Families used them to announce births and deaths, the government used them to post job openings, young lovers sent them to tell their folks that they had eloped.

No longer.

On Monday, the state-run telecommunications company will send its final telegram, closing down a service that fast became a relic in an age of email, reliable landlines and ubiquitous cellphones.

The fact that the telegram survived this long is a testament to how deeply woven it is into the fabric of Indian society. In much of the rest of the world, telegrams long ago were relegated to novelty services used by people who wanted to indulge in a bit of nostalgia.

Just 30 years ago the telegram was king in India. But the service has lost $250 million in just the last seven years as national cellphone subscriptions hit 867 million in April, more than double the number of just four years ago.

"Most people who come in now are those who want to send a telegram for an official reason," said Lata Harit, a telegraph officer at Delhi's historic Kashmere Gate Telegraph Office. "It's no longer about a birth in the family or a death. For that people rely on their telephones or cellphones."

The nearly empty telegraph office was a far cry, she said, from the days when long lines of customers crowded in the British-colonial style building close to the teeming heart of old Delhi to send a telegram. From 10,000 telegrams a day, the office now sends about 100.

The government still uses telegrams to inform recipients of top civilian awards and for court notices. India's armed forces recognize telegrams from troops extending their vacation or from soldiers' families demanding their presence at home for a funeral. Lawyers still send telegrams to create an official record, for example, to prove to a judge that they had complained their client was subjected to police abuse.

When Harit joined the service more than three decades ago, she underwent six months of training at a school for telegraph operators. Telegrams were sent using the complex dots and dashes of Morse code that had to be decoded at their destination.

"It required enormous concentration to decipher, but some of us were so good at our work, and so fast, that at the end of a day, we would feel exhilarated," she said. "It made us feel proud."

Other operators felt they were important messengers for crucial news.

Baljit Singh, who became a telegraph operator in 1972 and will retire in a few months, recalled the frenetic rush following the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the days of political turmoil and street violence that followed.

"People came in droves to send telegrams. We worked round the clock. I don't think we went home for days," he recalled.

Over the years, Morse code gave way to telex machines and teleprinters, and finally electronic printers and computers.

Before India overhauled its erratic landline network in the 1980s and 1990s and well before the mobile phone revolution the telegram was the only dependable means of conveying news across this vast nation.

At its peak less than three decades ago, a network of 45,000 telegraph offices served the sprawling country. Now there are only 75.

At the Kashmere Gate office, the growing irrelevance of the telegram is reflected in the flyblown calendars on walls graying with age, soot-blackened ceiling fans and a dust-covered chart showing 43 commonly used telegram messages to help customers find the shortest one for the occasion.

For the rare telegram user, it's the end of a way of life.

Abhilasha Kumari, a New Delhi-based sociologist, recalled the crucial role telegrams played in her small hometown of Sitamau in central India.

"The telegram was the only source for getting news quickly. So whenever there was any development in the large extended family whether it was a death, or a birth, or news about that much-coveted government job, the telegram was the quickest way to get the news," she said.

In countless remote towns and villages, the telegraph worker knew everyone and their family business.

Kumari recalled the time a telegram informed her family that a cousin died in an accident.

"The postmaster himself came to deliver the telegram. We saw him at the door, and realized something drastic had happened," she said.

While most of the remaining telegraph workers will be given new assignments in the telecommunications company, the informal economy that thrived on the telegram will disappear.

For nearly 35 years, Jagdish Chand Sharma has made a living helping illiterate customers write telegrams from his mat in a dusty corner of the Kashmere Gate office's patio.

In the 1980s, he would write about 150 telegrams a day, conveying the joys and sorrows of his customers with brevity and precision for a small fee.

Today, he might get three customers on a good day.

Sharma has already equipped himself with packaging material and sealing wax, and has switched to helping people send parcels and mail packages.

"But it's not the same. With a telegram, you instantly made a connection with people when you wrote out a telegram for them," said Sharma, idly swatting flies as he waited in the sweltering heat, a pile of dog-eared telegram forms gathering dust beside him.

Since the June 12 government announcement about the telegram's end, telegraph offices across the country have seen a small rush of people wanting to send some last historic messages.

"We've decided to send telegrams to each other," said Tarun Jain, an IT professional, who had come to the telegraph office with a friend. "Soon this will all be history. Our last telegrams will become collector's items."

In a new testimonial video, NASCAR executives discuss their collaboration with HP to better serve fans, media and sponsors by creating the NASCAR Fan and Media Engagement Center – a solution based onthat synthesizes big data in real-time.

