Aaron Adair received his first taste of the Star of Bethlehem mystery when he worked as a planetarium-show presenter while an undergraduate student at Michigan State University.

A decade later, after exploring dozens of star theories dating back centuries, he's a skeptic.

In the newly published The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View, the Ohio State University scholar says the star was most likely the literary creation of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, meant to convey a message of salvation.

None of the other hypotheses he has encountered can explain it, Adair said, and at least one - that the star was a "fantastic" conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in either 3 or 2 B.C. - would have to change history to fit the story.

"I found out that pretty much all the hypotheses failed to really conform to what the Gospel actually said," noted Adair, who has a master's degree in physics and a doctorate in physics education at Ohio State.

The story, told only in Matthew, says the star appeared upon Jesus' birth and guided wise men, or magi, from the East to worship him.

"A lot of the literature of the time is ultimately not to say what happened but is ultimately some sort of symbolic tale," Adair said. "It's supposed to be an important legend or myth that ... tries to explain points of theology in the way of storytelling."

Archaeologists have discovered a panel containing the only known example of spider rock art in Egypt and, it appears, the entire Old World.

The rock panel, now in two pieces, was found on the west wall of a shallow sandstone wadi, or valley, in the Kharga Oasis, located in Egypt's western desert about 108 miles (175 kilometers) west of Luxor. Facing east, and illuminated by the morning sun, the panel is a "very unusual" find, said Egyptologist Salima Ikram, a professor at the American University in Cairo who co-directs the North Kharga Oasis Survey Project.

The identification of the creatures as spiders is tentative and the date of it uncertain, Ikram told LiveScience in an email. Even so, based on other activity in the area, the rock art may date to about 4000 B.C. or earlier, which would put it well into prehistoric times, before Egypt was unified, noted Ikram, who detailed the finding in the most recent edition of the journal Sahara. [See Photos of the Newfound Spider Rock Art]

The main panel shows what appear to be a few spiders, with a "star" that's possibly meant to depict a web next to the spider on the far left. There are also comblike drawings that are more enigmatic; Ikram said they could be insects being trapped by the spiders, plants or even silken tubes spun by the spiders.

This is FDR's proposed second Bill of Rights that was filmed after he delivered his State of the Union Address via radio on January 11, 1944. Roosevelt's vision for America, along with his vice-president Henry Wallace, was in stark contrast to the war-machine created by the Wall Street oligarchs and mad generals who silently took over the US during WW2.

John Judge talk from 1988

"We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence."

~ Republican Senator Richard Schweiker, member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Village Voice, December 15th, 1975)

The first indication that someone might be impersonating Oswald came in a June, 1960 memo from J. Edgar Hoover to the State Department. His letter stated he believed that someone "accessed" Oswald's birth certificate and might be using it to impersonate him.

This date - 1960 - is not a typo.

Yes, the Kennedy assassination took place in 1963 and Oswald and the idea that there might be more than one of him was already on the radar screen of the FBI Director.

This and other gems - some well documented, some not - can be found in Harvey and Lee - How the CIA framed Oswald by John Armstrong.

Paul Jay of Real News interviews Peter Kuznick (co-author with Oliver Stone of the Untold History of the United States). A Wallace Presidency might have prevented the dropping of nuclear bombs on Japan and prevented the Cold War. But far more than that, it might have completely altered the course of modern U.S. history by leaving the 'Cold War' still-born.

• Discovery was made after DNA analysis on a Neanderthal woman's toe bone

• Her mother and father were closely related and may have been half-siblings

• Inbreeding may have been result of Neanderthal population being very small

• Scientists say many people alive today still carry ancient Neanderthal genes

Neanderthals liked to be close to their families - very close, a genetic study has shown.

DNA from a Neanderthal woman's 50,000-year-old toe bone shows she was highly inbred.

Scientists discovered that her parents were either half-siblings who shared the same mother, an uncle and niece, an aunt and nephew, or a grandparent and grandchild.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of iron-smelting furnaces used by the ancient Huns, a significant find indicating the conquering nomads were advanced enough to make their own iron and not just pillage it.

"With the discovery, the image of a nomadic nation has been altered significantly because we now believe that the Huns built a complex society with a sophisticated system of a division of labor in production," said Tomotaka Sasada, a senior researcher at Ehime University's Research Center of Ancient East Asian Iron Culture.

