Washington, March 24: An international team of researchers has found the earliest physical evidence for domesticated maize in Mexico, dating back to at least 8,700 calendar years ago, which is 1,500 years earlier than previously documented.

According to the researchers, the maize was probably domesticated by indigenous peoples in the lowland areas of southwestern Mexico, not the highland areas.

Washington, Mar 24: People who eat red meat and processed meat have a higher risk of dying from cancer or heart disease, says a new study.

However, according to a report in the March 23 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals, a higher intake of white meat is associated with a slightly decreased risk for overall death and cancer death.

Washington, March 24: Researchers have gathered evidence of early human experiments with agriculture in dog and pig bones, as well as bones of other animals, from an archaeological site in a region of northwest China.

The bones come from a Neolithic site known as Dadiwan, in China’s western Loess Plateau, excavated first by a Chinese team in the late 70s and early 80s, and in 2006 by a team from the University of California, Davis, and Lanzhou University in China.

Washington, Mar 24: Feeling scared or amorous can greatly change the way people make decisions, claims a new study.

According to Vladas Griskevicius, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota''s Carlson School of Management, everyday people are confronted with innumerable pieces of information and hundreds of decisions.

Unsurprisingly, people often process each piece of information deeply, instead relying on quick mental shortcuts to guide their behaviors.

London, Mar 24: An Austrian-American woman has claimed that she had an affair - and a child - with John F Kennedy while he was convalescing in the US during World War II.

Lisa Lanett also added that the former US president offered to marry her.

Now 87, Lanett told the Austrian newspaper Kurier, she had a two-year affair with Kennedy after they met in Phoenix, Arizona, during the Second World War.

New York  - US stocks staged the biggest rally since November after the US government unveiled the details of a long-awaited plan to take toxic mortgage assets off the balance sheets of US banks.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner put forward a 1-trillion- dollar public-private partnership that the administration hopes will go a long way to stabilize the crumbling US financial system.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its fifth-largest points gain in history, and US financial firms gained 18 per cent on the announcement.