The images, published in the current issue of the journal Nature, are the best evidence yet of lakes of liquid on the moon's surface since they were first predicted more than 20 years ago.

Researchers speculate the liquid is methane, which is one of the few molecules to exist as a liquid in the extreme cold of the moon, where temperatures rarely rise above -179 C.

The dense haze of Titan's mostly nitrogen atmosphere had prevented earlier attempts to view the surface of the moon. Cassini's probe made its northern-most radar pass to date last July to retrieve the images.

Radar is the only way to pierce the haze surrounding Titan, which has an atmosphere 10 times denser than Earth's.

The spacecraft took an image of a narrow strip about 250 kilometres wide and more than 1,000 kilometres long that contained more than 75 lakes.

Titan's dense atmosphere and presence of carbon-based material have fascinated scientists who see it as a time vault of what Earth may have looked like billions of years ago, before life formed and introduced oxygen into the atmosphere.

Scientists had speculated Titan might also contain vast oceans, but a 2004 Cassini flyby found no evidence of large bodies of liquid.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

"We may consider it incredible, but we have ground to assert that Middle-Volga region was the original land of Ancient Rus. This is a hypothesis, but a hypothesis, which requires thorough research," Reader of Ulyanovsk State University's archaeology department Dr Alexander Kozhevin told state-run television Vesti .

Dr Kozhevin, who has been conducting excavation in Staraya Maina for last seven years, said that every single square metre of the surroundings of the ancient town situated on the banks of Samara, a tributary of Volga, is studded with antiques.

Prior to unearthing of the Vishnu idol, Dr Kozhevin has already found ancient coins, pendants, rings and fragments of weapons.

He believes that today's Staraya Maina, a town of eight thousand, was ten times more populated in the ancient times. It is from here that people started moving to the Don and Dneiper rivers around the time ancient Russy built the city of Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine.

An international conference is being organised later this year to study the legacy of the ancient village, which can radically change the history of ancient Russia.

Starting in the 1980s wildlife officials introduced 72 of the rare rhinos to a protected valley about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Nepal's capital city of Kathmandu as part of a conservation program.

"We have records showing 23 rhinos had died due to poaching or other causes. The rest are missing," Laxmi Prasad Manandhar, a senior official at Nepal's Department of National Park and Wildlife Conservation, told the Reuters news service.

"Where did they go? I have no answer. It is a mystery," Manandhar said.

War Victims

The Indian rhino, also known as the great one-horned rhino, once roamed wild in the Babai Valley, which was made part of Royal Bardia National Park in 1984 (related photo: baby Indian rhino born in California zoo [February 11, 2005]).

The species is also found in the wild in the northeast Indian state of Assam.

In Nepal, army units stationed inside the national parks once effectively deterred poachers and helped the country's rhinos rally from about 60 animals in the mid-20th century to more than 500 in 2000.

But Nepal's recently ended civil war hampered conservation efforts and fueled the poaching of rhinos and other wildlife (photos: inside Nepal's revolution).

The monarchy's troops were needed to battle Maoist rebels, so the parks were left unguarded and poachers were free to ply their trade.

Royal Chitwan National Park, Nepal's largest rhino stronghold, has seen its population fall from 544 of the animals in 2000 to 372 in 2005.

Yet some Nepali officials think it unlikely that poachers killed Babai Valley's 49 missing rhinos, because only one skeleton has been found after an exhaustive search.

Poachers usually kill rhinos for the animals' horns, which are valuable in Chinese medicine. The massive carcasses are then left to rot.

Disappearing Act?

Eric Dinerstein is a rhino expert with the international conservation organization WWF and author of Return of the Unicorns, an analysis of Indian rhino conservation efforts.

Dinerstein explained that the rhinos have a high rate of natural mortality.

Calves often fall victim to tigers or are separated from their mothers by monsoon floods. Males engage in vicious battles during mating season that frequently end in the loser's death.

Still, Dinerstein suspects that there is a human hand behind the Babai Valley mystery.

"The likely answer is that many of them were poached," he said.

"The truth is that even back in 1975 I was told [by local people] not to go into the Babai Valley, because there were a lot of poachers there and it was very rough. There has been poaching there since long before there the [Maoist] insurgency," he said.

As for the missing carcasses, Dinerstein suggests that many factors could have caused them to disappear.

He's seen local Nepalese carry off the remains of a rhino that died naturally.

