Based from her 100,000 finds, Dutch archaeologist Eva Kaptijn discovered that Jordan’s Zerqa Valley had been consecutively irrigated and inhabited for over 13,000 years. However, it was not only communities that established irrigation systems; irrigation systems also built communities.

Kaptijn had abandoned excavating and assumed collecting. Together with colleagues, she applied a thorough field exploration method: 15 metres apart, the scientists would walk ahead for about 50 metres. As they advance, the group would pick up earthenware. On the way back, they would collect all other materials. This resulted to over 100,000 various finds that date back from around 13,000 years ago to just several decades ago.

On further studies regarding the finds and its locations, researchers succeeded in calculating the span of habitation at the Zerqa Valley throughout the past million years. The area of their study is known as the Zerqa Triangle, which is located along the River Zerqa and constitutes a section of the Jordan Valley. Researchers found out that the Zerqa triangle had been populated intermittently for thousands of years; however, the habitation was found to have been greatly dependent on the irrigation techniques used in the area. Though the valley’s soil was extremely rich, the area usually did not experience enough rainfall to sustain crops without additional irrigation.

Experts say the amount of space junk is getting out of hand and America should make an effort to control the orbiting debris.

According to the chief of US Strategic Command, the United States needs better equipment to monitor the orbiting space debris and plans to avoid satellite collisions.

"We are decades behind where we should be, in my view," said Air Force General Kevin P. Chilton.

In Chilton’s speech at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, he called for additional equipment, sensors and personnel to study and fight the threat.

To date, there are over 800 satellites and over 20,000 pieces of space junk orbiting the Earth. The orbiting space debris consists of parts from spent rockets and dead satellites, and items that slipped away from astronauts during spacewalks.

The problem on space junk is possible to deteriorate as more satellites are launched into orbit.

"Space situational awareness is no different than the situational awareness that we demand in any other domain," said Chilton. "And we do not provide that in an adequate fashion to my component commander in charge of space operations for the United States of America."

NASA announced that astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) might board the Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Friday night as a safety measure in case they need to evacuate the orbiting outpost due to a possible space junk impact.

The lightning storm that has continued to occur on Saturn’s calm exterior for eight months now has become the longest continuous lightning storm observed in our solar system. It generates lightning bolts 10,000 times stronger than those on Earth.

Saturn regularly experiences thunderstorms, which widely vary in duration. Cassini, a NASA spacecraft which has an instrument that detects radio waves emitted during a lightning discharge, has observed nine thunderstorm occurrences since July of 2004, in which some lasted only for weeks. The second longest storm, which dissipated in July of 2008, lasted for 7.5 months.

The thunderstorms usually appear as distinctively large light-coloured clouds, which can be spotted using amateur telescopes from Earth. They usually occur 35° south of Saturn’s equator, a region known as the ‘Storm Alley’. Lightning storms in this region are very common and can reach spans of up to 3,000 km.

Georg Fischer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute said, "The reason why we see lightning in this peculiar location is not clear. It could be that this latitude is one of the few places in Saturn's atmosphere that allow large-scale vertical convection of water clouds, which is necessary for thunderstorms to develop."

Another possible explanation for the Storm Alley’s southerly position suggests that it is seasonal. It takes 29.5 Earth years for Saturn to complete one revolution around the Sun. The Voyager spacecraft, which orbited near Saturn in 1980 and 1981, observed lightning storms that occurred closer to the equator.

Scientists from Russia have invented a device that could allow disabled people to interact with their environment through brainwaves.

“By imagining the movement of the left hand, the patient can make the lights switch on, or by imagining the movement of the right hand, he can learn to switch the TV set on. Since we take the signal right from the brain, this functions potentially even in cases when the patient can’t move his hands at all, when the muscle activity is zero”, said research officer Vadim Roshin, of the Russian Academy of Science.

