Strange Daze

Cartoon Time...

2010-07-07T02:15:00.000-07:00

NEW PET ROCK

The Little Giant Baby Maker...

2010-07-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

World's Smallest Mum

Shows Off Third Baby,

Wants Fourth

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

Stacey Herald, 36, who is just 2ft 4ins, has been warned against becoming pregnant, because a baby would grow too big and crush her lungs and heart.

But Mrs Herald, from Kentucky, USA, has successfully defied doctors three times, and now she and her husband Wil, a 27-year-old trainee vicar, who is 5ft 9ins, are thinking about having more children.

Mrs Herald has a rare genetic condition called Osteogenisis Imperfecta, which stunts her growth and causes underdeveloped lungs and brittle bones.

She said: "Three children is a handful at the moment, but I can see us having more babies in the future.

"We listen to doctors and respect them, but they don't always get it right, so we end up doing what we feel is best.

The latest addition to the Herald brood is baby Malachi, seven months, who has inherited his mum's condition, as has her eldest daughter, Kateri, three.

Makya, the couple's two-year-old daughter, is average sized.

Malachi, who was born by a rare vertical caesarian in November, was only allowed home last month after suffering breathing difficulties,

"Malachi was born without any broken bones," said Mrs Herald. "People with our condition are often born with broken arms and legs because our bones are fragile and can be damaged by the birth."

But Malachi, who was five inches and 2lb 1oz, had to be placed into an incubator in intensive care.

At 17 days old, he fell seriously ill with a virus and then at four weeks he suffered a life-threatening hernia and had emergency surgery.

"At one point they told us his heart had stopped and we thought he might not survive," said Mrs Herald. "But thankfully the doctors managed to save him. It felt like a miracle to us."

Malachi, who has small arms and legs because of his condition, grew stronger and was finally able to go home a month ago.

Mr Herald takes care of night feeding and nappy changing and Mrs Herald breastfeeds Malachi during the day.

She also baths the children and changes nappies in the day using a specially built platform, where she can look after them while staying in her wheelchair.

The family's cupboards are organised so she can reach everything she needs to when her husband is not home.

"We're pretty busy right now," she said. "Sleep is something we really miss.

"Three children would be a challenge for anyone - even normal sized people."

Mrs Herald struggles to cope with daughter Makya, who is already a foot taller than her.

"I can't physically stop Makya if she's upset," said Mrs Herald. "She's too big for me now, so Wil has to take care of that."

TED Talks, U Listen...

2010-07-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

Benoit Mandelbrot:
Fractals And The
Art Of Roughness

Another Creationist Fail...

2010-07-06T13:58:00.000-07:00

Moon Crater Theory
Destroyed By Science

I See England, I See France, I Can See Your...

2010-07-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

MAGIC MORMON
UNDERWEAR

That'll Hold Him...

2010-07-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

Family Lock

Scientist In Coffin

For Two Years

[ http://www.heraldsun.com.au ]

A FAMILY in India kidnapped a male relative and kept him in a coffin for over two and a half years after he refused to give them his bungalow.

Rajan Killaker, 41, a biotechnology scientist, was rescued Saturday, after police in Porbunder, western India were alerted to the kidnapping by an anonymous letter, the Indian Express reported.

Investigating Officer Jaydeepsinh Sarviya said that the letter told them a local property dealer named Hitesh Karavadra killed Killaker to stake claim over his property.

Police raided Mr Karavadra’s house and found Mr Killaker in a six-foot-by-three-foot coffin.

The victim said he had been confined there since December 2007 after Mr Karavadra hit him on the head with a baseball bat and stole the keys to his house. He was let out of the coffin once a day for a meal.

“Mr Killakar, who is unmarried, was rarely in touch with his family, which consists of a brother and three married sisters. We have learned that he hardly spoke to them, once in a year or two,” said Mr Sarviya.

Mr Killaker later lodged a case of abduction and other charges against Karavadar, his wife Jyoti, mother Haraben and accomplices Deepak Rathod, Lalit, Alpesh Prakash and Vijay.

Little Guys On The Lawn...

2010-07-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

Ex Hertford Cop’s

‘Close Encounter’

After UFO Sighting

[ http://www.herald24.co.uk ]

A FORMER police officer saw a UFO, and what he thought were children that “disappeared all of a sudden”, while driving from Hertford to Puckeridge.

The sighting was in July last year, but has only emerged within the last few days on a UFO-watcher’s website.

In his tantalising account the ex-cop, who identified himself only as Nick R, wrote: “I saw whilst driving along the A10 going home one evening after work north a light which was not the moon, orange and oval in shape. I drove into my parking space in Puckeridge and went into my flat. Faffed about for about 10 minutes then went outside for a cigarette.

“I saw something which I have never told anyone about. My flat was in Cambridge Court in Puckeridge backed on to fields. I saw in the twilight what I thought were kids messing about. No, as the light faded around 21.30 the orange globe appeared in the sky. I was at this time watching something on TV, then went outside for a fag again.”

Chillingly he raised the prospect of seeing alien beings that he initially thought were “children”, in the field – a so-called ‘close encounter of the third kind’.

He added: “I know that area is a flight path from Stansted, but that was strange.

“The children disappeared all of a sudden. I lived there for one-and-a-half years, and never experienced anything like that.”

In reply to the post another site user wrote: Intrigued by your report, am interested in sightings on either 25/26th of July in this area seems to be a pattern.”

He suggested Nick R report his sighting on another site dedicated to serving and retired police officers’ sightings of UFO-related phenomena.

Jumbo Jesus...

2010-07-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

Jesus's Face 'Seen In

Google Earth Image'

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

The resemblance was found by a 26-year-old man as he used the mapping website to look for holiday destinations.

Zach Evans, from Southampton, spotted the outline in satellite pictures of a field on farmland near Puspokladany in Hungary.

He told the Sun: "I'm not a religious person looking for images of Mary or Jesus in everything, but this is obvious."

A number of people have claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in recent years.

Last week, Alex Cotton, 38, saw Jesus's face in a drainpipe stain in Coventry.

Toby Elles, 22, from Salford, Manchester pictured an image burned into a frying pan after it caught fire.

Similar images have also been seen on a burned iron in Massachusetts and on an Ikea lavatory in Braehead, Scotland.

Family Plot...

2010-07-05T10:44:00.000-07:00

Jean Stevens, Wyalusing
Widow, Lived With
Corpses Of Husband
And Twin Sister,
Say Police

[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com ]

WYALUSING, Pa. -- The 91-year-old widow lived by herself in a tumbledown house on a desolate country road. But she wasn't alone, not really, not as long as she could visit her husband and twin sister.

No matter they were already dead. Jean Stevens simply had their embalmed corpses dug up and stored them at her house -- in the case of her late husband, for more than a decade -- tending to the remains as best she could until police were finally tipped off last month.

Much to her dismay.

"Death is very hard for me to take," Stevens told an interviewer.

As state police finish their investigation into a singularly macabre case -- no charges have been filed -- Stevens wishes she could be reunited with James Stevens, her husband of nearly 60 years who died in 1999, and June Stevens, the twin who died last October. But their bodies are with the Bradford County coroner now, off-limits to the woman who loved them best.

From time to time, stories of exhumed bodies are reported, but rarely do those involved offer an explanation. Jean Stevens, seeming more grandmother than ghoul, holds little back as she describes what happened outside this small town in northern Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains.

She knows what people must think of her. But she had her reasons, and they are complicated, a bit sad, and in their own peculiar way, sweet.

Dressed smartly in a light blue shirt and khaki skirt, silver hoops in her ears, her white hair swept back and her brown eyes clear and sharp, she offers a visitor a slice of pie, then casts a knowing look when it's declined. "You're afraid I'll poison you," she says.

On a highboy in the corner of the dining room rests a handsome, black-and-white portrait of Jean, then a stunner in her early 20s, and James, clad in his Army uniform. It was taken after their 1942 marriage but before his service in World War II, in which he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, James worked at a General Electric Corp. plant in Liverpool, N.Y., then as an auto mechanic. He succumbed to Parkinson's disease on May 21, 1999.

Next to that photo there is a smaller color snapshot of Jean and June, taken when they were in their late 80s.

In many ways, Jean shared a closer bond with her twin than her husband.

Though June lived more than 200 miles away in West Hartford, Conn., they talked by phone several times a week, and June wrote often. The twins -- who, as it happened, married brothers -- were honored guests at the 70th reunion of the Camptown High School Class of 1937.

Then, last year, June was diagnosed with cancer. She was in a lot of pain when Jean came to visit. The sisters shared a bed, and Jean rubbed her back. "I'm real glad you're here," June said.

On Oct. 3, June died. She was buried in her sister's backyard -- but not for long.

"I think when you put them in the (ground), that's goodbye, goodbye," Stevens said. "In this way I could touch her and look at her and talk to her."

She kept her sister, who was dressed in her "best housecoat," on an old couch in a spare room off the bedroom. Jean sprayed her with expensive perfume that was June's favorite.

"I'd go in, and I'd talk, and I'd forget," Stevens said. "I put glasses on her. When I put the glasses on, it made all the difference in the world. I would fix her up. I'd fix her face up all the time."

She offered a similar rationale for keeping her husband on a couch in the detached garage. James, who had been laid to rest in a nearby cemetery, wore a dark suit, white shirt and blue knitted tie.

"I could see him, I could look at him, I could touch him. Now, some people have a terrible feeling, they say, 'Why do you want to look at a dead person? Oh my gracious,'" she said.

"Well, I felt differently about death."

Part of her worries that after death, there's ... nothing. "Is that the grand finale?" But then she gets up at night and gazes at the stars in the sky and the deer in the fields, and she thinks, "There must be somebody who created this. It didn't come up like mushrooms."

So she is ambivalent about God and the afterlife. "I don't always go to church, but I want to believe," Stevens said.

Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and dying, said people who aren't particularly spiritual or religious often have a difficult time with death because they fear that death is truly the end.

For them, "death doesn't exist," she said. "They deny death."

Stevens, she said, "came up with a very extreme expression of it. She got her bodies back, and she felt fulfilled by having them at home. She's beating death by bringing them back."

There was another reason that Stevens wanted them above ground.

She is severely claustrophobic and so was her sister; she was horrified that the bodies of her loved ones would spend eternity in a casket in the ground. "That's suffocation to me, even though you aren't breathing," she said.

So she said she had them dug up, both within days of burial.

She managed to escape detection for a long time. The neighbors who mowed her lawn and took her grocery shopping either didn't know or didn't tell. Otherwise forthcoming, Stevens is vague when asked about who exhumed the bodies and who knew of her odd living arrangement. She blames a relative of her late husband's for calling the authorities about the corpses.

"I think that is dirty, rotten," she said.

State police -- who haven't yet released the identities of those who retrieved the bodies -- will soon present their findings to the Bradford County district attorney. A decision on charges is expected in a few weeks.

Stevens has talked extensively with both the police and Bradford County Coroner Tom Carman, who calls it a "very, very bizarre case."

But the coroner has nothing but kind things to say about the woman at the center of it.

"I got quite an education, to say the least. She's 100 percent cooperative -- and a pleasure to talk to," Carman said. "But as far as her psyche, I'll leave that to the experts."

The Air Up There...

2010-07-04T11:19:00.000-07:00

Scientists Cite Fastest

Case Of Human

Evolution

[ http://www.nytimes.com ]

Tibetans live at altitudes of 13,000 feet, breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than is available at sea level, yet suffer very little mountain sickness. The reason, according to a team of biologists in China, is human evolution, in what may be the most recent and fastest instance detected so far.

Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.

If confirmed, this would be the most recent known example of human evolutionary change. Until now, the most recent such change was the spread of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest milk in adulthood — among northern Europeans about 7,500 years ago. But archaeologists say that the Tibetan plateau was inhabited much earlier than 3,000 years ago and that the geneticists’ date is incorrect.

When lowlanders try to live at high altitudes, their blood thickens as the body tries to counteract the low oxygen levels by churning out more red blood cells. This overproduction of red blood cells leads to chronic mountain sickness and to lesser fertility — Han Chinese living in Tibet have three times the infant mortality of Tibetans.

The Beijing team analyzed the 3 percent of the human genome in which known genes lie in 50 Tibetans from two villages at an altitude of 14,000 feet and in 40 Han Chinese from Beijing, which is 160 feet above sea level. Many genes exist in a population in alternative versions. The biologists found about 30 genes in which a version rare among the Han had become common among the Tibetans. The most striking instance was a version of a gene possessed by 9 percent of Han but 87 percent of Tibetans.

Such an enormous difference indicates that the version typical among Tibetans is being strongly favored by natural selection. In other words, its owners are evidently leaving more children than those with different versions of the gene.

The gene in question is known as hypoxia-inducible factor 2-alpha, or HIF2a, and the Tibetans with the favored version have fewer red blood cells and hence less hemoglobin in their blood.

The finding explains why Tibetans do not get mountain sickness but raises the question of how they compensate for the lack of oxygen if not by making extra red blood cells.

Two other studies of Tibetans’ adaptation to high altitude have also identified this gene as a target of selection. A team led by Tatum S. Simonson of the University of Utah and RiLi Ge of Qinghai University in China scanned the genomes of 31 Tibetans and reported in Science in May that HIF2a and other genes involved in red blood cell production bore the stamp of natural selection.

Independently, a group led by Cynthia M. Beall, an anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University, and Yong-Tang Zheng of the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China has detected a genetic change in the same gene in Tibetans and found that it correlated with having less hemoglobin in the blood. Their report was published in the June 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Human adaptation to high altitude is a field of obvious interest, but another reason for the appearance of three studies on the same subject in matter of a few weeks may be that the technology to assess which parts of the genome are under selection has only recently become available.

The three new reports agree in finding the Tibetans’ version of the gene has been favored by natural selection. But the Beijing Genome Institute’s calculation that the Tibetan and Han populations split apart only 3,000 years ago is less likely to be accepted. Archaeologists say they believe that the Tibetan plateau has been inhabited for at least 7,000 years and maybe for as long as 21,000 years.

“The separation of Tibetans and Hans at 3,000 years ago is simply not tenable by anything we know from the historical, archaeological or linguistic record,” said Mark Aldenderfer, a Tibetan expert at the University of California, Merced.

Dr. Aldenderfer said that there had probably been many migrations onto the Tibetan plateau, and that there was indirect evidence that pastoralists had entered the plateau from the north-northeast around 6,000 years ago. Earlier genetic studies have found that Tibetans are more similar to northern Han than to those from southern China, and have some admixture of genes from Central Asia, he said.

Geneticists have a more elastic view of dates than do archaeologists, and the estimate of a Han-Tibetan population split at 3,000 years ago could probably have been adjusted to 6,000 if the geneticists had taken any account of any other kind of evidence.

Rasmus Nielsen, a Danish researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, did the statistical calculations for the Beijing study. “We feel fairly confident that something on the order of 3,000 years is correct,” he said. But in a later e-mail message, Dr. Nielsen said, “I cannot with confidence rule out that the divergence time is 6,000 instead of 3,000.”

There is similar flexibility in the estimates of population sizes. The Beijing team calculates that at the time of divergence there were only 288 Han Chinese and 22,642 Tibetans. These estimates have bewildered archaeologists, given that rice cultivation in southern China started 10,000 years ago and that there was an extensive civilization by 3,000 years ago. Dr. Nielsen said that the figure of 288 people was meant simply to indicate a bottleneck in the Han population, meaning a time when it was very small, and that this bottleneck could just as easily have occurred 10,000 years ago.

Genetic differences between Tibetans and Chinese are a potentially delicate issue, given Tibetan aspirations for political autonomy. Dr. Nielsen said he hoped that the Beijing team’s results would carry no political implications, given that it is cultural history and language, not genetics, that constitute a people. There is not much genetic difference between Danes and Swedes, he added, but Denmark and Sweden are separate countries.

Time For A New Cartoon...

2010-07-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

AQUAMAN
STEPS OUT

Out Of The Oven...

2010-07-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

Surprise Birth:
Like A Tornado

A Change Of Attire...

2010-07-01T12:47:00.000-07:00

King Crab Sheds Skin

Rage Against The Machines...

2010-07-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

Drug Frenzy
In Vegas

Romeo & Mooliet...

2010-07-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare Plays

'Help Boost Cows'

Milk Production'

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

Renditions of works by the 16th century poet and playwright were found to “relax” a dairy herd and help boost production by as much as four per cent.

Researchers have previously claimed that cows produced more milk when played slow music, which helped to alleviate stress.

And in an admittedly “bizarre experiment”, a theatre group, set out to see whether the same principal would apply to drama.

Actors from the local Changeling Theatre Company, which specialise in “very quirky, open-air Shakespeare productions”, were tasked with “entertaining” Friesian cows at the Pleasant Farm, near Maidstone, Kent.

Scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor, one of the playwright’s comedies about a man seducing two women, apparently led to an increase in milk yields of four per cent.

“We selected scenes from the play we felt to be lyrical and relaxing,”said Rob Forknall, the group’s artistic director.

"It started off as a rather a bizarre experiment after I was talking to a farmer about whether Shakespeare would have the same effect on cows as classical music.

"We were all slightly surprised when it did. Since then we’ve done several rehearsals with the cows. It saves us having to book rehearsal space and the farmer’s very pleased to get more milk.”

He added: “We chose a light-hearted comedy because we thought some of the heavier, woeful scenes from the Bard's tragedies might have had the opposite effect.

"We don't want to upset the cows by performing some of the more harrowing scenes from the likes of Hamlet or Macbeth.

"We thought The Merry Wives of Windsor would be just the ticket and so it proved to be the case."

Liam Batt, a farm worker, added: "Anything that calms the animals and reduces their stress is good and Shakespeare ticks all the right boxes.

"Perhaps there is something in the language of Shakespeare - we don't know, but it seems to work and milk production has gone up four per cent."

Mr Forknall said the play, which is being performed around Kent this summer, was transposed to the 1950s, complete with “hairnets and Dame Edna glasses”.

In 2001, scientists at the University of Leicester found that classical music acted as a “stimulant” to cows and helped relax them during milking.

During their study, researchers from the “Music Research Group”, based at the university’s psychology department, exposed cattle to fast, slow and no music at all for nine weeks.

But it is believed this is the first time cows have ever been exposed to dialogue from Shakespeare, widely regarded as the greatest ever writer in the English language.

Warning: Oxymoron Ahead...

2010-07-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

South Korea Professor

Charged Over 'Holy

Water' Fraud

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]

A South Korean professor who claimed he could make tap water into holy water will face fraud charges, police say.

The man, named as Prof Kim, claimed he could digitally capture the elements of holy water from Lourdes, France, that believers say has healing powers.

He had sold devices to more than 5,000 people, making almost 1.7bn won ($1.3m, £870,000).

Eight people, including Prof Kim's wife and brother-in-law, will also be charged.

The famous shrine to the Virgin Mary at Lourdes offers water which some believe has healing powers.

Mr Kim had claimed his ceramic and paper filters, and plastic cards used in water purifiers, had captured those powers for onward transmission.

He and his associates allegedly told customers that different devices cured different illnesses, including diabetes and tumours.

"Professor Kim says if the medical properties are changed into digital signals, and radiated onto any water, the water will adapt those properties," the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper quoted police as saying.

But police said experts had confirmed that this was "completely impossible, based on no scientific evidence".

The police also said that the people who had bought the devices had complained when they did not work.

Written & Directed By Uhg Ungh...

2010-07-01T12:21:00.000-07:00

Caveman Too

Went To The

Movies

[ http://www.discoveryon.info ]

The life of our prehistoric ancestors might not have been so drab after all.

Anthropologists have discovered numerous rock engravings across Europe that appear to be a Copper Age version of animation and may have played a key role in audiovisual performances.

The artwork, depicting fights, dances or hunts, dating back to 4000 to 1000 BC, is more than mere images, according to researchers from Cambridge University and Sankt Poelten's university of applied sciences (FH) in Austria.

"The cliff engravings... in our opinion are not just pictures but are part of an audiovisual performance," Discovery News quoted Frederick Baker of Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, as saying.

