Iran said on Monday it was ready to help fellow Muslim states launch satellites into orbit after it successfully put a dummy satellite into orbit -- a move that may increase Western suspicions over its atomic ambitions.

Iran said on Sunday it had put the home-grown dummy satellite into orbit on a domestically made rocket for the first time. The long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into space can also be used for launching weapons.

Iran ready to put Muslim countries' satellite in orbit

The device looks like a headband and is equipped with sensors that measure brain activity. By shining near-infrared light into the skull and measuring the intensity of light reflected back, oxygen levels corresponding to brain activity can be recorded. The device, originally developed by Drexel’s biomedical engineers to monitor the brain of patients under anesthesia, serves as a controller for the Drexel-developed video game Lazybrains.

Students Develop 'Mind-Control' Interface to Play Video Games Without a Controller

AFTER buttoning up a lab coat, snapping on surgical gloves and spraying them with alcohol, I am deemed sanitary enough to view a robot's control system up close. Without such precautions, any fungal spores on my skin could infect it. "We've had that happen. They just stop working and die off," says Mark Hammond, the system's creator.

This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other.

As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen.

Rise of the rat-brained robots

“Although conflict has many aspects, one that warfighters and policy makers often talk about is the motivation to fight, which undoubtedly has its origins in the brain and is reflected in peripheral neurophysiological processes," quotes Weiss from the report. “So one question would be, ‘How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight?’ Other questions raised by controlling the mind: ‘How can we make people trust us more?’ ‘What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain?’ ‘Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?’… As cognitive neuroscience and related technologies become more pervasive, using technology for nefarious purposes becomes easier.”

Defense Spooks: Let's Control Enemy Minds

The human brain could become a battlefield in future wars, a new report predicts, including 'pharmacological land mines' and drones directed by mind control

Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told.

In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies.

They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, including behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person's state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision.

On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with "pharmacological land mines" that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electronic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says.

Brain will be battlefield of future, warns report

In the face of the questions, FBI officials have decided to make their first detailed public presentation next week on the forensic science tracing the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a flask kept in a refrigerator in Ivins's laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Many scientists are awaiting those details because so far, they say, the FBI has failed to make a conclusive case.

Doubts grow on FBI's anthrax evidence

There is alarming evidence accumulated by serious scientific sources that the US Government is about to or already has ‘weaponized’ Avian Flu. If the reports are accurate, this could unleash a new pandemic on the planet that could be more devastating than the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic which killed an estimated 30 million people worldwide before it eventually died out. Pentagon and NIH experiments with remains in frozen state of the 1918 virus are the height of scientific folly. Is the United States about to unleash a new racially selective pandemic through the process of mandatory vaccination with an alleged vaccine "against" Avian Flu?

The Pentagon’s alarming project: Avian Flu Biowar Vaccine

As the government pegs the blame for the 2001 deadly attacks on one Army biologist, the attorney for scientist Bruce Ivins says his client never knew he was "the suspect" in the attacks.

"We were never informed or advised that an indictment was imminent of him," attorney Tom DeGonia tells WTOP. DeGonia's broadcast interview is Ivins' lawyers' first interview since Ivins committed suicide.

Ivins, a Fort Detrick scientist, overdosed on acetaminophen. He died July 29, hours before he was set to meet with the government about the case. Even though Ivins had died, DeGonia and co-counsel Paul Kemp still met with the Justice Department that day. It was then, DeGonia says, the government offered up a reverse proffer -- its plans to seek an indictment against Ivins.

"It had never been made clear to him nor to us that he was 'the suspect,'" says DeGonia, Ivins' co-counsel.

Attorney: Ivins never knew he was 'the suspect'

A day after federal authorities opened some of their files in the anthrax investigation, scores of colleagues, friends, family and observers continue to weigh in on the credibility of the government's evidence and the guilt, or lack thereof, of Bruce E. Ivins, the Fort Detrick, Md., scientist accused of carrying out the worst domestic bioterrorist attack in the nation's history.

Families of the victims of the attack say they are satisfied with the results, with one widow contending that the new revelations bolster her lawsuit against the government. And some of the people who were investigated by federal agents early in the case expressed relief that the case appeared near to being closed.

Two bioterrorism experts who reviewed the evidence at the request of The Times said the bureau would have to release "far more scientific evidence" to convince specialists.

Dr. Thomas V. Inglesby, deputy director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said the search warrant affidavits offered only incomplete data on how the letter anthrax was linked genetically to Ivins's lab to the letters and almost nothing on the preparation of the powder.

Jonathan B. Tucker, a biological warfare expert on the staff of a federal commission for the prevention of terrorism with unconventional weapons, said the documents contained "a number of gaps and inferences."

Martin E. Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert and longtime colleague of Ivins, told The Los Angeles Times that the FBI's scientific evidence seemed thin, arguing that the bureau did not apply the rigorous tests employed by scientists checking their own hypotheses for weaknesses.

Anthrax Evidence Getting Mixed Reaction

" For the first time, we've built a sequence from ancient DNA that is essentially without error," said Richard Green of Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The key is that they sequenced the Neandertal mitochondria—powerhouses of the cell with their own DNA including 13 protein-coding genes—nearly 35 times over. That impressive coverage allowed them to sort out those differences between the Neandertal and human genomes resulting from damage to the degraded DNA extracted from ancient bone versus true evolutionary changes.

