Newsdesk Archive

When the Roman emperor Hadrian drew a line from the Tyne to the Solway for his great wall in AD120 there were no legal obstacles in the way of planners. They worked for 10 years building 80 milecastles, 12 forts, umpteen turrets and three magnificent bridges over the North Tyne, Irthing and Eden rivers. But when the government's countryside advisers decided to create a more modest footpath along the route of the wall in 1984 they entered a legal minefield. Some of the 700 landowners along the route were hostile, fearing wayward ramblers and urban hordes creating havoc on their grazing lands.

A polished terracotta piece belonging to the Kushan period, a decorated piece of sandstone and a conch shell shaped figurine were among articles found on Saturday as excavation work in the acquired land here was stepped up with over a hundred labourers taking up digging work. Twenty of the labourers engaged by the Archaeological Survey of India were Muslims in keeping with the Allahabad High Court order that a sufficient number of Muslims be employed to strike a balance in the digging work and also to maintain transparency, according to sources.

A potential problem has cropped up in readying the two Mars Exploration Rovers for sendoff to the red planet. A May 30 launch date for the first rover has been slipped until no earlier than June 6. According to a NASA statement, the concern regards cabling that connects the spacecraft's main computer, which is inside each rover, to peripherals in the cruise stage, lander and small deep space transponder. The connection to the cruise stage is severed during approach to Mars and the connection to the lander is severed before the rover drives off.

New observations of striking clouds of gas and dust reveal the engine behind the beauty, some of the hottest and most massive stars ever detected. The photographs, taken by the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal site in Chile, show four separate nebulae in two small satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, known as the small and large Magellanic clouds. Nebulae can be castoffs from stellar explosions or interstellar clouds building toward future star formation. What makes many of them so visible and beautiful is largely understood, but that's not the case with some that appear to be strongly heated and show an amazingly high degree of excitation, astronomers say. Gas in these poorly understood nebulae is energized by large amount of ions, atoms that have been stripped of one or more electrons.

What better time than the Christian holy week to look once again at the sometimes- strained relationship between science and religion. Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, has just published an article in Skeptic magazine arguing in favour of a "natural" explanation for the Resurrection.

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico (AP) -- An angry crowd stoned to death an Indian man accused of practicing witchcraft in a southern Mexico town with a long tradition of religious violence. The man, Domingo Shilon Shilon, was also hacked with machetes Sunday by the crowd in San Juan Chamula, a majority Catholic township on the outskirts of the colonial city of San Cristobal, 460 miles (735 kms) southeast of Mexico City.

The Russian security services are trying to prevent illegal archaeologists, known as "black diggers", from destroying the remains of what may have been a remote outpost of classical Greek civilisation. Last week officials of the Hermitage Gallery in St Petersburg offered to care for 26 rare Greek pieces which were found five years ago near the village of Kazachi Brod in the Caucasus, a few miles from the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

The National Space Centre in Leicester is to become mission control for the Mars robot Beagle 2. A control centre is being set up to manage communications with the British-built lander, once it arrives at Mars. Beagle 2 is part of Europe's first solo mission to the Red Planet. It is hitching a ride on the European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft, due to be launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in June.

A Devon treasure trove inquest heard on Monday how a retired school secretary struck gold when she discovered a 13th century brooch with her metal detector. Adina Parnell, 66, found the piece of medieval jewellery while searching for metal on south Devon farmland last May. After digging just six inches below the surface she unearthed the tiny golden brooch. After telling the tenant farmer and the local coroner about her discovery Mrs Parnell of Bovey Tracey took the brooch to Exeter Museum.

The biological code crackers sequencing the human genome have said they have finished the job - two years ahead of schedule. Their announcement came less than three years after a "rough draft" was published to worldwide acclaim. When UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and then US President Bill Clinton hailed the publication of the draft in June 2000, 97% of the "book of life" had been read. The decoding is now virtually 100% complete. The remaining tiny gaps are considered too costly to fill and those in charge of turning genomic data into medical and scientific progress have plenty to be getting on with.

This much we know: coral bleaching is a modern epidemic that some biologists predict will kill up to half the world's reefs this century as climate change raises sea temperatures. What we have missed is that some bleaching may actually be an infectious disease spread by a worm, a "malaria of the oceans". Israeli scientists say they have studied a type of coral whose bleaching is triggered by a bacterium, and found that this is carried and transmitted by a coral-feeding worm. If the same is true for other corals, scientists may be able to prevent the disease by targeting the worm vector, just as they control malaria by targeting mosquitoes.

Worms contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident have started having sex with each other instead of on their own. According to Ukrainian scientists, they may have changed their sexual behaviour to increase their chances of survival. It is one of the first pieces of direct evidence on how wildlife is affected by radioactive pollution.

Arguments over the causes of global warming will bring little succour to the people of Bangladesh. Flooding in the country is set to increase by up to 40 per cent this century as global temperatures rise, the latest climate models suggest. Each year, roughly a fifth of Bangladesh is flooded, and climate change is forecast to exacerbate the problem as sea levels rise, monsoons become wetter and more intense cyclones lead to higher tidal surges.

BEIJING, April 13 (Xinhuanet) -- The top 10 archeological discoveries of 2002 were selected here Sunday out of 23 candidate events by a group of well-known Chinese scholars. The annual event was co-organized by the China Archeology Association, China Cultural Relics News and China Cultural Relics Magazine, and was supervised by the State Administration of Cultural Relics.

