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Did the First Americans Come From, Er, Australia? Mon Sep 6, 9:24 AM ET EXETER, England (Reuters) - Anthropologists stepped into a hornets' nest on Monday, revealing research that suggests the original inhabitants of America may in fact have come from what is now known as Australia.   The claim will be extremely unwelcome to today's native Americans who came overland from Siberia and say they were there first. But Silvia Gonzalez from John Moores University in Liverpool said skeletal evidence pointed strongly to this unpalatable truth and hinted that recovered DNA would corroborate it. "This is very contentious," Gonzalez,...

PASADENA, Calif. - Both of NASA (news - web sites)'s aging Mars rovers have been experiencing problems but continue to explore opposite sides of the Red Planet, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Wednesday. A semiconductor component aboard the Spirit rover did not power up while commands were being executed on Aug. 1, affecting the ability to use its three spectrometer instruments. Engineers believe the problem likely involves the timing of instruction signals reaching the component, called a gate array, within microseconds of each other. If that is confirmed, the likely solution would be to insert a delay between the signals,...

A Kyrgyz-Russian expedition has embarked for an ancient city covered by Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, local media reported Wednesday. Issyk-Kul, 2,250 square miles in area, is a mountain lake in the north of the country. Historians and legends tell about a disappeared island in the lake with fortifications near the north coast where Tamerlane, the Tartar conqueror in southern and western Asia and ruler of Samarkand, held noble prisoners in the 14th century, the Vecherniy Bishkek newspaper said. People have reported seeing stone buildings in on the bottom of northeast Issyk-Kul, not far from the mouth of the Tyup River....

The oldest known evidence of people keeping cats as pets may have been discovered by archaeologists. The discovery of a cat buried with what could be its owner in a Neolithic grave on Cyprus suggests domestication of cats had begun 9,500 years ago. It was thought the Egyptians were first to domesticate cats, with the earliest evidence dating to 2,000-1,900 BC. French researchers writing in Science magazine show that the process actually began much earlier than that. The evidence comes from the Neolithic, or late stone age, village of Shillourokambos on Cyprus, which was inhabited from the 9th to the...

An ambitious space program of the US voiced by President Bush at the start of his pre-election race has revived the interest of mankind to space that faded away within the past years People have got so much used to the issue of space that it is somewhat boring for us. This is the reason why majority of us are not aware of unique projects carried out by Russian scientists, engineers and investigators. In fact, preparation for a manned flight to Mars started in Russia 30 years ago. One of the program's final stages - imitation of a flight in...

A disturbing story in the March 1 issue of Pravda suggests that the U. S. Government is working on the discovery of a mysterious point over the South Pole that may be a passageway backward in time. According to the article, some American and British scientists working in Antarctica on January 27, 1995, noticed a spinning gray fog in the sky over the pole. U. S. physicist Mariann McLein said at first they believed it to be some kind of sandstorm. But after a while they noticed that the fog did not change its form and did not move so...

Space dust to unlock Mexican pyramid secrets Muon detector could point scientists to hidden burial chambersTwo vendors sit near the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, where physicists are using a muon detector to look for hidden burial chambers. TEOTIHUACAN, Mexico - Remnants of space dust that constantly shower the world are helping unlock the secrets of a 2,000-year-old Mexican pyramid where the rulers of a mysterious civilization may lie buried. Deep under the huge Pyramid of the Sun, north of Mexico City, physicists are installing a device to detect muons, subatomic particles that are left over when cosmic...

Land around a mysterious cavern underneath Blackheath could soon be under investigation. Parkman's, the surveyors who investigated a six-foot-wide crater that appeared in the A2 at Blackheath Hill last April has said further checks on land stability in the area are needed. Decisions on their report were to be made by Greenwich council last night. But the council, which would apply for a grant from English Partnerships to cover the costs of the investigation, is not yet sure how much it will cost. The collapse of the A2 into chalk pits after subsoil washed away triggered traffic chaos, hundreds of...

Mars Global Surveyor passed a milestone earlier this month when its 100,000th image was added to NASA's online image gallery for the mission. The total number of photographs is now more than twice the combined quantity supplied by the Viking orbiters in the 1970s. More interesting is the detail included in the new images. One is said to be among the most detailed views ever provided of the Red Planet. Another reveals new clues about a mysterious "Inca City" on Mars. Inca City In 1972, Mariner 9 returned images that showed ridges on Mars that intersect and appear to rise...

Space Expert to U.S.: Don't Do Mars on the Cheap 1 hour, 35 minutes agoBy Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites)'s ambitious plan to send Americans back to the moon and eventually to Mars must not be undertaken on the cheap, a space policy expert told a White House-appointed panel on Wednesday. Norman Augustine, a businessman and engineer who headed an earlier examination of NASA (news - web sites) after the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster, warned members of Bush's new space exploration commission not to set firm schedule targets or budget limits for the project....