He added: "There was still no moving image but (the pictures) created sequences like in animation... this was not just a treat for the eyes but also for the ears, as these rock engravings are especially found in locations with particular echoes. In this sense, the rock engravings are not just static images but pictures that created a story in the mind of the viewer — just like at the cinema."

The ancient cinema often depicted fights, dances or hunts, but never showed death and rarely portrayed women, the project's coordinators said.

The researchers have now joined hands for a "Prehistoric Picture Project" with Weimar's Bauhaus university in Germany to recreate these films, using computer technology to establish the sequence of images and animate them like in a cartoon. The project is being conducted in Valcamonica, in Italy's northern Lombardy region, where the highest concentration of such engravings — some 100,000 pictures — can be found.

Dibs On Bumblebee...

2010-07-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

Morphing Cars And
Planes Closer As
Pentagon Develops
Shape-shifting
Robot

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

Pentagon research scientists have taken a first step towards "Transformers"-style shape-shifting cars and aircraft, with a robot that can fold itself like origami into different forms.

At the moment the tiny robot - a sheet just half a millimetre thick, scarcely thicker than a piece of paper - only folds itself into a boat, like a child's toy, or a "paper glider" plane shape. But it is anticipated that in future it will be used to create full-sized cars and aircraft that morph as they move, or robots that can "flow" like mercury into small openings, or multipurpose military uniforms that can adapt to different environments.

Researchers at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) launched the project in 2007 in conjunction with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a small sheet of stiff tiles and "joints" of elastomer, “studded with thin foil actuators and flexible electronics. The demonstration material contains 25 total actuators, divided into five groupings. A shape is produced by triggering the proper actuator groups in sequence,” according to a statement by Robert Wood, the head of the Harvard research team.

The robot has four distinct stages in its shape-shifting. First, an algorithm creates a model of the 3-D shape it is to become, and it reverse-engineers the folding paths required to get there. A second algorithm produces a plan telling each individual tile how and when to fold to match those paths.

Dr Wood continues, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “The third algorithm receives each of the individual plans [and] assembles them onto one sheet…. Finally, the fourth algorithm chooses the optimum arrangement [to] minimize either the number of actuators or number of actuator groups.”

It is hoped that, in the not too distant future, a soldier (or engineer) can carry a can, like a paint can, in his or her vehicle, filled with shape-shifting particles of varying size. By telling the particles via computer what shape they need - for example, a specific size spanner - he or she can make the particles form that shape.

Further down the line it could create clothing that can keep its wearer cool by day and warm by night, or aircraft's wings that can change aerodynamic shape in flight.

Mysteries Of The Microverse...

2010-07-01T12:05:00.000-07:00

How Rules Of Physics

In Quantum World

Change When Applied

To Classical World

[ http://www.sciencedaily.com ]

Dartmouth researchers have discovered a potentially important piece of the quantum/classical puzzle -- learning how the rules of physics in the quantum world (think smaller than microscopic) change when applied to the classical world (think every day items, like cars and trees).

In a study published in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alex Rimberg and his colleagues describe one example of the microscopic quantum world influencing, even dominating they say, the behavior of something in the macroscopic classical world. They used tiny semiconducting crystals that contain two separate reservoirs of electrons to explore the different influences of both classical and quantum physics.

"We found that the motion of the crystals is not dominated by something classical like thermal motion, but instead by random quantum fluctuations in the number of electrons tunneling through the barrier; the fluctuations were the size of about 10,000 electrons," says Rimberg. "But the macroscopic world in this study also influences the quantum world, in that the vibrations of the crystal caused the electrons to tunnel in big bunches, more or less in sync with the vibrations of the crystal."

One major question in quantum physics deals with the connection between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Rimberg explains that scientists know that microscopic objects such as electrons obey the laws of quantum mechanics, while macroscopic objects obey Newton's laws. Researchers are still learning exactly how classical behavior emerges from quantum behavior as systems become larger and larger.

Rimberg says that the difference in size between the classical and quantum parts of thesystem described in this paper is really extreme. "To give a sense of perspective, we could imagine that the 10,000 electrons correspond to something small like a flea. To complete the analogy, the crystal would have to be the size of Mt. Everest. If we imagine the flea jumping on Mt. Everest to make it move, then the resulting vibrations would be on the order of meters."

Rimberg's future work will use nonlinear superconducting systems, different from using the semiconducting crystals in this experiment, to make very strongly quantum mechanical systems. Nonlinear classical systems can show unpredictable, chaotic behavior; the behavior of the corresponding quantum systems is not well understood. This effort will be a prelude to studying the quantum properties of mechanical resonators that are smaller than the crystals in this experiment, but definitely not microscopic either; they are the things in the murky borderland between quantum and classical regimes.

Rimberg was worked on this study with colleagues at Dartmouth, Miles Blencowe, Joel Stettenheim, Feng Pan, Mustafa Bal, and Weiwei Zue. They were joined by Madhu Thalakulam and Zhonquig Ji from Rice University; and Loren Pfeiffer and K.W. West from Bell Laboratories.

The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation.

They Did The Monster Mash...

2010-07-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Mystery

Of Germanys

Aristocratic

Mummies

[ http://www.archaeologydaily.com ]

When they died, Germany noble families of the 18th century did what the Egyptians had done before them: They had themselves mummified. As an increasing number of such well preserved corpses are found, scientists are trying to find out why.

Baron von Holz had a difficult lot. During the Thirty Years' War, von Holz fought in the Swedish army as a mercenary, but he was not granted a hero's death on the battlefield. He was cut down, rather less heroically, at the age of 35 by either the flu or blood poisoning. And it was only in death, that his situation really improved.

His family dressed his mortal remains in precious calf-leather boots with nailed soles. The warrior was then laid out in a kind of luxury crypt under the castle of Sommersdorf near Ansbach, in modern-day Bavaria. In those vaults von Holz's corpse was privileged with an honor previously reserved primarily for Egyptian pharaohs: His body did not decompose.

More than 370 years after his untimely death, the nobleman still lies in his casket, well preserved. Von Holz was a giant of a man, standing 1.80 meters (around 5'10"), at a time when most humans were far shorter. To this day, his feet are still shod in those smart leather boots that his clan had made for him almost four centuries ago.

Secrets of Mummification

The corpse recently left its burial place in the castle cellar for the very first time so that archeologists from the Reiss Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim could take a close look at the mummy. It quickly became clear that the boot-clad baron had no external injuries and he seems to have been in excellent health when he contracted his fatal infection. What remains unclear is why the aristocratic soldier's body was mummified in the first place.

Only a handful of scientists take an active interest in the leathery corpses that are recovered from boggy moorlands or cellar vaults in Germany. Every few months, a baron, or a priest, turns up at archeologist Wilfried Rosendahl's door to report that he has found a corpse under his castle or in his parish church.

Confronted with the ever-increasing number of new discoveries, Rosendahl concedes that: "We are more familiar with the history of the Egyptian mummies than with the bodies slumbering in our tombs."

Only a few weeks ago, the researcher discovered the superbly preserved bodies of 12 members of an aristocratic family in the district of Illereichen in southern Germany.

Why did German Nobility Dabble in Mummification?

Rosendahl's colleague Andreas Ströbl is currently examining the remains of an 18th-century nobleman's clan that was laid to rest in a cellar grave under the 18th century Church of St. John the Baptist in Hannover. "We've known that these aristocrats' crypts existed, but for a long time we didn't know why," Ströbl admits.

About 1,000 mummified bodies in German noblemen's graves have been discovered and cataloged so far. The vaults contain children as well as adults, their clothes are sometimes still in remarkably good condition. Often the tombs also contain burial objects: Combs, spices, coins, and in one case, a shaving brush.

The surprizing number of tombs containing mummified remains leads researchers to the conclusion that it was not random. "For a long time, I believed that mummification was more of an accidental corollary of the way people were buried in those days," Ströbl says. New evidence suggests something different: In this early modern period did many of the rich and aristocratic deliberately have themselves buried in this way so that their remains would be preserved?

A Mausoleum with Ancient Air Conditioning

There is scant source material -- but Ströbl did find a "smoking gun": In a letter, written in 1710, to the board of the parish church of Berlin, a woman called Catharina Steinkoppen made a request for her deceased granddaughter. Namely, that "the aforementioned corpse should not decay in the vaults below the church." The girl's father -- a courtier by the name of von Schütz -- offered the stately sum of 10 Reichsthalers, the equivalent of a year's wages for a coachman, for the service.

A total of 140 mummified bodies lie in a crypt below a church near Alexanderplatz in central Berlin. It has been known for some time that this was the exclusive domain of deceased members of rich or highly respected families. But the fact that church leaders in Berlin deliberately set up the biggest mausoleum in Germany is a more recent discovery.

After the discovery of the grandmother's petition, researchers examined the nobleman's crypt in the historic center of Berlin. What they found was an extremely effective ventilation system running through the tomb. All the burial chambers were connected to each other by a series of small shafts. As such this underground graveyard was always well ventilated.

Indeed Rosendahl and Ströbl found cleverly conceived ventilation systems in even the smallest of these basement graves. But that wasn't the only trick that promoted mummification. The undertakers lined the coffins of the departed with sawdust which then soaked up any fluids that leaked out of the body.

Part 2: Embalming in Time For Judgment day

Over the course of time though, many of the carefully created burial sites were destroyed by careless construction work. On more than one occasion, unsuspecting builders bricked up important ventilation shafts. In addition, to deter plunderers and grave robbers many churches bolted shut the windows of their crypts. Often enough, that sealed the fate of these historic tombs. Once the cross ventilation was cut off, the mummies began to rot within weeks.

But archeologists are still at a loss to explain why Germany's rich had themselves mummified in the first place. There is, however, one potential clue: Up to 99 percent of the crypt mummies have been found in areas of the country that were Protestant. The finds so far have been in Franconia, Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg, northern Germany, and Berlin.

Reiner Sörries, the head of the Museum of Sepulchral Culture in Kassel, is making the first attempts to explain the mystery. Sörries is one of the few archeologists in Germany who studies burial culture. He suspects that religious reformer Martin Luther may have triggered the trend for mummification in the modern age. By way of proof, Sörries cites a passage in the Book of Job that Luther translated into common German: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh, I will see God."

Maybe wealthy protestants chose this method of mummification out of fear that they might not rise up and go to heaven if their mortal remains rotted away? "There are still many gaps that we can't fill in," Sörries admits. "It is conceivable that people simply wanted to play it safe and preserve their bodies until Judgment Day."

Computer Reconstructions of Dead Nobility

Whatever the answer, superstition undoubtedly played a role. Bereaved families often sealed the coffins of their departed loved ones to prevent the dead rising up. There was fear that zombies could climb out of their crypts and attack the living.

The group of scientists working with Sörries, Rosendahl and Ströbl now wants to look closer at the bizarre burial rite. This involves researching how the mummified dead actually lived. Using computer tomography, the researchers constructed an image of the late Baron von Holz' face. From this, one sees that the tall warrior must have cut quite a formidable figure. He had the angular skull of a rugby player and remarkably healthy teeth for the period.

Ströbl hopes to be able to come up with similar insights into a potentially criminal case he unearthed in a family tomb in the Wettenbergen neighborhood in Hannover, which mainly contains members of two aristocratic families, von Hansing and von Grone. Strangely, four daughters in one of the families died in four consecutive years. Had the daughters of this household fallen victim to a virus in their youth? Or was it a case of murder? An analysis of the four girls' internal organs should provide information that could answer this question.

Mummies in Perfectly Preserved Period Costume

Another fascinating insight into the bygone era is provided by 29 very well preserved mummies found in a vault under the church of the Benedictine abbey in the town of Riesa, in the eastern German state of Saxony. Experts consider the church's crypt a unique historical testament to mummification in Germany. Construction work last fall drew the researchers' attention to the aristocratic tomb.

While the region was still part of what was formerly communist East Germany, the bare minimum of preservation work was done on the site. Now, however, the local church council is embroiled in a dispute about what to do with this cultural monument. Some want the crypt, which is only accessible down a narrow stairway, opened up to tourists. But the majority of councilors want to put tight restrictions on public entry.

The site is unique for the look it provides at the authentic period costumes worn by wealthy citizens in past centuries. One girl, for instance, is wearing a perfectly preserved silk dress and has a bonnet on her head. Other bodies were adorned with nightcaps, pointed caps, and long robes.

The identity of the 29 corpses is relatively certain. Uncertainty surrounds only the most famous of the crypt's inhabitants, who may or may not be Ernst Otto Innocenz, Baron von Odeleben, a Saxon officer with close ties to Napoleon.

In 1812, Odeleben supported the French general's ill-fated Russian campaign, which ended in a fiasco. Subsequently, Odeleben also witnessed the routing of the French army near Leipzig.

Genetic analysis is being used to help clear up this mystery. But in contrast to Baron von Holz, the researchers won't be looking for battle scars that may have led to his death. The war veteran spent the last decades of his life working as a land surveyor, and he passed away at his desk.

Thar She Blows...

2010-07-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

Ancient Monster Whale

More Fearsome

Than Moby Dick

[ http://www.newscientist.com ]

The fossilised skull of a colossal whale with a killer bite has been uncovered by a team who reckon the monster shared the Miocene oceans with a giant shark.

The bones, dated to 12 to 13 million years ago, were spotted by Klaas Post of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in Peru's Ica desert. In homage to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the beast has been named Leviathan melvillei.

The skull is a huge 3 metres long, says team member Olivier Lambert at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The team estimates the whale would have been between 13 and 18 metres long, like a modern sperm whale.

What really surprised the researchers was the size of the whale's teeth. "Some of the biggest ones are 36 centimetres long and 12 centimetres wide, and are probably the biggest predatory teeth ever discovered," Lambert says.

Teeth made for hunting

Unlike the modern-day sperm whale, which feeds by suction, the giant whale had these massive teeth on both its upper and lower jaw. "We think the whale used these teeth to catch its prey," says Lambert, suggesting the whale fed in a similar way to modern killer whales. Today's sperm whales have much smaller teeth on the lower jaw only.

"The whale would certainly have been able to catch very large prey, like baleen whales, of which there were plenty in the locality," Lambert says. "We think it was feeding on medium-sized baleen whales, which were about 8 or 9 metres long."

Leviathan melvillei is thought to have co-ruled the ocean with the giant shark Carcharocles megalodon, whose fossils have been found in the same locality in Peru. Lambert and colleagues estimate that the shark was about 15 metres long – more or less the same size as the giant sperm whale.

It's unlikely that the two giants would have battled each other, says Lambert. "At such sizes, I think it would have been very dangerous for adults of both species to fight," he says. "I could more easily imagine an adult of one species attacking a juvenile of the other."

Spermaceti mystery

The skull may shed light on the function of the mysterious spermaceti organ. Consisting of two oil and wax reservoirs on top of the whale's snout, it is specific to sperm whales ancient and modern.

"For a long time it has been proposed that the spermaceti organ helps the whale dive deeper," Lambert says. The team's proposal that the ancient whale fed on baleen whales, which live near the water's surface, suggests this may not be the case.

"An alternative hypothesis is that spermaceti organs are used as battering rams to injure opponents during contests over females," says Dave Carrier at the University of Utah. "Leviathan melvillei may also have used forehead ramming to dispatch their suggested prey – baleen whales," Carrier says.

Modern killer whales lack spermaceti organs, but are well known to attack large prey by ramming with their snouts."

The Plato Code...

2010-06-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

British Scientist Uncovers

'Secret Messages' Hidden

In Plato's Ancient Text

[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk ]

His works have been scrutinised and debated for more than 2,000 years by the greatest minds in history.

But it turns out the Greek philosopher Plato still has a few surprises up his sleeve.

In an extraordinary discovery, a British academic claims to have uncovered a series of secret messages hidden in some of the most influential and celebrating writings of the Ancient World.

The codes suggest that Plato was a secret follower of the philosopher Pythagoras and shared his belief that the secrets to the universe lie in numbers and maths.

Claims that an ancient text contains secret messages should normally be taken with a large pinch of salt.

But the latest study comes from a respected Classical scholar at Manchester University, and has been accepted for publication by a leading academic journal.

Plato, who died around 347BC, is arguably the greatest of all the Greek philosophers. With his mentor Socrates, and student Aristotle, he laid down the foundations of Western philosopher and science.

According to Dr Jay Kennedy one of Plato's most important beliefs was hidden in his writing.

'Plato's books played a major role in founding Western culture but they are mysterious and end in riddles,' said Dr Kennedy.

'In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but this was rejected by modern scholars.

'It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unravelling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.'

He added: 'The result was amazing - it was like opening a tomb and finding new set of gospels written by Jesus Christ himself.'

The key to unravelling the Plato Code lies in a Greek musical scale of 12 notes popular among followers of the earlier philosopher Pythagoras.

Dr Kennedy discovered that key phrases, words and themes crop up in regular intervals throughout Plato's writings and that they match the spacing of these 12 notes in the musical scale.

His most famous work, the Republic, for instance, is made up of 12,000 Homeric lines of text. Dr Kennedy found that every 1,000 lines, Plato returns to the theme of music.

In another dialogue, the Symposium, words describing harmony and unity crop up at the same regularly spaced intervals.

In the Greek musical scale some of the notes are harmonic, or pleasing to the ear. Others are dissonant or grating, and need to be followed by another note to relieve the musical tension they create.

At the location of harmonic notes in his writings, Plato wrote lines associated with love or laughter. But the dissonant notes were marked with screeching sounds or war or death.

Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the classics journal Apeiron, believes the pattern of symbols would have been obvious to the ancient followers of Pythagoras.

'As we read his books, our emotions follow the ups and downs of a musical scale. Plato plays his readers like musical instruments,' he said.

A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, or 'harmony of the spheres' and that the secrets of the universe lay in maths.

The presence and nature of the hidden codes suggest that Plato may have signed up to the same belief - and that 2,000 years before the birth of modern science, he was leaving a message in his writing that maths and logical patterns ruled the universe, not the gods.

Dr Kennedy argues that Plato did not use the code for pleasure, but for his own safety. Plato's own teacher had been executed for heresy.

Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death.

Plato led a dramatic life. He wrote at least 30 books and founded the world's first university, called the Academy.

He allowed women to study at the Academy, against the traditions of the time, was an early defender of romantic love - as opposed to arranged marriages and defended homosexuality.

Dr Kennedy added. 'This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications. All 2,000 pages contain undetected symbols.'

He Sure Does...

2010-06-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

THE POPE NEEDS
A MIRACLE

Glad It's Not Me...

2010-06-30T18:39:00.000-07:00

FAIL: JUNE 2010

Thanks For The Mammaries...

2010-06-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

MAN-BOOBS
BE RAPPIN'

It's A Hard Knock (After)Life...

2010-06-30T18:11:00.001-07:00

LIVING WITH
THE DEAD

The Royal Shaft...

2010-06-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

The Mystery Of King

Tut's Missing Penis

[ http://www.helium.com ]

King Tut never had it easy. He was running an empire at ten instead of hanging out doing whatever other kids did during that time. Current evidence shows he was a sickly child on top of that, so even if he had the time to be a normal kid, he likely would have been teased over his ailments as only kids can do. Now in death, his penis is gone. If you subscribe to the theory that you need all the parts you had on Earth to get along properly in the afterlife, King Tut got the short end of the stick because his is missing.

Believe it or not, as weird as it sounds, but there has been mystery surrounding the penis of the boy King for over 40 years. Around 1968 it was noted that his member was not where it was supposed to be. It was reported to have come loose and been lying separate from the body. Zahi Hawass, who is Egypt’s chief archaeologist confirms King Tut’s penis is no longer one with his body, but also notes it is well developed so you can’t really go the George Costanza route and speculate about shrinkage. It probably isn't possible for a mummy penis to undergo that humiliation anyway.

Part of the mystery is that when the mummy was discovered in 1922, everything including the penis was where it was supposed to be according to the original reports. It remained in place for a reported 46 years which removes the theory that it was stolen during WWII which some have speculated. It was then missing for 38 years before turning up on a CT scan. Now is where the real speculation begins.

There is a growing conspiracy theory of mythic proportions which is part science and part… well part just weird. German researchers have claimed their peers that conducted the investigation into what killed King Tut have it all wrong. They say Tut almost certainly would not have died from Malaria as is the popular theory now because he would have built a strong enough immunity to that by the time he reached about ten years old. They contend he had sickle-cell anemia that ultimately led to organ failure after an accident of some sort.

