Israeli scholars say they have confirmed the authenticity of a 2,000-year-old burial box bearing the name of a relative of the high priest Caiaphas of the New Testament.

The ossuary bears an inscription with the name "Miriam daughter of Yeshua son of Caiaphas, priest of Maaziah from Beth Imri."

To confirm the authenticity of the ossuary, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), who discovered the ancient burial box turned to Dr. Boaz Zissu of the Department of the Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology of Bar Ilan University and Professor Yuval Goren of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations of the Tel Aviv University.

"The prime importance of the inscription lies in the reference to the ancestry of the deceased - Miriam daughter of Yeshua - to the Caiaphas family, indicating the connection to the family of the Ma'aziahcourse of priests of Beth 'Imri," wrote Zissu and Goren in the conclusion of their study.

An ossuary is a stone chest used to store bones.

The moon will block part of the sun on Friday (July 1) in a partial solar eclipse, but everyone on the planet will likely miss the event unless you're a penguin, or possibly aboard an icebreaker sailing between Antarctica and Africa.

The partial solar eclipse will be relatively minor, as eclipses go, so it's no big deal for skywatchers to skip. However, this particular eclipse is noteworthy because it falls into two unusual categories.

First, it turns out that this event, puny as it is, will be the third eclipse to take place within a single month's time. It comes after a partial solar eclipse on June 1 over Earth's northern polar regions. That event was followed on June 15 by a stunning total lunar eclipse over Europe and Asia.

Now on Friday, there will be yet another partial eclipse of the sun.

The common crow knows when you're out to get him - and he's likely to teach his friends and family to watch out for you, a new study finds.

In results that can only be described as Hitchcockian, researchers in Seattle who trapped and banded crows for five years found that those birds don't forget a face. Even after going for a year without seeing the threatening human, the crows would scold the person on sight, cackling, swooping and dive-bombing in mobs of 30 or more.

"Most of the birds that are scolding us are not the ones we captured," said study researcher John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and an occasional victim of crow attacks. "It's likely that they're learning from their parents and their peers that this dangerous person is still out there."

The hacktivist group Anonymous may be setting its sights on the city of Orlando, Florida next, if an anonymous press release which has landed in our inbox is to be believed (see below). The group is threatening to take down a different city-related website every day, starting with Orlando Florida Guide, which doesn't even appear to be owned by the city of Orlando (it is registered to an organization called Utopia, administered by a man named Steven Ridenour). So any random website extolling the virtues of Orlando could be targeted.

The DDOS attacks are justified in the press release as retaliation for the repeated arrests of members of a non-profit group called Food Not Bombs, which feeds homeless people in a park without a permit. The leader of the group, Keith McHenry, was also recently arrested.

Using a vast array of radio telescopes, astronomers in North America are the first to make a direct measurement of the distance to Cygnus X-1, allowing them to conclude that the mass of its dark star is so great it can only be a black hole. They have also discovered that the black hole spins faster than most of its peers.

"There's no doubt about its distance now, and there's not much uncertainty anymore about its mass," says Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It's definitely a black hole."

A black hole is a star that has run out of fuel and died, collapsing into a small body with such enormous gravity that nothing escapes its grip. First identified as harbouring a possible black hole in 1971, Cygnus X-1 was one of the first sources of X-rays discovered by astronomers. It is found in the constellation Cygnus the Swan, also known as the Northern Cross, and is one of the most studied objects in the sky. It even inspired a 10-minute song by the Canadian rock band Rush about how the stars of the Northern Cross were "in mourning for their sister's loss".

It may not be marked on your holiday calendar but today, June 28, is noted for being "Tau Day", at least among strident detractors of pi, the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference, BBC News is reporting.

Proponents of Tau Day suggest a constant called tau should replace pi, which comes close to twice the value of pi, or about 6.28 - hence the 28 June celebration. Fans say that for many problems in math, tau makes more sense and makes calculations easier.

Not all math geeks agree, however, and pi has a long, rich history which means it will be a difficult number to unseat. "I like to describe myself as the world's leading anti-pi propagandist," said Michael Hartl, an educator and former theoretical physicist, to BBC.

"When I say pi is wrong, it doesn't have any flaws in its definition - it is what you think it is, a ratio of circumference to diameter. But circles are not about diameters, they're about radii; circles are the set of all the points a given distance - a radius - from the center" Dr. Hartl explained.

Leeds University experts are backing the campaign for pi to be replaced by tau by making certain mathematical problems easier.

The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang, but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of "aeons," according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite supports his idea of "conformal cyclic cosmology".

Penrose's finding runs directly counter to the widely accepted inflationary model of cosmology which states that the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged. That expansion is now believed to be accelerating due to a scientific X factor called dark energy and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe.

Penrose, however, said Physics World, takes issue with the inflationary picture "and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born - an extremely high degree of order that made complex matter possible. He does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe."

The core concept in Penrose's theory is the idea that in the very distant future the universe will in one sense become very similar to how it was at the Big Bang. Penrose says that "at these points the shape, or geometry, of the universe was and will be very smooth, in contrast to its current very jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang. Crucially, he says, the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe."

A house-sized asteroid zipped apst Earth yesteday closer than the moon. Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. Through Earth's history such collisions occur, on the average every one million years. If this figure is correct, it would mean that intelligent life on Earth has developed only because of the lucky chance that there have been no major collisions in the last 70 million years. Other planets in the galaxy, Hawking believes, on which life has developed, may not have had a long enough collision free period to evolve intelligent beings.

We have observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter, which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks.

It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth, about 70 million years ago, was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. A few small early mammals survived, but anything as large as a human, would have almost certainly been wiped out.

"The threat of the Earth being hit by an asteroid is increasingly being accepted as the single greatest natural disaster hazard faced by humanity," according to Nick Bailey of the University of Southampton's School of Engineering Sciences team, who has developed a threat identifying program.

It looks like the set of a Hollywood action movie but these images were taken by a team of expert cave divers in the depths of Russia.

A team of daring cave divers have produced an incredible photo-reportage of the longest underwater gypsum crystal cave in the world.

The Orda Cave in the western Urals region is three miles of eerily dramatic natural channels created by water so clear divers can see over 50 yards ahead of them.

Over a period of six months the intrepid team led by photographer and journalist, Victor Lyagushkin, 40, from Russia explored the water filled cave tunnels at temperatures barely above freezing.

The San Andreas Fault is overdue for "the big one," and the efforts by humans to control flooding in the area could be the reason for the recent lull in temblors, a new study suggests.

Ancient floods once helped unleash earthquakes on the San Andreas, a group of researchers has found. The southern portion of the fault has not experienced a large earthquake for about 300 years, though, which makes one long overdue - the previous five major earthquakes in the region occurred at approximately 180-year intervals.

Over the past century, humans have put in place measures to control floods in the region to protect property and infrastructure, which the researchers say might explain the quake lull.