Exploring a dig site in southern Cyprus which has already yielded the oldest wine and silk in the Mediterranean, the Italians unearthed copper-smelting ovens dating back to 2,000 BC.

They found that the walls were covered with thick, black resin.

Samples of the mysterious pitch-like substance were sent back to Rome from the site at Pyrgos Mavroraki near Limassol for analysis at the Institute of Technologies Applied to Art (ITABC).

It turned out to be the burnt residue of olive oil.

"It's the first time in the history of metallurgy that this fuel has been found in place of charcoal," said ITABC's Maria Rosaria Belgiorno.

The first historical evidence of olive oil being added to food is much later, she said.

Belgiorno said similar furnaces to the Pyrgos ones had been found at equally olive-rich ancient sites in Jordan and Syria.

"Mediterranean metallurgy was born in the places where we have the first evidence of olive-oil extraction," she said.

Copper from Cyprus is known to have been the most prized in the Mediterrean in the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1600 BC), she said. "This was probably because olive-oil smelting leaves fewer impurities from the ore." "It was therefore practically ready, without purification, to be mixed with tin to produce bronze". The world's first bronze is believed to have been produced in Asia Minor at about 3,500 BC, the conventional beginning of the Early Bronze Age, Charcoal ovens have been found in Asia Minor and elsewhere - but never any trace of olive oil. Charcoal, a slow, steady fuel produced by heating wood in airless chambers, was used right up until the Industrial Revolution when it was replaced by coke, or distilled coal. So why did the ancient Cypriot smelters use oil, Belgiorno was asked.

"Well, you need good axes to cut enough wood to produce sufficient coke for large-scale smelting. In Cyprus back then they only had rudimentary tools".



"The discovery of olive oil's potential was probably serendipitous. A few olives may have fallen into a fire and people were surprised at how well they burned. So they decided to extract the oil".

As well as 18 ancient ovens, fragments of oil presses, vats and pouring ducts have been found at Pyrgos. A model of the ancient Cypriot mines has been built at Blera near Viterbo, at the experimental archaeology centre Antiquitates.

"The smelting chamber was pre-heated to about 6-700 degrees C with wood, and then oil was added to reach the melting point of 1,083 degrees," said Angelo Bartoli of Antiquitates.

"They were pretty clever about preventing the oil flames blowing back into their faces," Bartoli said.



"The oil was fed into the chambers in reeds, with the feeding point covered by an improvised cap such as an upturned jar."

"This prediction of an active solar cycle suggests we're potentially looking at more communications disruptions, more satellite failures, possible disruptions of electrical grids and blackouts, more dangerous conditions for astronauts," said Richard Behnke of the Upper Atmosphere Research Section at the National Science Foundation.

"Predicting and understanding space weather will soon be even more vital than ever before," Behnke said at a telephone news briefing.

The prediction, roughly analogous to the early prediction of a severe hurricane season on Earth, involves the number of sunspots on the solar surface, phenomena that have been monitored for more than a century.

TWISTED MAGNETIC FIELDS

Every 11 years or so, the sun goes through an active period, with lots of sunspots. This is important, since solar storms -- linked to twisted magnetic fields that can hurl out energetic particles -- tend to occur near sunspots.

The sun is in a relatively quiet period now, but is expected to get more active soon, scientists said. However, there is disagreement as to whether the active period will start within months -- late 2006 or early 2007 -- or years, with the first signs in late 2007 or early 2008.

Whenever it begins, the new forecasting method shows sunspot activity is likely to be 30 percent to 50 percent stronger than the last active period. The peak of the last cycle was in 2001, the researchers said, but the period of activity can span much of a decade.

The strongest solar cycle in recent memory occurred in the late 1950s, when there were few satellites aloft, no astronauts in orbit and less reliance on electrical power grids than there is now.

If a similarly active period occurred now, the impact would be hard to predict, according to Joseph Kunches of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Space Environment Center in Colorado.

