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A gene study has shown that incomers could have ousted Stone Age Britons During the building of Stonehenge, around 2500BC, gene records show Stone Age Britons were replaced by Bronze Age Beaker folk. The men and women who built Stonehenge left an indelible mark on the British landscape. However, researchers have discovered that their impact on other aspects of the nation may have been less impressive. In particular, their input into Britain’s gene pool appears to have fizzled out, having been terminated by light-skinned Bronze Age invaders who arrived just as Ancient Britons were midway through their great Stone Age...

A false alarm that went out to some people’s television sets Tuesday might have scared some in New Jersey. A nuclear power plant warning issued in Cumberland and Salem counties was sent out by mistake.

Shortly after Neil Armstrong took "one giant leap for mankind" by stepping on the surface of the moon, he did what any tourist does: He collected a souvenir. Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the lunar surface, scooped some lunar rocks into a bag, then placed it into another bag, and put it in the pocket of his space suit. From there, the outer sample bag, containing traces of moon dust, took a long and torturous path before it was mistakenly put out to public auction and scooped up by a suburban Chicago lawyer for $995. Now, the...

The lineage of humans and apes possibly split at a point several hundred thousand years earlier than currently assumed — and in the eastern Mediterranean rather than sub-Saharan Africa, a German research team claim. After studying the only two fossils found that belong to the hominid Graecopithecus freybergi, researchers at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP) in Tübingen came to the remarkable conclusion announced on Monday, and set to be published in the PLOS One magazine. Hominids include humans and our ancestors, plus apes and their predecessors. Scientists have still to definitively prove when the lineage of...

Scientific evidence refuting the theory of modern humanity’s African genesis is common knowledge among those familiar with the most recent scientific papers on the human Genome, Mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes. Regrettably, within mainstream press and academia circles, there seems to be a conspicuous – and dare we say it – deliberate vacuum when it comes to reporting news of these recent studies and their obvious implications.

T he history of human evolution has been rewritten after scientists discovered that Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa.  Currently, most experts believe that our human lineage split from apes around seven million years ago in central Africa, where hominids remained for the next five million years before venturing further afield. But two fossils of an ape-like creature which had human-like teeth have been found in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2 million years ago. The discovery of the creature, named Graecopithecus freybergi, and nicknameded ‘El Graeco' by scientists, proves our ancestors were already starting to evolve in...

If humans ever want to live permanently in space, they will need to make sure they and any farm animals they bring with them can reproduce, said study senior author Teruhiko Wakayama, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamanashi in Kofu, Japan, and his colleagues. However, outer space is dangerous. For instance, the average daily radiation dose on the International Space Station (ISS) is more than 100 times higher than that on Earth, and could damage the sperm and eggs that give rise to most animal offspring, the researchers said. To examine the damage that space radiation could do...

The latest file revealed in WikiLeaks' Vault 7 catalog of CIA hacking toolkit is Athena, a surveillance tool apparently designed to capture communications from Windows XP to Windows 10 machines. Details of the Athena malware are available in a document allegedly created by the CIA in November 2015. The malware is said to have been made in conjunction with US cybersecurity firm Siege Technologies, which was acquired by Nehemiah Security late last year. Athena is the ninth Vault 7 release of CIA hacking tools for mobile and desktop systems. WikiLeaks has been revealing one tool at the end of each...

Earlier today, MetOcean Solutions' wave buoy in the Southern Ocean recorded a whopping 19.4 m wave. Senior Oceanographer Dr Tom Durrant is thrilled. "This is one of the largest waves recorded in the Southern Hemisphere," he explains. "This is the world's southern-most wave buoy moored in the open ocean, and we are excited to put it to the test in large seas."

Wi-Fi can pass through walls. This fact is easy to take for granted, yet it's the reason we can surf the web using a wireless router located in another room. But not all of that microwave radiation makes it to (or from) our phones, tablets, and laptops. Routers scatter and bounce their signal off objects, illuminating our homes and offices like invisible light bulbs. Now, German scientists have found a way to exploit this property to take holograms, or 3D photographs, of objects inside a room — from outside it. "It can basically scan a room with someone's Wi-Fi transmission,"...

