Newsdesk Archive

Researchers have found a possible link between the Lindisfarne gospels and another celebrated early British text, proving they may have been written at the same time in the same region. The gospels are now thought to have been written at the same time as Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English people, according to the British Library.

The Standing Antiquities Committee gave the excavation team from the Sorbonne the green light to resume the dig at Tel Al Hir, 27 kilometres east of the Suez Canal in North Sinai. The team, in cooperation with the Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA), is to comb through the site of a citadel that dates back to the fifth century BC, and potsherds and artifacts found on the site in past seasons will be restored.

EXCAVATIONS in Singapore over 20 years have lent weight to the theory that a thriving overseas Chinese settlement existed here about 500 years before Stamford Raffles arrived. The outpost, in what was then Temasek, was probably an informal settlement, as the Chinese were not allowed to live outside their country for any great length of time.

A unique piece of Zimbabwe's cultural heritage has been returned after being looted almost 100 years ago. A fragment of Zimbabwe's soapstone carved bird sculpture taken from the Great Zimbabwe ruins was handed back to President Robert Mugabe on Wednesday by a German museum, AFP news agency reports.

An exhibition of objects recovered from the wreck of the Titanic, including a chunk of the ship itself, goes on show to the public at the Science Museum in London on Friday. Visitors can see crockery from the ship, papers, money and personal effects preserved for decades in baggage, and one of the liner's bells.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (Reuters) - Ruins of a pre-Columbian city built before the rise of the Maya civilization have been discovered in a remote region of eastern Honduras, the Institute of Anthropology and History said on Tuesday. The so-called City of Encounters, in the wilderness of Botaderos mountain about 120 miles northeast of the capital, includes vestiges of three rectangular plazas, various mounds and small stone-encrusted pillars.

Amid the ruined temples of a civilization abandoned 4,000 years ago in southern Iraq, archaeologists on a 1968 expedition noted a striking parallel: Fragments of the long-extinct Sumerian civilization they were unearthing seemed to depict the present-day lives of the nearby tribal people. They speared fish from slender wooden boats, herded water buffalo and fashioned fantastic vaulted houses from the few building materials the marshes had to offer: reeds, clay and buffalo dung.

A large-scale ancient ruin park at the site of the famed Terracotta Army -- described as a wonder of the world -- is to be built later this year in China's ancient capital of Xi'an. The feasibility report on the construction of the park at the site of the mausoleum of the Qin (221-207 BC) Emperor Shihuang, China's first emperor, was approved by the State Council last month, and construction of the project will soon get under way, according to an official source with the Shaanxi Provincial Development and Reform Department.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Vandals have defaced ancient petroglyphs in Juke Box Cave, scrawling obscene pictures - and possibly parts of their names - with charcoal over the Indian rock art. The cave art was sealed behind a locked and gated entrance, but the vandals used a car jack, or something similar, to bend two vertical bars far enough apart to squeeze through, investigators said.

A US scientist has described an ambitious plan using a nuclear weapon and millions of tonnes of molten iron to send a grapefruit-sized probe to the centre of the Earth. David Stevenson, of the California Institute of Technology, told BBC News Online that he had come up with the plan, which appears in the journal Nature, to provoke discussion.

The destruction wrought on the world's oceans by industrial fishing is made clear in a shocking new report. The analysis, published in the scientific journal Nature, suggests 90% of large predator fish have been cleared from the seas in the past 50 years or so. The authors say the era of "heroic" fish - the truly huge swordfish, marlin and sharks that inspired legends and novels - is now well and truly over.

Adolf Hitler knew the day when he was to die, that is why he did away with his astrologer. Non-traditional forecasting methods are interesting for everyone, starting from an African Bushman to presidents of world's largest countries. Non-traditional forecasting includes astrologers and clairvoyants to whose services powers that be often resort while making important political and military decisions.

IN his book Memoirs of Gaur and Pandua, the historian Khan Sahib Abid Ali, who himself hailed from Malda, wrote: "Excavations have been made in different parts of the ruined city by village cultivators in search of treasure, which have revealed traces of spacious halls, pavements, staircases, subterranean passages, and a good many other relics, all testifying to the greatness of the once renowned city."

Stone-age treasures may soon come to light as a team of archaeologists launches what's billed as one of Norway's largest excavations ever. More than half-a-million objects are believed to lie below the site that ultimately will house a North Sea gas terminal. Around 50 archaeologists will work on the site at Aukra on Norway's west coast for the next year, all in an effort to trace its history before construction of the Ormen Lange gas terminal begins.

