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!

Imagine how much you could save on your electricity bill if you could use the excess heat your computer generates to actually power the machine.

Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have taken an important step toward harnessing that heat and converting it for practical use. The advance could lead to more energy-efficient appliances and information processing devices.

Daily measurements of CO2 at the authoritative "Keeling lab" on Hawaii have topped 400 parts per million for the first time. The station, which sits atop the Mauna Loa volcano, has the longest continuous measure of the concentration of the gas, stretching back to 1958.

The last time CO2 was regularly above 400ppm was about 3-5 million years ago - before modern humans existed. The climate back then was also considerably warmer than it is today, according to scientists.

Carbon dioxide is regarded as the most important of the manmade greenhouse gases, a product principally of burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

The Big Bang is somewhat of a mystery to scientists. They have long wondered why during this critical point in our Universe's history, more matter than antimatter was created. Now, they've discovered a clue that may eventually provide the answer to that question. Researchers have found the first direct evidence of pear-shaped nuclei in exotic atoms.

The fact that the Big Bang created more matter than antimatter explains the origins of our very existence. Antimatter is essentially the opposite of matter; they are particles that have the same mass but opposite charge from their matter counterparts.

"If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the Big Bang, everything would have annihilated, and there would be no galaxies, stars plants or people,"...

Researchers developed a portable way to produce ultracold atoms for quantum technology and quantum information processing, a scientific breakthrough that was published and featured on the front cover of Nature Nanotechnology.

The new technique is crucial for the measurement of atomic quantum states in compact devices, which is needed for a variety of practical applications, including quantum computers (and the all-knowing 'tricorder' scanning device from Star Trek...). For example, many of the most accurate measurement devices, including the atomic clocks needed for GPS satellites, work by observing how atoms transfer between individual quantum states. The highest precision is obtained with long observation times, often using slow-moving ultracold atoms that need to be prepared in a large apparatus.

Light and sound waves can be passed around objects, making them invisible since there is no shadow behind the object, by means of special meta-materials. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology researchers, who previously developed the world's first three-dimensional invisibility cloak for visible light, now succeeded in demonstrating that these special materials can also be used to specifically influence the propagation of heat. A structured plate of copper and silicon was shown to conduct heat around a central area without the edge being affected.

"For the thermal invisibility cloak, both materials have to be arranged smartly," explains Robert Schittny from KIT, the first author of the study which was presented in the Physical Review Letters journal.

A 105-year-old Texas woman has earned a place in almost all headlines by revealing the most unlikely secret to her long life.

Strangely, her key to longevity is bacon. Yes, you read it right; 105-year-old Pearl Cantrell loves to eat bacon and feasts on it almost every day. Her story, for sure, will be a subject of research for most health scientists.

Pearl Cantrell, who's mostly referred to as the '105-year-old bacon woman', said in an interview with a local NBC station, "I love bacon and I eat it everyday. I don't feel as old as I am, that's all I can say."

It's a bit like probiotics for mosquitoes. When scientists infect mosquitoes with a specific bacterium, the insects become resistant to the malaria parasite.

Sounds like an easy way to stamp out malaria, right? Just introduce the infected mosquitoes into an area and let the bugs take over the natural population. But there's been one big hitch: The bacterium — called Wolbachia — doesn't stick around inside mosquitoes that carry malaria. So scientists would have to continually release flocks of treated mosquitoes to keep malaria down.

Now entomologists have overcome this obstacle, at least partially. They've created a malaria-transmitting mosquito that maintains the Wolbachia infection for its entire lifetime and even passes it onto its offspring.

TRADITIONALLY, ARCHAEOLOGY HAS involved a lot of digging through both archives and dirt, as well as being in the right place at the right time. But the last decade has seen the development of a completely new tool, says Dr David Thomas, a pioneer of the field of satellite archaeology.

“The detail in many of the images is astonishing and allows archaeologists to investigate sites without leaving the safety of their offices,” says David, who is from Melbourne's La Trobe University and gave a talk today on ‘armchair archaeology’ at the Melbourne Museum.

“While this has obvious advantages, it also presents archaeologists with new problems and challenges,” he says.

The Arctic experienced an extended period of warm temperatures about 3.6 million years ago — before the onset of the ice ages — at a time when the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere was not much higher than the levels being recorded today, a new study finds. The research suggests that an ice-free Arctic may be a reality in the near future.

Starting in the 1980s, Alaska's Columbia Glacier began retreating, shrinking from 41 miles long (its originally documented length in 1794) to 36 miles long in 1995. This is what that change actually looks like from space.

The images are part of the Timelapse project from Google and TIME, what Google calls "the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public." It comes from a collection of images taken between 1984 and 2012 as part of the Landsat program, a joint satellite mission between NASA and U.S. Geological Survey that has been snapping pics of Earth's surface since the early '70s.

In Manshiet Dahshur, 25 miles south of Cairo, the villagers recently extended the boundaries of the cemetery. For Ahmed Rageb, a carpenter who buried his cousin in the annexe, it was a logical decision. "We want to bury the dead," he said, strolling through the new cemetery after visiting his cousin's tomb. "The old cemetery is full. And there is no other place to bury my family.".

Researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have spent many years studying the remains of a Stone Age community in Karleby outside the town of Falköping, Sweden. The researchers have for example tried to identify parts of the inhabitants' diet. Right now they are looking for evidence that fertilisers were used already during the Scandinavian Stone Age, and the results of their first analyses may be exactly what they are looking for.

Using remains of grains and other plants and some highly advanced analysis techniques, the two researchers and archaeologists Tony Axelsson and Karl-Göran Sjögren have been able to identify parts of the diet of their Stone Age ancestors.