The first of four parts where Professor Bob Carter uses the scientific method on the popular theory with global warming being linked to CO2 levels. He examnines the hypothesis and it fails the test. Inconvenient Truth author Al Gore would find his presentation contradicted by this presentation? Will Kyoto`s greenhouse reduction goals be in vain? [Part 2 of 4] + [Part 3 of 4] + [Part 4 of 4]

MIT scientist Richard Lindzen explains his doubts about the dangers of global warming.

Pigs fed a combination of genetically modified soy and corn suffer more frequent severe stomach inflammation and enlargement of the uterus than those who eat a non-GM diet, according to a new peer-reviewed long-term feeding study published Tuesday in the Organic Systems Journal. The five-month study combined “real on-farm conditions” with “strict scientific controls,” according to lead researcher Judy Carman of Flinders University in Australia. Using pigs was important not only because “we eat them,” but because humans and pigs share similar digestive systems, Carman said in a statement.

William F. Jasper: The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is in trouble, and climate alarmists are hoping the much-ballyhooed report by Australian activist John Cook, released last week, will convince the public to be very afraid of global warming. The last few years have not been kind to the global-warming alarmists. In the 17th century, François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld is credited with famously quipping, “There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts.” Unfortunately, for the climate catastrophists, their pet theory (though hardly beautiful) has been slaughtered many times over by a brutal and relentless onslaught of facts. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, however, the global-warming alarmists keep coming back like the undead in a B-grade horror flick. William F. Jasper: Global Warming “Consensus”: Cooking the Books

Practically everything you have been told by the mainstream scientific community and the media about the alleged detriments of greenhouse gases, and particularly carbon dioxide, appears to be false, according to new data compiled by NASA's Langley Research Center. As it turns out, all those atmospheric greenhouse gases that Al Gore and all the other global warming hoaxers have long claimed are overheating and destroying our planet are actually cooling it, based on the latest evidence.

[PDF] Abstract: The search for ever deeper relationships among the World’s languages is bedeviled by the fact that most words evolve too rapidly to preserve evidence of their ancestry beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y. On the other hand, quantitative modeling indicates that some “ultraconserved” words exist that might be used to find evidence for deep linguistic relationships beyond that time barrier. Here we use a statistical model, which takes into account the frequency with which words are used in common everyday speech, to predict the existence of a set of such highly conserved words among seven language families of Eurasia postulated to form a linguistic superfamily that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000 y ago. We derive a dated phylogenetic tree of this proposed superfamily with a time-depth of ∼14,450 y, implying that some frequently used words have been retained in related forms since the end of the last ice age. Words used more than once per 1,000 in everyday speech were 7- to 10-times more likely to show deep ancestry on this tree. Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that might be preserved across wide spans of time and geography.

Washington Post: Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’

Washington Post: Words that last [Interactive/Multilingual] - A research team led by Mark Pagel at the University of Reading in England has identified 23 “ultraconserved words” that have remained largely unchanged for 15,000 years. Words that sound and mean the same thing in different languages are called “cognates”. These are five words that have cognates in at least four of the seven Eurasiatic language families. Those languages, about 700 in all, are spoken in an area extending from the British Isles to western China and from the Arctic to southern India. Only one word, “thou” (the singular form of “you”), has a cognate in all seven families.

Huge numbers of people on Earth are keen to leave the planet forever and seek a new life homesteading on Mars. - About 78,000 people have applied to become Red Planet colonists with the nonprofit organization Mars One since its application process opened on April 22, officials announced Tuesday. Mars One aims to land four people on the Red Planet in 2023 as the vanguard of a permanent colony, with more astronauts arriving every two years thereafter. "With 78,000 applications in two weeks, this is turning out to be the most desired job in history," Mars One Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Bas Lansdorp said in a statement. "These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants." Mars One estimates that landing four settlers on Mars in 2023 will cost about $6 billion. The Netherlands-based organization plans to pay most of the bills by staging a global reality-TV event, with cameras documenting all phases of the mission from astronaut selection to the colonists' first years on the Red Planet.