When the world's foremost curators, archaeologists and historians met at the British Museum recently to devise a strategy to retrieve thousands of priceless Mesopotamian artefacts looted in Baghdad last month, the collective sense of outrage was almost palpable. When Donny George - sometimes described as a Middle Eastern answer to Indiana Jones and who is director of research at the Iraq Museum - passionately condemned the looting of his institution as "the crime of the century", sympathetic heads shook in agreement. Some even seemed close to tears.

The smallest seahorse known to science has been identified by marine biologists. The creature, to be known as Hippocampus denise, is typically just 16 millimetres long - smaller than most fingernails. Some were found to be just 13 mm long. Researchers say the animal was mistakenly thought to be a juvenile of another of the 32 known species of seahorses.

In fishing circles, talk of the big ones always garners an audience. The bigger the fish, the more awe it inspires. A crowd may soon gather around Tierney Thys, a marine biologist with the Monterey, California-based Sea Studios Foundation. As part of Thys's study of the little-known ocean sunfish (Mola mola), a behemoth that can grow more than 4.2 meters (14 feet) long from dorsal fin tip to anal fin tip and 3 meters (10 feet) in horizontal length, she has uncovered a fish that may be a new record setter for the world's heaviest bony fish.

Around midnight on March 26, hundreds of meteorites rained on the Chicago suburbs of Park Forest and Olympia Fields, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) southwest of downtown. The larger meteorites punched holes in roofs and dented cars. One meteorite embedded itself in the Park Forest fire station. "We were asleep when it happened," says Phillip Jones, a retired electrical designer who lives in Olympia Fields. "My youngest granddaughter came into our room saying she had heard a noise but we told her she was dreaming and to go back to sleep."

You smell a group of crested auklets before you see them, says Julie Hagelin. "It's like someone is peeling a tangerine next to you," she says. The citrus-scented seabirds are the first found to communicate using odour. The birds seem to use perfume to make themselves attractive, Hagelin's team has discovered. Crested auklets (Aethia cristatella) live in Alaska; a breeding colony can be 100,000 strong. When birds meet, they press their bills against each other's necks - feathers here have the strongest smell.

Sticky plant sap may cause the most common deadly cancer affecting children in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers have discovered. White sap from the African milkbush is used by children as a gooey toy or as glue in their schoolbooks, while adults use it to make herbal remedies. But scientists have now found that even tiny amounts of the plant sap can boost the activity of a cancer-causing virus in human cells. The Epstein-Barr virus is thought to be a major cause of Burkitt's lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system that is rare in Western countries.

Infections by a computer worm that travels via both email and file-sharing networks grew on Tuesday, according to anti-virus companies. "I'm surprised because we expected it to die down," says Carole Theriault, consultant with UK anti-virus company Sophos. Computer viruses usually fizzle out quickly if they gain widespread publicity, as users gain awareness. "But we're actually seeing more activity today," she says.

A small team was chartered by NASA to make a top-level assessment of the viability of using the Apollo Command and Service Modules the basis for a Crew Return Vehicle, and potentially for a Crew Transfer Vehicle, for the International Space Station. This assessment was conducted 13-14 March 2003. The Assessment Team focused in on a small set of factors that might make the application of the Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) an attractive option for serious consideration for the OSP CRV and perhaps the CTV.

A celestial dragon will chew on the Moon Thursday evening and Friday morning, drenching the normally predictable satellite in blood-red hues before finally consuming it entirely from our night sky. That's how the ancient Chinese explained lunar eclipses. The events terrified many cultures through time. But now scientists can explain the mechanics of an eclipse and predict its timing and duration, and there is nothing to be frightened about.

Michaela Denis, who has died aged 88, and her husband Armand pioneered a style of animal wildlife programmes shown on the BBC in the 1950s and 60s that was subsequently widely copied, and sometimes parodied. Accompanied by Armand's running commentary, the two would be filmed getting as close to animals as possible. Just as strikingly, there would usually be a "trademark moment" for Michaela to apply lipstick or comb her hair. She once commented that she could not possibly get into the water with crocodiles until she had put on her eyebrow pencil.

The North East's most famous book is due to return home this week. A hi-tech copy of the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels will arrive on Holy Island, 1300 years after the original version left the island. The Lindisfarne Gospels were put together by Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne in around 715 AD. The complex and lavishly decorated text is widely recognised as the pinnacle of Anglo Saxon cultural achievement. The text is now held at the British Library after surviving attacks by invading Vikings and many other adventures in its history.