Before the discovery by Japanese and Mongolian archaeologists, the Huns, who built a nomadic nation between the third century B.C. and first century in the Mongolian plateau and adjoining regions, were believed to have obtained iron for weapons and other implements by pillaging the territories of the Chinese Qin Dynasty (221 B.C.- 206 B.C.) and Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220).

The joint team of researchers from Ehime University's Research Center of Ancient East Asian Iron Culture and the Institute of Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Science have excavated five small iron-smelting furnaces since 2011.

They were uncovered in the remains of Khustyn Bulag in Tov province, located about 120 kilometers east from Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia.

Archaeologists have just completed the most detailed study ever carried out of the life story of a prehistoric Briton.

What they have discovered sheds remarkable new light on the people who, some 5500 years ago, were building the great ritual monuments of what would become the sacred landscape of Stonehenge.

A leading forensic specialist has also used that prehistoric Briton's skull to produce the most life-like, and arguably the most accurate, reconstruction of a specific individual's face from British prehistory.

The new research gives a rare glimpse into upper class life back in the Neolithic.

Five and a half millennia ago, he was almost certainly a very prominent and powerful individual - and he is about to be thrust into the limelight once again. For his is the prehistoric face that will welcome literally millions of visitors from around the world to English Heritage's new Stonehenge visitor centre after it opens tomorrow, Wednesday. The organisation estimates that around 1.2 million tourists from dozens of countries will 'meet' him as they explore the new visitor centre over the next 12 months.

A 900-year-old medieval crypt, containing seven naturally mummified bodies and walls covered with inscriptions, has been excavated in a monastery at Old Dongola, the capital of a lost medieval kingdom that flourished in the Nile Valley.

Old Dongola is located in modern-day Sudan, and 900 years ago, it was the capital of Makuria, a Christian kingdom that lived in peace with its Islamic neighbor to the north.

One of the mummies in the crypt (scientists aren't certain which one) is believed to be that of Archbishop Georgios, probably the most powerful religious leader in the kingdom. His epitaph was found nearby and says that he died in A.D. 1113 at the age of 82.

One of the earliest examples of ingenuity in the Western Hemisphere is composed of gourds and twine

As a nomadic cultural historian, my subjects have led me in wildly different directions. I spent every Friday for five years in a dim, dusty reading room in West Orange, New Jersey, formerly a laboratory on the second floor of Thomas Edison's headquarters, deciphering the blunt-penciled scrawls of the celebrated inventor. Two years after my biography of Edison appeared, I found myself laboring up vertiginous stairs at daybreak in Mexico, photographing the faded ocher outlines of winged snakes etched into stone temples at the vast ruins of Teotihuacán. The daunting treks led to a book on Mesoamerican myth, Legends of the Plumed Serpent.

Those two disparate worlds somehow collided unexpectedly on a recent afternoon in the hushed, temperature-controlled precincts of the National Museum of the American Indian storage facility in Suitland, Maryland. There, staffers pushing a rolling cart ushered one of the museum's greatest treasures into the high-ceilinged room. Nestled in an acid-free corrugated cardboard container was the earliest known example of telephone technology in the Western Hemisphere, evoking a lost civilization - and the anonymous ancient techie who dreamed it up.

The gourd-and-twine device, created 1,200 to 1,400 years ago, remains tantalizingly functional - and too fragile to test out. "This is unique," NMAI curator Ramiro Matos, an anthropologist and archaeologist who specializes in the study of the central Andes, tells me. "Only one was ever discovered. It comes from the consciousness of an indigenous society with no written language."

We'll never know the trial and error that went into its creation. The marvel of acoustic engineering - cunningly constructed of two resin-coated gourd receivers, each three-and-one-half inches long; stretched-hide membranes stitched around the bases of the receivers; and cotton-twine cord extending 75 feet when pulled taut - arose out of the Chimu empire at its height. The dazzlingly innovative culture was centered in the Río Moche Valley in northern Peru, wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the western Andes. "The Chimu were a skillful, inventive people," Matos tells me as we don sterile gloves and peer into the hollowed interiors of the gourds. The Chimu, Matos explains, were the first true engineering society in the New World, known as much for their artisanry and metalwork as for the hydraulic canal-irrigation system they introduced, transforming desert into agricultural lands.