"It's pretty uncertain what would happen, which makes this work more relevant," Kunches said.

"What we have here is a prediction that the cycle is going to be very active, and what we need and what we're of course working on is to be able to predict individual storms with a couple days or hours in advance so the grids can take the action," Behnke said.

The London-based research team believes its work will help conservationists prevent extinctions through early intervention - prevention, not cure.

It is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study concentrates on a concept called "latent extinction risk".

This means animals are not under threat right now, and may not be classified as in danger according to the Red List, the internationally accepted database of threatened species.

But the pattern of human development means they could be sent on a fast track to extinction in the near future, perhaps overtaking other species currently in higher-risk classifications.

"We can see this leap-frogging happening now, for example with the Guatemalan howler monkey, which was classified as being on the 'least concern' list in 2000 but which moved to the 'endangered' list in 2004 as it lost much of its forest habitat," said study leader Dr Marcel Cardillo, from Imperial College London.

"We hope conservationists will use our findings to pre-empt future species losses rather than concentrating solely on those species already under threat."

Ox and reindeer

The scientists calculated the latent extinction risk for more than 1,500 non-marine mammals.

Re-inforcing the conclusions of other groups, they find that species at particular risk tend to have relatively large bodies, live in small areas and reproduce relatively slowly; these include, they say, the North American reindeer, the musk ox, the Seychelles flying fox and the brown lemur.

Perhaps surprisingly, areas identified as containing species with a particularly large latent extinction risk exclude well-known biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazon and Congo basins, and include sub-Polar regions in northern Canada, northern Russia and Greenland.

"I am surprised that paper doesn't pick up the Amazon and Congo basins, regions where there is a large number of animal species with small ranges," observed Thomas Brooks of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science (Cabs) in Washington DC, a division of Conservation International.

One reason for this may be poor information. Some databases of plants and animals are badly in need of revision - a flaw which scientific groups led by IUCN, the World Conservation Union, are trying to address through improving background studies of various species and ecosystems.

Ahead of the curve

Conservation International is one of a number of groups which already tries to mount "preventative" programmes rather than waiting until very few members of a species remain.

"It's widely recognised among conservation practitioners that wherever we have the opportunity we should get ahead of the curve and implement proactive conservation measures," Dr Brooks told the BBC News website.

"Proactive solutions tend to be cheaper and easier.

"But the magnitude of human impacts on biodiversity is such that most conservation programmes will inevitably be reactive."

Some "last-chance" programmes have proved successful. In Yellowstone National Park, grizzly bears have recovered enough to come off the US endangered species list; while in the UK, numbers of stone curlew breeding pairs have doubled over the last 20 years.

Through the Convention on Biological Diversity, the international community has set itself the goal of making a "substantial reduction in the rate of loss of biological diversity" by 2010.

But overall, extinctions are coming at 100 to 1,000 times the normal background rate, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a vast attempt to audit the Earth's ecological health which was published last year.

It concluded that a third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction.

It also concluded that although humanity is the cause, humanity will ultimately be among the losers.

Reducing biodiversity will, it says, impact societies at a number of levels, including diminishing the availability of economically valuable natural goods such as timber and compromising "ecosystem services" such as fresh water and biodegrading bacteria.

Meanwhile, a levee on private property near Sonoma Creek overtopped just before 8 a.m. Monday, flooding the owner's vineyard, officials said.

No damage to homes or businesses was reported, said Sandy Covall-Alves, a Sonoma County emergency services coordinator.

Sonoma Creek is prone to flooding and most homeowners in the area are prepared, officials said.

Nevertheless, its proximity was whipping up gusts of up to 120 kilometres an hour on Reunion and producing lashing rain. Some 10,000 homes were without electricity and 20,000 were without running water as a result.

Authorities also said that spot flooding had hit several communities and roads Saturday night.

"Reunion will remain in the zone of influence of the phenomenon Sunday and Monday," a Meteo-France forecaster, Philippe Caroff, said.