Daily alternative news articles at the News Desk for GrahamHancock.com. Featuring alternative history, science, archaeology, ancient egypt, paranormal & supernatural, environment, and much more. Check in daily for updates!

More Canadians say they are seeing unidentified flying objects than ever before, with 2012 numbers nearly doubling the record number of sightings recorded in previous years.

In 2012, there were 1,981 sightings, nearly doubling the previous annual record of 1,004 sightings recorded in 2008. There were record numbers of UFOs reported in every province last year except for Saskatchewan and P.E.I.

“It’s something across the board,” said Rutkowski. “People in Canada were actually looking up into the sky more than in previous years.”.

Electric cars may still play second fiddle to gas-guzzlers here on Earth, but they've dominated the Martian driving scene for more than a decade.

NASA's tiny Sojourner rover hit the red dirt in 1997, followed by the golf-cart-size twins Spirit and Opportunity in 2004. And last August, the 1-ton Curiosity rover dropped in to determine whether Mars could ever have supported microbial life.

All three generations of six-wheeled NASA rovers have used electric power systems of various design and complexity to find their way around the Red Planet.

As suicide rates climb steeply in the US a growing number of psychiatrists are arguing that suicidal behaviour should be considered as a disease in its own right, rather than as a behaviour resulting from a mood disorder.

They base their argument on mounting evidence showing that the brains of people who have committed suicide have striking similarities, quite distinct from what is seen in the brains of people who have similar mood disorders but who died of natural causes.

Eighty thousand years ago the Earth began to cool, marking the start of the last Ice Age. Experts are still discovering how the big freeze affected the giant mammals which prowled its dramatically changing landscape.

Scientists are helping to uncover the secrets of giant Ice Age beasts like the sabretooth cat - by foraging in crates of dirt which were collected during the building of a car park.

A new stem cell discovery has reawakened controversy about human cloning — though technical challenges mean scientists are far from being able to create human babies as in Michael Bay's 2005 sci-fi flick "The Island."

Not that they would even want to.

"Nobody in their right mind would want to do that," said John Gearhart, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. And indeed, the research wasn't conducted with the idea of creating cloned mini-me's in mind. Instead, scientists attempting to treat diseases of the cell's powerhouse, the mitochondria, refined the technique, which is the same one used to create the cloned sheep Dolly in 1996.

When Harvard graduate and Heritage Foundation study co-author Jason Richwine asserted that Hispanic immigrants and their descendants have lower intelligence quotients (IQs) than whites do — and that immigration policy should be based on IQ — much of the ensuing furor focused on whether that was true. No one questioned whether IQ is a reliable, or even useful, measure of intelligence.

However, cognitive scientists now know that the brain is not a coffee mug that is either more- or less-full of intelligence. Instead, there are many different kinds of intelligence, and genius in one area does not necessarily predict genius in another. Helping to illustrate this concept is a highly sophisticated animal that is probably asleep on your sofa: the domestic dog.

The H1N1 virus strain that caused a 2009 swine flu outbreak in humans was detected in northern elephant seals off the coast of central California.

Scientists say this is the first time marine mammals have been found to carry the H1N1 flu strain, which originated in pigs. The seals seem to have picked up the virus while at sea, but it's unclear how this happened.

"We thought we might find influenza viruses, which have been found before in marine mammals, but we did not expect to find pandemic H1N1," Tracey Goldstein, an associate professor with the UC Davis One Health Institute and Wildlife Health Center, said in a statement.

Our oceans are taking a beating from overfishing, pollution, acidification and warming, putting at risk the many creatures who make their home in seawater. But when most people think of struggling ocean species, the first animals that come to mind are probably whales, seals or sea turtles.

Sure, many of these large (and adorable) animals play an important part in the marine ecosystem and are threatened with extinction due to human activities, but in fact, of the 94 marine species listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), only 45 are marine mammals and sea turtles. As such, these don’t paint the whole picture of what happens under the sea. What about the remaining 49 that form a myriad of other important parts of the underwater web?.

Out of sight (and smell), natural gas slowly bubbled up into Norma Fiorentino’s private water well near the town of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania—in the heart of the new fracking boom in the U.S. Then, on New Year's Day 2009, when a mechanical pump flicked on and provided the spark, Fiorentino's backyard exploded. She and many others blame the blast on fracking—the colloquial name for the natural gas drilling process that combines horizontal drilling and the fracturing of shale deep underground with high-pressure water to create a path for gas to flow back up the well.

A huge explosion on the sun will deal Earth a glancing blow today (May 17) but should not pose a threat to the planet, scientists say.

The sun storm erupted late Tuesday (May 14) during a powerful solar flare — the fourth unleashed by a single sunspot in just 48 hours — and hurled a massive cloud of charged particles out into space at millions of miles an hour.

Such eruptions — known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs — can wreak havoc if they hit Earth squarely, temporarily disrupting GPS navigation, satellite communications and power grids. But this one isn't aimed directly at us, so there's no cause for alarm, experts say.

Whether we're listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. For instance, Mozart's jaunty Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major is most often associated with bright yellow and orange, whereas his dour Requiem in D minor is more likely to be linked to dark, bluish gray.