It's not something we'd like to admit, but it seems the human race may actually be becoming increasingly dumb.

Man's brain has been gradually shrinking over the last 20,000 years, according to a new report.

This decrease in size follows two million years during which the human cranium steadily grew in size, and it's happened all over the world, to both sexes and every race.

'Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball,' Kathleen McAuliffe writes in Discover magazine.

'The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.'

Proof that Manhattan was once buried underneath an Ice Age glacier has been uncovered at Ground Zero.

Crews excavating the site of the destroyed World Trade Centre this summer have uncovered a spectacular underground landscape carved into the bedrock by glaciers about 20,000 years ago.

A 40-foot 'pothole' is the most arresting feature. However reports described a world of rocky colour basking in the New York sun for the first time in thousands of years: underground cliffs, layers of steel-gray bedrock, and thousands of cobblestones in a muted rainbow of reds and purples and greens - as smooth as those found by the sea.

'There are areas in local parks that have small vertical potholes exposed," Cheryl J. Moss, the senior geologist at Mueser Rutledge, told The New York Times.

"But I'm not aware of anything in the city with a whole, self-contained depression on this scale."

This page repeats the original Wikipedia article - exactly "as is" (to be more exact - exactly "as was"). The article was originally located here

Please, note also that in order to get better understanding on how this kind of nuclear demolition scheme worked out particularly in the WTC nuclear demolition on 9/11 (including watching the WTC demolition videos), you might need to visit this website.

Nuclear demolition

Nuclear demolition of skyscrapers was a new concept of a broader term of controlled demolition that first appeared at the end of 60s, when it became necessary to provide some satisfactory means of how to demolish modern tall steel frame buildings in order to meet necessary requirements set by a building code.

Atomic demolition

It shall be understood that this concept of nuclear demolition as a kind of controlled demolition had nothing to do with another concept - that of a so-called atomic demolition, which existed in the 50s. The difference between the two is as follows. In an atomic demolition, a building (or bridge, or tunnel, or bunker, or another structure) is being demolished by special small- or medium-caliber atomic demolition munitions (SADM or MADM) that produce a classical atmospheric nuclear blast. So a larger part of an entire explosive energy of such an atomic munitions would be spent on creation of a well-known atomic air-blast wave, a thermal radiation, a penetrating ionizing radiation, an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), as well as it will also cause an ensuing radioactive contamination of surroundings. So only a relatively small part of such an atomic explosion would be directed towards the main job - the demolition of the intended building, while incomparably larger part of its energy would be spent on creating unnecessary devastation around the demolished object. Judging from this point of view, an atomic demolition has never been an option when it comes to real demolition works in civil life. Real demolition works are always performed through usage of charges of conventional explosives - attached to bearing structures at right points, which allows to achieve the highest efficiency factor - meaning spending as much explosive energy as possible on the actual demolition job, and as little explosive energy as possible - on damaging surroundings. So, an atomic demolition could only be performed in times of real emergency - for example, in times of war, when to spend several weeks to calculate and prepare a "conventional" controlled demolition of an important object can not be afforded. There is yet another factor that prevents routine usage of atomic demolition munitions in demolishing any civil infrastructure, besides described above "atomic" damages that it would inevitably cause to surroundings. This is a financial factor. There is no nuclear device that could cost cheaper than 2 million US dollars, while precisely wrought SADM or MADM suppose to cost even more than that. Which makes their routine usage simply too costly.

A Texas A&M University researcher has discovered how nature's most primitive immune systems worked by studying bacteria's methods of resisting antibiotics over millions of years.

Thomas Wood, study leader and professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, along with a team of researchers, have researched bacteria's method of using DNA from invading viruses to build a resistance to antibiotics, which revealed the secrets behind how nature's earliest immune systems worked and how it affects humans today.

What Wood and his team studied was viral DNA, which is a virus that contains DNA as its genetic material. For millions of years, viruses have had the option to replicate by trespassing into bacteria cells and merging with the chromosomes of the bacteria. The bacterium then makes a copy of its chromosome, which now contains the virus particle, and the virus acts as a ticking time bomb as it replicates itself and kills the bacterium. This isn't always the case, though. Sometimes, random mutations occurring within the bacterium chromosome can cause the virus to mutate as well when integrated into the chromosome. The mutations can make the virus unable to replicate, hence, the bacterium wins this round.

