One of the earliest human skeletons of America, which belonged to a person that lived more than 10,000 years ago, in the Ice Age, was recovered by Mexican specialists from a flooded cave in Quintana Roo. The information it has lodged for centuries will reveal new data regarding the settlement of the Americas.

The Young Man of Chan Hol, as the skeleton is known among the scientific community, due to the slight tooth wear it presents, which indicates an early age, is the fourth of our earliest ancestors found in the American Continent, and has been studied as part of a National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) project.

After 3 years of studies conducted In Situ to prevent information loss, the Chan Hol skeleton was subtracted from the water by a team of specialists headed by biologist Arturo Gonzalez, coordinator of the project Study of Pre Ceramic Men of Yucatan Peninsula and director of Museo del Desierto de Coahuila (Museum of the Desert of Coahuila), with the participation of speleodivers Eugenio Acevez, Jeronimo Aviles and Luis Garcia, part of the recently founded Instituto de la Prehistoria de America (Institute for American Prehistory), funded by INAH.

The Young Man of Chan Hol, named after the cenote it was found in, was recovered in a 542 meters long and 8.3 deep cave where stalagmites abound, and is reached after going through flooded, dark and difficult labyrinths.

The remains of a prehistoric child were removed from an underwater cave in Mexico four years after divers stumbled upon the well-preserved corpse that offers clues to ancient human migration.

The skeletal remains of the boy, dubbed the Young Hol Chan, are more than 10,000 years old and are among the oldest human bones found in the Americas.

The corpse was discovered in 2006 by a pair of German cave divers who were exploring unique flooded sandstone sinkholes, known as cenotes, common to the eastern Mexican state of Quintana Roo.

An 8th BC century palace which Greek archaeologists claim was the home of Odysseus has been discovered in Ithaca, fueling theories that the hero of Homer's epic poem was real.

Odysseus - known to the ancient Romans as Ulysses - famously took 10 years to return home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy.

On his journey, he was twice shipwrecked and encountered a cyclops, the spirit of his mother and tempting Sirens before returning to Ithaca, where he found his wife, Penelope, under pressure to remarry from a host of suitors who had invaded the royal palace.

With the help of his father, Laertes, and his son, Telemachus, he slaughtered his rivals and re-established his rule.

But despite the fantastical details in the Greek epic, a team of archaeologists has claimed the tale is anchored in truth - and that they have discovered his home on the island of Ithaca, in the Ionian sea off the north-west coast of Greece.

Sometime in the early 17th century in Northern Peru, a Spaniard jotted down some notes on the back of a letter. Four hundred years later, archaeologists dug up and studied the paper, revealing the first traces of a lost language.

"It's a little piece of paper with a big story to tell," says Dr. Jeffrey Quilter, who has conducted investigations in Peru for more than three decades, and is director of the archaeological project at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the El Brujo Archaeological Complex, where the paper was excavated in 2008. Quilter explains this simple list offers "a glimpse of the peoples of ancient and early colonial Peru who spoke a language lost to us until this discovery."

The writing is a set of translations from Spanish names of numbers (uno, dos, and tres) and Arabic numerals (4 - 10, 21, 30, 100, and 200) to the unknown language. Some of the translated numbers have never been seen before, while others may have been borrowed from Quechua or a related language. Quechua is still spoken today in Peru, along with Spanish, but in the early 17th century, many languages were spoken in the region, such as Quingnam and Pescadora. Information about them today is limited. Even so, the archaeologists were able to deduce that the lost language speakers used a decimal system like our own.

Turkey, Archaeologists recently discovered new inscriptions during excavations of the ancient city of Pompeiopolis, located in the Taşköprü district of the Kastamonu Province in Turkey's Black Sea region.

The inscriptions are about festivals of the Roman era, Professor Dr. Christian Marek, who has been examining the inscriptions, told national media. According to them, Roman emperors also participated in those festivals, most of which were religious.

When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics.

It's a mystery that presented itself unexpectedly: The radioactive decay of some elements sitting quietly in laboratories on Earth seemed to be influenced by activities inside the sun, 93 million miles away.

Is this possible?

Researchers from Stanford and Purdue University believe it is. But their explanation of how it happens opens the door to yet another mystery.

There is even an outside chance that this unexpected effect is brought about by a previously unknown particle emitted by the sun. "That would be truly remarkable," said Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics and an expert on the inner workings of the sun.

The story begins, in a sense, in classrooms around the world, where students are taught that the rate of decay of a specific radioactive material is a constant. This concept is relied upon, for example, when anthropologists use carbon-14 to date ancient artifacts and when doctors determine the proper dose of radioactivity to treat a cancer patient.

Washington -- Using the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope satellite, astronomers have detected gamma rays from a nova for the first time, a finding that surprises both observers and theorists. The discovery dispels the long-held idea that nova explosions are not powerful enough to produce such high-energy radiation. These findings are published in the August 13th edition of Science with Teddy Cheung, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), as the lead author.

A nova is a sudden, rapid increase in the brightness of a star. The explosion occurs when a white dwarf ignites in an enormous thermonuclear explosion. The newly detected explosion is equivalent to about 1,000 times the energy that the sun gives off every year. However, compared to what Fermi is capable of detecting, this exploding nova is a relatively modest event.

Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light, and scientists believe the observed gamma-ray emission arises as a million-mile-per-hour shock wave races from the site of the explosion. Fermi's LAT detected the nova for 15 days.

The nova explosion was first noticed on March 11, when amateur astronomers Koichi Nishiyama and Fujio Kabashima in Miyaki-cho, Saga Prefecture, imaged a dramatic change in the brightness of a star in the constellation Cygnus. They knew that the star, known as V407 Cyg, was 10 times brighter than it appeared in an image they had taken three days earlier.

The amateur astronomers contacted Hiroyuki Maehara at Kyoto University, who in turn notified astronomers around the world asking for follow-up observations.

"A few days later, automatic processing of data from Fermi's LAT alerted us to a new high-energy gamma-ray source at the same location as the nova," said NRL's Cheung. "When we looked closer, we found that the LAT had detected the first gamma rays at about the same time as the nova's discovery."

You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with?

That's right: Other people really can't stand them.

Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

"It's not hard to find examples but we were the first to show this happens and have explanations for why," said Craig Parks, lead author of The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group in the current Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The moon will reach full phase Tuesday. But as far as full moons go, it won't be the most impressive. In fact, it will be the smallest full moon of the year.

About 13 hours after it's officially full, the moon will arrive at the point in its orbit farthest from Earth (called apogee), a distance of 252,518 miles (406,389 km). The moon's apparent angular size that night will be at a minimum in 2010.

Though the casual viewer may not notice the difference, the Aug. 24 moon will appear 12.3 percent smaller than the full moon of Jan. 30, which nearly coincided with perigee - the moon's closest point in its orbit relative to Earth. [Moon Mechanics]

An author has come forward to say sales of his book contradict recent figures about how much the new Apple iBooks store is affecting Amazon's Kindle e-book sales.

J.A. Konrath, who is a popular fiction author, wrote on his blog that he sells 60 Kindle books for every iBook.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently said that the iPad, in conjunction with iBooks, had captured 22 percent of the e-book market, which has been dominated recently by Amazon. But Konrath contends that his sales aren't even close to Jobs' figures.