Newsdesk Archive

Channel 4 has hit back at claims that a logo promoting reality TV show Big Brother, painted near a chalk horse on a hillside, has angered local residents. The "eye" logo, about 300ft wide, was painted on to the site near Uffington, Oxfordshire, on Thursday so it could be filmed as part of the TV show's idents.

After years of research and negotiations, Bob Weatherall stood trembling with fear and emotion outside a vault beneath the foundations of London's Royal College of Surgeons. Behind the dusty steel door lay the remains of dozens of Aborigines, most likely stolen from their graves and shipped to Europe to satisfy the curiosity of 19th century anthropologists, doctors and scientists.

British archives and documents are an important source of modern UAE history, but researchers must look for more sources, a renowned Egyptian expert said here yesterday. The British documents include conventions and treaties signed by the rulers of the emirates and the British, and reports of the British officials on various local tribes such as Al Qoasim, Bani Yas and Buflasah.

VIKINGS were responsible for introducing ironing to Scotland. The pillaging Scandinavians were surprisingly conscious of their appearance and regularly smoothed their clothes. Excavations across Scotland have revealed evidence that the Nordic warriors used ironing boards and smoothing stones to make the job easier. Dr Euan MacKie, of Glasgow University, said he found out about the ironing culture by chance 10 years ago, when his colleague's child found a piece of a whalebone on the Hebridean island of North Uist.

PARIS - Art experts, curators and law enforcement officials gathered at Interpol headquarters Monday to create a computerized list to help customs agents catch any looted Iraqi treasures that pass through their borders. Compiling an easily accessible description of looted antiquities was at the top of the agenda for the two-day meeting in the southeastern city of Lyon.

In an important finding, an ancient stone inscription in Dev Nagri script and a foundation were discovered in the on-going excavation in the acquired land in Ayodhya on Sunday, sources said. The inscribed stone, which was found in a trench is expected to be extracted on Tuesday after weekly closure Monday, they said. Stone pieces and a wall was found in other trenches south of makeshift structures.

The top terms that people search for on the net are a good guide to the crazes and trends sweeping the world. Currently topping the charts is the Sars virus, war in Iraq and more populist subjects such as David Beckham and pop singer Avril Lavigne. Now MSN, Microsoft's net portal, has compiled a list of the least popular search terms that only a handful of people, in some cases only one, have looked for.

Scientists have found the gene responsible for the rare condition Ondine's Curse - where sufferers 'forget' to breathe. The condition is named after a mythological story. Some accounts say the water nymph Ondine was punished by the gods after falling in love with a knight by being condemned to stay awake in order to breathe.

Songs with violent lyrics increase aggressive thoughts and emotions, suggests a study in US college students. The study contradicts a popular suggestion that music loaded with violent imagery, such as some rap and heavy metal, are cathartic in venting aggression. Craig Anderson at Iowa State University and colleagues found that students who listened to songs with violent lyrics were more likely to make aggressive associations in subsequent psychological tests.

An audacious scheme to plant the world's desert coastlines with mangrove trees is being condemned by marine biologists as a potential disaster for coral reefs. The scheme is the brainchild of a retired US cell biologist, Gordon Sato. He wants to plant mangroves along hundreds of kilometres of coastline in Mexico, Arabia and elsewhere. His first 250,000 trees are already growing close to coral reefs on the shores of the Red Sea in Eritrea.

Over five thousand years ago, the people dwelling in southern Iraq invented one of the world's earliest systems of writing. They did not do so in order to write stories or letters, nor yet to publicize the deeds of gods and kings, though soon enough writing came to be used for those purposes. They invented writing because they needed a means of accounting for the receipt and distribution of resources. For their numbers had grown and their society had become complex in the alluvial plains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers,

When hikers spotted a corpse poking from the Schnalstal glacier in the Austrian-Italian Alps in 1991, they thought they had found the body of a lost climber. Then researchers took a closer look and announced the iceman was an ancient shepherd, a primitive farm worker who had got lost in the mountains and had died of hypothermia. Yet now, after 12 years of careful research, scientists have discovered the truth about Otzi the Iceman: that he was the Stone Age equivalent of a hi-tech trooper kitted with complex weapons and survival gear.

