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The oldest known skeleton showing signs of leprosy has been found in India and may help solve the puzzle of where the disease originated.

The skeleton, about 4,000 years old, was found at the site of Balathal, near Udaipur in northwestern India. Historians have long considered the Indian subcontinent to be the source of the leprosy that was first reported in Europe in the fourth century B.C., shortly after the armies of Alexander the Great returned from India. Read the rest of this entry »

The head was rebuilt in clay based on an incomplete skull and jawbone discovered in a cave in the south west of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania by potholers.

Using radiocarbon analysis scientists say the man or woman, it is still not possible to determine the sex, lived between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago.

Europe was then occupied by both Neanderthal man, who had been in the region for thousands of years, and anatomically-modern humans – Homo sapiens. Read the rest of this entry »

Hundreds of massive black holes left over from the early universe may wander the Milky Way, according to new calculations.

These rogue black holes are thought to have originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way.

The idea of such wandering black holes has been suggested before, but a new computer simulation calculated that hundreds of them should be left over, and predicted that they might now be shrouded by small star clusters. Read the rest of this entry »

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.

Proteins such as collagen are far more durable than DNA, but they had not been expected to last the 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out. So palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University attracted wide attention when she reported finding first soft tissue and later collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone that was intact until it was broken during excavation. Read the rest of this entry »

An employee of a New York jeweler stole 513 pounds of gold from the firm over five years, taking one small piece at a time hidden in her purse, police allege.

Authorities said Wednesday that Teresa Tambunting, 50, of Scarsdale, N.Y., a longtime employee of Jacmel Jewelry, brought a suitcase filled with 66 pounds of gold worth an estimated $868,000 back into the company’s office after an investigation was launched in January, The New York Times reported. Authorities allegedly found another 447 pounds of stolen gold at the vault manager’s home in February, the newspaper said. Read the rest of this entry »

Egypt began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country Wednesday as a precautionary measure against the spread of swine flu even though no cases have been reported here yet, the Health Ministry said.

The move immediately provoked resistance from pig farmers. At one large pig farming center just north of Cairo, farmers refused to cooperate with Health Ministry workers who came to slaughter the animals and the workers left without carrying out the government order.

“It has been decided to immediately start slaughtering all the pigs in Egypt using the full capacity of the country’s slaughterhouses,” Health Minister Hatem el-Gabaly told reporters after a Cabinet meeting with President Hosni Mubarak. Read the rest of this entry »

WATERFORD TOWNSHIP, Mich. – Tinker Bell has been reunited with her owners after a 70-mph gust of wind picked up the six-pound Chihuahua and tossed her out of sight. Dorothy and Lavern Utley credit a pet psychic for guiding them on Monday to a wooded area nearly a mile from where 8-month-old Tinker Bell had been last seen. The brown long-haired dog was dirty and hungry but otherwise OK.

The Utleys, of Rochester, had set up an outdoor display Saturday at a flea market in Waterford Township, 25 miles northwest of Detroit. Tinker Bell was standing on their platform trailer when she was swept away.

Dorothy Utley tells The Detroit News that her cherished pet “just went wild” upon seeing her.

Meet the child known as “patient zero” by his doctors — 5-year-old Edgar Hernandez, who survived the earliest documented case of swine flu in an outbreak that, officials say, has now spread across four continents.

His family lives in the 3,000-population village of La Gloria in the state of Veracruz, where a flu outbreak was reported on April 2. State officials arrived and tested dozens of people.

Lab tests confirmed that Edgar was the only patient in Veracruz to test positive for the swine flu virus; the others had contracted a common flu. Health officials had returned to Edgar’s sample only after cases of the new flu strain were spotted around the country. Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers excavating a coal mine in South America have found the fossilized remains of the mother of all snakes, a nightmarish tropical behemoth as long as a school bus and as heavy as a Volkswagen Beetle.

At 2,500 pounds, Titanoboa could eat crocodiles. It lived after dinosaurs died out.

Modern boas and anacondas, which average less than 20 feet in length and reach a maximum of 30 feet, have been known to swallow Chihuahuas, cats and other small pets, but this prehistoric monster ate giant turtles and primitive crocodiles. Read the rest of this entry »

A faint gamma-ray burst (GRB) captured last Thursday by NASA’s Swift satellite has smashed the record for the earliest, most-distant known object in the universe.

The burst, named GRB 090423 for its discovery date, went off in Leo and was seen to last for 10 seconds. Several teams, including a group using the Gemini-North telescope in Hawaii and a European group using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, followed up the Swift detection by observing the burst’s fading infrared afterglow. Based on how much the afterglow’s light was stretched by cosmic expansion since the era when the burst happened, the group determined that it went off about 630 million years after the Big Bang. Read the rest of this entry »

Serbian union official who chopped off his finger and ate it in a protest over wages that in some cases have not been paid in years, said Monday he did it to show how desperate he and other workers were.

“We, the workers have nothing to eat, we had to seek some sort of alternative food and I gave them an example,” Zoran Bulatovic said. “It hurt like hell.”

