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In the remote desert highlands of southern Yemen, a team of archaeologists have discovered new evidence of ancient transitions from hunting and herding to irrigation agriculture 5,200 years ago.
As part of a larger program of archaeological research, Michael Harrower from the University of Toronto and The Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia (RASA) team explored the Wadi Sana watershed documenting 174 ancient irrigation structures, modeled topography and hydrology, and interviewed contemporary camel and goat herders and irrigation farmers.

By measuring a peak in the temperature of hot gas in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4649, scientists have determined the mass of the galaxy's supermassive black hole. The method, applied for the first time, gives results that are consistent with a traditional technique.
Astronomers have been seeking different, independent ways of precisely weighing the largest supermassive black holes, that is, those that are billions of times more massive than the sun. Until now, methods based on observing the motions of stars or of gas in a disk near such large black holes had been used.
"This is tremendously important work since black holes can be elusive, and there are only a couple of ways to weigh them accurately," said Philip Humphrey, leader of the study and an assistant project scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCI. David Buote, associate professor of physics and astronomy at UCI, also worked on this study.

Women exposed to high levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls – a group of banned environmental pollutants) are less likely to give birth to male children, according to a study published today in Environmental Health.
The researchers found that among women from the San Francisco Bay Area, those exposed to higher levels of PCBs during the 50s and 60s, were significantly more likely to give birth to female children.
Similar exposure is thought to have occurred in Wales, after a quarry on the edge of Groesfaen village near Cardiff was used as a toxic dumping ground from 1965 to 1972.

A two-year study led by researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) reveals that low-carbohydrate and Mediterranean diets may be just as safe and effective in achieving weight loss as the standard, medically prescribed low-fat diet, according to a new study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
In the study, 322 moderately obese people were intensively monitored and were randomly assigned one of three diets: a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet; a Mediterranean calorie-restricted diet with the highest level of dietary fiber and monounsaturated/saturated fat; or a low-carbohydrate diet with the least amount of carbohydrates, highest fat, protein, and dietary cholesterol. The low-carb dieters had no caloric intake restrictions.

It's no secret that the Commonwealth Fund doesn't like private health care and their new national scorecard states that scores on access have declined significantly since the first national scorecard in 2006. Despite spending more on health care than any other industrialized nation, they state, the U.S. overall continues to fall far short on key indicators of health outcomes and quality, with particularly low scores on efficiency.

The Tunguska event is regarded as one of the biggest natural disasters of modern times. On 30 June 1908 one or more explosions took place in the area close to the Tunguska River north of Lake Baikal. The explosion(s) flattened around 80 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres.
The strength of the explosion is estimated to have been equivalent to between five and 30 megatons of TNT. That is more than a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.
This almost unpopulated region of Siberia was first studied in 1927 by Professor Leonid A. Kulik. There are a number of different theories about what caused the catastrophe. However, the majority of scientists assume that it was caused by a cosmic event, such as the impact of a meteorite, asteroid or comet. If it had exploded in the atmosphere just under five hours later, St. Petersburg, which was the capital of Russia at that time, would have been completely destroyed because of the Earth's rotation.

hominin fossils are the most important materials for exploring human origins and evolution. Since most hominin fossils are incomplete, or filled with a heavy calcified matrix, it is difficult or often impossible to reconstruct the endocast in a real fossil without destroying it.
Accordingly, traditional methods limited the study of human brain evolution. CT can explore fossils in a noninvasive way by transforming a real fossil into a virtual object, and make it possible for paleoanthropologists to extend the study of fossil specimens from the exterior to the interior.

Just this once, anti-fishing organizations can fall back on capitalistic economics to make their case - with huge increases in fuel costs, it may be time to have government-run fisheries rather than spend more money on fuel subsidies currently given to fishing fleets.
In addition, it would actually save money to invest in re-training fishers, says University of British Columbia fisheries economist Rashid Sumaila, a 2008 Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation.
Dramatic fuel price increases over the past weeks have sparked large-scale protests by fishers around the world. In France, fishers set up blockades at several ports while Japanese squid fishing boats halted operations for two days. Similar events have taken place in Australia, Nigeria and the Philippines.

University of Florida and Florida Institute of Technology engineering researchers have narrowed the search for the source of X-rays emitted by lightning, a feat that could one day help predict where lightning will strike.
"From a practical point of view, if we are going to ever be able to predict when and where lightning will strike, we need to first understand how lightning moves from one place to the other," said Joseph Dwyer, a professor in the department of physics and space sciences at FIT. "At present, we do not have a good handle on this. X-rays are giving us a close-up view of what is happening inside the lightning as it moves."

Archaeopteryx is famous as the world's oldest bird, but reptiles were flying about some 50 million years earlier than that (225 million years ago), even before large dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
A new study of extinct reptiles called kuehneosaurs, by scientists from the University of Bristol, England, shows that these early flyers used extraordinary extensions of their ribs to form large gliding surfaces on the side of the body. The results were published today in Palaeontology.
Kuehneosaurs, up to 70 centimetres (two feet) long, were first found in the 1950s in an ancient cave system near Bristol. Their lateral 'wings' were always assumed to be some form of flying adaptation, but their aerodynamic capability had never been studied before.

Genomic imprinting is a mechanism that regulates gene expression in the developing fetus and plays a major role in regulating its growth. Research published in Nature Genetics by a team of international scientists has established an identical mechanism of genetic imprinting which evolved 150 million years ago.
"This paper shows that we share a common genetic imprinting mechanism which has been active for about 150 million years despite the differences in reproductive strategies between marsupials and humans," said Professor Geoffrey Shaw of the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne, a coauthor on the paper.

Penn State researchers say they can produce greener, less expensive hydrogen for fuel using water, solar energy and nanotube diodes that use the entire spectrum of the sun's energy.
Currently, the steam reforming of natural gas produces most of our hydrogen. As a fuel source, this produces two problems. The process uses natural gas and so does not reduce reliance on fossil fuels; and, because one byproduct is carbon dioxide, the process contributes to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the carbon footprint.
Craig A. Grimes, professor of electrical engineering, says their process splits water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen, and collects the products separately using commonly available titanium and copper. Splitting water for hydrogen production is an old and proven method, but in its conventional form, it requires previously generated electricity. Photolysis of water solar splitting of water has also been explored, but is not a commercial method yet.