication. Now, a new study on the striking-looking crested auklet adds to evidence that smell is as important to birds as to other animals. Scientists report that the sea bird, found in Alaska's Aleutian islands, produces a strong tangerine-like smell which they link to courtship displays. The research, published in an upcoming edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals for the first time that birds can be attracted to their own scents, and hints at the use of chemical signals for communication.

Cities and agriculture make global warming difficult to assess, warns a new report. Eugenia Kalnay and Ming Cai of the University of Maryland in College Park have found evidence that rising temperatures in the United States - about 0.13 ºC over the past 50 years - have been due to changes in land use, in particular the growth of cities and the spread of agriculture1.

Ladies! Looking for a way to relax? Then try sniffing a man's underarm. New research shows that armpit sweat calms female volunteers. It also shifts menstrual cycles, so the discovery could give rise to perspiration-derived drugs to manipulate female fertility. "The underarm contains physiologically active pheromones," says chemist George Preti of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelpha, Pennsylvania, who led the study. These behaviour-altering chemicals - which are common throughout the animal world - can affect the brain, and hence our bodies, without our even realizing it.

The first complete skulls of a bizarre "horned" kangaroo are the star finds in the cache of fossils newly unearthed from caves in the Nullarbor Plain, Australia. John Long at the Western Australian Museum in Perth and colleagues first excavated the site in 2002. They found an astonishing collection of megafauna fossils, including partial skull fragments of a horned kangaroo, and the first complete skeletons of the thylacoleo, a giant marsupial lion.

Ultra-violet light, long thought to be an impediment to the early formation of long organic molecules, may in fact hold the key to the origin of life, according to a new study. Intense UV rays from a young Sun bombarded the early Earth and were thought likely to destroy any exposed organic molecules. But a new mathematical model implies the radiation actually helped select out the molecular seeds of life.

The woman in the grave at the African Burial Ground in New York was clearly a very special person. Her teeth were filed into an hourglass shape and she was buried wearing a wristlet of yellow and green beads and a belt or sash at her waist made of cowrie shells and 111 glass beads. She came from Africa and she was a person of stature in the black community, perhaps a spiritual leader, says Cheryl LaRoche, a Ford Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The world's oldest multiple-page book - in the lost Etruscan language - has gone on display in Bulgaria's National History Museum in Sofia. It contains six bound sheets of 24 carat gold, with illustrations of a horse-rider, a mermaid, a harp and soldiers. The small manuscript, which is more than two-and-a-half millennia old, was discovered 60 years ago in a tomb uncovered during digging for a canal along the Strouma river in south-western Bulgaria.

Visiting Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos bestowed the island republics highest medal of valor to archaeologist Maria Anagnostopoulou for work in rescuing Cyprus cultural heritage, during a ceremony on Sunday evening in the Old Parliament Building in downtown Athens. The medal was received by Anagnostopoulous daughter, as her mother was unable to attend due to illness.

Genetically modified (GM) crops will need monitoring for years if they are grown in the UK, British scientists say. The warning comes from the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science. It says ministers have failed to act on advice they were given nearly five years ago about GM monitoring. The society says they should not guess what will work and then simply hope for the best.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Recipe for an "instant" Earth-like planet: scrape up cosmic dust swirling around a newborn star and wait a mere three million years. Even the building blocks for giant gas planets like Jupiter might form just as quickly, about three times faster than many scientists believe, a team of astronomers reported on Monday.

The widely circulated German newspaper Diezeit published a survey on the world places of attraction where Egypt ranked first in the world leading 60 countries. Minister of Tourism Mamdouh Al-Beltagui said that the plan set up by the Ministry to overcome the negative impacts of war on Iraq started to achieve success in restoring inflow of tourists. Moreover, British magazine T.T.G. published a special supplement on Egypt.

