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SEOUL, Feb. 6 (UPI) -- The owner of a South Korean cafe where diners hang out with live sheep said business has been booming with the coming of the Year of the Sheep. -snip- The cafe owner said many South Koreans are seeking to spend time around sheep during the year, and his business offers an easier alternative than traveling out to a rural sheep farm.

When did dogs first become domesticated? A sophisticated new 3D fossil analysis by biologists Abby Grace Drake, visiting assistant professor of biology at Skidmore, and Michael Coquerelle of the University Rey Juan Carlos contradicts the suggested domestication of dogs during the late Paleolithic era (about 30,000 years ago), and reestablishes the date of domestication to around 15,000 years ago... Whether dogs were domesticated during the Paleolithic era, when humans were hunter-gatherers, or the Neolithic era, when humans began to form permanent settlements and take up farming, is a subject of ongoing scientific debate. Original fossil finds placed dog domestication in...

Lawmakers have failed in past attempts to rename North America’s highest mountain, but a new proposal may have a better chance this year under a Republican Congress, according to an aide to an Alaska lawmaker who is resurrecting the effort. U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have introduced a bill to give Mount McKinley its historical Alaska Native name. The Alaska Republicans announced a Senate bill Wednesday to formally call the 20,320-foot mountain by its Athabascan name, Denali, KTUU reported. The bill comes after previous efforts by Murkowski failed. …

It is one of the most common mistakes made by tourists visiting the capital - referring to beautiful Tower Bridge as London Bridge. But a father-of-one has found the mislabelling of the iconic landmark so frustrating, he has launched a one-man campaign to correct tourists from around the world. Charles Lawley, from London, trawls Instagram looking for users who have who have made the mistake as he gets a kick out of correcting them. His typical reply is 'That's Tower Bridge not London Bridge.'

An ancient gospel has been discovered in the pages of a diminutive book dating back to the 6th century. The text, dubbed the 'Gospel of the Lots of Mary' is written in Coptic and contains oracles that would have been used to provide support and reassurance to people seeking help for problems. It is not a gospel in the traditional sense, because it doesn't predominantly teach about Christ, and its translator suggests that the discovery could rewrite the ancient definition and purpose of gospels. The ancient book was given to Harvard University's Sackler Museum in 1984 by Beatrice Kelekian, in...

LONG BEACH (CBSLA.com) — Royalty will meet Thursday for the first time in the Port of Long Beach. The Queen Mary will be visited by her “niece” when the Queen Elizabeth II, which is in the midst of a global cruise, pulls into a nearby dock around 7 :30 a.m. It is the first time a modern Cunard liner will dock and disembark passengers in the Long Beach harbor. The Queen Elizabeth is a replica of the original ship, which, along with the Queen Mary, made more than 2,000 trans-Atlantic crossings while in service.

We, as a country, love weird things. We celebrate it, wear T-shirts proclaiming our weirdness, and enshrine oddities that probably should have gone out with the trash a decade ago. And that’s okay. At Yahoo Travel, we went in search of weird, wonderful, and wacky museums that are worth going out of your way to see.

No one loved telling stories quite like Ernest Hemingway loved telling stories. Like most grand storytellers, the writer also had a fervent affection for local legends, which is how he became smitten with the idea of owning a six-toed mitten cat. Back at the turn of the century, sailors believed that six-toed cats, also called gypsy cats, were good luck, and they wanted them aboard their ships. This led to an abundance of six-toed cats in porttowns like Key West, Fla., in the thirties and forties.

The site of Zita contains remains of a Roman forum and a Punic child sacrifice precinct. During the summer of 2015, a team of archaeologists and other specialists and students will be exploring a large mound that contains the remains of an ancient city that once commanded the highest point on a peninsula that juts out from the southern coast of Tunisia into the Mediterranean. Visible from the island of Djerba, which was anciently known as Calypso of the Lotus Eaters in Homer's The Odyssey, the mound features the remains from a Roman bathhouse, ceramic kilns, evidence of metallurgy, and...

<p>Ticket brokers had to call an audible after hundreds of Super Bowl XLIX tickets never arrived, leaving fans with no defense.</p> <p>According to ESPN, several brokers and resale sites had to refuse tickets to fans who they already bought them for the big game today in Arizona. One fan reportedly paid as much as $2,100 for tickets.</p>

Although no nuclear-thermal engines have ever flown, several design concepts have been built and tested over the past few decades, and numerous concepts have been proposed. These have ranged from the traditional solid-core design to more advanced and efficient concepts that rely on either a liquid or a gas core. In the case of a solid-core design, the only type that has ever been built, a reactor made from materials with a very high melting point houses a collection of solid uranium rods which undergo controlled fission. The hydrogen fuel is contained in a separate tank and then passes through...

