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Fossilized hand and footprints have revealed that mankind lived on the Tibetan plateau at the height of the Ice Age -- 16,000 years earlier than anyone previously thought. The 19 fossilized signs of life have also cast doubt on the theory that the plateau was fully covered by a glacier one kilometer thick at that time. The 20,000 year-old prints, 85 kilometers (53 miles) from Lhasa, predates any archaeological evidence on the plateau and suggests that man may have migrated to the "roof of the world" extremely early on. At the arid and frigid site, 4,200 meters above sea level,...

The superstar couple are struggling to get bums on seats and UK fans are being handed freebies and upgrades The superstar couple have thousands of unsold tickets for their UK dates, forcing them to cover large sections of seating in the stadium venues. Fans outside their Glasgow concert reported being handed freebies while others said they were offered upgrades for nothing. One wrote on Twitter: “If you are near Hampden Park go to the main parking lot they are giving out free tickets for the Beyoncé & Jay Z concert because of empty seats.” Another tweeted: “Met Beyoncé’s security in...

<p>Lava from Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano has destroyed about 600 to 700 homes since it began flowing early last month and there's no sign of it stopping anytime soon, officials said Monday.</p> <p>Punctuating that point, Kilauea again erupted early Tuesday with a blast similar to a series of explosions that have sent towering columns of ash high above the island. A 5.3-magnitude earthquake accompanied the latest eruption.</p>

This Monday, June 4, 2018 photo shows a detailed figurine of a king's head on display at the Israel Museum, dating to biblical times, and found last year near Israel's northern border with Lebanon, in Jerusalem. A palm-sized enigmatic sculpture of a king's head dating back nearly 3,000 years has set off a modern-day mystery caper as scholars try to figure out whose face it depicts. The 5-centimeter (2-inch) head is an exceedingly rare example of figurative art from the Holy Land during the 9th century BC, a period associated with biblical kings. (AP Photo/Ilan Ben Zion) _________________________________________________________________________ An enigmatic...

The strain identified by the researchers was recovered from individuals in a double burial in the Samara region of Russia, who both had the same strain of the bacterium at death... this strain is the oldest sequenced to date that contains the virulence factors considered characteristic of the bubonic plague, and is ancestral to the strains that caused the Justinian Plague, the Black Death and the 19th century plague epidemics in China... caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis... The disease continues to affect populations around the world today. Despite its historical and modern significance, the origin and age of the...

Sometimes the most extraordinary finds occur by sheer luck. At least that was the case of a fourth century B.C. chamber tomb that came to light five weeks ago during the construction of an aqueduct in a Rome suburb, when an earthmover accidentally opened a hole in the side of the chamber... The tomb contained the remains of four occupants -- three men and a woman -- and funerary wares. Archaeologists are calling it "the Tomb of the Athlete" because of the presence of two bronze strigils, the instrument used by ancient Greek and Roman athletes to scrape sweat from...

Park and Tulare County swift-water rescue resources responded to the Kaweah River around midday after receiving a report that a visitor was swept down the middle fork of the river, according to a news release from the National Park Service. The man had gone into the river downslope of the park entrance sign parking lot, officials stated. Park rangers found the man and determined he had died... “With rising area temperatures, rivers look very inviting. Please stay away as they are swift, cold, and dangerous,” said Park Ranger Elizabeth Dietzen. … The man’s name was not immediately released, but park...

Pope Francis told leading oil executives Saturday that the transition to less-polluting energy sources “is a challenge of epochal proportions” and warned that satisfying the world’s energy needs “must not destroy civilization.” The Vatican said Francis held a two-day conference with the executives as a follow-up to his encyclical three years ago that called on people to save the planet from climate change and other environmental ills. Participants included the CEOs of Italian oil giant ENI, British Petroleum, ExxonMobil and Norway’s Statoil as well as scientists and managers of major investment funds. Their remarks on the first day of the...

As Volvo prepares to inaugurate its first United States-based manufacturing facility in South Carolina, the Swedish luxury marque announced it will also reveal the 2019 S60 sedan at the same location. The S60 will make its debut at the Charleston production facility on June 20. Motor Authority is scheduled to be on hand in Charleston for the reveal of the S60 and a tour of the new plant. The reveal is part of Volvo's shifting strategy around media events. Volvo issued a press release about that strategy on Friday. Rather than attend major auto shows, Volvo said it will plan...

Full Title: Bay City Rollers legend Alan Longmuir fights for life in Mexican hospital after contracting deadly virus on Cancun holiday The 69-year-old was on holiday in the country with his wife Eileen when he took ill and was taken to the Galenia Hospital BAY City Rollers legend Alan Longmuir has been rushed to hospital after falling seriously ill while on holiday. The guitarist is reportedly receiving specialist care at the Galenia Hospital in Cancun, Mexico. Longmuir, 69, had been enjoying a sunshine break with his wife Eileen before taking ill. A message shared on Facebook page Bay City Rollers...

