Did our ancient ancestors build to please the ears as well as the eyes? Trevor Cox pitches into the controversial claims of acoustic archaeologists. And in our web-only article Acoustic archaeology: The secret sounds of Stonehenge, he explains how the acoustic footprint of the world's most famous prehistoric monument was measured

"The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it... Overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They entered carefully beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors"

Sure, we use stone in the construction of our buildings, in high-end kitchen countertops and the driveways where we park our cars, but our ancestor’s connection to terra firma was much more a relationship of necessity. Stone once served as the basis for a dizzying array of tools and weapons that helped us weather the harsh world that preceded civilization. More importantly, they helped us succeed as a species.

The fossil record hints that even our most distant ancestors used stone tools. Earlier this month we learned that Australopithecus afarensis, a hominin relation of modern humans used rock blades to carve up dinner some 3.4 million years ago. This pushes stone tool use back nearly a million years before the arrival of Homo habilis, the first member of our genus.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere are unexpectedly shrinking and cooling due to lower ultraviolet radiation from the sun, US scientists said Thursday.

The sun's energy output dropped to unusually low levels from 2007 to 2009, a significantly long spell with virtually no sunspots or solar storms, according to scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

During that period, the thermosphere, whose altitude ranges from about 55 to 300 miles (90 to 500 kilometers), shrank and contracted from the sharp drop in ultraviolet radiation, said the study published in the American Geophysical Union's journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The results are published online this week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Investigators in the laboratory of Stephen Warren, PhD, chairman of human genetics at Emory University School of Medicine, used DNA microarray technology to read variant sites across the entire genomes of 471 Ashkenazi Jews. The work comes from a collaboration between Warren and Ann Pulver, ScD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who recruited the participants for a study of schizophrenia genetics.

In a study published online today in Science, the team argues that a pair of pelvic bones discovered at Dinosaur Cove, southern Victoria, over 20 years ago, does not belong to a tyrannosaur.

“Our examination of these bones shows that the key features considered by the original research team to link them to tyrannosaurs are not present,” said PhD candidate Matt Herne from the UQ School of Biological Sciences, who led the research.

“Other features of the bones are also found in more distantly related theropod dinosaurs, some of which are already known from the southern continents,” Mr Herne said.

While it often possible to broadly determine which group of dinosaurs a single bone might belong to, more complete and ideally associated skeletal remains are usually required to accurately identify something down to a specific family.

In the August 26 issue of Science Express, the Yale team describes how one mutated copy of a gene called keratin 10 causes a severe skin disease known as ichthyosis with confetti. However, amidst the diseased skin, these patients also have hundreds to thousands of spots of normal skin.

This phenomenon, the researchers report, occurs by the recombination of chromosomes prior to cell division. Instead of producing one normal copy of the gene and one dominant, disease-causing mutation, the exchange between chromosomes results in cells with either two mutant copies or no mutant copies. If the latter occurs, spots of normal, disease-free skin will form. The investigators used these recombination events in spots of normal skin to map and ultimately identify the disease gene.

"It is the first time that you can feel images in the air," said Norio Nakamura, senior scientist with the research team at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

"You can have the sense of touch like poking a rubber ball or stretching a sticky rice cake" when manipulating images, he told AFP by telephone.

The technology changes the shape of three-dimensional images in response to "touches", aided by cameras that monitor how the fingers move, Nakamura said.

It is not known when the technology will be put to practical use but its creators see it being used to simulate surgical operations and in video game software allowing players to experience the sensation of holding weapons or sports equipment.

The new site improves the ability of synthetic molecules, recently developed by the team, to attach to prostate cancer cells, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the body's immune response to the disease. Their findings appear online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The new study builds on the team's recent development of a new class of synthetic molecules, called "antibody-recruiting molecules targeting prostate cancer" (ARM-Ps), which work by binding simultaneously to antibodies already present in the bloodstream and to a protein found on prostate cancer cells called prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA). By coating the cancer cells in antibodies, the ARM-P molecules flag them as a threat and trigger the body's own immune response, which does not recognize the cancer cells as foreign pathogens on its own.

In 2002, Paul Koehler, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennesse, and others were measuring neutron resonances in four types of platinum isotopes. These resonance patterns - which are the energies at which the nucleus of a platinum isotope absorbs neutrons - are affected by the motion of the protons and neutrons inside the nucleus. These motions are thought to be chaotic, at least according to random matrix theory, which is used to determine the behavior of large nuclei. However, in a recent study, Koehler and his colleagues found that the protons and neutrons seem to move in a collective way that can't be explained by any known model of nuclear structure.