Provincial cultural relics officials in Zhengzhou has reported the discovery of several new caves and niches under a highway in the renowned Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang City of central China's Henan Province. Provincial cultural relics officials in Zhengzhou has reported the discovery of several new caves and niches under a highway in the renowned Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang City of central China's Henan Province.

A Roman high street, complete with a pedestrian walkway, shops and a roadside shrine where weary travellers could refresh their spirits and curse their enemies, has been unearthed by archaeologists. The 200-yard stretch of Roman village life was uncovered in farmland destined for a housing estate in Northamptonshire. The site is so large, and the finds so plentiful, that archaeologists have yet to uncover many of its secrets.

NEW YORK - The homelands of the Indo-European languages stretch from Dublin to Delhi. But Hadza, a tongue that is one of a kind, is spoken by just 1,000 people near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania. Why do the world's languages have so uneven a distribution pattern? Two researchers theorize that much of the answer has to do with events that began 10,000 years ago, as crop plants were domesticated.

Early humans and Neanderthals probably did not interbreed, according to evidence collected by Italian scientists. Scientists know that Neanderthals and early human ancestors were distinct species, even though they lived during the same period. However, there is controversy over theories that Neanderthals made a contribution to the modern human gene pool. A skeleton uncovered in Portugal appeared to show both Neanderthal and human features.

Skywatchers are preparing themselves for a total eclipse of the Moon on Thursday night into Friday morning. It will be visible from much of Europe, Africa and the Americas. The slow and subdued nature of lunar eclipses makes them less dramatic than solar eclipses. Scientifically they are also less important.

One of the UK's rarest birds, the bittern, can look forward to a more secure future. Conservationists hope work to improve the reedbeds where they live will double the numbers of bitterns within a decade. In 1997 the population was so small there were fears the bittern could become extinct. The European Union is paying more than half the cost of the rescue plan.

An Egyptian flight arrived in Cairo on Sunday carrying a number of Pharaonic artifacts and murals smuggled from Egypt 150 years ago. Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni and head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) Zahi Hawwas are to hold a press conference on Monday to brief reporters on the efforts exerted to win back the precious monuments.

MIAMI (Reuters) - Rotting trash can? Decaying dead animal No. It was a giant tropical plant whose rare bloom in Miami on Monday night drew a small gaggle of rapturous plant enthusiasts to admire the smelly splendour. "Mr Stinky," the amorphophallus titanum, or Titan Arum, was towering at more than 85 inches (216 cm) in a conservatory at the Fairchild Tropical Garden.

Remains of a medieval castle believed to be one of the first built in Ulster have been uncovered in a former County Tyrone military base. They are thought to date back to the early 14th Century and to have been built by Irish chieftain Domnall O`Neill. Archaeologists have examined the site in the centre of Dungannon and recovered thousands of artefacts, but it has now disappeared under tonnes of concrete in preparation for development.

Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and his colleagues are stirring controversy with contentions that many biblical stories never happened, but were written by what he calls `a creative copywriter' to advance an ideological agenda. Prof. Israel Finkelstein sees no contradiction between holding a proper Pesach seder and telling the story of the exodus from Egypt, and the fact that, in his opinion, the exodus never occurred.

A study of English otters has found the area they inhabit grew fivefold in 25 years. Half a century ago, otters were found only in parts of eastern and south-west England. Better water quality has helped their recovery, though road traffic is now a growing menace. The study, the National Otter Survey of England, is the work of the Environment Agency (EA) and the Wildlife Trusts, with help from English Nature and the privatised water companies.

Dozens of controversial GM trials taking place across the UK are due to end this summer. Public consultation will then follow on whether these cops should be grown commercially. The government is due to launch a £500,000 "public debate" in the coming weeks. The move to ban the GM crops for the Trust's 2,000 tenant farmers has been welcomed by campaigners Friends of the Earth.

People's personalities are not set in stone by the age of 30, contrary to popular and professional beliefs, new research suggests. In fact, the old adage about people becoming wiser with age may hold some truth, according to the US study, which examined five major personality traits.

In recent years exploring Mars has become a reality with the Pathfinder mission. The next step, landing a human crew on the planet's surface, may be as few as 20 years away, according to Dan Goldin, a former NASA administrator. Nexterra Inc. has taken on the task of putting a man on Mars by providing an online simulation of a space mission that may inform generations of the importance of science as well as demonstrate the feasibility of the endeavor.