James Dyson's uphill water feature has been the striking image of this year's Chelsea Flower Show. But how did he do it? It certainly beats your common or garden water feature. Inventor James Dyson, he of the bagless vacuum cleaner, has stolen the headlines from the gardeners at this year's Chelsea Flower Show with his "Wrong Garden".

A flood-damaged 500-year-old Czech Bible, regarded as one of the jewels of central European Christianity, has been saved by British and other experts in a painstaking restoration project using freezers and vacuums to bring them back to their old glory. The Bible is one of the most precious items among a vast array of books, manuscripts and ancient maps waterlogged after the worst floods in 200 years swamped the Czech capital, Prague, last August.

KABUL: French First Lady Bernadette Chirac reopened the library of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA) Monday after two decades of war and a long diplomatic wrangle over its books. The wife of President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the new library and restocked it with four tonnes of books and documents that had prompted a diplomatic incident when France tried to remove them during the Soviet invasion.

Accounts of one of Scotland's most famous murders may have to be rewritten because of research work done in the aftermath of Edinburgh's Old Town fire, according to one expert. The buildings involved were so badly damaged that some had to be demolished and the rubble removed. This opened up to scrutiny an area which had not been exposed for hundreds of years. Archaeologists and a genealogist have now examined the site and compared it with archives.

FURTHER excavations are planned for the midlands bog where the body of a man that could date back to the Iron Age was found earlier this month. Department of Environment archeologists have identified a 74-acre site in Co Offaly which they believe could contain other human remains or evidence of settlement.

The Information Office of the State Council Monday issued a white paper on the history and development of China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The 55-page white paper, which is titled History and Development of Xinjiang, consists of ten parts. It is the first white paper about Xinjiang issued by the Chinese government.

Massachusetts (AP) -- They've been overlooked as useless oddities for decades -- flat-backed stones with sunken eye sockets and gaping mouths carved into them -- stowed in bowling ball bags, left in barns or fashioned into candle holders by those who found them in the woods of central Massachusetts. Now in the hands of retired state geologist Joseph Sinnott, the five stone faces found in Sturbridge and Southbridge are getting the attention of archaeologists and antiquity researchers throughout New England. They are wondering whether the stones were sculpted by American Indians, prehistoric settlers or practical jokesters

The record for the fastest ever ascent of Mount Everest has been broken for the second time in three days. Lakba Gelu Sherpa made the ascent from Base Camp to the summit in just under 11 hours, shaving nearly two hours off the previous best time. The latest record came on the same morning that a 32-year-old South African man became the first black climber to reach the top of the world's highest mountain.

The archaeologists of German Institute for Eastern Studies in Cairo unearthed an archaeological find in Abidos dated back to the first kingdom. The archaeologists found two medium-sized pottery made vessels in the Southeastern part of King Den Tomb, the fifth king of the first kingdom. Culture Minister Farouq Hosni received report on the archaeological find. The report highlighted the historical and religious position of Abidos which cantoned the second royal cemetery of the first kings of first and second kingdoms.

SIGHISOARA, Romania (Reuters) - Bloodied fangs painted on their T-shirts and silver bats dangling from their ears, they swoop to the heart of Transylvania to feed their hunger for the occult. The guise of academia is swiftly dropped -- ghost stories dominate the dinner table, passionate debate swirls around which character actor played the best Count Dracula and midnight strolls usually head straight to the nearby cemetery.

How many stars like the Sun are circled by planets? Today, astronomers think they may be quite rare. They base that assessment on the observations of a group of stars, called T Tauri stars, that closely resemble the Sun when it was young. These stars appear to lose the disk of dust and gas that surrounds them at birth before there is time for planets to form. However, two Vanderbilt astronomers argue that the current wisdom may be wrong: Instead of losing the basic planetary building blocks, the material surrounding these stars may simply be evolving in ways that makes it invisible to Earth's telescopes as part of the planet building process. They have begun gathering evidence to support their theory. If they are right, then planetary systems similar to our own may be relatively commonplace.