A team of scientists have managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species.

Moscow - It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species.

The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds.

The experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers, who published their findings in Tuesday's issue of “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” of the United States.

“We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth's surface,” the scientists said in the article.

Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows.

Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy Of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in northeastern Siberia.

“It's a very viable plant, and it adapts really well,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the Russian town of Pushchino where her lab is located.

She voiced hope the team could continue its work and regenerate more plant species.

The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, the sediments dating back 30,000-32,000 years.

The sediments were firmly cemented together and often totally filled with ice, making any water infiltration impossible - creating a natural freezing chamber fully isolated from the surface.

“The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,” said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. “It's a natural cryobank.”

The burrows were located 125 feet (38 meters) below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer.

Gubin said the study has demonstrated that tissue can survive ice conservation for tens of thousands of years, opening the way to the possible resurrection of Ice Age mammals.

“If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue,” Gubin told the AP. “And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth.”

Japanese scientists are already searching in the same area for mammoth remains, but Gubin voiced hope that the Russians will be the first to find some frozen animal tissue that could be used for regeneration.

“It's our land, we will try to get them first,” he said. - Sapa-AP

Spain will send hulking military transport planes to Florida to retrieve 17 tons of treasure that US undersea explorers found but ultimately lost in courts.

Madrid - Spain will send hulking military transport planes to Florida to retrieve 17 tons of treasure that US undersea explorers found but ultimately lost in American courts.

The Civil Guard said on Monday that agents would leave within hours to take possession of the booty, worth an estimated 380 million euros, and two Spanish Hercules transport planes will bring it back.

A federal judge has ordered Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration to give Spanish officials access to the silver coins and other artefacts beginning Tuesday.

Odyssey found them in a Spanish galleon in 2007 off Portugal. Spain argued successfully in court it never relinquished ownership of the ship or its contents. - Sapa-AP

The famous, 5,000 year-old stone circle in Britain is one of the best-known world heritage sites and many have guessed at the reasons for its existence.

Vancouver - Ancient legends of thunder gods can be explained today with the modern science of sound waves, said a US scientist on Thursday who believes an auditory illusion inspired the creation of Stonehenge.

The famous, 5,000 year-old stone circle in Britain is one of the best-known world heritage sites and many have guessed at the reasons for its existence, from a prehistoric observatory to sun temple to sacred healing ground.

Steven Waller, who has studied cave art for 20 years and cultivates a particular interest in the sounds of ancient sites, thinks that a sound wave effect that scientists understand today was so mysterious back then that it compelled people to erect Stonehenge.

The phenomenon is known as acoustic interference. It happens when two sources of sound, such as two bagpipers, are playing the same note at the same time from different places in a field.

As a listener passes, the sound waves, rather than aligning to make the noise louder as one might expect, actually bounce off each other to create a wavering, muffling effect.

“You hear the sound modulating between and loud and quiet,” Waller told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver.

“That would have been a very mysterious phenomenon, totally inexplicable. You would think that two pipers playing would sound louder than one piper but as you walk around it modulates and there are some places where it is almost completely silent,” he said.

“So the net result... is this ring of invisible objects, massive objects blocking the sound. And it occurred to me that that is very similar to the structure of Stonehenge.”

Legends back up the notion, too, like the tale of the two magic pipers who led some maidens to dance around in a circle and they all turned to stone, Waller recounted.

But being a scientist, legends were not enough to satisfy his curiosity, so Waller set up an experiment to test his theory with modern people wearing blindfolds and experiencing the same auditory illusion as the pipers in a field scenario.

“I asked them what was between them and the sound,” Waller said. “They drew pictures that are very similar to Stonehenge. They pictured these massive objects blocking the sound, where it was really just sound wave cancellation.”

Waller also found that when he tested the site itself, placing a sound source in the centre of Stonehenge and then walking around to hear how it came across, the same blocking, modulating effect could be heard.

Still, he remains convinced that the sound illusion came first, inspiring the erection of the stone circle with its 17 upright blocks of sandstone, which weigh up to 45 tons, topped with six lintels aligned towards the direction of the sunrise on the summer solstice.