Berkeley Lab's sound-restoration experts have done it again. They've helped to digitally recover a 128-year-old recording of Alexander Graham Bell's voice, enabling people to hear the famed inventor speak for the first time. The recording ends with Bell saying "in witness whereof, hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell." Berkeley Lab's Carl Haber and Earl Cornell developed the noninvasive optical sound recovery technology that gave Bell's recording a second life. Their method is derived from work on instrumentation for particle physics experiments. It acquires high-resolution digital maps of the surface of audio media without touching them. It then applies image analysis methods to recover the data and reduce the noise of scratches and other damage. A few years ago, Haber and Cornell set up this technology at the Library of Congress, where it's used to digitally restore audio recordings that are too fragile to play. This analysis was conducted at Berkeley Lab earlier this year. The work required help from Engineering Division staff, who developed the gear and belt seen in the image above. This enabled the drum to be rotated at a slow, steady rate so it can be optically scanned.

On Monday, April 29, the Herschel Space Observatory exhausted its supply of ultra-cold liquid helium coolant, required to do its most sensitive observations. A ten-year period in which five telescopes gazed at the sky observing the heat of cosmic objects, rather than the light emitted, has come to an end.

Herschel was launched on May 14, 2009 from the European Space Agency launchpad in French Guiana carrying a a 3.5 meter (11.5 feet) mirror, the largest ever flown in space, and launched with over 2,300 liters of liquid helium to support at least a three year mission lifetime. The telescope observed wavelengths of light unobserved by previous instruments. Infrared astronomy is a useful probe of the Universe for three central reasons. Much of the universe is comprised of material which is cold, unlike the hot surface of stars. This is invisible in most of the electromagnetic spectrum unless illuminated by nearby hot objects, but is visible in the infrared. Cold clouds of gas and dust can be mapped directly through infrared observations. Much of the universe is also dusty, and dust extinguishes visible light. Infrared has the ability to reveal the details of events like stellar formation inside obscuring clouds. It permits a full and unbiased census of stellar formation even for extraordinarily distant galaxies. Finally, the universe is expanding, and the most distant objects appear to recede from us at enormous velocities. This shifts much of their emitted radiation towards the red and into the infrared.

The first chops, to the forehead, did not go through the bone and are perhaps evidence of hesitancy about the task. The next set, after the body was rolled over, was more effective. One cut split the skull all the way to the base.

“The person is truly figuring it out as they go,” said Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution.
In the meantime, someone — perhaps with more experience — was working on a leg. The tibia bone is broken with a single blow, as one might do in butchering a cow. That’s one possible version of an event that took place sometime during the winter of 1609-1610 in Jamestown. What’s certain is that some members of that desperate colony resorted to cannibalism to survive.

That cannibalism occurred during the colony’s “starving time” was never in much doubt. At least a half-dozen accounts, by people who lived through the period or spoke to colonists who did, describe occasional acts of cannibalism that winter. They include reports of corpses being exhumed and eaten, a husband killing his wife and salting her flesh (for which he was executed), and the mysterious disappearance of foraging colonists.

Washington Post/The Fold: Jamestown colony’s cannibal past - VIDEO

A lost ancient Egyptian city submerged beneath the sea 1,200 years ago is starting to reveal what life was like in the legendary port of Thonis-Heracleion.

For centuries it was thought to be a legend, a city of extraordinary wealth mentioned in Homer, visited by Helen of Troy and Paris, her lover, but apparently buried under the sea. In fact, Heracleion was true, and a decade after divers began uncovering its treasures, archaeologists have produced a picture of what life was like in the city in the era of the pharaohs. The city, also called Thonis, disappeared beneath the Mediterranean around 1,200 years ago and was found during a survey of the Egyptian shore at the beginning of the last decade. Now its life at the heart of trade routes in classical times are becoming clear, with researchers forming the view that the city was the main customs hub through which all trade from Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean entered Egypt.