There's no telling how many works of art and other antiquities were looted or destroyed after the U.S. military arrived in Baghdad four weeks ago. Estimates ranged from as many as 170,000 from the Iraq National Museum alone to the minuscule number 25 reported by The New York Times on Thursday. That number was cited by Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist, based on a list given him by officials from the museum. Searches are proceeding; results are anything but complete. Only when thorough investigations of vaults in museums and the Central Bank in Baghdad are finished will the truth be known. Who owns the artifacts of a nation's history?

from the Friends of Verulamium Park unearthed more than they bargained for when they discovered the remains of an ancient tower block in the park. A 15-strong group of volunteers came across the bastion while they were de-weeding the Roman Wall, which once enclosed the Roman city of Verulamium in AD200. English Heritage, guardians of the 120-metre long wall, said the bastion would have been used as launch pad for a large catapult mechanism known as a ballista.

Twelve thousand years ago, when mom was too tired to cook mammoth stew or goosefoot greens for dinner, the hunter and gatherer families of the Great Basin chowed down on their own form of fast food -- sun-dried grasshoppers, seasoned with lake salt. At certain times, 200 pounds of the crispy orthopteran insects could be collected in an hour along the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Crunching on a pound of bugs provided 1,365 calories of protein, slightly more than a pound of today's medium-fat beef, archeologists say.

An astronaut from the International Space Station (ISS) who returned to Earth aboard a Russian spacecraft has described the crew's less-than-perfect landing. A Soyuz capsule carrying the two Americans and a Russian landed heavily and at least 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the designated target site in the remote Kazakh steppes after a three-and-a-half hour journey from space. It took rescue teams using 15 aircraft and 50 vehicles two hours to locate the capsule, which experts say might have returned to earth on a steeper trajectory than expected.

Researchers have stumbled across a new subatomic particle. The mysterious body is causing theorists to rethink their ideas about the strong force, which binds subatomic particles together into atoms. Dubbed 'Ds (2317)', the new-found particle is probably an unusual configuration of quarks - the entities that, in trios, form protons and neutrons. It could be one quark orbiting another, or perhaps a sort of molecule of four quarks.

The 5th of May is not Mexican Independence Day, but is should be ! And Cinco de Mayo is not an American holiday, but it should be. Mexico declared its independence from mother Spain on midnight, the 15th of September, 1810. And it took 11 years before the first Spanish soldiers were told and forced to leave Mexico. So, why Cinco de Mayo? And why should Americans savor this day as well? Because 4,000 Mexican soldiers smashed the French and traitor Mexican army of 8,000 at Puebla, Mexico, 100 miles east of Mexico City on the morning of May 5, 1862.

Salamanders, given a choice between tubes containing two fruitflies or three, lunge at the tube of three1. This hints that the ability to differentiate between small numbers of objects may have evolved much earlier than scientists had thought. Primates can spot the greater of two quantities smaller than four, without any training. Babies choose the bowl with more cookies; monkeys go for the bucket with more slices of apple.

In NGC 1275, one galaxy is slicing through another. The disk of the dusty spiral galaxy near the image center is cutting through a large elliptical galaxy, visible predominantly on the lower left. Galaxies can change significantly during a collision like this, with gravitational tides distorting each galaxy and gas clouds being compressed and lighting up with new star formation. Galaxy collisions occur in slow motion to the human eye, with a single pass taking as much as 100 million years.

History can be learned from books, but the members of the Cumberland River Archaeological Society prefer to make a physical connection to the people who walked the earth years ago. ''This area was covered with woolly mammoths and mastodons,'' society newsletter editor Steve Cooper said. The society had its third annual ''Archaeofest'' on Saturday in Cumberland Furnace, Tenn., featuring displays of several collections of ancient weapons and tools found in and around Dickson County.

A ROMAN villa has been excavated on the outskirts of Stowmarket. After four years of archaeological investigation and excavations at Crest Nicholson's Cedars Park development, the remains of a Roman villa dating back to the second century AD have been identified and recorded.

Fossilized fish bones may help scientists to reconstruct the temperatures of 65 million years ago, according to a paper in this week's Nature, co-authored by colleagues representing three generations of researchers. St. Lawrence University alumnus Scott J. Carpenter of the University of Iowa, Iowa City; Chapin Professor of Geology J. Mark Erickson, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY; and F.D. "Bud" Holland Jr., professor emeritus, department of geology and geological engineering, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, co-authored the paper, which compared the carbon, oxygen and strontium isotope ratios of four fossils collected from the Fox Hills Formation of South Dakota.