Aleksandr Kaplan, of Moscow State University, is currently developing devices that utilise basic electrical signals of the brain to control machines –– but he believes they can do more. In addition, there are also several teams throughout the world working on this project.

In a basic programme, sensors read the impulses of the brain and subsequently transmit the messages to a computer.

Kaplan focuses on increasing the efficiency of the machine to be used by those paralysed or disabled people in their daily lives.

The new device gives great hope to many people who have survived strokes, spine and nervous system injuries, and other diseases or accidents that disabled them.

Though the equipment is quite costly and the headwear might look hideous, the researchers vow that, as technology advances, they will develop something that looks somewhat better.

Surgeons are considering state-of-the-art robotic equipment to operate patients with prostate cancer. However, medical authorities are bothered about the lax standards and inadequate training of practitioners.

Doctors prefer to use the da Vinci Surgical System instead of the traditional surgery in removing the prostate gland because it offers greater precision. In the United States, there were around 80,000 robotic prostatectomy procedures performed last year.

The robotic arms of the device are equipped with instruments and a camera. The tiny instruments are inserted through small incisions and are operated under the surgeon’s control. The entire procedure can also be viewed in a 3D screen.

The failure rate for such a surgery is comparable to that of a conventional surgery. However, patients are more at risk if the robots are used by inexperienced doctors.

“The more you do, the better you're going to get. The question is at what point are you doing safe surgery”, said Kevin Zorn, MD (Chief of Urology – Weiss Memorial Hospital).

He strongly believes that there is a need to have a machine to evaluate the competency of surgeons because they do not have the chance to practise on simulators before performing the robotic operation on live patients.

Doctor Zorn recounted one case where in a surgeon was using the robot for the fourth time. He performed the surgery for eight hours and his proctor, an experienced surgeon, told him that the progress of the operation was too slow.

Unmanned planes flying above a forbidding region of Antarctica have photographed the place, where the dense, cold seawater which drives the ocean's circulation is made.

These unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs are presenting a boon to scientists studying the ice-covered regions at the poles of Earth, several parts of which are not reachable by people.

Missions that have used UAVs have captured the details of the surface features of glaciers, icebergs and sea ice, researchers said today at the American Geophysical Union’s annual gathering.

The UAVs resembled remote-controlled toy airplanes, but were in fact initially developed by the military. Recently, scientists have started repurposing UAVs to fly to inaccessible polar regions, where planes equipped with advance instruments can capture photographs and measure temperature. The UAVs are presenting more information than other methods, such as satellites or manned flights.

"We're not as worried if we lose one of these things", said Betsy Weatherhead of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Every [polar researcher] knows a researcher who has died trying to get data".

John Cassano, of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, said the latest UAV mission done in Antarctica probed a polar ocean feature referred to as a polynya, a region that has "very strong winds that drain off the Antarctic continent".

The recent flights, performed in September 2009, flew to Terra Nova Bay of Antarctica to monitor one perennial polynya. The images captured by the UAVs provided the closest views of the features ever seen.

A team of MIT researchers has been working on a new retinal implant that can possibly give back a useful degree of vision to blind people. The research was prompted by the development of the cochlear implant, which could restore hearing to deaf people.

The new eye implant was designed for blind people who lost their eyesight to macular degeneration due to old age or to retinitis pigmentosa, two of the most prominent reasons for blindness. It works by taking over the functions of retinal cells that have degenerated or been destroyed. The implants electrically stimulate nerve cells that carry visual inputs to the brain from the retina.

The implanted chip cannot restore vision back to normal per se, but it would make navigating rooms or walking down sidewalks easier for blind people.

Shawn Kelly, an MIT Research Laboratory for Electronics researcher and a Boston Retinal Project member said, "Anything that could help them see a little better and let them identify objects and move around a room would be an enormous help".