They have discovered the remains of more than 64 ships buried in the thick clay and sand that now covers the sea bed. Gold coins and weights made from bronze and stone have also been found, hinting at the trade that went on. Giant 16 foot statues have been uncovered and brought to the surface while archaeologists have found hundreds of smaller statues of minor gods on the sea floor. Slabs of stone inscribed in both ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian have also been brought to the surface. Dozens of small limestone sarcophagi were also recently uncovered by divers and are believed to have once contained mummified animals, put there to appease the gods.

Dr Damian Robinson, director of the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Oxford, who is part of the team working on the site, said: “It is a major city we are excavating. “The site has amazing preservation. We are now starting to look at some of the more interesting areas within it to try to understand life there. “We are getting a rich picture of things like the trade that was going on there and the nature of the maritime economy in the Egyptian late period. There were things were coming in from Greece and the Phoenicians.

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.

The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are the super-Earth-sized planets. Two of the newly discovered planets orbit a star smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler-62f is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making it the exoplanet closest to the size of our planet known in the habitable zone of another star. Kepler-62f is likely to have a rocky composition. Kepler-62e, orbits on the inner edge of the habitable zone and is roughly 60 percent larger than Earth. The third planet, Kepler-69c, is 70 percent larger than the size of Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. Astronomers are uncertain about the composition of Kepler-69c, but its orbit of 242 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our neighboring planet Venus. Scientists do not know whether life could exist on the newfound planets, but their discovery signals we are another step closer to finding a world similar to Earth around a star like our sun. "The Kepler spacecraft has certainly turned out to be a rock star of science," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The discovery of these rocky planets in the habitable zone brings us a bit closer to finding a place like home. It is only a matter of time before we know if the galaxy is home to a multitude of planets like Earth, or if we are a rarity."

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions. - Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon. Getting this right is essential for the short and long-term planning of governments and businesses ranging from energy to construction, from agriculture to insurance. Many scientists say they expect a revival of warming in coming years.

Bob Carter, Willie Soon & William Briggs: Changing sun, changing climate

Music is used to regulate mood and arousal in everyday life and to promote physical and psychological health and well-being in clinical settings. However, scientific inquiry into the neurochemical effects of music is still in its infancy. In this review, we evaluate the evidence that music improves health and well-being through the engagement of neurochemical systems for (i) reward, motivation, and pleasure; (ii) stress and arousal; (iii) immunity; and (iv) social affiliation. We discuss the limitations of these studies and outline novel approaches for integration of conceptual and technological advances from the fields of music cognition and social neuroscience into studies of the neurochemistry of music.

An archaeological dig in the heart of the City "will transform our understanding" of Roman London, experts claim.

About 10,000 finds have been discovered, including writing tablets and good luck charms. The area has been dubbed the "Pompeii of the north" due to the perfect preservation of organic artefacts such as leather and wood. One expert said: "This is the site that we have been dreaming of for 20 years." Archaeologists expect the finds, at the three-acre site, to provide the earliest foundation date for Roman London, currently AD 47.

The site will house media corporation Bloomberg's European headquarters. It contains the bed of the Walbrook, one of the "lost" rivers of London, and features built-up soil waterfronts and timber structures, including a complex Roman drainage system used to discharge waste from industrial buildings. Organic materials such as leather and wood were preserved in an anaerobic environment, due to the bed being waterlogged.

If you talk to the global warming crowd, carbon dioxide -- CO2 -- is the enemy of mankind. Any and all creation of CO2 is bad for the planet, we're told, and its production must be strictly limited in order to save the world. But what if that wasn't true? What if CO2 were actually a planet-saving nutrient that could multiply food production rates and feed the world more nutritious, healthy plants? As it turns out, CO2 is desperately needed by food crops, and right now there is a severe shortage of CO2 on the planet compared to what would be optimum for plants. Greenhouse operators are actually buying carbon dioxide and injecting it into their greenhouses in order to maximize plant growth. The science on this is irrefutable. As just one example, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food says:

CO2 increases productivity through improved plant growth and vigour. Some ways in which productivity is increased by CO2 include earlier flowering, higher fruit yields, reduced bud abortion in roses, improved stem strength and flower size. Growers should regard CO2 as a nutrient.