Although it is well established that Neandertals are the hominid form most closely related to present-day humans, their exact relationship to us remains uncertain, according to the researchers. The notion that Neandertals and humans may have "mixed" is still a matter of some controversy.

Complete Neandertal mitochondrial genome sequenced from 38,000-year-old bone

The world's most powerful particle accelerator, aimed at unlocking secrets of the universe, will be launched on September 10, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Thursday.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), housed in an underground tunnel 27 kilometers (17 miles) in circumference, will recreate conditions just after the Big Bang which many scientists believe gave birth to the universe.

It will seek to collide two beams of particles at close to the speed of light.

"The first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on September 10," the Geneva-based CERN said in a statement.

 Sept launch for bid to crack secrets of universe

Teachers and textbooks beware -- your future could be under threat from a quickly developing and very smart technology.

A pandemic flu bug would pose a greater threat to Britain than terrorism, according to a register of risks that has been kept secret until today. Deaths from global flu will be on a scale far beyond anything related to such an attack, the Government will say.

Until now, the official list of threats and risks facing Britain has been kept confidential, although MI5 has for some time published on its website the terrorist threat level, currently defined as severe.

Plans to publish a risk register were announced by the Prime Minister in March during a statement to the Commons on national security strategy. Top of the list is pandemic flu because of the conviction in Whitehall that it is “not a question of if but when” and that it could kill 750,000 people.

Flu pandemic beats terrorism and flood in official table of reasons to be fearful

Tucked in a bill pledging $48 billion to combat the disease, signed into law by President Bush last week, was language stripping the provision from federal immigration law.

But that change didn't fully lift the entry ban on visitors with HIV or AIDS, which applies whether they're on tourist jaunts or seeking longer stays. The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services still needs to delete HIV from the agency's list of “communicable diseases of public health significance,” which includes tuberculosis, gonorrhea and leprosy.

U.S. acts to open borders to foreigners with HIV

For two years, archaeologists have been studying a Bronze Age place of worship in eastern Germany. The site has a number of parallels with Stonehenge in England. By the end of the summer, researchers hope to know the full story.

Here in the fertile soil beneath Spatzier is a Bronze Age place of worship, one which in the last two years of work has shown remarkable similarities with Stonehenge. This summer, work on the site has just been resumed, and Spatzier's team hopes that by the end of the digging season, they will have completely excavated and deciphered the site. It has, though, not been easy -- While Stonehenge is made out of stones that have weathered thousands of years, the German prehistoric site was built of wood, which rotted away many years ago.

First observed from an airplane in 1991, researchers are now trying to figure out how exactly the new site -- dubbed by the media as the "German Stonehenge" -- was used. They believe the place must have been a site for celebrations and ritual acts, as the earthen walls could not have offered defensive protection against attackers. Animal bones and vessels found at the site also point to it being a cult site. And human skeletal remains -- not unlike findings at the original Stonehenge -- have also been dug up. The researchers are especially intrigued by the graves of a child, aged between five and 10, who was buried in a fetus-like position, and that of a higher ranking dignitary.

"We might start a bigger excavation there next year," Spatzier said -- in the hopes of completely uncovering the mysteries of the German Stonehenge.

 Bronze Age Wonder: German Stonehenge Slowly Reveals its Secrets - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

A glass bottle of plutonium powder that probably cracked when a federal employee tapped it up against a piece of marble later fell apart, releasing the radioactive material into a Boulder, Colo., lab, according to a new federal report on the June 9 spill.

The report on the accident at the National Institute of Standards and Technology campus also confirmed the substance that makes up a key component of a nuclear bomb trigger was obtained without managers' approval. The worker on the project when the powder spilled then washed his hands at a sink connected to the municipal sewer system and left the lab, spreading the contamination, the report said.

Officials for the federal laboratory earlier confirmed several workers on its Boulder campus were being treated for plutonium contamination.

 Feds turn over plutonium to 'untrained' researchers

THE photographed remains of a mysterious "creature" washed up on a Long Island beach near New York has led to a frenzy of online speculation.

The animal has a simian jaw, bulging forehead, small snout and eyes that are so close together that they appear almost attached.

Its front legs are much shorter than its back legs, causing it top hop rather than walk on all fours like a normal piglet.

The animal was one of five piglets recently born to a sow owned by a family in Fengzhang village, Xiping township.

“It’s hideous. No one will be willing to buy it, and it scares the family to even look at it,” owner Feng Changlin told the Oriental Today newspaper.

 Piglet 'with face of a monkey' born in China - Telegraph

"DNA contained in blood, of course, makes cloning possible. It means that a kind of "resurrection" also appears possible. However cloning of the emperor is a theoretical issue. Many countries ban human cloning," the scientist and secretary of the Vavilov Institute of Genetics Alla Borovyagina was quoted as saying by the Zhizn za Vsyu Nedelyu weekly.

Associate of the Russian Academy of Sciences and geneticist Elsa Khusnutdinova also states that it makes no difficulty for science to get a gene from the old bloodstain and define DNA structure.

"We quite exactly define the structure of the bones that have been beneath the sod for thousands years. On the basis of DNA, we can construct the similar, but yet new cell," she said.

The emperor shed blood clotted on the shirt in 1891 when he visited Japan. A Japanese fanatic police officer attacked him and hit his head with a sword. The Hermitage keeps the shirt Nicholas II had on.

Interfax-Religion