More schools teaching biblical creation are to be established across the north east of England. The boss of a Sunderland-based car dealership is to pay for up to six new schools in Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside. All will teach creationism alongside the theory of evolution. The Vardy Foundation, which plans the new schools, already runs Gateshead's Emmanuel College.

Regular cannabis use may be as dangerous as smoking in the long term, claims a UK drug expert. Professor John Henry, a toxicologist at Imperial College London, says he fears that deaths attributable to cannabis could soar. There are currently an estimated 3.2 million people in the Britain who smoke cannabis regularly, compared with 13 million tobacco smokers.

Three astronauts are due to return to Earth in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft after more than five months on the International Space Station (ISS). Americans Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit, along with Russian Nikolai Budarin - Expedition Six to the orbiting platform - are scheduled to land in Kazakhstan's remote steppes shortly after 0200GMT on Sunday, after a three-and-a-half hour journey.

A US museum decided in an unprecedented move to hand over four ancient Egyptian pieces to Cairo. Michael Carlos Museum of Atlanta city, State of Georgia, handed Dr. Zahi Hawas, Chairman of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who is now in the US four rare pieces belonging to the tomb of King Setti I, the most famous king of the l9th Dynasty. The tomb is located in the Valley of Kings, on the west bank of Luxor.

On the freezing surface of Mars, a sensor takes readings of the thin atmosphere and transmits the data to an automated rover, which relays the information to an orbiting satellite. From there, the data packets are sent to an approaching research ship, where astronauts study the readings and send their findings back to Earth, via e-mail.

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Mister Rogers now has an asteroid named in his honor. "Misterrogers", formerly known as No. 26858, honors Fred Rogers, creator and host of public television's "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.'' Rogers died Feb. 27 at age 74. "I doubt that there are many who have not been touched in some way by the life and work of Fred Rogers,'' said John G. Radzilowicz, director of the Henry Buhl Jr. Planetarium & Observatory at the Carnegie Science Center, which made the announcement Thursday.

At Cape Blanco, five feral sheep have taken up residence near the lighthouse. BLM District Archaeologist Stephan Samuels said the sheep, which have been there for about a year, are becoming a problem for those maintaining the lighthouse and the lands for tours. That's because the sheep droppings are tracked all over the lighthouse and the visitor's center.

The star cluster at lower right - click on link to see image - cataloged as Hodge 301, is a denizen of the Tarantula Nebula. An evocative nebula in the southern sky, the sprawling cosmic Tarantula is an energetic star forming region some 168,000 light-years distant in our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. The stars within Hodge 301 formed together tens of millions of years ago and as the massive ones quickly exhaust their nuclear fuel they explode. In fact, the red giant stars of Hodge 301 are rapidly approaching this violent final phase of stellar evolution - known as a supernova.

A Russian woman who claims to be able to speak 120 languages says many of them are from her previous lives. Linguists claim to have identified that she speaks 16th century English, Chinese, Persian, Egyptian, Mongolian, Vietnamese, Korean and Swahili, reports Komsomol'skaya Pravda.

Thirty years ago, something happened that would alter forever our understanding of how humankind came into being. Elaine Morgan was made fearfully cross. An avid reader of popular science books, borrowed from the library in the Welsh valley town of Mountain Ash, the prevailing tenor of the evolutionary debate left her cold. "They were taking a very aggressive line, suggesting that the whole essence of humanity lies in murder and bloodshed. Also they were taking a terribly macho line, implying that everything evolved to benefit the male hunter. And it had nothing at all to say about children, when if evolution is about anything it's about ensuring the survival of the child."

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, is set to move in front of the star as viewed from Earth on Wednesday, 7 May. Such transits are few and astronomers - amateur and professional - will be keen to see and film the event. If you have the right equipment, and take the correct precautions, Mercury will be visible as a small dark spot that appears first on the Sun's northeastern limb.

US space agency (Nasa) officials say there was probably nothing that could have been done to save the crew of Columbia, even if mission control had fully realised the jeopardy the astronauts were in. A report to be handed to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board next week will say the crew were almost certainly doomed from the moment a chunk of foam from the external fuel tank struck the left wing shortly after launch.

A British geologist says he has discovered a way to predict how much lava will pour out of Mount Etna in the future. The technique is based on monitoring earthquakes in the region, as they are statistically related to Etna's output 25 years later. The method does not allow specific eruptions to be predicted, but it does provide a way to predict the total lava output over a several-year future period.