Bulatovic, a union leader at the Raska Holding textile factory in Novi Pazar in southwest Serbia, used a hacksaw to cut off most of his left-hand little finger Friday. Read the rest of this entry »

Two space probes are to be sent to explore the Sun, in an attempt to get closer to the centre of the star than any previous mission.

The spacecraft will travel more than 70 million miles to one of the least hospitable regions of our solar system, where temperatures are hot enough to melt metal and intense radiation along with chaotic magnetic fields can tear manmade structures apart.

Scientists hope the missions will help them answer a long list of questions that still exist about the sun, including why its outer atmosphere is hotter than its surface, and what causes solar wind, sun spots and flares. Read the rest of this entry »

$62,000 to download a movie? That’s what happened to Alberto Fiore. Alberto made the grave mistake of downloading Wall-E for his nephew while vacationing in Mexico over his data card and was slapped with a $62,000 bill from his wireless carrier when he returned home.

Alberto tried to contest the charge and the carrier reduced the bill to $17,000, arguing that the five-figure charge was what it cost them to deliver the movie.
Read the rest of this entry »

PORTLAND, Oregon – An Oregon identity thief who wrote songs about his exploits was sentenced to 13 years in prison because of his long criminal record and lack of remorse.

Stephen Rowell, 28, who adopted the alias The Mailman, had a folder of songs in his home when police searched it, along with more prosaic evidence like credit card numbers, The Portland Oregonian reported Thursday. One song described his methods. Read the rest of this entry »

POLLICA, Italy – The Italian town of Pollica will soon offer Web cam services that enable people worldwide to check on the graves of their loved ones, Mayor Angelo Vassallo said.

Vassallo said because of numerous requests from tourists to be buried in the southern Italian town, the decision was made to sell tombs equipped with video and audio equipment, the Italian news agency, ANSA, reported Thursday.

The mayor said the technology will include a camera that pans the town’s graveyard while offering glimpses into the area’s scenery. Read the rest of this entry »

A lack of sunspots and solar flares has made the Sun its dimmest for nearly a century, claim scientists.

The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity.

At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period.

Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity. Read the rest of this entry »

The graceful robotic penguins were unveiled by German engineering firm Festo this week.

Using their flippers, the mechanical penguins can paddle through water just like real ones, while larger helium-filled designs can “swim” through the air. The penguins are on show at the Hannover Messe Trade Exhibition in Germany.

Each penguin carries 3D sonar developed by EvoLogics in Berlin, Germany, which is used to monitor its surroundings and avoid collisions with walls or other penguins. Read the rest of this entry »

Sharp and Japanese network KDDI have a come up with the world’s first solar-powered waterproof cell phone.

The phone, scheduled for a June release in Japan, can nab one minute of talk time or two hours of standby power from ten minutes of sun.

The phone can derive 80% of its charge in total from solar power.

Details on Sharp’s phone are scant, with pricing yet to be released.

The company hasn’t given a timeline on when the phone will be unveiled in the U.S., but Sharp’s cell phone will beat both Samsung and LG’s solar-powered models to market.

EL PASO, Texas – Santos says he became one of the thousands of American and Mexican teenagers recruited into the dangerous world of drug smuggling.

Santos’ journey into the underworld of teenage drug smuggling offers a glimpse into how drug cartels lure teenagers into doing their dirty work.

They’re often called mules. These teenagers are usually hired only to smuggle drug loads across the border. It’s a short drive or walk that offers quick cash but can carry serious consequences. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, were searching space for evidence of amino acids: the basic chemicals from which life is created.

They told the Guardian newspaper that, despite failing to locate any such aminos, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries. Read the rest of this entry »

Fourteen thoroughbred horses dropped dead in a mysterious scene Sunday before a polo match near West Palm Beach, Florida, officials said.

State and local veterinary teams are trying to figure out what happened at the International Polo Club Palm Beach in Wellington, Florida, as team Lechuza Caracas prepared to compete in a U.S. Open match.

Two horses initially collapsed, and as vets and team officials scrambled to revive them, five others became dizzy, said Tim O’Connor, spokesman for the polo club. Read the rest of this entry »

Injaz, or Achievement, was unveiled to the world alongside her surrogate mother five days after being born at the city’s Camel Reproduction Centre.

“This is the first time scientists have cloned a camel calf,” the scientific director of the central veterinary research laboratory, Dr Ulrich Wernery, said. “She is a healthy female.”

The project had the personal backing of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, best known in Britain as one of the world’s leading racehorse owners. Read the rest of this entry »

A boat floats in Argentino Lake near the Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park in Santa Cruz province in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina.

Swiss officials say they are powerless to act against identical twins who have run-up hundreds of parking tickets and blamed each other for the offences.

They say they cannot punish Harold and Michael Lengen, 38, for parking offences committed while driving around Winterthur.

Police say that in the last year alone the twins have collected 29 parking tickets on a car which they both share.

But every time they refuse to pay them and tell courts that the other was driving. Read the rest of this entry »