Bob Carter, Willie Soon & William Briggs: Changing sun, changing climate

A pre-Viking woolen tunic found beside a thawing glacier in south Norway shows how global warming is proving something of a boon for archaeology, scientists said on Thursday. - The greenish-brown, loose-fitting outer clothing — suitable for a person up to about 5 feet, 9 inches tall (176 centimeters) — was found 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level on what may have been a Roman-era trade route in south Norway. Carbon dating showed it was made around the year 300. A Viking mitten dating from the year 800 and an ornate walking stick, a Bronze Age leather shoe, ancient bows, and arrowheads used to hunt reindeer are also among 1,600 artifacts found in Norway's southern mountains since thawing accelerated in 2006. The archaeologists said the tunic showed that Norway's Lendbreen glacier, where it was found, had not been so small since 300. When exposed to air, untreated ancient fabrics can disintegrate in weeks because of insect and bacteria attacks. "The tunic was well-used — it was repaired several times," said Marianne Vedeler, a conservation expert at Norway's Museum of Cultural History. The tunic is made of lamb's wool with a diamond pattern that had darkened with time. Only a handful of similar tunics have survived so long in Europe. The experts in Oslo said one puzzle was why anyone would take off a warm tunic by a glacier. One possibility was that the owner was suffering from cold in a snowstorm and grew confused with hypothermia, which sometimes makes suffers take off clothing because they wrongly feel hot.

With the release of the password to unlock the full 220,000 email treasure trove, the Climategate saga has entered a new phase. Joining us to discuss this latest development is Dr. Tim Ball of drtimball.com.

Climategate: Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails
It’s Time For The Person Who Leaked the CRU Emails To Step Forward
Climategate 3.0
Climategate 3.0 has occurred – the password has been released
Climategate: FOIA – The Man Who Saved The World

Philip Zimbardo knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge. Philip Zimbardo was the leader of the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment -- and an expert witness at Abu Ghraib. His book The Lucifer Effect explores the nature of evil; now, in his new work, he studies the nature of heroism.

Wall Street Journal: CIA Ramps Up "Role" in Iraq...
John Glaser: CIA Boosts Support for Iraqi Militias
Chris Floyd: A Low, Dishonest Decade: New Details for the Iraq War Crime Mosaic
Naomi Spencer: Guardian/BBC report lays out US policy of torture, murder in Iraq

Global warming activists and media outlets are hyping a new study published in Science that claims the Earth is experiencing unprecedented temperatures. See: New York Times: Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years & Associated Press: HEAT SPIKE UNLIKE ANYTHING IN 11,000 YEARS. But the new media touted study is "based on 'reconstructed data' from 73 data sites, pretended to cover space-time of 196 million sq. mi. and 11,300 years". Another way to view the same claims are as follows: Earth Cooler Today Than 28% of the Past 11,300 Years: 'This is a paper that was bound to cause lurid headlines along lines that Earth is warming faster than at any time during past 11,000 years'. The new study is also counter to a preponderance of existing peer-reviewed studies showing the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warming were both as warm or warmer than today without benefit of modern emissions or SUVs.

Tests of water samples from Antarctica's Lake Vostok have yielded a completely new class of bacteria, a Russian scientist has told reporters. - The frozen samples were brought up from under the Antarctic ice in May 2012. Sergei Bulat of St. Petersburg’s Nuclear Physics Institute said they collected a core sample of water frozen into the borehole. He said the probe contained bacteria that didn’t belong to any known phyla, which is the next ranking above a class in size. In May, the samples will be brought to the lab by the Akademik Feodorov icebreaker to confirm the discovery.