PORTSMOUTH, Va. - An underwater survey found what might be remnants of the Confederate ironclad warship Virginia, the former USS Merrimack that fought the Union's ironclad Monitor in the 1862 battle that redefined naval warfare. "It would be a stroke of incredible luck to discover it after all these years," said Dick Hoffeditz, curator of the Virginia War Museum in Newport News.

From the Alps to the North Sea everyone would probably be speaking a mixture of French, Italian and Spanish, and it is unlikely there would ever have been a German Empire. History would have taken a different course, and Europe would be a very different place, if the Varus Battle had not taken place. This battle - 1,994 years ago, in AD 9 in the Teutoburg Forest - stopped the expansion of the Roman Empire into Germania, and sent the advancing Romans reeling back toward the Rhine, from where they would never venture north again.

A professor at Chico State University believes the campus may have dug up a genuine problem for itself. Greg White, a professor and director of the campus Archaeological Research Project, warned Chico State officials as early as last June that a $10.7 million, 9,000-foot-long trenching project could quite literally dig up trouble for the university.

Unless protective measures are taken, once every century or so when the Earth trembles in a violent release of pent up tension, buildings will tumble, streets will buckle, and pipelines will snap, leaving upwards of a million people crushed beneath the debris. That is the conclusion of Roger Bilham, a geological scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studied the potential impact of earthquakes on the world's rapidly expanding urban populations in the 21st century.

Although most people in the United Kingdom have only known one species of squirrel to visit their back yard, the familiar gray squirrel is in fact a recent immigrant. As little as one hundred years ago, the typical visitor was the native red species cheerily depicted as Squirrel Nutkin in Beatrix Potter's well-loved 1903 children's book.

Just off a dirt road about two miles south of Laramie, a long-silent sandstone guardhouse that once held unruly soldiers from 19th-century Fort Sanders is facing the noise and dust of a 21st-century commercial development. The plans of Burgener Brothers Trucking of Fort Collins to expand its business into Wyoming are nothing new for the abandoned fort, which has been torn up over the years for highway construction, water and sewer lines, and residential and business buildings.

Come December 2003 - January 2004, an armada of five new invaders from Earth should arrive on the shores of the Red Planet -- the Japanese ( ISAS) Nozomi orbiter, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter carrying the Beagle 2 lander, and NASA's own two Mars Exploration Rovers. While Nozomi began its interplanetary voyage in 1998, the other spacecraft are scheduled for launch windows beginning this June. Clearly, earthdwellers remain intensely curious about Mars and the tantalizing possibility of past or present martian life, with these robotic missions focussing on investigating the planet's atmosphere and the search for water.

Peter Piccione translates hieroglyphs for his history students the way a horror-movie archaeologist deciphers ancient curses from sarcophagi -- slowly and portentously. During slide presentations at the College of Charleston, he'll run through images ranging from papyrus paintings to the Pittsburgh Pirates before posing a question seemingly out of leftfield: "Did the Egyptians invent baseball?"

Blue penises and plague, "pigoons" harvested for organs and armed guards at the gates of privileged scientists. This is the near future conjured up by novelist Margaret Atwood in her new book Oryx and Crake. All of this is already possible, she says, in our world where the biosphere is degraded and wars are fought over resources. But what if we used our knowledge to break the cycle by re-engineering humanity?

Voodoo has been practised in Haiti since the late 18th Century, but only now has it been recognised as a religion on a par with others worshipped in the country. Haiti's Catholic President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, took the decision earlier in April which means that voodoo ceremonies such as marriages now have equal standing with Catholic ones.

In recent archeological excavations in Gilan province, 60 archaic sites representing ancient civilizations were unearthed in Farab Amaloui district on the outskirts of Roudbar. Announcing this, Director General of Gilan province Cultural Heritage Department Mojtaba Taqavi told IRNA here on Wednesday that in the recent research excavations, archeologists discovered 60 ancient sites, which are eligible for registration.

There is a good reason why the DNA of living things on Earth is not like that of Steven Spielberg's ET, researchers believe. Samples of DNA taken from humans, animals, plants, microbes and viruses have one thing in common: they form a double helix structure held together by four different chemicals called bases.

Observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that the first stars formed as little as 200 million years after the Big Bang - much earlier than previously thought. The evidence comes from data that shows large amounts of iron present in very distant, ancient quasars. This iron is made in supernova explosions ending the very first generation of stars in the Cosmos.

