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A team of evangelical Christian explorers claim they've found the remains of Noah's ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Turkey's Mount Ararat (map). But some archaeologists and historians are taking the latest claim that Noah's ark has been found about as seriously as they have past ones—which is to say not very.

Plato was the Einstein of Greece's Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy's findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.

If you had a dinner invitation in Utah's Escalante Valley almost 10,000 years ago, you would have come just in time to try a new menu item: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.

Researchers from Leeds University are working on a camera and drill-weilding robot known as Djedi to solve the mystery of the blocked shafts inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. In 1992 and 2002, remote cameras were sent through the shaft under the watchful eye of antiquities master Dr. Zahi Hawass only to be stopped by limestone doors. Dr. Robert Richardson of the Mechanical Engineering department said their goal is to find out what is beyond the blocks and go as far as possible to discover the purpose of the shafts, all while doing minimal damage to the structure. Final preparations are being made now with hopes of sending the robot in before year's end. Place your bets now!

That age-old question, "where did life on Earth start?" now has a new answer. If the life between the mica sheets hypothesis is correct, life would have originated between sheets of mica that were layered like the pages in a book.

The conservation of Mayan wall paintings at the archaeological site of Calakmul (Mexico) will be one on the subjects touched upon by Piero Baglioni (based at the University of Florence) in his invited lecture at the 3rd European Chemistry Congress in Nürnberg in September. In a special issue of Chemistry-A European Journal, which contains papers by many of the speakers at this conference, he reports on the latest developments on the use of humble calcium and barium hydroxides nanoparticles as a versatile and highly efficient tool to combat the main degradation processes that affect wall paintings. La Antigua Ciudad Maya de Calakmul is located in the Campeche state (Mexico) and is one of the most important cities of the Classic Maya period (AD 250-800). The excavation of this site (set up in 1993) involves, under the supervision of the archaeologist Ramon Carrasco, archaeologists, architects, engineers, conservators and epigraphists, besides other specialists. Since 2004, the Center for Colloid and Surface Science (CSGI) at the University of Florence (CSGI), and currently directed by Piero Baglioni, has been an active partner, being involved in the study of the painting technique and in the development of nanotechnology for the consolidation and protection of the wall paintings and limestone.

The fortress-like Coptic monastery of St Anthony the Great stands at an oasis spring in the Red Sea Mountains, 155 km (100 miles) south east of Cairo. It was founded in the mid-4th century, on Saint Anthony's burial site. He, along with St Pachomius (the first monk to organise hermits into groups) were two of the first exponents of Christian monasticism, which originated in the Egyptian desert. The Coptic orthodox monastery, presided over by an abbot, is the oldest Christian monastery in the world. The church is one of Egypt's great treasures - some of the wall paintings here date from the 6th and the 9th centuries, and among them is a picture of the founder, St Anthony himself. He lived in a tiny cave, high above the desert, for 40 years soon after AD 300, and the monastery - really a city in the desert - was built in the 360s. Amazingly, the monks who live here still speak Coptic, a language directly descended from the language of the ancient Egyptians.

1,600-year-old St. Anthony's Monastery restoration took eight years to complete. The announcement comes a month after Egypt's worst incident of sectarian violence in over a decade. Amid the renovations, archaeologists discovered the remains of the original monk cells dating to the 4th century.

King Tut, depicted here by a gold funerary mask, was a frail pharaoh, according to a new DNA study. Tutankhamun was beset by malaria and a bone disorder—and possibly compromised by his newly discovered incestuous origins, researchers say. (Read the full story: "King Tut Was Disabled, Malarial, and Inbred, DNA Shows.")Released Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the report is the first DNA study ever conducted with ancient Egyptian royal mummies. It apparently solves several mysteries surrounding the 14th-century B.C. pharaoh, including how he died and who his parents were."He was not a very strong pharaoh. He was not riding the chariots," said study team member Carsten Pusch, a geneticist at Germany's University of Tübingen. "Picture instead a frail, weak boy who had a bit of a club foot and who needed a cane to walk."

Although any T. Rex–enthralled kid will tell you that a gigantic asteroid wiped the dinosaurs off the planet, scientists have always regarded this impact theory as a hypothesis subject to revision based on further evidence gathered from around the globe. Other possible causes, such as volcanism and smaller, multiple asteroid strikes, never actually went away, and over the years researchers raised important points that did not fully jibe with a history-changing celestial impact near the Yucatan peninsula one awful day some 65.5 million years ago. A group of 41 researchers have pored over the evidence and decided that—in accordance with the original postulate put forth 30 years ago by a team led by father and son researchers Luis and Walter Alvarez—it was, indeed, a massive asteroid that slammed into Earth, creating Chicxulub Crater on Mexico's Gulf Coast, that killed off many of the species on the planet, including the non-avian dinosaurs.

A team of archaeologists unearthed two large red granite statues in southern Egypt at the mortuary temple of one of the most powerful pharaohs, who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago, the Culture Ministry said Tuesday. A ministry statement said the team discovered a 13 foot (4 meter) statue of Thoth, the ancient god of wisdom and the top part of a statue of Pharaoh Amenhotep III standing next to another god. Both were found buried in the pharaoh's mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile in the southern temple city of Luxor.

A bejeweled mummy dressed in Roman robes has emerged from the sands of Egypt's Bahariya Oasis, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said Monday. Entombed in a decorated gypsum sarcophagus, the 38-inch tall mummy  belonged to a woman or girl who died in the Greco-Roman period about 2,300 years ago. Unearthed in a rock-hewn tomb at a modern construction site near the town of Bawiti, in Bahariya Oasis, some 185 miles southwest of Cairo, the mummy points to the existence of a large Greco-Roman necropolis nearby, Mahmoud Affifi, director of Cairo and Giza antiquities, said in a statement.

Carved in stone on a Civil War-era bridge -- a world-class feat of engineering that stands a couple miles northwest of Washington -- are the names of builders and officials of the day.

A key name, however, is missing. New research shows that Virginian Alfred R. Rives led the design and construction of the Cabin John Bridge. Also called the Union Arch Bridge, the aqueduct and roadway reaches 220 feet across Cabin John Creek in a single span -- the world's longest single-span masonry bridge for nearly 40 years and the nation's longest still today.

Catalan researchers have discovered in the rubbish dump of Can Mata in the Vallès-Penedès basin (Catalonia) a new species of Pliopithecus primate, considered an extinct family of primitive Catarrhini primates (or "Old World monkeys"). The fragments of jaw and molars found in this large site demonstrate that Pliopithecus canmatensis belongs to this group, which includes the first Catarrhini that dispersed from Africa to Eurasia.