Seven pyramids have been identified on the African island of Mauritius. Remarkably, in construction, they are identical to the ones found on the island of Tenerife, an island on the opposite side of the continent. It underlines the likelihood that one civilisation sailed to various islands off the coast of Africa and constructed these structures.

The island of Mauritius is part of the Mascarene Islands and is in the Indian Ocean, about 900 kilometres (560 miles) east of Madagascar. The island is 61 km long and 47 km wide, and sits just north of the Tropic of Capricorn. In origin, it is a volcanic island. The historical record shows that the island was known to Arab and Austronesian sailors as early as the 10th century; Portuguese sailors first visited in 1507. Mauritius was first plotted on a map in 1502, made by the Italian Alberto Cantino. The Arabs called the island Dina Harobi, while the planisphere identifies all three Mascarene islands (Reunion, Mauritius and Rodrigues) and calls them Dina Margabin, Dina Harobi and Dina Morare.

It is suspected that prior to the Arabs, Mauritius was known to certain people living on the African shores, as well as the famous Sea Peoples, a confederacy of seafaring raiders, which included the proto-Phoenicians. The Greek account of Periplus [The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea] relates the story of Hanno (Hannan), the Carthaginian navigator, who lived in the 5th century BC, and who traversed the Straits of Gibraltar at the command of ships that would explore the African coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. Herodotus describes a Phoenician expedition leaving the Red Sea and traversing the "sea of the south", and, following the orders of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II (610-595 BC), entered back into the Mediterranean Sea through the Straits of Gibraltar, which means they circumnavigated Africa.

The Texas state Senate yesterday gave preliminary approval to a state budget that includes a provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista without written consent of the legislature.

Sen. Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat from McAllen and vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed the rider because "of the many reports of problems with Vista."

"We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide," Hinojosa said during a Senate session debating the rider Wednesday evening (starting at 4:42 of this RealMedia video stream). "And the XP operating system is working very well."

With the help of a common virus, scientists have built a battery that rivals the state-of-the-art rechargeable models now powering personal electronics and hybrid vehicles. The hope is to replace the costly, toxic electrodes currently used in lithium-ion batteries.

The researchers modified the M13 virus, which infects only bacteria, to grow proteins on its surface that attract amorphous iron phosphate. The result: Wires just nanometers thick of the material, which is cheaper and environmentally friendlier than ones currently used to make electrodes for lithium-ion batteries.

London - Watch out scientists -- you may be replaced by a robot.

Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.

Such robo-scientists could be put to work unraveling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modeling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.

For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.

At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.

Planetary scientists are all set to turn noise from the data obtained by NASA/ESA LISA satellites' mission into useful information about the mass of near-Earth asteroids.

LISA is on a mission to detect gravitational waves - a warping of the space/time continuum that scientists hope to see directly for the first time.

Slated for launch no earlier than 2018, LISA will include three satellites connected by laser beams. The distance between the satellites should change as a gravitational wave passes.

Some of the brightest colors in nature are created by tiny nanostructures with a structure similar to beer foam or a sponge, according to Yale University researchers.

Most colors in nature - from the color of our skin to the green of trees - are produced by pigments. But the bright blue feathers found in many birds, such as Bluebirds and Blue Jays, are instead produced by nanostructures. Under an electron microscope, these structures look like sponges with air bubbles.

Now an interdisciplinary team of Yale engineers, physicists and evolutionary biologists has taken a step toward uncovering how these structures form. They compared the nanostructures to examples of materials undergoing phase separation, in which mixtures of different substances become unstable and separate from one another, such as the carbon-dioxide bubbles that form when the top is popped off a bubbly drink. They found that the color-producing structures in feathers appear to self-assemble in much the same manner. Bubbles of water form in a protein-rich soup inside the living cell and are replaced with air as the feather grows.

Scientists at Penn State and the National Institute of Genetics in Japan have demonstrated that several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results.

"Our finding means that hundreds of published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect conclusions," said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and the team's leader. The team's results will be published in the Online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week ending Friday 3 April 2009 and also in the journal's print edition at a later date.

Nei said that many scientists who examine human evolution have used faulty statistical methods in their studies and, as a result, their conclusions could be wrong. For example, in one published study the scientists used a statistical method to demonstrate pervasive natural selection during human evolution. "This group documented adaptive evolution in many genes expressed in the brain, thyroid, and placenta, which are assumed to be important for human evolution," said Masafumi Nozawa, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State and one of the paper's authors. "But if the statistical method that they used is not reliable, then their results also might not be reliable," added Nei. "Of course, we would never say that natural selection is not happening, but we are saying that these statistical methods can lead scientists to make erroneous inferences," he said.

Yesterday researchers at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver announced that they'd created a tiny battery (pictured) that could draw power from human blood. They're basically cyborg batteries, half biological and half technological.

The batteries are designed for use in pacemakers and other implantable medical devices. A small colony of yeast lives inside each battery, and this living core of the fuel cell can draw energy from glucose (sugar) in blood flowing around it.

The intaglios near Blythe, along the Colorado River along the California-Arizona border are the American equivalent of the Peruvian Nazca lines. Though never promoted as the airport for extraterrestrial beings, here are nevertheless the same geometric shapes, animals and humans, etched in the soil and best - and some of them only - visible from the sky.

Geoglyphs can be found in a number of locations across the States, but those that rival the intricacies found at Nazca most closely are near Blythe and Bouse, where allegedly over 600 exist - though far fewer - and only the largest - can be located today. The intaglios are found east of the Big Maria Mountains, about 15 miles north of downtown Blythe just west of U.S. Highway 95 near the Colorado River, where it defines the border between Arizona and California.

Academia is notoriously resistant to change, which to some extent is a good thing. It was therefore no surprise that when Wikipedia became a phenomenon most academics scoffed at it as a passing fad, fatally flawed by its very core idea: anybody, and I mean anybody, can become a Wiki author and post new entries or edit existing ones. Surely, this will inevitably lead to chaos and complete unreliability, the critics said. But a few years ago a study of a sample of entries compared the accuracy of Wikipedia with that of the unquestionably prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica, and Wikipedia was at least as accurate, in some cases more.