"Every part of the animal was considered valuable," he said. "There wasn't a shred of that rhino left."

The reserve's animal denizens may have also played a part.

"There are lots of scavengers on the [southern plain known as the] Terai-mammals, birds, lots of species," Dinerstein said.

"If somebody had been patrolling they would have been tipped off [to a dead rhino] by lots of vultures.

"But because nobody was patrolling, you could easily have a carcass disappear quite quickly without much of a trace."

Found in China, the fossil hatchling has two perfectly formed heads and necks fused at the base.

"When I saw it, I immediately realized it was something extremely unusual," said paleontologist Eric Buffetaut of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France.

"Two-headed reptiles are very rare, so the chance that one of them could get fossilized, preserved, and collected is extremely small," he added.

Buffetaut and Chinese colleagues detail their finding in the past week's issue of the journal Biology Letters.

Two Heads Not Better Than One

The developmental anomaly that causes animals to occasionally form two heads is called axial bifurcation.

The abnormality occurs when an embryo is damaged in the womb. A lesion can form, causing some parts to develop in duplicate.

The phenomenon, though quite rare, has been observed a number of times in modern-day reptiles, including lizards, snakes, turtles, and tortoises. (Related photo: "Two-Headed Turtle Found in China" [March 17, 2006].)

Scientists have even run across some two-headed mammals, such as sheep, though few survive to adulthood.

Two-headed reptiles are also at a significant disadvantage in the wild, but some have been know to live long lives in captivity.

"There is a two-headed tortoise at the Natural History Museum in Geneva [in Switzerland] which has lived there since it was born ten years ago," Buffetaut said.

There is no possibility that the new specimen was a two-headed species, he adds.

The hatchling belongs to a long-necked fish-eating species known either as Sinohydrosaurus or Hyphalosaurus that grew up to 3 feet (1 meter) long. Many one-headed specimens that otherwise resemble the fossil were found near the hatchling.

And no vertebrates have ever been reported to have two heads as their normal state.

"Having two heads obviously causes huge coordination and behavior problems, since it means having two brains which function more or less independently, while other organs within the body cavity, such as the heart and digestive tube, are usually not duplicated," Buffetaut said.

"Reptiles with two heads can survive for years in captivity because they are cared for, but in the wild they apparently don't survive very long."

Possible Hoax?

Buffetaut first learned of the fossil from study co-author Jianjun Li at the Beijing Museum in China.

The unusual nature of the fossil immediately aroused his suspicion-like many Chinese fossils, this was found by a local farmer and sold to a museum.

The isolated nature of such discoveries allows fakes to easily find their way to market-such as the Archaeoraptor fossil purported to be the missing link between carnivorous dinosaurs and birds in 1999.

Archaeoraptor was actually created by a Chinese farmer who intricately glued the front part of a fossil bird and the tail and hind legs of a small dinosaur together. (Read the full story: "Dino Hoax Was Mainly Made of Ancient Bird, Study Says" [November 20, 2002].)

In the case of the two-headed Choristodere, however, "the slab bearing the fossil is untouched and shows absolutely no sign of tampering, and neither do the tiny bones, so we are completely confident that the specimen is genuine," Buffetaut said.

Susan Evans is an evolutionary biologist at University College London in England and a leading expert on Choristodera.

"Two-headed mutants are fairly widely reported amongst modern reptiles, but this is the first reported occurrence of the phenomenon in a fossil reptile," she said.

"That certainly makes it interesting and worth reporting, and it gives us one more glimpse of Choristoderan biology."

Sam Harris's books "The End Of Faith" and "Letter To A Christian Nation" have established him as second only to the British biologist and author Richard Dawkins in the ranks of famous 21st century atheists. The thrust of Harris's best-sellers is that with the world so crazed by religion, it's high time Americans stopped tolerating faith in the Rapture, the Resurrection and anything else not grounded in evidence. Only trouble is, our country's foremost promoter of "reason" is also supportive of ESP, reincarnation and other unscientific concepts. Not all of it is harmless yoga class hokum -- he's also a proponent of waterboarding and other forms of torture.

"We know [torture] works. It has worked. It's just a lie to say that it has never worked," he says. "Accidentally torturing a few innocent people" is no big deal next to bombing them, he continues. Why sweat it?