The perplexing cosmic object known as "Boyajian's star" is once again exhibiting a mysterious pattern of dimming and brightening that scientists have tried to explain with hypotheses ranging from swarms of comets to alien megastructures. On Friday, an urgent call went out to scientists around the world to turn as many telescopes as possible toward the star, to try and crack the mystery of its behavior.

It's hard to imagine, given the full diversity of forms that matter takes in this Universe, that for millions of years, there were only neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium gas. It's perhaps equally hard to imagine that someday, quadrillions of years from now, all the stars will have gone dark. Only the remnants of our now-vibrant Universe will be left, including some of the most spectacular objects of all: black holes. But even they won't last forever. David Weber wants to know how that happens for this week's Ask Ethan, inquiring: What happens when a black hole has lost...

Robots are set to make up a quarter of Dubai's police by 2030 - and Robocop is the first The "world's first operational Robocop" has been unveiled in Dubai as part of the emirate's planned robot police force. Robocop started work on Sunday and is already making a name for itself. At 5ft 5in tall and weighing 100kg, it can speak six languages and is designed to read facial expressions. It had an easy start to working life, being unveiled at the three-day long Gulf Information Security Expo and Conference. But when the Expo draws to a close tomorrow, it...

[FULL TITLE had to be edited because it wouldn't 'take': Hepatitis danger from Full English breakfast... caused by EU meat: Sausage bug has been dubbed ‘the Brexit virus’] Tens of thousands of people are being infected with a potentially deadly illness after eating imported meat riddled with what has been described as 'Brexit virus'.    The strain of hepatitis E, which used to be mainly a tropical disease but has now mutated to infect livestock, causes a flu-like illness and in severe circumstances, could cause death. Experts predict 10 per cent of pork imported from Europe has the strain and...

My wonderful step-father (WW2 Vet) is experiencing delusions. He has Macular Dejeneration and Dementia. Noticed, today, he thinks people are "in the household ". Very agitated. Talked to many "people" in the room.

A famous feature near the summit of Mount Everest, known as the Hillary Step, has collapsed, potentially making the world's highest peak even more dangerous for climbers. Last year, pictures appeared to show a change in shape to the 12-metre rocky outcrop, named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to scale the mountain. It is thought to have been destroyed in Nepal's 2015 earthquake, but snow coverage made the news hard to confirm. British mountaineer Tim Mosedale confirmed the collapse after he reached the summit this week. "It's official — The Hillary Step is no more," he said in...

AbstractAbstract The history of the life–Earth system can be divided into five ‘energetic’ epochs, each featuring the evolution of life forms that can exploit a new source of energy. These sources are: geochemical energy, sunlight, oxygen, flesh and fire. The first two were present at the start, but oxygen, flesh and fire are all consequences of evolutionary events. Since no category of energy source has disappeared, this has, over time, resulted in an expanding realm of the sources of energy available to living organisms and a concomitant increase in the diversity and complexity of ecosystems. These energy expansions have...

It's a mystery that has intrigued Norway for nearly 50 years. In November 1970, the badly burnt body of a woman was found in a remote spot in Norway's Isdalen valley. Someone had cut the labels off her clothes, and scraped distinctive marks off her belongings - as if to stop her from being identified. And as police started investigating her death, they uncovered a trail of coded messages, disguises, and fake identities - but never cracked the case. Forty-six years later, Norwegian police and NRK journalists have decided to reopen the investigation. This is the story of the Isdal...

To understand this problem, one needs to wrap one’s head around some celestial rotations. Our planet orbits the sun, which, in turn, orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Inside solar systems, the gravitational pull from the mass of the sun and the speed of the planets are in balance. By Newton’s laws, this is why Mercury, the innermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at over 100,000 miles per hour, while the outermost plant, Neptune, is crawling at just over 10,000 miles per hour. Now, you might assume that the same logic would apply to galaxies:...

The paper-thin material is called a ferroelectret nanogenerator, or FENG, and it works by converting electrical energy to mechanical energy on a very precise and very small scale. The technology is bidirectional, too. Run in “reverse,” the material can turn mechanical energy back into electrical energy. As such, FENG materials can work as a microphone, converting physical energy of sound waves back into electrical impulses. Researcher Nelson Sepulveda said the material was originally developed as a fabric that would generate power from repetitive movement. “The first intention was to harvest electricity from human motion and use it to power wearable...