Greek tomb uncovered in road construction

Tomb found in roadwork

Road construction on the western Greek island of Lefkada has uncovered and partially destroyed an important tomb with artifacts dating back more than 3,000 years, government officials said this week.

The find is a miniature version of the large, opulent tombs built by the rulers of Greece during the Mycenaean era, which ended around 1100 BC.

The tomb contained several human skeletons, as well as smashed pottery, two seal stones, beads made of semiprecious stones, copper implements and clay loom weights. It appeared to have been plundered during antiquity.

Orbiter captures Mars avalanches

A robotic spacecraft circling Mars has snapped the first image of a series of active avalanches near the planet’s north pole, scientists said Monday.

The image, taken last month by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, reveals at least four avalanches of fine ice and dust breaking off from a steep cliff and settling on the slope below. The cascade kicked up massive debris clouds, with some measuring more than 590 feet across.

Nobel laureate retracts paper

A Nobel laureate and her co-authors on a 2001 paper on the sense of smell have retracted the study, saying they had discovered problems in the data and were unable to duplicate their findings.

Linda Buck shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering odor-sensing proteins in the nose and tracing how the nervous system delivers odor information to the brain. It was not immediately clear how important the retracted research was to the body of work that led to her Nobel.

The retracted paper reported details of how the nervous system of the mouse carries odor signals from the nose to a particular region of the brain.

Buck, who did the work at Harvard Medical School, is now at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. She did not immediately respond to requests for an interview. But she told the journal Nature, which reported the development in its news section, that data inconsistencies appeared in figures contributed to the paper by another author.

Could happiness be inherited?

You can’t buy happiness, but it looks like you can at least inherit it, British and Australian researchers said Thursday.

A study of nearly 1,000 pairs of identical and nonidentical twins found genes control half the personality traits that make people happy, while factors such as relationships, health and careers are responsible for the rest of our well-being.

“What this study showed was that the identical twins in a family were very similar in personality and in well-being, and by contrast, the fraternal twins were only around half as similar,” said Tim Bates, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh who led the study. “That strongly implicates genes.”

Saturn moon may have its own ring

Saturn’s second-largest moon, Rhea, may have a small ring around it – the first time a moon has been found to have a ring, an international team of researchers reported Friday in the journal Science.

The four largest planets in the solar system – Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn and Uranus – have rings, and Earth probably had one as well at some point billions of years ago.

From Times Staff and Wire Reports