Digital Journal

The spectacle of Vesuvius's explosion over Pompeii spawned legends that gradually became myths over time ― like the belief that people died of ash suffocation. But scientists now have refuted this widely accepted contention. Recent research found that people didn't suffocate; they died of heat surges. Pictures of the lifelike poses of many victims at Pompeii—seated with face in hands, crawling, kneeling on a mother's lap—have left a lasting impression on many, giving rise to speculations...

Big trees provide shade and improve air quality. But new study insists that they can fight crime as well. Large trees in urban areas are associated with lower crime rates. Conversely, smaller trees around homes were associated with higher crime rates. The claim comes from a US Forest Service study. Geoffrey Donovan led the research for the US Forest Service's Pacific Northwest and Southern Research Stations. The results have been published in the journal Environment and Behavior. The study says...

The universe is getting more crowded by the day. New telescopes and technologies are allowing astronomers to discover new astronomical objects all the time, such as ten new galaxy clusters found recently by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). An international team of scientists led by Rutgers University astrophysicists have discovered these 10 new massive galaxy clusters from a large, uniform survey of the southern sky. They found the galaxies using a breakthrough technique that detects...

The Al-Qaeda threat to Egypt's Coptic Christians has run into all-round opposition ― from the country's powerful Muslim Brotherhood political group to the press. The threat had been issued by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), an Al-Qaeda outfit in Iraq. The Opposition Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report, said Muslims must protect Christian houses of worship. "The Muslim Brotherhood is stressing to all, and primarily Muslims, that the protection of holy places of...

The Singapore High Court on Wednesday found a British author guilty of insulting the city-state’s judiciary in a book on the death penalty in Singapore. Alan Shadrake, 75, would be sentenced for contempt of court next Tuesday. The Briton is likely to face a possible jail term, a fine or both. "This is a case about someone who says among other things the judges in Singapore are not impartial... (and are) influenced by political and economic situations and biased against the weak and the poor,"...

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a 3400-year-old enclosure wall around Giza's Sphinx, presumably erected to protect the celebrated landmark from desert winds. It was probably one of the earliest tries at architectural conservation. According to a statement issued by the Ministry of Culture, two sections of the enclosure wall were discovered, one 86 metres long and 75 cm high and the other 46 metres long and 90 cm high. In the statement, Supreme Council for Antiquities Secretary-General...

Sleep can help both learn a new piece of information, as well as get the brain to file it away for later retrieval. Sleep helps people remember a newly learned word and incorporate new vocabulary into their mental lexicon, according to researchers. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers taught volunteers new words in the evening, followed by an immediate test. They slept...

An epidemic, suspected to be malaria, has killed dozens of people of the Yanomami tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon. Leaders of the three villages told health workers that around 50 people have died so far, many of them children. "There are still many, many sick people," Andres Blanco told the Associated Press (AP) over telephone from Puerto Ayacucho in southern Venezuela. Blanco, a Yanomami health worker in a government program for the indigenous communities, alerted regional officials this month...

A dying mountain bear held captive at a cafe in Azerbaijan was forced to drink Coca-Cola for the amusement of customers. It died shortly, and was replaced by another bear. The incident came to light after a video of the cruel incident was released by Daryl Willard, a British sports coach who was working in the former Soviet republic. The pictures were taken last month in the city of Gabala. Willard told The Sun: "People cheered and shouted as they watched the starving bear drink from the cola...

Human rights organisations that posted on their websites clips of the shocking video of Indonesian soldiers torturing Papuan tribal people have been coming under heavy cyber attack. On Tuesday, the Asian Human Rights Commission’s (AHRC) reported that its website has been subjected to a concerted “cyber-attack” since October 28. Computers with hidden locations and identities have been used to flood the website’s servers with fake requests, in order to overload it, the organisation said. The...