US stem-cell researchers are reeling from a court order handed down yesterday that puts a temporary hold on the current policy for federal funding of human embryonic stem-cell (ESC) research. Now, many are calling for legislation that would make such research unambiguously legal once and for all.

The court order is the outcome of a lawsuit originally filed last August against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, which contends that federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells is illegal because it requires the destruction of embryos.

Pamela Sakuda, 57, was anxious and depressed. After two years of intensive chemotherapy for late-stage colon cancer, and having outlived her prognosis by several months, she'd finally lost hope. She was living in fear and was worried how her impending death would affect her husband.

Sakuda's doctor prescribed antidepressants, but they didn't do any good. So, at her wits' end and feeling that she had nothing to lose, Sakuda volunteered for an experimental depression treatment being studied at UCLA.

But in a recent study appearing in the Aug. 26 edition of the journal, Nature, a Lawrence Livermore scientist and his colleagues used the method to trace the pathway of carbon dioxide released from the deep ocean to the atmosphere at the end of the last ice age.

The team noticed that a rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations coincided with a reduced amount of carbon-14 relative to carbon-12 (the two isotopes of carbon that are used for carbon dating and are referred to as radiocarbon) in the atmosphere.

The skis and scientific instruments of a physicist who accompanied Captain Scott on his ill-fated trip to the Antarctic will be sold in London next month, Christie's auctioneers said Wednesday.

Canadian scientist Charles Seymour Wright was part of the support team that set off with Captain Robert Falcon Scott in 1910, although he turned back after a year, leaving Scott and four others to continue to the South Pole.

Ten months later, when Scott failed to return, Wright joined the search party and it was he who spotted the tip of a green tent poking out of the ice. Inside, he found the frozen bodies of the adventurer and two of his colleagues.

A study in Biology Letters written up in the BBC earlier this week has found an interesting wrinkle in Darwin's theory of natural selection. In short, evolution may not be as driven by competition as once thought.

In the classic view of "Darwinism" (itself a misleading phrase, perhaps), organisms compete over resources for the right to survive and reproduce. Those that are successful pass on their genes. Those that can't cut it die out.

But looking at the fossil record over the last 400 million years, Sarda Sahney and colleagues at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom found that patterns of evolution don't always match this trend.

When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit.

This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates -- these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an early age.

The world's first known human cannibals ate each other to satisfy their nutritional needs, concludes a new study of the remains of cannibal feasts consumed about one million years ago.

The humans-as-food determination negates other possibilities, such as cannibalism for ritual's sake, or cannibalism due to starvation. In this oldest known case of humans eating humans, other food was available to the diners, but human flesh was just part of their meat mix.

"These practices were conducted by Homo antecessor, who inhabited Europe one million years ago," according to the research team, led by Eudald Carbonell.

More detailed pictures of the processes that continuously reshape the Earth from the inside out are being generated by new, more sophisticated computer models, yielding new insights into the hidden world beneath our feet.

The added resolution that these models provide — down to a single kilometer from a minimum of 20 kilometers (0.6 to 12 miles) in previous models — could improve our understanding of the forces behind the movement of the planet's tectonic plates, which cause the rumblings of earthquakes and explosion of volcanoes. It may also help explain why the Earth, uniquely in our solar system, has plate tectonics in the first place.

Astronomers studying sound waves on a distant star have discovered that it has a magnetic cycle similar to our sun's solar cycle.

The find marks the first time astronomers have detected a star's magnetic cycle using a method called stellar seismology, which monitors the vibrations inside a star. The result could help researchers learn more about the inner workings and evolution of stars, including our own sun.

"This is one piece of a larger puzzle that should help us better understand the sun," said study co-author Travis Metcalfe of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Alan Boyle writes:NASA's Kepler planet-hunting probe has spotted a system where two giant planets are locked in constantly changing orbits — with a super-Earth potentially pinned down in the crossfire.

Astronomers like to think of planets as a kind of celestial clockwork, keeping regular time. For example, the time it takes for the planets in our own solar system to complete their orbits can be calculated to within fractions of a second, and unless something huge happens, they'll stick to that timetable for billions of years.

LONDON: Scientists have created liver cells in a lab for the first time using reprogrammed cells from human skin, paving the way for the potential development of new treatments for liver diseases that kill thousands each year.

Cambridge University scientists who reported their results in the Journal of Clinical Investigation on Wednesday, said they also found a way of avoiding the kind of intense political and ethical rows over embryonic stem cells which are currently hampering work in the US. "This technology bypasses the need for using human embryos," said Tamir Rashid of Cambridge's laboratory for regenerative medicine, who led the study. "The cells we created were just as good as if we had used embryonic stem cells."