But I don't think spiritual poverty has anything to do with religion, paradoxical as that may seem. I think it has much to do with human connection, with the sense one gets when one can be part of something larger than oneself, in fellowship with others. Where sacrifice is voluntary in the service of those very invisible treasures that nourish our spirit.

For after all, what is democracy? Can you touch it, buy it at a shopping mall, smell it like a flower? Can you paint it like a landscape, see it like a sunrise? Where does it exist if not in our spirits and our hearts? What is freedom? Is it visible to the naked eye? Is it something one can grasp with one's open hand? What is love, respect, honor, justice? Can they be purchased on the stock market? Can they be manufactured by industry? We put great stock in these invisible things, but how do they come about, and how do we gain common language to make them come about?

I think that whether Americans realize it or not, we are all starving. We are starving for something more than material gain, even more than the safety and happiness of our families and loved ones. That alone cannot be enough to nourish our spirit. We have a human connection with each and every person in this whole world; we are all made of the same stuff, we are all affected by what happens to each one of us.

This problem preceded the Bush Administration, but has been made far more severe during its reign. Modern life has always been a trade-off, convenience and material gain at the expense of spiritual growth. The Industrial Revolution was a marvelous thing and spared much of humankind the backbreaking labor which led to early death and miserable existence. But it also created the factory environment where humanity became part of a giant machine, ripped from the land, divorced from our bonds with nature.

Promoting religious tolerance, the world’s most influential Buddhist leader said on Sunday that talk of "a clash of civilisations between the West and Muslim world is wrong and dangerous."

Muslim terrorist attacks have distorted people’s views of Islam, making them believe it is an extremist faith rather than one based on compassion, the Dalai Lama told a press conference in the Indian capital.

Muslims are being unfairly stigmatised as a result of violence by "some mischievous people," said the Dalai Lama, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his work to bring democracy and freedom to his people.

All religions have extremists and "it is wrong to generalise (about Muslims)," the 71-year-old spiritual leader said.

A British expert co-led the team which made the find during the first biological expedition to the Yariguies mountains in northern Colombia.

Ms Blanca Huertas, a curator at the Natural History Museum in London, said: "The description of a new bird is a rare event in modern times."

The bird, which has the Latin name Atlapetes latinuchus yariguierum, differs from its closest relatives by having a black back and no white markings on its wings.

Thomas Donegan, from the Colombian bird conservation organisation Fundacion ProAves, said: "Before we began this study, no-one knew what species lived in the Yariguies mountains and whether they needed protecting.

Palaeontologists and biologists at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago showed that three-quarters of a large group of marine animals - including oysters, clams and other molluscs - first appeared in the tropics and later moved toward the poles.

Only the remaining quarter of this group emerged at higher latitudes, according to the scientists, whose study appears in the latest issue of the U.S. journal, Science.

James Valentine, biology professor at Berkeley and one of the co-authors of the study, said plants and other animal species probably originated in large part in the tropics.

Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome... Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive. A paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science proposes a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy for the brain to process.

The paper, published in the British journal Nature, describes the case of a 22-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric problems who was being evaluated for treatment of epilepsy. When a region of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction was electrically stimulated, the woman described encounters with a ‘shadow person' who mimicked her bodily movements.

"Electrical stimulation repeatedly produced a feeling of the presence of another person in her extra-personal space," said Olaf Blanke, co-author of the study conducted by a team of researchers from University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland.

When the patient was lying down, stimulation of this brain region caused her to feel that someone was behind her. She described the person as young, of indeterminate sex, "a shadow who did not speak or move, and whose position beneath her back was identical to her own", according to the researchers.

Over the past 15 years, astronomers have identified more than 200 planets outside our solar system, but the new ones identified by the Hubble are at least 10 times as far from Earth.

That planets can be found at the center of the galaxy, as well as near our solar system, has given NASA researchers confidence that they are likely to be everywhere. If that is the case, then the likelihood of other Earth-like planets becomes greater.

"We all are dreamers, and part of that dream is to find life somewhere," said Mario Livio, head of the science program at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees Hubble operations. "We're finding that the galaxy is full of planets, and the chances are, somewhere out there, we will find one with the conditions necessary to be habitable."