Add in that early autopsies of King Tut were rather brutal in nature and things got broken that shouldn’t have. Then add in there are small things aside from the penis missing that were reported as present when the body was found and the whole situation is a mess. That brings the story back to the German researchers who believe King Tut had Antley-Bixler syndrome which is a genetic mutation that can cause an elongated skull.

and - under-developed genitalia. King Tut did have a slightly elongated skull, and inbreeding was not an uncommon thing at the time so that lends more credence to the theory. Examining his penis would have been the final thing to check - if that could be done.

The German researchers cannot do that however because - well where is it? Then there is speculation that even if they did examine the detachable penis it may not even be the real penis of King Tut. In a weird theory that is circulating, it is theorized that if Tut did in fact have Antley-Bixler syndrome, at the time his body was being mummified, they may have switched his penis for one that was a bit more - well bigger. Even in the afterlife a king should have a staff that conveys authority and commands respect.

The problem is no one will likely know the truth for a very long time. The German research team has been denied access to King Tut, and Hawass is so dismissive of their theory that Tut could have died of anything but malaria he will not authorize a DNA sample to be run to check for sickle-cell anemia or anything else.

As for the penis of the great boy king - maybe it is really with the body but fell off, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe it is really his, and maybe it is someone else’s. Maybe someone stole it and sold it on the black market. That is a possibility as something like King Tut’s penis would fetch quite a bit of coin, and it would explain the 4 decades it was missing. The conspiracy theory stretches on further claiming someone simply replaced the penis with one from another mummy of a similar age before the 2006 CT scan to cover the crime for whatever reason, and that is why it was found unattached and why it is not now available for inspection.

Whatever you believe if you can believe any of it, somewhere in the afterlife, King Tut cannot be happy about this.

That Date Just Gets Pushed Further Back...

2010-06-30T17:49:00.000-07:00

Many Americans Expect

Jesus' Return By 2050

[ http://www.ynetnews.com ]

Poll finds 41% of Americans expect Jesus' Second Coming in next 40 years; most fear nuclear terrorism

A new survey finds that Americans are divided over whether they believe Jesus Christ will return by the year 2050.

Among respondents to the survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and Smithsonian Magazine, 41% said they expect Jesus' Second Coming in the next 40 years, while 46 percent said it probably or definitely won't happen.

The poll suggests that 58 percent of white evangelicals believe Jesus will return by 2050 compared to only 32 percent of Catholics, and respondents with no college education were three times as likely as those with college degrees to expect Christ's Second Coming in the next 40 years.

A majority of all respondents, meanwhile, say they expect there to be nuclear terrorism against the US or another world war by 2050.

Sixty-eight percent of respondents under the age of 30 predict a world war by 2050, 72% believe that there will be an energy crisis worldwide by 2050 and 31% expect an asteroid will strike the planet.

According to the poll, 53% expect a terrorist attack against the United States using a nuclear weapon.

The poll also shows a sharp dip in overall optimism from 1999, when 81% expected a good life for themselves and their families.

Deadly Art Department...

2010-06-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

Mystery Of Caravaggio's

Death Solved At Last –

Painting Killed Him

[ http://www.guardian.co.uk ]

He killed a man, brawled constantly, rowed with patrons and fled justice while revolutionising painting with his chiaroscuro style. Now, as if to underline how dramatic Caravaggio's short life was, researchers say he may have quite literally died for his art.

Scientists seeking to shed light on the mysterious death of the Italian artist in 1610 said they are "85% sure" they have found his bones thanks to carbon dating and DNA checks on remains excavated in Tuscany.

Caravaggio's suspected bones come complete with levels of lead high enough to have driven the painter mad and helped finish him off.

"The lead likely came from his paints – he was known to be extremely messy with them," said Silvano Vinceti, the researcher who announced the findings today .

"Lead poisoning won't kill you on its own – we believe he had infected wounds and sunstroke too – but it was one of the causes."

Art historians already suspect that Goya and Van Gogh may have suffered from the ill effects of the lead in their paints, which can cause depression, pain and personality changes.

Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio after the Lombardy town where he grew up, was a young man at the height of his career in Rome when he killed a man in a brawl in 1606, fleeing to find new patrons in Naples and then Malta, only to be thrown off the island two years later for more brawling.

"After a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ballcourt to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument," wrote one observer.

In between fights he found time to astound his contemporaries with his shocking realism and use of light and shade – chiaroscuro – although he won no favours with religious authorities in Rome when he reportedly used a famous prostitute as a model for the madonna.

From Malta, Caravaggio moved to Sicily, where his paintings became as dark and shadowy as his worsening moods which prompted him to sleep armed and tear up paintings after any criticism.

Returning to Naples, Caravaggio was the victim of a possible attempt on his life, leaving him with the wounds Vinceti believes became infected and spurring him on to Tuscany were he hoped to obtain a pardon for the Rome murder.

How Caravaggio died there, at 38, has been shrouded in mystery ever since – a blank page that Vinceti and a team of archaeologists and forensic scientists have set out to fill 400 years after his death.

To test existing theories that he died of malaria on a Tuscan beach, was devoured by syphilis, or was murdered by one of his many enemies, the team needed to start by locating Caravaggio's remains, which had never been found.

Vinceti went into action when a document was unearthed suggesting the painter was buried in the tiny San Sebastiano cemetery in Porto Ercole.

Discovering that the site had been built over in 1956, the team headed for the town's municipal cemetery to where the bones had been shifted, turning up nine potential sets.

"Set number five turned out to be from a tall man – Caravaggio was described as such – while tests showed he was between 38 and 40 and died around 1610," said Vinceti.

The team's next stop was the town of Caravaggio to compare DNA from the bones with local people. No descendents were found but families with the same surname were traced, giving samples which were 50 to 60% compatible with the bones.

Add in the toxic level of lead in the remains and Vinceti is convinced he has his man, adding to his reputation as Italy's foremost cold case historian, which he won when he dug up the remains of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a philosopher at the court of the Medicis, to prove he had been poisoned.

Now Vinceti is aiming for Leonardo da Vinci, hoping the custodians of his tomb will let him in to create a facial reconstruction of the Renaissance polymath.

Vinceti's press conference today at which a purported fragment of Caravaggio's skull was displayed on a silk red cushion could not have been better timed.

Shunned after his death before coming to be recognised as one of the fathers of modern painting, an exhibition of Caravaggio's work at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome this year celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death attracted 580,000 visitors.

His Bark Is Worse That His Bite...

2010-06-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

MUST SEE Image Of

Jesus In A Tree?

[ http://www.wzzm13.com ]

Holy horticulture!

Residents in one Connecticut town say they've seen the face of Jesus... on a tree.

And now, people are flocking to Wallingford-- near New Haven-- to get a glimpse.

Take a look here at the tree and see if you can spot him.

Residents say the tree hasn't always looked like this.

They say a limb had to be cut off a few years ago, leaving this knot in its place.

But even though the limb's been gone a while, residents say they just recently found Jesus' face in the bark.

Now Made Of Swiss Cheese...

2010-06-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

Rare Hole In The

Moon Photographed

[ http://www.space.com ]

New photos of the moon have revealed the most detailed views yet of a rare hole in the lunar surface — a pit large enough to swallow an entire football field whole.

High-resolution cameras aboard the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft first spotted the irregularly shaped chasm, located in Mare Ingenii on the moon's southern hemisphere. Now, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken a new, up-close photo of the moon pit from lunar orbit.

"Only three have been discovered thus far, so I believe it is safe to state that skylights (pits) are rare at the 100-meter scale," Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) at Arizona State University, told SPACE.com in an e-mail.

Mare Ingenii, also called the "sea of cleverness," is best known for its prominent lunar swirls, which are highly reflective surface features that are associated with magnetic anomalies. The new images of the region from LROC show a giant pit measuring about 427 feet (130 meters) in diameter.

The boulders and debris resting on the floor of the cavity are partially illuminated and likely originated at the surface, falling through the pit opening during its collapse. The hole is thought to be the result of a partially collapsed lava tube.

A similar moon pit, which was believed to be a skylight into a lava tube, was previously discovered by the Kaguya mission in the Marius Hills region of the moon. The new pit in Mare Ingenii, however, lacks the numerous volcanic features that were found in the Marius Hills region.

"The existence of lava tubes and thus skylights had long been postulated," Robinson said. "However it is a surprise to me how large and beautifully preserved are the three that we have seen thus far."

Closer examination of Mare Ingenii could help scientists understand the differences between the two areas of the lunar surface, and such discoveries could also spur on further exploration of the moon, said Robinson.

"Imagine how fantastic it would be to land in one of these skylights and explore underground on the moon!" he said.

The 1,900 Mile High Club...

2010-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

International Space

Station Sex Ban

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

Commanders do not allow sexual intercourse on the International Space Station, it has been disclosed.

"We are a group of professionals," said Alan Poindexter, a NASA commander, during a visit to Tokyo, when asked about the consequences if astronauts boldly went where no others have been.

"We treat each other with respect and we have a great working relationship. Personal relationships are not ... an issue," said a serious-faced Mr Poindexter. "We don't have them and we won't."

Mr Poindexter and his six crew members, including the first Japanese mother in space Naoko Yamazaki, were in Tokyo to talk about their two-week resupply mission to the International Space Station.

The April voyage broke new ground by putting four women in orbit for the first time, with three female crew joining one woman already on the station.

Sexual intercourse in space may appear out of bounds, but astronauts have been known to succumb to earthly passions.

In 2007 former NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak allegedly wore adult diapers when driving hundreds of miles across the United States without bathroom breaks to confront a suspected rival in a romance with a fellow astronaut.

The Green Grass Of Home...

2010-06-30T16:55:00.000-07:00

Behavior Breakthrough:

Like Animals, Plants

Demonstrate Complex

Ability To Integrate

Information

[ http://www.sciencedaily.com/ ]

A University of Alberta research team has discovered that a plant's strategy to capture nutrients in the soil is the result of integration of different types of information.

U of A ecologist J.C. Cahill says the plant's strategy mirrors the daily risk-versus-reward dilemmas that animals experience in their quest for food.

Biologists established long ago that an animal uses information about both the location of a food supply and potential competitors to determine an optimal foraging strategy. Its subsequent behavioral response is based on whether the food supply is rich enough to accept the risks associated with engaging in competition with other animals.

Cahill found plants also have the ability to integrate information about the location of both food and competitors. As a result, plants demonstrate unique behavioural strategies to capture soil resources.

Previous studies show plants alter the growth of their roots in relation to the placement of food or a competing plant. Cahill and his colleagues now show an integration of both location and competition information in plants. "This ability to integrate information is a level of complexity never seen in plants before," said Cahill. "This is something we assumed only happened with animals."

Using a mini-rhizotron camera, referred to by Cahill's team as a "camera on a stick," the researchers compared the root movement of potted plants in relation to various positions of nutrients and competing plants.

The roots of one plant in a pot where nutrients were evenly distributed occupied the entire breadth of the soil.

When two plants occupied a single pot and the nutrients were evenly distributed, the roots stopped growing laterally towards each other. There was complete segregation of the root systems; the plants avoided contact with one another. Cahill says in terms of risk versus reward, the plants avoided each other because the rewards were low.

But when nutrients were placed between two plants sharing a single pot, both plants grew their roots much closer towards each other. Cahill says in this case the rewards were high, and the plants risked increased competition.

That's Why They Call Him The Lip...

2010-06-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

Male Fish In Mexico

Sports Sexy 'Moustache'

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]

Male molly fish in Mexico wear a moustache that makes them appear more sexy to females.

Scientists were unsure why male Mexican mollies wear an extravagant moustache-like structure on their top lip.

Now a study has revealed that female fish find the moustache sexually attractive, and it is likely to be a sexually selected trait.

As well as being visually-attractive, the moustache may be used to rub the female fish's genitals, exciting them.

Details are published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

As their name suggests, Mexican mollies (Poecilia sphenops) live in Mexico, being a fairly common species that resides in a range of habitats from small rivers to creeks and lakes.

The fish has a complicated mating behaviour, with males fertilising females internally, rather than spreading sperm over externally laid eggs.

Sexy company

Not all males are equal, however.

Some possess a moustache-type structure growing from scales on their top lip.

Until now, its function has not been known as it has not been studied or described in any detail.

So zoologist Professor Ingo Schlupp of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, US and colleagues in the US and Germany decided to study it for the first time.

They caught from the wild a selection of male and female Mexican mollies, measuring the length of the moustache on those males found to be growing one.

The research team then conducted a series of experiments, placing male and female fish into tanks, and measuring how long females spent in the company of males sporting moustaches of various lengths, or none at all.

They also measured how female fish responded to videos of different males.

The results were clear: on experiments involving over 100 fish, females consistently preferred males with moustaches.

"The moustache-like structure seems to be a previously unrecognised sexually selected trait in poeciliid fishes," the researchers write in the journal.

Touchy feely

Although the scientists only tested the visual attractiveness of the moustache, they strongly suspect it also has a tactile function.

"This is based on the general observation that males will touch the female's genital region with their mouth prior to mating," Prof Schlupp told the BBC.

This behaviour is known as 'nipping' and is being investigated further by the scientists.

But they think that the females can acquire information about the males this way.

In short, rubbing his moustache against a female's genitals may be a way for a male Mexican molly to advertise his attractiveness.

"Several other species, including catfish, have comparable structures, mostly with unknown functions," Prof Schlupp says.

Some zoologists have speculated that the long fleshy tentacles grown by male catfish might mimic larvae, allowing them to catch more prey.

That ability to catch more food might make them attractive mates to females.

You're Bound To Look Like A Monkey...

2010-06-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

What Kind Of Man

Are You – Chimpanzee

Or Bonobo?

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

Forget macho or metrosexual, men should be split into two types of apes – aggressive chimps or peace loving bonobos, scientists have found.

Researchers have discovered the way men's bodies react to competition varies just like those of their closest cousins.

Whereas "status-striving" men tend to produce the macho hormone testosterone when challenged, like chimpanzees, laid-back men produce cortisol, nicknamed the cuddle compound, like bonobos.

Chimpanzees live in male-dominated societies where status is paramount and aggression can be severe, with frequent fights to the death.

In bonobos, a female is always the most dominant and tolerance can allow for more flexible co-operation and food-sharing.

They are often referred to as the "peace and love" apes.

Scientists have frequently questioned whether differences in competitive behaviour could in part be explained by differing physiological responses to competition.

In their new study, researchers led by Harvard University collected saliva from the apes using cotton wads dipped in Sweet Tarts candy, then measured hormone levels before and after pairs from each species were presented with a pile of food.

They found that males of both species showed hormonal changes in anticipation of competing for the food, but bonobos and chimpanzees were completely different in which hormones increased.

Male chimpanzees showed an increase in testosterone, which is thought to prepare animals for competition or a fight.

By contrast, male bonobos showed an increase in cortisol, which is associated with stress and more passive social strategies in other animals.

"Chimpanzee males reacted to the competition as if it was a threat to their status, while bonobos reacted as if a potential competition is stressful by showing changes in their cortisol levels," said Victoria Wobber, a Harvard graduate student and lead author of the study.

Human males usually experience an increase in cortisol before many types of competition in a similar way as seen in the bonobos.

However, if men have what is called a "high power motive," or a strong desire to achieve high status, they experience an increase in testosterone before a competition.

"These results suggest that the steroid hormone shifts that are correlated with the competitive drive of men are shared through descent with other apes," Ms Wobber said.

While some men may seem more bonobo-like before competition and others more chimpanzee-like, something unique about human males is that after competition they experience an increase in testosterone if they win or a decrease in testosterone if they lose – which accounts for giddy or depressed sports fans following a win or loss.

This variation in hormones post-competition was not observed in either chimpanzees or bonobos.

"It's exciting because we can see that in some ways we're similar to bonobos, in others we're similar to chimpanzees," said Dr Brian Hare, an anthropologist at Duke University, North Carolina.

"But then there's also a part of our biology that seems to be entirely unique."

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Time For A Cartoon...

2010-06-27T05:40:00.000-07:00

First In A New
Series Of Shorts

A Very Blustery Day...

2010-06-25T01:24:00.000-07:00

'Superstorm' Rages

On Exoplanet

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]

Astronomers have measured high-speed winds in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star.

Data on carbon monoxide gas in the atmosphere show that it is streaming at fierce speeds from the planet's hot day side to its cool night side.

Writing in Nature, a team detected longitudinal winds of roughly 2km/s (7,000km/h) in the atmosphere of a "hot Jupiter" planet.

Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit very close to their parent stars.

The planet HD209458b orbits a star in the constellation Pegasus, some 150 light-years away. It circles this star at around one-eighth the distance Mercury orbits the Sun.

This means the exoplanet is heated intensely by its parent star, and has a surface temperature of about 1,000C on its hot side.

But as the planet always has the same side to its star, one side is searing, whereas the other is much cooler.

"On Earth, big temperature differences inevitably lead to fierce winds, and as our new measurements reveal, the situation is no different on HD209458b," said co-author Simon Albrecht, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US.

Ignas Snellen, who led the team of astronomers, commented: "HD209458b is definitely not a place for the faint-hearted.

The researcher, based at Leiden University in the Netherlands, added: "By studying the poisonous carbon monoxide gas with great accuracy we found evidence for a 'super wind', blowing at a speed of 5,000 to 10,000km per hour."

The researchers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its powerful CRIRES spectrograph to detect and analyse the tiny fraction of starlight that filtered through the planet's atmosphere as it passed in front of its star.

The chemicals in the atmosphere, such as carbon monoxide, produce distinctive fingerprints, known as absorption lines, in this spectrum of stellar light.

Team member Remco de Kok, from the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON), said CRIRES was uniquely equipped to deliver precise measurements of the carbon monoxide lines.

"This high precision allows us to measure the velocity of the carbon monoxide gas for the first time using the Doppler effect."

The Doppler effect, or Doppler shift, is the change in the wavelength of the planet's light spectrum caused by its motion towards or away from Earth.

The authors were able to use the Doppler shift to obtain a direct measurement of the exoplanet's mass.

The effect was used to calculate the velocity of the exoplanet as it orbited its home star - its orbital velocity.

Once the orbital velocity of HD209458b was known, the masses of both the star and planet could be calculated using Newton's law of gravity.

Mercedes Lopez-Morales, from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, US, who was not connected with the study, said: "Measuring spectral lines from molecules in the atmosphere of an exoplanet and using them to derive the planet's mass directly is a remarkable achievement.

"Equally striking is the fact that the observations have been made using ground-based telescope facilities. Until a few months ago, such challenging precision measurements were thought to be possible only from space-based platforms."

The astronomers also measured how much carbon is present in the atmosphere of this planet.

"It seems that H209458b is actually as carbon-rich as Jupiter and Saturn. This could indicate that it was formed in the same way," said Dr Snellen.

"In the future, astronomers may be able to use this type of observation to study the atmospheres of Earth-like planets, to determine whether life also exists elsewhere in the Universe."

What's He Building In There...

2010-06-25T01:20:00.000-07:00

Extreme DIY:

Building A Homemade

Nuclear Reactor In NYC

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]

Many might be alarmed to learn of a homemade nuclear reactor being built next door. But what if this form of extreme DIY could help solve the world's energy crisis?

By day, Mark Suppes is a web developer for fashion giant Gucci. By night, he cycles to a New York warehouse and tinkers with his own nuclear fusion reactor.

The warehouse is a non-descript building on a tree-lined Brooklyn street, across the road from blocks of apartments, with a grocery store on one corner. But in reality, it is a lab.

In a hired workshop on the third floor, a high-pitched buzz emanates from a corner dotted with metal scraps and ominous-looking machinery, as Mr Suppes fires up his device and searches for the answer to a question that has eluded some of the finest scientific minds on the planet.

In nuclear fusion, atoms are forcibly joined, releasing energy. It is, say scientists, the "holy grail" of energy production - completely clean and cheap.

The problem is, no-one has found a way of making fusion reactors produce more energy than they consume to run.

