Astronauts Fix, Haul Gear on Final Shuttle Flight Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/16/astronauts-fix-haul-gear-on-final-shuttle-flight/#ixzz1SJ2dVxci

In more good news, they brought back online a computer that abruptly stopped working two days earlier, the second computer failure in five days aboard Atlantis. NASA wants to run more diagnostic testing, but so far the computer seems to be working fine, officials said.

Engineers have yet to figure out why the computer shut down Thursday; cosmic radiation is suspected. The first computer failure was traced to a bad switch throw and quickly fixed.

Atlantis has five of these main computers, each one critical for the trip back to Earth.

Over on the space station, astronauts fixed a treadmill and carried more supplies back and forth.
Atlantis delivered several tons of food, clothes and other household items -- enough to keep the space station operating for a full year. The giant cargo canister is being filled back up with station trash that Atlantis will return to Earth on Thursday -- the very last landing by a space shuttle.

Meanwhile, celebrity wake-up calls continued. The latest Earth-to-space greeter: singer Beyonce.

Mission Control beamed up a half-minute of her song "Run the World (Girls)" as well as a prerecorded message in which Beyonce saluted astronaut Sandra Magnus, the lone woman among the 10 space travelers.

"This song is especially for my girl, Sandy," Beyonce said, "and all the women who have taken us to space with them, and the girls who are our future explorers."

Magnus replied: "Hopefully, we as a team at NASA can keep our inspirational work up for the young people of America."

NASA is aiming to send astronauts to an asteroid and Mars in the coming decades. Private companies will take over space station supply runs as early as this fall, and ferry flights for astronauts in three to five years.

As for NASA's three space shuttles, they will live out their days as museum displays.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/16/astronauts-fix-haul-gear-on-final-shuttle-flight/#ixzz1SJ2ZhM9H

Two-clawed and parrot-sized: new T.rex cousin unveiled

A tiny distant cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered in China with only a single claw on each upper limb.

Linhenykus monodactylus weighed no more than a large parrot and was found in sediments between 84 and 75 million years old.

The dinosaur belongs to a sub-branch of the theropods, the dinosaur group which includes T.rex and Velociraptor, and which gave rise to modern birds.

Details are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new species was named after the Chinese city of Linhe, Inner Mongolia, near where its fossilised remains was uncovered in what is called the Upper Cretaceous Wulansuhai Formation.

The international team found a partial skeleton, including bones of the vertebrae, forelimb, hind limbs, and a partial pelvis.

It is part of the Alvarezsauroidia family of theropods, a strange group of small, long-legged running dinosaurs.

Michael Pittman of University College London, who was part of the team, says the animal would have been hardly be intimidating.

"You'd see a very small animal, probably below your hip height, with a very small skull. It's not very threatening because its teeth are very small compared to other carnivorous dinosaurs and there's some evidence it may have been an insectivore," he told the BBC.

What is striking is the animal's unusual claws.

"Non-avian theropods start with five fingers but evolved to have only three fingers in later forms," he says. "Tyrannosaurswere unusual in having just two fingers but the one-fingered Linhenykus shows how extensive and complex theropod hand modifications really were."

The suggestion is that this mono-digit theropod may represent the end of one evolutionary pathway, in which unused digits disappear as part of a process of natural selection.

"Vestigial structures, like legs in whales and snakes, may appear and disappear seemingly randomly in the course of evolution," says Jonah Choiniere of the American Museum of Natural History, who also worked on the find.

"Linhenykus highlights complexity in evolution of these vestigial fingers."

Dr Paul Barrett of London's Natural History Museum said the discovery was a "nice specimen" to add to a sub-group already known for its weirdness.

"Alvarezsauroids are already know to be an unusual group of theropods with very bizarre hands used primarily for digging, and this new find confirms there was some variation in how weird these hands were."

