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A 1.5 metric ton block of engraved limestone at the Abri Castanet in southern France is the earliest evidence of wall art - approximately 37,000 years old and evidence of the role art played in the daily lives of Early Aurignacian humans. The research team has been excavating at Abri Castanet for the past 15 years. Abri Castanet and its sister site Abri Blanchard are among the oldest sites in Eurasia bearing artifacts of human symbolism. Hundreds of personal ornaments have been discovered, including pierced animal teeth, pierced shells, ivory and soapstone beads, engravings, and paintings on limestone slabs.

Your cay may soon have a new dashboard, one made of a flexible plastic and oxide layer that could be integrated into the car front window to give the driver direct informationThe MULTIFLEXIOXIDES project is designed to develop new cost-efficient, long lasting, light, flexible and transparent devices (can anything be all of those?  Only in academia) which can display information directly on the windshield. This is possible using small glass pads with a transparent substrate of nano-sized flexible oxides, which act as a basis for organic LEDs (light-emitting diodes).

The University of Luxembourg has agreed to actively participate in the Open Access initiative.  Defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, it is an effort to make scholarly publications freely available to the public - because the content creator pays for publication, rather than a corporation underwriting the cost and retaining copyright while charging a subscription fee for access.

Researchers have discovered a new nanometer-scale atomic structure in solid metallic materials known as metallic glasses, filling a gap in understanding of this atomic structure.Glasses include all solid materials that have a non-crystalline atomic structure. They lack a regular geometric arrangement of atoms over long distances. "The fundamental nature of a glass structure is that the organization of the atoms is disordered—jumbled up like differently sized marbles in a jar, rather than eggs in an egg carton," says Paul Voyles, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of materials science and engineering and principal investigator on the research. 

A few hundred thousand billion free-floating, Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way, argues an international team of scientists in Astrophysics and Space Science.Because it's required for astronomy claims this decade, they make note that those planets could have alien life.

Athletes sometimes 'choke' - succumb to pressure and underperform - in key situations. How can an athlete be among the top 1,000 participants in the world at a task and be paralyzed by situations in a game they play with expertise?Choking happens to lots of people.  We've all heard people say they can't take tests, for example.  A new analysis from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) suggests that when there are higher incentives to succeed, people can become so afraid of losing their potential reward that their performance suffers.

It's no surprise that tattoos and piercings have been linked to other risky decisions but capped Internet bandwidth?  

People who claim to see the 'aura' of others - and subsequently claim they can modify them - may actually have synesthesia, according to new research.Synesthesia is believed to occur due to cross-wiring in the brain; synesthetes have more synaptic connections than 'normal' people and some are interconnected in ways others are not, including across brain regions. Since the brain regions responsible for the processing of each type of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected, synesthetes see or taste a sound, feel a taste, or associate people with a particular color.

Shortly after celebrating the tenth anniversary of its time in service, engineers have declared the Envisat satellite lost, following numerous attempts to re-establish contact since April 8th.

Which countries are the best at providing higher education?
 The Universitas 21 Ranking was announced today at Lund University in Sweden. Universitas 21, a network of research universities, has developed their own ranking as a benchmark for governments, education institutions and individuals to highlight the importance of creating a strong environment for higher education institutions that will contribute to economic and cultural development, provide a high-quality experience for students and help institutions compete for overseas applicants. 
So calibrate accordingly when the metrics for 'higher education' don't actually mention education.

How can basically honest scientists using a rigorous methodology have different data?  Numerical models are tricky business and while climate scientists are rapidly becoming experts in statistics and creating better models, that was not always the case.One vital component of getting clean models is accurate calibration. Calibration is life, in science.  A satellite temperature record put together by the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1989 has often been cited by climate change skeptics as evidence of doubt that models showing the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming are accurate.

Type Ia supernovae are important for measuring the universe because they're bright enough to be seen across large distances and similar enough to be a reference, an an object of known luminosity - but astronomers still don't know what star systems make Type Ia supernovae.Two very different models might explain the possible origin of Type Ia supernovae and different studies support each model. Some new evidence says both models are correct because some supernovae are produced one way and some the other.