The national airline of Cyprus has ceased operations after the European Commission ordered that it must repay €65 million in illegal state aid. The Commission ruled that the airline, which has been losing money for some time and is 94% government-owned, must pay back €65 million of the €103 million that it received in state aid in 2012 and 2013. The airline has been receiving money from the government since 2007. …

The discovery of a 55,000-year-old partial skull of a modern human in an Israeli cave, the first sighting of Homo sapiens in this time and place, offers skeletal evidence to support the idea that Neandertals and moderns mated in the Middle East between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. What's more, the skull could belong to an ancestor of the modern humans who later swept across Europe and Asia and replaced the Neandertals. The find supports a raft of recent genetic studies. A 2010 analysis, for example, found that up to 2% of the genomes of today's Europeans and Asians consist...

In addition to Genghis Khan and his male descendants, researchers have previously identified the founders of two other highly successful Y-chromosome lineages: one that began in China with Giocangga, a Qinq Dynasty ruler who died in 15823, and another belonging to the medieval Uí Néill dynasty in Ireland. Jobling's team made a systematic search for genetic founders by analysing the Y chromosomes of more than 5,000 men from 127 populations spanning Asia... because lots of data were available and there was already evidence of such lineages. The team identified 11 Y-chromosome sequences that were each shared by more than 20...

Spanish archaeology students have discovered a 2,200-year-old moat in what is now the Catalan town of Valls, filled with objects providing evidence of the presence of troops of the Carthaginian general Hannibal in the area. The moat, which surrounded the Iberian town of Vilar de Vals, contained coins and lead projectiles, researchers said in a statement. It is estimated the moat could have had a width of 40 metres (131 feet), a depth of five metres, and a length of nearly half a kilometre. Jaume Noguera from the Prehistory department at the University of Barcelona, and Jordi López, from the...

NAGASAKI – A hotel with robot staff and face recognition instead of room keys will open this summer in Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki Prefecture, the operator of the theme park said Tuesday. The two-story Henn na Hotel is scheduled to open July 17. It will be promoted with the slogan “A Commitment for Evolution,” Huis Ten Bosch Co. said. The name reflects how the hotel will “change with cutting-edge technology,” a company official said. This is a play on words: “Henn” is also part of the Japanese word for change. Robots will provide porter service, room cleaning, front desk...

The plane was in good condition and the crew were all certified, said Mardjono Siswosuwarno, the chief investigator for Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee. ... Investigators have submitted their preliminary report into the crash, officials said Tuesday, but it's unclear when it will be released fully to the public. Co-pilot Remi Emmanuel Plesel, 46, had less flying time than the captain with 2,275 hours with AirAsia Indonesia. He was also president of a French pilot association. The captain of the ill-fated airliner, known only as Irianto -- as many Indonesians go by one name -- had more than 20,000 flying...

...Pierre-Paul Riquet, the man behind one of the 17th century's greatest works of engineering -- and some say, works of art -- remains in Vauban's shadow, despite his life's accomplishment, which was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. This 150-mile long waterway was once known as the Canal Royal en Languedoc, for good reason. French revolutionaries may have removed the 'royal' from its title in 1789, yet this is a canal which remains fit for a king. Dappled sunlight streams onto its emerald-green water from between the leaves of the 42,000 plane and oak trees which line...

Five teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE have just been awarded a combined $5.25 million for meeting significant milestones in developing a robot that can safely land on the surface of the moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send mooncasts back to the Earth. A tiny startup from India, Team Indus, with no experience in robotics or space flight just won $1 million of this prize. ... What has changed since the days of the Apollo moon landings is that the cost of building technologies has dropped exponentially. What cost billions of dollars then...

Dubai airport has soared ahead of London's Heathrow, riding a boom in long-haul flights between Asia and the West to become the world's top international travel hub, it said Tuesday. Traffic at the airport increased 6.1 percent last year to 70.47 million passengers, Dubai Airports said, adding that it expected a further surge in traveller numbers in 2015. Dubai International is home to Emirates, the Middle East's largest carrier, which along with Abu Dhabi's Etihad and Qatar Airways has seized a significant portion of travel between the West, Asia and Australasia.