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An analysis of clam shells and volcanic rocks from an Italian cave shows that Neanderthals collected shells and pumice from beaches. And due to specific indicators on some of the shells, the researchers also believe Neanderthals waded and dove into the ocean to retrieve shells, meaning they may have been able to swim.

It's fortunate that the shells, as well as the volcanic rock called pumice, were retrieved from the cave and stored at the Italian Institute of Human Paleontology because the cave itself is no longer accessible. Blasting for coastal highway construction buried the cave in the early 1970s.

Shell tools for Neanderthals are rare, and only a few examples of them have been discovered. The majority of tools associated with Neanderthals involve stone spear tips and stone hammers. But there was even less evidence prior to this study that Neanderthals living in Western Europe dove underwater. The study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC says it's ceasing exploration in offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future.

an exploratory well drilled to 6,800 feet found oil and gas but not in sufficient quantities.

Shell drilled in 150 feet of water about 80 miles off Alaska's northwest coast.

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has issued a profit warning after it made less money than expected in the final quarter of 2013.

"Fourth-quarter 2013 figures... are expected to be significantly lower than recent levels of profitability," the company said in a statement.

It now expects profits for the quarter to be about $2.2bn (£1.3bn) and profits for 2013 as a whole to be $16.8bn. Shell's shares fell more than 4% at the beginning of trading in London.

It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.

He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling. The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

The recent excavation of a cave site along Portugal's coast revealed a wealth of fossilized remains of food, including fish, birds and mammals. It's estimated that Neanderthals lived in the cave, known as Figueira Brava, between 86,000 and 106,000 years ago.

From the sea, they could feast on limpet, mussels, clams, brown crabs, spider crabs, sharks, eels, sea breams, mullets, dolphins and seals. Marine birds also included mallards, common scoters (a large sea duck), geese, cormorants, gannets, shags, auks, egrets and loons.

Neanderthals living in Italy and across the Iberian Peninsula likely would have followed a similar lifestyle with a Mediterranean climate.

A shell has hit a bus in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 12 civilians and wounding many more, Ukraine's military says.

In a statement, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko condemned the attack, blaming the rebels and those "who is arming them and inspiring to commit bloody crimes".

But following talks in Berlin on Monday, foreign ministers for the four countries said that "further work needs to be done" before a summit could be held.

Syrian opposition: Shelling in water-rich valley kills 7

Syrian opposition activists say government shelling has struck a village in a rebel-controlled area near Damascus, killing at least seven civilians and injuring several others, in violence that has tested the country's fragile cease-fire.

Fighting has raged in the valley that provides the Syrian capital with most of its water supply, restricting the flow since Dec.22, despite talks to stem the violence.

As Global Witness has tirelessly pointed out, much of the corruption is made possible (or at least easier) by anonymous shell companies, which are open to abuse by drug lords, sanctions-busters, kleptocrats and their cronies. Ms Gooch and her colleagues liken shells to getaway cars—for money launderers rather than bank robbers.

the source of the problem is often rich countries. Corporate secrecy is particularly strong in America. Registration agents aren’t even required to collect and hold ownership information in states like Delaware and Nevada. (Just today your reporter received an email containing evidence that a Delaware shell company implicated in large-scale cocaine trafficking last year is still registered in the state and in good standing.)

the first animals evolved about 750 million years ago.

But it’s not until around 520 million years ago that many major groups of living animals left behind their first fossils.

For decades, scientists have searched for the trigger that set in motion this riot of diversity in the animal kingdom.

Dr. Clapham and his co-author, Jonathan L. Payne, a Stanford geochemist, concluded that animals with skeletons or shells made of calcium carbonate, or limestone, were more likely to die than those with skeletons of other substances. And animals that had few ways of protecting their internal chemistry were more apt to disappear. Being widely dispersed across the planet was little protection against extinction, and neither was being numerous. The deaths happened throughout the ocean. Nor was there any correlation between extinction and how a creature moved or what it ate. Instead, the authors concluded, the animals died from a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water, an excess of carbon dioxide, a reduced ability to make shells from calcium carbonate, altered ocean acidity and higher water temperatures. They also concluded that all these stresses happened rapidly and that each one amplified the effects of the others. That led to a wholesale change in the ocean’s dominant animals within just 200,000 years, or perhaps much less, Dr. Clapham said.

So what happened 252 million years ago to cause those physiological stresses in marine animals? Additional clues from carbon, calcium and nitrogen isotopes of the period, as well as from organic geochemistry, suggest a “perturbation of the global carbon cycle,” the scientists’ second paper concluded — a huge infusion of carbon into the atmosphere and the ocean.

scientists suspect that the answer lies in the biggest volcanic event of the past 500 million years — the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, the stairlike hilly region in northern Russia. The eruptions sent catastrophic amounts of carbon gas into the atmosphere and, ultimately, the oceans; that led to long-term ocean acidification, ocean warming and vast areas of oxygen-poor ocean water

North Korea and South Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells across their disputed western sea border on Monday, escalating military tensions a day after the North threatened to conduct more nuclear tests.

