Reports

"That's All Right Mama" by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup is the world's oldest rock-and-roll song. Southeastern Louisiana University rock historian Joseph Burns claims it was the first to contain all of the elements that are associated with rock and roll. Burns, who hosts the weekly radio program "Rock School" on Southeastern’s KSLU 90.9 FM radio station, cites the following elements to be identified as a rock and roll number: * It is music that draws heavily from blues and country in a hit form that...

Amazon.com Inc is entering film production with a website that will allow aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers to submit scripts and films that could eventually hit the screens. The Web retail giant announced on Tuesday the launch of Amazon Studios in a partnership with Warner Bros Pictures. To start with, Amazon Studios (http://studios.amazon.com) is offering $2.7 million for "top submissions" of scripts and test films received by December 31, 2011. Those would subsequently be developed as...

In 2008, workers came across buried objects during excavation work for building a new luxury hotel on the grounds of Syon Park in west London. Archaeologists have now confirmed that these are Roman artefacts dating from the 1st century AD. Around 11,500 fragments of pottery, 100 coins and jewellery were unearthed by the experts from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), along with burial sites containing human remains and a Roman road, a museum statement revealed. The artefacts were found...

In a country where corruption is commonplace, quantifying it in terms of numbers is anybody's guess. There can be many indicators; one ofthem being the illegal outflow of capital. A US-based organisation has just done that. Tax evasion, crime, and corruption, it says, removed gross illicit assets from India worth US $462 billion between 1948 and 2002. The Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit Financial Flows from India: 1948-2008 report released Wednesday by nonprofit Global Financial Integrity (GFI)...

Scientists in the US are more likely to publish fake research than their colleagues from other countries, a study has revealed. The findings appear in the November 16 online issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. R Grant Steen, Medical Communications Consultants, delved through the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn in the 2000-2010 period. Research papers that are withdrawn are usually removed from public records. The PubMed database is the only...

More than 400,000 unlicensed copies of articles from major US news websites were republished online between March and July this year, according to new research published this week by copyright tracking service Attributor. Attributor's Graduated Response Trial for News monitored 70,101 news articles during the period and discovered that in more than 400,000 cases 80 per cent of the original article had been illegally copied. In all, 44,906 websites were involved in republishing content, the...

Yahoo is all set to jump on to the content bandwagon. The Internet giant on Tuesday launched the Yahoo Contributor Network, hosting 400,000 freelance writers, photographers and videographers from Associated Content, a firm that it bought over in May. Yahoo said in a statement that the Yahoo! Contributor Network would give freelance content creators access to popular destinations such as Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports and the Yahoo! homepage. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in the...

Astronomers, for the first time, believe they have witnessed the birth of a black hole. The black hole is believed to be a remnant of a supernova, 50 million light years from Earth, which was spotted by an amateur astronomer in 1979. NASA announced this on Monday. According to NASA researchers, although the information they have collected is consistent with the birth of a baby black hole, they cannot rule out other possibilities. "If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example...

Egyptologists have unearthed twelve ancient sphinx statues at Luxor. The sculptures were found at a newly discovered part of the Avenue of Sphinxes, an ancient road that leads from the temple at Karnak to the temple of the goddess Mut at Luxor. The discovery was made as part of excavation and restoration works at the site by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), according to Egypt's Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosni. The statues of the mythical creatures, inscribed with the name of Pharaoh...

A journalist in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 50 lashes in public and two months in prison for reporting on a protest against power cuts. The sentence was handed down on October 26 to Fahd al-Jukhaidib, a correspondent for national daily Al-Jazira, by the General Court in Qubba in northern Saudi Arabia, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Al-Jukhaidib's article, describing the problems faced by Qubba residents as a result of frequent power cuts, was published on September 7, 2008. The...