Palaeontologists have unveiled three new Australian dinosaur skeletons in Queensland today.

The two herbivores and one carnivore, excavated from the Winton formation, roamed our land during the Cretaceous period - 98 million years ago.

The research, published in the current edition of PloS One, puts Australia back on the palaeontology map and describes Australia's fauna before it separated from the supercontinent Gondwana.

Palaeontologist and lead author Dr Scott Hocknull, of the Queensland Museum, says in the past dinosaur discoveries in Australian haven't been considered important because there were so few of them.

Omar W. Rosales, the American Writer, Anthropologist, Expedition Leader, and Filmmaker will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout July to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

PROVIDENCE — Weeks after legalizing the sale of marijuana to sick people, lawmakers have voted to explore how much Rhode Island might collect in revenue if it were to make all sales of marijuana legal and impose a “sin tax” of $35 per ounce.

During the General Assembly’s aborted rush to adjournment Friday, the Senate approved a resolution — introduced earlier the same day — to create a nine-member special commission to study a swath of issues surrounding marijuana. Among them: “The experience of individuals and families sentenced for violating marijuana laws ... The experience of states and European countries, such as California, Massachusetts and the Netherlands, which have decriminalized the sale and use of marijuana.”

The ancient civilisation based at Angkor in Cambodia collapsed in the late 16th century because of problems with a very modern ring to them, research by an international team indicates.

The Greater Angkor Project, based in Sydney, is preparing a paper arguing that extreme climate change and the failure of Angkor's complicated water systems were to blame.

The temple complex was the heart of the mighty Khmer empire and its ruins are one of the most popular attractions in South-East Asia.

The Angkor Wat temple, the centrepiece, was built in the ninth century and surrounded by huge reservoirs and canals - believed to be partly Hindu symbols and partly for irrigation.

It is being called the most documented case of reincarnation ever.

A little boy is able to recall over 50 memories from someone else's life.

A World War II Pilot's family believes it is their reincarnated brother based on the child's memories.

The boy's story is so compelling, it has been published in a new book called "Soul Survivor."

Fox 8's Suzanne Stratford spoke exclusively to the child and his family.

The Home Secretary Alan Johnson killed off the Government's cherished compulsory identity cards scheme last night, promising that British citizens would never be forced to sign up for them. Critics urged the Government to retreat further and scrap its flagship £5bn policy outright.

Mr Johnson's predecessors had argued that the cards were needed to help tackle terrorism, illegal immigration and serious crime. They suggested that the move to compulsory carrying would follow once more than 80 per cent of the population was covered.

But, in his first major announcement as Home Secretary, Mr Johnson pledged that ID cards would remain entirely voluntary for UK nationals in future, and insisted that it should be a "personal choice" for citizens to sign up. He also abandoned plans to require some pilots and airport workers to carry ID cards in the face of bitter opposition from their unions.

For thousands of years the pyramids of Egypt have amazed and baffled people in equal measure.

Tourists and scholars alike have been awestruck by the size and precision of the structures, while struggling to comprehend why they were built in the first place.

Over the years, countless theories explaining their existence have been put forward, with experts struggling to reach agreement on the story behind them.

Turkey today announced plans to resume a controversial £1bn dam project in the face of environmental protests that it would displace thousands of people, destroy habitats and drown priceless archaeological treasures.

The environment minister, Veysel Eroglu, said work on the Ilisu hydroelectric dam on the Tigris river in south-east Turkey would restart after a six-month funding suspension ends next week.

The duck-billed dinosaurs have been giving up their secrets lately. Just yesterday researchers revealed new details of how hadrosaurs chewed their food, using a set of teeth that look like a “cranial cuisinart.” Today, paleontologists have put the hadrosaur’s skin on display, thanks to a “mummified” creature that shows the shape of its soft tissue and cell-like structures.

Such a discovery was possible because the dinosaur’s skin fossilized before bacteria had a chance to eat up the tissue.

WASHINGTON: In a new research, scientists have shown that human beings can develop echolocation, the system of acoustic signals used by dolphins and bats to explore their surroundings.

The research was conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Alcala de Henares (UAH) in Spain.

"In certain circumstances, we humans could rival bats in our echolocation or biosonar capacity", said Juan Antonio Martínez, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Superior Polytechnic School of the UAH.

The team led by this scientist has started a series of tests, the first of their kind in the world, to make use of human beings' under-exploited echolocation skills.

A search for gravitational waves stemming from the creation of the universe commences this week with an array of new detectors sensitive enough to measure signals as faint as a billionth of a volt.

The experiment, called QUIET, is the latest attempt to find theoretical ripples in the expanse of space caused by the big bang explosion some 14 billion years ago.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravity waves which would have alternatively compressed and expanded space in one direction and then another, disrupting space and time. The effect is similar to what happens when a rock falls into a smooth body of water.

