Tehran, Sept 27 : Iranian archaeologists have identified 100 ancient sites at the Seimareh Dam reservoir in the country’s western Ilam Province.

The sites have been identified as belonging to Neolithic, Bronze Age, Copper Age, Stone Age, Parthian, Sassanid, and early Islamic eras, said team director Rasul Seyyedin Borujeni.

Washington, Sept 27 : Scientists at Yale University have achieved two major steps towards putting quantum computers into real practice – sending a photon signal on demand from a qubit onto wires, and transmitting the signal to a second, distant qubit.

Over the past several years, the research team of Robert Schoelkopf and Steven Girvin have explored the use of solid-state devices resembling microchips as the basic building blocks in the design of a quantum computer.

Washington, September 27 : Researchers at the University of California, Riverside say that plants can be used to study why prescription medications work successfully to cure an ailment in some people, while the same dose of the same drug can cause an adverse reaction in others.

“The genetics behind variable drug responses is not peculiar to humans but exists also in other branches on the tree of life,” Nature Chemical Biology quoted Sean Cutler, an assistant professor of plant cell biology at UC Riverside, as saying.

Washington, Sept 27 : A study of caves of the tropical Pacific island of Borneo has helped scientists understand how the Earth’s climate suddenly changed several times over the last 25,000 years.

Georgia Tech Asst. Prof. Kim Cobb and graduate student Jud Partin analyzed stalagmites, pillar-like rock formations that stem from the ground in caves, to produce a high-resolution and continuous record of the climate over the equatorial rainforest.

Washington, Sept 27 : Archaeologists have discovered a Stone Age rice field in a swamp in China.

The team led by Cheng Zong of Britain’s Durham University found evidence of prehistoric rice cultivation, including flood and fire control on the site of Kuahuqiao in Zhejiang province near present-day Hangzhou.

The research follows previous excavations at the site that revealed a Stone Age community of wooden dwellings perched on stilts over the marshy wetlands.