The Ministry of Culture has decided to take urgent action plan to save the tomb of Amenhotep III in the Valley of Kings. Secretary-General of the Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) Dr Zahi Hawas said that a committee of experts from UNESCO and Japan have visited the site this week to assess what needs to be done in the first phase of the project.

A seven-year-old boy who was admitted to hospital with stomach pains was actually "pregnant" with his twin brother. Doctors at Chimkent Children's Hospital in Kazakhstan originally believed Mourat Zhanaidarov was suffering from a cyst.

It's not just the colour of butterflies' shimmering wings that attracts mates, suggests a new study. The polarized light that bounces off the wings of some females lures males. This is the first evidence of a land creature reacting to light in this way. The scales on butterfly wings were known reflect light waves in only one plane - but no one knew why.

A Japanese scientist could soon become stinking rich with an invention to be ready by 2005 that would use Panda dung to create electricity. Fumiaki Taguchi, emeritus professor of Kitasato University in Tokyo, embarked on the project five years ago when he asked Ueno Zoo for a bucketful of one of their most popular residents' feces.

In the coming weeks, workers at Kennedy Space Center will finalize preparations for the upcoming Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. If all goes as planned, the two spacecraft will launch in June, complete their one-way trips to Mars in January 2004, and land in two distinctly different locations on the planet. The first rover will explore an area at Gusev Crater, which appears to have once held a lake, and the second will probe Meridiani Planum, an area with deposits of hematite located halfway around the planet. Each rover over will examine its landing site for geological evidence of past liquid water activity and environmental conditions potentially hospitable to either past or present life.

About 25 sets of human remains have been discovered at the Keeaumoku superblock site of the Wal-Mart/Sam's Club complex since Jan. 17, state Historic Preservation Division officials said. State archaeologists believe the remains, found along Sheridan and Makaloa streets, are remnants of a smallpox grave site dating back to the 1850s.

Beware of memory. For the time being, 2003 marks the fall of a hated tyrant. In years to come it may mean something else, the destruction of the greatest treasure from the oldest age of Western civilisation. We know of the sacking of the Library at Alexandria in AD624. Who cares what caused it? Until this week only soldiers and reporters had witnessed the devastation of the National Museum of Baghdad, the seventh biggest in the world, and the burning of the National Library, containing some 5,000 of the earliest known manuscripts.

Scientists working in Southern California have proposed a way of interpreting feeble tremors that herald a large earthquake, a step that could help in providing advance warning. The system theoretically could give anywhere from seconds to tens of seconds of advance notice - enough time to send school children diving below their desks or to cut the flow of gas through pipelines vulnerable to rupture, scientists said. Details appear Friday in the journal Science.

ONALASKA, Wisconsin. While pieces of pottery found in an ancient refuse pit here last week are the first ever local link to the legendary prehistoric city of Cahokia, they are providing local archaeologists with more questions than answers. The Cahokia-style pottery was found at a dig along with artifacts from the area's late Woodland people, conducted by the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, said archaeologist Robert "Ernie" Boszhardt.

In recent years the rediscovery of Central Europe's Celtic heritage has become increasingly popular. Central Europe was settled by Celts until around 500 AD but they were replaced by later waves of Germanic and Slavic tribes. Around a dozen groups are performing as the festival of Beltine or Beltane, is celebrated in the southern town of Telc. The bands - including one called Czeltic, spelt with a "z" - are not from Ireland, Scotland, Wales or even Brittany. They are Czechs who are reclaiming their Celtic heritage.

Physicists have found a new subatomic particle, named Ds (2317). It will help them better understand the building blocks of matter. The particle consists of an unusual combination of more fundamental particles - quarks. Two quarks form Ds (2317) and, curiously, its properties are not what theory predicted. The announcement was made by physicist Antimo Palano to a packed auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Slac) in the US.

UK scientists have opened a jar thought to contain a preserved internal organ of an Egyptian mummy more than 3,000 years old. Archaeologists at Birmingham University retrieved tough, leathery material, which looked like dried meat, from the container and sent it to a nearby hospital for analysis.

The complete genetic sequence of the feared bacterium which causes anthrax has been de-coded by scientists. The breakthrough could help doctors come up with better ways to protect people in the event of a bioterror attack. A team from The Institute for Genomic Research (Tigr) spent four years unravelling the genome of the virulent Ames strain of bacillus anthracis, and their results are described in the journal Nature.

