Very Important Information about Education And Reference, Entertainment And Music And More

Kissing meant much more than physical attraction for the ancient Greeks and Romans, for the juicy gesture was used to express deference at the time, says an expert.Donald Lateiner, a humanities-classics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, says that men kissed men on the cheek as a social greeting, while subjects of a king “abased” themselves by kissing the ground in front of him.

While speaking at a press conference in Chicago, he said that people who wanted to curry favour with someone of higher status would “kiss up” the person’s hands, shoulders, and head-in that order.

He revealed that peems, novels, and all kinds of art helped him parse out the history of the kiss.

Lateiner said that many Tuscan and Roman ladies’ mirror cases sported erotic scenes “from the world of myth, (or) sometimes from the world of daily life.”

However, on Athenian vases and Pompeian frescoes, romantic smooching is quite rare.

“(Instead) there’s a whole lot of sex,” National Geographic quoted him as saying.

He said that that might be because artists of the era preferred to depict full bodies, and a “Hollywood close-up” of people kissing would be too small a detail to feature.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University highlighted the fact that over 90 percent of human societies and several animals, including chimpanzees, used kisses to express themselves.

She said that the ubiquity of the smooch supported Charles Darwin’s belief that kissing was an instinct that evolved to jump-start reproduction.

The two researchers presented their findings on kissing during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

With a view to increasing its surveillance capabilities, Indian Air Force is going to have its own satellite in space by the end of 2010.

“We will launch our satellite by the end of 2010,” IAF chief Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi Major said here yesterday.

The satellite to be launched by ISRO next year will be a dual-use satellite and will be used for civilian purposes also.

It will help the IAF to position its aerial and ground assets and targets. It would be used to gather navigational information.

In the recent past, IAF has been working closely to develop its space-based capabilities. It even has plans of setting up an Aerospace command under it but it has faced opposition from the other two services over the issue.

Its Southern Command based in Thiruvananthapuram works closely with ISRO in space related areas. At the air headquarters also, one Air Vice Marshal rank officer looks after space operations.

There’s something kinky going on in the world of seed beetles. According to a new study, the female insects seek out intimate moments not to increase their chances of becoming fertilized, but for hydration.”We were curious about the behavior of these females-males are known to inflict damage during mating, and yet the females keep going back for more,” the National Geographic quoted study lead author Claudia Ursprung of the University of Toronto Mississauga.

“We wanted to find out whether females were getting food or drinks from the ejaculated fluid,” said Ursprung, whose research appears in a recent issue of the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

To reach the conclusion, the research team kept 79 female seed beetles in enclosures for eight days. Some were given food and water, some just food, and some just water.

In the absence of water but not food, females were much more likely to try breeding. Being given water, however, left the females with little appetite for sex.

The beetles probably evolved this bizarre tactic because the species lives in a dry environment, the researchers suspect.

The giant particle collider built to reproduce “Big Bang” conditions will now be restarted in September to allow time for repairs, not the summer as planned, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said.

In a statement late on Monday, CERN said the first particle collisions would take place in October, following repairs and the installation of new safety features to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest and most complex machine ever built.

After another short technical stop at the end of 2009, the collider will run until autumn next year, producing enough data on the smallest building blocks of matter to announce results in 2010, it said.

“The schedule we have now is without a doubt the best for the LHC and for the physicists waiting for data,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in the statement.

“It is cautious, ensuring that all the necessary work is done on the LHC before we start up, yet it allows physics research to begin this year,” he said.

The new timetable represents a setback of six weeks on the previous schedule, which had foreseen that the LHC’s giant tunnels would be cooled down to their operating temperature of just above absolute zero by early July.

CERN had previously said it would restart the collider this spring after shutting it down in September because of an electrical fault and helium leak, only nine days after starting it up to great fanfare.

The collider is designed to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, believed by most cosmologists to have created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

It sends beams of sub-atomic particles around a 27-km (17-mile) tunnel under the French-Swiss border outside Geneva to collide with each other at nearly the speed of light.

These collisions will explode in a burst of energy which scientists will monitor for new or previously unseen particles which they predict could help explain the nature of mass and the origins of the universe.

CERN has said the accident last year never posed any danger. When it first started the machine it had to rebuff suggestions that the experiment would create millions of black holes that would suck in the earth.

CERN, whose scientist Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1990, said in December it expected the repairs to cost up to 35 million Swiss francs ($30 million).

The LHC has already cost 10 billion francs ($8.5 billion) to build, supported by CERN’s 20 European member states and other countries including the United States and Russia.