Canada in bid to expel Tunisian Belhassen Trabelsi

The Canadian government is working to arrest and expel Belhassen Trabelsi, the brother-in-law of former Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

Canada has revoked Mr Trabelsi's residency permit and has moved to seize the billionaire's Canadian assets.

Mr Trabelsi and his family reportedly arrived in Montreal on a private jet last week after Mr Ben Ali was ousted.

Officials at the Tunisian embassy in Ottawa have asked Canada to arrest and extradite Mr Trabelsi.

Speaking to Canadian media in Val D'Or, in the province of Quebec, Mr Cannon said the government would make "every effort" to track down Mr Trabelsi's assets.

"He is not welcome," Mr Cannon said. "We are going to find - in the context, obviously, of current legislation - ways to assure, as quickly as possible, that we might comply with the demand from the Tunisia government."

It is believed Mr Trabelsi and his family fled the Chateau Vaudreuil Suites Hotel in Montreal on Thursday, and their whereabouts remain unknown.

It is unclear how long Mr Trabelsi had residency status, which allows non-Canadian citizens to live in the country and can require a lengthy application process.

Mr Ben Ali, who was president for 23 years, was forced from power this month by a series of protests against poverty and corruption. The former president fled with his wife to Saudi Arabia.

Interpol also issued an alert for the arrest of Mr Ben Ali and six family members on request from Tunisia, which has accused them of property theft and illegal transfer of foreign currency, among other charges.

The international police agency said member states had been asked to "search, locate and provisionally arrest Mr Ali and his relatives".

During a recent trip to Morocco, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said members of Tunisia's former regime were not welcome in Canada.

Lake Vostok drilling in Antarctic 'running out of time'

With only about 50m left to drill, time is running out for the Russian scientists hoping to drill into Vostok - the world's most enigmatic lake.

Vostok is a sub-glacial lake in Antarctica, hidden some 4,000m (13,000ft) beneath the ice sheet.

With the Antarctic summer almost over, temperatures will soon begin to plummet; they can go as low as -80C.

Scientists will leave the remote base on 6 February, when conditions are still mild enough for a plane to land.

The team has been drilling non-stop for weeks.

"It's like working on an alien planet where no one has been before," Valery Lukin, the deputy head of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the project, told BBC News.

"We don't know what awaits us down there," he said, adding that personnel at the station have been working shifts, drilling 24 hours a day.

But some experts remain concerned that probing the lake's water - thought by some to be isolated from everything else on Earth - could contaminate the pristine ecosystem and cause irreversible damage.

The sub-glacial lake is located underneath the remote Vostok station in Antarctica.

Overlaid by nearly 4km of ice, it has been isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. Some scientists think the ice cap above and at the edges has created a hydrostatic seal with the surface, preventing lake water from escaping or anything else from getting inside.

And if the Russian team gets through to the pristine waters, they hope to encounter life forms that have never been seen.

It was at the Vostok station that the coldest temperature ever found on Earth (-89°C) was recorded on 21 July 1983.

Normally, water in such extreme conditions exists only in one state: ice. And when, in the 1970s British scientists in Antarctica received strange radar readings at the site, the presence of a liquid, freshwater lake below the ice did not instantly spring to mind.

After three km and as we near the bottom [of the ice sheet], the ice temperature gets very close to the ice melting point, and all sorts of problems begin”

It was not until 1996 that the discovery was formally acknowledged, after satellites sent in the images outlining the lake's contours.

Space radar revealed that the sub-glacial body of fresh water was one of the largest lakes in the world - and one of some 150 subglacial lakes in Antarctica.

At 10,000 square km and with depths reaching 800m, it is similar to Lake Baikal in Siberia or Lake Ontario in North America.

Since the lake has remained sealed off from the rest of the world, scientists estimate that conditions in it have probably remained unchanged for some 15 million years.

For liquid water to exist in Antarctica, glaciologists suggest that the ice cap serves as a giant insulating blanket, able to capture the Earth's geothermal heat to melt the bottom of the ice sheet.