Earlier on Monday, North Korea told the South that it would conduct live-fire military drills in seven zones along the maritime border, which hugs the southern coast of North Korea.

“This is a premeditated provocation to test our will to defend the maritime border, and if the North provokes again using our response today as an excuse, we will act decisively,” Mr. Kim said. “We have increased our vigilance along the western frontier islands and boosted weapons’ readiness there.”

In the years I was assigned to Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or Fincen, I observed many formal requests for assistance having to do with companies associated with Delaware, Nevada or Wyoming. These states have a tawdry image: they have become nearly synonymous with underground financing, tax evasion and other bad deeds facilitated by anonymous shell companies

A study by researchers at Brigham Young University, the University of Texas and Griffith University in Australia concluded that America was the second easiest country, after Kenya, in which to incorporate a shell company.

A recent World Bank study found that the United States was the favored destination for corrupt foreign politicians opening phantom companies to conceal their ill-gotten gains.

In a way, what one division of American soldiers and marines did there in June of 1918 is responsible for the carnage that took place to the east throughout the summer and fall that followed: Had they not attacked and taken those woods from the Germans, many historians believe, Germany would have won the war that month.

Plenty of others believe it, too. “If the Americans don’t stop the Germans at Belleau Wood, the Germans take Paris — the war is finished,” Jacques Krabal told me. Mr. Krabal is the mayor of Château-Thierry; every day, as he walks about the city, he can see, looming over it from the heights above town, the massive American monument built a decade later to commemorate Belleau Wood and the battles that followed it that summer.

In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched a series of offensives in France designed to win the war before too many more American troops could get there. The first two were exceedingly successful; the third was, too, until a fledgling American force pushed back at Château-Thierry. The Germans instead took up positions behind formidable defenses in nearby Belleau Wood — only about 40 miles from Paris, the closest they’d gotten since 1914. The French were panicked: As their roads clogged with terrified refugees, Allied commanders confided to one another that the war was lost, and drew up plans to abandon the French capital. Their only hope was to drive the Germans out of Belleau Wood somehow, but French commanders dreaded the prospect of such an assault. So they asked General John J. Pershing to do it.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed a Syrian Kurdish militia fighter working with Kurdish militants inside Turkey for a suicide car bombing that killed 28 people in the capital Ankara, and he vowed retaliation in both Syria and Iraq.

A car laden with explosives detonated next to military buses as they waited at traffic lights near Turkey's armed forces' headquarters, parliament and government buildings in the administrative heart of Ankara late on Wednesday.

Davutoglu said the attack was clear evidence that the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia that has been supported by the United States in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria, was a terrorist organization and that Turkey, a NATO member, expected cooperation from its allies in combating the group.

, after the sound of gunfire was silenced on Armistice Day, the deaths continued to mount. Revolutions spawned in Russia and Germany, arbitrary redrawing of national borders set the stage for decades of conflict, harsh reparation demands inspired the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War I

. The first World War continues to kill to this day - just this past March, two Belgian construction workers were killed when they encountered an unexploded shell buried for a century. Bomb disposal units in France and Belgium dispose of tons of discovered shells every year.

the remnants remain -- scarred landscapes, thousands of memorials, artifacts preserved in museums, photographs, and the stories passed down through the years -- stories of such tremendous loss

Lombardo and colleagues reveal how they made their discovery after investigating “forest islands” – raised, wooded areas, about 70 meters in diameter – within savanna in Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia.

Using a range of sources, including Google Earth, the team report more than 6,600 forest islands in Llanos de Moxos, adding that they looked at the makeup of soil samples at 82 of the sites, finding more than 60 showed telltale signs of human occupation – such as charcoal, shells and bone fragments. From these findings, the team estimated at least 4,700 of the “forest islands” identified were sites where humans once lived – and chucked their waste.

“They are places where people just threw their rubbish after eating or whatever they did,” said Lombardo, noting the accumulation went on for thousands of years, resulting in a raised platform that, safe from the savannah’s seasonal floods, eventually became colonised by trees.

A new frontline in the war in Syria and a standoff between forces backed by Washington and Moscow with competing agendas, mere meters apart.

Twenty-four hours earlier the SDF had moved south to the Euphrates River, kicking ISIS out of a pocket of Deir Ezzor's surrounding countryside and bringing their forces within shouting distance of the Syrian regime and the Russian military assisting them. 

Bashir Elmelham says: "We heard the call of war from the minaret and the shells and artillery came pounding down on us like heavy rain. We fled to abandoned lands." 

On Wednesday, a court in the Netherlands issued a landmark ruling against Royal Dutch Shell — an oil company already pledging to cut its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 — ordering it to act faster.

The cost of building new wind and solar power has fallen dramatically. Electric appliances and heat pumps could conceivably replace natural gas in homes. And after Tesla proved that battery-powered vehicles didn't have to be glorified golf carts, the entire auto industry is racing to pivot toward electric vehicles

Meanwhile, governments around the world — particularly in Europe and China — have been promoting green technology through increasingly aggressive incentives and penalties.