A French archaeological team has discovered the remains of temples dating back to the Iron Age at two sites the team unearthed last year. The three-member team has completed excavation in Al Bithna village, 13 km west of Fujairah city, where they discovered an old temple and a fortifications. Ahmed Khalifa Al Shamsi, Director of the Fujairah Department of Archaeology and Heritage, said: "They recently discovered a housing structure in the defensive site and more remains of old temples dating back to the Iron Age which were later occupied by Muslims."

Deep in the ruins of a Hebrew town sacked nearly 3,000 years ago by an Egyptian Pharaoh, scientists say they have discovered new evidence for the real-life existence of the Bible's legendary kingdoms of David and Solomon. The evidence refutes recent claims by other researchers who insist that the biblical monarchs were merely mythic characters, created by scholars and scribes of antiquity who made up the tales long after the events to buttress their own morality lessons. The debate, however, is not likely to subside, for archaeology is a field notable for its lengthy quarrels among partisans, however scientific they may be. The latest evidence comes from Israeli and Dutch archaeologists and physicists after seven years of digging at a historic site called Tel Rehov. The site is in the Jordan valley of Israel, where successive settlements rose and fell over the centuries.

THE Scottish scientist who created Dolly the sheep is planning to clone a human embryo to work towards a cure for motor neurone disease. Professor Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, intends to harvest stem cells from the embryos for medical research. The embryo would not be allowed to develop into a baby and its cells would be used for scientific experiments, especially to create an embryonic clone of a patient with the incurable muscle-wasting disease. Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is the name given to a group of related diseases affecting the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord along which the brain sends instructions, in the form of electrical impulses, to the muscles.

Archaeologists from the Tshwane Museum in Pretoria have discovered artifacts believed to have been used during the Anglo Boer War more than a century ago. This is part of ongoing research on the war, which lasted for almost three years. All the items found will be exhibited at the museum.

DPP Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chia-ching has demanded that the city's Cultural Affairs Bureau step up efforts to protect a prehistoric archeological site which now lies derelict on the grounds of the Municipal Children's Recreation Center (MCRC). "The Yuanshan Culture site, which holds the largest prehistoric shell mound in Taiwan, has been listed as a national historical heritage site," Hsu said yesterday.

Computer modelling is lifting the lid on the secrets of Roman hydraulic engineering1. Hitherto mysterious hurdles and holes, it hints, may have smoothed the flow of water. In the third century AD, Roman engineers built a system of tunnels and tanks to bring water to the city of Aspendos, today in Turkey. Aspendos was a crucial hub of Roman trade in Asia Minor, sitting at the crossroads of important routes with river access to the Mediterranean Sea.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A flight document carried to the surface of the moon during the first lunar landing on July 20, 1969, and signed by Astronaut Buzz Aldrin fetched nearly a quarter of a million dollars after an all-day auction on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the Swann Galleries said. Highlight of the auction was a "Data Card Book," essentially a navigational notebook that also bears smudges of moon dust that was the property of Aldrin. The 8 by 10.5 inch document containing 16 numbered pages on 11 loose leaves sold for $222,500 to a unnamed Pennsylvania dealer specializing in 19th century art and autographs.

A priceless collection of Egyptian artifacts, including the world's oldest dress, will be rescued from cramped storage over a boiler room, according to a recent Heritage Lottery Fund press release. Thanks to a $7.7 million grant, comprised of money collected from the British national lottery, the public will be able to view items in the massive 80,000-item collection that haven't been seen for over a hundred years.

A hot theory about how the Ice Age ended has got a frosty response at a meeting of the leading European and American geoscience societies in France. A climatologist says the idea that bursts of methane from deep-sea reservoirs jolted the planet out of its chilly state does not match the geologic record. This idea, popularly dubbed the "hydrate gun hypothesis", was first proposed a decade ago, but has gained momentum through the work of James Kennett, a paleo-oceanographer from the University of California - Santa Barbara. Hydrates are a frozen mixture of water and methane and form under the cool temperatures and high pressures found in ocean sediment.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found two distant supernovae - exploding stars - that provide new clues about the accelerating Universe and its mysterious "dark energy". The supernovae are approximately 4.7 and 7.6 billion light-years from Earth, deep in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Two views of the same patch of sky taken several years apart revealed the supernovae, among the most distant ever seen and certainly the most detailed. The later images were taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) that has delighted astronomers since it was installed on Hubble in March 2002.

Scientists meeting in France say 2002 was the second hottest year on record. It continued a warming trend that has set records for the last five years. Only 1998 was warmer. The planet is now 0.6 Celsius warmer than in 1900, an increase that scientists attribute to human activity. Researchers say even a fractional boost in average temperatures has significant consequences for the health of the planet.

A British scientist is making two claims about Jewish history this Passover season that could surely spark discussion over the Seder meal. Colin J. Humphreys of Cambridge University has concluded that science backs traditional beliefs that the Israelites' exodus from Egypt was led by Moses pretty much the way the Bible and the Haggadah ritual tell it. He also says that Mount Sinai, where Scripture says Moses received God's Law, is located in Saudi Arabia, not Egypt's Sinai Peninsula - moving a key site for Judaism into the nation where Islam was founded. Humphreys' theories come at a time when his close, literal reading of the Book of Exodus is far out of fashion among Conservative and Reform Jews, though it may be welcomed by Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians.