BEIJING (AP) -- The SARS outbreak won't delay China's first manned space launch, a matter of great national pride for the communist nation, state media said Saturday. Launching the Shenzhou V spacecraft will make China the third country after Russia and the United States to send a human into space. A front-page story in the Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper didn't give a date but earlier reports have said the launch will take place in the second half of this year.

South Africa has succeeded in cloning a cow, the first animal to be cloned on the continent. Named Fut, which means "replica" or "repeat" in Zulu, the animal was born on April 19, in Brits in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. "She's doing brilliant," veterinarian Dr. Morne de la Rey told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Fut is the result of a collaboration between the South African Embryo Plus centre and scientists at the Danish Agriculture Institute.

Meteor showers such as November's Leonids usually provide a good celestial show as tiny bits of dust and rock debris burn up, creating flashes of light across the sky. A new analysis indicates that some 480 million years ago, the spectacle was even more dramatic. A report published today in the journal Science provides direct evidence that the influx of meteorites to the earth was 100 times what it is today.

Strange shapes and textures can be found in neighborhood of the Cone Nebula. The unusual shapes originate from fine interstellar dust reacting in complex ways with the energetic light and hot gas being expelled by the young stars. (Follow link to see image) The brightest star on the right of the above picture is S Mon, while the region just above it has been nicknamed the Fox Fur Nebula for its color and structure. The blue glow directly surrounding S Mon results from reflection, where neighboring dust reflects light from the bright star.

Hundreds of people are expected to celebrate the preservation of a hill fort in Herefordshire that is more than 2,000 years old. The future of Credenhill Iron Age Hill Fort and Park Wood on the edge of Hereford has been secured through a combination of grants and fundraising. The fort is thought to have been the site of an Iron Age tribal capital.

Army ants, these days dispersed across the world, all came from a single source over 100 million years ago on the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. A new study indicates the insects all share identical genetic markers that reveal a common ancestor. Many scientists believed that army ants originated separately on several continents relatively recently in Earth history.

Many people believe that Noah's Ark is the result of the ancient folk art, some kind of a myth. However, more evidence arise to show that the biblical story about Noah and the Ark cannot be disregarded. More and more scientists share the opinion that the geological proofs do exist and the Flood described in the Genesis is a real historic fact. It was reported several times already that a construction resembling a ship had been found on the top of the Ararat Mountain.

'Why do people so desperately want to believe in Atlantis-style tales?' moans Archaeology Editor Peter Young, unable to comprehend why people are turned away from the 'real' archaeology featured in his magazine. Bogus Archaeology expert Garrett Fagan, Assistant Professor of Classics and author of the epic, best-selling, modern-day scholarly classic Bathing in Public in the Roman World explains, 'There is little doubt that presenting science (and archaeology) on television is a difficult business. The slow pace of change in scientific thinking, the habitual lack of consensus among academics about details, and the often complex nature of the arguments involved place pressures on producers ... The unspectacular and painstaking nature of the discipline does not make for particularly spectacular television. For how long will viewers sit through scenes of dirt sifting through knee- high ruins?'

Egypt retrieved on Thursday from the US a large panel dating back to the Pharaonic era.Zahi Hawwas, Chairman of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, took delivery of the slab which depicts cobra motifs at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headquarters in New York at an international ceremony. Attending the ceremony were Egypt's Counsul General in New York Mahmoud Allam, a number of archaeologists and antiquity aficionados from the Brooklyn and Metropolitan museums in addition to reporters and international TV stations.

First results have been announced from one of the most promising experiments on the International Space Station. The project studies a type of matter called a "dusty plasma", which contains particles big enough to be seen and tracked with video cameras. The plasma structures created, some never seen before on Earth, will help scientists to test their ideas about conventional solids, whose atoms are too small to watch.

MAPLES MILL - High on an Illinois River Valley bluff, tucked back along the treeline and beneath spring blooms of purple and white, rest the remains of an ancient people. Buried near Maples Mill and discovered by archaeologists is a site so significant that to this day no other examples of the centuries-old culture can compare to those found at Tampico Mounds.

Will our Sun look like this one day? (follow link to see image) The Helix Nebula is the closest example of a planetary nebula created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce.

An intrepid Nottingham professor will don full Viking battle dress as he attempts to trace the county's bloodline back to Norse invaders. Stephen Harding and his researchers from the University of Nottingham will be wearing the attire at the Notts County Show this weekend. They are trying to find irrefutable evidence that the blood of the Viking raiders who first settled in Notts during the ninth century still flows through the veins of their descendants who may be among the folk of Notts.

