The earliest iron artefacts ever found -- funeral beads strung around bodies in a 5,000-year-old Egyptian cemetery -- were made from a meteorite, archaeologists said on Monday.Hi-tech scanning of the beads, discovered by British archaeologists in the Lower Egypt village of el-Gerzeh in 1911, shows the metal came from a rock in outer space, they said.The nine small beads come from two burial sites dated to around 3,200 BC, where they were found in necklaces along with exotic terrestrial minerals

GRASSY KEY, Florida (AP) ― A dog may be man’s best friend, but dolphins can imitate human actions, and even how they solve problems.When a dolphin has one of its senses blocked, it can use other senses to mimic a human’s movements, according to a recent study.A bottlenose dolphin named Tanner was blindfolded and instructed to mimic the actions of a trainer in the water with him. When Tanner wasn’t able to use sight to figure out the movement, he switched to another technique: emit sounds, listen

Chinese scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that a new bird flu strain is sometimes able to spread from person to person, but they are emphasizing that the virus still does not transmit easily.The new bird flu strain, known as H7N9, was first reported by Chinese authorities in March. As of the end of May, there were 132 cases and 37 deaths in China and Taiwan linked to the virus. Health officials suspect patients were most likely infected by birds in live animal markets but acknowle

LONDON (AP) ― At a public tasting in London on Monday, Dutch scientists served a single hamburger made from cow stem cells. Some questions and answers about the science behind the revolutionary patty, how it could help combat climate change and what it actually tastes like.Q: What are stem cells?A: Stem cells are an organism’s master cells and can be turned into any other cell type in the body, i.e. blood, tissue, muscle, etc. Adult stem cells are found in small numbers in most human tissues, in

The Korean Peninsula has become more prone to earthquakes with the number of tremors soaring nearly 55 percent over the past three years, the state weather agency said Monday.According to the Korea Meteorological Administration, a total of 65 quakes were observed in the first seven months of this year, up 54.8 percent from 42 for all of 2010.This year‘s figure compares with 52 in 2011 and 56 in 2012, the weather agency said, adding that the final tally for this year, if this trend continues, may

The government vowed on Monday to invest 1.6 billion won ($ 1.43 million) over the next three years to nurture qualified professionals in the satellite industry.The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning has partnered with the Satellite Technology Research Center of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology to jointly develop new training courses for selected postgraduate students and researchers. The ministry said it was seeking to increase manpower in the space industry from rou

A year ago, the world's largest particle collider made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science, identifying what is believed to be the Higgs Boson -- the long-sought maker of mass.Today, its computer screens are dark, the control desks unstaffed and the giant, supercooled tunnel empty of the crashing proton beams whose snapshots of the Big Bang helped flush out the elusive particle.But the silence is an illusion.Behind the scenes, work is pushing ahead to give the vast machine

TOKYO (AFP) ― Japan launched a cargo-carrying rocket Sunday loaded with supplies for the crew of the International Space Station, along with a small robot meant as a companion for one of the country’s astronauts.The H-2B rocket blasted off from the southern island of Tanegashima at 4:48 a.m. local time, images broadcast by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency showed.According to JAXA the launch had gone to plan.“The HTV4 module has separated from the rocket as scheduled and continues its journ

Earthquakes can rip open sub-sea pockets of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, according to a study by German and Swiss scientists published on Sunday.Quake-caused methane should be added to the list of heat-trapping carbon emissions that affect the world‘s climate system, although the scale of this contribution remains unclear, they said.The evidence comes from cores of sediment drilled from the bed of the northern Arabian Sea during a research trip by marine scientists in 2007.One of the