Artefacts found at the site of a 19th century Chinese mine in north-east Tasmania have been revealed. Archaeologists have unearthed tools, jars, opium tins and other implements at the site at Moorina. Archaeologist, Denise Gaughwin, says the findings exceeded their expectations. Ms Gaughwin says it appears three or four miners lived there for a couple of years.

A new Internet site, displaying photos of antiquities illegally smuggled out of Egypt, has been designed by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). The website will also give detailed information about each item and is part of the Ministry of Culture's efforts to effect restoration of stolen antiquities, said Dr. Zahi Hawass, SCA Secretary-General, yesterday.

A FORMER stronghold of royal power in Wales is revealing centuries of secrets in a multi-million pound programme to hand it over to the people. The ancient keep and gate-house of Carmarthen Castle will soon open to the public for the first time as workmen near the end of the third of four phases of preservation and enhancement work. Access to the top of the 13th century Shell Keep will provide new vistas across a town that was the mediaeval capital of South Wales. Chambers on the ground floor and upper levels of the gatehouse will be opened up, and workmen have also uncovered cellars that were once part of a now demolished inn.

NASHVILLE, Ind. -- Rocks and trees are natural sights in the forest. But there's definitely something unnatural going on in Yellowwood State Forest. Somehow, large boulders have found their way to the tops of tall trees and gotten wedged among the branches. There are at least three, maybe five, maybe more. The first was discovered a few years ago and was dubbed Gobbler's Rock, because it was found by a turkey hunter scouting in a remote area of the 23,000-acre forest.

Dramatic clues to North American climate change have been discovered by a team of Queen's University scientists in the bottom of 50 Arctic lakes. Using innovative techniques that enable them to collect historic evidence from fossilized algae in lake bottom sediment, the researchers have found signs of marked environmental changes in a variety of lakes of different depths and composition, within a 750-km region bordering the northern tree-line. The changes are a signal of things to come in the rest of North America, say the Queen's paleolimnologists.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- In the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) landing site sweepstakes, the winners are: Meridiani Planum and Gusev crater. NASA has concluded that these two touchdown zones on Mars offer the greatest science reward for the soon-to-be launched dual Mars Exploration Rovers. Each MER robot will examine its landing site for geological evidence of past liquid water activity and past environmental conditions hospitable to life.

Desert nomads were reported yesterday to have discovered an abandoned vehicle and a network of tunnels in a remote region of southern Algeria thought likely to provide clues about the mysterious disappearance of 29 western tourists in the Sahara over the past seven weeks. Germany's ARD television channel said the off-road vehicle was found in a mountainous district north of the Algerian town of Tamanrasset at the weekend by a camel train of nomads passing through the region. The vehicle was left parked outside the entrance to a complex system of underground caves linked by tunnels. The nomads said they suspected the caves "were inhabited", although they had not entered the system to find out.

FORT EDWARD, N.Y. -- An archaeological team on Wednesday exhumed skeletal remains from the grave of an 18th-century woman whose death during the Revolutionary War turned her into an early American icon. Excavation work at Jane McCrea's purported gravesite in this Hudson River town 45 miles north of Albany began before dawn in a snow-covered cemetery where two workers used a chain hoist to remove the half-ton marble tombstone.

Stone Age people in Ireland appear to have built tombs based on a detailed knowledge of how the Sun moves across the sky during the year. Tombs at the archaeological site of Loughcrew in County Meath align with the rising Sun at the spring and autumn equinoxes. The inside of the chambers are spectacularly illuminated by a shaft of sunlight at dawn on these days, said Frank Prendergast of the Dublin Institute of Technology. It suggests settlers in the area some 5 to 6,000 years ago knew the yearly cycle of the Sun and perhaps centred their lives around it.

Scientists in the United States say hundreds of attempts to clone monkeys have ended in failure. They think the biological make-up of the eggs of primates, including humans, makes cloning almost impossible. Cloning has been successful in several mammals, including sheep, mice and cattle, but there is increasing evidence that it does not work in all species. The research, reported in the journal Science, casts further doubt on efforts by a handful of mavericks to clone humans.

Long-lost documents relating to the 19th Century discovery of the planet Neptune are shedding new light on one of the most controversial episodes in the history of astronomy. Speaking at the UK/Ireland National Astronomy Meeting in Dublin, a historian who has pored over hundreds of letters from the period says British scientists have taken more credit for the discovery than they deserved.

The cannibal habits of ancient humans probably caused epidemics of diseases similar to CJD, claim researchers. They also possibly helped promote the genes which now appear to protect the vast majority of us from such illnesses, they say. The question of whether our ancestors ever used to feast on each other, however, remains controversial. The research team, from University College London, normally study the genetics of prion diseases such as CJD hoping to find ways to protect modern humans from them.

Scientists have shown that levitation is not just a trick from a Harry Potter book. Researchers at the University of Nottingham have used magnetism to make solid objects such as coins float in the air.

A claim that the asteroid that struck Mexico 65 million years ago did not cause the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs triggered heated debate at a meeting this week. The announcement is based on preliminary analysis of the first core drilled into the 185-kilometre Chicxulub asteroid crater near the Yucatan Peninsula. Gerta Keller of Princeton University in New Haven, Connecticut, says that she has found microfossils there hinting that abundant plankton survived for at least 300,000 years after the impact.