In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky culminated decades of research with a book titled Worlds in Collision that "proposes that many myths and traditions of ancient peoples and cultures are based on actual events." His approach was interdisciplinary, a rarity in the 20th century, taking into account astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology, ancient history, and comparative mythology.

He noted, for example, that Venus, the second brightest object in the night sky, was not mentioned by the earliest astronomers. He proposed that the planet was a newcomer to our solar system, a comet, appearing in historical times with an irregular orbit that caused catastrophic events on our own planet.

"... we are children equally of the earth and the sky." (Carl Sagan)

In sci-fi movies, the first stirrings of life happen in a gooey pool of primordial ooze. But new research suggests the action started instead in the stormy skies above.

The idea sprang from research led by University of Arizona's Sarah Hörst. Her team recreated, in the lab, chemical reactions transpiring above Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

"We're finding that the kind of chemistry an atmosphere can do has intriguing implications for life on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system," says Hörst. "Titan's skies might do some interesting chemistry - manufacture the building blocks of life."

Hörst and her colleagues mixed up a brew of molecules (carbon monoxide,⁽¹⁾ molecular nitrogen and methane) found in Titan's atmosphere. Then they zapped the concoction with radio waves - a proxy for the sun's radiation.

What happened next didn't make the scientists shout "it's alive!" but it was intriguing. A rich array of complex molecules emerged, including amino acids and nucleotides.

"Our experiment is the first proof that you can make the precursors for life up in an atmosphere, without any liquid water.⁽²⁾ This means life's building blocks could form in the air and then rain down from the skies!"

After decades of popular-press articles, a serious proposal to start the colonization of Mars with one-way missions has been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. In a recent issue of the Journal of Cosmology, physicist Paul Davies (Arizona State) and geologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch (Washington State) make a strong case for sending two two-person teams to Mars - and leaving them there. With the prospects of return missions currently stuck on the drawing board - we can't even get back to the moon, let alone Mars, under NASA's over-cautious safety-at-all-costs philosophy - they propose that if we're going to go anywhere in space in the next decade or two, Mars is the destination and one-way is how it's going to happen.

The idea is to send two pairs of physically and psychologically fit 60-somethings to Mars in twin spacecraft, where they would set up basic living quarters in a lava-tube cave (to shelter from cosmic rays, since Mars lacks the ozone layer and magnetosphere which protect Earth). Preceding them, robotic missions would have landed the essentials: solar/nuclear generators, the basics for agriculture, vehicles and sufficient food and supplies to last for a year or two. After landing, priorities for the foursome would include setting up a greenhouse for growing fresh food; obtaining water from ice and subsequently breaking it down into hydrogen (for fuel) and oxygen (for life support); and assembling a plant to recycle human waste.

NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft is monitoring a vast hole in the sun's atmosphere--a "coronal hole." It's the dark region denoted by arrows in this extreme ultraviolet image taken during the early hours of Dec. 30th.

Coronal holes are places in the sun's atmosphere where the solar magnetic field opens up and allows solar wind to escape. A stream of solar wind flowing from this coronal hole should reach Earth on Jan. 2nd or 3rd--the first solar wind stream of the New Year! High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

An international team of astronomers has discovered and imaged a fourth giant planet outside our solar system, a discovery that further strengthens the remarkable resemblances between a distant planetary system and our own.

The research is published 8 December in the advance online version of the journal Nature.

The astronomers say the planetary system resembles a supersized version of our solar system.

"Besides having four giant planets, both systems also contain two 'debris belts' composed of small rocky or icy objects, along with lots of tiny dust particles," said Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and co-author of the Nature paper.

Our giant planets are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and our debris belts include the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune's orbit.

President Dmitry Medvedev fired two senior Russian space officials Wednesday over the loss of three navigation satellites that crashed into the sea this month.

The GLONASS satellites, intended for Russia's rival to the American GPS system, a project dear to the Kremlin, were lost because the Proton M rocket carrying them into orbit was loaded with too much fuel, a investigating commission found.

A Kremlin spokeswoman said the deputy head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Viktor Remishevsky, and the deputy head of the Russian rocket manufacturer Energia, Vyacheslav Filin, had both been fired over the calculation error.

Medvedev also issued an official reprimand to Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov.

The satellites were to be the last of 24 needed for Russia to fully deploy GLONASS -- short for Global Navigation System -- next year.