I wanted to interview Harris to find out why a man sold to the American public as the voice of scientific reason is promoting Hindu gods and mind reading in his writing. But we spend much of our time discussing his call for torture and his Buddhist perspectives on "compassionately killing the bad guy."

In 2004, Sam Harris' award-winning first book said society should demote Christian, Muslim and Jewish belief to an embarrassment that "disgraces anyone who would claim it," in doing so catapulting himself from obscure UCLA grad student -- the son of a Quaker father -- to national voice of atheism.

"The End of Faith" may be the first book suitable for the Eastern Philosophy shelf at Barnes & Noble that somehow incorporates both torture and New Age piety, and offers pleas for clear scientific thinking alongside appeals to "mysticism." The old-fashioned brand of atheist, like the late Carl Sagan, argued eloquently against religion without supporting rituals and ghosts.

Harris, however, argues that not just Western gods but philosophers are "dwarfs" next to the Buddhas. And a Harris passage on psychics recommends that curious readers spend time with the study "20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation."

Asked which cases are most suggestive of reincarnation, Harris admits to being won over by accounts of "xenoglossy," in which people abruptly begin speaking languages they don't know. Remember the girl in "The Exorcist"? "When a kid starts speaking Bengali, we have no idea scientifically what's going on," Harris tells me. It's hard to believe what I'm hearing from the man the New York Times hails as atheism's "standard-bearer."

Harris writes: "There seems to be a body of data attesting to the reality of psychic phenomena, much of which have been ignored by mainstream science." On the phone he backpedals away from the claim.

"I've received a little bit of grief for that," he says. "I certainly don't say that I'm confident that psychic phenomena exist. I'm open-minded. I would just like to see the data."

To see the "data" yourself, "The End of Faith" points readers to a slew of paranormal studies.

One is Dr. Ian Stevenson's "Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy." The same author's reincarnation book presents for your consideration the past life of Ravi Shankar, the sitar player who introduced the Beatles to the Maharishi. He was born with a birthmark, it says, right where his past self was knifed to death, aged two.

Making the case for the "20 Cases researcher, Harris sounds almost like "Chronicles of Narnia" author C.S. Lewis, who said Jesus could only be a liar or the Son of God.

"Either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on," Harris says. "Most scientists would say this doesn't happen. Most would say that if it does happen, it's a case of fraud. ... It's hard to see why anyone would be perpetrating a fraud -- everyone was made miserable by this [xenoglossy] phenomenon." Pressed, he admits that some of the details might after all be "fishy."

Another book he lists is "The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena." "These are people who have spent a fair amount of time looking at the data," Harris explains. The author, professor Dean Radin of North California's Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is not accredited for scientific peer review, proclaims: "Psi [mind power] has been shown to exist in thousands of experiments."

Harris has spent the past two years doing "full-time infidel" duty, in his words. His second book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," takes the infidel persona and runs with it, lashing back at Christians for their intolerance toward his first book.

In a versatile turn, however, Harris moonlights as inquisitor as well as heretic. Without irony, he switches hats between chapters of "The End of Faith." Chapter 3 finds him complaining that the medieval Church tortured Jews over phony "blood libel" conspiracies. Then in chapter 6, "A Science of Good & Evil," he devotes several pages to upholding the "judicial torture" of Muslims, a practice for which "reasonable men and women" have come out.

Torture then and now: The difference, he tells AlterNet, is that the Inquisition "manufactured" crimes and forced Jews to confess "fictional accomplices."

But if the Iraq War hasn't been about "fictional accomplices," what has? "There's nothing about my writing about torture that should suggest I supported what was going on in Abu Ghraib," says Harris, who supported the invasion but says it has become a "travesty." "We abused people who we know had no intelligence value."

While our soldiers are waging war on Islam in our detention centers, according to Harris, our civilians must evolve past churchgoing to "modern spiritual practice," he writes. "[M]ysticism is a rational enterprise," he writes in his book, arguing it lets spiritualists "uncover genuine facts about the world." And he tells AlterNet there are "social pressures" against research into ESP.

Society is remarkably free, however, in airing justifications for putting Muslims to the thumbscrews. Harris's case for torture is this: since "we" are OK with horrific collateral damage, "we" should have no qualms against waterboarding, the lesser evil. "It's better than death." Better, in other words, than bombing innocents.