AMANDA, a giant telescope buried 1.5 kilometres below the Antarctic ice, has begun to sharpen theories about the Universe's most violent objects - by spotting very little. Its first findings were unveiled this week at the American Physical Society's annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The device looks for high-energy neutrinos - elusive, neutrally charged particles with virtually no mass that almost always pass through the Earth intact. Neutrinos interact so rarely with even a single atom of matter that they can escape from where photons of light cannot, such as the hearts of massive dying stars and the edges of powerful black holes.

WASARE, Kenya -- Since this nation has been basking in a new beginning -- its first change of government in four decades -- many Kenyans have been searching for signs that their hardships will soon be over. So when a 16-foot python presented itself in this village on the banks of Lake Victoria, some residents regarded it as a harbinger of good news: More rains would come, their harvests would be more bountiful and their livestock would produce healthy offspring.

The launch of Europe's Ariane 5 rocket was postponed on Tuesday just hours before it was due to blast off from Kourou, French Guiana. It would have been the rocket's first flight since the loss of a heavy-lift version of the vehicle last December. The rocket's operator, Arianespace, said the delay had been requested by one of the operators of the two satellites the Ariane 5 is carrying into space. The rocket's double payload includes an Indian TV, meteorology and communications satellite; and a US spacecraft to provide TV and satellite broadband coverage over North America.

The tree of life has a new branch. Genetic studies show that the group from which insects were thought to come, the Collembola, turns out not to be closely related to insects after all. Instead, the creatures, known as wingless hexapods but more commonly called springtails, belong to a separate evolutionary line that predates even the separation of insects and crustaceans.

Scientists have taken another stride forward in the quest to develop fusion power - the energy source that powers the Sun and other stars. Fusion promises relatively cheap energy - the fuel is seawater - with far fewer pollution problems compared with conventional nuclear power. But the path to this technology has been long and expensive, with no commercial generation in sight. Now, US scientists have created a hot, dense plasma that produces thermonuclear neutrons - a step, they say, towards harnessing nuclear fusion energy they say.

The world's first mammal cloned from an adult cell was preserved after her death in February. She will be unveiled on Wednesday ahead of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, which begins later this week. Dolly was cloned from the breast cell of a six-year-old adult ewe and born on July 5 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. Her birth was only announced seven months later and was heralded as one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the decade.

NAPLES (Reuters) - Italian police have recovered a pair of 2,000-year-old frescoes stolen from a villa in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii but the thieves had vanished, officials said on Tuesday. The frescoes, hacked off the walls of the "House of the Chaste Lovers" over the weekend, were discovered in a nearby derelict building after extensive police searches in and around the neighboring city of Naples.

A child falls from his bicycle and his father winces. A bride says "I do" and the maid of honor grins from ear to ear. A mother frowns with displeasure and her infant son frowns back. UCLA neuroscientists using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are the first to demonstrate that empathetic action, such as mirroring facial expressions, triggers far greater activity in the emotion centers of the brain than mere observation.

LONDON (Reuters) - British explorer David Hempleman-Adams has become the first person to walk to the geomagnetic North Pole solo, his spokeswoman said on Monday. Hempleman-Adams, 47, dragged a sled containing his equipment and supplies almost 300 miles in three weeks and had to climb and abseil through the hazardous terrain, which included ice cliffs and glaciers. "I am thrilled to have achieved this," the Briton said after completing his journey despite badly bruising his leg falling from a glacier days earlier. "I failed in 1999 and felt I had to come back."

A security bug has been discovered in the screensaver software used by millions of people to search for alien messages in radio telescope signals. The bug could be used to invade computer systems worldwide, a Dutch computer student says. Berend-Jan Wever, at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, found that a sending a specially crafted update to the SETI@home program installed on a user's computer forces it to run unauthorised code. This could be exploited to gain control of the machine.

A US scientist has cast doubt on the controversial idea that the Sun has been the main contributor to climate change over the past 20 years. The Sun is known to brighten and fade from time to time, influencing temperatures on Earth. Scientists are divided over how significant a factor this is compared with what people are doing to the planet. A recent study suggests the Sun has brightened steadily over the past 20 years, accounting for half or more of the 0.3 degrees Celsius warming blamed on greenhouse gas emissions since 1980.

NASA is preparing to launch the last of its "Great Observatories," space telescopes that astronomers hope will explore the faint warm glow of the early days of the universe and see through the billowing clouds of interstellar dust that obscure the birthplaces of stars and, possibly, far-off planets. The telescope, a robot observatory that the space agency calls the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, or Sirtf, is scheduled to be launched on April 18 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on a Boeing Delta II rocket. Sirtf (pronounced SIRT-ef) will travel in an unusual orbit: it trails the Earth from a distance on its mission to map the infrared, or heat, emissions from objects near and far.

The music may be base-ic, but a team from Ramon y Cajal Hospital (RCH) in Madrid have found the song inside us all. They took each nucleotide from the genome of Candida albicans, plus a few other organisms, and arbitrarily designated a tone from the do-re-mi scale (Thyamine is re, guanine is so, adenine is la; and cytosine is do). The end result: a full musical interpretation of the genome. Inspiration for the project came to microbiologist Aurora Sanchez Sousa while she was observing the sequence of the yeast. "I wondered what would happen [if] instead of genetic keys they were sound keys," Sanchez Sousa says. She took her idea to composer Richard Krull, a previous collaborator on a music project for several scientific videos about fungi-caused infections. After more than two years, the end result was a 10-track instrumental CD "Genoma Music/Music on the Genome." A few song titles: ELOVL4, YRB1P, and Basic Components Alfa; names only a life scientist could love.