I can't believe it. I guess now I'll have to vote for Bush in the upcoming elections...Not what I expected, but after reading this report where he evinces strong support for the space program, I've had to switch alliances. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of science fiction, but I don't want to live out my life just reading about space--I'd like to go there, and perhaps teach there! However, as usual, Bush is a bit muddled in his plans. Fans of Ben Bova or Bob Zubrin Mars Society Founder know that a moonbase is an unnecessary,...

NASA's fiscal year 2005 budget spells out the agency's strategy for reprogramming $11.6 billion in funding over the next five years to support its new space exploration program. Before the loss of the shuttle Columbia, NASA planned to spend roughly $86 billion total over the five-year period starting in 2005. The FY '05 budget proposes redirecting approximately $11.6 billion of that funding, as well as adding $1 billion, to implement the president's space exploration goals (DAILY, Jan. 15). About $5.9 billion will be shifted from the agency's Space Launch Initiative (SLI), which includes efforts such as the Orbital Space Plane...

<p>Moon base? Old news.</p> <p>In his hotly anticipated announcement Wednesday, President Bush ordered NASA scientists to plan for a manned "foothold on the moon." They might look through their old filing cabinets to start, because the U.S. government and its contractors have been planning lunar colonies since long before Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind in 1969.</p>

A mysterious ancient stone mask from Mexico has spoken but apparently only to say that its people's written language remains undeciphered. BYU's Stephen Houston holds a copy of ancient script from Mexico. He disagrees with claims that "Teo Mask" words have been deciphered.Stuart Johnson, Deseret Morning News A study by Brigham Young University archaeologist Stephen Houston and his colleague from Yale University, Michael D. Coe, say the mask disproves earlier claims that the language had been cracked. Their paper is to be published in "Mexicon," a journal about news and research from Mesoamerica. The title is "Has Isthmian Writing Been...

The Mysterious Tribe of Tuwa-It's said that they originated from the old or wounded soldiers abandoned by Genghis Khan The Mysterious Tribe of Tuwa On the banks of the Kanas Lake, there live 2,000 Tuwas, a Mongolian tribe that have existed in this remote area of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region for generations. They mainly inhabit the areas of Kanas, Hemu and Baihaba. Their primitive nomadic lifestyle seems to have been isolated from the modern civilization of the 21st century. They believe in Shamanism and Lamaism and keep the primitive worship of fire and other natural forces as their...

Jan. 27, 2004 ? In a prehistoric battle for survival, Neanderthals had to compete against modern humans and were wiped off the face of the Earth, according to a new study on life in Europe from 60,000 to 25,000 years ago. The findings, compiled by 30 scientists, were based on extensive data from sediment cores, archaeological artifacts such as fossils and tools, radiometric dating, and climate models. The collected information was part of a project known as Stage 3, which refers to the time period analyzed. he number three also seems significant in terms of why the Neanderthals became extinct....

The First Men on the Moon by Steven H Silver On July 20, AD 1969, two men came in peace for all mankind. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, became the first humans to set foot on another world. Sixty miles above them, Mike Collins orbited the moon in the Columbia, becoming, in his words, the loneliest man in the universe. It is a day that sticks out in the memory of everybody who was alive at the time. At 9:51 PM Eastern Time, more than six hours after landing on the Moon, a grainy black and...

Years Were Longer 1.3bln Years ago: Chinese ScientistsPeople who complain that there aren't enough hours in the day might have preferred to live 1.3 billion years ago. At that time, according to the latest research by a group of Chinese scientists, there were 15 hours in one day, 42 days in a month, and 13 to 14 months, or more than 540 days, in a year. The finding was obtained through a five-year systematic study of stromatolite samples, known as "stone with memory", by several researchers with the Tianjin geology and minerals research institute under the China Geological Survey...

Autism appears to be caused by a reduction in the brain at birth and then extremely rapid development in the first few months of life, researchers in San Diego, California said. "What we've discovered is really very startling - the first glimpse of when autism begins," said Eric Courchesne, director of the autism research center at the Pediatric Hospital of San Diego. "Excessive brain growth does not allow time for accumulation of experiences and emotions that guide and shape normal behavior." Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life, resulting from a neurological...

Science & Technology 5/5/03 Article of Faith A stone tablet could be a relic of King Solomon's temple--or a clever forgery By Betsy Carpenter Solomon's Temple was the glory of Jerusalem after its completion in the 10th century B.C. Fronted by colossal bronze columns, it was said to be built of hewn limestone. The nave was lined with fragrant cedar and held a massive golden table and altar. In an inner sanctuary guarded by gilded olive-wood doors, even the walls glistened with gold. The sole remaining testimony to this wondrous temple is the biblical account--and now, perhaps, a dark slab...