WORCESTER, Mass. (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 who are wondering whether they were sculpted by American Indians, prehistoric settlers or practical jokesters.

NAPLES - "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation," the playwright Jean Kerr observed, updating Rudyard Kipling for a more cynical age. Kerr's words take on a positively macabre slant when applied to that sunny day of Aug. 24, A.D. 79, when at about 1 p.m. Vesuvius began to erupt. For had the entire population of Pompeii and its surrounding settlements been sufficiently panicked to flee then and there, what would have been buried deep beneath the ash and stone that later began to rain down on the plain would have been empty ghost towns and sea ports, abandoned villas and farms.

Bruce Thompson holds one of Maryland government's more esoteric jobs -- assistant state underwater archaeologist -- and, at times, seemingly one of the more tedious. But not to him. Searching for a British Revolutionary War fleet scuttled more than 200 years ago, Thompson was intensely viewing three screens as he steered his 27-foot May-Craft last week through St. George Creek, 75 miles from Washington near the mouth of the Potomac River.

A rescue operation is set to save the remains of a spectacular Roman bridge which once spanned the Tyne. A trial excavation has revealed massive blocks from the stone bridge in the river bank at Corbridge in Northumberland. Evidence suggests that the bridge had a triumphal arch and was adorned with statues. But the structure is under threat from riverbank erosion and Tyne and Wear Museums and English Heritage have lodged a bid with the Heritage Lottery Fund for backing to finance a rescue dig.

The Knights Templar, the mysterious Christian warriors who fought in the Crusades but were later disbanded by the Pope, may have had a hostelry in Galway city, it was claimed last evening following the discovery of a medieval wall in Eyre Square this week. On Tuesday, archaeologists monitoring construction work for the Galway broadband network around Eyre Square made a discovery which could prove important for understanding mediaeval Galway.

Before the Roman ruins at Kom Al-Dikka could be exposed, mountains of earth had to be removed from what was once a dump heap which had been further raised as an artillery position in Napoleon's time. Beneath the dump, Muslim cemeteries were revealed, themselves spread over Byzantine ruins. And, eight metres beneath the level of modern Alexandria, the Polish mission found monumental red-brick baths dating from the fourth century with an adjoining cistern, and a small theatre with marble tiers of the same period. Both buildings opened to the west into a large open space lined with columns, the agora of late antique Alexandria.

Archaeologists are trying to catalog what the largest wildfire in state history has done to more than 1,300 archaeological sites in eastern Arizona. It will be a while before they know which sites burned, which survived and which new sites were uncovered by the roughly 469,000-acre blaze, but archaeologists also have another, more pressing job. They're scrambling to strengthen the fragile land around surviving sites before Arizona's annual monsoon rains begin later this month.

Police on the Greek island of Crete said they had arrested a gang of grave robbers who looted about 1000 artefacts from ancient burial sites. Two local farmers and a construction worker were arrested while trying to sell 120 artefacts to an unidentified foreigner, police said, in what is being described as one of the worst cases of ancient grave looting ever reported in Greece.

A unique gold wreath of a Thracian chieftain is on display in the National Museum of History in Sofia since Thursday. The wreath decorated the head of an ancient chieftain who lived in the 4th century BC and which name is still unknown to the archeologists. The artifact is part of the private collection of Bulgarian tycoon Vassil Bozhkov who chairs the club of the country's big business - Vazrazhdane.

It is a matter of preserving the preserved. One of the rare treasures of the country, an Egyptian mummy dating back to 2,500 BC is in danger of being destroyed because of lack of expert advice. Nasihu, the daughter of a Pharaoh, lived in 2,500 BC in far away Egypt. When she died, experts preserved her form beautifully and in time, she found her way to India.

SANTA FE, N.M. - An art gallery turned over to federal agents a rare 16th century Peruvian altarpiece that had been listed as stolen from a remote village. Federal agents and a U.S. Embassy official in Peru have said the huge altarpiece - 10 feet by 10 feet and weighing 800 pounds - was stolen after it was removed from a church during repair work in January 2002.

A new campaign is being launched on Friday to combat the growing problem of so-called light pollution in the UK. Researchers have found that a good view of the night sky is becoming more and more difficult in the countryside. They have found that during the 1990s the area of countryside with pure dark skies reduced by 27%. Campaigners want better downward-pointing street lighting introduced to enable the continued view of the night time sky's landscape.