Gov. Tom Corbett challenged the penalties against Penn State for its handling of the Jerry Sandusky child molestation scandal. Corbett issued a statement Thursday that said he feels strongly the claims he raised were compelling and deserved a thorough review by the courts.

Corbett says people and businesses in Pennsylvania are suffering because of the sanctions the school agreed to nearly a year ago.

The judge's order dismissing the lawsuit in its early stages calls the litigation a "Hail Mary pass."

The NCAA penalties include a $60 million fine, a four-year bowl ban and a loss of football scholarships.

Corbett didn't indicate if he plans to appeal the decision. His office hasn't disclosed the lawsuit's cost.

Using observations by NASA's sharp-eyed , for example, researchers have located and imaged Apollo moon landing leftovers, old Soviet-era spacecraft and, more recently, the impact locales of NASA's twinthat were deliberately driven into a mountain near the moon's north pole.

But the search is ongoing to find the exact location of several pioneering moon landers. []

The pacy 19-year-old, a product of Barca's youth academy and a Spain under-20 international, played mostly for the La Liga side's B team last term and scored 18 goals in 34 matches.

He also made four appearances for the first team and in May agreed to extend his Barca contract until 2017.

"Gerard is a real diamond of Spanish football and a boy with incredible footballing talent," Martinez said of his fellow Spaniard on Everton's website (www.evertonfc.com).

"I am delighted that he has chosen to take the next step of his career with Everton."

MONS, Belgium (Reuters) - Crouched behind banks of computer screens flashing data, NATO analysts try to stay ahead of millions of suspected attempts to hack the Western alliance's computer networks, as cyber defense moves to the center of NATO operations.

NATO's cyber defense nerve center, operating from the alliance's operational headquarters at Mons in southern Belgium, monitors potential attacks on NATO computer systems installed at 55 locations around the world.

"Our intrusion detection systems handle something like 147 million suspicious events every day," director Ian West told reporters during a visit to NATO's computer incident response capability technical center on Wednesday.

Attacks on NATO's systems range from hacking, attempts to implant malicious software and so-called denial of service attacks where a computer is bombarded with so much data that it collapses.

NATO analysts dealt with around 2,500 confirmed serious attacks on its computers last year, West said.

In an era where weapon systems and military operations increasingly depend on computers, there is a risk that hacking attacks could have fatal consequences for the alliance.

"The worst case scenario of a cyber attack for us could be loss of life ... If intelligence doesn't get through about an ambush, if notification doesn't get through about a security situation, then our troops' lives are at risk," West said.

Some attacks against NATO's computer networks have been successful, he said, although he declined to say whether hackers had succeeded in stealing confidential data.

The threats come from hacking activists, criminals and "hostile nation states", although West declined to say which countries are suspected.

In May, the Pentagon said China was using espionage to acquire technology to fuel its military modernization, for the first time accusing the Chinese of trying to break into U.S. defense computer networks. Beijing denied the allegation.

China hit back after fugitive spy agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of U.S. cyber spying, accusing Washington of hypocrisy.

SPEAR PHISHING

Analysts among the cyber defense centre's 130-strong staff from 15 nations say the attacks on NATO defense systems are growing in number and sophistication.

"The majority of the attacks are conducted by 'spear phishing' emails," said Andrzej Dereszowski, a Polish engineer at the center, referring to attempts by hackers to get hold of passwords or other confidential information by posing as a legitimate organization.

"They try to entice the user to follow the links (in emails) by pretending to be from a legitimate source or even using another compromised organization to actually send emails from a real person from that organization," he said.

In the case of a serious hacking attempt, the centre's analysts will analyze malicious code used and try to find who is behind the attempt, West said.

If it needs help from police, NATO may tip off the country concerned, but it will not go after the hacker itself, he says. NATO's remit in the cyber area is purely defensive, not offensive.

NATO was alerted to the threat of cyber attacks in 2007, when Estonia's Internet network was paralyzed by an electronic attack that Estonia blamed on Russia.

Since then, NATO has given a much higher priority to cyber defense. NATO ministers agreed at a Brussels meeting last month to strengthen the organization's cyber defenses.

The alliance is beefing up the capabilities of the Mons cyber defense center, including creating rapid reaction teams to help protect NATO's own computer systems and an around-the-clock response to incidents.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) - Jan Simek, leader of the team that discovered the oldest known cave art in the United States, says he is far from finished.

The 60-year-old science professor at the University of Tennessee still plans to belly crawl through caves or climb atop bluffs in the hope of finding more art in his cave-rich state.