July 1, 2009 -- A new stash of fossil feathers is yielding a wealth of information about Moas, the extinct giant birds that once roamed ancient New Zealand.

In a unprecedented discovery, Nicolas Rawlence of the University of Adelaide and a team of researchers found they could extract DNA from the feathers' shafts, and use the genetic material to prove the feathers belonged to four species of the flightless Moa, including the Heavy-footed Moa Pachyornis elephantopus.

The team's study was published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Academy B: Biological Sciences.

July 1, 2009 -- Vegetation helped save Earth from runaway cooling that would have encased the planet in ice, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The paper sheds light on the big natural mechanisms that over hundreds of millions of years have swung the globe like a pendulum between deep chill and intense heat.

Around 50 million years ago, the planet's poles were ice-free and crocodiles roamed the Arctic.

July 1, 2009 -- Astronomers on Wednesday said they had identified an intermediate class of black hole that could explain how supermassive, light-sucking monsters develop in the heart of galaxies.

Their find -- a black hole more than 500 times the mass of the sun, on the fringe of galaxy ESO 243-249 -- is reported in the latest issue of Nature, the British-based science journal.

In terms of size, it lies between supermassive black holes, which can be billions of times the mass of the sun, and relative toddlers, which are between three and 20 solar masses.

WASHINGTON – Like a car salesman pushing a luxury vehicle that the customer no longer can afford, NASA has pulled out of its back pocket a deal for a cheaper ride to the moon.

It won't be as powerful, and its design is a little dated. Think of it as a base-model Ford station wagon instead of a tricked-out Cadillac Escalade.

Officially, the space agency is still on track with a 4-year-old plan to spend $35 billion to build new rockets and return astronauts to the moon in several years. However, a top NASA manager is floating a cut-rate alternative that costs around $6.6 billion.

This cheaper option is not as powerful as NASA's current design with its fancy new rockets, the people-carrying Ares I and cargo-lifting Ares V. But the cut-rate plan would still get to the moon.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Researchers have identified the early master cells that make up the human heart and said on Wednesday they could someday be used to make patches to fix damaged hearts.

The discovery, published in the journal Nature, also sheds surprising light on how human hearts develop in the womb, and how congenital heart disease develops.

"This cell that we describe is probably not going to be used directly as cell-based therapy because it has the possibility of going into too many different cell types," said Kenneth Chien of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.

In a small way, the plight of the British in 1940 resembles the state of the civilized world now. At that time we had had nearly a decade of the well-intentioned but quite wrong belief that peace was all that mattered.

The followers of the peace lobbies of the 1930s resembled the environmentalist movements now; their intentions were more than good but wholly inappropriate for the war that was about to start. It is time to wake up and realize that Gaia, the Earth system, is no cozy mother that nurtures humans and can be propitiated by gestures such as carbon trading or sustainable development.

AS WESTERN governments dither at the negotiating table over how to help the world's poorest people cope with climate change, some unlikely saviours have stepped up to the plate: the giants of the global insurance industry.

As well as providing protection from the increasingly unpredictable weather, the premiums could also be a powerful way to get poor people to adapt to climate change by encouraging them to invest in measures like drought-resistant crops. Is this profit-driven endeavour too good to be true?

CHENNAI: "We have a triple eclipse coming up within a month and through archaeo-astronomy, using planetarium software, we found that this rare astronomical phenomenon occurred twice in ancient times and they were two most traumatic periods. It set us wondering if there is a probability of a major catastrophe awaiting us now," said Bharath Gyan conceptualiser D K Hari on Tuesday.

Bharath Gyan, an initiative of Hari and his wife, has been collating information about India using ancient knowledge sources and modern scientific tools and methods. It has 400-500 hours of content, compiled in capsules on various subjects.

Hari talked about the triple eclipses in 3067 BC and again in 3031 BC and the corresponding historical upheavals. "With the advancement of modern science and technology we are able to date these two triple eclipses and accord dates to the events of the Mahabharata and correlate them with the events that occurred in the rest of the world. Occurrences of many of these triple eclipses have coincided with some of the major catastrophes that mankind has experienced. Those that have changed the course of civilization! Is this a mere coincidence or do triple eclipses influence the course of civilization," asks Hari.

A leading climate scientist argues that overbroad claims by some researchers—coupled with overblown reporting in the media—can undermine the public's understanding of climate issues. Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate modeler, author and PM editorial advisor, concurs with the consensus view that the planet's temperature is rising due largely to human activity. But, he says, many news stories prematurely attribute local or regional phenomena to climate change. This can lead to the dissemination of vague, out-of-context or flat-wrong information to the public.

"People think that if there's a trend, it has to be connected to this bigger trend," he says.