Some animals can feel and think in ways not too dissimilar from us, welfare campaigners say. They say there is evidence of altruism, with some animals acting disinterestedly for the good of others. Animals which live in communities, they say, often exhibit signs of morality which resembles human behaviour. They say there is scientific backing for their claims, with huge implications for human use of animals.

A spacecraft has blasted off from Japan on an ambitious four-and-a-half-year journey to bring asteroid samples back to Earth for the first time. The Muses-C space probe is scheduled to visit the 1998 SF36 asteroid, 300 million kilometres (186 million miles) from Earth, and bring back rock samples.

The tiny fossil of a fly discovered 300 miles from the South Pole could help scientists figure out what life was like millions of years ago in Antarctica. The find by geologist Allan Ashworth, detailed in this week's journal Nature, could open a new chapter in the understanding of plant and animal life in ancient Antarctica and shed light on global changes in the the climate. Until now, scientists did not think that the coldest continent ever harbored this type of flies, which are from the Cyclorrhapha family, so-called "higher flies" that include the common housefly, Ashworth said.

Pollution in coastal seawater might get into freshwater aquifers more easily than scientists had suspected1. This could worsen the shortage of fresh water in the Middle East - a major cause of Arab-Israeli tension. Israel's scant water resources are in a parlous state. It has just two small main aquifers, from which water is being drawn faster than it can be renewed, thanks to irrigation, non-indigenous crops and the country's burgeoning number of swimming pools, gardens and golf courses. Add to these stresses lax pollution regulations, and contamination is already causing dysentery and kidney disease.

This year's Astronomy Day (10th May) couldn't have fallen in a more astronomically active month. To celebrate, the Nature Science Update team bring you a stargazing special featuring this month's heavenly highlights: a transit of Mercury, an annular eclipse of the Sun and a full eclipse of the Moon. If you can tear yourself away from the screen, astronomy clubs around the world are organising events that you can take part in too.

A funeral headstone dating to the pharaohs was officially returned to Egypt yesterday at a Queens ceremony, where a top Egyptian official vowed to step up his country's campaign to retrieve other illegally removed archaeological treasures. Federal officials gained possession of the hieroglyphic-inscribed limestone stele, which weighs several hundred pounds, in connection with their investigation of a New York dealer, Frederick Schultz, who was convicted last year of conspiring to sell stolen Egyptian artifacts.(free registration)

Teams of agents from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), working with U.S. military authorities in Iraq, have recovered nearly 700 artifacts and located 39,400 manuscripts missing from the National Museum in Baghdad. "The recovery of these items was the direct result of a superb, cooperative effort between U.S. law enforcement, the U.S. military and the Iraqi people," said ICE acting Assistant Secretary Michael J. Garcia. "While we are pleased with the results thus far, there is clearly more work to be done.

Global warming was a good thing for Erik the Red. Without it, the Viking, exiled from Iceland for murder in AD982, might never have founded a settlement in Greenland. And without that home base, his son Lief Eriksson might never have ventured even further west 15 years later to winter in modern-day Maine, laying claim to being the first European to set foot on North America. The adventures of father and son occurred during an era known as Medieval Warm Period, which began about 900 and peaked from 1000 to 1300. European culture prospered in a climate so balmy that English farmers could grow wine grapes 500 kilometres north of modern limits. Trade flourished, great cathedrals were built and the population exploded.

Federal prosecutors have filed rarely used charges against a man accused of looting Indian grave sites behind Grand Coulee Dam. Leaders of the Spokane Tribe say the charges are long overdue because looting is common every year when Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind Grand Coulee, is drawn down.

The skulls of two Stone Age dogs believed to be the earliest known canines on record have been found, according to a team of Russian scientists. The dog duo, which lived approximately 14,000 years ago, appear to represent the first step of domestication from their wild wolf ancestors.

Taking the deepest visible-light images ever taken of our Universe, astronomers have detected unexplained stars in the outskirts of the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy. Surprisingly, they find that many of the stars in Andromeda's halo formed only about 7 billion years ago: quite different from the 12 billion-year age of the stars in our Milky Way's halo.

The UK is to make swingeing cuts in emissions of gases thought to cause climate change, the government says. The Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, held out the prospect of a 60% cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. The UK has already made deeper cuts in six gases than it promised to achieve. But emissions by the US are projected to rise massively on present trends.

