Reports

North Cachar Hills always had its share of problems ― from the politics of insurgencies to that of underdevelopment. But these have become increasingly internecine and debilitating since this district of Assam was renamed Dima Hasao earlier this year. For the uninitiated, NC Hills is to Assam what Assam is to India ― a vibrant melting pot of cultures. What the rechristening has decidedly done is make things worse for the people living in the area. They are now caught between Scylla and Charybdis...

Archaeologists have found a piece of a stone axe 35,500 years old on sacred Aboriginal land in Australia, the oldest object of its type ever found. The shard of stone was found in Australia's lush and remote far northern reaches in May, and has marks that prove it comes from a ground-edge stone axe. The discovery was made by a Monash University researcher and a team of international experts. The previous oldest ground-edge axes were 20,000 to 30,000 years old, and the conventional belief was...

A hundred days later, the litany of woes is piling up for victims of the devastating floods that ravaged Pakistan. Bad news is that the waters still remain. Worse still is the fact that aid is fast drying up. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), funding for the Floods Relief and Early Recovery Response Plan is only at 40 per cent of the requirements of USD$1.93 billion. An estimated 14 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian...

The plague pathogen originated in or near China. Then it evolved and emerged multiple times to cause global pandemics. And it spread far and wide, an international team of scientists has found using DNA fingerprinting analyses. Researchers from Ireland, China, France, Germany and the United States, examined the past 10,000 years of global plague disease events. Their collaborative research traced the roots to somewhere in or around present-day China. The plague spread over various historical...

This is bad news for males. Female boa constrictors can produce babies without mating. Scientists have found that the babies produced from this asexual reproduction have attributes previously believed to be impossible. Males are not needed anymore. This is the first time that asexual reproduction, known in scientific terms as parthenogenesis, has been attributed to boa constrictors, according to scientists from the North Carolina State University (NCSU). They have published their findings online...

A painting said to be of Sir Sean Connery posing for an art class wearing only a thong is slated to go on public display soon. Robert Webster, known as Rab, painted the actor in 1951 while a student at the Edinburgh College of Art. The previously unseen oil painting shows bare back of Sir Sean, now 80, with his head turned to one side and wearing a thong. Webster died last month aged 83, according to BBC News. The painting was made long before Dr No (1962) was to make Connery a film legend. Nick...

It's discovery season in Egypt. Archaeologists have unearthed the upper part of a statue of Pharaoh Amenhotep III at Luxor. The statue is around 3,400 years old. Amenhotep III is believed to be the grandfather of the young King Tutankhamun. The find – part of a double statue featuring King Amenhotep III with the falcon-headed sun god Re-Horakhti – was made on Thursday at the pharaoh's funerary temple on Luxor's west bank. The team also found a granite colossus featuring Thoth, the god of wisdom...

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...