A team of archaeologists, in excavations in Greece, has found new evidence which validates the theory that Zeus, considered as the father of Greek Gods, was born in Arcadia on Mt. Lykaion and worshipped at the same place more than 3,200 years ago.New excavation evidence indicates that Zeus’ worship was established on Mt. Lykaion as early as the Late Helladic period, if not before, more than 3,200 years ago.According to Dr. David Gilman Romano, Senior Research Scientist, Mediterranean Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum, and one of the project’s co-directors, it is likely that a memory of the cult’s great antiquity survived there, leading to the claim that Zeus was born in Arcadia.

New evidence to support the ancient myth that Zeus was born on Mt. Lykaion in Arcadia has come from a small trench from the southern peak of the mountain, known from the historical period as the ash altar of Zeus Lykaios.

Over fifty Mycenaean drinking vessels, or kylikes, were found on the bedrock at the bottom of the trench along with fragments of human and animal figurines and a miniature double headed axe.

Also found were burned animal bones, mostly of goats and sheep, another indication consistent with Mycenaean cult activity.

“This new evidence strongly suggests that there were drinking (and perhaps feasting) parties taking place on the top of the mountain in the Late Helladic period, around 3,300 or 3,400 years ago,” said Dr. Romano.

In mainland Greece, there are very few if any Mycenaean mountain-top altars or shrines.

This time period - 14th-13th centuries BC - is approximately the same time that documents inscribed with a syllabic script called Linear B (an archaic form of the Greek language) first mention Zeus as a deity receiving votive offerings.

Linear B also provides a word for an ‘open fire altar’ that might describe this altar on Mt. Lykaion as well as a word for a sacred area, temenos, a term known from later historical sources.

vidence from subsequent periods in the same trench indicate that cult activity at the altar seems to have continued uninterrupted from the Mycenaean period down through the Hellenistic period (4th - 2nd centuries BCE), something that has been documented at very few sites in the Greek world.

Miniature bronze tripods, silver coins, and other dedications to Zeus including a bronze hand of Zeus holding a silver lightning bolt, have been found in later levels in the same trench.

A new survey has found that half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22 percent preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the world came about, and many confused about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.According to a report in the Guardian, the poll, known as “The Rescuing Darwin survey”, was carried out to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, “On the Origin of Species”.

The poll found that 25 percent of Britons believe Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is “definitely true”, with another quarter saying it is “probably true”.

Half of the 2,060 people questioned were either strongly opposed to the theory or confused about it.

About 12 percent people preferred intelligent design, the idea that evolution alone is not enough to explain the structures of living organisms.

The remainder were unsure, often mixing evolution, intelligent design and creationism together.

“Creationists ask if people believe in evolution. Evolution is a theory and a fact. You accept it because of the evidence. What the creationists have done is put a cloak of pseudo-science to wrap up their religious belief,” said James Williams, a lecturer at Sussex University.

“Evolution is very badly taught in schools; so the results of the survey don’t surprise me. On the other hand, creationism has traditionally been an issue in North America and there is a big problem in Australia and Turkey. It matters if people don’t understand how science works,” he added.

Who loves Lucy? Far fewer people than a Seattle science center hoped when officials paid millions to show the fossil remains of one of the earliest known human ancestors.Halfway through the five-month exhibit, the Pacific Science Center faces a half-million-dollar loss resulting in layoffs of 8 percent of the staff, furloughs and a wage freeze, President Bryce Seidl said Friday.

Lucy is a 3.2 million-year-old fossilized partial skeleton of a species with chimplike features that walked upright. The discovery in 1974 in Ethiopia forced a major revision of theories about the evolution of Homo sapiens.

The fossil exhibit was successful at the first stop on the tour — Houston in 2007, but the expenses have other museums reconsidering the planned six-year, 10-city tour.

The Seattle center’s staff redesigned the Lucy exhibit, adding a large section on Ethiopian history and artifacts, an audio tour and interactive displays in which visitors can put themselves in the shoes of a fossil hunter.

“It’s a powerful story of evolution and culture and history … but we’re not getting the attendance we need for an exhibit of this scale,” Seidl said.

The center had hoped to draw 250,000 visitors during the exhibit that ends March 8, but only 60,000 have come. Seidl blamed the recession, which has cut into arts and museum revenue nationwide, as well as December snowstorms that curtailed travel within and around Seattle.

The Lucy show cost the center about $2.25 million, Seidl estimated. That includes a $500,000 fee to Ethiopia, which plans to use the money for cultural and scientific programs.

The Field Museum in Chicago withdrew from the tour because of the cost. Debate over whether the irreplaceable fossil should be shipped around the globe led the Denver Museum of Nature & Science to drop the idea after early consideration.