'I was inspired'

Mr Suppes, 32, is part of a growing community of "fusioneers" - amateur science junkies who are building homemade fusion reactors, for fun and with an eye to being part of the solution to that problem.

He is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to community site Fusor.net. Others on the list include a 15-year-old from Michigan and a doctoral student in Ohio.

[ Mr Suppes has spent the last two years perfecting his reactor ]

"I was inspired because I believed I was looking at a technology that could actually work to solve our energy problems, and I believed it was something that I could at least begin to build," Mr Suppes told the BBC.

While they might un-nerve the neighbours, fusion reactors of this kind are perfectly legal in the US.

"As long as they [private citizens] obtain that material [the components of the reactor] legally, they could do whatever they want," says Anne Stark, senior public information officer for California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

During fusion, energy is released as atomic nuclei are forced together at high temperatures and pressures to form larger nuclei.

Scientists say devices like Mr Suppes' pose no real threat to neighbouring communities or the environment because they contain no nuclear materials, such as uranium or plutonium.

"There is no chance of any kind of accident with fusion," says Neil Calder, communications chief for Iter, a multi-national project begun in 1985 with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of fusion power.

"There's no CO2 pollution, there's no greenhouse gases, you can't use it for proliferation [the spread of nuclear weapons] - it has so many advantages," he said.

'Mechanics to janitors'

Government-led efforts to produce power from fusion have been going on around the world for 50 years.

Iter - funded by the EU, US, Japan, Russia, India, China, and South Korea - is working on a multi-billion dollar, advanced reactor, due to be built in the south of France by 2019.

But the availability of equipment and technology has seen an increasing number of amateurs enter the fray.

"We have people in the whole gamut, from physicists to electronics people to car mechanics to even one janitor - and all these people share a common bond to do nuclear fusion in their home," said Richard Hull, founder of Fusor.net.

Some experts are sceptical that all these people are producing fusion reactions, but when he demonstrates his device, Mr Suppes says a bubble meter placed next to the reactor indicates that a fast neutron, a by-product of fusion, has been produced.

The amateur scientist began building his reactor two years ago, purchasing parts on eBay with $35,000 of his own money and about $4,000 he raised on a website that connects artists and inventors with private investors.

"Real researchers that are working at Los Alamos [US Department of Energy National Laboratory] and are working at Lawrence Livermore are following this and commenting on it, even though it's not an officially sanctioned project," he says.

Tricky situation

Mr Suppes sees his work in nuclear fusion as more than just a hobby, and he intends to try to build one of the world's first break-even reactors - a facility producing as much energy as it uses to operate.

"He now has to go out and do what everybody else has to do, which is to convince people to invest in his project - whether its government funding or private funding to carry him through," said Mr Calder.

Mr Suppes is hoping to build a break-even reactor from plans created by the late Robert Bussard, a nuclear physicist who drew up plans for a fusion reactor that could convert hydrogen and boron into electricity.

Work on a scaled up version of a Bussard reactor, funded by the US Navy, has already been taking place in California.

But Mr Suppes believes he will be able to raise the millions of dollars it takes to build a Bussard reactor because he feels someone with enough money "will feel they cannot pass up the opportunity" to find out if it will work.

Iter said it would be wrong to dismiss out of hand the notion that an amateur could make a difference.

"I won't say something that puts these guys down, but it's a tricky situation because there is a great deal of money and time and a lot of very experienced scientists working on fusion at the moment," said Mr Calder.

"But that does not eliminate other ideas coming from a different group of people."

What neighbours say

For Mr Suppes, convincing the experts is one thing. Convincing the locals is another problem entirely.

"A homemade nuclear fusion reactor being built in Brooklyn - I would have thought there would be some sort of rules and laws about messing around with nuclear fusion in your apartment," said Brooklyn resident Stephen Davis. "I'm not sure I'd like that living right next to me."

"The fact that he's trying to form a new kind of energy is all well and good," said another local, Christopher Wright. "But without the proper scientific work behind it, I don't know if it's too good of an idea."

But others had a more positive outlook on Mr Suppes' reactor.

"I think it's a good idea. If a guy can make an invention like that, it should definitely be spread around so we don't need to depend on oil," Brooklynite Chris Stephens told the BBC.

"We need to do something that's new and more creative for society."

Has Manbearpig Met His Match?

2010-06-25T01:14:00.000-07:00

Mystery Surrounds

'Horse-Boy' On

Google Street View

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]

Mystery surrounds a man wearing a horse's head who has been captured on Google's Street View in Aberdeen.

The man - who has become known as "horse-boy" - can be seen in the Hardgate area of the city.

The sighting has become a popular attraction on Google's service, which offers a photographic map of streets.

The man is wearing dark trousers, a purple shirt - and a brown and white horse's head.

Dozens of BBC news website users have e-mailed from across Europe to say they know who horse boy is.

Others have sent in images of the mystery horse-head wearer and some have claimed to be him.

Stefan Kleen from Germany said he and a friend met horse-boy at a German festival last weekend.

He added: "He only spoke English so we didn't really talk a lot to him."

Anders Hauge reckons he has been shopping in Haugesund in Norway; John Hammond was convinced he was playing the fairways and relaxing in the bars of Marbella and Julian Sykes said he had been sighted in Cardiff.

John Ainsworth insisted he saw horse-boy in Norwich earlier in the year walking through Wensum Park.

He said: "I thought I was hallucinating at first but then realised it was real."

Other readers have not been impressed with the story and some have told the website that it is not newsworthy and is a prank to generate further publicity.

And Gareth Remblance pointed out: "Horse boy isn't a person, it's a cheap mask - for example I saw at least three people wearing similar heads at this year's Download Festival in Donington."

A number of contributors have said that horse-boy features in other parts of Google's street view service.

Mark Coates said: "If you go down the road and turn back you can see him putting on the horse head and on the shot back up the road again he has white hair."

The BBC news website story has had more than 800,000 hits.

Dig This...

2010-06-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

World's Largest Dinosaur

Graveyard Linked

To Mass Death

[ http://www.livescience.com ]

Scientists have revealed what may be the world's largest dinosaur graveyard.

The dinosaurs may have been part of a mass die-off resulting from a monster storm, comparable to today's hurricanes, which struck what was then a coastal area.

The findings could help solve a mystery concerning why the badlands of western Canada are so rich in dinosaur fossils.

The roughly 76-million-year-old fossil beds apparently hold thousands of bones over an area of at least 568 acres (2.3 square km), skeletons that belonged to a roughly cow-sized, plant-eating horned dinosaur known as Centrosaurus. This treasure trove provides the first solid evidence that some horned dinosaur herds were much larger than previously thought, with numbers easily in the high hundreds to low thousands, said senior research scientist David Eberth, a paleontologist and geologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta.

The "mega-bonebed," which consists of 14 smaller bonebeds, lies in northern Alberta near Hilda, Canada, right by the border with Saskatchewan. The graveyard was actually discovered in 1997, but confirmation of the discovery's size was detailed this month in the book "New Perspectives On Horned Dinosaurs" (Indiana University Press, 2010). [Illustration of centrosaur herd]

Alberta is extraordinarily rich in fossils, such as those of duck-billed dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs including Triceratops, ankylosaurs, raptors related to Velociraptor, and tyrannosaurids such as Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex. The area was home to a remarkable diversity of other animals as well, including birds, pterosaurs, alligators, turtles, lizards and mammals — in fact, scientists recently found mammal tooth marks on dinosaur bones in Alberta.

Thousands die in flood

Back when these centrosaurs lived, Alberta was warm and lush, and encompassed lowlands on the western coast of the Western Interior Seaway, a vast inland sea that divided what is now North America in half. The way the fossils are linked together in the same layers of earth within these bonebeds suggests all these centrosaurs were wiped out simultaneously.

The likely culprit in this scenario was a catastrophic storm, which could quickly have routinely made the waters flood up as high as 12 to 15 feet (3.6 to 4.6 meters), if experiences with modern floodplains are any guide.

"The flooding could have reached more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the shoreline," Eberth told LiveScience. "The landscape basically just drowns."

The flat area would have provided no high ground for escape, leading to thousands of animals drowning in the rising waters.

"It's unlikely that these animals could tread water for very long, so the scale of the carnage must have been breathtaking," Eberth said. "The evidence suggests that after the flood, dinosaur scavengers reentered the area, trampling and smashing bones in their attempt to feast on the rotting remains."

Fossil mystery solved

These storms could also help explain why fossils are so abundant in the badlands of western Canada overall, "and why they are often found preserved so exquisitely," Eberth said.

Coastal floodplains such as those seen in modern Bangladesh can cover vast areas, with flooding killing hundreds of thousands of livestock, not to mention the human tragedies that occur.

"Because of their size and the scale of the flooding, dinosaurs could not escape the coastal floodwaters and would have been killed in large numbers," Eberth explained. "In contrast, fish, small reptiles, mammals, and birds may have been able to escape such seasonal catastrophes by retreating to quiet water areas, the safety of trees and burrows, or simply by flying away."

The researchers now hope to take lessons they have learned in Alberta to compare it to other parts of the world in an effort to pinpoint signs of past catastrophes elsewhere.

Don't Hold Your Breath...

2010-06-23T20:39:00.000-07:00

Jesus Will Return

By 2050, Say 40%

Of Americans

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

Americans are largely optimistic about the future, according to the poll from the Pew Research Center For The People and The Press/Smithsonian Magazine.

By mid century, 71 per cent believe cancer will be cured, 66 per cent say artificial limbs will work better than real ones and 81 per cent believe computers will be able to converse like humans.

But Americans are also braced for a major energy crisis and a warming planet, according to the survey. More than half, or 58 per cent, fear another world war in the next 40 years and 53 per cent expect a terrorist attack against the United States using a nuclear weapon.

The poll also shows a sharp dip in overall optimism from 1999, when 81 per cent said they were optimistic about life for themselves and their families. The current poll found just 64 per cent were.

Sixty-one percent said they were optimistic about the future of the United States, compared to 70 percent in 1999. And 56 percent predicted the US economy would be stronger in 40 years, compared to 64 percent of those polled in 1999.

The results were compiled from telephone and online interviews with 1,546 adults in April. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, according to Pew.

Here are some other findings of the poll:

• 71 per cent believe cancer will be cured by 2050.

• 81 per cent believe computers will be able to converse like humans.

• 68 per cent of those under 30 predict a world war by 2050.

• 53 per cent say ordinary people will travel in space

• Nearly three-quarters, or 74 per cent, of those polled believe it likely that "most of our energy will come from sources other than coal, oil, and gas".

• Yet 72 per cent believe the world is likely to experience a major worldwide energy crisis by 2050.

• 66 per cent say the Earth will definitely or probably get warmer but it breaks down strongly along political lines, with just 48 per cent of Republicans saying so and 83 per cent of Democrats.

• 42 per cent say it is likely that scientists will be able to tell what people are thinking by scanning their brains but 55 say this will definitely or probably not happen.

• 89 per cent believe a woman will be elected US president by 2050.

• 86 per cent say it is at least probable that most Americans will have to work into their 70s before retiring.

• 41 per cent say Jesus Christ will return within the next 40 years while 46 per cent say this will definitely or probably not happen.

• 63 per cent anticipate the demise of paper money

• 61 per cent say almost no one will send letters by 2050.

• 31 per cent expect the planet will be struck by an asteroid.

Solar Serenade...

2010-06-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

Music Of The Sun

Recorded By Scientists

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

The sun has been the inspiration for hundreds of songs, but now scientists have discovered that the star at the centre of our solar system produces its own music.

Astronomers at the University of Sheffield have managed to record for the first time the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun.

They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument.

In other cases they behave more like soundwaves as they travel through a wind instrument.

Using satellite images of these loops, which can be over 60,000 miles long, the scientists were able to recreate the sound by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up the frequency so it is audible to the human ear.

Professor Robertus von Fáy-Siebenbürgen, head of the solar physics research group at Sheffield University, said: "It was strangely beautiful and exciting to hear these noises for the first time from such a large and powerful source.

"It is a sort of music as it has harmonics.

"It is providing us with a new way of learning about the sun and giving us a new insight into the physics that goes on at in the sun's outer layers where temperatures reach millions of degrees."

The coronal loops are thought to be involved in the production of solar flares that fling highly charged particles out into space, creating a phenomenon known as space weather.

When the sun's activity, and thus solar flare production, increases, the resulting "space storm" can have catastrophic results here on earth, destroying electronic equipment, overheating power grids and damaging satellites.

Nasa warned last week that the sun's activity is starting to increase following an extended period of low activity and is on course to throw out unprecedented levels of magnetic energy into the solar system by 2013.

Professor Fáy-Siebenbürgen said that studying the "music of the sun" would provide new ways of understanding and predicting solar flares before they happen.

The coronal loops vibrate from side to side because they are "plucked" rather like guitar strings by the blast waves from explosions on the surface of the sun.

The scientists also found the loops vibrate backwards and forwards in a way that mimics the acoustic waves in a wind instrument.

Professor Fáy-Siebenbürgen's research has been revealed as the University of Sheffield launches a new project, called Project Sunshine, aimed at finding new ways to harness and understand the power of the sun.

He said: "These loops are oscillating like the strings on a guitar or the air in a wind instrument. Over time the waves die away and that is telling us new things about the physics in the sun's atmosphere."

Killing You Softly...

2010-06-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

Could Unbridled

Climate Changes

Lead To Human

Extinction?

[ http://sify.com ]

Sydney: Scientists have sounded alarm bells about how growing concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes in the way the oceans function, providing evidence that humankind could well be on the way to the next great extinction.

The findings of the comprehensive report: 'The impact of climate change on the world's marine ecosystems' emerged from a synthesis of recent research on the world's oceans, carried out by two of the world's leading marine scientists.

One of the authors of the report is Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, professor at The University of Queensland and the director of its Global Change Institute (GCI).

'We may see sudden, unexpected changes that have serious ramifications for the overall well-being of humans, including the capacity of the planet to support people. This is further evidence that we are well on the way to the next great extinction event,' says Hoegh-Guldberg.

'The findings have enormous implications for mankind, particularly if the trend continues. The earth's ocean, which produces half of the oxygen we breathe and absorbs 30 per cent of human-generated carbon dioxide, is equivalent to its heart and lungs. This study shows worrying signs of ill-health. It's as if the earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day!,' he added.

'We are entering a period in which the ocean services upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail', he added.

The 'fundamental and comprehensive' changes to marine life identified in the report include rapidly warming and acidifying oceans, changes in water circulation and expansion of dead zones within the ocean depths.

These are driving major changes in marine ecosystems: less abundant coral reefs, sea grasses and mangroves (important fish nurseries); fewer, smaller fish; a breakdown in food chains; changes in the distribution of marine life; and more frequent diseases and pests among marine organisms.

Study co-author John F Bruno, associate professor in marine science at The University of North Carolina, says greenhouse gas emissions are modifying many physical and geochemical aspects of the planet's oceans, in ways 'unprecedented in nearly a million years'.

'This is causing fundamental and comprehensive changes to the way marine ecosystems function,' Bruno warned, according to a GCI release.

These findings were published in Science.

The Old Man Of The Mountain...

2010-06-20T15:32:00.000-07:00

Ancient Legends Once

Walked Among

Early Humans?

[ http://www.usatoday.com ]

Wild, hairy, folks who fought griffons and nomads — have paleontologists unearthed mythic figures of folklore?

Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.

But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: "The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of 'wild people' inhabiting the region," wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the United Kingdom's Bodleian Library Oxford, in a letter to The Times of London.

Wild people?

Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about these human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats; they are one-eyed, 'shaggy with hairs, the toughest of men'," according to John of Tzetses, a writer of the Byzantine era. They also fought griffons, mythical winged lions with eagle's faces, for gold, according to Herodotus and his contemporary Aristeas, who clearly knew their stuff when it came to spicing up historical writing.

Heaney notes that legends of hairy wild people, or almases, have been standard fare in the Russian steppes for centuries. "The reports of wild men, although having typical mythic overtones, do often reflect what we know of primitive hominins," Heaney says, by e-mail. "The presumed almases of Central Asia could be any one of a number of pre-(homo) sapien ancestors."

What about their gold-mine-guarding griffon foes? In a 1993 companion piece to a look at the Arismaspians by Heaney, Stanford historianAdrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, suggested their legend sprang from dinosaur bones unearthed by nomads in their travels across the steppes of Western Mongolia.

"That region could well be Bayan-Ulgii aimag (province) in western Mongolia and environs, where I have wandered many long days and have seen ancient and contemporary small gold mines," says archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball of the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, who calls a dinosaur-bone origin for griffon stories reasonable. But as for Arimaspians being the same as the newly-discovered archaic humans, Davis-Kimball has pretty strong doubts.

"We have excavated Bronze Age hunters and gatherers and small villagers along the Eurasian rivers — these were the people that precede the nomads by a 1,000 or maybe even many more years. I've seen lots of skeletons from many locales in my travels from Hungary to Mongolia, but none that correlates with this new hominid line or with the one-eyed Arimaspians," Davis-Kimball says, by e-mail. "It's too difficult for me to believe that hominids living 1,000,000 years ago could be perpetuated in a myth to the time of Herodotus or about 450 BC."

Another explanation came in a 2008 Archaeology Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia journal study by Dima Cheremisin of the Russian Academy of Sciences who looked at the ancient Pazyryk people of Siberia, an Iron Age tribe whose burial mounds dot the Altai Mountains. "The mythical griffon is the most popular figure in Pazyryk art, suggesting that the Pazyryk people maybe identified with the 'griffons guarding gold,' mentioned by Aristeas and Herodotus," Cheremisin noted.

And cryptozoologists, who make a study of legendary creatures, have offered similar archaic human explanations in the past for sightings of the Yeti or Bigfoot. Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of modern cryptozoology, theorized in the 1980's that such sightings of the wild people could be based on ancestral memories of Neanderthals.

Of course, it does turn out that people seem to have interbred with Neanderthals, according to a May Science magazine report led by Svante Pääbo, a long-time ancient genome researcher who also was a co-author on the Denisova Cave discovery report. More than 50,000 years ago, most likely in the Near East, intermingling of early modern humans and Neanderthals led to modern-day Europeans and Asians typically having a genome that is 1- 4% Neanderthal, according to the study.

Such interbreeding is another staple of old stories. Hercules, the hero of Greek myths, walked around in a lion skin with a club over his shoulders and was wondrously strong, a bit like a Neanderthal, due to half-divine parentage.

Even the Old Testament contains references to Nephilim, "giants," who married people and had children.

"These stories go back millennia, but they don't go back that far," says biblical archaeologist Robert Cargill of UCLA. "There's no way that the author of the Book of Genesis had in mind Neanderthals." Most likely, ancient people were trying to explain the origin of tall people, Cargil says, and pointing back to a time when things were so bad that even semi-divine creatures were misbehaving.

Of course, it's fun to speculate. After all, researchers in 2003 discovered another human species, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbits" for their puny stature about three feet tall, who died out perhaps 12,000 years ago in Indonesia.

So we have hobbits, giants, and possibly cyclopean wild men, running around in prehistory. It's not quite The Lord of the Rings, but we can certainly forgive Herodotus for some of his taller tales.

Sing, Sing, Sting...

2010-06-19T23:16:00.000-07:00

WOMAN SINGS FLIGHT

OF THE BUMBLEBEE

Up, Up & Away...

2010-06-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

Colin Rich's
Camera-Balloon
Videotapes The World
From 24 Miles Up

[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com ]

It's nice to see that the global recession hasn't kept artists from low-budget innovation.

The Atlantic's Daily Dish turned us on to a cinematographer in Oxnard, CA, who built a homemade high-altitude weather balloon with two second-hand digital cameras he bought on Ebay (for only $45) that captured beautiful video images from 24 miles above the Earth's surface.

DIY-tinkerer Colin Rich built his device with styrofoam and duct-tape to prevent the cameras from freezing at temperatures below -50F.

The balloon eventually burst at around 125,000 feet, which triggered a parachute to deploy, allowing the device to float safely down to land in Santa Paula, 15 miles away from where it was launched.

Bionic Bird On A Wire...