“As a result of that auditory illusion and that vision of stones that they could hear but not see, that is why they built Stonehenge,” Waller said. “They made that vision concrete, so to speak, by actually building the temple.”

Waller said his theory doesn't necessarily conflict with others that suppose a solar purpose, because both indicate the site was a mystical place where people tried to understand the makings of the universe.

“Stonehenge is one the big mysteries of the past. Yes, there are a lot of theories but they are all controversial, none of them really explain... None of the theories really add up.”

He also urged contemporary society to take care to preserve the acoustic past of our predecessors and the archeological sites we hold dear, and cautioned against destroying them through practices such as widening ancient caves for easier tourist access.

“Nobody has been paying attention to the sounds. We have been destroying the sounds,” he said.

“The ancient people didn't know about sound waves. It was magic. That is why we need to preserve and study the soundscapes of archeological sites.” - Sapa-AFP

Scientists are using advanced scanning techniques on the mummified corpses of a young woman and a girl child to discover whether the two are related.

Edinburgh - Modern technology reveals the secrets kept for thousands of years by Egyptian mummies in a major exhibition at Scotland's National Museum.

Scientists used advanced scanning techniques on the mummified corpses of a young woman and a girl child laid over her feet to reveal jewellery in the binding and also have plans to tap their DNA to discover whether the two are related.

The show, including the embalmed mummies and objects dating back 6,000 years from the collections at the Scottish museum and the National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden in The Netherlands, opened at the weekend and runs through to May 27 when it will go on to Spain.

The exhibition is being staged in a new purpose-built space created during a 47 million pound renovation of the Edinburgh museum completed last July.

The vastly expanded space has allowed the museum to display objects not seen by the public for generations. Officials said three-million people have visited the museum since July.

Jim Tate, head of conservation at the museum, said scientists at Liverpool University who scanned the mummified corpses using advanced techniques had identified a gold amulet in the young woman's binding and created an exact copy as a gold-gilded titanium artefact.

Scientists now plan to use nuclear DNA tests to determine if the woman and child are related, Tate said.

The area holding the mummies and a series of coffins has been designed to resemble a tunnel into pyramids and tombs, providing an evocative and somewhat eerie atmosphere.

Museum director Gordon Rintoul said Edinburgh had a major Egyptology collection, with Alexander Henry Rhind, a Scottish traveller in the mid-19th century, one of the first collectors to scientifically record his discoveries.

Hanneke Kik of the Leiden museum said the institution had cooperated with an exhibition on Egyptology with the Museum of Civilisation in Canada's Quebec City three years ago. The current joint exhibition in Edinburgh had been two years in the making, and will go from the Scottish capital to six locations in Spain later this year. - Reuters

A new centre will be built above an excavation area called the City of David in east Jerusalem, leaving the ruins below accessible to tourists.

The Israeli government has given a hardline Jewish group permission to build a new archaeological centre in a tense Arab neighbourhood in east Jerusalem, officials said.

Interior Ministry spokeswoman Efrat Orbach said that a Jerusalem planning committee approved the project this week. The public has 60 days to appeal.

Any Israeli-backed project in east Jerusalem runs the risk of sparking protests that can escalate into violence, as conflicting claims to the area are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The centre is to be built in Silwan, an impoverished neighbourhood next to Jerusalem's Old City. Arab residents often clash with Israeli police and guards who protect 80 Jewish families who settled there.

The centre is planned by Elad, a pro-settler group that runs archaeological digs in Silwan. It will be built above an excavation area called the City of David, leaving the ruins below accessible. The area is named for the biblical monarch thought to have ruled from the spot 3,000 years ago.

Israel captured east Jerusalem, home to sensitive Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites, in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its eternal capital, although the annexation of the eastern sector has never been internationally recognised.

The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. They say that the Silwan development plan is part of a strategy meant to cement Israel's control over the area.

Interior Ministry spokesman Efrat Orbach said the Jerusalem district planning committee approved the archaeological centre on Monday.