Britain's academy of science, the Royal Society, says there is no evidence that eating GM food is any more harmful than eating non-GM food. The society says in a submission to the UK Government's GM review that although the technology could lead to "unpredicted harmful changes in the nutritional status of foods", the same is true of conventional crop breeding.

The permanent committee for Egyptian antiquities agreed Wednesday to allow a French Sorbonne University archaeological mission to continue its work in collaboration with the Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) at Tal AL- Heer area in northern Sinai, 27 kilometers east of the Suez Canal. The meeting was held under SCA Secretary General Zahi Hawas.

The re-evaluation of excavation agreements signed with American universities has become necessary to settle disputes over entitlements of foreign excavation teams to portions of the finds. In some cases the teams are granted half of the items unearthed, which some regard as too much. Those who approve the terms of these agreements believe them to be fair, considering the rarity of Egyptian specialists in excavation.

Atlantis Carlos Museum in the US has decided to restore a mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh by the end of the year. The mummy had been stolen from a tomb in the Valley of Kings in Luxor.A museum official said that the mummy most probably belongs to Ramses I (1292- 1290 BC). CNN quoted Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities chief Dr Zahi Hawas as saying that the mummy belonged to a royal personage, a matter indicated by the mummy's gilt finger nails.

In a new biography, Tenzing: Hero of Everest, recently issued by National Geographic Books, author Ed Douglas profiles the life of Tenzing Norgay. Together with Edmund Hillary, the climber became the first human to stand atop the world's highest mountain. Douglas charts Tenzing's journey from his youth in Tibet as the son of a poor yak herder to an adulthood marked by international acclaim as a Sherpa and a citizen of India. Douglas recently spoke with National Geographic News about Tenzing's life and accomplishment on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his historic climb.

Following centuries of persecution, England's hen harrier (Circus cyaneus) population had dwindled to only seven successful breeding pairs last year. Now, after three major fires at specially protected moorland breeding sites, one of the country's most spectacular birds of prey is at the brink of extinction. Hen harriers have been heavily persecuted by gamekeepers, due to their perceived effect on red grouse populations. Red grouse is a commonly shot, and lucrative, game species, and also a typical hen harrier prey item.

The diminutive disk of Mercury, the solar system's innermost planet, spent about five hours crossing in front of the enormous solar disk yesterday (Wednesday, May 7th), as viewed from the general vicinity of planet Earth. The Sun was above the horizon during the entire transit for observers in Europe, Africa, Asia, or Australia, and the horizon was certainly no problem for the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft. Seen as a dark spot, Mercury progresses from left to right (top panel to bottom) in these four images from SOHO's extreme ultraviolet camera.

Archeology fans in Bulgaria are excited by the excavations that are to resume this summer in Halka Bunar area, some 100 km south of capital Sofia. The explorations which archaeologists from the New Bulgarian University have carried out for some years give ground to expect important discoveries in a remarkable ancient Thracian settlement. The site was discovered by scientists in 1999 during a regular inspection. A trench dug by grave-robbers and more than 600 holes punched by treasure-hunters made visible the remains of a large and rich in finds Thracian site.

The oldest site of iron and steel manufacturing from the early Paekje Kingdom (18 B.C.-A.D. 660) of the Three Kingdoms period was found in Kian-ni, Hwasong in Kyonggi Province, the director of the Kijon Archeological Research Center said yesterday. The 30,000-pyong site will be able to reveal much about how people lived at the time as it is closely connected to Hansong, the capital of the kingdom. One pyong equals 3.3 square meters. It is also believed to have been the core production center for iron mine refinery and forging for the country.

Archaeologists digging on a farm above the York River believe they have found Werowocomoco, principal village of the Indian chieftain Powhatan, who controlled the Virginia Tidewater when the English established the Jamestown colony in 1607. It was at Werowocomoco that Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, purportedly intervened with her father to spare the life of Capt. John Smith, Jamestown's military leader.

The planet Mercury has passed in front of the Sun as viewed from Earth. The event, called a transit, occurs only about 12 times a century. Mercury began the journey across the star's disc at just after 0510 GMT, depending on the viewing location on Earth. It slipped off the star's face at about 1032 GMT.

The Columbia space shuttle was lost because damage to a seal or panel on its left wing allowed the super-hot gases of re-entry to get inside the vehicle frame and break it apart. This is the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's (CIAB) "working scenario" - a best assessment of what happened to the orbiter based on the evidence gathered so far.