2010-06-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

Creepy Robots: What

Every Power Line Will

Be Wearing In 2014

[ http://dvice.com ]

Those big high-tension power lines that form the national power grid need to be carefully inspected on a regular basis for impinging trees and other potential problems. In remote areas this work is often done by costly helicopter crews, but that could change when this cable crawling robot enters service.

Creeping along the top guide wire at 3 mph, the robot actually runs using power harvested by induction from the main cables. The solar cells are only there for backup, and presumably so it can also look for problems during a blackout. The robot's high-resolution cameras will automatically make comparisons with images taken earlier from the same location and then issue alerts if it finds obstructions like abnormal tree growth, some kid's dangling sneakers, or an Earth Liberation Front banner on the line. The robot communicates using both satellite and cellphone links.

Developed by the Electric Power Research Institute, each 6-foot-long, 140-pound robot will cost around $500,000, and according to EPRI it can cover 160 miles in a year. That seems kind of low to me, when you consider that 3 mph works out to over 26,000 miles in a year. Still, they claim it will save at least 30 percent when compared to the current helicopter inspections.

The first commercial test is expected in 2014, just enough time for the UFO hunters and conspiracy theorists to come up with some crazy theory about what these robots are really doing.

Too Much To Carry On...

2010-06-18T17:58:00.000-07:00

Up To 60 Human Heads

Discovered At Airport

[ http://news.sky.com ]

A US airline worker has discovered between 40 and 60 human heads during a routine security check, prompting fears of a black market trade in body parts.

The Southwest Airlines employee made the gruesome dicovery when he realised the container, bound for a medical research company in Fort Worth, Texas, had not been labelled properly.

Now officials in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the heads were found, are investigating whether they are part of an illegal trade in human body parts.

"We've come to the conclusion that there is a black market out there for human body parts for research or for whatever reason," said county coroner Garland Camper.

"We just want to make sure these specimens here aren't a part of that black market and underground trade."

The package was being sent to a company called Medtronic which maintains that it is common to ship body parts for medical education and research.

However, spokesman Brian Henry admitted it was very rare for a shipment to be seized.

"We expect our suppliers to follow procedures," he said.

Mr Henry identified the supplier as JLS Consulting, a company which, according to an Arkansas online database, had its business licence revoked last year.

But company founder Janice Hepler has spoken out to a local newspaper to blame a private courrier she hired to transport the heads.

"Nothing is wrong," she was quoted as saying. "We're providing the documentation."

Although US federal law prohibits the sale of human body parts, suppliers can be reimbursed for expenses in the case of legitimate research.

They're Heeeeere...

2010-06-18T17:54:00.000-07:00

What to Do If Your

Child Really Does

See Dead People

[ http://www.aolnews.com ]

Haley Joel Osment shocked millions of American moviegoers when he said, "I see dead people" in "The Sixth Sense."

Turns out, what's really shocking is how many kids can actually communicate with spooks -- or at least feel they do.

So says Caron Goode, a Fort Worth, Texas-based psychotherapist and author of the new book "Kids Who See Ghosts: How to Guide Them Through Fear" (Weiser Books).

Goode says that while some kids play with imaginary friends, there are others who are convinced they are being visited by spooks and apparitions.

Well, are they?

Depends on your upbringing, Goode says.

"Are ghosts real? In some cultures they are and others they aren't," she says, adding that there are many factors that can make people feel they are seeing one -- including stress and their brain waves being in a "theta" or daydreaming state.

On the other hand, there are many people -- including Goode -- who have had experiences that they believe could only be caused by another entity and are not hallucinations.

So how can you tell if your kid's chat with his dead Uncle Leo is normal child's play or a paranormal experience? Well, age appropriateness is one way.

"Generally, children at the age of 2, 3 or 4 aren't able to distinguish between a ghost or a purely imaginary playmate," Goode says. "By the time they are 7, 8 or 9, they are able to distinguish between an apparition or a shadow on the bed."

Goode claims she knows this firsthand.

When she was 8, Goode was allegedly visited by the spirit of a bald, full-bearded man in a friar's robe who would stop by her room every couple of months to thank her for donating a dollar to the nuns at her Catholic school.

She says she didn't know much about him, but when she was a high school senior, she recognized him as a Capuchin monk named Padre Pio, who had stigmata during his adult life before dying in September 1968 and was later canonized as a saint for his ability to bi-locate, or be in two places at once.

Goode says the ability to pick up the paranormal often shows up at a young age, and one way parents can tell if their kids are really seeing something is the child's reaction to it.

For instance, if Junior thinks he sees a ghost and has a visceral gut reaction that makes him run to tell Mom or afraid to go to sleep, chances are it's not imaginary.

However, Goode says there is still some cause for debate. She cites a former patient named "Lucy," who allegedly started seeing ghosts after her parents divorced when she was 8.

"[The split] caused financial setbacks for both parents, who lived in apartments, and Lucy went back and forth between both homes, usually sleeping on the couch when she stayed with her dad," Goode says.

One night, while at her father's place, Lucy woke up and reportedly saw the ghost of a little girl pulling the quilt off her toes. She wasn't frightened, just sleepy, and she told herself that she'd close her eyes and if the spook was there when she reopened her eyes, the ghostly girl would be her friend.

According to Goode, the ghost followed Lucy home, and, eventually, she told her mom they had been conversing for a year.

Whether the ghost existed or not is, to Goode's thinking, open to interpretation.

"This mother thought the daughter created the friend to deal with a stressful time, but another mother might accept that it was really a ghost," she says.

"Some cultures are more accepting of ghosts or spirits than others," she says. "Also, the parents' reaction can have an effect. Some parents try to shut their kids down."

Although Goode says older children are more adept at distiguishing a true paranormal being from a shadow, parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach says younger kids are actually more likely to stay firm to their beliefs that they saw a ghost.

"Younger kids will stick to their story while the older kids are more likely to be acculturated to the idea that there are no ghosts," Auerbach says. "Sometimes, the parent might also see the ghost too, but not want to admit it.

"One way to tell the difference between whether the child is seeing something more than an imaginary friend is when they mention recognizable details about someone you know, such as a dead relative they never met."

According to Auerbach, parapsychology "is a parallel field" to traditional psychology, but there have been baby steps to link the two fields of study.

"In the last 30 years, there has been something called 'transpersonal psychology' that takes a person's religious, spiritual and psychic experiences into account and how they objectively impact the person," Auerbach says.

Still, even if child therapists acknowledge the possibility that kids might be seeing spooks, not every kid is a budding "ghost whisperer."

"Some kids have one experience, and some have a lot," Goode says. "Sometimes, these experiences can be attributed to stress, reactions to trauma, distress, fluctuating blood sugar levels or sleep deprivation -- even plain daydreaming.

"It is possible that the kid could just be talking to themselves, but you need to look at the behavior and see how the child is coping [with] stress," she says.

In addition, some personality types are just more spook-friendly than others.

"A child who is a 'doer' or a 'high achiever' will likely work their way through a problem and not really feel their way through it the way a more sensitive child might," she says.

Also, a kid who is truly intuitive will consistently claim to see spirits, but others will have just one-time experiences.

"My grandson was staying with me once, and he looked up at the ceiling at one point and said, 'Grandma,'" Goode says. "He never calls me anything but 'Eetsie,' so I believe he saw something. However, it hasn't happened since, and I don't believe he is intuitive."

But even if a child is able to see or feel ghosts consistently, that doesn't mean a parent should become a paranormal stage mom who forces the kid to hang up a giant neon hand and start reading fortunes.

"I was teaching at a school for intuitive children, and one of the mothers was talking about her boy's needs and abilities, and he was just bored out of his mind," Goode says.

Using her own intuitive abilities, she sensed he wasn't a very happy medium.

"I asked him, 'You're not into this, are you?' and he said, 'No.' So I influenced the mom to enjoy enhancing her own psychic ability and let her son do something he enjoyed," she says.

And enjoyment -- or the lack thereof -- is one reason why Goode wrote her book.

"I don't want kids going to bed scared and shaking," she says. "I don't want them to grow to be adults who are afraid of their environment. If this helps parents understand that their kid might need to take a toy sword and fight the ghost in order to work through this, I'll be happy."

Far Out Art...

2010-06-18T17:48:00.000-07:00

Warhol In Space:

Apollo 12 Secretly

Carried Art To

The Moon

[ http://www.aolnews.com ]

Neil Armstrong's moon walk on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission was a small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind, but a small ceramic tile snuck aboard the Apollo 12 mission a few months later has turned out to be a giant leap for American art.

Believe it or not, one of the engineers who built the lunar module for the Apollo 12, the second moon landing, snuck aboard a tiny ceramic chip containing original artwork by six of the American art world's biggest names, including Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg, creating a permanent miniature art museum on the moon.

The tiny tile holding all six pieces -- which is only three-quarters of an inch by half an inch -- was affixed to one of the legs on the lunar module.

Amazingly, its existence has been a secret known only by a select few people, including renowned New York artist Forrest "Frosty" Myers, who created the "Moon Museum" and contributed a drawing, and a deceased engineer who worked on the project and is only known by the cryptic name "John F."

But now, the whole picture of how the mini museum made it to the moon is coming to light thanks to the PBS series "History Detectives," which has its 8th season premiere on June 21.

The show features four history experts who track down the history of obscure artifacts sent in by readers.

In this case, series host and historian Gwendolyn Wright found out about this piece of history from Jade Dellinger, a Florida-based art curator who bought a reproduction of the tile via an online auction.

Wright admits she was skeptical about the tile's provenance, but after all the research now admits it's one of the "strangest, most exciting" experiences of her life.

"I will never think of the moon in the same way again," Wright said. "This case truly surprised me. What I thought seemed impossible, at first, became an amazing story of art winning its place alongside science, and some playful innovation that is sure to intrigue history buffs, space lovers and art aficionados alike."

As artworks go, none of the pieces here are going to stand next to these artists' greatest works. For instance, the Warhol piece is basically his initials made to look like a rocket or a phallic symbol depending on your mindset, and Rauschenburg's contribution is a single minimalist line. Meanwhile, David Novros and John Chamberlain contributed drawings that look like circuitry.

The artists did normal-sized pieces and then Bell Laboratories scientist Fred Waldhauer reduced the artists' sketches and imprinted them onto the ceramic wafer using state-of-the-art technology of the time. Waldhauer made a number of tiles -- one for the lunar module, and copies as souvenirs for the artists and other participants.

But to Wright, the real story isn't the quality of the art -- it's the bravery of the engineers who decided it was important that art, one of the things that separates mankind from the animals, should be represented on the moon.

"I had this image of NASA being totally controlled, but I realized once again that no bureaucracy has complete control," Wright said. "Engineers are seen as dull, but they're always playing around. That's how you get new things -- by breaking the rules."

Myers actually tried to get the art aboard Apollo 12 by going through normal channels, but while NASA officials never said no, they never said yes, either, leaving the project in limbo. That is, until a contact hooked him up with the mysterious "John F.," an aerospace engineer who worked on the rocket.

This "unknown solderer," as some people call him, promised to send Myers a telegram when the mini museum was stuck onto the craft. Shortly before the rocket launch was set to begin, he got one, reading, "You're on. A-OK. All systems are go," and signed "John F."

While the real identity of John F. remains a mystery, Richard Kupczyk, the Grumman launch pad foreman for the Apollo 12 mission, suggests it may be a pseudonym to protect the engineer's real identity; he imagines the name was chosen as a nod to John F. Kennedy, the president who championed the space program.

"There were 68 technicians who worked on the project, but NASA tried to control everything," Kupczyk said.

However, "try" is the operative word. Astronauts, like Alan Bean, who piloted the Apollo 12 lunar module, and mission commander Charles "Pete" Conrad were allowed to bring personal items from home -- and the engineers also wanted in on the fun.

The engineers snuck these personal items by tucking them in the 16 layers of mylar blankets that protected the spacecraft from heat and cold during its journey.

"Some people would put a picture of their wife in there," Kupczyk said. "I actually was terminated for creating a giant sign that said 'Congratulations' and sneaking it aboard.

Kupczyk said the engineers were celebrating the successful landing of Apollo 12 with some cocktails and one of the engineers who was a little drunk mentioned the sign to a reporter who then quizzed someone else.

The resulting news story cost Kupczyk his job -- for two weeks.

"They called me up two weeks after firing me and hired me back because there wasn't anybody who could do what I did," Kupczyk said. "There was an envelope in my desk with the money I would have earned. The other guys took a collection so I wouldn't lose money.

"It's funny. Forty years ago, I got fired and now they put me on the news," he added.

Wright says stories like Kupczyk's are the best part of her job, and brought back the uniqueness of the moon landings.

She believes that in the 41 years since the Apollo 11 mission, people have lost sight of how extraordinary an achievement the moon landing was. She figures it's because the focus is on the astronauts, not the engineers who made it possible.

"I think the reason why the moon landings haven't had as much resonance as they should is because the men who were chosen to be astronauts were the least interesting men," she said.

"But with good reason. They were sent to do a specific mission and follow orders. They'd never let guys like Kupczyk on the moon."

Seeing Isn't Believing...Especially On Video...

2010-06-18T17:37:00.000-07:00

Confessions Of

A UFO Hoaxer

[ http://www.aolnews.com ]

A shaky camera turns on, out of focus in haste to capture something of terrible importance. The camera zooms in, and the image emerges in awful clarity: the space shuttle, destroyed and coasting in helpless orbit, the astronauts almost certainly dead. The impact debris coasts alongside the ruined shuttle in a funeral procession of atmospheric flotsam.

The most disturbing thing is that no story is explained. We see the destruction like a live news feed, without context, without explanation, and our imaginations paint the back story with our deepest fears: collision, terrorism, tragic accident.

With no commentary except the occasional audio interruption of the NASA controllers, the video feels like the pause in a historical retrospective, the quiet stillness between scripted voice-overs that lets the audience reflect on the tragedy. A moment of silence for the dead.

The man who created the videos is known online as The Faking Hoaxer (TFH for short), and he has a talent for creating footage that earns the rarest of compliments: It feels real.

In an age where special effects are getting cleaner and more elaborate, this one steals their thunder by slipping past our increasing skepticism with decidedly low-tech methods.

The camera mimics the rushed fumbling of amateur news footage: It zooms in, focuses, zooms out, focuses again. We see it as we've seen so much disaster footage: shaky, perspective changing, nervous and painfully immediate, before it's cleaned up and boiled down. It feels raw.

In one video, a badly damaged shuttle wing rotates slowly in orbit, partly blackened with scorch marks and punched through with jagged holes. The torn wing floats in contrast to the blue Earth in the background. Unlike the fertile oceans beneath, it's become as silent and lifeless as space itself.

In another video, crash footage of Air Force One is displayed on a live news feed, depicting the presidential airplane down in a waterway, sitting silently with massive blast holes in it. While the video pans across the plane, talking heads fill the background with informational noise that doesn't ever completely explain the situation.

The Faking Hoaxer says he imagines the scenarios and then works on them one by one, with very few tools: a Nikon D40 for the photos, a Canon HV30 for video elements, Autodesk 3D Studio Max for 3D modeling and Adobe Creative Suite 4 to put it all together.

Each video is created individually, but how long it takes depends on complexity. "It all depends how long or CGI intensive it is," TFH says. "I can create a simple UFO hoax in less than an hour, but other more cinematic videos can take a few days."

Themes typically revolve around flight: airplanes, UFOs, space shuttles and extraterrestrial exploration.

Especially with the more cinematic CGI videos, TFH says that music is a major part of how the video is crafted. "I search film soundtracks for the right piece or sometimes I hear a piece first and I create a video for it. The music I choose is because I like the style and it fits in with what I do and how I think."

He doesn't have any specific rules for the videos he creates, but he does have a rule not to create any video that is too graphic for people to watch.

"I always try to make my videos look real and not CGI, but I am starting to go more cinematic and hopefully this will lead to a short film."

While he seems a perfect fit for Hollywood, TFH is currently unemployed, taking a career break to look for something new and more creative and rewarding. Although his specialty has been UFOs and disaster footage, he doesn't consider it his only talent.

"I have been doing FX for about two years now. I have always been a keen artist, and now I have moved into the 'video art' side," he told AOL News. "It's just part of what I do. It's kind of cool to see what hasn't been seen before in real life."

He's still sensitive of his work being promoted as real, even though the full video always bears his moniker and his "TFH" watermark clearly visible in the videos. In one he even made his full name visible on the wing of the space shuttle.

TFH says that it's partly branding, but also so that the hoax can be easily revealed if somebody tries to promote it as authentic footage. "People have stolen my videos, replaced the 'TFH' watermark and tried to pass them off as real."

Sometimes, people succeed.

Unlike a disaster, which can be easily debunked by simply turning on a television set, others are less restricted by real-time events. UFOs, "classified" films and similar videos can be passed around repeatedly.

While TFH can't control people copying it, he can at least appreciate the reactions. "Most of the UFO ones are my favorite because they create the most discussion on forums around the world," he said. "I saw my 'Midlands UFO' on the MSN website once, but nothing on TV yet."

His most viewed CGI work is the space shuttle destroyed video, but it's not really a hoax -- it was called out as a CGI project.

TFH knows that many of the people who view his work have strong emotional reactions to it, but he doesn't create the videos with that in mind.

"I generally receive good feedback, usually stating the quality of the CGI. I think most people like my work. Maybe the realness of my work and the subject matter is personal to some people.

"I try not to make them look like Hollywood CGI. I hope people respect my work for what it is and makes them think that not all video footage is real."

TFH is sanguine about his success so far. It's a hobby he enjoys and he's good at it, even if it provides manna for conspiracy theorists and more headaches for UFOlogists.

Commenters on his YouTube page are surprised that he hasn't been seriously approached by the production arm of a special effects company yet, but his ability to generate both quality video and new ideas makes it very likely, if not a foregone conclusion.

A disaster with a happy ending.

Tough & Ruthless Or Rough & Toothless...

2010-06-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

Bigfoot Discovered?

Virginia Man Says

He's On Verge Of

Bigfoot Discovery

[ http://abcnews.go.com ]

Billy Willard says he's on the verge of a major discovery that could change the way humans think about the natural world, not to mention their need for a creature-proof home security system.

Here in Spotsylvania County, in the forests around Lake Anna, Willard claims there have been 14 sightings in the past decade of that most fabled of cryptozoic beasts: Bigfoot.

Or Sasquatch, as the elusive, apelike brute is referred to in more high-minded circles -- and on the side of Willard's blue pickup. The decal on the truck reads "Sasquatch Watch of Virginia," of which Willard is chief pooh-bah (when he's not earning a living installing and removing underground home oil tanks).

Go ahead, call him a loon, a flake, a huckster. He's heard it all. But Willard knows what he knows, which is that three people from this area -- a woman, her husband and their granddaughter -- told him they saw a shaggy, super-size figure on two legs gallivanting across their wooded property.

Quick! To The T.A.R.D.I.S...

2010-06-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

NASA Discovers Doctor

Who’s Crack In The

Middle Of The

Milky Way

[ http://www.thedailydust.co.uk ]

Daily Galaxy’s picture of the day reveals the huge MacGuffin in space

For those of you following this year’s season of Doctor Who, this picture of the day makes for some rather disturbing viewing. It appears that the constellation Sagittarius is featuring a huge stellar bit of graffiti.

And it looks rather like the crack in the Universe that’s been following Matt Smith and Karen Gillan around this year’s story.

So what is this crack? it’s “the core of a thick, sooty cloud large enough to swallow dozens of solar systems and may be harboring beastly stars in the process of forming.”

That’s ominous – a star devouring gap in the middle of the night sky… someone better call for The Doctor!

A Thousand Words Of Anger & Sadness...

2010-06-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

Eyewitness:

BP Oil Spill

[ http://www.guardian.co.uk ]

Delicate patterns in the sea breaking on Orange Beach, Alabama, more than 90 miles from the BP oil spill, cannot distract from the mess four to six inches deep on parts of the shore.

THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS ARE
FROM THE CHINESE MEDIA

[ http://www.aladding.com ]

Click To Enlarge

The Case Of The Semi-Seamstress...

2010-06-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

Threading A Needle

No Problem For

China's Armless

Wonder

[ http://www.aolnews.com ]

[ Ren Jiemei, 65, of Haiyang, China, is so agile that she is able

to do everything she needs to using just her feet.

