Cairo - An Austrian archaeological team has used radar imaging to determine the extent of the ruins of the one time 3,500-year-old capital of Egypt's foreign occupiers, said the antiquities department Sunday.

Egypt was ruled for a century from 1664-1569 B.C. by the Hyksos, a warrior people from Asia, possibly Semitic in origin, whose summer capital was in the northern Delta area.

Irene Mueller, the head of the Austrian team, said the main purpose of the project is to determine how far the underground city extends.

The radar imaging showed the outlines of streets, houses and temples underneath the green farm fields and modern town of Tel al-Dabaa.

Archaeology chief Zahi Hawass said in the statement that such noninvasive techniques are the best way define the extent of the site. Egypt's Delta is densely populated and heavily farmed, making extensive excavation difficult, unlike in southern Egypt with its more famous desert tombs and temples.

The Austrian team of archaelogists has been working on the site since 1975.

Austrian archaeologists located a 3,600-year-old underground city in Egypt, believed to part of the ancient city of Avaris, the capital of the Hyksos, the Ministry of Culture announced.

The city was located during the Austrian mission's excavations in the Tel al-Dabaa area, north-east of Cairo, using a radar.

The photos taken give an overview of the urban planning of the city, which appears to be complete, with streets, buildings and temples, Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council Of Antiquities, said.

Irene Mueller, head of the Austrian team, said that the geophysics archaeological survey work done by the team helped them identify one of the Nile river tributaries that passed through the city, as well as two islands.

The first comprehensive synthesis on the effects of climate change on the world's oceans has found they are now changing at a rate not seen for several million years.

In an article published June 18 in Science magazine, scientists reveal the growing atmospheric concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet.


The findings of the report emerged from a synthesis of recent research on the world's oceans, carried out by two of the world's leading marine scientists, one from The University of Queensland in Australia, and one from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the USA.


Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, lead author of the report and Director of The University of Queensland's Global Change Institute, says the findings have enormous implications for mankind, particularly if the trend continues.

Astronomers at the University of Sheffield have managed to record for the first time the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun.

They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument.

In other cases they behave more like soundwaves as they travel through a wind instrument.

Using satellite images of these loops, which can be over 60,000 miles long, the scientists were able to recreate the sound by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up the frequency so it is audible to the human ear.

Professor Robertus von Fáy-Siebenbürgen, head of the solar physics research group at Sheffield University, said: "It was strangely beautiful and exciting to hear these noises for the first time from such a large and powerful source.

"It is a sort of music as it has harmonics.

Wild, hairy, folks who fought griffons and nomads - have paleontologists unearthed mythic figures of folklore?

Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Nature journal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.

But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: "The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of 'wild people' inhabiting the region," wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the United Kingdom's Bodleian Library Oxford, in a letter to The Times of London.

Wild people?

Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about these human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats; they are one-eyed, 'shaggy with hairs, the toughest of men'," according to John of Tzetses, a writer of the Byzantine era. They also fought griffons, mythical winged lions with eagle's faces, for gold, according to Herodotus and his contemporary Aristeas, who clearly knew their stuff when it came to spicing up historical writing.

A 'Doomsday' moment will take place in 2014 - and will determine whether the 21st century is full of violence and poverty or will be peaceful and prosperous, according to a Cambridge University professor.

In the last 500 years there has been a cataclysmic 'Great Event' of international significance at the start of each century, he claims.

Occurring in the middle of the second decade of each century, they include events which sparked wars, religious conflict and brought peace.

• In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenburg church, sparking the Reformation of the church and rise of Protestantism.
• 1618 marked the start of the 30 Years War and decades of religious conflict in Western Europe.
• That conflict ended with the establishment of the Hanoverians in 1715. They ruled over Great Britain and Ireland, and Hanover (in Germany).
• The enlightened Congress of Vienna took place in 1815, following the defeat of Napoleon, and heralded a century of relative stability across Europe.
• In 1914 the First World War broke out, a catastrophic conflict that would claim millions of lives and set the tone for international discord throughout the 21st century.

As the scientist who helped eradicate smallpox he certainly know a thing or two about extinction.

And now Professor Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University, has predicted that the human race will be extinct within the next 100 years.

He has claimed that the human race will be unable to survive a population explosion and 'unbridled consumption.'

Fenner told The Australian newspaper that 'homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years.'

'A lot of other animals will, too,' he added.

'It's an irreversible situation. I think it's too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.'

Since humans entered an unofficial scientific period known as the Anthropocene - the time since industrialisation - we have had an effect on the planet that rivals any ice age or comet impact, he said.

Some might see a blood-red jellyfish in a forest of seaweed, while others might see a big, red eye or a pair of lips. In fact, the red-colored object in this new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a sphere of stellar innards, blown out from a humongous star.

The star (white dot in center of red ring) is one of the most massive stellar residents of our Milky Way galaxy. Objects like this are called Wolf-Rayet stars, after the astronomers who found the first few, and they make our sun look puny by comparison. Called V385 Carinae, this star is 35 times as massive as our sun, with a diameter nearly 18 times as large. It's hotter, too, and shines with more than one million times the amount of light.

Fiery candles like this burn out quickly, leading short lives of only a few million years. As they age, they blow out more and more of the heavier atoms cooking inside them -- atoms such as oxygen that are needed for life as we know it.

The material is puffed out into clouds like the one that glows brightly in this WISE image. In this case, the hollow sphere showed up prominently only at the longest of four infrared wavelengths detected by WISE. Astronomers speculate this infrared light comes from oxygen atoms, which have been stripped of some of their electrons by ultraviolet radiation from the star. When the electrons join up again with the oxygen atoms, light is produced that WISE can detect with its 22-micron infrared light detector. The process is similar to what happens in fluorescent light bulbs.

London - Bones discovered in an elaborate tomb in Germany are the remains of an early queen and member of the English royal family, British archaeologists have said.

Two years after they were found in Magdeburg Cathedral in northern Germany, experts are now sure they belong to Eadgyth, the granddaughter of Alfred the Great and half-sister of Athelstan, the first king of all England.

It means the bones are the oldest surviving remains of an English royal burial, the team at the University of Bristol said on Thursday.

The discovery involved anthropological study and carbon dating of the bones, but the key was in the teeth preserved in the upper jaw, which contained traces of a diet and environment specific to somebody who had lived in England.

Far beyond the orbit of Neptune in a region of the outer solar system known as the Kuiper Belt float thousands of icy, moon-sized bodies called Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs). Astronomers think they are the remnants of the bodies that slammed together to form the planets more than 4 billion years ago. Unlike Earth, which has been continually eroded by wind and water since it was formed, KBOs haven't changed much over time and may hold clues about the early solar system and planet formation.

Until now, astronomers have used telescopes to find KBOs and obtain their spectra to determine what types of ices are on their surface. They have also used thermal-imaging techniques to get a rough idea of the size of KBOs, but other details have been difficult to glean. While astronomers think there are about 70,000 KBOs that are larger than 100 kilometers in diameter, the objects' relatively small size and location make it hard to study them in detail.

One method that has been has been proposed for studying KBOs is to observe one as it passes briefly in front of a bright star; such events, known as stellar occultations, have yielded useful information about other planets in the solar system. By monitoring the changes in starlight that occur during an occultation, astronomers can determine the object's size and temperature, whether it has any companion objects and if it has an atmosphere.