Eager to explore the ancient lake, scientists started drilling and managed to go as deep as about 3,600m - but when the untouched waters were only some 130m away, in 1998, the project ground to a halt.

"We had to stop because of the concerns of possible contamination of the lake," explained Alexey Ekaikin, a member of the current expedition, who spoke to the BBC Russian Service from Vostok station.

He said that drilling was resumed in 2004, when the team came up with new, ecologically safe methods of probing the lake.

In November 2010, the scientists submitted a final environmental evaluation of the project to the Antarctic Treaty's environmental protection committee and were given the go-ahead to sample the ancient waters.

They said that instead of drilling into the lake, they would go down until a sensor on the drill detects free water.

We have to make a huge effort not to spoil the environment by being interested in it”

Then they would take the drill out without going any further and adjust the pressure so that instead of any liquid in the borehole falling down into the lake, water in the lake would be sucked up.

Then the drill would be taken away and left for quite some time to freeze, creating a plug of frozen ice in the bottom of the hole.

Finally, next season, the team would drill down again to take a sample of that ice and analyse it.

But the work has not been going very smoothly, being repeatedly delayed because of technical difficulties.

"Up until three km down, drilling is usually relatively easy - it has been done in Greenland and here in Antarctica. But after three km and as we near the bottom [of the ice sheet], the ice temperature gets very close to the ice melting point, and all sorts of problems begin," said Dr Ekaikin.

Dr Lukin added that additional difficulties arise from the changing structure of the ice - after about 3,600m, it is pure frozen lake water, composed of huge round monocrystals of a metre or more in diameter and as hard as glass.

That is why for the past few weeks, the team had been advancing at a snail's pace - about 1.6m a day.

They have already reached the 3,700m mark and have just some 50m more to go.

Dr Ekaikin said that having analysed the ice cores obtained so far, the scientists have already discovered some bacteria that are likely to be living at the bottom of the lake, where the water is warmer because of the heat coming from the Earth.

Besides possibly discovering new microorganisms, sampling the waters could also move us a step closer to the understanding of similar glacial conditions at one of Jupiter's moons, Europa.

Its surface, researchers suspect, is covered by a huge ocean, hidden within a thick shell of ice.

Despite all the precautions, some international observers still dub the project a threat to the ancient sub-glacial lake.

"It's probably almost impossible to make something absolutely, utterly and totally clean," said Dr Andy Smith, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey.

"It's worth [sampling the waters], as even though originally it seemed a really wild thing to expect, there will be life there - anywhere we go on the planet where there's an extreme environment, we always find life.

"But we have to make a huge effort not to spoil the environment by being interested in it," he added.

But the Russians working in Antarctica believe that the risks are virtually non existent and that the possibility of a great discovery makes it entirely worthwhile.

In 2006, researchers reported evidence for a network of rivers under the ice which connect Antarctica's sub-glacial lakes. Some scientists think this could spell trouble for the prospects of finding microbial life that has evolved "independently".

Nevertheless, some of those on the team working at Lake Vostok have been waiting for a eureka moment for decades, and have been coming to the base to drill since the discovery of the lake in the 1970s.

Now they are hoping the technology will not fail them and they will be able to reach the waters before the season ends on 6 February.

Because if not, they will have to stay patient for yet another long year.

Humans 'left Africa much earlier'

Modern humans may have emerged from Africa up to 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.

Researchers have uncovered stone tools in the Arabian peninsula that they say were made by modern humans about 125,000 years ago.

The tools were unearthed at the site of Jebel Faya in the United Arab Emirates, a team reports in the journal Science.

The results are controversial: genetic data strongly points to an exodus from Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago.

Simon Armitage, from Royal Holloway, University of London, Hans-Peter Uerpmann, from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and colleagues, uncovered 125,000-year-old stone tools at Jebel Faya which resemble those found in East Africa at roughly the same time period.