"I was born without arms. So from childhood I swore

to myself that I'll use my feet to do all the jobs," she said. ]

A 65-year-old armless woman in China has been named the best embroiderer in her village. And while this seems like an unimaginable achievement, given her disability, it is not.

Ren Jiemei, of Haiyang, Shandong province, is a modern-day armless wonder who, like many before her, demonstrates skills that are seemingly impossible.

Ren is said to be able to thread a needle without fail and works quicker and better than all her fully limbed peers. She holds the needle with her right foot and threads it with her left.

"I was born without arms. So from childhood, I swore to myself that I'd use my feet to do everything," she told the Qilu Evening Post.

That everything includes eating, washing her face, combing her hair, drawing pictures and cutting paper.

Had Ren been living in an earlier era, she would've been touring the world with P.T. Barnum, like Ann E. Leak. In the 1870s, the armless Leak not only embroidered with her feet; she also sewed, crocheted, wrote and mastered the use of forks, knives and scissors.

[ Matthew Buchinger, known as the Little Man of Nuremberg,

was born without any limbs. Using only small stumps,

Buchinger played various instruments, performed magic

and was an expert marksman. ]

During the same period, a young armless fellow named Charles Tripp left his home in Canada, marched into Barnum's New York City office, took off his shoes and showed the showman what his phenomenal feet could do. He was hired on the spot.

Like Ren, Tripp was adept at cutting paper with his toes. His dexterity with scissors helped him craft paper dolls during performances. Painting, shaving, woodcarving, photography and penmanship were also demonstrated onstage. His efforts earned him as much as $200 a week. Tripp could even pedal a tandem bicycle with his legless friend, Eli Bowen, steering.

This armless wonder performed for 50 years and married late in life. He lived to be 74.

In 1933, "The Armless Musician" Ray Myers played a Hawaiian steel guitar with his feet in the Ripley's "Believe It or Not Odditorium" at the Chicago World's Fair. After returning from the exhibition with a footful of cash, Myers bought himself a car and learned to drive. He received licenses in both Pennsylvania and West Virginia. According to a promotional pamphlet, he never had a "serious" accident.

[ Ann E. Leak performed with P.T. Barnum in the 1870s.

Like Ren, she was known for her embroidery skills.]

Myers married in 1937 and had a healthy son a year later. He went on to have a successful radio career, entertaining for decades before his passing in 1986 at the age of 74.

As impressive as these armless wonders are, they pale in comparison to my favorite limb-deprived performer, Matthew Buchinger -- known as the Little Man of Nuremberg. Buchinger wasn't exactly armless. He was born in 1674 without hands, feet, legs or thighs, but had minor stumps to work with. And did he ever.

The Little Man of Nuremberg was known to play the flute, bagpipe, trumpet and other instruments, perform sleight-of-hand tricks, shoot a pistol with accuracy, sketch figures and landscapes, and write exquisite calligraphy. A famous self-portrait features various psalms from the Bible forming the flowing curls of his wig.

[ This photo, taken in the 1890s, captures the ultimate in

teamwork: The armless Charles Tripp and legless

Eli Bowen combine limbs to ride a tandem bicycle. ]

Buchinger frequently performed before Europe royalty. Oh, and he married four times and fathered 11 children.

Ren, along with her remarkable predecessors, offers a powerful reminder of what the human spirit can accomplish. So the next time you think you can't do something, count your limbs -- and think again.

Blue Ice...Yes, THAT Blue Ice...

2010-06-18T00:09:00.000-07:00

Ice Fell From Jet

Plane And Smashed

Car Windscreen

[ http://www.thisisplymouth.co.uk ]

A PLYMOUTH man had a miracle escape after a block of ice — believed to have fallen from a passing jet — smashed through his car windscreen.

Kenneth Hendy, 71, had parked up outside his Mount Gould home at about 1.30pm after picking up his daughter Lisa from work as a school dinner lady on what was a sunny afternoon.

After going inside, there was an "enormous crash" outside and a neighbour started shouting.

Mr Hendy said he ran out to find a "football-sized" block of ice had smashed through the windscreen of his Volvo S40.

Mr Hendy said he was convinced it was frozen toilet waste — due to its colouring — and had come from a plane flying overhead. "If it had been a second or two earlier, it would have hit me and then my daughter, who was in the back seat.

"It came down at an angle, so it would have hit me in the face or the chest.

"I've had a triple heart bypass and it would have killed me.

"My heart misses a beat every so often, and it gave me quite a shock - it really shook me up."

Father-of-seven Mr Hendy, from Mount Gould Avenue, added: "Somebody up there must like me!"

He said his Volvo was undriveable and had to be towed away by the RAC to a Plymstock repair garage.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said it had been made aware of the incident involving Mr Hendy's car.

Spokesman Richard Taylor said it regularly recorded such incidents of "ice fall" in an effort to safeguard the public by urging airlines to carry out safety checks.

However, Mr Taylor said toilet waste was not always to blame. "The misconception is that a toilet has been flushed and the remnants, when falling to earth, have frozen."

Within the air industry, the phenomenon was often nicknamed "blue ice", so called because of the chemicals added to plane toilets.

But Mr Taylor said toilets were not emptied until a plane was grounded.

It was more likely to be a faulty seal on a hose socket used to load/unload liquid to the aircraft.

He added: "It leaks from the galley pipes and seeps out of the aircraft, freezing quickly."

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, modern commercial aircraft cruise at high altitudes, and the sub-zero temperatures outside cause any liquid to freeze immediately. The resulting ice then breaks off the plane, gaining speed as it falls to the ground .

Mr Taylor said most ice would break up on descent, adding: "It is very rare, but sometimes the ice fails to thaw.

"As a rule, it falls unnoticed and without harming anyone."

Out of three million flights in the UK between 2008 and 2009, there were just 35 reported cases of ice falling.

And in the 40 years the CAA has been recording such incidents, there have been just five cases of a person being hit.

Primate Boob Tubers...

2010-06-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

Scientists:

'Monkeys Like TV'

[ http://web.orange.co.uk ]

Scientists in Japan have published a new study which they say proves that monkeys like watching television.

A three-year-old male rhesus macaque enjoyed a video of a circus elephant, giraffe and tiger performing, according to scientists from 1 University's Primate Research Institute.

Scientists used a technique called near-infrared spectroscopy to examine various aspects of the blood flow to the brain of the monkey while it was watching the television images.

The study found that when the monkey was witnessing the acrobatic performances of circus animals on a television screen, the frontal lobe area of its brain became vigorously active.

The activity in such an area was significant in reflecting the monkey's pleasure, as the human equivalent is a neurological area associated with triggering delight in a baby when it sees the smile of its mother.

The study, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, the Swiss online scientific journal, reflects the latest parallels between the physiological make-up of monkeys and humans.

Previous studies have revealed how monkeys learn in a similar way to humans, in terms of how they acquire and store information.

Another recent study conducted by scientists at the same Kyoto University institute showed how mother monkeys teaching their young how to floss their teeth in a similar way to humans.

Hey Look! More Godfreaks Acting Stupid...

2010-06-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

Fear Of The Devil

Holding Up Census

In Mizoram

[ http://sify.com ]

Aizawl: The fear of the 'Beast' or the Devil in the Christian-dominated state of Mizoram has caused almost 1,000 families to refuse to enroll their names in the National Population Register (NPR) taken up along with the Census 2011 here from May 15.

The dread stems from Chapter 13 Verse 17 of the Book of Revelations in the Bible which says "... and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark or the name of the Beast or the number of his name."

The problem has stemmed from the Unique Identification Authority of India stipulating that none one could buy or sell property without the Unique ID card.

According to adherents of the belief, since buying or selling of property made one a follower of the Beast, one having the UID card, which authorised property transactions, automatically made one a follower of the Devil.

Those refusing to be enumerated belong to the Mizoram Presbyterian Church and the Baptist Church of Mizoram.

Champhai District Magistrate Vijay Kumar Bidhuri said when he summoned Lalzawna the leader and high priest of a sect he was told that his religious belief would not permit him to register his name and he was ready to face any punishment.

Serchhip Deputy Commissioner H said that adherents of the belief claimed they had the religious freedom to disobey the government and were not afraid of punitive action.

"They are not afraid of being prosecuted for their beliefs as they are more afraid of being identified with the Devil," one enumerator said.

The highest decision making body of the largest Church in the state on June 13 issued a message to all members asking them to cooperate with census officials as it was the duty of every citizen to do so.

"We (the believers) should not be afraid of the Beast (Devil), rather the Beast should be afraid of us as we believe in God who is more powerful," the message said.

The Church said that UID was important to identity bona fide citizens of the country and also help in identifying illegal immigrants and terrorists.

The Church also condemned people who were issuing booklets about the 'Number of the Beast' to terrify church members.

The message of the Presbyterian Church was read out in all church branches in the state, but there were still some who were skeptical, a church elder said.

Enumerators were instructed by District Magistrates of all the eight districts in the state to identify those refusing to cooperate on religious grounds.

Census workers find SC man who had fallen in home

The reports lying with five District Magistrates indicated that there were 939 families who have refused to have their names registered in the NPR, official sources said.

Aizawl district has the largest number of of 483 families including 132 from Aizawl city followed by 158 families in Champhai district.

Serchhip district 5 families and Lawngtlai district 130 families, while there were 33 families in Kolasib district refusing to be enumerated, the sources said.

District Magistrate Bidhuri convened a meeting for people who refused to cooperate with the census officials on June 11 where only two persons, after being given explanations, agreed to cooperate with officials.

The rest refused to budge from their stand even after the authorities told them that they could be fined up to Rs 1,000 and liable for imprisonment of up to three years.

They were also informed that they could be deprived of their right to franchise, ration cards, works under NREGS and other benefits from the government.

"As they have refused to believe our explanations, we may be left with no other option, but to take punitive action against them," one official said.

Caste-ing the dice: India's dangerous gamble

The fear of the Beast is not new among Mizo Christians as many of the sects and cults have refused to enroll their children in school believing enrolment would make them adherents of the Devil.

Many have refused to have ration cards to avail rice at a cheaper rate on the same grounds even though most of them belonged to poorer sections of the society.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

2010-06-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

Tara Was Just Seven

When Puberty Struck -

Shockingly, Cases Like

Hers Are Becoming All

Too Common - So

What's To Blame?

[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk ]

[ Maturing early: Tara Lamey seen here at the age of seven ]

The first reports of a steep drop in the age of puberty began to emerge from the U.S. just over a decade ago - around the time my son Tony was born - but I didn't take too much notice back then.

If it was a real problem, I reasoned, I would know someone with a child in this situation and back then I did not.

As with so many other health stories, sceptical scientists quickly stepped in to criticise the methods used in the American studies, while others blamed the lifestyle there - too much obesity, too much sitting in front of televisions and computer screens and too much hormone-treated beef.

It couldn't, I thought, happen to us. I could not have been more wrong. A study at the University of Copenhagen by some of the most respected experts in this field - and the first of its kind in Western Europe - has concluded the age at which girls and boys begin to mature physically has dropped in a short space of time.

In girls, the age of puberty is down by a whole year - from 11 to ten. For boys, the change is less stark, but it's nonetheless real - they now start puberty around four months earlier than they once did, on average aged ten rather than 11.

Separate studies in Holland and Italy have confirmed these findings, which echo what endocrinologists (doctors who specialise in hormones) have been reporting: a surge in the number of children being referred to their clinics with symptoms of early puberty.

Dr Richard Stanhope, who has worked at London's Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital for more than 20 years, believes the change is creating serious problems for many children who are physically mature at an age when they are too young psychologically to deal with it.

'They are physically ready for sexual reproduction, but mentally completely unready,' he says.

Dr Stanhope believes they are potentially more vulnerable to sexual abuse and teenage pregnancy.

In boys, research suggests those who go into puberty early are more likely to get involved in risky behaviour, including taking drugs, binge- drinking and breaking the law.

It is thought that an early increase in levels of the male hormone testosterone can lead to aggression in boys too young to control their impulses.

'We all know that testosterone is a very difficult hormone to learn to live with,' Dr Stanhope says. 'And if you get a rise in testosterone outside the normal age, then it is even more of a problem.'

[ Shocked: Tara, now 18, is still haunted by her premature puberty ]

Recently I experienced first-hand the impossible tensions Dr Stanhope describes when I was allowed inside a secure children's unit for a documentary on Radio 4.

These child prisons house some of the most damaged and potentially dangerous youngsters in the UK, sent there for their own protection by social services or the courts.

I observed one boy blowing his top in what was meant to be an anger management counselling session - kicking at the locked door and demanding to be let out, hurling abuse at me when I said there was no need to swear.

Although he looked about 18, he'd hit puberty at nine and was fully physically mature at around the age of ten. The boy may have looked grown up, but his troubles had begun when, just like any other ten-year-old, he had been showing off to some older boys, trying to impress.

Sadly for him, his idols were in a drug dealing gang. They had used him to do their dirty work and he had quickly built up a record for serious violence.

'You see,' he growled at me in a deep, gravely voice, 'I didn't want to be with kids of my age, playing hide-and-seek.

The problem is that two important life events - puberty, where we develop physically and sexually, and adolescence, where we mature emotionally and psychologically - are now happening separately for many children, whereas they used to coincide.

Although the consequences for many won't be as devastating as they were for the boy I met in the secure unit, they will be damaging nevertheless.

Tara Lamey, 18, is a service co-ordinator. She lives in North London with her mother Susan, a teaching assistant. Tara recalls noticing the first signs of puberty when she was just seven years old.

'I was growing hair under my armpits,' she says. 'And I was horrified. At that age, barely into primary school, I'd had no lessons about puberty and had no idea what was happening to my body. But I knew it didn't feel right. I remember getting changed for swimming lessons and feeling mortified. I longed to fit in and be hairless like all of my friends.'

Shortly afterwards, and still aged seven, Tara felt she couldn't confide in a soul when she began developing pubic hair.

'I just wanted to pretend it wasn't happening to me,' she says. 'Then one evening, when I was in the bath, mum popped in and I remember her asking me how long I'd had hair like that. I felt embarrassed but relieved Mum knew.'

Luckily for Tara, her mother reacted calmly. Trips to the hospital for tests revealed that although she had started puberty early, her hormone levels were still within a range considered normal - so she wasn't given treatment.

'I don't recall Mum acting shocked, but in hindsight she must have been stunned to find her little girl was developing so early. Around the same time I began developing mood swings. I can't recall much about it, but I do remember feeling teary for no reason.'

[ Growing up fast: Hayley Smith, 15, needed to wear a bra by the age of six ]

Despite the reassurance that she was normal, Tara was a child who felt terribly embarrassed, insisting on covering up, wearing T-shirts with sleeves even in summer.

Sadly, those hang-ups are still there today. 'Even now I dislike getting changed in communal changing rooms and I also hate anyone seeing my armpits - I still feel more comfortable in tops and dresses with small sleeves.'

Wanting to be like everyone else is very important to children, according to Linda Blair, a psychologist with 30 years' experience working with families both in the NHS and in private practice.

She told me she has lost count of the number of people whose problems stem from early puberty, but says there has been a dramatic rise in recent years.

'Children can feel miserable about anything that makes them stand out,' she says. 'They want to belong. It's only in late adolescence that we want to be different and individual.

'The fact they are maturing so much faster physically than they are emotionally is creating huge tensions within children and a great deal of conflict at home.'

Linda also believes that advertising, which encourages children to want to look older, is adding to their problems.

'Children of ten are only just about able to empathise, let alone to project into the future and realise the consequences of their actions.

'Yet some are hitting puberty at nine and are being encouraged by what they see on TV to think they should be having feelings and experiences they are just not ready for.'

Linda Blair and psychologists like her find themselves advising parents on how to explain physical signs of sexual maturity to children who are not emotionally ready to learn about sex.

'It can be traumatic for children. I advise parents to answer questions only as they arise and to tell young girls who are having periods that it is the way the body prepares for having a baby one day, but that the body is getting rid of that preparation because that day is a long way off in the future.'

As well as lasting psychological problems, there are worries that early puberty might bring with it an increased risk of health problems in later life.

'The earlier a girl has her period, the longer her exposure to oestrogen,' Dr Stanhope explains. 'This may increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer and of developing cardiovascular problems.

'In men, prostate cancer is a hormonally sensitive tumour. So, in theory, the longer you are exposed to testosterone, the more you would expect the incidence rate to rise.'

According to Cancer Research UK, a girl who has her first period a year later than her contemporaries is five per cent less likely to develop cancer in later life. Girls who reach puberty early are also more likely to develop diabetes.

This has happened to Hayley Smith, from Bingham near Nottingham. Now 15, Hayley began puberty aged just three and at six was having periods and wearing a bra.

Her parents Debbie, a former chemist, and David, a project manager, were worried sick - and still are. Hayley was diagnosed with diabetes when she was four.

'David and I had so many discussions,' says Debbie. 'We have asked ourselves: "What if Hayley's early puberty meant she would go through the menopause in her 20s? Would her fertility be affected? Should we be thinking about having some of her eggs frozen in case she wanted a family of her own one day?"

'They are questions we still don't know the answers to because the necessary research hasn't been done.'

The Smiths are also baffled as to why their child has been affected. Although scientists don't know why the age of puberty has dropped, they agree that the change is too sudden to be genetic and must be down to environmental factors - almost certainly more than one.

The Western diet is probably part of it and there is a link between obesity and early puberty. But in the Danish study, scientists found no difference in the body mass index of girls who were growing breasts a year earlier than those who weren't.

They concluded that, although obesity is a risk factor, it doesn't explain the trend. Research in Italy suggested that the light and radiation coming from televisions and computer screens may be suppressing the production of the hormone melatonin, which regulates the body's internal clock.

This hormone is thought to protect against the early onset of puberty. And as scientists have looked for significant changes in the way we live that may account for what is happening, Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals - mostly man-made - are emerging as a prime suspect.

These can damage the way hormones work in our bodies and can mimic the effects of some hormones, including oestrogen.

It is a tricky area of research because we are all exposed to a cocktail of these chemicals in our daily lives. One group of chemicals called phthalates are added to plastic to increase its flexibility and can be found in everything from food packaging to toys.

Another, Bisphenol A, is used in some children's feeding cups and even baby bottles. For his part, Dr Stanhope believes that the early onset of puberty may turn out to have more to do with chemical contamination than diet. 'It's just a hunch,' he told me.

'There's no proof as yet, but you only have to look at the way sperm counts have come down in the West in the past 40 years.'

Whatever the factors, there will be lots involved. Ten years on from the first findings of early puberty in our children, I too know an emotionally immature little girl with the body of a grown up.

This girl, the child of some friends, began her periods at ten and now at 13 years is wreaking havoc at home, demanding to wear revealing low-cut clothes and make-up even at school.

For parents trying to protect their children from the distressing prospect of turning into adults before their time, psychologist Linda Blair is adamant that we must be ' consistent, clear and directive'.

We must, she says, lay down the rules. 'You must be willing to say to a child: "No. You are too young to go out alone unsupervised to hang out with the opposite sex." Tell girls firmly: "You are too young for underwear designed for adults."

'Kids feel very alone in puberty, they need a calm and steady guide.'

When families do as she suggests, she says, everyone is happier - particularly the child.

According to Linda, early puberty is one factor in the distress some children exhibit and lies behind the disturbing current prevalence of anorexia and self-harm.

'Sadly for our children this disconnect between physical and mental maturity has come at a time when they are bombarded with images of experiences they are not ready for - romantic relationships and sex,' she says.

'Advertising is pushing kids to look older, while at the same time parents are reluctant to be clear, firm and direct.'

Now - more than ever, it seems - vulnerable children are thrust into the dangerous realms of physical maturity and need the support of genuine adults, confident and willing to help them through.

A Voice Of Reason...

2010-06-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

CHRISTOPHER

HITCHENS:

THE VIRGIN BIRTH

Jesus Bleeds Again...Does This Guy Ever Stop?

2010-06-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

Pilgrims Besiege Church

To See 'Blood' Run

From Image Of Christ

[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk ]

Thousands of pilgrims have overwhelmed a small church in Argentina after blood was said to be oozing down the face of an image of Jesus Christ.