At one time, spotting a cougar in the eastern United States ranked alongside an encounter with Bigfoot or a UFO. But over the years, the rise in cougar tales has sparked an interest in wildlife officials and cougar enthusiasts alike. Now, four wilderness lovers have formed a new network to trace cougar presence from the prairie to the eastern seaboard. "There was a need for somebody to really document what the cougar status is in the East," said Ken Miller, one of the Eastern Cougar Network's (ECN) four founders.

The Earth's core may be hotter than some scientists had thought. The iron-rich core contains lots of radioactive potassium, which generates heat as it decays, say V. Rama Murthy, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and colleagues1. This supplements the heat still in the Earth's bowels from its fiery formation 4.5 billion years ago.

Exercise bike? Dolls house? Nest of occasional tables? You can tell a lot about a person by what you find in their attic - including what air pollutants they have breathed, new research suggests. Slowly accumulating between the piles of junk, attic dust provides a unique archive of potentially hazardous airborne particles going back to when the house was built. "It's a rough but good indicator of what air pollution was like," says environmental scientist Paul Lioy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who led the study1.

A new device could make fibre-optic telecommunications easier, cheaper, and faster1. Researchers have created a light-emitting diode (LED) from gallium arsenide (GaAs) that emits infrared light of a wavelength compatible with long-distance fibre-optic networks. Previously, GaAs LEDs produced light of the wrong wavelength. In standard town-to-town or continent-to-continent optical telecommunications, signals are encoded in pulses of infrared light with a wavelength of about 1.5 thousandths of a millimetre (micrometres) - glass optical fibres transmit this wavelength most efficiently. But GaAs normally produces light with a wavelength of 0.85 micrometres, which is useful only for short-distance communications.

ROOSEVELT, Ariz. -- The Salado Indians disappeared centuries ago, but the remnants of their civilization linger in central Arizona canyons. Their villages and pots, trumpets and jewelry dot the Tonto Basin. Shelters big enough for 300 commoners and platform houses built for the elite are still there as well.

The incredible wealth of the Etruscan burial ground, which was found and studied in recent years in the Arnoaldi family land in Bologna, was already renown in Roman times. Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered the true opulence which had already attracted tomb raiders. Even those ancient Roman tomb raiders decided to steal from those tombs which had particularly precious objects for life after death.

STONES and bones and ancient pottery and glass discovered by archaeologists at Dungannon's Castle Hill have opened a unique window on the past. The prominent historic hill-top site, once home to the exiled O'Neill clan, was used more recently as a police and Army base. Dungannon council had begun discussions over the future of the site, partly owned by the Orange Order and the DoE Water Service, before the discovery was made.

German archaeologists hope to return to Iraq when it returns to normality to examine whether an "anomaly" in the ground is the lost grave of King Gilgamesh, the legendary subject of the world's oldest book. A German-led team believes it has found indications that may tie in with a description in the book describing the king's burial place. However, the experts stress that the chances they have found the grave are still only in the realms of theoretical possibility. Joerg Fassbinder, of the Bavarian office for historic monuments in Munich in southern Germany, said tests at the site of the ancient city of Uruk had shown elements of some kind of structure.

High-tech analysis of a mummy, nicknamed "Cleo," is shedding light on the life and burial of the middle class woman inside the wrappings who lived 2,000 years ago in Egypt. Late last month she underwent a CAT scan, or computerized tomography, which digitally reconstructs three-dimensional objects using thousands of photographed slices.

Europe's first mission to Mars will blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, 2 June. The Soyuz-Fregat launcher carrying the Mars Express orbiter, and its lander, Beagle 2, is expected to leave the launch pad at 2345 local time (1745 GMT). The launch date and time were set following a successful review of all the spacecraft's systems last week. Mars Express will be leaving Earth slightly later than originally planned because engineers needed extra time to fix a problem in one of the probe's electronic modules.

Drinking herbal tea may damage teeth, dentists have warned. Researchers at the University of Bristol Dental School have found these teas erode the enamel or protective layer on teeth. Some are even more harmful than orange juice, which is very acidic and is known to harm teeth. The researchers said the findings should act as a warning to people who regard herbal teas as a healthy alternative to other drinks.

"The Egyptian role in post-war Iraq is important, given Egypt's leading role in the Arab world, Ibrahim Hamoudi," the Political Advisor to the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said Monday. Emerging from a meeting with Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, Hamoudi told reporters that his visit came in response to the 'generous' invitation to the Iraqi opposition groups to hold talks with Egyptian officials on the future of the war-scarred Iraq.