The British Museum unveiled the largest hoard of Iron Age gold and silver coins - more than 3,000 - found in the country yesterday. The coins, amounting to 10 per cent of the total number previously recovered, were found in shallow pits, where it is thought that they had been placed as offerings to pagan gods, on farmland in east Leicestershire

It could have come from a Harry Potter film, and it did feature in The Madness of King George. Sir Christopher Wren's geometric staircase is one of the hidden treasures of St Paul's Cathedral which are being restored in readiness for a public debut. The hanging stairs, which appear to defy gravity, are being cleaned and repaired as part of a £40 million facelift to mark the cathedral's 300th anniversary in 2008. Wren, who was a mathematician and astronomer as well as an architect, designed the staircase to give the Dean of St Paul's a private route from the south-west corner of the cathedral to his library.

POMPEII, Italy - Thieves stole two Roman frescoes and damaged other priceless mural art in the ancient city of Pompeii, an official said Monday. The theft likely occurred either Friday or Saturday, said Raffaella Leveque, spokeswoman for the government office overseeing the site. Selling such rare art on the open market would be almost impossible so the theft may have been commissioned, Leveque said.

Archaeologists from the Mary Rose Trust are to manage the excavation of part of the medieval ship found in Newport last summer. Archaeologists from across Europe will be attempting to reclaim as much of the ship as possible but said they will leave the stern because it's felt, it is too dangerous to dig out. This has angered Newport-based activists from the Save Our Ship campaign who say that without the stern, they will not get a complete picture of what the ship looked like. The discovery of the ship last summer - which contains vital clues about Wales' early sea trade with Europe - has been hailed as a major discovery.

Cairo - Archaeologists digging out a 5 000-year-old burial site outside Cairo have opened a tomb containing the some of the earliest evidence of mummification, Egypt's antiquities chief said. On Sunday, archaeologists opened a number of intact wooden coffins found in a previously overlooked burial shaft in the Sakkara area, about 25km south of Cairo. One of the skeletons, lying in the fetal position and facing east, had linen wrapped around parts of the body.

An enormous defensive wall has been discovered by archaeologists of the National Museum of Ras Al Khaimah. The discovery was made during a general survey in February. Christian Velde, Resident Arch-aeologist, said the fortification is known to local people as "Wadi Sur". It was thought to be a dam erected to keep the Wadi Bah floods out of Shamal and Al Nakheel. A detailed examination of the fortification revealed it was built to fortify the area and originally consisted of a dam made from gravel with a mud brick-wall on top. The seven-km-long, two-metre-high dam ran from Al Nakheel to the so-called "Queen of Sheba's Palace". The enormous length is not the only impressive feature.

Two monoliths which form part of the Avebury stone circle are to be returned to their proper positions. The ancient stones at the centre of the circle are close to toppling over after listing precariously for more than 300 years. The task of returning the 50-tonne stones to the vertical will begin on Monday and is expected to take up to seven weeks. Once the work is complete, visitors will be able to get up close to the stones for the first time in six years.

The famous Taung skull will be returned to the site of its discovery where it will be the major attraction at an improved heritage site, Public Enterprises Minister Jeff Radebe said at the weekend. The fossilised skull of a five- to six-year-old child was found by miners at a lime quarry in 1924, and was shown to archaeologist Raymond Dart, who at the time was teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand.

That long period which stretches from the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) down to the Tang Dynasty (618-907) occupies a significant place in Chinese history. It witnessed the evolution of feudalism from its origins in the Qin to its zenith in the Tang and is well understood due to a wealth of archaeological findings. It was in 210 BC that Qinshihuang unified the whole country. As the first Emperor of the Qin Dynasty he founded China's first centralized feudal monarchy

Alexandria is not merely an Egyptian port city, a trade centre or a beautiful beach resort, but rather a city where the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations merge. Throughout history, it was the Egyptian gate to Europe and the Mediterranean countries, and the forefront of Pharaonic, Coptic and Islamic civilizations as revealed in its monuments. Thus it has been and still is a cultural centre of learning. When Alexander the Great first came to Egypt from the Mediterranean, he chose an ancient Egyptian village called "Rakoda" to be the place for establishing a new capital of Egypt in 331B.C. called Alexandria, which was modeled on Greek urban style.

Since Saturn's axis is tilted as it orbits the Sun, Saturn has seasons, like those of planet Earth ... but Saturn's seasons last for over seven years. So what season is it on Saturn now? Orbiting the equator, the tilt of the rings of Saturn provides quite a graphic seasonal display. In fact, this month, Saturn's rings will reach their most "open" angle after appearing nearly edge on in the mid-1990s. The ringed planet is also well placed in evening skies providing a grand view as summer comes to Saturn's southern hemisphere and winter to the north.

BONES, teeth and hair are invaluable to DNA researchers striving to prolong human life, but are just as vital to another discipline investigating the equally gripping world of death. "In antiquity, one was usually better off drinking wine every day instead of water. That way, you could die of cirrhosis in 40-50 years, instead of typhoid in a week," says Philippe Charlier, a French paleopathologist tracking human illness in the Mediterranean from prehistory to the end of antiquity.