A red substance was photographed running from the forehead of Jesus and down his cheek in a church depiction of the Last Supper.

Local priest Father Jorge Gandur said the 'ooze comes from one of the wounds on the left side of the forehead of Christ produced by the crown of thorns'.

The stains were first noticed on Friday by two men who had entered the Oratory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Yerba Buena, Tucuman province.

The pair reported the substance to Father Gandur, who took samples of the substance to be scientifically tested to see if it was human blood.

After local media were tipped off that the men had seen Christ weeping 'tears of blood' the streets surrounding the church became jammed pilgrims wanting to see the phenomenon for themselves.

Hundreds of people were reported to be crying and praying fervently in at least two streets leading up to the church.

The area has become so congested and the church so crowded that on Sunday priests celebrated Mass in the street outside.

As more people arrived from surrounding provinces, officials of the Archdiocese of Tucuman yesterday urged worshippers to exercise prudence and caution and not to jump to conclusions about the alleged authenticity of the image.

'If this is something wrought by God, it will have continuity, and if it is of men, it will disappear,' Father Gandur said.

'As a priest, at no time have I wished to create false expectations,' he said.

'I am not going to support deceit. Something happened here that divine wisdom will explain in time.'

The Roman Catholic Church is cautious in dealing with claims of so-called 'private revelations' because so many later turn out to be false.

Hundreds have been reported in the last century but only a few are considered to be authentic.

The Vatican has admitted that it believes most are the fruits of the imaginations of the alleged visionaries or the elaborate hoaxes of people seeking to gain financially.

Five years ago, for instance, a statue of St Pìo of Pietrelcina, a 20th century priest commonly known as 'Padre Pio', was said to have wept blood in a church in Marsicovetere, Italy, but tests later showed that the blood belonged to a woman.

Last week Church officials in France rejected the claims of a visionary who said the Virgin Mary was using her as a mouthpiece to speak to the world.

In 2007 the Vatican also aggressively dismissed as 'hysterical' the claims that the Mother of Christ was appearing to a woman in the back garden of her home in Surbiton, Surrey.

New Darkness Comes To Light...

2010-06-17T13:49:00.000-07:00

Dark Energy May

Not Exist In Space,

Scientists Claim

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

Dark matter and energy, the mysterious forces thought to make up 96 per cent of the universe, may not exist according to a groundbreaking study.

British scientists have claimed that the method used to calculate the make-up of the universe may be wrong.

The universe as we know it – formed of recognisable components such as planets, stars, asteroids and gas - accounts for just four per cent of the cosmos, according to the decades old Standard Model.

The rest is thought to be made up of mysterious dark matter and dark energy. This permeates space and powers the expansion of the universe.

But physicists at Durham University now claim the calculations on which the Standard Model is based could be fatally flawed.

This raises the possibility that the “dark side” of the cosmos does not exist, which in turn could mean that the universe is expanding less quickly than previously thought.

Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society, which published the findings, said: “This would challenge greatly our assumptions about the long term future of the universe, because the assumption at the moment is that the universe is expanding and if it isn’t that would be a huge shock.

“It could even mean that the expansion of the universe is slowing down and could grind to a halt.”

A new analysis of measurements taken by NASA of Big Bang heat radiation in 2001 showed that the heat waves may be far smaller than previously thought.

When the measurements were first taken in 2001 the size of the ripples in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation led scientists to conclude that the cosmos is made up of four percent "normal" matter, 22 percent "dark" or invisible matter and 74 percent "dark" energy.

But scientists now claim that the waves of radiation which were previously measured at about twice the size of the full moon may in fact be less than half that size.

Professor Tom Shanks, who led the research, said: “CMB observations are a powerful tool for cosmology and it is vital to check for systematic effects. If our results prove correct then it will become less likely that dark energy and exotic matter particles dominate the universe. So the evidence that the universe has a dark side will weaken.”

Space Madness...

2010-06-16T01:00:00.000-07:00

NASA Warns Solar

Flares From 'Huge

Space Storm' Will

Cause Devastation

[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]

Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”, Nasa has warned.

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

Dr Fisher added: “Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect.”

A “space weather” conference in Washington DC last week, attended by Nasa scientists, policy-makers, researchers and government officials, was told of similar warnings.

While scientists have previously told of the dangers of the storm, Dr Fisher’s comments are the most comprehensive warnings from Nasa to date.

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause the Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely.

A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.

He said preparations were similar to those in a hurricane season, where authorities knew a problem was imminent but did not know how serious it would be.

“I think the issue is now that modern society is so dependant on electronics, mobile phones and satellites, much more so than the last time this occurred,” he said.

“There is a severe economic impact from this. We take it very seriously. The economic impact could be like a large, major hurricane or storm.”

The National Academy of Sciences warned two years ago that power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications could “all be knocked out by intense solar activity”.

It warned a powerful solar storm could cause “twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina”. That storm devastated New Orleans in 2005 and left an estimated damage bill of more than $125bn (£85bn).

Dr Fisher said precautions could be taken including creating back up systems for hospitals and power grids and allow development on satellite “safe modes”.

“If you know that a hazard is coming … and you have time enough to prepare and take precautions, then you can avoid trouble,” he added.

His division, a department of the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC, which investigates the Sun’s influence on the earth, uses dozens of satellites to study the threat.

The government has said it was aware of the threat and “contingency plans were in place” to cope with the fall out from such a storm.

These included allowing for certain transformers at the edge of the National Grid to be temporarily switched off and to improve voltage levels throughout the network.

The National Risk Register, established in 2008 to identify different dangers to Britain, also has “comprehensive” plans on how to handle a complete outage of electricity supplies.

Let's Mount Aunt Vera There...

2010-06-16T00:55:00.000-07:00

3D Sculptures

Made Out Of

Human Ashes

[ http://www.boingboing.net ]

Dutch artist Wieki Somers makes 3D printed sculptures of animals paired with common household appliances out of human ashes.

A Godly GOOOOAAAAL...

2010-06-16T00:49:00.000-07:00

Meet Mexico's Soccer

Baby Jesus

[ http://www.aolnews.com ]

Ah, the FIFA World Cup. The one time every four years Americans pretend to know anything whatsoever about soccer.

The racks at Dick's Sporting Goods are littered with various jerseys from various countries that everyone claims some sort of connection to, and the churches in Mexico begin displaying Baby Jesus Christ dressed in Mexican soccer team gear, complete with official FIFA soccer balls.

This right here? This is really eff'd up, man.

Now I'm no defender of the sacrosanct, and I'm not even offended by the liberties taken with this childlike Christ's image. I'm more concerned with the hollow eyes and porcelain cheeks. They might as well name him Damien. Of course, if I were a pious man, I'd get all up on the whole "idol" thing, plus the fact that Mexico seems to have taken full franchise of the "Christ got our back, yo" thing. And with Jesus as a 12th man, I don't think any other team stands a chance. So yeah, mark me down for Mexico in my pool.

The Big Thaw...

2010-06-16T00:45:00.000-07:00

Mystery Explained:

How Frozen Humans

Are Brought Back

[ http://www.livescience.com ]

Yeast and worms can survive hypothermia if they are first subjected to extreme oxygen deprivation, a new study finds.

The results could explain a long-held mystery as to how humans can be brought back to life after "freezing to death," the scientists say.

The study uncovered a previously unknown ability of organisms to survive lethal cold by temporarily slowing the biological processes that maintain life.

"We have found that extension of survival limits in the cold is possible if oxygen consumption is first diminished," said researcher Mark B. Roth of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash.

One form of "forced hibernation," the behavior known as "suspended animation," literally involves the sudden halting of chemical reactions in the body due to the lack of oxygen. A 10-hour time lapse video of a garden worm embryo in the process of developing into a full-fledged baby worm showed a rapid process of cell division freeze to a stop upon the environment’s oxygen removal. That same cell division resumed unaffected two and a half hours after oxygen was restored.

When subjected to literally freezing temperatures, the embryos of yeast and garden worms do not live, researchers found. A full 99 percent of those in the experiment died after 24 hours of exposure to temperatures just above freezing.

But, when first deprived of oxygen in the manner described above, 66 percent of the yeast and 97 percent of the garden worms survived. Upon re-warming and reintroduction of oxygen, the "two widely divergent organisms" reanimated and showed normal life spans, said scientists in a statement.

Improved understanding of the connection between low oxygen and low temperature could lead the way to extending the shelf-life of human organs for transplantation, Roth said.

It could also explain what has been an unsolved mystery: reported instances of humans "brought back to life" after succumbing to hypothermia.

"There are many examples in the scientific literature of humans who appear frozen to death. They have no heartbeat and are clinically dead. But they can be reanimated," Roth said. "Similarly, the organisms in my lab can be put into a state of reversible suspended animation through oxygen deprivation and other means. They appear dead but are not."

Documented cases of humans successfully revived after spending hours or days without a pulse in extremely cold conditions first inspired Roth to study the relationship between human hypothermia and his own research in forced hibernation.

In the winter of 2001, the body temperature of Canadian toddler Erica Norby plunged to 61 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) as she lay for hours in below-freezing weather after wandering outside wearing only a diaper. Apparently dead, she recovered completely after being re-warmed and resuscitated.

The same curious fate befell Japanese mountain climber Mitsutaka Uchikoshi in 2006, who was discovered with a core body temperature of 71 degrees F (22 degrees C) after 23 days after falling asleep on a snowy mountain.

"We wondered if what was happening with the organisms in my laboratory was also happening in people like the toddler and the Japanese mountain climber. Before they got cold did they somehow manage to decrease their oxygen consumption? Is that what protected them?" Roth said. "Our work in nematodes and yeast suggests that this may be the case, and it may bring us a step closer to understanding what happens to people who appear to freeze to death but can be reanimated."

Oxygen deprivation’s protective effect comes from the way it arrests biological processes before dangerous instabilities can develop. When reanimated, the processes continue where they left off, with no sign of disruption having occurred.

"When an organism is suspended its biological processes cannot do anything wrong," Roth said. "Under conditions of extreme cold, sometimes that is the correct thing to be doing; when you can't do it right, don't do it at all."
The ultimate goal of such research is to "buy time" for patients in physical shock, such as after heart attacks and severe blood loss, increasing their chances of survival by preserving them until they can reach medical care, researchers said in a statement. Other forms of forced hibernation include exposure to chemical agents like hydrogen sulfide.

A Blessed Stain...

2010-06-16T00:42:00.000-07:00

Couple Find Face

Of Baby Jesus In

Wallpaper While

Decorating Their

Kitchen

[ http://swns.com ]

A couple decorating their home had the fear of God put into them after this image of the baby Jesus appeared – on their WALLPAPER.

Stunned Sheila and Richard Woolhouse were stripping old wallpaper from their kitchen when they spotted the religious incarnation.

The eerie damp marking appears to show a baby wrapped in linen – with eyes, nose, mouth and hair clearly defined.

Sheila, 63, of St Austell, Cornwall, says the image looks like the baby Messiah.

She said: ”It’s spooky – it looks like the baby Jesus. They way it looks like a child wrapped in swaddling – it really has got religious connotations.

”The more you look at it, the more real it becomes. A few of the neighbours and friends have been round and they have been surprised by it as well.”

Richard added: ”We’ve lived her fore 23 years but never noticed the image until we decided to take out a small wall in the kitchen area.

”I do believe in the after life and there have been a few strange goings-on in here over the years.”

When Science Roars...

2010-06-15T23:22:00.000-07:00

Why Do People Laugh
At Creationists? (Pt. 33)

by Thunderfoot

TED Talks, U Listen...

2010-06-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

MICHAEL SHERMER:

THE PATTERN BEHIND

SELF-DECEPTION

Impressive Skills...

2010-06-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

Rapping With 100
Movie Titles

Stayin' Alive...

2010-06-15T23:04:00.000-07:00

WORLD'S OLDEST
PORN STAR

Hard At It At 75

Chowtime...

2010-06-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

FEEDING OF
THE DOGS

100 Dogs Eat On Command

Starlight, Star Bright...

2010-06-15T22:53:00.000-07:00

Sun's Strange Behavior

Baffles Astronomers

[ http://www.liveleak.com ]

The sun's temper ebbs and flows on what scientists had thought was a pretty predictable cycle, but lately our closest star has been acting up.

Typically, a few stormy years would knock out a satellite or two and maybe trip a power grid on Earth. Then a few years of quiet, and then back to the bad behavior. But an extremely long stretch of low activity in recent years has scientists baffled and scrambling for better forecasting models.

An expected minimum of solar activity, between 2008 and 2009, was unusually deep. And while the sun would normally ramp up activity by now, heading into its next cycle, the sun may be on the verge of a weak solar cycle instead, astronomers said at the 216th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Miami last month.

"We're witnessing something unlike anything we've seen in 100 years," said David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The sun's constant interaction with Earth makes it important for solar physicists to keep track of solar activity. Stormy periods can force special safety precautions by satellite operators and power grid managers, and astronauts can be put at risk from bursts of radiation spat out by solar storm. Scientists need to more reliably predict what's in store.

At the conference, four solar physicists presented four very different methods of measuring and tracking solar cycles.

The sun has spots

Sunspots are areas of concentrated magnetic activity that appear as dark dots on the solar surface. The ebb and flow of the sun's magnetic activity, manifested in the appearance of sunspots, make up the solar cycle.

Typically, a cycle lasts about 11 years, taking roughly 5.5 years to move from a solar minimum, a period of time when there are few sunspots, to peak at the solar maximum, during which sunspot activity is amplified.

The previous cycle 23's extraordinary minimum recorded the highest number of days without sunspots that researchers had seen since 1913, said Hathaway.

Hathaway and his team of researchers measured what is called the meridional flow, which is the circulation of stellar material from the sun's equator toward the poles and back again. This flow can often influence a cycle's strength.

The scientists examined the changes in the structure of the flow, and the levels of geomagnetic activity, as they corresponded to the minimums and maximums of the previous solar cycles.

"We found that there were variations in the strength of that flow," Hathaway said. "The last minimum in 1996, that velocity was about 11 meters per second (about 22 miles an hour), which is pretty slow for an object as big as the sun. That flow slowed down as we went to maximum in 2001."

The meridional flow then quickly increased again, and by 2004, it was faster than it was at the last maximum, said Hathaway. This flow continued to stay fast on the approach to this most recent minimum.

"My suspicion is that this sunspot cycle 23 was a weaker cycle than the last two, with fewer sunspots and weaker magnetic fields. These may feed into what happens with the meridional flow that is going to lead to another weak cycle."

Hathaway predicts that cycle 24 should reach its peak in mid-2013 at about half the size of the last three cycles.

Act Of God...

2010-06-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

Touchdown Jesus

Destroyed

By Lightning

[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com ]

(AP) MONROE, Ohio — A six-story-tall statue of Jesus Christ with his arms raised along a highway was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm Monday night and burned to the ground, police said.

The "King of Kings" statue, one of southwest Ohio's most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.

The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m., Monroe police dispatchers said.

The sculpture, 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained early Tuesday.

The fire spread from the statue to an adjacent amphitheater but was confined to the attic area, and no one was injured, police Chief Mark Neu said. The fire department would release a monetary damage estimate Tuesday, he said.

Goldilox Preserves...

2010-06-15T22:41:00.000-07:00

Prehistoric Mammal

Hair Found In

Cretaceous Amber

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]

Palaeontologists have discovered two mammal hairs encased in 100 million-year-old amber.

While older 2D fossilised hairs are known, those preserved in the amber are the oldest 3D specimens known.

The hairs, found alongside a fly pupa in amber uncovered in southwest France, are remarkably similar to hair found on modern mammals.

That implies that the shape and structure of mammal hair has remained unchanged over a vast period of time.

"We have 2D hair imprints as early as the Middle Jurassic," says Dr Romain Vullo of the University of Rennes, France, who discovered the hair.

The Jurassic Period lasted from 200 to 145 millions of years ago, followed by the Cretaceous Period which lasted to 65 million years ago.

"However, carbonised hair provides much less information about the structure than a 3D hair preserved in amber," says Dr Vullo.

"Our specimens are the oldest known hair specimens in which we can observe the cuticular structure."

Dr Vullo and Professor Didier Neraudeau identified the hairs, which were initially found by colleague Dr Vincent Girard in amber he was examining for microorganisms.

Details are published in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

The piece of amber, which is fossilised tree resin, was found in the Font-de-Benon quarry at Archingeay-Les Nouillers in Charente-Maritime, southwest France.

Dead or hungry?

The first hair fragment is 2.4mm long and 32 to 48 micrometres wide, while the second is just 0.6mm long and 49 to 78 micrometres wide.

A close analysis of the hairs showed they have a very similar cuticular structure to those of hair or fur carried by modern mammals.

The identity of the animal that shed the hair is not known.

Four teeth of a primitive marsupial called Arcantiodelphys have been found in the quarry, above the layer in which the amber was found.

"The more parsimonious hypothesis is to consider that the hair from the amber belong to this animal, or a closely related form," Dr Vullo told the BBC.

As to how the hair became encased in amber, the researchers say there are three possibilities.

Either amber swamped part of an animal's corpse, an idea that is supported by the fly pupa found alongside the mammal hairs, as a fly may have laid its eggs into the carcass of the dead animal.

Or the hair was lost by a living animal which brushed past the resin, perhaps by a tree-living (arboreal) species.

Or the hair was lost in a similar manner by a mammal that came to feed on insects trapped in the resin, which later fossilised into amber.

Moon Martinis, Anyone...

2010-06-15T22:35:00.000-07:00

'Much More Water'

Found In Lunar Rocks

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]

The Moon might be much wetter than previously thought, a group of scientists has said.

A US-led team analysed the mineral apatite in lunar rocks picked up by the Apollo space missions and in a lunar meteorite found in North Africa.

The scientists found that there was at least 100 times more water in the Moon's minerals than they had previously believed.

The new study has been published in the journal PNAS.

This group is one of several different teams of researchers hunting for evidence of water on the Moon - and clues to how it got there.

Lead author Francis McCubbin from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC told BBC News that the water content on the Moon ranges from 64 parts per billion to five parts per million.

"It would be about 2.5 times the volume of the Great Lakes," he said.

"Or another way of looking at it - if you took all of the water that was locked up inside the rocks of the Moon and put them on the surface, it would make a metre-thick layer covering the Moon."

The scientist explained that the Moon most probably formed after a Mars-sized space body collided with the young Earth, some 4.5 billion years ago.

The high-energy impact produced molten debris, which eventually cooled to form our planet's only natural satellite.

Back then, he said, there was a magma ocean on the Moon. Magma contained water, which eventually erupted via "fire fountains" on to the lunar surface.

Most of this water evaporated during the volcanic activity - but some of it stayed, said Dr McCubbin.

"I like to use the analogy of someone who's trying to make non-alcoholic beer. There's always going to be some alcohol left," he explained.

Quest for water

After the US Apollo space missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s returned to Earth with numerous samples of lunar rocks, scientists spent years examining them in search of water.

At first, they declared that the Moon was dry - but this theory was challenged in 2008, when a US team used the method of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) and found evidence of water in lunar volcanic glasses - pebble-like rocks that ended up on the Moon's surface after the volcanic outpouring.

It was a breakthrough discovery, even though the quantity of water was only of the order of 46 parts per million.

Nevertheless, the scientists said that their research shed light on the origins of lunar water, asserting that it was "native" to the Moon.

Earlier in 2010, a radar experiment aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft found thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole.

In the recent study, Dr McCubbin and his colleagues used SIMS to look at the Apollo samples once more - but this time, they analysed the only water-bearing mineral of the rocks - apatite.

This mineral happens to be a major component of tooth enamel and bones and, as Dr McCubbin explained, "has a better chance of retaining water than volcanic glass".

The team specifically studied hydroxyl (OH) - a chemical compound in apatite that contains one atom of oxygen and one atom of hydrogen.

The researchers combined their measurements with models that analyse how the material crystallised as the Moon cooled.

The team found that the Moon's interior contains at least 100 times more water than was previously believed, stored in lunar minerals.

Other researchers have called the results important for future studies.

