Israel's Holocaust memorial says it has now identified four million of the six million Jews who were killed by Nazis in the Holocaust of World War II.

Yad Vashem has made the recovery of the names a main mission in order to keep the memory of the murdered Jews alive.

In 2004, it launched a database of victims' names on its website. It had 3 million names at the time and since then has been compiling the names of other victims. It said Tuesday that the database now has 4 million names....

Scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of whether pills found in a 2,000-year-old shipwreck were, in fact, created and used as effective plant-based medicines.

And the bigger question: Could the ingredients of these ancient tablets still work to help with modern illnesses?

Around 130 B.C., a ship, identified as the Relitto del Pozzino, sank off Tuscany, Italy. Among the artifacts found on board in 1989 were glass cups, a pitcher and ceramics, all of which suggested that the ship was sailing from the eastern Mediterranean area.

Its cargo also included a chest that contained various items related to the medical profession: a copper bleeding cup and 136 boxwood vials and tin containers.

Inside one of the tin vessels, archaeologists found several circular tablets, many still completely dry.

"They were less than an inch in diameter and about a third to a half inch thick," said Robert Fleischer, an evolutionary geneticist with the Smithsonian's Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics in Washington, D.C.

He told AOL News that the tablets were "very tightly compressed vegetation in a very solid pill. In fact, you had to use a scalpel to cut pieces off of it.

"But under a microscope, you could see plant fibers in it. It probably wasn't something that was taken whole.

"It was assumed the pills were medicines that the physicians were using. There were things associated with this chest that led them to believe it was a physician's chest," said Fleischer.

Using DNA sequencing, Fleischer has identified some of the plant components in the tablets: carrot, radish, parsley, celery, wild onion, cabbage, alfalfa, oak and hibiscus....

Spanish police have recovered stolen art worth millions of euros after one of the thieves tried to sell a sculpture to a scrap dealer.

Thirty-five works by Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Chillida and others were stolen from a warehouse south of Madrid on 27 November.

Police were tipped off that Chillida's bench-like 'Topos IV', worth 800,000 euros (£675,000), had been offered to a scrapyard for 30 euros (£25).

The haul was found nearby.

When the heist happened last month, the art works had just been brought back from an exhibition in Germany and were all still in the truck in a warehouse in Getafe, on the outskirts of Madrid.

Thieves broke into the warehouse and drove off with the lorry-load of art, with a combined value thought to be more than 5m euros (£4.2m)....

For nearly 60 years the portrait of a baby-faced Philip IV by Velázquez hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European paintings galleries, a stunning example of the only 110 or so known canvases by that 17th-century Spanish master. Majestic in size, it was rare in its depiction of a young, uncertain monarch and was the earliest known portrait of Philip by Velázquez, who, as the king’s court painter, went on to record his image for decades.

So it was quite a shock when, in 1973, the Met, reconsidering 300 of its most treasured works, declared that the painting was not a Velázquez and was probably executed in his studio by an assistant or follower.

But in the museum world, 37 years is several lifetimes, especially considering how extraordinarily technology and scholarship have advanced. Now, after a year of examination and restoration, curators, conservators and scholars have changed their minds....

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) is trying to quell the political storm kicked up over controversial comments he made about the struggle for civil rights in his state.

In a Weekly Standard magazine profile published Monday, Barbour said he didn't remember it "being that bad" and referred benignly to white groups called Citizens Councils, which were known to enforce segregationist policies throughout the South.

His office released a statement Tuesday morning backtracking from those remarks....

The remains of an Anglo-Saxon settlement have been discovered at a surface mine in Northumberland.

Buildings and artefacts dating from the 6th to 8th centuries have been uncovered at Shotton Surface Mine, on the Blagdon Estate, near Cramlington.

The site had been investigated by archaeologists before the start of open-cast mining work.

Experts said the find had provided "the first direct evidence" of Anglo-Saxon settlement in that part of the county.

A team of archaeologists from TWM Archaeology, funded by Banks Mining, undertook the excavation and discovered the settlement....

Though climate change seems a particularly modern predicament — one that generates alarm about the fate of the planet and how people and businesses will adapt — scientists are finding evidence that climate fluctuations influenced cultural changes among inhabitants of prehistoric New England.

Research is revealing the interconnected relationship between environmental shifts and changes in prehistoric people’s tools and settlement patterns. At the end of a cold period came the end of a particular type of chipped stone point used in hunting; when surface water temperatures cooled, burial traditions shifted.

Archeologists have long debated how environmental changes shaped the lives of people. Today, big sets of data are allowing them to look more closely at possible correlations between human and ecological changes in prehistory. Research published this month found that every time the climatic needle jumped in the Northeast, so did human culture. That work builds on a 2005 study that looked closely at a 1,300-year mini ice age followed by rapid warming, and the simultaneous abrupt change in both the landscape and hunting tools.....

The beak was like nature's Swiss Army knife because it provided many tools in one unit.

The emergence of the beak on dinosaurs was "an evolutionary innovation," according to a new study that found this seemingly simple trait is like nature's Swiss Army knife because it functions as many tools in one.

Over time, many dinosaurs replaced their toothy grins with beaks to aid their transition to plant eating, according to the new study that is published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

Reporting from Albuquerque —
Nearly 130 years after the death of Henry McCarty, alias William Bonney, but better known as Billy the Kid, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson will take some of the final hours of his administration to decide whether to pardon the baby-faced gunslinger.

Richardson will review evidence that in 1881, one of his predecessors promised to pardon Bonney for killing a sheriff in return for his testimony in a murder case. The record suggests that New Mexico territorial Gov. Lew Wallace later reneged on that promise.

Richardson has promised a decision by Dec. 31, his final day in office.

Richardson, who is in North Korea for talks aimed at defusing recent tensions after that country's recent artillery barrage on a South Korean island, has also solicited comment from citizens to help him make a decision, according to spokeswoman Alarie Ray-Garcia....