Rock art etched on cliff walls in the eastern Sahara more than 6,000 years ago could spell out the answer to one of archaeology's great puzzles - where the ancient Egyptians came from. The answer? They were there all the time. The pyramid builders made their first entry in the archaeological record 5,000 years ago. This appearance was so abrupt that it has provoked fantasies of alien landings, mysterious civilisations or an invading master race. But in Genesis of the Pharaohs, published on Monday by Thames and Hudson, the Cambridge Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson presents a different picture.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- Colorado State University tropical storm researcher William Gray and his research team are forecasting above-average Atlantic basin hurricane activity in 2003. In the first report of 2003, the team calls for twice as many hurricanes as in 2002. "A wide variety of global indicators obtained and analyzed through March continue to point to 2003 being an active Atlantic hurricane season," said Gray, now in his 20th year of hurricane forecasting.

Claims that man-made pollution is causing "unprecedented" global warming have been seriously undermined by new research which shows that the Earth was warmer during the Middle Ages. From the outset of the global warming debate in the late 1980s, environmentalists have said that temperatures are rising higher and faster than ever before, leading some scientists to conclude that greenhouse gases from cars and power stations are causing these "record-breaking" global temperatures.

Employers are planning a new system of accrediting "worthwhile" science degrees after expressing concern that modern university courses are failing to teach the basics of the subject. Companies such as AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals group, are in talks over a system of accreditation that will give a "seal of approval" to some courses and inform students about which options carry the best chance of a job.

A RESEARCH project of five years has revealed that Dingwall is the site of one of the most important Viking remains in Scotland. It has long been believed that Dingwall took its name from the Norse word, Thingvoll, meaning meeting place, but the actual site of the ancient court of administration has never been found. Now, however, Dingwall historian David MacDonald and his wife Sandra, both former teachers, say they have definitive proof of the site of the Norse court. Mr MacDonald, a former history teacher and depute rector at Dingwall Academy, will make public their important findings at a talk in the Town Hall on the evening of Thursday, April 3.

NEW YORK -- The halves of a carving depicting an ancient Greek chariot race interlock on the gallery wall like parts of a jigsaw puzzle. "Both pieces, currently divided between Athens and London, should be rejoined at the New Acropolis Museum," says the caption. Greece is presenting its case for the return of the Elgin Marbles in an exhibit at the Alexander S. Onassis Cultural Center in Manhattan, using nationalism, finger-pointing and appeals to fair play to gain support.

THE STEREOTYPE of a classicist has not always been flattering. Lost in ancient texts, vases, coins and speculations, (s)he has often been accused of living in a past that never was a present. The truth is that, on the contrary, classical studies have always been the broadest of academic disciplines. Those adventurous enough to become engaged in this field must become acquainted with multiple methodologies that include philology, literary and textual criticism, history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and archaeology. Classical studies are now broader than ever because progress in all these fields has been considerable with new evidence surfacing and new approaches to old evidence emerging all the time. Take, for instance, this year's Runciman Lecture delivered by the alert, youthful looking - and sounding - Professor Paul Cartledge (born in 1947), who holds the chair of Greek History at Cambridge University as well as that of its Classics faculty. The lecture was, as every year, the work of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, an organisation active in promoting Greek culture.

For hundreds of years, experts have been pondering what brought about the crumbling of the pharaohs' power, the failure of central government as Egypt was plunged into a dark age that lasted more than 1000 years. Before that, around 4200 years ago, it was the world's first great civilisation, with its own distinctive art, literature and architecture. The Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza, royal tombs built for the mummified bodies of the pharaohs, are the only lasting evidence of a once-great civilisation. Some of the theories for the ancient apocalypse have included political conflict and an invasion from Asia.

A survey of one of the few remaining cultures that still makes and uses stone tools, the Konso of southern Ethiopia, reveals that women dominate the toolmaking process. The finding suggests that the image of men as stone toolmakers in both present and past history may have to be retooled to include women. According to the survey and study, the Konso make stone tools for scraping and cleaning animal hides used for bedding, clothing, bags and other products. Out of the 119 hide workers identified, 75 percent were women.

The evidence is still skimpy, but there is a chance that the dino killer asteroid was not alone when it walloped the Earth 65 million years ago. A possible second crater, at least as big or bigger than the famous Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, may have been created by a second hit moments after Chicxulub and off the coast of Maine. "It probably is a crater, but we really don't have age data," said marine geologist Dallas Abbott Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

India is on course to send a spacecraft to the Moon, the country's top space body says. Some of the country's leading scientists have met to review the mission which has been in the pipeline for the last several months. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which hosted the meeting, said the mission was likely to take place in 2008. But there is no plan to send an astronaut on the lunar flight. ISRO chairman K Kasturirangan said the project would "electrify the nation and show the world that India is capable of taking up complex projects at the cutting edge of space research.

NOORDWIJK, Netherlands - A satellite that relies on solar power to put it into orbit around the moon was unveiled Thursday by the European Space Agency, which plans to use the spacecraft in Europe's first attempt at a lunar exploration. The craft, known as the Smart-1, will be launched in July for a two-year mission orbiting the moon to look for water, believed to be hidden deep in craters on the lunar surface. The satellite will also gather evidence to test the theory that the moon was created when a giant asteroid struck the Earth during the early days of the solar system.