Opponents say that actual construction is unlikely to begin for months. Several Israeli groups said they would file appeals during the 60-day review period, opening the door for lengthy legal wrangling.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could also intervene to halt the project, said activists. Netanyahu has said he would never relinquish control over east Jerusalem. But concerns that the construction could set off violence could factor into his thinking.

Netanyahu, for instance, has delayed a contentious renovation project of a gate inside the Old City because of objections by Arab countries.

Yoni Mizrahi of the dovish group Emek Shaveh said projects like the archaeological centre are a way for Israeli authorities to ensure their control of Silwan.

“Israeli authorities have been changing the landscape with archaeological and tourism projects,” Mizrahi said. “The idea is that Israelis will never give this up, by creating facts on the ground.” - Sapa-AP

Archeologists have announced the discovery of 23 stone plaques with carved images inside the main temple of what was once the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

Mexico City - Mexican archeologists on Tuesday announced the discovery of 23 stone plaques with carved images inside the main temple of what was once the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, in downtown Mexico City.

The carved images of serpents and warriors tell stories that include the birth of the Aztec warrior god Huitzilopochtli, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said.

The tiles were likely carved when the main temple was built between 1440 and 1469, said archeologist Raul Barrera.

It is the first time that archeologists discover stone carvings set up explicitly to narrate an Aztec myth within the ancient city's most sacred temple, the statement read.

The tiles on average measure 50 centimetres by 40 centimetres.

Archeologists discovered the carvings in late 2011 near a circular platform decorated with serpent heads that was discovered in September 2011, the INAH said.

Experts are still trying to determine if markings that appear on some of the carvings refer to dates on the Aztec calendar, said archeologist Lorena Vazquez.

Tenochtitlan, founded around 1325, was built on an island in a shallow lake.

Spanish conquistadors stormed Tenochtitlan with their native allies in 1521, levelled the city, then built what is now Mexico City on top of it.

The remains of the main temple were discovered in mid 20th century, but a full excavation did not get under way until the 1980s. - Sapa-AFP

Scientists hunting the Higgs boson have decided to turn up the power in their Large Hadron Collider to try to prove its existence this year.

Geneva - Scientists hunting the Higgs boson, the sub-atomic particle believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe, decided on Monday to turn up the power in their Large Hadron Collider to try to prove its existence this year.

The CERN research centre near Geneva wants to prove or disprove the existence of an invisible 'Higgs' field permeating the universe quickly, before the giant LHC machine is shut down for a long-term upgrade in late 2012.

“This means more Higgs, more quickly,” said CERN spokesman James Gillies. The existence of the particle was postulated by British physicist Peter Higgs in 1964 but has never been proved.

According to the theory, the particle was the agent that made the stars, planets - and life - possible by giving mass to most elementary particles, the building blocks of the universe.

In the LHC, two beams of energy are fired in opposite directions around the 27km pipe before slamming into each other, spawning particle collisions that recreate what happened a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, which brought the universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago.

By boosting the energy of each beam - from 3.5 Tera-electron Volts (TeV) to 4 - scientists will get three times more data from tens of millions of daily collisions, CERN said.

Physicists believe that without the Higgs boson and its associated 'particle field', debris from the Big Bang would never have coalesced to form galaxies, stars and planets.

In December two teams of researchers at CERN, the European particle physics centre, both said they had separately seen “tantalising glimpses” of what might be the Higgs during collisions inside the LHC, deep under the Swiss-French border.

But both groups need to gather enough information independently to claim formal discovery of the boson - or to conclude that there is no Higgs, at least in the form that they and others have been seeking since the mid-1980s.

Whether the existence of the Higgs is proved or disproved, a definitive answer would be a momentous event in modern physics, which combined with cosmology and astronomy is rapidly pushing back the frontiers of knowledge about the universe.

The LHC has been closed for a three-month winter break and is due to close again for 20 months from the end of 2012 for a major upgrade in its equipment and power.

“By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of the year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci.

