The discovery of small perforated sea shells, in the Cave of Pigeons in Taforalt, eastern Morocco, has shown that the use of bead adornments in North Africa is older than thought. Dating from 82 000 years ago, the beads are thought to be the oldest in the world.

As adornments, together with art, burial and the use of pigments, are considered to be among the most conclusive signs of the acquisition of symbolic thought and of modern cognitive abilities, this study is leading researchers to question their ideas about the origins of modern humans.

An all-electric aircraft will be more efficient, produce fewer greenhouse emissions and be quieter but current technology cannot be used because an electric motor using conventional magnets can weigh up to five times as much as conventional jet engine and not be as fuel efficient.

Superconducting motors are the answer to greenhouse emissions from plane flights, according Philippe Masson and Cesar Luongo from Florida State University, Gerald Brown at NASA and Danielle Soban at Georgia Institute of Technology. They explain that because superconductors lose no energy through electrical resistance, they could be very efficient components for a new type of aircraft propulsion.

Genes account for only 2.5 percent of DNA in the human genetic blueprint, yet diseases can result not only from mutant genes but from mutations of other DNA that controls genes.

Looking at fossils of long-dead creatures, it's easy to understand how anthropologists determine the way an animal looked. But how do they determine how one moved?

Alan Walker,Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Penn State University, and a team of researchers studied 91 separate primate species, including all taxonomic families. The study also included 119 additional species, most of which are mammals ranging in size from mouse to elephant, that habitually move in diverse ways in varied environments.

Their goal was to document the relationship of the dimensions of the semicircular canals to locomotion. These structures are filled with a fluid, which moves within the canals when the animal moves.

A gene responsible for the single most common cause of hearing loss among white adults, otosclerosis, has been identified for the first time. Ms Melissa Thys, from the Department of Medical Genetics, University of Antwerp, Belgium, said that this finding may be a step towards new treatments for otosclerosis, which affects approximately 1 in 250 people.

Otosclerosis is a multifactorial disease, caused by an interaction of genetic and environmental factors. The outcome is a progressive hearing loss as the growing bone in the middle ear interrupts the sound waves passing to the inner ear. While the causative factors remain unknown, now one of the genetic components has been identified, Ms Thys told the conference.

The long-running controversy about the origins of the Etruscan people appears to be very close to being settled once and for all.

Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University of Turin, Italy, will say that there is overwhelming evidence that the Etruscans, whose brilliant civilisation flourished 3000 years ago in what is now Tuscany, were settlers from old Anatolia (now in southern Turkey).

Etruscan culture was very advanced and quite different from other known Italian cultures that flourished at the same time, and highly influential in the development of Roman civilisation. Its origins have been debated by archaeologists, historians and linguists since time immemorial.