A Devon farmer has realised his dream by building a Bronze Age burial chamber on his land. Gavin Dollard transported four huge pieces of granite from Dartmoor to his estate near Ivybridge to carry out the construction. It is thought to be the first time in 2,000 years that a cromlech - defined as a prehistoric monument made of stones and thought to be a burial tomb - has been built in the UK.

The largest prehistoric man-made cavern in the world may be hidden under a north Wales peninsula. The cavern is part of a Bronze Age copper mine complex which was first uncovered in 1987 at Great Orme's Head near Llandudno,. Archaeologists excavating the 4,000-year-old site made their latest discovery 130ft below ground in December and have estimated it is at least 50ft in length.

Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton may have suffered from a type of autism, according to experts. Researchers at Cambridge and Oxford universities believe both scientists displayed signs of Asperger's syndrome. Many people with Asperger's are often regarded as being eccentric. They sometimes lack social skills, are obsessed with complex topics and can have problems communicating.

A 4.5 magnitude earthquake centered in northern Alabama rattled windows and bookshelves around the South early Tuesday. The rare Southern quake, which occured at about 5 a.m., was centered near the Alabama-Georgia line, 27 miles northwest of Rome, Ga., according to the U.S. Geological Survey's Web site.

A 3,000-year-old mummy that many scholars believe is ancient Egypt's King Ramses I is the star attraction of an exhibit at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta that will run from April 26 to September 14. How the mummy came to reside in North America for 140 years, and wound up in Atlanta, is a tale that includes the collapse of law and order in ancient Egypt, grave robbers, stolen antiquities, a two-headed calf and a five-legged pig, the wonders of modern science, and an international gesture of good will.

Heritage Malta is holding open days at the site of Ta' Hagrat temple, Mgarr, on May 10 and 11, to mark the 80th anniversary of the first excavations there. The important and evocative temple site is normally open only to scholars and by appointment. The open days are being held under the umbrella of ICOMOS International Monuments Day, 2003.

Sometimes in science, if you want answers, you just have to bust things up. That's what Kazushige Tomeoka and colleagues did in order to learn why most of the space dust that falls to Earth is wet, while larger space rocks found on the planet are usually dry as a bone. More than 97 percent of all meteorites collected on Earth's surface lack water. Meanwhile, about 30,000 tons of interplanetary dust reaches Earth's surface every year. Almost all of this dust contains water, resembling the paltry 2.8 percent of known, hydrated meteorites.

An archaeologist claims he has found the foundations to a lost building on the estate of the last Welsh-born Prince of Wales Owain Glyndwr. Spencer Smith, 30, has investigated the site of the prince's home at Sycharth in mid Wales in an effort to identify buildings mentioned in the poems of Glyndwr's court poet, Iolo Goch.

The looting of Iraqi museums is the worst calamity to befall any national art collection since World War II, the director of the British Museum said Tuesday as some of the world's top curators met to draft a plan to recover the treasures. The British Museum, which is organizing the gathering along with the U.N. heritage organization UNESCO, said international experts would announce an assistance program to help Iraq recover from wartime looting that devastated the country's priceless collections of Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian artifacts.

Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest "book" in history. The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name.

Two thousand years ago, people in central Louisiana developed a complex culture represented today by a group of earthworks and mounds protected today at the site of Marksville. The Marksville culture, a southeastern variant of the Hopewell culture centered in Ohio and Illinois, embraced elaborate mortuary rituals, constructed conical burial mounds and other earthworks, and had complex trade networks and decorative pottery. This video describes the Marksville site and the remarkable prehistoric American society that built it.

The first conclusive evidence of pain perception in fish is said to have been found by UK scientists. This complements earlier findings that both birds and mammals can feel pain, and challenges assertions that fish are impervious to it. The scientists found sites in the heads of rainbow trout that responded to damaging stimuli. They also found the fish showed marked reactions when exposed to harmful substances.

An Ariane rocket carried Egypt's first satellite together with a Japanese cousin into orbit Tuesday night (early Wednesday Cairo local time), the 108th successful launch of an Ariane, officials said. The Ariane 4, equipped with four solid strap-on boosters, blasted off from Europe's launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northern edge of South America at 7.53pm Tuesday (01.53 Wednesday Cairo local time).