The Standard Model is an overarching theory explaining how the known universe works, based on the work of Albert Einstein and his two theories of relativity early last century.

The Higgs is the last important element in the model whose existence has yet to be proven. If it is found not to exist, physicists will seek answers from the super-powered LHC when it starts up late in 2014.

The upgrade is intended to let the LHC investigate “New Physics”, which includes concepts such as super-symmetry, dark matter, dark energy and parallel universes, long been the stuff of science fiction. - Reuters

Builders on a construction site at at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town have unearthed what appears to be an old wooden barge.

Builders working on a new six-storey office block at the V&A Waterfront have unearthed what appears to be an old wooden barge.

Waterfront spokeswoman Lynette Lambert described the unexpected discovery at Number One Silo in the Clock Tower precinct as an exciting find.

“We have temporarily cordoned off a section of the affected development area until a marine archaeologist has had the opportunity to assess the find.

“It will take a few days to determine what it is exactly we have unearthed or how big it is.”

Lambert said it would be examined by marine archaeologist Liesbet Schietecatte, who is part of the construction team.

“Once we have received her report, a decision will be made on the next steps.”

The 18 000m² Number One Silo complex is located between the Clock Tower shopping centre and the disused grain silo building.

It is part of the R1-billion refurbishment of the Clock Tower precinct.

Construction started in September and is scheduled to be completed in mid-2013.

Lambert added that they would continue digging for more remains today and the archaeologist would be on site to make the required assessments. - Cape Argus

Russia has pierced through Antarctica's frozen crust to a vast, subglacial lake that has lain untouched for at least 14 million years.

Moscow - Russia said on Wednesday it had pierced through Antarctica's frozen crust to a vast, subglacial lake that has lain untouched for at least 14 million years hiding what scientists believe may be unknown organisms and clues to life on other planets.

Sealed deep under the ice sheet, Lake Vostok is one of the world's last unexplored frontiers. Scientists suspect its depths may reveal new life forms and a glimpse of the planet before the ice age.

If life is found in the lake's icy darkness, it may provide the best answer yet to whether life can exist in the extreme conditions on Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa.

“The 57th Russian Antarctic expedition has penetrated the waters of the subglacial Lake Vostok,” Valery Lukin, head of the Russian Antarctic expedition, said in a statement.

After 20 years of stop-go drilling, the Russian team raced to chew through the final metres of ice and breached Lake Vostok in time to take the last flight out on February 6 before the onset of Antarctica's harsh winter. It was here that the coldest temperature found on Earth, minus 89.2 Celsius (minus 128.6 Fahrenheit), was recorded.

Lukin said the breakthrough came on February 5, on the eve of the mission's departure: “At a depth of 3,769 metres (12,365 ft) the drill bit made contact with the real body of water.

“The discovery of this lake is comparable to the first space flight in its technological complexity, its importance and its uniqueness,” Lukin told Interfax.

But Russia must wait for the Antarctic summer to collect and study water samples, leaving the door open for U.S. and British missions to explore two other subglacial lakes and beat it to be the first to answer the question of whether life exists under the polar ice. “We call it extraterrestrial life,” Russian astrobiologist Sergei Bulat told Vesti 24 state television. “It will be useful to the search for life on other icy planets like Jupiter's satellite Europa.”

A century after the first expeditions to the South Pole, the discovery of Antarctica's hidden network of subglacial lakes via satellite imagery in the late 1990s set off a new exploratory fervour among scientists the world over.

“This is scientific exploration, this is work that no one has ever done before,” Martin Siegert, head of the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences, told Reuters.

“This is probably one of the last frontiers on our planet that remains largely unknown to us,” said Siegert, who is leading a British expedition to explore Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica in 2012-2013.

Experts say the ice sheet acts like a blanket, trapping in the Earth's geothermal heat and preventing Antarctic lakes from freezing.

If there is life in Vostok and other ice-bound lakes, it is unlikely to be anything more complicated than single-cell organisms adapted to survive in the high-pressure, sunless environment, Siegert said.

“It is just imagination, we don't really know until we go in,” he said.