Iceland Spar - thought to be the material used
in Viking sunstones

A crystal found in a shipwreck could be similar to a sunstone - a mythical navigational aid said to have been used by Viking mariners, scientists believe. - The team from France say the transparent crystal may have been used to locate the Sun even on cloudy days. This could help to explain how the Vikings were able to navigate across large tracts of the sea - well before the invention of the magnetic compass. However, a number of academics treat the sunstone theory with scepticism. The team from the University of Rennes in France say they found the crystal while examining the wreck of a British ship sunk off the island of Alderney - in the English Channel - in 1592. An oblong crystal the size of a cigarette packet was next to a pair of dividers - suggesting it was part of the navigational equipment. It has now been shown that it is of Iceland spar - a form of calcite known for its property of diffracting light into two separate rays. Testing a similar crystal, the scientists proved that by rotation it was possible to find the point where the two beams converge - indicating the direction of the Sun. They say it works on cloudy days, and when the Sun has set.

KpopStarz: Legendary Viking Sunstone Found – What's Next, Atlantis?
Yahoo: Mythical Viking sunstone may have existed after all

Dr. Elhaik’s research shows that the dominant element in the genetic makeup of European Jews is Khazar. For Central European Jews it is 38%, while for East Europeans it is 30%.

On December 14, 2012, Dr. Eran Elhaik turned almost two generations of Jewish genome research upside down. But he went even further. The young Israeli-American geneticist has charged former researchers with academic fraud, and he has the research to back it up. How could those those eminent Jewish scientist before him have been so wrong? Easy says Dr. Elhaik, “First these researchers decided what conclusions they wanted to find, and then they set off to find evidence to support it.” I was not bashing Jewish scientists. What Elhaik has described is a slam dunk fraud. But why? Why would Jews who take such pride in the academic achievement risk exposing themselves to a group deception which was bound to be discovered later? Dr. Elhaik does not delve into the quicksand of the politics, but I will gladly do so. They perpetrated the fraud solely to support the bogus biblical claim to Palestine which was anchored in their being a separate people. This distinguished them from all others because they claimed a land title in their blood. They bet the farm on this DNA proof of purchase, a God given bar coded passport to the Palestine. Dr. Ehaik just erased the bar code. It was just stamped on anyway, because it was never in the blood. Dr. Elhaik’s research shows that the dominant element in the genetic makeup of European Jews is Khazar. For Central European Jews it is 38%, while for East Europeans it is 30%. To that you can add his findings that in both groups their genome is mostly Western European. Surprise, surprise. The Roman empire is the dominant lineage there, those that settled on the frontier, like retired soldiers, and the locals with whom they produced families. There were some Jewish merchants there as Elhaik did find some Middle Eastern roots which he suspects are Mesopotamian and a bit of biblical Israel. But here comes the slam dunk…the Israel connection is such a tiny part of their overall genome that it cancels out their DNA title claim to the Land. The good doctor would not wander into this swamp but I will, by calling a spade a spade. [H/T: xymphora: A short history of Polish colonialsim]

Eran Elhaik: The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses. (Eran Elhaik, Ph.D.) - Abstract: The question of Jewish ancestry has been the subject of controversy for over two centuries and has yet to be resolved. The “Rhineland hypothesis” depicts Eastern European Jews as a “population isolate” that emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastward and expanded rapidly. Alternatively, the “Khazarian hypothesis” suggests that Eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars, anamalgam of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries CE and converted to Judaism in the 8th century. Mesopotamian and Greco–Roman Jews continuously reinforced the Judaized empire until the 13th century. Following the collapse of their empire, the Judeo–Khazars fled to Eastern Europe. The rise of European Jewry is therefore explained by the contribution of the Judeo–Khazars. Thus far, however, the Khazars’ contribution has been estimated only empirically, as the absence of genome-wide data from Caucasus populations precluded testing the Khazarian hypothesis. Recent sequencing of modern Caucasus populations prompted us to revisit the Khazarian hypothesis and compare it with the Rhineland hypothesis. We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses to compare these two hypotheses. Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Near Eastern-Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry. We further describe a major difference among Caucasus populations explained by the early presence of Judeans in the Southern and Central Caucasus. Our results have important implications for the demographic forces that shaped the genetic diversity in the Caucasus and for medical studies.