By any measure, the human brain is an awe-inspiring invention. But close examination reveals that it's far from perfect. One of the brain's flaws is its tendency to economize on neurons (as if 100 billion or so weren't enough), forcing these neural workhorses to perform multiple jobs at the same time. For example, the very back of your brain houses nerve cells that are "tuned" to respond only when visual contours of a very specific orientation are present in your visual field.

Toiling through the soil, the plump and slimy earthworm is almost universally seen as nature's helper, eating rotting matter and releasing nutrients into the earth, excavating tunnels that allow the entry of rain and act as passageways for plant roots. But not all worms are equally benign. One species--a two-inch-long brownish-red European invader of North America called Lumbricus rubellus--appears to be driving a rare fern to extinction. Forest-ecology researcher Michael Gundale recently documented the extent of the obliteration with a survey of 28 sites in the Chippewa National Forest in Minnesota, at which the rare goblin fern, Botrychium mormo, was known to grow until recently.

Scottish academics claim to have found scientific proof of a 'sixth sense' after completing radical experiments which seek to establish how spiritual mediums obtain information supposedly transmitted from beyond the grave. The controversial research, led by a University of Glasgow professor, appears to discount the common assumption that mediums are merely picking up signals from body language, or relying on guesswork and prior knowledge.

NASA launched a celestial census-taker into orbit on Monday that is slated to spend the new two years surveying galaxies so scientists can piece together a comprehensive picture of cosmic evolution. Rather than study deep and narrow chunks of the sky, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, nicknamed GALEX, will probe far and wide, taking in ultraviolet light radiating from bodies that formed 8 to 10 billion years ago.

More than 300 dishes and bowls decorated with the Imperial chrysanthemum seal, believed to be made between the 17th and 19th centuries, have been unearthed at the Kyoto Imperial Palace in Kamigyo Ward, Kyoto, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned. They are reportedly Arita ware porcelain, made in Aritamachi, Saga Prefecture. They were believed to be made at the request of the Imperial family and given to aristocrats.

Three Buddhist stupas and some artefacts were discovered during the recent excavations at the Shalkandey village near Munda in Lower Dir district, Dawn learnt on Sunday. The excavation was started by the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, NWFP, after a lapse of about four decades. The site has been excavated by the officer in charge of Chakdarra Museum, Dir, Dr Zainul Wahab, and was supervised by Prof Ihsan Ali, director of archaeology.

Making sense of the ruins will be slow, dirty work. When the first wave of outrage at the looting of the National Museum of Iraq burns off, when politicians seem not to care and angry headlines speak of some new outrage, the job of piecing together civilization's past will likely fall where it always has: to archaeologists. Worldwide outcry over 7,000 years' worth of artifacts smashed or stolen two weeks ago - and over US troops' failure to protect them - has galvanized heavy-hitters in the antiquities and policing worlds. UNESCO wants to send a team to Iraq to assess damage, Interpol has alerted police in 181 countries, and the US has pledged the FBI's help.

Scientists are unveiling one of the world's leading laboratories looking for "dark matter", in a cavern 1,100 metres underground. Situated at the Boulby potash mine in the north of England, the 10-year-old facility has been upgraded and refurbished to lead the search for a vital component of the cosmos.

The newly refurbished Lovell Radio Telescope will be officially opened by the Prince of Wales on Monday. The telescope, at the UK's Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, has had a £2.5m three-year upgrade during which the old panelling of the of the 76-metre dish has been replaced by a new high-precision surface.

One of the world's wettest places is suffering from a shortage of water. The Khasi Hills, in a remote part of north-east India, usually experience torrential rains. Famously, the area once recorded more than 1,000 inches (2,540 centimetres) of rain in just one year - a global record. But villagers in the region, which was named after the rain-filled clouds that supplied the waterfalls and streams, now have to bring water from other areas.

The Niger River is the lifeblood for about 60 million people in West Africa. From its origins in Guinea, it flows north through Mali, Niger and then south through Nigeria to the sea. Long before it reaches the coastal delta, far inland, it is threatened by drought, desertification, pollution, and a deceptively beautiful plant - the water hyacinth - that is strangling the precious flow of water.

If China's fragmented mountain reserves are not linked and expanded, the chances of isolated panda populations dying out remains high, Chinese and American scientists report. "Pre-existing reserves may not be sufficient in the long-run, " said Colby Loucks, a conservation scientist with the World Wildlife Fund-U.S. (WWF-US) in Washington D.C. "If we can build habitat corridors to link up the patches, pandas are going to be in much better standing."