Then again, Sam Harris is not devoting his time in the media to call for an end to bombing civilians. Attacking the sacred cow of airstrikes might have been a real heresy, true to his Quaker roots but ensuring himself exile from cable news. Instead the logic he lays out -- that Islam itself is our enemy -- invites the reader to feel comfort at the deaths of its believers. He writes: "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."

Playing his part in last year's War Over Christmas, Harris plays it safe with "Letter to a Christian Nation." The book lumbers under a title so heavy, you'd think Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote it from prison. While keeping the Christian Nation on notice that Harris remains disdainful of "wasting time" on Jesus, he now calls for something of an alliance with the Right against Muslim Arabs and the "head-in-the-sand liberals" he denounced in a recent editorial. "Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living," he writes.

Thus praising the hard Right for its "moral clarity" in the War on Terror, Harris reserves much of his wrath for nonfundamentalist Christians, whom he considers enablers of a virgin-birth sham.

Fine, but the alternative to Jesus that Harris recommends in "The End of Faith" is a menu of messiahs. There is Shankara, an avatar of the god Shiva whose water pot could stop floods. There is the first Buddha and his 8th-century successor Padmasambhava. After materializing on a lotus leaf at age 8, Padmasambhava cast a spell that changed his friend into a tiger.

"That is objectively stupider than the doctrine of the virgin birth," Harris says in the interview, however.

Like any religious moderate, he has picked and chosen what he likes from a religion. On the one hand, there's an obligatory swipe in "The End of Faith" against Pakistan and India for threatening to nuke each other over "fanciful" religious disputes. The equal-offender pose doesn't slow Harris from claiming the supremacy of Shankara and other oracles over Europe's entire secular brain trust. For thousands of years, "personal transformation [...] seems to have been thought too much to ask" of Western philosophers, he complains petulantly, as if finding the entire Enlightenment short on self-help tips.

He likes that Buddhism will make you relax. And "dial in various mental states," he says. In the classic case, he says, "you see various lights or see bliss." And like a Scientologist cleric promising you the state of Clear, evicting alien ghosts ruining your life, Harris expresses a faith that his own style of pleasurable mental exploration ushers in good deeds. Meditation, he says, will drive out whatever it is "that leads you to lie to people or be intrinsically selfish."

So it purges your sins? "You become free to notice how everyone else is suffering," he says. Well, some more than others.

We all need our illusions. But doesn't his, a mishmash of Buddhism and "Time-Life Mysteries of The Unknown," weaken his case against Christians? His answer is that Buddhism is a superior product for including the doctrine of "non-dualism," or unity. "The teachings about self-transcending love in Buddhism go on for miles," he says. "There's just a few lines in the Bible." And hundreds in Dostoyevsky and the Confessions of St. Augustine, but never mind: Harris's argument that "belief is action" rests on treating works like the Old Testament not as complex cultural fables but something akin to your TiVo instruction manual.

Though it lapses in skepticism, Harris's work has won a surprising following among nonmystics. Times science writer Natalie Angier felt "vindicated, almost personally understood" reading it, she wrote in a review. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has practically adopted Harris as the American Robin to his Batman in confronting unreason wherever it may lurk in the hearts of men. "The End of Faith" should "replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land," blurbs Dawkins.

* * *

When that happens, Muslims will check into the Best Western and find a text cheering their torture.

Legendary for his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial, American attorney Clarence Darrow wrote of his admiration for his forbearer Voltaire, the original 18th-century renegade against the church. He thanked Voltaire for dealing superstition a "mortal wound" -- and for an end to torture. "Among the illustrious heroes who have banished this sort of cruelty from the Western world, no other name will stand so high and shine so bright."

And then among those who want to bring it back, there stands Sam Harris.

"They're not talking," Harris is telling me, imagining a torture scenario where the captives clam up, "quite amused at our unwillingness to make them uncomfortable."

No, it's not the sticky (and real) case of Jose Padilla, the detainee who may have been reduced by his treatment to mind mush, possibly ruining his trial. Instead he's sketching out a kind of Steven Seagal action movie scenario in which we lasso Osama or his gang, maybe on the eve of a terror plot. What to do?

"We should say we don't do it," Harris says of torture. "We should say it's reprehensible." And then do it anyway, he says.

So there it is. In Harris's vision of future America, we will pursue "personal transformation" and gaze into our personal "I-we" riddles, while the distant gurgles of Arabs, terrified by the threat of drowning, will drift into our Eastern-influenced sacred space, the government's press releases no more than soothing Zen koans.