Eran Elhaik: The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses. (Eran Elhaik, Ph.D.) - Discussion: (Pages 71-72) A major difficulty with the Rhineland hypothesis, in addition to the lack of historical and anthropological evidence to the multimigration waves from Palestine to Europe (Straten 2003; Sand 2009), is to explain the vast population expansion of Eastern European Jews from fifty thousand (15th century) to eight million (20th century). The annual growth rate that accounts for this population expansion was estimated at 1.7-2%, one order of magnitude larger than that of Eastern European non-Jews in the 15th-17th centuries, prior to the industrial revolution (Straten 2007). This growth could not possibly be the product of natural population expansion, particularly one subjected to severe economic restrictions, slavery, assimilation, the Black Death and other plagues, forced and voluntary conversions, persecutions, kidnappings, rapes, exiles, wars, massacres, and pogroms (Koestler 1976; Straten 2003; Sand 2009). Because such an unnatural growth rate, over half a millennium and affecting only Jews residing in Eastern Europe, is implausible - it is explained by a miracle (Atzmon et al. 2010; Ostrer 2012). Unfortunately, this divine intervention explanation poses a new kind of problem - it is not science. The question of how the Rhineland hypothesis, so deeply rooted in supernatural reasoning, became the dominant scientific narrative is debated among scholars (Sand 2009).

Scribd: Johns Hopkins Genome Study of Jewish Origins (The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses.) - Conclusions: We compared two genetic models for European Jewish ancestry depicting a mixed Khazarian-European-Middle Eastern and sole Middle Eastern origins. Contemporary populations were used as surrogate to the ancient Khazars and Judeans, and their relatedness to European Jews was compared over a comprehensive set of genetic analyses. Our findings support the Khazarian Hypothesis depicting a large Caucasus ancestry along with Southern European, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European ancestries, in agreement with recent studies and oral and written traditions. We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaized Khazars, Greco-Romans Jews, Mesopotamian Jews, and Judeans and that their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan.

The results of a new study indicate that suicide rates among veterans in the United States are increasing. - An estimated 22 military veterans take their lives every day in America, according to the study helmed by Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist and researcher who works with the Department of Veterans Affairs. “While the percentage of all suicides reported as Veterans has decreased, the number of suicides has increased,” the conclusion of the study stated. Specific trends were observed during the course of the study regarding the age and gender of veterans who most frequently committed suicide. [...] The study was conducted over the course of two years, and is, according to Bossarte, indicative mainly of veteran suicides playing a part in what is a national problem.

Skeleton found beneath Leicester car park confirmed as that of Richard III, as work begins on new tomb near excavation site

Not just the identity of the man in the car park with the twisted spine, but the appalling last moments and humiliating treatment of the naked body of Richard III in the hours after his death have been revealed at an extraordinary press conference at Leicester University. There were cheers when Richard Buckley, lead archaeologist on the hunt for the king's body, finally announced that the university team was convinced "beyond reasonable doubt" that it had found the last Plantagenet king, bent by scoliosis of the spine, and twisted further to fit into a hastily dug hole in Grey Friars church, which was slightly too small to hold his body. But by then it was clear the evidence was overwhelming, as the scientists who carried out the DNA tests, those who created the computer-imaging technology to peer on to and into the bones in raking detail, the genealogists who found a distant descendant with matching DNA, and the academics who scoured contemporary texts for accounts of the king's death and burial, outlined their findings. Work has started on designing a new tomb in the cathedral, only 100 yards from the excavation site, and Canon David Monteith said a solemn multifaith ceremony would be held to lay him into his new grave there, probably next year. Leicester's museums service is working on plans for a new visitor centre in an old school building overlooking the site.