The growing use of electrified vehicles is expected to cost Germany’s crucial car sector some 75,000 jobs by 2030, a study found Tuesday, with smaller auto parts suppliers set to be worst hit. The IG Metall union, which commissioned the study along with BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler and a string of car parts makers, said the pivot towards cleaner engines posed a “major challenge” to Germany’s biggest industry, which employs more than 800,000 people. Electric engines are simpler to build and require far fewer parts than petrol- or diesel-fueled cars. According to the study, carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute, the...

A new emissions study based on testing methods that are supposedly "difficult-to-impossible to cheat" has revealed that even the latest models of European diesel cars are bad polluters. The first such analysis since the 2015 Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, the results show more than 4,000 vehicle models exceeding nitrogen oxides (NOx) levels set by the European Union. The new rating system is known as The Real Urban Emissions Initiative (TRUE). With a data set of 375,000 individual cars from across Europe, TRUE uses a beam of light to study a car's exhaust plume. European cars are broken into numbered groups...

It's as easy to use as playing Minecraft," Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun said as we watched my colleague Rachel Crane pull on a motorcycle helmet. Rachel and I had just flown into Las Vegas for an exclusive first look at the Silicon Valley single-seat flying machine, Flyer. Kitty Hawk, funded by Google cofounder Larry Page and led by Thrun, a self-driving car pioneer, attracted nationwide attention when it teased its Flyer prototype last year. But now Rachel was suiting up to become the first reporter to take flight in a new, sleeker model -- no pilot license required. Expectedly,...

American Airlines Flight 1897 met a storm from hell on Sunday. Strong updrafts tossed the aircraft and thick hail battered its body. The incredible pictures of the plane's destroyed nose captured the world's attention. Meanwhile, though, observers on the ground captured another wild visual: the flight's meandering real-time path as pilots tried to navigate around the worst of the monster storm.

A German investment company said on Tuesday it would strip two unwanted Airbus A380 superjumbo passenger jets for parts after failing to find an airline willing to keep them flying following a decision by Singapore Airlines not to keep them in service... ...Throwing the loss-making program a lifeline for a decade, Emirates recently ordered up to 36 more A380s and set out plans on Tuesday to install 56 Premium Economy seats.

Archaeologists found a significant discovery at a Celtic sacrificial place near the village Slatina nad Bebravou. They discovered relief-decorated shoulder boards made from bronze that were part of a breastplate of a prominent Greek warrior. "It is the oldest original Greek art relic in the area of Slovakia," said deputy of director of Slovak Archaeological Institute in Nitra, Karol Pieta, as quoted by the SITA newswire. The relief was made in the Greek colony of Taranto in southern Italy in the middle of the fourth century BC. It came to Slovak territory about one hundred years later. "There is a...

SAN DIEGO -- Like their fellow Americans in the coastal town of Bahia de los Angeles on the Gulf of California, Jo Anne Butler and Ray Ball kept returning, year after year, drawn by the small-town feel, the area's stark natural beauty, the warm waters that lapped almost at their door, friends said. But the shooting deaths of the two U.S. retirees together with their dog early Saturday at their waterfront house south of town has shattered the tranquillity of this quiet community some 380 miles from the U.S. border. Sustained largely by tourism and fishing, Bahia has a year-round...

Southeastern Norway is the most populous part of Norway today. Based on an analysis of more than 150 settlements along Oslo Fjord, the area apparently also appealed to Stone Age people. Eleven thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age, Norway was buried under a thick layer of ice. But it didn't take long for folks to wander their way north as the ice sheet melted away. The first traces of human habitation in Norway date from roughly 9500 BC. Steinar Solheim is an archaeologist at the University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History who has worked...

If modern Icelanders came face-to-face with their founding fathers, they'd be hard-pressed to see much family resemblance, according to a new study. That's because today's Icelanders have a much higher proportion of Scandinavian genes than their distant ancestors did, suggesting the islanders underwent a remarkably rapid genetic shift over the past thousand years... Medieval histories suggest Iceland was first settled between 870 C.E. and 930 C.E. by seafaring Vikings and the people they enslaved, who possessed a mélange of genes from what is now Norway and the British Isles. For the next thousand years, the population of Iceland remained relatively...

Pope Francis will meet with some of the world’s oil executives next week, likely to give them another moral nudge to clean up their act on global warming. Climate change policy and science experts are cautiously hopeful but aren’t expecting any miracles or even noticeable changes. The conference will be a follow-up to the pope’s encyclical three years ago calling on people to save the planet from climate change and other environmental ills, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke confirmed Friday. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who spearheaded the encyclical, set up the June 8-9 conference with the executives. The pope himself will speak...