The Simek team's discovery of 6,000-year-old art in the Cumberland Plateau, a division of the Appalachian Mountains extending from southern West Virginia to northern Alabama, is featured in this month's issue of Antiquity, the archeological journal published by Britain's Durham University.

"Yes, we have cave art that is 6,000 years old," Simek said. "But we don't want to say it is the oldest rock art (in the United States)."

Simek told Reuters there might be ancient rock art in 400 or 500 of the 9,000 caves recorded in the limestone and sandstone bedrock of Tennessee.

His team has explored about 1,000 of them so far. "We are in the early stages of this, to be honest," he said.

Cave locations are kept secret because of concerns that looters could damage any archeological treasures that may be inside.

By global standards, 6,000-year-old cave art is still relatively youthful. Experts say the famous Paleolithic paintings in Lascaux, France, are as old as 20,000 years; other drawings found in Australia and southern Africa are believed to be older still.

Nonetheless, archaeologists and Native Americans are excited about the discoveries by Simek and his team: Alan Cressler of the U.S. Geological Survey; Nicholas P. Hermann of Mississippi State University and Sarah C. Sherwood of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Albert Bender, a Cherokee and board adviser for the Nashville-based Native American Indian Association of Tennessee, said the discovery "shows the sophistication of Native American society in the South going back thousands and thousands of years."

Michael Moore, director and state archeologist in Tennessee's Division of Archaeology, described the team's find as "extremely exciting and extremely significant" for "the different insights into prehistoric culture."

RELIGIOUS CONNECTION

Simek said his team's main focus was on the connection of the art to religion. Some of the drawings show humans hunting or engaging in magical activities like flying; others depict more mythological or spiritual images such as serpents and circles.

"We know ... that these folks had recognized multiple layers of reality, and humans only occupied one of the layers in the middle," he said. "But they interacted with and were influenced by a celestial world, an upper world that had certain creatures and spirits associated with it and an underworld that had other spirits associated with it."

Simek said this multi-tiered religious view was represented by the figures on bluffs, those in the open air, and those beneath the ground in the Cumberland Plateau.

He compares the spiritual view of the artists with other religions, including Christianity.

"Christ was taken to the top of the mountain, crucified, taken down, put in a cave and from there was reborn," he said. "Those are the vertical levels of our spiritual world."

To him, the artwork and the sheer physical demands required for the painters and carvers to reach so high on the bluffs as well as so far below ground to depict their spiritual hopes and fears are proof that a sophisticated society predated people who currently call Tennessee home.

"This stuff is thoughtful, insightful, profound, sacred," said Simek, who fortunately is neither claustrophobic nor afraid of the dark. "These people have taught me a great deal about the power of the human mind."

Then he stopped and added: "It's a lot of fun."

(Reporting by Tim Ghianni; Editing by Arlene Getz and Lisa Von Ahn)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Remains fitting the description of a missing autistic boy were found buried in a shallow grave near his California home on Wednesday, police said, and a 16-year-old family member was arrested on suspicion of murder.

Captain John Hill, acting police chief of Menifee, California, said the remains had not yet been formally identified as the missing 11-year-old, Terry Smith, but appeared to belong to a male juvenile.

Police declined to name the suspect, citing the ongoing investigation, but said he is a 16-year-old relative of the missing boy who was taken into custody on suspicion of murder following an interview by detectives.

"One of the things I want to stress is that this is a domestic issue within that residence, and that there is no stranger in the city of Menifee that caused this to happen," Hill said at a news conference.

Terry Smith was reported missing from his home in Menifee, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles, on Sunday morning, prompting a search by authorities using helicopters and bloodhounds that was assisted by local volunteers.

The Riverside County Sheriff's Department has said the boy was last seen alive by his older brother between 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Saturday and that his mother contacted police when she did not find him in bed mid-morning the following day.

Hill said investigators went to the home early on Wednesday morning after receiving a report that possible human remains had been spotted there by a volunteer searcher, then found the partially exposed body.

He said police conducted multiple searches of the property using dogs and volunteers after the boy was reported missing, but did not explain how the remains were not found earlier.

"Sometimes it takes awhile for us to put all the puzzle pieces together in a circumstance like this," he said.

Local television news images showed forensic technicians working under a green tarp to remove the remains from dirt about 75 feet from the home and load the remains into a coroner's van with darkened windows.

Riverside County medical examiners were expected to conduct an autopsy to identify the remains in the coming days and determine a cause of death.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Will Dunham)

A team of international astronomers has detected four explosive events, known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), above the plane of our. Lasting only a few thousandths of a second, these sources send powerful signals across the universe, traveling billions of light-years through space.