Beneath the vast white landscape, Lake Vostok is the deepest and most isolated of Antarctica's subglacial lakes. Its size compares to Siberia's Lake Baikal or one of the Great Lakes, increasing the chance of biodiversity in its waters.

Scientists estimate the body of water is roughly 1 million years old and supersaturated with oxygen, resembling no other known environment on Earth.

John Priscu of Montana State University suspects that an oasis of life may lurk there, teeming around thermal vents.

“I hope that they can confirm unequivocally that there is indeed microbial life in the lake,” said Priscu, the chief scientist on the U.S. project to probe subglacial Lake Whillans.

Russia has dreamed of uncovering the lake's secrets since the 1996 discovery that the low-lying buildings and radio towers of its Antarctic station sit above the ancient waters.

But the drive to explore this unspoilt environment is not without controversy.

The Russian borehole, pumped full of kerosene and freon to keep it from freezing shut, hangs like a needle over the pristine lake. “The ice core at Vostok is there and it won't go away because it is full of anti-freeze,” said Siegert.

In a bid to address international concerns, Russia halted drilling for several years to devise a cleaner method in 2000.

It used a smaller thermal drill to punch through to the lake and back pressured the borehole to force lake water to rise up into it, effectively sipping up samples from the lake's surface. - Reuters

This could just be our earliest ancestor – a sponge-like creature that lived three-quarters-of-a-billion years ago.

This could just be our earliest ancestor – a sponge-like creature that didn’t have a gut and lived three-quarters-of-a-billion years ago.

Otavia antiqua was small, sometimes about the width of a human hair. It lived in the earliest oceans, in a world that had less oxygen in its atmosphere than today.

An academic paper, released this month in the South African Journal of Science, has announced Otavia as the earliest known animal. Microscopic Otavia fossils have been found across Namibia.

It also appears that this multicellular organism was a tough critter that survived one of the worst cold spells to grip planet Earth.

The discovery of these fossils is a culmination of 15 years of research by paleontologist Dr Bob Brain in the Namibian desert.

Brain is better known for his work on hominids and cave taphonomy, but since his retirement he has searched for the earliest traces of predation. It is his hobby, is how he describes it.

“I have been interested in predation, I just wanted to see where it all started,” explained Brain.

The oldest Otavia were around 760 million years old, a 150 million years earlier than when other animals emerged in the fossil record.

Co-author of the paper Dr Anthony Prave, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, believes that Otavia would have lived in quiet water settings, like in lagoons.

“In general, oxygen levels would have been lower than today’s and temperatures probably somewhat warmer overall,” said Prave.

Otavia would have likely shared its world with algae and bacteria, both of which it preyed on.

Scientists believes how it fed has to do with the microscopic holes that can be seen across the bodies of these primitive sponges.

Beating flagella, tail-like structures on the outer body of Otavia, are believed to have drawn water with food matter into the organism.

Otavia didn’t have a gut, so its prey would have been drawn into the inner cavity, where it would be digested.

“Later, what is left over would be pushed out of those same small holes,” said Brain.

While temperatures might have been warmer than today, life – it appears – wasn’t always idyllic for the world’s earliest animal.

Prave, whose job it was to work out just when Otavia lived, discovered that the sponge was around before and after an event that scientists refer to as Snowball Earth.

This event makes the later ice ages appear like mild cold snaps.

Snowball Earth might have left the planet entirely frozen, with the seas iced up even at the equator.

There might have even been two Snowball events that Otavia survived.

“They (Otavia) are also found in rocks that occur between the two major Snowball Earth units in Namibia, and we have also found them in rocks that post-date the youngest Snowball Earth unit.

“So, yes, they evolved before Snowball Earth, survived through these events and existed too close to the Cambrian explosion (about 530 million years ago),” said Prave.

While Otavia might not have had the means to stalk its prey, Brain sees it as a predator, the first of its kind that started an evolutionary arms race.

He believes that, ultimately, what was started by Otavia led to man dominating the planet.

“We have done it (predation) better than others,” said Brain. - The Star