Anthropologists have unearthed the leftovers of the world's first known organized feast, which took place around 12,000 years ago at a burial site in Israel, according to a new study.

Based on the findings, approximately 35 guests ate meat from 71 tortoises and at least three wild cattle while attending this first known human-orchestrated event involving food.

The discovery additionally provides the earliest known compelling evidence for a shaman burial, the apparent reason for the feasting. A shaman is an individual who performs rituals and engages in other practices for healing or divination.

Earlier this week, a television commercial advertising medicinal marijuana was aired in California – the first ever broadcast in the U.S. The ad was shown over Fox affiliate KTXL in Sacramento, and has swirled up a nice little cloud of controversy from community members who worry about the commercial's effect on children. The ad itself features a series of testimonials from customers, all A-typical of our drug culture stereotypes: A pretty young woman claims she was diagnosed with a bone disease, while a middle-aged woman says she was hit by a drunk driver.

Today, the administration of psychoactive drugs to children (6-17) is all too common and growing at an alarming rate. These drugs often cause the opposite of the intended effect, often condemning children to a life of misery and ill health. The prescription of these drugs is said to treat "chemical imbalances" which were said to cause ADHD, Depression and Bi-polar disorder. It turns out, however, that what we were calling "disease-causing chemical imbalances," is simply incorrect . The sad irony is, the inappropriate use of these medications is in fact creating different chemical imbalances, which do cause mental disorders, many of which are both life-long and debilitating.

A Japanese rocket unfurled a 300-metre-long ribbon in space on Monday, testing technology that could one day allow spacecraft to navigate by surfing Earth's magnetic field.

Conventional spacecraft have to burn fuel to manoeuvre in orbit. But the fuel adds weight and cost to the launch and eventually gets used up, limiting the probes' lifetime.

In principle, it is possible to propel an orbiting spacecraft without fuel by using a long piece of metal to interact with the magnetic field surrounding our planet. "You're essentially pushing against the Earth's magnetic field," says Les Johnson of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Anthropologists have unearthed the leftovers of the world's first known organized feast, which took place around 12,000 years ago at a burial site in Israel, according to a new study.

Based on the findings, approximately 35 guests ate meat from 71 tortoises and at least three wild cattle while attending this first known human-orchestrated event involving food.

The discovery additionally provides the earliest known compelling evidence for a shaman burial, the apparent reason for the feasting. A shaman is an individual who performs rituals and engages in other practices for healing or divination.

Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking famously declared that a "theory of everything" was on the horizon, with a 50 per cent chance of its completion by 2000. Now it is 2010, and Hawking has given up. But it is not his fault, he says: there may not be a final theory to discover after all. No matter; he can explain the riddles of existence without it.

The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow, is Hawking's first popular book in almost a decade. It duly covers the growth of modern physics (quantum mechanics, general relativity, modern cosmology) sprinkled with the wild speculation about multiple universes that seems mandatory in popular works these days.

Fossils of a new type of dinosaur, which looks like a beefy version of the predatory Velociraptor, have been unearthed in Romania.

The stocky dinosaur lived some 70 million years ago; higher sea levels at this time would have made the region an island archipelago.

The animal is also notable for the two large and sharp claws on each foot; Velociraptor had just one.

It may have used these to rip apart its prey scientists believe.

WHAT glows yellow and behaves like a liquid and a solid at the same time? Water - at least in the strange form it appears to take deep within Uranus and Neptune. This exotic stuff might help explain why both planets have bizarre magnetic fields.

Simulations in 1999 and an experiment in 2005 hinted that water might behave like both a solid and a liquid at very high pressures and temperatures. Under such conditions, the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the water molecules would become ionised, with the oxygen ions forming a lattice-like crystal structure and the hydrogen ions able to flow through the lattice like a liquid. This "superionic" water, forming at temperatures above 2000 °C or so, should glow yellow.

East Coast residents are bracing for this monster, headed their way with 125-mph winds, as a fleet of NASA satellites and airplanes monitors its evolution.

As of Wednesday morning, Hurricane Earl was a Category 3 storm, but an especially large one. Storm-force winds extend 200 miles from its eye, seen above in a photo snapped from the International Space Station.

NASA scientists are flying airplanes into this swirling mass, measuring the hurricane’s wind speeds, precipitation and more.

A particularly mind-bending (and controversial) physics paper surfaced in the past week that should make you feel pretty special. It seems the laws of physics can change after all, and it just so happens they're uniquely suited for us right here, right now.

The paper, recently submitted to Physical Review Letters and posted to the physics arXiv, suggests the fine structure constant is not actually constant at all. This could mean that if we were in a different place or time period, atoms would not stay together and nothing — neither planets nor people — could exist.

A team led by John Webb at the University of New South Wales, Australia, has been studying whether the fine structure constant, otherwise known as alpha, changes over time.

Plants are extremely efficient converters of light into energy, more or less setting the bar for researchers creating photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. As such, researchers are constantly trying to mimic the tricks that millions of years of evolution and development have taught to plant biology. Now, a team of MIT scientists believe they’ve done it, creating a synthetic, self-assembling chloroplast that can be broken down and reassembled repeatedly, restoring solar cells that are damaged by the sun.