Work on the retinal implant has been going on for about 20 years. Its funds are from the National Science Foundation, the VA Center for Innovative Visual Rehabilitation, the MOSIS Microchip Fabrication Service, and the Catalyst Foundation. The team working on the project includes ophthalmologists, engineers, and scientists from MIT, Cornell, the Boston VA Medical Center, and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Relentless toothaches require consulting a dentist, and on the condition the tooth decay is really severe, a treatment via root canal is usually the only alternative. The process must be done airtight to avoid the entry of bacteria that could cause renewed inflammation.

Materials to be used must be removable. On cases where the natural crown is badly damaged, the dentist must attach a root post in the formerly filled canal with dental cement. The root post provides attachment for the composite material that is used to reconstruct the tooth’s remaining parts.

In the treatment, several materials are joined, each carrying out different requirements. The trouble is that the materials do not always match each other or do not attach properly to the dental tissue.

Researchers from Würzburg’s Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC, along with their research associates at VOCO GmbH, have recently formulated a material which can be used for all the components on a root canal treatment.

“The basis of this material is provided by ORMOCER®s,” states ISC’s group manager, Dr. Herbert Wolter. “We have combined these ORMOCER®s with various nano- and microparticles to achieve the highly diverse properties needed”.

Materials for root canal filing, for example, must not shrink while they harden; it must create an airtight attachment with the dental material and must be visible on x-rays. On the other hand, materials used to reconstruct the tooth must have similar properties with the tooth itself.

Scientists at the Faculty of Engineering in Leeds have discovered a way to recover major amounts of rare-earth oxides usually found in titanium dioxide minerals. These rare-earth oxides, essential for wind turbine manufacturing and energy-efficient lighting, are cheaply extracted from waste materials of other industrial processes.

If brought to industrial level, the newly discovered process might eventually alter the power balance of supply in the world, breaking the near monopoly of China on these crucial, limited resources. China presently controls 95% of the global reserves of these rare-earth oxides in the global market which caters a steadily increasing demand.

“These materials are also widely used in the engines of cars and electronics, defence and nuclear industries. In fact they cut across so many leading edge technologies, the additional demand for device related applications is set to outstrip supply,” accounted Professor Animesh Jha, head of the study.

“There is a serious risk that technologies that can make a major environmental impact could be held back through lack of the necessary raw materials -- but hopefully our new process, which is itself much 'greener' than current techniques, could make this less likely”.

Regardless of their name, these rare-earth metals appear more frequently in the Earth’s crust as compared to other precious metals; however, their oxides are seldom found in ample concentrations to consider purification and commercial mining. They are, nevertheless, found rather often with titanium dioxide – a mineral used widely from medicines and cosmetics to aerospace industries and electronics, which the professor has been studying for the past eight years.

This new technology not only reduces hazardous wastes and carbon dioxide emissions, but also extracts major amounts of rare-earth metal oxides, as one of the products of its refining method.

Every Christmas season, people decorate their houses with premium quality wooden figures portraying the nativity scene. Now, South Tyrol’s woodcarvers are shifting to advanced production methods.

For years, pantograph machines have been used in the traditional way of making wooden figures in South Tyrol.

“Pantographs are often given away in children's magazines and comics. Kids love them. With just a pencil and paper, they can reproduce their favourite characters on whatever scale they like, and then hang the posters on their wall. The same principle applies here, too -- only in this case, we're talking about producing high-quality wooden carvings”, said Jürgen Goetz, group manager of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA.

This traditional method, however, has its drawbacks. It’s dusty and too loud, and uncovered machines pose dangers to workers. Also, it usually takes months before a batch is ready for delivery. The woodcarver must first create a design and produce a master figure. Only then can the manufacturing start.

Goetz’s group developed an advanced workflow for pantograph woodworking. A three-dimensional scanner first traces the original figure. A software package then processes over 50,000 sets of scanner data groups of the figure, creating the foundation for a CNC programme that runs the milling machine.

This new automated process reduces production time by half and the quality of the product is much better. It also eliminates the workers’ risk of exposure to dust and noise.