Discoveries

Most California schoolchildren learn the basic facts about the state's mission history in the fourth grade. Established from 1769 to 1823 by Franciscan monks from Spain to spread the Roman Catholic faith among the area's Native American population, the series of strategic-religious outposts spanned 650 miles of California coastline, from San Diego to Sonoma, providing Spain with a powerful presence on the Pacific frontier.

After weeks of testing the soil in the Martian arctic, NASA's Phoenix lander has for the first time confirmed through chemical analysis the presence of water on another planet, scientists said Thursday. Several weeks ago, Phoenix uncovered convincing visual evidence that it had landed on an ice field when it set down on Mars' northern plain May 25.

A French museum has found a previously unknown piece of music handwritten by Mozart, a researcher said Thursday. The 18th century melody sketch is missing the harmony and instrumentation but was described as an important find. Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, said there is no doubt that the single sheet was written by the composer. "His handwriting is absolutely clearly identifiable," he said. The work, described as the preliminary draft of a musical composition, was found by a library in Nantes in western France as staff were going through its archives.

Desert winds blow, sands shift, archaeologists dig, and one day you find a pyramid. Egyptian authorities announced Tuesday that they had discovered what's left of the base of a pyramid estimated to be 4,300 years old. The site near Saqqara has been under excavation for 20 years, and its pyramid is believed to have belonged to Queen Sesheshet, the mother of King Teti, who ruled the Sixth Dynasty about 2291 BC.

Reaching a milestone in the search for Earth-like planets in the universe, two teams of astronomers say they have parted the curtains of space to take the first pictures of planets beyond our solar system. The first team, led by UC Berkeley researchers, used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a picture of a giant planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. "It's almost science fiction," said Berkeley astronomer Eugene Chiang.

Biologists exploring the ocean floor for new sea creatures have stumbled upon one of the largest known single-celled creatures, a bland, grape-sized distant cousin of the amoeba that may solve a thorny evolutionary question that has puzzled researchers for decades.

Texas researchers have discovered the wreck of the slave ship Trouvadore, which slammed into a reef off the coast of the Turks and Caicos Islands in 1841, freeing the 193 Africans who were being brought to the U.S. South for a life of servitude. It is the only known wreck of a ship involved in the illegal slave trade, said marine archaeologist Don Keith, president of the underwater archaeology institute Ships of Discovery in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Scientists who tested monkeys with the resurrected 1918 killer flu virus have a better idea of how the deadliest epidemic in history attacked and killed so many people -- by over-amping the victims' immune systems. The findings help explain why so many of the roughly 50 million who died in the Spanish flu pandemic were young and healthy, Wisconsin researchers reported Friday in the journal Science.

On the heavily forested eastern slopes of the Andes, Peruvian farmers have discovered a massive ruin whose unusual size and shape promise to shed new light on the relationship between the Chachapoyas and the Inca warriors who destroyed their civilization.

Newly disclosed letters written by the father of Anne Frank illuminate his desperate attempts to get his family out of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a New York-based institution that focuses on the history and culture of Eastern European Jews, said Thursday it had discovered the file among 100,000 other Holocaust-related documents about a year and a half ago.