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Scientists who work in the Alaskan Arctic have discovered that local shrubs are growing larger and spreading across previously bare areas of the tundra. Researchers looked through aerial photos taken 50 years ago and compared them with new photos and found that shrub growth in some of the areas has increased as much as 15 percent.

?The Alaskan Arctic for three decades has gotten considerably warmer and experimental and model studies have shown that there should be more shrubs,? says Matthew Sturm, a U.S. Army geophysicist working in Alaska. ?We come along and find these photos, and that?s exactly what we?re seeing.?
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According to geneticist Bryan Sykes, of Oxford University, we are all descended from one of 33 ancient Eves. If you take a swab from your cheek and send it in to a laboratory, you can tell which of the 33 original mothers is yours. ?Your genes have been through a fantastic journey,? says Sykes.

Sykes first started taking DNA from archeological bones and in 1994 was invited to examine the frozen remains of a 5,000-year-old man trapped in glacial ice in Northern Italy. This led him to research how a gene passed undiluted from generation to generation through the maternal line. ?If you look at the mitochondrial gene, it is DNA which is just inherited from your mother,? he explains. ?It is found in eggs, not sperm.?
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A previously unknown Asian civilization used writing 4,000 years ago, hundreds of years before Chinese or Sumerian writing was developed.

An archeological excavation near Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, revealed an inscription on a piece of stone that seems to have been used as a stamp or seal. This discovery suggests that Central Asia had a civilization comparable to that of Mesopotamia and ancient Iran as far back as the Bronze Age.

Archeologists have uncovered ?monumental structures,? including mud brick apartment complexes. The ancient society seems to have herded goats, grown crops and made bronze tools and ceramics about 300 years after the pyramids of Egypt were built. It is not known what they called themselves.
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A professor of theoretical physics at the University of Connecticut believes he has found a way to build a time machine using light. He thinks that a circulating beam of light, slowed down almost to a snail’s pace, might be the answer. ?With this device,? says Mallett, ?time travel may become a practical possibility.?

It?s not simple, since slowing down light requires temperatures close to absolute zero, but if it works the way it should, this device would provide time travelers from the future with their first gateway into our history…and given the strides that are being made in slowing light, some of us may actually be among the travelers.
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