Teachers from across the nation converged on Philadelphia for the annual National Science Teachers Association's meeting, March 26 through March 30. NSTA convenes the largest meeting of science educators in the world, and this year more than 13,000 people attended. The meeting spanned the breadth of science: physics, chemistry, biology, earth and space sciences. The SETI Institute education team presented workshops and short courses, and participated in the earth and space science events that share lessons with teachers. We also had our exhibit in the trade show arena of the meeting, adjacent to NASA's exhibits. Throughout the five days, a steady stream of interested teachers talked with us about SETI and our science education materials at the booth. Like NASA, we were always busy interacting with the attendees

The dispute continues over the supposed discovery of the first inscription directly tied to one of the ancient kings in the Bible. If authentic and truly thousands of years old, the words on the so-called "Temple Tablet" would undergird Israel's present-day claim to Jerusalem's Temple Mount. This would also buttress traditional Jewish and Christian belief in the reliability of Old Testament history, against liberal scholars who treat the accounts of King Solomon and his Temple as fiction.

Deputy Head of Khorassan province Cultural Heritage Department for research Rajab-Ali Labbaf-Khaniki declared here on Wednesday a recently-approved project on restoration of the historical site in the ancient city of Neishabour, IRNA reported. He told IRNA that once the project becomes operational, not only Neishabour historical sites and monuments will be identified and restored, but a proper touristic atmosphere of high attraction will be created in the city.

The loss of ozone over the Arctic varies widely from year to year, US scientists say. Using data collected by the US space agency (Nasa), they say the amount, timing and pattern of ozone loss all fluctuate. They say their findings will help to show the effectiveness of agreements on limiting ozone depletion. And they should also give scientists a better understanding of what is happening in the Arctic.

In the sixth instalment of the BBC News Online Mars Express diary, project manager Rudi Schmidt describes the triumphant arrival of Europe's Mars spacecraft at its launch site. The date for shipping the spacecraft to Baikonur gets closer and closer. So many things have to be ready at the same time. Volga-Dnepr, our cargo company, wants a lot of paperwork before sending two Antonov planes to us. We have to have the Mars Express spacecraft ready and packed safely in its special transport container

New fossil evidence suggests a distant cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex that roamed the plains of Madagascar millions of years ago regularly dined on its own kind to survive during hard times. The discovery is the strongest evidence yet that some carnivorous dinosaurs were cannibals. Dinosaur experts say it sheds light on the hardships predators faced in the late Cretaceous period when dinosaurs vanished, possibly as a result of asteroid impacts, widespread climate change and disease.

Between the sun and the stars, Los Angeles sometimes seems like paradise. But life in the City of Angels comes at a price: earthquakes. Now the threat of "the big one" may be greater than previously feared. Researchers have identified a buried fault that may have caused at least four large-magnitude earthquakes in the past 11,000 years and is still active. Known as the Puente Hills Blind Thrust System, the fault is three to 17 kilometers (2 to 11 miles) deep and extends for almost 50 kilometers (31 miles) from northern Orange County, through Los Angeles, up to Beverly Hills.

At first glance, the headlines sound plausible: Shark leaps from ocean to attack a hovering helicopter. Mild winter brings Swiss a bumper spaghetti crop. Taco Bell Corporation purchases Liberty Bell from U.S. Government. Alabama legislature votes to change the value of the mathematical constant pi. But they are all lies. Happy April Fools' Day. In celebration of the day, National Geographic News has compiled a listing of some of the greatest hoaxes in history. They are the lies, darned lies, and whoppers that have been perpetrated on the gullible and unsuspecting, probably since humans evolved the art of speech.

ROME (Reuters) - Italy unveiled an ancient Greek bronze statue of a dancing satyr on Tuesday, five years after Sicilian fishermen dragged it from the Mediterranean seabed in one of the most important marine archaeological finds ever. The 2,500-year-old satyr went on public display inside Italy's parliament in Rome, where it will spend two months before being moved to a permanent home in Mazara del Vallo, the fishing village in western Sicily nearest to where it was found.

More than 30 ancient tombs have been discovered in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The graves, dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907), are located in the Litong District of Wuzhong City, 60 kilometers south of Yinchuan, the region's capital. The grave group covers 6,400 square meters and is the largest of its kind ever excavated in the region. Local archaeologists have found a variety of relics, including pottery kettles and bowls, bronze belts and buttons, and face-shaped sculptures.

Answering the pleas of archaeologists and scholars worldwide, the Pentagon has ordered ground troops and aircraft to spare Iraq's treasured archaeological sites wherever possible. This is the fabled Mesopotamia of antiquity, the "cradle of civilization" where the first agrarian societies around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers invented writing, the wheel, the first laws, and literature and mathematics -- some more than 6,000 years ago. Today's armies are battling across lands where Chaldeans, Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians founded and lost great empires. Fighting has raged around such fabled sites as Ur of the Chaldees, the birthplace of Abraham, and bombs have struck near Nineveh, where God ordered the prophet Jonah to preach repentance.

Scientists have satisfied key tests that confirm that the virus causing the global outbreak of severe pneumonia is a new type of coronavirus. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has so far struck down more than 2300 people, and killed 78. The identification will speed up the testing of victims and their contacts to see how the disease spreads, and how it might be contained. That is badly needed, with new cases being announced each day in Hong Kong and China, and in previously unaffected countries, such as South Africa, the Philippines and Malaysia. In another sign of the seriousness of the growing outbreak, the World Health Organization issued an unprecedented advisory on Wednesday, warning people not to travel to Hong Kong or the adjacent Guangdong province of China.

