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A University of Southern California scientist says that experiments done more than 20 years ago on Martian soil collected by Viking landers 1 and 2 show that life exists on Mars in the form of microbes. The significance of that finding was overlooked and the data was lost after NASA concluded that its experiments showed only signs of chemical activity on the surface of Mars, according to Joseph Miller, a USC neurobiologist. But a careful reexamination of a fragment of the recovered NASA record shows a surprising pattern: gas released by the Martian soil and tracked by Viking followed the same kind of rhythms followed by all Earth-bound organisms from humans to fruit flies. ?I think, basically, that it?s bugs,” says Miller.
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Over Four thousand two hundred years ago, the first great civilization in Egypt collapsed.

The pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom built the pyramids at Giza, one of the greatest monuments of the ancient world. But after nearly a thousand years of stable government, central authority disintegrated and the country collapsed into chaos for more than a 100 years. Why this happened is a huge controversy for Egyptologists.

Professor Fekri Hassan, from University College London, decided to solve the mystery using scientific clues. His inspiration was the little known tomb in southern Egypt of a regional governor, Ankhtifi. The hieroglyphs there say that ?all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children.? read more

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The crater of Mount Pinatubo is filling with water and scientists warn that it?s about to burst. Pinatubo erupted violently in 1991. Now the lake water level inside the crater is rising, effecting a geological fault in the crater called the Maraunot notch.

They believe it could give way at any time, sending an avalanche of mud over the towns and villages below. Emergency agencies are calling for immediate action to prevent a disaster. ?Two things are for certain, the lake water level is rising and the Maraunot notch will eventually be breached,? according to a geology research team commissioned by the charity group Oxfam.
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Scientists are planning to hatch dinosaurs from chicken eggs by turning back the evolutionary clock to when birds were dinosaurs. They believe advances in DNA technology could make such a feat possible in 60 to 100 years.

Modern birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, and some say that structurally birds are dinosaurs. Major differences between species can already be created or removed with surprising ease. Already one team at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has succeeded in getting the beaks of chicken embryos to grow budding teeth. This is a feature bird ancestors lost 60 million years ago, soon after the death of the dinosaurs. Researchers have partially restored legs to snakes and eyes to eyeless cave fish. read more