The authors of the study say the people who made the tools were newcomers in the area with origins on the other side of the Red Sea.

The researchers were able to date the tools using a light-based technique, which tells scientists when the stone artefacts were buried.

So-called anatomically modern humans are thought to have emerged somewhere in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

They later spread out, migrating to other continents where they displaced the indigenous human groups such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Asia.

DNA from the cell's powerhouses - or mitochondria - can be used as a "clock" for reconstructing the timing of human migrations. This is because mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) accumulates mutations, or changes, at a known rate.

Studies of mtDNA had suggested a timing for the "Out of Africa" exodus of 60-70,000 years ago.

But scientists behind the latest study argue that the people who made tools at Jebel Faya 125,000 years ago are ancestral to humans living outside Africa today.

Professor Uerpmann said the estimates of time using genetic data were "very rough".

"The domestic dog was said to be 120,000 years old, and now it is 20,000. You can imagine how variable the genetic dating is," he explained.

Commenting on the findings, Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum, said: "This archaeological work by Armitage and colleagues provides important clues that early modern humans might have dispersed from Africa across Arabia, as far as the Straits of Hormuz, by 120,000 years ago.

"This research augments the controversial idea that such populations could have migrated even further across southern Asia, despite conflicting genetic data that such movements only occurred after 60,000 years."

The researchers say the toolmakers at Jebel Faya may have reached the Arabian Peninsula at a time when changes in the climate were transforming it from arid desert into a grassland habitat with lakes and rivers.

These human groups could later have moved on towards the Persian Gulf, trekking around the Iranian coast and on to South Asia.

Indeed, Dr Mike Petraglia at the University of Oxford has uncovered tools in India that he says could have been made by modern humans before 60,000 years ago. Some tools were sandwiched in ash from the eruption of the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that geologists can date very accurately to 74,000 years ago.

However, other researchers suggest that the people living in India at this time could have died out and been replaced by a later wave of humans.

Anthropologists already knew of an early foray out of Africa by modern humans. Remains found at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel date to between 119,000 and 81,000 years ago.

But the Skhul and Qafzeh people are generally thought to have died out or retreated south, perhaps because of climatic fluctuations. They subsequently disappear, and their sites are re-occupied by Neanderthals.

Professor Stringer said the fact that the tools found at Jebel Faya did not resemble those associated with modern humans at Qafzeh and Skhul hinted at "yet more complexity in the exodus of modern humans from Africa

EU studies Kosovo 'organ traffic' allegations

The EU mission in Kosovo has begun investigating allegations that Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebels engaged in organ trafficking.

"Eulex prosecutors have opened a preliminary investigation," the EU rule of law mission (Eulex) said.

On Tuesday the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog, approved a report by its investigator, Dick Marty.

Organs were taken from prisoners killed by the KLA after the 1999 war against Serb forces, Mr Marty alleged.

He accused a KLA faction led by Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of involvement in organised crime, including organ trafficking.

Mr Thaci strongly denies the allegations.

Eulex said it took the allegations "very seriously" and was ready to "handle the judicial follow-up".

"Eulex calls on all relevant organisations and individuals, including Dick Marty, to present what evidence they have...

"We understand concerns about witness protection in the region but we have full confidence in our own witness protection unit," the statement said.

The Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly called for international and Albanian investigations into crimes committed in the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict, including "numerous indications" that organs were removed from the bodies of prisoners held by the KLA on Albanian territory.

Swiss senator Dick Marty's report, published last month, claims witnesses were silenced and paid off by members of the Drenica Group, a faction within the KLA, whose members allegedly engaged in organ trafficking, as well as heroin smuggling and assassinations.

The group's leader is named as Mr Thaci, then the KLA's political chief.

Mr Marty said he had never claimed Mr Thaci was directly involved in organ-trafficking, but added that "it [was] hard to believe that he never heard anything being said".