A recent archeological find of 1000-year-old human remains in Skagafjördur in north Iceland may shed a new light on a period of Iceland’s history that is largely in the dark, the period around which Iceland converted to Christianity.

Archeologists have found bones that belonged to an infant and an old man under a layer of volcanic ash from 1104 during an ongoing excavation project at the farm Steinsstadir, Fréttabladid reports.

GENEVA - CERN, the world's biggest particle physics laboratory and creator of the Worldwide Web, on Friday unveiled a new computer network allowing thousands of scientists around the world to crunch data on its huge experiments.

Some 7,000 scientists in 33 countries are now linked through the computing network at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to analyze data from its particle-smashing test probing the nature of matter that began last month.

When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species 150 years ago, he deliberately avoided the subject of the origin of life. This, coupled with the mention of the 'Creator' in the last paragraph of the book, led us to believe he was not willing to commit on the matter. An international team, led by Juli Peretó of the Cavanilles Institute in Valencia, now refutes that idea and shows that the British naturalist did explain in other documents how our first ancestors could have come into being.

An egg collected by Charles Darwin during his voyage on HMS Beagle has been rediscovered at Cambridge University.

The small dark brown egg, with Darwin's name written on it, was found by a retired volunteer at the university's zoology museum.

It bears a large crack, caused after the great naturalist put it in a box that was too small for it.

The egg is the only one known to exist from Darwin's Beagle collection.

When the space shuttle Atlantis lands — planned for Saturday — it will cap off a mission to Hubble and mark the end of the servicing era.

The astronauts' fifth overhaul of the Hubble Space Telescope was the last planned mission to repair the telescope, or any satellite for that matter. And if NASA retires the space shuttle fleet in 2010 as planned, the agency will lose the ability to visit orbiting spacecraft and repair them in space.

The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they're bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.

Ever since astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the Moon, there has been an adamant group of conspiracy theorists who claim the whole event was concocted in a film studio.

In 2002, a frustrated Mr Aldrin even punched a documentary maker who claimed the Moon missions were faked.

Now new photos taken by Nasa's Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO) camera may settle the matter once and for all.

Venus Express has constantly been observing the south pole of Venus and has found it to be surprisingly fickle. An enormous structure with a central part that looks like the eye of a hurricane, morphs and changes shape within a matter of days, leaving scientists puzzled.

The eye of the hurricane is at the centre of a 2000 km-wide vortex. It was discovered in 1974 by the Mariner 10 spacecraft. There is a similar structure on the planet’s north pole, which was observed by the Pioneer Venus mission in 1979.

A group of the world's leading scientists has urged the United Nations to establish an international network to search the skies for asteroids on a collision course with Earth. The spaceguard system would also be responsible for deploying spacecraft that could destroy or deflect incoming objects.

The group - which includes the Royal Society president Lord Rees and environmentalist Crispin Tickell - said that the UN needed to act as a matter of urgency. Although an asteroid collision with the planet is a relatively remote risk, the consequences of a strike would be devastating.

A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains.

The "Blue Brain" has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory.

Scaling the simulation to the human brain is only a matter of money, says the project's head.

The work was presented at the European Future Technologies meeting in Prague.

Millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide could be prevented from entering the atmosphere following the discovery of a way to turn coal, grass or municipal waste more efficiently into clean fuels.

Scientists have adapted a process called "gasification" which is already used to clean up dirty materials before they are used to generate electricity or to make renewable fuels. The technique involves heating organic matter to produce a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called syngas.

University of Arizona optical scientists have broken a technological barrier by making three-dimensional holographic displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.

The holographic displays ­ which are viewed without special eyewear ­ are the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory ever to be developed, making them ideal tools for medical, industrial and military applications that require "situational awareness."

"This is a new type of device, nothing like the tiny hologram of a dove on your credit card," UA optical sciences professor Nasser Peyghambarian said.

Organizers of an effort to get UFO reports taken more seriously teased journalists on Friday with glimpses at dark, grainy video showing what appeared to be a face peeping up from a window.

The video was played at a downtown Denver news conference, after days of buildup from a Denver resident who is circulating a petition calling on the city to create an "Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission" to deal with reports of alien encounters. The petition drive's organizer, Jeff Peckman, hopes to get 4,000 signatures to place his initiative on the ballot.

TOKYO (AFP) - Scientists at a Japanese university said Thursday they believed another planet up to two-thirds the size of the Earth was orbiting in the far reaches of the solar system.

The researchers at Kobe University in western Japan said calculations using computer simulations led them to conclude it was only a matter of time before the mysterious "Planet X" was found.

COWS, sheep and goats may seem like innocent victims of humanity's appetite for meat, but when it comes to climate change they have a dark secret. Forget cars, planes or even power stations, some of the world's worst greenhouse gas emitters wander idly across rolling pastures chewing the cud, oblivious to the fact that their continuous belching (and to a lesser degree, farting) is warming the planet.