Speaking after what was tabled an end of day 'fireside chat', Mr Page said one thing that he had learned since Google launched eight years ago was that technology can change faster than expected, and that AI could be a reality within a few years.

Certainly in that short period of time, Google has gone from a start-up in Mountain View to one of the most recognised brands in the world. As evidence of its meteoric rise, the Hertfordshire hotel in which the conference took place was also home to the England football team. The post-conference press roundtable was briefly interrupted by assistant manager Steve McLaren who had evidently got the wrong room.

Google's executives were also forced to defend their tactics. While suggesting the business could one day capture a 20% share of the $800bn (£424bn) global advertising market, Mr Schmidt explained that the apparently scatter-gun approach to research that lets engineers spend a fifth of their time working on pet projects, also allows the company to innovate faster than any rival.

While this has created some products (such as shopping service Froogle) that have not been a great success, it also led to the Gmail email service which despite still being only in test form is rapidly catching up with market leaders such as Hotmail.

But Mr Schmidt admitted that the company is spending more energy than perhaps it has in the past on integrating some of these seemingly random ventures back into its core revenue-generating search tool, something that could be seen as a sea change within the business, though Google executives maintain it is not going through a major consolidation phase.

But the lack of a visible pipeline of development from Google - which never gives a clear indication of what it is working on until it is released - infuriates some of its stockholders, who would rather it concentrated on a few lucrative services.

"We are very clear and I want to be clear and on the record," said Mr Schmidt. "We run the company for the benefit of our end-users globally."

Looking at the current court case in Houston where Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, former executives of collapsed energy giant Enron, await the outcome of their trial for fraud, he added: "Speaking as an American company chief executive, when the management team starts focusing on the stock price rather than focusing on its business and customers you get a really bad outcome. We are focused on doing the right thing for the long-term"

Mr Schmidt also attacked suggestions from some major US cable companies that providers of capacity-hungry internet services - such as video and TV - should be charged to run their services over the web. This presents a challenge to what is generally seen as the internet's neutrality, that everyone should be able to get on to it.

"We believe this violates one of the founding principles that built the internet today and it could stifle the next wave of innovation," he said.

In fact Google is currently working on its own video tool. While adamant that the company is not looking to get into the provision of content itself, it is looking to produce a video tool that will allow broadband TV viewers to find the shows they want from the hundreds that are available across the world. It is looking for media partners interested in using such a tool.

Mr Schmidt also had a few consoling words for the traditional media business which sees its profitability being utterly eroded by online rivals. He said usage of traditional media placed online is rising rapidly, but circulations - the revenue generator - are declining. "You don't have a lack of audience problem, you have a business model problem," he said.

The archeologist said the animal had probably died of an illness.

A whole mammoth skeleton is a rare and valuable find, but the Krasnoyarsk skeleton is likely to be lost again. To preserve the bones, affected by water, a complicated technical procedure is required. Since the archeological community cannot afford it, most of the skeleton will be lost, except for several parts that will go on display in the local museum.

Kovac says his work, recently published in the Bratislava Medical Journal, builds on studies that show parts of the human body respond to fluctuations in the earth's geomagnetic field caused by sun storms.

He also found patients suffered fewer strokes when the moon was farthest from earth.

"We see a correlation between the human body and lunar and solar phenomena, even if we don't know exactly what explains the connection," he told Reuters.

Coronal mass ejections, which peak roughly every 11 years, send hot gas toward earth that cause radio blackouts and satellite malfunctions, illuminate skies around the north and south poles and are believed to impair the navigational ability of pigeons.

Despite skepticism from astronomers, Kovac and colleagues in the U.S. and Japan think fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field caused by the ejections may disturb the electro-chemical reactions that make human bodies work.

He began his research in the 1980s after observing unexplained increases in stroke patients on certain days, weeks, months and years.

"I'd be getting a lot of patients, and I'd talk to heart doctors and they'd say the same thing," he said.

Solar flares and coronal ejections last peaked in 2000 and 2001, Kovac said.

"That means we have four more years in the cycle," he said with a sigh. "Then we'll be busy again."

The move came after the agriculture ministry earlier on Monday confirmed the presence of the H5 bird-flu virus in dead chickens found in the neighbourhood, the latest of dozens of outbreaks of avian flu in Romania this spring.

Inimaroiu said, urging residents to stay calm, that "about 40 streets have been blocked" in the Luica quarter.

He said the quarantine would last for "a period of a week to 21 days and all the institutions in this quarter will be closed".

"About 2 500 birds from this area will be slaughtered as rapidly as possible," said the mayor.

A neighbourhood on the northern outskirts of the capital was put under quarantine on Sunday evening with fences blocking a dozen streets and police preventing anyone from going in or out, except for medical emergencies.

Carefully planned experiments

Many animals such as squirrels hide their food, and some, such as chimpanzees and crows, have been shown to use tools to retrieve food, but the two carefully planned experiments show that animals can plan for the future, as well.

In one study, Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany tested orangutans and bonobos at the zoo in Leipzig.

They set up a series of experiments that required the apes to remember a complex method for retrieving a treat using tools the researchers provided.

In one experiment, they inserted a piece of uncooked spaghetti into a metal cylinder and hung bunches of grapes from the ends of the spaghetti.

"To obtain the reward subjects had to break the spaghetti by inserting a plastic tube through the top hole over the cylinder. That caused the grapes to fall down and hang in front of the bottom holes thus allowing subjects access to them," the researchers wrote.

In another experiment, the apes had to use a metal hook to retrieve a bottle of grape juice. To pass the test, the subjects had to pick which tool was needed to get the juice and remember to bring it back with them some time later.

Passed tests

Both orangutans and bonobos passed the tests several times, the scientists said.

In the other set of studies, Joanna Dally of the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and colleagues studied the food-hiding behaviour of captive scrub jays. The birds are members of the corvid family, which includes jays, crows and ravens, and considered the smartest group of birds.

They found that if a bird dominant to the jays saw them store their food, the jays would come back later and move the food when the dominant bird wasn't there.

However, if the bird that watched the food being hidden was a subordinate or a mate, the jay didn't move their food cache. The researchers said the birds could fight off a subordinate bird that tried to steal the food.

"These results suggest scrub jays remember who observed them make specific caches," Dally's research team wrote.

The ape researchers said the two studies show that not only humans can plan for future needs.

"Together with recent evidence from scrub jays, our results suggest that future planning is not a uniquely human ability, thus contradicting the notion that it emerged in hominids only with the past 2.5 to 1.6 million years," wrote Mulcahy and Call.