While the leaves on a tree appear to be as static as the PV cells on a solar panel, they’re not; sunlight is actually quite destructive, and to counter this effect leaves rapidly recycle their proteins as often as every 45 minutes when in direct summer sunlight.

Evolution has been caught in the act, according to scientists who are decoding how a species of Australian lizard is abandoning egg-laying in favor of live birth.

Along the warm coastal lowlands of New South Wales (map), the yellow-bellied three-toed skink lays eggs to reproduce. But individuals of the same species living in the state's higher, colder mountains are almost all giving birth to live young.

Only two other modern reptiles—another skink species and a European lizard—use both types of reproduction. (Related: "Virgin Birth Expected at Christmas—By Komodo Dragon.")

Wouldn't it be convenient if Red Bull could recharge your phone just as it recharges you? Researchers at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society today revealed the creation of a new breed of battery-like device that's more like the mitochondria that fuel biological cells than the anode-cathode batteries that charge our devices. As such, it could power our cell phones or other portable electronics with sugary drinks or other energy-storing media like vegetable oils.

The technology is actually as old as the beginnings of life itself, but the research represents the first working fuel cell that produces power in such a way. The new biofuel cell borrows from the mitochondria that power our bodies' own cells. Mitochondria, you'll remember from high school biology, are the powerhouses of the cell, converting sugars or fats into adenosine triphosphate -- or ATP -- which stores the energy until the cell needs to burn it.

The new fuel cell is still in prototype, but the researchers have demonstrated it in the lab. It essentially consists of a thin layer of mitochondria pressed between two electrodes, one of which is gas-permeable. In tests, cooking oil byproducts and sugar both produced electricity.

After more than a decade of work, scientists have completed a 3-D atomic-scale map of a virus that causes the common cold. It's the largest virus ever mapped. The map could help scientists re-engineer the virus for gene therapy, as well as to create possible treatments for cancer and other ailments. Robotic systems, an advanced x-ray, and years of patience made it possible.

The human adenovirus family, which is responsible for a host of ailments ranging from colds to gastrointestinal disorders, is quite good at making us sick because adenoviruses can infect many types of cells. For several years, scientists have tried to use adenoviruses as a vector to carry therapeutic genes into cells, mostly for treating cancer and cardiovascular disease. Understanding its structure, including how it disassembles when it enters a cell, could help scientists design better vectors.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2010) — The cave bear started to become extinct in Europe 24,000 years ago, but until now the cause was unknown. An international team of scientists has analysed mitochondrial DNA sequences from 17 new fossil samples, and compared these with the modern brown bear. The results show that the decline of the cave bear started 50,000 years ago, and was caused more by human expansion than by climate change.

"The decline in the genetic diversity of the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) began around 50,000 years ago, much earlier than previously suggested, at a time when no major climate change was taking place, but which does coincide with the start of human expansion," says Aurora Grandal-D'Anglade, co-author of the study and a researcher at the University Institute of Geology of the University of Coruña.

According to the research study, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, radiocarbon dating of the fossil remains shows that the cave bear ceased to be abundant in Central Europe around 35,000 years ago.

A new drug may change the landscape of melanoma treatment, offering patients a treatment option that goes beyond anything previously used against the skin cancer, new research shows. Tests in people whose melanoma had spread show the drug was able to shrink tumors in most patients and, in a few cases, even wiped the growths out, scientists report in the Aug. 26 New England Journal of Medicine. The compound targets the protein encoded by a mutated version of the BRAF gene that underlies melanoma in roughly half of all patients.

1883: Krakatau volcano in the Dutch East Indies roars to life with a volley of ever-increasing explosions. It will culminate the next morning with the loudest explosion in human history.

Krakatau (aka Krakatoa) had been rumbling and sending up puffs of ash since May 1883. The eruption turned deadly on the afternoon of Aug. 26, with the first explosion coming at 1 p.m. A column of black ash soon rose 17 miles into the sky above the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

IT IS time to start asking the hard questions. Countless people in flood-stricken Pakistan have lost families and livelihoods. Who can they hold responsible and turn to for reparations?

Less than a decade ago, these questions would have been dismissed outright. "Many scientists at the time said that you can never blame an individual weather event on climate change," says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford. But a small meeting of scientists in Colorado last week - organised by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, among others - suggests the tide is turning.

Every cloud has a silver lining: wet weather could soon be harnessed as a power source, if a team of chemists in Brazil is to be believed.

In 1840, workers in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, reported painful electric shocks when they came into close contact with steam leaking from factory boilers. Both Michael Faraday and Alessandro Volta puzzled over the mysterious phenomenon, dubbed steam electricity, but it was ultimately forgotten without being fully understood.

Fernando Galembeck at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil, is one of a small number of researchers who thinks there is a simple explanation, but it involves accepting that water can store charge – a controversial idea that violates the principle of electroneutrality.

Family doctors could instantly detect a raft of diseases – from breast cancer to MRSA – using a cheap hand-held device being developed by the UK-based R&D company Cambridge Consultants.

The CliniHub, now in its early stages of development in partnership with XenBio Fluidics of San Diego, California, centres on a cheap detector that senses a telltale fluorescent glow from a raft of disease markers that the developers say will be the subject of patent applications.