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.

New Haven, Connecticut - Astronomers have glimpsed what could be the youngest known star at the very moment it is being born. Not yet fully developed into a true star, the object is in the earliest stages of star formation and has just begun pulling in matter from a surrounding envelope of gas and dust, according to a new study that appears in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The study's authors - who include astronomers from Yale University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany - found the object using the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Known as L1448-IRS2E, it's located in the Perseus star-forming region, about 800 light years away within our Milky Way galaxy.

Archaeologists found some of the richest and most unusual Aztec offerings ever in excavations under a mammoth slab depicting an earth goddess and said Wednesday they hope to uncover an emperor's tomb nearby.

The seven offerings of strange and unparalleled oddities found under the stone slab depicting the goddess Tlaltecuhtli include the skeleton of a dog or wolf dressed in turquoise ear plugs, jadeite necklaces and golden bells on its feet.

It is a very simple equation: Energy = Civilisation. Without any form of energy we regress to circa 5000 BC. Energy powers every aspect of our modern lifestyle: clean water, fresh food, lighting, comfortable shelter, mobility, communication, safety and security. Our very own giant hot star, the sun, is earth's primary source of energy.

On June 12th, at 00:55 Universal Time, an M2-class solar flare sparked a bright flash of extreme ultraviolet radiation, propelling a shock wave through the sun's atmosphere, and hurling a billion-ton Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) into space. According to scientists at NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), "The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity... at the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms." One needs to go back over 8,000 years in order to find a time when the sun was, on average, as active as it is at present!

The sun supports almost all life on earth via photosynthesis and drives earth's climate and weather. Solar flares have been connected with weather extremes, and there have been some powerful lightning storms in recent days:

1. BP temporarily suspended siphoning operations on its Gulf of Mexico oil gusher after a drill ship collecting the oil was hit by lightning;

2. A 62 feet -- six storey -- tall statue of Jesus Christ in Ohio came to a blazing end when it was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm and burned to the ground; and

3. A bolt of lightning struck a local gasoline storage tank in North Carolina, erupting into a wall of flames that leapt as high as 100 feet and belched a plume of smoke in the shape of an arch across eight lanes of US interstate highway.

The one critical factor that did not operate according to plan in many of the recent severe lightning-strikes was the electrical grounding system, which was supposed to draw lightning away from the structures. The sun has begun to awaken and possibly exhale a massive solar storm on planet earth's electromagnetic field. Are several interlocking factors in play that could bring life as we know it to a stand-still via a catastrophic disruption?

Six hundred recent observations of the Mars landscape from an orbiting telescopic camera include scenes of sinuous gullies, geometrical ridges and steep cliffs.

Each of the 600 newly released observations from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter covers an area of several square miles on Mars and reveals details as small as desks.

The HiRISE images taken from April 5 to May 6, 2010, are now available on NASA's Planetary Data System and the camera team's website.

This image shows the west-facing side of an impact crater in the mid-latitudes of Mars' northern hemisphere. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the image on April 13, 2010. It is one of 600 recent HiRISE observations newly released to NASA's Planetary Data System.