Filmy ice clouds high in the sky over the center of the United States contained minute sea creatures lofted into the air by a Pacific Ocean hurricane, a new analysis concludes. Hurricane Nora in September, 1997, struck Mexico and moved north into Southern California before blowing out. The storm's powerful winds blasted ocean spray containing salt and plankton high into the air and as far east as Utah and Oklahoma, researchers report in the April issue of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.

As the world gets warmer, it is getting wetter. And one of the main conclusions reached at Europe's largest ever earth sciences conference was that we are less prepared for it than ever. While some delegates were still reeling from the catastrophic floods that hit the continent in August 2002, others warned that the risk of future flooding has been vastly underestimated. And studies of past episodes of climate change suggest that a wetter world may be not only a consequence of global warming but a trigger for further, more dramatic temperature rises.

Famous American Michael Cremo, the author of the world best sellers Forbidden Archeology and The Hidden History of the Human Race, delivered a lecture at the Ethnology and Anthropology Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is also expected that the scientist will deliver lectures at the Philosophy Institute and will appear on radio and TV. Traditional anthropology hasn't seen yet such a trouble-maker as Michael Cremo: He calls into question the most undisputed beliefs and even has big ideas about Charles Darwin.

A reconstructed digital portrait of our planet is reminiscent of the Apollo-era pictures of the "big blue marble" Earth from space. To create it, researchers at Goddard Space Flight Center's Laboratory for Atmospheres combined data from a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES), the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), and the Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES) with a USGS elevation model of Earth's topography.

Martin Rees is rather chirpy for a horseman of the apocalypse. He welcomes me to his house in Cambridge with a firm handshake and optimistic smile. In his new book, Our Final Century, the astronomer royal predicts that we're doomed. Well, almost. The subtitle is not quite so hopeless: "Will the human race survive the 21st century" it asks. Ultimately, Rees concludes that we have no more than a 50-50 chance of surviving.

Scientific research at the prehistoric Passage Tomb Cemetery at Loughcrew, one of Ireland's premier archaeological sites, is revealing new data on the astronomical orientations of the passage tombs and relationships in the way they are laid out. Using techniques from the science of archaeoastronomy, this research has already identified significant astronomical orientations in the larger focal tombs and significant patterns in the relative orientations of the monuments.

Nestled in a beautiful, verdant valley along the Mississippi River, a great feast took place nearly 1,000 years ago. In what appears to be something like an ancient Thanksgiving dinner - albeit with dog meat instead of turkey - people of two different cultures met, exchanged food, ideas and possibly gave birth to an entirely new cultural tradition.

Fundamental and frequency-tripled light from an Nd:YAG laser is being used to clean one of the world's best-known ancient monuments. Laser specialists on the Greek island of Crete developed the new method, which prevents the common "yellowing" effect seen when stonework is laser-cleaned

Archaeologists in west Cumbria claim they have found remains of a Roman fortress. Recent excavations close to Muncaster Castle, near Ravenglass, have revealed what is described as a "remarkably well preserved" section of Roman road. The section of road is several feet thick and stretches towards hilltops close to the castle.

Archaeologists from the French Archaeological Institute in Cairo (IFAO) have unearthed an Egyptian necropolis filled with over 4,000-year-old rock-cut tombs, shedding new light over the quest for the missing pharaoh Userkare, according to a new documentary. Located at Tabbet al-Guesh, near the pyramids of Saqqara about 15 miles south of Cairo, the necropolis contains tombs of high-ranking officials from Egypt's Old Kingdom, which lasted from 2400 BC-2100 B.C.

Russia has marked its return to the Arctic after a 12-year absence by raising its national flag at a polar research station. A group of 12 scientists, led by polar explorer and parliamentarian Artur Chilingarov, have set up camp on an ice floe about 150 km from the North Pole. They have named it North Pole-32.

Ukraine's Orthodox monks are resorting to sit-ins to regain church property seized by the Soviet government and still occupied by secular organizations. For the past week, about a dozen monks have occupied the State Archaeological Institute's archives, housed in the gold-crested, onion-domed Monastery of the Caves, demanding the government return the building to the church. The holed-up monks refuse to allow entry to outsiders.

"African Eve," the female ancestor of all humans, likely hailed from East Africa, according to a recent study. If the current analysis is correct, East Africa probably served as the cradle of humanity many thousands of years ago.