“Lucy may not be anywhere other than Ethiopia after Seattle,” Seidl said.

But Donald Johanson, the American anthropologist who discovered Lucy, said fascination with the skeleton remained strong.

“As I travel around the country lecturing, people seem to have a deep interest in their origins, in their roots,” Johanson said.

Iceland’s government unveiled Tuesday a steep rise in its disputed commercial whale hunt, a sixfold increase allowing the killing of 150 fin whales and up to 150 minke whales a year. Iceland, which pulled out of an international whaling moratorium in 2006 after observing it for 16 years, had a quota of nine fin whales and 40 minke whales per year.

But outgoing Fisheries Minister Einar Gudfinnsson said the government would follow the recommendations of the Marine Research Institute, which suggested a quota of 150 fin whales and 100 to 150 minke whales a year over the next five years.

“I think that whalers will be satisfied by this quota,” Gudfinnsson told AFP.

Gudfinnsson is a member of the centre-right Independence Party, whose coalition government with the left-leaning Social Democrats collapsed on Monday following protests over its handling of the economic crisis.

The Social Democrats and Left Greens, who oppose whaling, have been asked by President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson to form a new minority coalition after the one led by Prime Minister Geir Haarde, of the Independence Party, resigned.

Foreign Minister Ingibjoerg Solrun Gisladottir, the Social Democratic leader, had blasted Gudfinnsson in May for authorising whale hunting again this year.

Conservationists blasted the new quota.

“I hope that the minister who will replace Einar (Gudfinnsson) will have the courage to recall this decision,” said Arni Finnsson, of the Icelandic Natural Conservation.

Iceland and Norway are the only two countries in the world that authorise commercial whaling. Japan officially hunts whales for scientific purposes, although the whale meat is sold for consumption.

Using an advanced method of facial reconstruction, a team of researchers at the Otago University in New Zealand, has revealed the face of an Egyptian aristocrat, dating back to 2,000 years.The 35-year-old female aristocrat has been part of the Otago Museum’s collection for more than a century.

The facial reconstruction of the mummy is the result of over a year’s work by a team from Otago University and they are confident that their modern day model is extremely accurate.

“I would say if somebody from that era comes and sees this reconstruction, I would say they would recognise her,” said Dr George Dias from Otago University’s Adanatomy Department.

The team developed an advanced method of facial reconstruction, which more accurately recreates the soft tissues like nose and skin surrounding the skull.

Previous methods have more guesswork and left the process open to artistic interpretation.

“We know there’s no such thing called an average face,” said Dr Dias. “You take two people from the same racial background, same age, same sex, the faces are different,” he added.

Four years ago, scientists in Egypt put the mummy of Tutankhamen through a CAT scan. There, the fragile skeleton of the young Pharaoh was already unwrapped.

But this new process is non-invasive, preserving the ancient artefact by editing the original CAT scan.

The mummy was then electronically unwrapped, stripping away her wooden sarcophagus, bandages, and remaining soft tissue, thus revealing an accurate 3D image of the skull inside.

The process also has genuine real world applications, in the area of Police forensics and cold cases.

The next step is using silicone skin, to create a more human face.

Aerospace firm Boeing has reported that their prototype truck-mounted laser has shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) at a missile range in New Mexico, US.According to a report in New Scientist, mounted on a Humvee off-road vehicle, the Laser Avenger is an infrared laser with power levels somewhere in the tens of kilowatts range.

It is designed to take down the smaller variety of UAV, which are hardest for conventional air-defence weapons to target.

The power of its laser has been doubled since 2007, when it was shown off destroying a stationary improvised bomb.

Now it has tracked three small UAVs and shot one of them down.

The laser tracks an object and holds fire until the target is close enough for it to cause burning with a single blast.

Marc Selinger, a Boeing spokesman based in Crystal City, Virginia, has not disclosed at what distance this was achieved, saying it was “an operationally relevant range”.

“The feat is all the more important because the tracking was achieved against the complex, cluttered visual background of the New Mexico mountains and desert scenery,” he said.

The Laser Avenger is a modified version of an existing US Army air defence system that uses two Stinger missile launchers and a heavy machine gun, with one missile pod swapped for the laser and its target tracker.

“If funded by the Pentagon, the Laser Avenger could be available within a year,” according to Selinger.

Firing a laser multiple times would also be cheaper than firing many missiles, and could continue as long as power can be supplied.

However, Brown’s colleague Peter Felstead, editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly, said that the first battlefield lasers will not have UAVs in their sights.

“Laser weapons are more likely to be fielded first to counter rockets and mortars, and that capability is not that far away,” he said.