Archaeologists in Jerusalem have unearthed the most ancient written document ever found in the Holy City – a tiny fragment of a letter thought to be addressed to Akhenaten, the “heretic” pharaoh who ruled Egypt during the 14th century B.C. Discovered outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls, the document consists of a minuscule clay fragment -- about one square inch -- covered with cuneiform script in ancient Akkadian. Thought to date back some 3,400 years, the fragment appears to have been part of a tablet from the royal archives. Indeed, the script on the chip, which includes the words “you,” “you were,” “later,” “to do” and “them,” is of a very high level, according to Wayne Horowitz, a scholar of Assyriology at the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. “It was written by a highly...

Physicists have moved to quash rumours that the elusive Higgs boson - dubbed the God particle - has been detected by a US "atom smasher". A spokesman for the lab which operated the Tevatron accelerator denied scientists had made a discovery there. The Tevatron, based at Fermilab in Illinois, is the US rival to Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The rumours were made public in a blog post by an Italian particle physicist. But a spokesman for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) told BBC News: "There is no merit to the rumours of a Higgs discovery." On Tuesday, Fermilab's Twitter feed said: "Let's settle this: the rumours spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumours. That's it." Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a spokesperson...

The ancient Romans slaughtered dozens of babies at a villa in England’s Thames Valley, a new study into the tiny remains has revealed. Located in Buckinghamshire, just northwest of London, Yewden Villa, as the site is known, was excavated in 1912 by Alfred Heneage Cocks, a naturalist and archaeologist. Now a wheat field, the site was almost forgotten. Archaeologists began investigating it only recently, as Cocks' original report was rediscovered at Buckinghamshire County Museum, along with 300 boxes containing photographs, artifacts, pottery and bones. Indeed, Cocks' excavations produced a number of unusual discoveries, including a very high number of iron styli -- pens for writing on wax tablets -- as well as several corn-drying kilns. But what intrigued the researchers were the...

Researchers have discovered the fossilised remains of an ancient whale with huge, fearsome teeth. Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists have dubbed the 12 million-year-old creature "Leviathan". It is thought to have been more than 17m long, and might have engaged in fierce battles with other giant sea creatures from the time. Leviathan was much like the modern sperm whale in terms of size and appearance. But that is where the similarity ends. While the sperm whale is a relatively passive animal, sucking in squid from the depths of the ocean, Leviathan was an aggressive predator. According to Dr Christian de Muizon, director of the Natural History Museum in Paris, Leviathan could have hunted out and fed on large sea creatures such as dolphins, seals and even other...

Europe's Herschel space telescope has spied a far-distant galaxy with the aid of a cosmic "zoom lens". The observatory is already one of the most powerful astronomical tools ever built, but its abilities can be boosted thanks to a neat trick of gravity. By viewing a huge cluster of galaxies, Herschel has been able to study in detail an even more distant object. This is possible because the gravity of the foreground cluster magnifies the light of the background galaxy. In a new picture released by the European Space Agency (Esa), this far-off galaxy is seen just a couple of billion years after the Big Bang. "If the cluster were not there, we might not be able to see the galaxy," commented Professor Seb Oliver from the University of Sussex, UK.

Scientists have used the latest imaging techniques to look inside a python that had just swallowed a rat whole. The resulting footage is part of a project using hi-tech scanning methods to explore animals' anatomy. It took 132 hours for snake to fully digest the rat, the scientists said. Their work has revealed other strange insights into python digestion. They presented the study at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Prague, Czech Republic. The researchers carried out a computer tomography or CT scan of an anaesthetised 5kg Burmese python one hour after it had devoured the rat whole. They also used a technique called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the creature's internal organs. By using contrast agents, the scientists were able to highlight...

The whole of Mars' surface was shaped by liquid water around four billion years ago, say scientists. Signs of liquid water had been seen on southern Mars, but the latest findings reveal similar signals in craters in the north of the Red Planet. The team made their discovery by examining data from instruments on board Europe's Mars Express and Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They report the findings in the latest issue of the journal Science. John Carter, of the University of Paris, led the team of France- and US-based scientists. "Until now, we had no idea what half Mars was made of in terms of mineral composition," he told BBC News. "Now, with the Esa and Nasa probes, we have been able to get a mixture of images and spectral information about the...

Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they have moved a step closer to their aim of unlocking the mysteries of the Universe. The world's highest-energy particle accelerator has produced a record-breaking particle collision rate - about double the previous rate. The collider is now generating around 10,000 particle collisions per second, according to physicist Andrei Golutvin. The LHC is housed in a 27km circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border. The vast machine is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), based near Geneva in Switzerland. Physicists say this marks the start of turning the LHC into the world's most powerful particle collider. "It's clear that the LHC is the new boy in town, but in two years running...

Dave Collier has never come face to face with a Bigfoot, but he’s talked to plenty of people who have. “I believe that sightings and encounters are more common than most people believe,” he says. “And what surprised me the most when I started this was how many there were in this area.” By this area, the Martinez resident doesn’t mean the Southeast, and he’s not just talking Georgia. Collier means right here in the CSRA. Working for a public utility, Collier is perfectly positioned to be a Bigfoot researcher. He’s out among the public all day, often in rural locations, he deals with people in a relatively relaxed setting, and he deals with a lot of them. Though he’s consumed by the Bigfoot question — does it exist and if it does, how has it...

Commanding the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, a group of 16 seventh-grade students from California looked for lava tubes on the surface of Mars. They found what they were looking for, but they also discovered a small black feature straddling one of the tubes. The feature near the Pavonis Mons volcano was a hole, punched in the top of a hollow tube. It's a cave on Mars, otherwise known as a "skylight." The students, from Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, California, were participating in the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), a part of Arizona State University's Mars Education Program. This program engages youngsters in real Mars research by getting them to ask questions about the Red Planet's geology....