"These bursts gave off more energy in a millisecond than the sun does in 300,000 years," said principal investigator Dan Thornton of the University of Manchester in England. []

Mysterious origins

Studying observations by the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in Australia, Thornton and his team spotted four new point sources across the sky. The bursts ranged from 5.5 to 10 billion light-years away, meaning it took the light from some of them 10 billion years to reach Earth. (Thethat created our universe occurred 13.8 billion years ago.).

These newfound objects allowed the researchers to calculate that an FRB should occur once every 10 seconds.

After the astronomers verified that the objects weren't Earth-based, they questioned whether the new signals came from . To do so, they studied how the radio waves were affected by the material they pass through a technique that could allow these new objects to shed light on the components of space.

As radio waves travel in space, they are stretched and slowed by the ionized material through which they move. Using models, the team concluded that the FRBs traveled billions oflight-years much farther than the edge of Earth's galaxy.

"These are extragalactic in origin not from the Milky Way but the source is likely located in anothergalaxy," Thornton said.

Although the explosions are brief, the astronomers can pinpoint the bursts' locations pretty accurately.

"They are so bright and narrow that we can limit the size of the emission region at the source to just a few hundred kilometers," Thornton said.

No corresponding object could be observed in optical, gamma or X-ray wavelengths, so the explosions' origins remain unknown to scientists.

"Other variable extragalactic radio sources vary on timescales of days to months," Thornton said. "FRBs happen in just a few milliseconds."

Possible sources include intersecting magnetic fields from two neutron stars, extremely dense city-size bodies packing the mass of the sun. A special kind oforbited by a neutron star could potentially produce radio bursts as the star's magnetic field interacts with the explosion of the supernova, though such combinations would be rare, researchers said.

"Our favorite explanation is a giant burst from a, a highly magnetized type of neutron star," Thornton said.

These bursts of radiation can produce an enormous amount of energy, similar to that seen in the FRBs.

Hard to spot

Although frequent, an FRB's short signal duration makes it difficult to spot.

"The problem with searching for FRBs is that we don't know where or when they will go off," Thornton said.

A , leaving scientists puzzled about its source, and even its existence. For the last four years, Thornton and his team have used the High Time Resolution Survey to search for similar bursts. Powered by the 210-foot (64 meters) CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, the survey was designed to search above and below the plane of the Milky Way for objects such as rotating neutron stars known as pulsars.

The Parkes telescope essentially "stares" at a region of the sky for a set amount of time, making it ideal to capture FRBs.

"At some point, one will go off in the field of view of the telescope," Thornton said.

The four new sources appeared above the plane of the galaxy. Follow-up observations, performed approximately a year after the FRBs were first spotted, looked at whether the objects continued to produce emission, but the signals appear to be nonrepeating.

"It is, of course, possible that repetitions were missed, particularly if they happened soon after the original FRB," Thornton said.

"Efforts are ongoing at the moment to detect FRBs in close to real time, such that they can be followed up quickly," he added. Ideally, such follow-up observations would be performed at a multitude of wavelengths, providing further insight into what drives these powerful explosions.

The research, along with a companion Perspectives article by James Cordes of Cornell University in New York, was published online Thursday (July 4) in the journal Science.

Follow us@Spacedotcom,FacebookorGoogle+. Originally published on.

The lawmaker, Alexei Pushkov, later tweeted that he had seen the news on state-run Russian television channel Rossiya-24, but a representative of Rossiya-24 said it had been referring to Pushkov's initial tweet.

Pushkov, the pro-Kremlin chairman of the international affairs committee in the lower parliament house, could not immediately be reached for comment.

A Russian Foreign Ministry official declined immediate comment and the Venezuelan embassy in Moscow could not immediately be reached.

Snowden, who is wanted in the United States on espionage charges after revealing details of secret surveillance programs, is believed to be holed up in the transit area at a Moscow airport where he arrived on June 23 from Hong Kong.

He has appealed to about 20 countries for asylum and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on Friday that he had decided to offer the 30-year-old American fugitive asylum. Nicaragua and Bolivia also have said they would take him in.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Snowden should choose a final destination and go there as soon as possible, but it is unclear how he would get to any of the Latin American countries that have offered him asylum.

There are no direct flights from Moscow to Venezuela, Nicaragua or Bolivia, and U.S. authorities have urged nations around the world not to give Snowden refuge.

(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Michael Roddy)