London, Oct 23: Russian archeologists have claimed that the Russians were the first people on the planet to cultivate land, breed cattle and make earthenware.

Russian tribes inhabited Khabarovsk Region in the Stone Age, the archeologists said after finding a 15,000-year-old hunters’ settlement on the bank of the Amur River in Khabarovsk.

According to a report in Press TV, stone axes, knives, scrapers, arrowheads and baked earthenware have so far been unearthed in the area.

“It was the first earthenware on the globe, and though it was primitive, with plain decoration, and poorly baked, yet it was a significant landmark in the history of mankind,” said Andrei Malyavin, an employee of Khabarovsk Archeology Museum.

London, Oct 23 : Scientists have now made it possible to store information inside the nucleus of an atom—a breakthrough that has paved the way for a quantum computer which could crack problems unsolvable by current technology.

Touted as the holy grail of computing, quantum computing involves individual piece of information, or ‘bit’, which can have more than one value at once, as opposed to current technology which is limited to either 1s or 0s. This can dramatically escalate the processing power and thus widens the scope of what computers can do.

London, Oct 23 : Scientists at Newcastle University have now unravelled the mechanism by which the fundamental building blocks of life, proteins and metals, bind together.

Lead author Professor Nigel Robinson has revealed the mechanism, which ensures that the right metal goes to the right protein.

Life, microbe, plant or human, are all made up of atoms, which include metals such as copper and manganese which act as catalysts in proteins, which in turn around the metal atoms.

London, Oct 23: Scientists are hoping that India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar mission will help solve the riddle of whether the Moon is an alien body that collided with the Earth, or is part of the Earth that was broken off after a collision with another body.

According to a report in The Times, a camera on board Chandrayaan-1, which will take X-ray images of the Moon’s surface, may provide the answer to this riddle.

Manuel Grande, a British lunar scientist from Aberystwyth University, has helped to design the European Space Agency’s instrument.

“After the Apollo landings, people thought they knew a fair bit about the Moon - they''d seen people walking around up there,” Grande told The Times.

London, Oct 23 : Republicans bracing themselves for defeat in the November 4 election are already contemplating the prospect of Sarah Palin becoming their presidential candidate against Democrat President Barack Obama in 2012.

Conservative Republicans are talking enthusiastically about Palin as a White house contender next time, acknowledging that if a week is a long time in politics then four years amounts to several lifetimes, The Telegraph reported.

“Sarah’s the one,” said one leading conservative who is convinced McCain will lose this election.

“The party is broken and only she can fix it. We need someone who comes from outside Washington and relates to the aspirations of ordinary Americans,” he added.

London, Oct 23: An international team of researchers have identified as many as 26 genes that are frequently mutated in the most common form of lung cancer, thus opening up avenues for developing new therapies for treating the disease.

The researchers looked at nearly 200 patients with lung adenocarcinoma and decoded or sequenced the DNA of several hundred genes that are known to or are suspected to be involved in cancer development.

By scanning the tumour genomes, they identified several abnormally active as well as silent genes.

The team was able to pinpoint more than 1,000 genetic alterations — the majority of which had not been previously known.