"It is gratifying to see this proof of the OH contents in lunar apatite," commented lunar scientist Bradley Jolliff from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

"The concentrations are very low and, accordingly, they have been until recently nearly impossible to detect. We can now finally begin to consider the implications—and the origin - of water in the interior of the Moon."

Other theories

Dr Lawrence Taylor from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, US has been involved in a separate, but similar research.

He told BBC News that besides finding water in the apatite, he and Jim Greenwood from Wesleyan University in Connecticut have come up with an additional theory about the origins of lunar water.

"We're thinking now that there might have been a cometary input as well," said Dr Taylor.

He explained that there were a lot of comets flying around at the time of the Moon's formation, "hitting the little, nascent, early Moon some 4.5 billion years ago".

Some scientists call comets "dirty icebergs" as they mostly contain ice, as well as other rocky material, soil and gases.

"So maybe there was a lot of cometary debris going by and as these 'dirty icebergs' hit the Moon, they provided a lot of water input," Dr Taylor said.

"Back then, the outer portion of the Moon was molten, it was all a lunar magma ocean, so the comets were incorporated into the chemistry of the [Earth's satellite]".

The Hitchens Post...

2010-06-15T22:30:00.000-07:00

Charles, Prince

Of Piffle

[ http://www.slate.com ]

by Christopher Hitchens

A very silly man gives a

very sinister speech.

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one. And a king does have the ability to alter the atmosphere and to affect the ways in which important matters are discussed. (The queen herself proved that in subtle ways, by letting it be known that there were aspects of Margaret Thatcher's foreign policy that she did not view with unmixed delight.)

So the speech made by Prince Charles at Oxford last week might bear a little scrutiny. Discussing one of his favorite topics, the "environment," he announced that the main problem arose from a "deep, inner crisis of the soul" and that the "de-souling" of humanity probably went back as far as Galileo. In his view, materialism and consumerism represented an imbalance, "where mechanistic thinking is so predominant," and which "goes back at least to Galileo's assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion." He described the scientific worldview as an affront to all the world's "sacred traditions." Then for the climax:

As a result, Nature has been completely objectified—She has become an it—and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo's scheme.

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. None of these liberating undertakings have required any sort of assumption about a soul. That belief is at best optional. (Incidentally, nature is no more or less "objectified" whether we give it a gender name or a neuter one. Merely calling it Mummy will not, alas, alter this salient fact.)

In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself—perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?—with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range.

None of this might matter very much, until you notice the venue at which Charles delivered his farrago of nonsense. It was unleashed upon an audience at the Center for Islamic Studies at Oxford University, an institution of which he is the patron. Nor is this his only foray into Islamophilia. Together with the Saudi royal family, he supported the mosque in North London that acted as host and incubator to Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid, the hook-handed Abu Hamza al-Masri, and several other unsavory customers. The prince's official job description as king will be "defender of the faith," which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire.

A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own. And, as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience. I quote from a recent document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the imposition of sharia, which has been very active in London mosques and in the infiltration of local political parties. "The primary work" in the establishment of a future Muslim empire, it announces, "is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum."

So this is where all the vapid talk about the "soul" of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The "vacuum" will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

BP Viral Video...

2010-06-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

THE BOARDROOM
SPILL...

Meanwhile, On The Beach...

2010-06-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

Return To Sender...

2010-06-13T01:42:00.000-07:00

Thinking Man's

Mystery: Stolen

Descartes Letter

Returned

[ http://www.google.com/hostednews ]

PARIS — A stolen letter written by 17th-century thinker Descartes and found in the United States was returned to France on Tuesday, ending a detective tale featuring a Google search and a thieving Italian count.

"I am, of course, a bit amazed at what a simple search at home from your home computer late at night can bring about," Erik-Jan Bos, a Dutch Descartes scholar who found the letter through the web, said before a handover ceremony.

The letter written by French philosopher Rene Descartes in 1641 went missing more than 150 years ago, one of a vast collection of documents stolen by an Italian count, Guglielmo Libri.

Libri, a math professor in France in the 19th century who was also in charge of inspecting archived papers, is believed to have stolen thousands of letters and documents, selling them to collectors and booksellers.

Descartes' letter eventually wound up in a collection at Haverford College in the US state of Pennsylvania, and the school's administration was not aware of its theft generations earlier when Bos informed them of it.

Bos found the letter's trace after keying the terms "autographed letter" and "Descartes" into the search engine late one night in January, contacting the college immediately by email and hearing back soon after.

The letter was important not only because it was from Descartes, writing to his friend Marin Mersenne, who was acting as an editor for him as well, but also because it contained significant substance.

In the letter, the author of the famous statement "I think, therefore I am" discusses his soon to be published "Meditations on First Philosophy," writing of potential changes, among other things.

The school knew the letter was in its library's special collections, but did not realise it was considered missing in France and had been stolen.

John Anderies, head of special collections at Haverford, notified the school's president and recommended it be given back to the Institut de France, where one of the country's oldest libraries is located and where the letter was taken from.

For Anderies and Haverford President Stephen Emerson, the question of what to do with it was a moral one -- even though a legal case could likely be made for hanging on to it.

"Personally, I thought that if the shoe had been on the other foot, that if material had been stolen from our library, we would be very grateful if it were returned," Anderies said. "So, in that sense, it is a very easy decision."

Everyone hasn't seen it that way. In fact, Libri, convicted in absentia in France after fleeing to England, is believed to have stolen 72 of 75 archived letters from Descartes to Mersenne.

One Descartes letter was auctioned in Switzerland recently, and the Institut de France could not come up with the 150,000 euros (179,000 dollars) needed to buy it back, said Mireille Pastoureau, library director at the institute.

Emerson said he believed returning the letter was an obvious choice -- though he had personal reasons for wanting to keep it.

He had been a philosophy student and recalled reading "Meditations" in both English and French, saying it was one of the great works of Western philosophy.

"So I went over to read (the letter)," he said. "And it was great."

But he did not hesitate. With the decision to return it made, the four-page letter was encased in a wooden box, allowing the university president to take it with him on his flight to Paris this week.

On Tuesday, he, Anderies, Bos, French philosopher and Descartes expert Jean-Luc Marion, along with others, took part in a handover ceremony at the Institut de France.

The Americans did not leave completely empty-handed: The institute awarded their school a 15,000-euro grant for the letter's return.

Drawn Together...

2010-06-13T01:39:00.000-07:00

A Cartoonist's

Chicago — Warts

And All

[ http://www.chicagotribune.com ]

The first time Daniel Clowes says he thinks about Chicago every time he has to draw a face, you feel warm inside. Then a second or two pass, and the meaning of what he said begins to settle in. You remember what a Daniel Clowes face looks like and you start to feel less cozy. You glance at a reflective surface, down at one of his lumpish creations, back up at that reflective surface. Then you sigh and wish you were never born.

Daniel Clowes grew up in Hyde Park, and became one of the most important contemporary authors of alternative comics. Along with Chicago cartoonists Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti, he left a key mark on the acerbic, dour tone of the underground comic (and a literal mark on Wicker Park ). And yet if you have ever read one of his comics or seen "Ghost World," the acclaimed 2001 adaptation of his work (which earned him an Academy Award nomination for screenwriting, and co-starred the Clowesian Steve Buscemi), you will feel bad about yourself. And bad about others, as well.

And society, and …

Oh, why bother getting out of bed?

"I saw Dan give a talk in New York recently," said Adrian Tomine, another influential alternative cartoonist and illustrator, and a long-time friend of Clowes. "This woman stands up and says, ‘Daniel, where do you get the ideas for such ugly faces?' And Dan goes, ‘Well, look, have you ever been to Chicago?'"

And so, the next time Clowes mentions his love of Chicago, and its profound influence on his comics, on his famously sweaty, pimply faces, full of desperation and worry lines and thinning hair — a portrait of everything you have ever feared you'd see in a photo of yourself — you get a little defensive: You tell him he's lived in California for a while (because he has). You add (sucking in your gut) that perhaps Chicago is more toned than he remembers.

He pauses.

"I don't mean that in an insulting way," he said. "I say that feeling out of place where I am." He lives in Oakland, Ca.; he's lived on the West Coast almost 20 years now. "But I still feel unattractive here, very schlubby. You get used to everyone being perfect and in shape, so when I get off a plane in Chicago, it just feels more … specific. When I close my eyes to draw I always think Chicago in 1975. My formative years. Those faces, that architecture. Every building in my background is a version of the John Hancock. Remember, when I was a kid, downtown was dead. The Financial District was like being in a zombie movie. I would make Super 8 films with friends and we would shoot in the middle of State because there was literally no one around to bother us."

Clowes is 49 now.

He's appearing this weekend at the Printers Row Lit Fest — 25 years after selling his first work to then-fledgling graphic novel publisher Fantagraphics, then creating the iconic alt-comic "Eightball," then seminal graphic novels such as "Ghost World" and "David Boring," which led to a frequent gig illustrating the cover of The New Yorker.

However, before this story makes him sound like a lapsed Midwesterner, understand that as misanthropic as his work is often mistakenly judged, the need for warts and all is empathy — an empathy so deep that "Wilson," his latest book, tells the story of a schlubby, middle-aged misanthrope who grew up in Chicago and now lives in Oakland and pines for the way things were and the people he knew. It's not autobiographical, Clowes said. But not entirely without autobiography.

"I wanted the (title) character to feel about things much the way I feel about things," he said. "He's just hopelessly inept at getting it across, the kind of person who doesn't want to be dishonest in any way. He wants people to like him in his worst possible state, and he's gotten so used to that, so used to expecting the world to tag along, he has no sense of what an off-putting creep he's become.

"The thing is, I look for commonality no matter how objectionable a character. Still, it's not reality. Compared with reality, I barely scratch the surface."

About five years ago, Liz Mason, the manager of Quimby's on North Avenue, was poking around in the bookstore's basement when she found a sizable stash of tiny, hastily stapled comics, scrawled in a variety of pens and markers, then photocopied. Each showcased a different style, and the names signed at the bottom were remarkable: Clowes; Ware; Archer Prewitt, who created "Sof' Boy" and co-founded Chicago bands the Coctails and Sea and Cake; illustrator Gary Leib; Doug Allen, who created another iconic underground comic, "Steven"; and Terry LaBan, who draws the nationally syndicated comic strip "Edge City" — a who's who of early ‘90s Chicago comic book talent, or rather something of a "Superfriends" of hip alt-comic reference points.

"(The comics) were small, cute and folded, and I remember thinking that it looked like these guys had been involved in a kind of comics jam," she said.

She's spot on.

Clowes attended the University of Chicago Lab School (and was a classmate of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan). He grew up at 55th and Woodlawn, not far from the Woodlawn Tap — where a Clowesian character or two can still be found. By the mid ‘80s, he was well-known nationally within the underground comics scene, which, around 1991, was small. He began meeting with Leib and LaBan at then-new Earwax Cafe on Milwaukee Avenue. "We would basically meet Thursday nights, draw comics and make each other laugh," Clowes remembers. "Then the owner figured out who we were and he asked if we would design the menu and the logo, and so we did. We didn't get paid for it, but we had a permanent tab and ate maybe $400 in bagels."

This circle expanded incrementally, becoming a kind of intense collective, encompassing Allen; then Ware, who moved to Chicago from Texas (and lived next door to Clowes); then Prewitt, who introduced himself to Clowes and was "pawned off on Gary at first, because Daniel didn't quite how to navigate fans. But it was great, a common thread of melancholy. We finished two or three comics each meeting. But it takes a certain temperament for young men to sit in a circle and obsessively draw. Other cartoonists wanted in. Dan and Gary picked carefully who they wanted to spent time with. They knew adding people would throw off the balance. Anyway, there were a lot of free scones, which is fair because I think Earwax used those illustrations forever."

To this day, in fact (just as Ware designed the Quimby's sign, which still hangs over North Avenue, a block away).

As for Brunetti, another Chicago-based cartoonist connected to this collective, Clowes remembers him being a member. Brunetti doesn't.

"I knew of it," he said. "Of the great cartoonists in Chicago at that time, Dan was the most established. We both lived in Hyde Park. He was nice enough to encourage me when I barely knew him." But Brunetti said his own work was "so horrible" joining Earwax wasn't an option. "Still, it was inspiring to know artists I looked up to were toiling. Reassuring, actually." A couple of weeks ago, Clowes had a New Yorker cover. A week later, so did Brunetti.

Today, Clowes said he gets back to Chicago once or twice a year. His mother still lives in Hyde Park, though his father died recently of lung cancer. The graphic novel universe, however, which he partly created here, "has really changed tremendously," said Tomine, who grew up in Sacramento, sending fan mail to Clowes' home on the South Side. "It's no longer this little insulated world of a few personalities. The new generation — some of these people have no respect for a Robert Crumb or even know who a Jack Kirby (the great Marvel superhero creator) is. It's really alienating to me. Dan, though, is like beyond reproach with these kids. Which is interesting because his work hasn't changed much. It's still kind of Chicago, with a weird Midwest flatness."

"Wilson" was started while Clowes was sitting at his father's side in a Chicago hospital, reading a biography of Charles Schulz. His father loved "Peanuts," and Clowes began to wonder what Charlie Brown, the quintessential Midwest misanthrope, would have been "if he'd gotten worse and worse." Which led to the realization that his work "wasn't strictly influenced by the comics I grew up with, comic strips and books. When I drew I would often have some classic comic open on the table beside me for inspiration. For each new comic I would do this. Then I stopped when I recognized that what was more inspiring was the idea of creating a history of comics that never existed. What if (older comics) had had John Fords and Alfred Hitchcocks?

"What if the ambitions were at a much higher level? I suppose that now I work in a tradition that does not exist. Some big literary cinematic comic, whatever you want to call it. That's what I and others are doing, I think. But it didn't exist before. Not really. So we had to create it. Without an airbrush."

Feeling Tight? Grab A Jar Of Vlassics...

2010-06-13T00:06:00.000-07:00

Phys Ed: Can

Pickle Juice Stop

Muscle Cramps?

[ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com ]

Recently, 10 healthy male college students filed into an exercise laboratory at Brigham Young University in Utah to drink pickle juice. Many people involved in sports are convinced that the briny fluid combats muscle cramping. In a 2008 survey, a quarter of the athletic trainers interviewed said that they regularly dispense pickle juice to cramp-stricken athletes. Many also report that, in their experiences, the stuff quickly brakes the cramping. The athletic trainers have told researchers that they believe the pickle juice must be replenishing the salt and fluids the athletes had lost to sweat. But no laboratory science had verified that theory.

The Utah volunteers began with a series of 30-minute bicycling sessions, using a semi-recumbent bicycle, configured so that only the leg pedaled. The laboratory was warm, increasing the amount the exercising men sweated. Each cycled in 30-minute bouts (with five minutes of rest between) until each had lost 3 percent of his body weight through perspiration, a widely accepted definition of mild dehydration.

The young men were then fitted with a contraption on the big toe of their unexercised leg, and the tibial nerve in the men’s ankles was electrically stimulated, causing a muscle in the big toe to cramp. (The procedure causes some discomfort, making it too painful to use on larger muscles, like the hamstrings or the quadriceps.) The volunteers were told to relax and let the cramps run their course. The average duration of the cramps was about two and a half minutes.

The volunteers rested and did not drink any fluids. Then their tibial nerve was zapped again. This time, though, as soon as the toe cramps began, each man downed about 2.5 ounces of either deionized water or pickle juice, strained from a jar of ordinary Vlasic dills. The reaction, for some, was rapid. Within about 85 seconds, the men drinking pickle juice stopped cramping. But the cramps continued unabated in the men drinking water. Pickle juice had “relieved a cramp 45 percent faster” than drinking no fluids and about 37 percent faster than water, concluded the authors of the study, which was published last month on the Web site of the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.

Exercise-induced muscle cramps are one of the continuing mysteries of physiology. Extremely pervasive, they afflict most active people at some point. But scientists remain deeply divided about what causes the cramping. For years, most people, inside and outside academia, believed that cramping was caused by sweating-induced dehydration and the accompanying loss of sodium and potassium. Sufferers were advised to load up on potassium-rich bananas or chug large amounts of salty sports drinks.

But a number of laboratory and field studies in recent years have undermined the dehydration theory. The most recent, completed by the same group of scientists who studied pickle juice, employed a similar study design. A group of college students had cramps induced in their toes. They then pedaled with one leg until dehydration set in. Their toes were made to cramp again, Presumably if dehydration were the underlying cause of the cramping, the scientists should have been able to induce a cramp with less electrical stimulation when the men were dehydrated; their muscles should have been primed to cramp. But the experiment didn’t work out that way. As detailed last month in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, the scientists had to use the same amount of stimulation to induce a cramp after dehydration as they had before. Their conclusion? “Exercise-induced cramps occurring to athletes” who are mildly dehydrated “were likely not caused by dehydration,” says Kevin C. Miller, Ph.D., ATC, the lead author of both studies and now an assistant professor in the Athletic Training Education Program at North Dakota State University in Fargo.

What, then, does probably cause athletes to cramp? The pickle-juice experiment provides some intriguing clues. “The pickle juice did not have time” to leave the men’s stomachs during the experiment, Dr. Miller points out. So the liquid itself could not have been replenishing lost fluids and salt in the affected muscles. Instead some other mechanism must have initiated the cramps and been stymied by the pickle juice.

Dr. Miller suspects that that mechanism is exhaustion, either directly or through biochemical processes that accompany fatigue. Certain mechanisms within muscles have been found, in animal and limited human studies, he says, to start misfiring when a muscle is extremely tired. Small nerves that should keep the muscle from overcontracting malfunction, and the muscle bunches when it should relax. Pickle juice may work, Dr. Miller says, by countermanding the malfunction. Something in the acidic juice, perhaps even a specific molecule of some kind, may be lighting up specialized nervous-system receptors in the throat or stomach, he says, which, in turn, send out nerve signals that somehow disrupt the reflex melee in the muscles. Dr. Miller suspects that ultimately, it’s the vinegar in the pickle juice that activates the receptors. In a recent case report by other researchers, a single athlete’s cramping was relieved more quickly when he drank pure vinegar (without much pleasure, I’m sure) than when he drank pickle juice.

At the moment, speculation about the powers of pickle juice remains just that, speculative. “It’s extremely challenging” to induce realistic sports cramps in the lab, Dr. Miller says. His technique, of causing the big toe to spasm, while useful, can’t fully replicate what happens in larger, stronger leg muscles during a cramp. Still, the work is suggestive and, perhaps most important, implies methods for finding relief. “If muscle fatigue is the cause,” he says, then training properly, building up your mileage slowly and perhaps adding strength training that focuses specifically on muscles that have cramped in the past, may help. In the meantime, if your calf or other muscle suddenly, painfully catches, “try stretching it,” Dr. Miller says. Doing so has been found in laboratory studies to significantly shorten the duration of a muscle cramp, most likely by shaking up and resetting the misfiring muscle and nerve reflexes. And perhaps, if you can stomach the idea, pack a few ounces of pickle juice on your next training session. It’s not as palatable as bananas, but unlike them, Dr. Miller says, “it seems to work.”

1st Annual Tupperware Harvest...

2010-06-12T23:48:00.000-07:00

Future-ready: Plastic

That Can Be Grown

On Trees

[ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com ]

WASHINGTON: Money sure doesn’t grow on trees, but the day isn’t far when gasoline, computers, and tennis shoes might actually grow on trees, all thanks to new advances in biotechnology that could allow manufacturers to produce fuel, plastics, and other chemicals from plants instead of petroleum.

C&EN senior business editor Melody Voith says today’s plant-based fuels and plastics involve growing crops and then using physical and chemical means to extract sugars that manufacturers transform into the desired product.

However, a large number of plant biotechnology companies are trying to make plants do more of the manufacturing work. For example, several firms are trying to develop specially engineered plants, such as switch grass and corn, that make it easier and faster to produce biofuels.

The development could potentially lower the cost of renewable fuels, says Voith. But producing chemical factories from plants will involve challenges. Farmers will need to gamble on new, risky crops planted over large areas. It is also unclear how processors will collect and efficiently transport these plant products.

Research and development of new plant traits is moving at a brisk pace in several biotech labs, says Voith.