Wikipedia: Richard III of England
The Search for King Richard III - The Genealogy - Video
University of Leicester: The search for Richard III - completed

A scientist has said it would be possible to clone a Neanderthal baby from ancient DNA if he could find a woman willing to act as a surrogate. - The process would not be legal in many countries and would involve using DNA extracted from fossils. George Church, a genetics professor of Harvard School of Medicine, said that the process was possible and that far from being brutal and primitive, Neanderthals were intelligent beings. They are believed to be one of the ancestors of modern man and became extinct 33,000 years ago. He added that altering the human genome could also provide the answers to curing diseases such as cancer and HIV, and hold the key to living to 120.

Self-control, not self-esteem, leads to academic success, researchers have concluded. Indeed, teaching self-esteem actually reduces student achievement and undermines the work ethic of some students. “In one study, university students who’d earned C, D and F grades ‘received encouragement aimed at boosting their self-worth.’ They did worse than students with similar grades whose self-esteem had been left alone. ‘An intervention that encourages [students] to feel good about themselves, regardless of work, may remove the reason to work hard,’” notes “Roy Baumeister, a Florida State professor who’s studied the topic for years. ‘Self-control is much more powerful and well-supported as a cause of personal success,’ he says.”

The two black holes are not supermassive black holes like the one at the centre of our galaxy, but they are still ten times more luminous than the normal stellar-mass black holes that pepper the space between the stars. - NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), has captured an image of two black holes in the spiral galaxy IC342 (also known as Caldwell 5). “These new images showcase why NuSTAR is giving us an unprecedented look at the cosmos,” said Lou Kaluzienski, NuSTAR program scientist in a release. “With NuSTAR’s greater sensitivity and imaging capability, we’re getting a wealth of new information on a wide array of cosmic phenomena in the high-energy X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.” The NuSTAR is the first telescope in orbit that can focus on high-energy X-Ray emissions, which allows it to get a much clearer picture of distant stellar phenomena. Galaxy IC342 is 7 million light-years away from Earth. “High-energy X-rays hold a key to unlocking the mystery surrounding these objects,” Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said in a statement. “Whether they are massive black holes, or there is new physics in how they feed, the answer is going to be fascinating.” In the NuSTAR image (above), the two points of purple indicate the presence of black holes. The purple indicates X-rays while the rest of the image is represents visible light. “Before NuSTAR, high-energy X-ray pictures of this galaxy and the two black holes would be so fuzzy that everything would appear as one pixel,” said Harrison.

The country that oversaw the launch of the world's first artificial satellite hopes to regain some of its former glory with a big boost in space spending announced by Russia on Thursday after a series of failures. - Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($68.71 billion) on developing Russia's space industry from 2013 to 2020, state-run RIA news agency reported. "The programme will enable our country to effectively participate in forward-looking projects, such as the International Space Station (ISS), the study of the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies in the solar system," Medvedev was quoted as saying. Despite the launch by the former Soviet Union of Sputnik 1 in 1957, triggering the Cold War space race, Russia's space programme has suffered a series of humiliating setbacks in the past year.

The Canadian government has reportedly ordered the scientific journals of the country not to publish articles authored by Iranian researchers and scientists. - Iranian academics, who had primarily received an acceptance from the journals, have received new messages that notified them of the journals' decision not to publish their work due to recent policies adopted by the Canadian government. In a recent move, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research refused to publish an article by an Iranian assistant professor despite the earlier acceptance of the article. The journal argued that it "will not be permitted to publish" the article as previously stated, citing the political and non-academic reasons. It said that Ottawa had closed down its mission in Tehran for what it called the “civil rights abuse of the citizens of Iran” and “the threat to the security of Canadian personnel and Israel.”