A black hole's event horizon - beyond which not even light can escape the extreme pull of gravity - creates a unique X-ray signature as matter is sucked in, new research demonstrates. Event horizons are characteristic of black holes but, by definition, cannot be seen. So Christine Done and Marek Gierlinski at University of Durham, UK, compared the X-ray emissions from suspected black holes with emissions from known neutron stars. Neutron stars are only slightly less dense than black holes and, in both cases, the immense gravitational force they exert is transformed into X-ray radiation as material spirals inwards and is torn apart. According to theoretical models, material should crash into the solid surface of a neutron star, releasing any remaining energy back out. But this energy will be swallowed completely by a black hole, producing a characteristic difference in the X-ray spectra generated by each object. And the new survey has now shown that the difference does indeed exist.

Human remains covered in resin and cloth were found inside a 5,000-year-old cedar wood coffin at Sakkara near Cairo, Egypt. The coffin had been placed in a tomb thought to date from 3100 to 2890 BC under Egypt's 1st Dynasty. "We found more than 20 tombs built of mud bricks in this area and inside these tombs we found sarcophagi intact for the first time, completely enclosed in mud brick," said Dr Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities

A colossal squid has been caught in Antarctic waters, the first example of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni retrieved virtually intact from the surface of the ocean. "All we knew prior to this specimen coming through was that this animal lived in the abyssal environment down in Antarctica," New Zealand squid expert and senior research fellow at Auckland University of Technology, Dr Steve O'Shea, told BBC News Online.

New DNA evidence suggests "African Eve", the 150,000-year-old female ancestor of every person on Earth, may have lived in Tanzania or Ethiopia. A genetic study has shown that the oldest known human DNA lineages are those of East Africans. The most ancient populations include the Sandawe, Burunge, Gorowaa and Datog people who live in Tanzania. Researchers found a very high amount of genetic variation, or diversity, between the mitochondrial DNA of different individuals in these populations. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively through the maternal line. The longer a population has existed, the more variation accumulates in its DNA lineages.

Archaeologists could soon be making discoveries about the Maya from their computers. The first stage of a new online database is set to go live later this year, housing hundreds of thousands of documents on the excavation of Tikal, one of the most important settlements in ninth-century Mesoamerica. The Tikal Digital Access Project will enable everyone from schoolchildren to scholars to search the notes, photographs and sketches made by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology when they worked at the site between 1956 and 1970.

The Moon may harbour five times more water than we thought, reckon researchers in the United States who have doubled previous estimates of how much of the lunar surface is permanently dark. This is encouraging news for those in favour of human colonization of the Moon. Any ice that accumulated in sunless pits on the Moon billions of years ago would still be frozen there, having never sublimed and floated free of the tenuous gravity, explain Ben Bussey, of the University of Hawaii, and his colleagues. A colony supported by lunar ice reserves would re-energize the US space programme and could mine for precious minerals, argues team member Paul Spudis. Lunar ice might be melted to provide water for colonists, he speculates, and it could be split using solar power into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel.

A leading palaeontologist is questioning the heritage of a 3.5-million-year-old fossil skull hailed two years ago as a new human relative1. It's just one example, he suggests, of scientists being too quick to give us a bushy family tree. The fossil hit the headlines in 2001 when Meave Leakey of National Museums of Kenya and colleagues described it as evidence of a new human-like lineage. They named their specimen Kenyanthropus platyops - literally, the 'Flat-faced Man of Kenya'. Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, now argues that K.platyops was more probably a Kenyan variant of one of the most famous human ancestors of all time - 'Lucy', discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. This fossil skeleton was formally named Australopithecus afarensis.

Scientists have discovered the earliest examples of salamanders - some specimens up to 165 million years old - in fossil beds in Mongolia and China. Scientists say they have found literally thousands of the animals preserved in volcanic ash. The researchers describe one juvenile in particular that reveals the amphibian's eye, folds in its tail and a stomach bulging with clam shrimps. The discoveries are part of an ongoing excavation programme being conducted by staff from the University of Chicago, US, and Peking University in Beijing, China. Before these extraordinary finds, the oldest known salamander fossils dated back only to the Tertiary Sub-Era, which began 65 million years ago.

Experts have managed to control a mysterious mould that threatened to destroy one of the world's most famous cave paintings. The primitive art of the Lascaux cave complex in south western France survived untouched for nearly 18,000 years but became extremely vulnerable when the cave mouth was widened in the 1950s to accommodate up to a thousand daily visitors. Two years ago, experts noticed a fungus spreading gradually along the floor, walls and part of the ceiling. They tackled it with antifungal and antibiotic chemicals, but it was extremely resilient, and only now have scientists stopped it in its tracks. However, after more than a year of decontamination the authorities say they have not managed to return the cave to its original state.

Biologists believe that climate change is affecting living things worldwide, and the latest evidence suggests that warmer winters may mean fewer migratory birds. New research shows that as winter temperatures have risen in central Europe, the number of migratory birds has dropped. Ultimately, this may also decrease the number of migratory bird species there. "We predict that with increasing winter temperatures...the number of long-distance migratory bird species should decline," say Nicole Lemoine and Katrin Boehning-Gaese of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, in the April issue of Conservation Biology.

Chimpanzees kept at the Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark are showing a preference for the organic fruit now being offered to them. "The chimpanzees are able to tell the difference between the organic and regular fruit," keeper Niels Melchiorsen told an Organic Agriculture reporter. "If we give them organic and traditional bananas, they systematically choose the organic bananas." In addition, the chimpanzees eat the skin of organic bananas, but peel the regular ones before eating them, according to Melchiorsen. Studies conducted in recent years have shown that rabbits, chickens and rats also prefer organic food.